There has been a lot of talk about whether or not Joseph Smith thought he was translating the "sen-sen" papyrus. The evidence is, I think, air-tight that he did, but apologists have gone to great lengths to claim he didn't. Countering their claims takes a lot of time and effort and goes deep into the documentary record.

Similarly with facsimile No. 1. Here it has to to do totally with Joseph Smith's interpretation of images in the picture. Egyptologists give it one interpretation and Joseph Smith another.

However, in facsimile No. 3, there is a simple, air-tight case against Joseph Smith. It avoids any discussion of "missing scrolls," or "scribes" trying (on their own) to reverse engineer a translation, or interpretations of pictures. It has to do entirely with translation of hieroglyphic Egyptian THAT ARE RIGHT THERE IN THE PUBLISHED BOOK OF ABRAHAM.

Although Facsimile No. 1 has no actual Egyptian writing on it, Facsimile 3 is full of copied hieroglyphs. The copying is not that great since it was done by someone who was totally unfamiliar with the script and from a 1900-year-old document. Many of the glyphs are unreadable but enough are legible that it presents problems for the supporters of Joseph Smith.

figure 5 in Facsimile No. 3 is described by Joseph Smith as

"5. Shulem, one of the king’s principal waiters, as represented by the characters above his hand."

Now this is interesting for two reasons. First Joseph Smith tells us this person's name and title. But more important is that, second, he says this is what the "characters above his hand" represents. The characters above his hand are Egyptian hieroglyphs which are 100% legible to Egyptologists today.

This is not some papyrus that must be LINKED to Joseph Smith, this is Joseph Smith's finished translation with the hieroglyphs identified by Joseph Smith, himself.

Here is what the "characters above his hand" actually say:

"Osiris Hor, justified for eternity."

Nothing about "Shulem" or "principle waiter" or any "king."

But, you don't have to take my word for it. You can find the separate hieroglyphs and their translation in any good Egyptian-English dictionary. Just for fun let's use Mark Vygus's dictionary that is available free online in pdf form:

http://www.pyramidtextsonline.com/documents/VygusDictionaryApril2012.pdf

Since you've probably never used a hieroglyphic dictionary I'll walk you through the translation. It's very basic.

The two columns of characters above the hand of fig. 5 begin at the top of the left-most column. There is a horizontal glyph of an eye and two vertical glyphs under it. This is the name "Osiris." You can find it in the Vygus dictionary on page 80 at the very top of the page. It shows an eyeball, a chair, and a "pennant." The eyeball and chair form the name "Osiris," and the "pennant" is the symbol for "god" (pronounced "netcher" more or less.)

Next is a glyph that is a profile of a hawk. This is the name "Hor" ("Horus" in the Greek version we are more familiar with). It can be found in the Vygus dictionary on page 511, again at the very top of the page.

This finished out the left-most column. The top of the next column has two vertical glyphs that spell out "true of voice" or "justified." One was "justified" in the Egyptian afterlife if one was declared "true of voice." It uses two glyphs, a feather and an oar. The feather stands for "true" or "truth" (maa) in ancient Egyptian. notice that figure 4, in front of fig. 5, has this same feather glyph on her (it's a her, not a him) head. This is the goddess of truth Maat ("truth is a bad translation of the Egyptian concept of Maat, but for now it will have to do). The second glyph is an oar, and gives the word "voice" (khru). Together they form the standard epitaph in Egyptian: "true of voice." This word/phrase can be found in the Vygus dictionary on page 685. It is the 13th item on the page.

Next is a horizontal glyph which represents a mouth. It is the preposition "r" which in Egyptian means "for" or "in respect to." You can find it in the Vygus dictionary on page 85. It is the 5th item on the page.

Finally is the word "djet" which means "eternity." It is formed from a cobra and a semi-circle which represents a loaf of bread. It is found in the Vygus dictionary on page 731 as either the bottom item on the page or the 5th from bottom item.

There you have it. You have now read part of the canonized Mormon scripture that 99.99 percent of Mormons haven't read. Feel free to share your new-found scriptural knowledge with your Mormon friends and acquaintances.

