"2 Inks" Gee criticises scholarly standards of JSP Project

[_Shulem]

MG,

Can any of the Church's egyptologists translate the English version of the Facsimile Explanations back into original Egyptian?

U ain't gonna get anything out of wormy.

[_Doctor Scratch]

Yesterday I read an interesting comment from Dan Vogel at journal.interpreterfoundation.org responding to Dr. Gee's criticisms of the transcriptions in the JSP volume. It's now gone missing. Must be a glitch. I hope he'll resubmit his comment.

Tom:

Can you provide us with more details, please?

[_Gadianton]

Symmachus,

That was a very helpful summary of the problem. I had no idea there was an actual textbook meaning for a "critical text" project (like Skousens).

Do you find it credible that these represent the real concerns of Gee? Maybe he's that much of a perfectionist and really bothered by details, but I feel like this is all a pretense for something else.

[_TrashcanMan79]

Yesterday I read an interesting comment from Dan Vogel at journal.interpreterfoundation.org responding to Dr. Gee's criticisms of the transcriptions in the JSP volume. It's now gone missing. Must be a glitch. I hope he'll resubmit his comment.

Tom:

Can you provide us with more details, please?

Check out the public posts on Vogel’s Facebook. I haven’t dug into it much myself, but it looks like there were some shenanigans on the part of Interpreter.

[_mentalgymnast]

MG,

Can any of the Church's egyptologists translate the English version of the Facsimile Explanations back into original Egyptian?

- Doc

Straight across one to one correlation? No. Interesting correlations and connections? Yes.

Lindsay's closing paragraph (here) alludes to that:

https://latterdaysaintmag.com/dealing-w ... f-abraham/

Students of the Book of Abraham might benefit from the evidence for the potential authenticity of several names in the Book of Abraham and may be fascinated to learn how the Book of Abraham’s cosmology and its theme of the divine council fit remarkably well in the world of the ancient Near East. They might benefit from learning that there is support for Shinehah as a term that means the sun, or that modern archaeological evidence provides tentative support for the ancient place name Olishem in the right time and place to correspond to the Book of Abraham, etc. Appreciation of the Book of Abraham can increase by learning that the once ridiculed idea of Egyptian priests offering human sacrifice has been shown to have significant support, in part from Kerry Muhlestein’s Ph.D. dissertation and related publications. Sound scholarship can also lead students to awareness of extensive ancient traditions consistent with numerous extra-biblical details of the Book of Abraham, such as the attempt to slay Abraham for his opposition to idol worship, the sin of his father in pursuing idolatry, and many other details. It is useful to know that some elements in the Facsimiles have strong plausibility, such as the crocodile being the god of Pharaoh, the four sons of Horus (Fig. 6 in Facs. 2) representing the “four quarters of the earth,” the association of Hathor (the cow in Facs. 2) with the sun, the association of bird wings with the expanse of heaven and the association of the solar barque with the number 1000, the relationship of Facs. 1 to the hieroglyphic for prayer, etc. While the lofty standard of academic credibility and the dream of objectivity may make it difficult or improper to raise or even hint at such issues in JSPRT4, that volume seems to do too much to underscore the positions of our critics...

Regards,
MG

[_mentalgymnast]

Jensen's view is one of divine origin also, but you would know that if you had taken the time to actually listed to what he says.

Perhaps you could provide a constructive commentary of Vogel's views regarding the time line of the production of the Book of Abraham vis a vis Gee's and explain why you believe one over the other, rather than simply name calling and hoping no one calls you on it.

In Lindsay's piece he attempts to show that there may be a problem with the timeline that Jensen and Hauglid seem to support.

https://latterdaysaintmag.com/dealing-w ... f-abraham/

That timeline is crucial. GAEL and Book of Abraham. Chicken or the egg?

Regards,
MG

[_toon]

The explanation for the upside down photographs are so simple I am sure Jensen et al are reluctant to point it out, since it will make Gee et al just feel worse about themselves.

This is a Joseph Smith Papers project, so the photographs are displaying the Egyptian text the same way Joseph Smith used it.

I heard that if read upside down, you can learn that Paul is dead.

[_Tom]

A revised version of Dr. Gee's review has been posted with this note: "This review was edited by the author, after initial publication, to address multiple requests for clarification. In part, these clarifications came after a substantive conversation between the author and principal figures in the Joseph Smith Papers Project."

All the comments on the previous version have gone missing.

[_Everybody Wang Chung]

A revised version of Dr. Gee's review has been posted with this note: "This review was edited by the author, after initial publication, to address multiple requests for clarification. In part, these clarifications came after a substantive conversation between the author and principal figures in the Joseph Smith Papers Project."

All the comments on the previous version have gone missing.

Tom,

Are you able to identify the main changes in Gee's revision?

It sounds like Gee and the Interpreter were admonished by the Church?

