I am getting near the breaking point. For me the Book of Abraham is the last straw for me.

I cannot accept Joseph Smith as a Prophet of God. The only Book of Abraham theory that has a plausible element to it for me is "the missing scroll theory" which supposes that the text of the Book of Abraham is actually on that missing scroll... that is presumably very long according to Joseph F. Smith statement.

However, even assuming that there is a missing scroll that was never recovered... the simple fact that Joseph Smith's interpretations of the three different Egyptian facsimilies(vignettes) is totally wrong is enough to convince me that even if there is a large Egyptian papyri scroll missing it does not matter. The fact that Joseph was wrong in his interpretation of the Egyptian facsimilies and that is enough for me to know that he did not know what he was doing. That and the fact that Kolob and Oliblish are completely made-up goobly gook words.

Sad to discover this, but its good to know the truth.

Actually they found the very scrolls JS worked off of and it has been translated by modern scholars. They are normal Egyptian funeral documents. Nothing more.

welcome to the RfM boards!

All one has to do is look at the facsimiles to know it is a big fat lie. Take Facsimile #3: "One of the king's principal waiters?" Come on!

As Morpheus says in the Matrix to Neo, "Welcome to the real world..."

Looking through the book "...by his own hand upon papyrus", I see this arguement.

The scrolls in existence now match the original accounts by Joseph Smith.

There were two scolls and a few other fragments.

The missing scroll theory is not plausible.
The Facsimiles are in fact the same ones that Joseph Smith did use.
Even if there really were missing scrolls, why would they be included in a funerary context? The Hypocephalus is a magical incantation to help the dead pass on to the Feild of Reeds.

To include the text of the Book of Abraham in such a document would be like listing Car parts in the Sealing Ceremony.

Another point to consider is this- The teachings from the Book of Abraham contradict the Book of Mormon, The Book of Moses, the Doctrine and Covenants ( prior to 121-130) And, most of those teachings have been removed from the new Gospel Principles manual.

There is a copy of JS's "translation" which has the characters copied right from one of the found papyri and in the same order. Each character's accompanying "translation" is located directly next to it which at times is a short paragraph's worth of English.

Even a casual pondering of this scenario with minimal knowledge of language triggers one's BS detector. What language out there has one character (doesn't matter if it's from a pictorially or phonetically written language) equaling a short paragraph's worth of English translation? Such a language would be so unwieldy that it would be impossible to learn.

The best apologist's argument that could be made is that JS used the papyri to inspire an entirely different revelation from God that's independent of the papyri. That, of course, is no TRANSLATION at all which is problematic since it's called a "translation" on the BoA's title page. If LDS, Inc. removed that their ass would be covered.

The other thing is that Egyptologists know exactly what the characters mean and can translate them with no help from any god. That translation has absolutely nothing in common with JS's "translation".

The other thing is the the BoA has considerable historical and linguistic anachronisms, so the "translation" doesn't even stand on its own two feet.

Of course, all these problems fall into place if what happened is that JS pulled it out of his ass.

I know this particular issue was definitely one of the last straws for me, as it is for many faithful LDS. As GBH said...it's either all true or all false. If that one thing (and it's not a minor thing in my mind) is not true, then none of it is.

You'll find in the coming months an increased clarity and will literally feel cobwebs being cleared up in your head as you examine and re-examine issues in the church. To put it in TBM lingo, it's like the veil is being lifted from your mind.

Most of us have been where you're at now. Like many here, I was a faithful RM, married in the temple, and have been in the Bishopric, senior member of the HC, EQP, etc. Good luck in your search.

Actually, I think the missing scroll theory makes the most sense.

Grant Palmer (LDS institute director for decades and still active) covers this issue and a few others in his book "an insiders view of Mormon origins".

It is a well researched, totally factual, backed up with proper references, account if the early major events.
Be warned, it leaves no doubt as to the truth...

Describes two facimiles on it ...

Please find one of several publications (i.e. "the Book of Anni", etc) that are excellent photographic copies of what is known as "The Book of Breathings" (along with the excellent translations). There you will also see the facimilies that Oliver Cowdery tried to give the mormon slant to. She for yourselve how Egyptian scholars translate those items.

You'll never give any credence to mormon myths again.

It has been relegated to the scripture trash can. It's provenance and content are too embarrassing for LDS Inc to want to have anything to do with it.

I bet there are already plans afoot to "redistribute" the parts of the PoGP, and delete it as a separate book of scripture. I also bet that the BoA will disappear in that redistribution.

If I am right, that makes me a better prophet than Tommy.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/12/2010 05:18PM by Brother Of Jerry.

I'd like to hear a reason that "makes the most sense" AND - don't tell me it was because of his enemies. A translation where God gives you each golden shining word would be the same because Jesus/Jehovah is the same "yesterday, today and forever."

