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Coming from you, this is nothing short of hilarious. By your own logic you are a know nothing since you admit you won't answer questions and explain your arguments online. But as usual, you demand everyone else answers your questions or else they're just bluffing.
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For what it is worth, Paul Osborne was the only serious student of the KEP during my 10 year tenure as an LDS apologist. Nibley was too old and speaking incoherently whenever he did give a talk, and John Gee was still in college when I first came across the topic. Kerry Shirts was the most popular apologist but he clearly had not delved into the KEP matter at all. Also, Paul was analyzing the intricacies of the Joseph Smith Egyptian Papers long before "William the liar" ever really understood exactly what the KEP were. This was proved in a highly embarrassing exchange that took place between he and I in May of 2006 when he showed how dumb he really was by suggesting the KEP and the Joseph Smith Papyri were one and the same.
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Paul's defense of Joseph Smith as a bonafide prophet who knew the secrets of the Egyptian language, is documented throughout the MADB archives. In fact, when Paul finally left that forum, he was at that time, the all time leading defender of the Church in that he had more posts at FAIR/MADB then I think the next two people behind him put together. But most of his research on the matter was over most everyone's head, so he didn't really get a lot of attention even though he frequently advertised his website on the forum. This is also because his approach was completely different from the conventional apologetic approach, and most people didn't want to follow his reasoning because it would naturally lead to apostasy (obviously). The difference was that the Nibley type apologists (myself included) were trying to divorce Joseph Smith from the KEP as much as possible whereas Paul's approach was more honest because he embraced the evidence and maintained his belief that Joseph Smith properly translated the Joseph Smith papyri; that the true meaning of the language escaped Egyptologists who had relied on worldly knowledge and the reasoning of men. That is what I remember Paul arguing with me profusely as I was writing misleading FAIR articles about the "missing papyrus."
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Defending the untenable for so long is enough to drive anyone crazy. That Paul is a bit unstable at this point is understandable. I see him as an escapee from the asylum, trying to treat his own mental illness that was inflicted upon him during his faithful tenure as an LDS apologist.
Few intellectually honest observers would have missed, by this time, the fact that Neither Paul nor Graham have so much as attempted to answer the clear, concise, and easily understood questions about the GAEL that Will has asked above, and have instead spent all available bandwidth engaged in a series of foam flecked anti-Will Schryver polemics heavy on red faced self promotion and empty of intellectual content.
This approach is, of course, of long standing, when really specific, detailed questions about specific aspects of the KEP are asked, and it begins to appear that the entire KEP dependency theory is limping around on logical crutches because it
cannot actually account for the contents of the KEP in a way that inferentially connects it to the BofA as a source with any degree of logical strengthThere are, indeed, a variety of arguments delineating, - whether one believes in the divine origin and provenance of the BofA or not - why the KEP is probably not a source document for the BofA.
KEP dependence is a weak theoretical reed, and always has been, and one does not have to be a "TBM" or believer in the religious truth claims of the Church to come to that conclusion through a fair analysis of the evidence.
