The Abraham/Egyptian papers appear to show hieroglyphs from the recovered papyri to translate the first section of the Book of Abraham.Craig Paxton wrote: ↑Tue Jul 07, 2020 4:02 pmI'm trying to understand WHY it is so critical to Gee's Missing Papyri Theory that all of the translation process took place in 1835. Even if translation took place in 1842, which the historical record supports, the claimed missing papyri wouldn't have gone missing until years after 1842. So why is 1835 so important?
The Abraham/Egyptian papers are dated to the end of 1835.
Gee posits this was not a translation project because the recovered papyri do not contain the text of the Book of Abraham.
Gee posits that the part of the papyri with the Book of Abraham on it is missing.
Therefore, Gee must argue (following Nibley) that the Abraham/Egyptian papers do NOT show a translation from Egyptian to the the first part of the Book of Abraham. (Even Gee knows that the characters in the margins do not translate into the English shown in the Abraham/Egyptian papers.)
Therefore, Gee must argue that the Abraham/Egyptian papers are not a translation project, but instead show some of Joseph Smith's scribes taking the Book of Abraham text and trying to reverse engineer it into the some of the characters on the papyri.
But, and this is critical, in order for this theory to work, the scribes MUST have had the text of the Book of Abraham in order to attempt their "reverse engineering" project as he thinks the Abraham/Egyptian papers show.
Because the Abraham/Egyptian papers are concretely dated to the end of 1835, the text of the Book of Abraham MUST have been completely translated prior to the creation of the Abraham/Egyptian documents.
That is why Gee must argue that the entirety of the Book of Abraham was translated in 1835; in spite of the evidence.
At least, that is how I understand the situation.