Oh, and if anyone doubts that Joseph Smith's translation of the glyphs over Fig. 5's hand doesn't jibe with modern Egyptology, you can refer them to F.A.I.R., the Mormon apologetic site where it says:

"Joseph Smith provides the following identifications for three of the figures in the facsimile:

"Fig. 2. King Pharaoh, whose name is given in the characters above his head.
"Fig. 4. Prince of Pharaoh, King of Egypt, as written above the hand.
"Fig. 5. Shulem, one of the king’s principal waiters, as represented by the characters above his hand.

"What is notable in these particular identifications is that Joseph isn't simply assigning an identify to each figure, but is indicating that characters located near each figure confirm the assignments. Egyptologists note that the characters have an entirely different meaning."

http://en.fairmormon.org/Book_of_Abraham/Joseph_Smith_Papyri/Facsimiles/Facsimile_3

Notice that F.A.I.R. admits that (1) Joseph Smith is indicating the actual "characters near each figure that confirm the assignments" and that (2) "Egyptologists note that the characters have an entirely different meaning."

Now you know one of those "different meanings."

The easy way is just to point out the canopic jars that joe labeled as "gods".

Also to show pics of similar drawings from other funerary scrolls.

Your information is excellent as usual.
Timely for me as family are asking about BofA.

I'm hopeful, although some people just can't handle the truth.

The BofA seems to be a major sticking point since the essay came out.

I had to smile when prominent BoA apologist Kerry Muhlenstein basically admitted in a recent DN article that he starts with the assumption that the BoA is true and then finds the evidence to support this.

Priceless. He must be so esteemed amongst non-LDS Egyptologists and scholars.

sherlock Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I had to smile when prominent BoA apologist Kerry
> Muhlenstein basically admitted in a recent DN
> article that he starts with the assumption that
> the BoA is true and then finds the evidence to
> support this.

Finds and SLANTS evidence to support this.

One of the main "evidences" that Muhlestein, and others, use
are "ancient Egyptian documents" that mention Abraham. What
they don't point out is that these "ancient Egyptian documents"
came from Jews who immigrated to Egypt after Judea was
conquered by Nebuchadnezzar. This happens in the 6th century
B.C.E.--1400 years AFTER Abraham would have lived.

To use these late-period Jews who immigrated to Egypt as
evidence that "ancient Egyptians" associated Abraham with
ANYTHING would be like using the Puritans who immigrated to the
Americas as an example of "ancient Americans," who associated
Jesus Christ with "the Great Spirit," to defend the Book of
Mormon. See? "Ancient Americans" DID know about Jesus Christ!

The fact is that BEFORE the immigration of Jews to Egypt in the
6th century B.C.E. absolutely NOTHING has been found in Egypt
that mentions Abraham at all.

> Priceless. He must be so esteemed amongst non-LDS
> Egyptologists and scholars.

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,808394

Excellent! Thank you, Baura. Now that I'm an evil anti-Mormon Egyptologist, I think I'll hide a missile silo in a volcano and hold the world hostage for ... for ... one MILLION dollars! Mwahahaha!

ETA: When I wrote my required apologetic essay on BoA for my BYU Pearl of Great Price class, I took the approach that Egyptologists, while understanding the literal translation, failed to understand the nuanced meaning. For example, "You're welcome" in Chinese can be literally translated as "No need for manners." He wrote, "Nice try" and gave me an A. Confused, I found FAIR and felt its explanation to be terrible. So I held on to mine for several more years, tickled that I was smarter than FAIR. Imagine the cog dis if I had looked into the detail you share here.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/18/2014 01:20PM by Good Clean Fun.

Good Clean Fun Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> ETA: When I wrote my required apologetic essay on
> BoA for my BYU Pearl of Great Price class, I took
> the approach that Egyptologists, while
> understanding the literal translation, failed to
> understand the nuanced meaning. For example,
> "You're welcome" in Chinese can be literally
> translated as "No need for manners." He wrote,
> "Nice try" and gave me an A. Confused, I found
> FAIR and felt its explanation to be terrible. So I
> held on to mine for several more years, tickled
> that I was smarter than FAIR. Imagine the cog dis
> if I had looked into the detail you share here.