"By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus"

An audio of his presentation at the 2009 Exmormon Conference is also available at the Exmormon Foundation's Website...

Fair warning; he's not very nice to Hugh Nibley in his description of Nibley's tactics...

And if you can bring yourself to visit a "notorious 'anti' site," the Tanners' UTLM newsletters have some devastating information. The late Gerald Tanner was the one who identified the one-for-one correlation with JS's "translation notes" (proving this was the papyrus used), and there's ample evidence (in the form of a receipt signed by Emma Smith) that the "missing papyrus" hypothesis is just a bunch of cemetary whistling...

It just gets worse (or better depending on your point of view) from here on out!

Congrats, my friend. You've broken the spell!

Welcome!

Timothy

Joe made the whole BoA up. From scratch.

The only winner in the whole sorry affair is Michael Chandler who fleeced the early church of $2500 by taking advantage of Joe's gullibility.

And, MBM, let's not forget that Joe was hoping to publish his translation of the Kinderhook plates, when his untimely death put paid to those plans.

As these plates were deliberate forgeries, it's perhaps best that he never published the translations. That means the LDS inc. can now say that Joe was never fooled by these plates (notwithstanding what Oliver Clayton wrote in his diaries), even though it looks like he was.

I suspect Joe believed he could translate all this stuff and he and his merry band of followers never came across any real scholars who doubted and challenged his translations. In short, Joe believed his own spin.

My .02 on the BoA and the missing scroll theory

The missing scroll idea matters little to me— we have the Facsimilies and their translations— and they they don't match. More accurately Joseph's translations are just wrong. He obviously couldn't read the papyri.

If you think the KEP (Kirtland Egyptian Papers) are likely what Joseph used to translate (I do) then the missing scroll idea has been proven wrong. It has the characters found on the papyri in sequence paired with the BoA translation. No surprise, the translations don't match at all.

Apologists are spinning like crazy to find alternate explanations. I have a hard time giving any time to the latest stuff presented at FAIR because on it appears to be so ridiculous and desperate.

This and Joseph's polygamy/polyandry are what led me to no longer believe.


Good luck in your search.

when I happened to glance through those Book of Abraham facsimiles one night while trying understand the church more and came across Joseph Smith's description of two Egyptian females as a King and his Prince? I thought ugghhhhh?

I brought it up with one of the ward bishopric members and he completely ignored it!?!?!? He just closed my Quad and asked me what Iliked about the church!

A little later I googled Book of Abraham wondering if anyone else had noticed anything strange! lol

Ended up purchasing the Lost Book of Abraham DVD and later Charles Larsons Book 'By His Own Hand'.

I especially love the interpretation of figure 7 in facsimile #2 as God on his throne...so we have God on his throne with an obvious erection in the Book of Abraham. BoA was the first thing that really woke me up...and it's just the tip of the iceberg...there's so much more.

And does anyone in TSCC deny that the church leaders were practicing polygamy at exactly the same time they were publicly denying it? Seems like that's historical fact...how can anyone accept the early church leaders lying like that? Polygamy/polyandry, the multiple versions of the first vision and their differences, the Book of Mormon DNA problem plus issues with the BoM itself, changes to the BoM introduction...Lamanites are no longer the "Principal" ancestors of the American Indians..just "among" the ancestors, and there's so much more.

Hello and welcome! :-)
You may want to check this out:

http://www.utlm.org/topicalindexb.htm#Book%20of%20Abraham

Just in case you didn't know,the site owner is a gggrandaughter of Brigham Young.

JS runs across a mummy and what do you know...it happens to contain an actual papyrus from Abraham!

JS runs across a pile of rocks and what do you know...it happens to be the actual alter Adam used!

JS runs across a bone and declares it to be a bone from Zelph, a white Lamanite. Yep. He actually knows the guy's name from the bone.

JS decides he wants to mess around with more women so ...what do you know...God gives him a revelation. Poor Joseph. He really didn't want to hit on those teens but what do you do when God makes you.

JS decides he wants somebody's farm, so what do you know. JS gets a "revelation" that God wants the guy to sell the farm and "donate" (for blessings of course) to the church.

JS feels the heat from Emma about his wanderings, so what do you know...God tells JS to tell Emma she will be destroyed if she doesn't accept it! (The whole D&C is full of manipulative stuff like this.)

The guy was really good at feeding it to credulous people. Everything he stepped in was gold. No coincidence that God decides to appear to him, eh? JS knew one important thing about human nature: the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.

The Book of Abraham was one of the last straws for me. I mean, come on. That claim really exposed him for me.

This is a typical tactic the LDS apologists employ.

If the evidence trends against their claim, they look for some possibility no matter how remote that the church's version of events could be true--maybe.