[Guest]

I've marked the substantive changes below:

Abstract: Volume 4 of the Revelations and Translations series of the Joseph Smith Papers does not live up to the standards set in previous volumes. While the production values are still top notch, the actual content is substandard. ErrorsProblems fill the volume, including upside-down misplaced photographs and numerous transcription errors questionable transcriptions beyond the more than two hundred places where the editors admitted they could not read the documents. For this particular volume, producing it incorrectly is arguably worse than not producing it at all.
...
On the surface, this volume appears to conform to the standards of the previous volumes, but in the details that is not the case. There is much in the volume with which one could and perhaps should quibble. I will not go into the numerous poor editorial decisions, and I will be able to spend little much time on the numerous questionable editorial decisions or scholarship evident in the volume. I will, however, note that the editors chose to completely relabel the documents from their historical names, which will sow much confusion in discussions, but they provided no concordance of other major labels for the documents, as is standard in scholarly editions. Instead, I will simply list a sample of known errata in the volume. Space does not allow listing all the errors in the volume nor even all the errors I know of, so a smattering from each section will have to suffice problems in the volume.

I have previously done a letter-by-letter transcription of the documents based on high-resolution photographs and personal examination of the original documents utilizing the transcription standards used by ancient historians1 rather than those of the modern American historian that the Joseph Smith Papers used. The practices of the two types of historians differ in a number of particulars but might be generalized by saying that ancient historians prioritize what the scribe actually wrote on the document while American historians prioritize the perceived scribal intent. For this volume of the Joseph Smith Papers, the alternative, ancient standard is arguably preferable for the following reasons:

◾Many debates about the documents revolve around scribal practices but these debates are poorly served by American historian standards where the discussion of scribal practice is [Page 177]infrequent and are better served by the ancient historian standards where discussions about scribal practice are commonplace.

◾Many of the groups of letters in the documents are clearly not English and one cannot argue that one is following scribal intent if one cannot understand what is being written and, thus, what the scribe’s intent was. In the documents in this volume of the Joseph Smith Papers the scribes’ intent and the authors’ intent are hotly debated. Transcribing according to the scribes’ intent is begging the question and subtly predetermining the outcome of the debate.

◾The stated audience of the Joseph Smith Papers is scholars, not lay members of the Church. Presumably a scholar should not be spending too much time puzzling over the spelling of “behod” in context, but perhaps I have spent too much time working with documents having non-standard spelling and other scholars find unusual orthography to be a serious obstacle.

◾Interesting and perhaps important aspects of the documents may be glossed over by using the standards of the American historian. For example, the Book of Abraham manuscripts in Willard Richards’s hand may have served as the printer’s manuscript, but Richards’s handwriting is difficult to read and this may explain why there are numerous unnoted retouchings of letters in an unknown hand throughout the manuscripts to make words legible.

Space does not allow listing all the problems in the volume nor even all the problems I know of (though others using differing standards may not consider them errors by their standards), so a smattering from each section will have to suffice. I will address each section, in turn.
. . ..

The document on p. 47 is upside down; this has been corrected in the online version. The document on p. 49 is upside down in comparison to the photograph of the same document on p. 9. This might confuse some readers. . . ..

The manuscripts of the Book of Abraham have been published before by one of the editors. Unfortunately, these documents are also plagued by transcription errors problems. Again, we use a random page, p. 261, which contains the following transcription errors discrepancies:
....

Out of 147 words on the page, 9 (6%) are mistranscribed can be transcribed differently. Each of the next two pages numerically has even more. I am not certain what percentage of mistranscriptions is acceptable in the Joseph Smith Papers in general, but I would be surprised if the tolerance was this high.

...

Presuppositions

Everyone approaches a text with certain presuppositions that inform how they understand the text. It would have been nice if the editors had been more explicit about theirs. As it is, the text often leaves the reader to [Page 181]intuit what the presuppositions of the editors were. Certain statements allow one to reconstruct some of the editors’ presuppositions. Reconstructing presuppositions can be hazardous, but authors can avoid others reconstructing their assumptions by making them explicit.

The editors assert that Joseph Smith and his associates “assumed that the Egyptian language contained a series of complex systems and symbols, each of which held multiple meanings” even though the editors cannot “explain comprehensively the ways in which earlier concepts regarding the Egyptian language — such as the notion that each character represented multiple ideas — may have been inherited, used, or understood by Joseph Smith” (p. xvii). They also assert that “these attempts [by Joseph Smith and his clerks] are considered by modern Egyptologists — both Latter-day Saints and others — to be of no actual value in understanding Egyptian” (p. xxv). They claim that Joseph Smith “was certainly unequipped to translate the scrolls as a scholar would” (p. xxii). The assumption seems to be that Joseph Smith got all his ideas about Egypt from his environment except correct ones. Not all of the ideas about ancient Egypt circulating in Joseph Smith’s day were wrong. For example, hieroglyphic signs in the time period when the Joseph Smith Papyri were produced frequently have multiple meanings. To be able to sort the issues out requires a firsthand knowledge of the intellectual content and context which, in this case, means a knowledge both of Egyptian and how it was understood in Joseph Smith’s day. Unfortunately the editors demonstrate no firsthand knowledge of works by Samuel Sharpe, Gustav Seyffarth, Jean-François Champollion, or others, so they cannot set the work of Latter-day Saints like with. with. Phelps in its proper historical context.