Kerry Muhlestein, the Morg's most visible BOA apologist,
teaches ancient scripture at BYU. I wonder what his BOA
classes must be like. I'm sure the vast majority of his TMB
students leave class thinking that modern Egyptology has
totally vindicated Joseph Smith. I imagine what would happen
if one of them got into a real conversation with a real
Egyptologist.

When I was a young, bright-eyed Mormon lad who went off to
college, I was eager with the "every member a missionary"
spirit to share the TRUTH that I'd been taught. I joined one
of the campus clubs and met a graduate student who specialized
in pre-Columbian archaeology/anthropology.

"Wow," I thought, "this is a golden opportunity to share some
TRUTH." I mentioned Quetzalcoatl possibly being Jesus visiting
the peoples here on the American continent. I'd heard it
mentioned in Church and read about it in Church magazines and
in apologetic books that my TBM father had.

The graduate student was gentle with me. She pointed out that
Quetzalcoatl was about a thousand years out of place to be
Jesus visiting after his crucifixion.

I, of course, had never heard this before. None of the books
or talks or articles in "The Improvement Era" (for-runner of
the ENSIGN) had mentioned this little detail.

If you stay in the Mormon "gated community" all is well in
Zion. But if you venture out into the real world, with the
silliness Mormons teach, you can have your head handed to you
on a platter.

The phrase "Osiris Hor justified" appears again, very readably, on Facsimile No. 3. It appears along the bottom row of hieroglyphs and begins just under fig. 5's rear toe. It uses a variation on the name Osiris. "Osiris" in hieroglyphs is "eye-chair" as I mentioned in the original post. But here a different kind of chair is pictured.

You can find this version of "Osiris," with a curved-back chair, in the Vygus dictionary on page 80 as the 3rd item on the page. This, again, clearly indicates that this is a pagan Egyptian funeral document for someone named "Hor," and not something written by Abraham.

This is admitted by Michael Rhodes in the "Encyclopedia of Mormonism" where he says

"Facsimile 3 presents a constantly recurring scene in Egyptian literature, best known from the 125th chapter of the Book of the Dead. It represents the judgment of the dead before the throne of Osiris. It is likely that it came at the end of the Book of Breathings text, of which Facsimile 1 formed the beginning, since other examples contain vignettes similar to this. Moreover, the name of Hor, owner of the papyrus, appears in the hieroglyphs at the bottom of this facsimile."

http://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Book_of_Abraham#Facsimiles_From_the_Book_of_Abraham

Spot on! This is exactly why I chose my moniker...Facsimile 3 is all you need.

If you took a painting of Madonna and Child and you tore off the heads of both figures and you replaced them with a dog and a cat, it would be as obvious to us now that this is wrong as the replacing of the clearly jackal head with a human head on this Egyptian piece because we know what these images actually look like. In the same way, we know that those figures would – never under any circumstance – hold a knife. And that’s critical to the text itself (Book of Abraham) because it’s not merely decoration for this text. It goes to the core of the supposed story that accompanies it. If you take the knife away, you take away the story as well. And clearly the knife had no reason to be there.

- Professor Robert K. Ritner, Ph.D., University of Chicago

laughing at the notion that the JS translation in the so-called Book of Abraham might actually have any basis in fact.

As a scientist I occasionally come across wild claims relating to my field and just laugh at them, while at the same time lamenting at the current state of scientific knowledge among the general population. Some of my colleagues actually have to respond to such ideas; I feel sorry for them, as they have to feign interest in considering nonsense.

jerry64 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Some of my colleagues
> actually have to respond to such ideas; I feel
> sorry for them, as they have to feign interest in
> considering nonsense.

I recall a professor of mathematics at the University of Utah
mentioning that being at the U of U had an advantage over being
at some high-profile university like Harvard or Yale--he wasn't
constantly inundated with claims by crackpots to have trisected
the angle, or squared the circle.

Underwood Dudley (what a great name!) former professor of
mathematics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwood_Dudley

mentioned in his book "A Budget of Trisections" that he gives
all such correspondence to a graduate student to find the
error. This takes the burden off of him and gives the grad
student some awareness of the vast army of crackpots out there.