No DNA evidence of a link between Middle Eastern peoples and native Americans. No problem. There was a genetic drift that diluted the Lamanite DNA. They present no evidence that such a drift occured and the pure blood of Laman and Lemuel was dilluted beyond recognition. They point to weak or no textual evidence in the Book of Mormon for outside people mating with the seed of Lehi. But there are no other possibilities if the church is true, so since the burning in the boosm says the church is true this must be the answer. Tada!

They do the same thing with the Book of Abraham. If you have watched the video at www.bookofabraham.info and read Robert Ritner's 2003 article in The Journal of Near Eastern Studies about all this, he makes it pretty clear that even if there are pieces missing there is...ahem...no way in hell that such a foreign narrative would be attached to the papyrii that we know are connected to Joseph Smith. The argument of the apologists in this instance is equally shifty with little or no evidence to support it. Besides it doesn't make sense: why would this story about Abraham be on the bookend of this scroll about Horus?

Hope you find life in the real world as rewarding as we do. It's a bit of a wrench at first, but you can get better at it every day.

Former investigator from the UK here. The Book of Abraham was one of (many) breaking points for me. Egyptology is fairly established, and we have the Rosetta Stone over here (you probably know that that's the stone that helped with cracking hieroglyphs, but even people over here don't necessarily know its name).

So I asked the missionaries about that. Why is Reformed Egyptian not on the Rosetta Stone? Is there any other instance of Reformed Egyptian that isn't connected to Joseph Smith? Anything at all?

Apparently, there isn't. Even though there are so many Egyptian scrolls, there's not a single one with Reformed Egyptian not connected to JS? Not one?

I wanted to believe. I truly did. And I was good and ready to drag my atheist boyfriend into it, kicking and screaming. But (amongst other stuff, I just couldn't buy), the BoA killed it. Plus, I initially read that it was in Abraham's own hand. Then I was told it was a retelling by someone else. Please, I am not trying to discourage you, or dissuade you from your beliefs. This is a personal experience. Just me.

Maybe there IS a missing scroll...
And maybe it DOES say that the black race was repopulated after the flood by Ham and a descendant named Egyptus who migrated to Africa...

Welcome and once you feel comfortable, would love to know what you're dealing with...parents, wife, kids, girlfriend???

First - welcome, MBM!

Second, here the video: The Lost Book of Abraham (more proof that Joseph Smith lied about his 'translation' ability): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcyzkd_m6KE

Third, plenty of more material for ya!:

Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (by former BYU history professor Dr. D. Michael Quinn): http://www.amazon.com/Early-Mormonism-Magic-World-View/dp/1560850892

The Changing World of Mormonism: http://www.utlm.org/navonlinebooks.htm

To Those Who Are Investigating Mormonism: http://packham.n4m.org/tract.htm

PBS FRONTLINE + American Experience: "The Mormons" (4-hour documentary film aired on PBS in '07 that includes excerpts from interviews with President Gordon Hinckley, Mormon Apostles Boyd Packer and Jeffrey Holland and member of the First Quorum of the Seventy and church historian Marlin Jensen): http://www.pbs.org/mormons/

101 Doubts about Mormonism: http://packham.n4m.org/101.htm

Contradictions in Mormonism: http://packham.n4m.org/contra.htm

Rethinking Mormonism: http://www.i4m.com/think/

Joseph Smith's Changing First Vision Accounts: http://www.irr.org/mit/first-vision/fvision-accounts.html

Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church (by genetic researcher Dr. Simon Southerton, a former LDS bishop): http://www.amazon.com/Losing-Lost-Tribe-Native-Americans/dp/1560851813

"DNA vs. The Book of Mormon" (ref. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svfxSscxh8o)

Book of Mormon Tories (plagarisms in the BoM involving two American history books, one published in 1789 and the other in 1805, that were available to Joseph Smith): http://www.postmormon.org/exp_e/index.php/magazine/pmm_article_full_text/211

The 'motherlode' of historical info. about Mormonism (including many quoted official church sources, and their references): http://www.utlm.org/navtopicalindex.htm

Digital photograph of the title page of the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon that shows that Joseph Smith was the author and proprietor (he claimed he was the 'translator' of the ancient gold plates): http://www.inephi.com/1.htm

The Untold Story of the Death of Joseph Smith: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvSo0ate4tM&feature=related

‘Faith-disrupting’ teachings and statements of Mormon ‘prophets’ (after Joseph Smith): http://mormonthink.com/prophetsweb.htm#apostleadmits

How Mormonism 'programs' people and affects their self-esteem: http://members.shaw.ca/blair_watson/

40 fears created by LDS 'programming': http://members.shaw.ca/blair_watson/fears.htm