One of the assumptions is that the authorship of the documents included in the volume belongs to Joseph Smith. In fact, the authorship of the documents is disputed, something the volume never acknowledges. Others have put forth historical arguments that with. with. Phelps, not Joseph Smith, authored many of the documents published in the volume. These arguments are ignored. The volume should have followed the standard practice of the Joseph Smith Papers Project and put most of the documents in an appendix as disputed. For instance, in a forthcoming Joseph Smith Papers volume a much-quoted letter from Joseph Smith to Nancy Rigdon is placed in an appendix because the editors cannot prove that it is not a forgery. The same procedure should have been followed here. If the policy is that only those documents known to be authored by, in the handwriting of, or in the possession of Joseph Smith should be included in the papers, then only the Joseph Smith Papyri, Egyptian Alphabet A, and the Book of Abraham manuscripts should have been placed in the volume and the rest should have been relegated to an appendix. This, however, did not happen.

Another of the assumptions is revealed in the organization of the volume. Although the editors state that “the sequence of the creation of the Kirtland-era Book of Abraham manuscript and the various manuscripts of the Egyptian-language project is unknown” (p. xxv), they readers can easily assume an a chronological order in their presentation of the material. For them the chronological order of the documents is first the papyri, next the notebooks of characters, then the pages of characters, then the Egyptian alphabet, then the Grammar and Alphabet, then the Book of Abraham manuscripts, and finally the published editions of the Book of Abraham. They organize their volume accordingly The organization of the volume, while logical, implies the ordering of the documents favored by critics of the Church but this order is not necessarily supported by the dates given by the editors. If the documents of disputed authorship had been placed in an appendix, this would have solved the problem. . . ..

Conclusions

Given the constraints of space, this is only a sample of the types of problems and errors found in the volume.

It may seem that some of these matters are mere trifles. I disagree. The bedrock of the work on the Joseph Smith Papers Project is the transcription of the documents. Especially in these manuscripts where so many of the words in the documents do not purport to be English and the editors have no idea what the language may be, accurate transcriptions are essential. It is thus disappointing that there are so many errors in problems with the transcriptions. It is incredibly easy to make transcription errors in a document in one’s own language when one is doing a quick first draft in a limited time when visiting an archive. Throw in bad handwriting and a foreign language, and the difficulties multiply. But the authors have been working on this volume for seven years. One expects better. The 213 unique instances in the documents where the editors admitted they could not read what the scribes wrote8wrote9 is an indication of the difficulty in reading the documents and how often the challenge of transcription defeated the editors. Though some of these instances would defeat any responsible scholar, some of them can be read. . . ..

Anything the editors say about Egyptian language, papyri, or characters is beyond their skill and training. It is regretable that although The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints counts several faithful Egyptologists among its membership, the editors deliberately chose not to involve them in any serious way. It is true that two of that number were given a month to peer review the volume and some of their suggestions were accepted, but no photographs were included in what was reviewed, nor did the Egyptologists see the appendix on the Egyptian characters. One might argue that this series is about nineteenth-century religious history, but this volume, in particular, is about early Latter-day Saint leaders’ involvement with Egyptian characters. The volume editors cannot adequately deal with early Latter-day Saints’ interaction with those characters without some understanding of those characters of their own.

In sum, this volume does not display the care one has come to expect from the Joseph Smith Papers Project.Because The editors may have followed the number general guidelines of errors involved is so high, nothing the Joseph Smith Papers Project, but the material in this volume should is not like the other material in the series and would have benefited by adapting the guidelines to the nature of the material. While it is great to have good-quality images of the documents finally available to the public, the transcriptions and notes are often inadequate to the needs of the ongoing debates about the documents. One still needs to be trusted without extremely careful checking using the material. This means that other than legal access to the photographs, neither the serious researcher nor the lay person is not in a better position than he was they were before the volume was published. As the online version will be updated to reflect new information, it may become, over time, the preferred version to use.

[Editor’s note: This review was edited by the author, after initial publication, to address multiple requests for clarification. In part, these clarifications came after a substantive conversation between the author and principal figures in the Joseph Smith Papers Project.]

1. I use the term ancient historians to encompass a variety of disciplines dealing with ancient languages like Akkadian, Egyptian, Greek, and Coptic which share similar transcription practices.