I once saw some correspondence between a math professor and an
angle-trisecting crackpot. The professor was INCREDIBLY
patient and fair with the crackpot, carefully pointing out the
error in his trisection and, basically, teaching him geometry
through the mail.

Of course, the crackpot never accepted any of this. To a
crackpot his idea is MONUMENTAL and anyone trying to dismiss it
is an evil anti-trisector (sound familiar?). The final upshot
of the correspondence was that the math professor finally,
after they'd been going around in circles, stated that he
really didn't want to continue the correspondence since it
wasn't going anywhere. This resulted in the crackpot writing
to the department chair and complaining about the professor.

Underwood Dudley is a pretty awesome name for a mathematician. I was taught Aristotelian ethics by a man named Atherton Lowry.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/18/2014 03:26PM by Ex Aedibus.

A number of us attended at UVU about a dozen years ago (from memory, there was ihidmyself and his wife who's still working on it, Norma Rae, Jolimont and her husband, myself, and some others...

I noted in the video that Ritner seemed to be having trouble keeping a straight face while discussing this stuff.

And the FAIR crowd sent a group of Nibleyites to pass out a little handout that was offered as a "rebuttal."

One of them--who actually watched the video--was dismayed that old Hugh wasn't in it...

He said, "Hey, when you think of physics, you think of Einstein, right? And when you think of languages, who do you think of? Nibley, right?"

BYU folk were routinely indoctrinated with the belief that Nibley was an actual world-class scholar rather than the obscure church apologist crackpot he actually was.

And the little handout? It noted, regarding Ritner's appearance along with several other apologists, that, "They would've thought it was beneath the dignity of such renowned scholars to have participated in an attack on a religion's sacred scripture."



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 08/18/2014 08:52PM by SL Cabbie.

SL Cabbie Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> BYU folk were routinely indoctrinated with the
> belief that Nibley was an actual world-class
> scholar rather than the obscure church apologist
> crackpot he actually was.

They were lucky that the video didn't mention Nibley. If it
had it would have only torn Nibley's apologetics to shreds.
When his slipshod "scholarship" was scrutinized by a MORMON
scholar, Nibley was reduced to saying, "I refuse to be held
responsible for anything I wrote more than three years ago."
(see Hugh Nibley, "The Facsimilies of the Book of Abraham: A
Response," Sunstone, Dec. 1979, pp. 49-51.)
https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/017-8-49-51.pdf

Here is Edward Ashment's article that Nibley is responding to:
https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/017-8-33-48.pdf

> And the little handout? It noted, regarding
> Ritner's appearance along with several other
> apologist, that "They would've thought it was
> beneath the dignity of such renowned scholars to
> have participated in an attack on a religion's
> sacred scripture."

Nice of them to clarify for everyone that these are, indeed,
world-class scholars. If the said religion's "sacred
scripture" hadn't made real-world, scholarly claims, then these
renowned scholars wouldn't have been consulted in the first
place.

Mormons want it both ways. On the one hand they demand that
Hugh Nibley's (and Rhode's and Gee's and Muhlestein's)
apologetics be taken seriously by the scholarly world. Then on
the other hand they cry "persecution" when it is.

There are two things I like about Mormonism: it's face.

It only took me less than ten minutes reading Nibley to recognize him as a crackpot and intellectually dishonest. That was back in 1978 when a TBM loaned me a book by the "great" Hugh Nibley under whom he had studied at BYU.

WAY back in the late '60s I was a TBM who had heard somethings
about the BOA controversy. I didn't know exactly what the
problems were but I had caught winds of a few of them.

I picked up a copy of "The Improvement Era" (forerunner of the
"Ensign." It had an article by Hugh Nibley on the BOA
controversy. I remember going into the article thinking I
would increase my understanding of the gospel and how to defend
it yadda yadda. Nibley, with a bunch of ad-hominem
name-calling, laid out the problem. It was a "problem" that I
had thought of years earlier. However the facts that he laid
out were devastating, to my mind, against the BOA. "Wow," I
thought, "this looks pretty bad, but I know Nibley will
completely destroy the critics by the end of the article.

Well I got to the end of the article and Nibley's "refutation"
was so painfully weak that I was really bothered. It was
another ten years before I'd give myself permission to face the
obvious truth, but Nibley was a huge hit to my "testimony."

