EdGoble wrote:Actually, it doesn't. It supports the idea that he is claiming to "translate an alphabet" "as practiced by the ancients." There is nothing to suggest that he had any concept here other than reproducing what the ancients were doing with a certain "alphabet." There is no claim that this "alphabet" contained the text of the Book of abraham, at all. The only claim was that it was an "alphabet" like any other "alphabet."
Almost no one interprets it this way. The KEP was a failed attempt to understand Egyptian language so they could translate any Egyptian document. It's not really coherent, and no one could make it work.
In other words, the indication here is that we ought to be finding what the context is here, to the ancients, about the types of things they used alphabets for, and to see if any of that matches with what is internally found in the KEP. This has nothing to do with finding the source of the text of the Book of Abraham and magically reproducing some way to extract that text from what is before us. The source of that text was lost to antiquity, and nothing short of pure revelation brought it forward to the modern day.
Feel free to show how it works. So far we see no evidence of anything you are suggesting.
Therefore, my hypothesis has nothing to do with some mechanical method of translating, but rather, identifying what is going on here with the evidence that is internally available in that text, coupled with identifying anciently what people thought of and how they used alphabets and seeing if there is a match here.
You provide nothing from the ancient world that shows any re-purposing you interpret from the KEP. It makes zero sense. Why make an incoherent second meaning from the papyri, when they could just write it down. It's like trying to make a new language to tell a story. And one that can only work with one document. Change that document and you then have no coherent story. Just like if I took a short story and added a paragraph of story text to each word, and then tried to apply it to a different short story. It makes zero sense. I have no problem taking Egyptian pictures and changing their meaning, but you wouldn't do that with the text. You use it to tell your story that also explains how the pictures, usually having a different meaning, what they mean now. Fac 3 is a good example. Mostly pictures with some text at the bottom and by each figure. It explains the scene and who each person is. You don't re-purpose the text to mean something else. You write the Egyptian text to explain what the picture now means. You use text to describe each figure and that they are now different participants in a different scene. You also don't make this papyri up and bury it with your dead relative that is not meant to be seen again by living humans. Reality is Joseph was making it up as he did from the start as a treasure hunter, but that cannot be the faithful view.