The BoA is what got my husband out of the church. After he read up on it and did some research he was out no turning back. So thank you to everyone who shares it you helped us leave. For me it took more to see the the church is fraud but there plentiful evidence so it took not much longer to come to the same conclusion.

they'd probably have to put a disclaimer like Lehigh University did with biologist and intelligent design advocate Dr. Michael Behe at Lehigh University.

http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/faculty/behe.html

http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/news/evolution.htm

Ex Aedibus Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> they'd probably have to put a disclaimer like
> Lehigh University did with biologist and
> intelligent design advocate Dr. Michael Behe at
> Lehigh University.


Interesting that even Behe admits in his own bio that he hasn't yet succeeded in defining even "... a rough dividing line between design and non-design in biochemical systems." He says he's still trying to do that.

And yet, all of ID claims that not only is there a "rough dividing line," but that the line is plain, clear, bright, and scientifically demonstrable.

How about that :)


In some ways Behe sounds a lot like BoA apologists -- at least when he's preaching to the choir. In other ways, like this bio post at his university site (probably forced on him by his department), he's too honest as the quote above shows. Something few BoA apologists match.

Exactly so. Smith put LABEL numbers on the actual published Facsimile characters, then gave the characters a (supposed) translation!

Today everyone knows that those translations are wrong!

That fact alone destroys any other excuses, explanations etc. that Mormon "scholars" try to dream up.

There's no getting around it.

Perfectly put, my Take:


"Exactly so. Smith put LABEL numbers on the actual published Facsimile characters, then gave the characters a (supposed) translation!

Today everyone knows that those translations are wrong!

That fact alone destroys any other excuses, explanations etc. that Mormon "scholars" try to dream up.

There's no getting around it."


No one can get around that fact that Smith HIMSELF published the meaning of the characters ... and he was dead wrong!

This is really awesome. I've always been interested in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

But in the PDF what is going on with D410 and D410A? Wonder what the translation of that is.

In the Gardiner sign list D52 is a human penis and D53 is a
human penis with fluid issuing from it. These were signs with
both a phonetic meaning and were used as determinatives for
words having to do with procreation, masculinity, sex,
urination etc.

There is an example of D53 in facsimile No. 2 in the BOA. It's
on the outer ring of glyphs at about 8:30. it's behind the
image of a bull. It is the inside glyph. These are "cursive,"
written hieroglyphs so it won't look exactly like the carved
hieroglyph.

The "bolt of cloth" glyph, S29, signifies the sound of "s."
The penis glyph D52, has the sound value of "mt" So the union
of the two glyphs creates D410, which has the phonetic sound
value of "smt." It's use phonetically has nothing to do with
it's meaning pictorially.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Shummy Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
---

I second Don's acolade, Baura, for all you do.

As a token of my gratitude, please allow me to translate the above caractors I used as topping just in case you don't read Deformed Egyptian heiroglyphs:



"5. SHUMMY, one of the king’s principal waiters, as represented by the characters above his hand."
---

Note the one correction if you will to the poseur prophet's papyrii plagiarasm.

The verified version of the text was uncovered by me at Buttfuqq Egypt in 1981, all written in DE and I have finally cracked the code.

I love this quote by Archibald Sayce, Oxford professor of Egyptology:

“It is difficult to deal seriously with Joseph Smith’s impudent fraud .... Smith has turned the goddess [Isis in Facsimile No. 3] into a king and Osiris into Abraham.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Abraham

Great post, baura. Thank you so much for putting it together. I enjoyed reading it and pondering it.

Figure 7 from Facsimile No. 2 is one of my favorites, where JS says Min the god of fertility, with an erect penis, is God sitting on his throne. I actually showed this one to my TBM DW. She currently thinks the BoA was some kind of mistake by JS.

http://www.mormonthink.com/book-of-abraham-issues.htm#fig7



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/19/2015 04:28PM by freeatlast2015.

This one is especially amusing since TSCC recognized that it was embarrassing, removed the penis from their scriptures, then had to put it back in when people noticed. Very good evidence that at least some of those at the top are con-men themselves.