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Over on the board that must not be named, CaliforniaKid has opened a thread about the obviously problematic "translation" Joseph Smith made of the Book of Abraham facsimiles. In response, there have been some obvious red herrings and some honest admissions from TBMs that it is indeed problematic. The interesting post for me is David Bokovoy's statement that the obvious error in translation does not mean the book isn't inspired.

If the argument here is that Joseph Smith could not “translate” ancient Egyptian and by extension ancient reformed Egyptian in a traditional manner, then I whole-heartedly agree.

If the argument, however, is that Joseph Smith could not produce an inspired “translation” i.e. “interpretation” (see “translate” no. 6 in Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language; 1828), then I couldn’t disagree more.

To me, this is pretty much throwing in the towel on the Book of Abraham. Essentially, he's telling us that "wrong but inspired" is good enough.

Runtu wrote:Over on the board that must not be named, CaliforniaKid has opened a thread about the obviously problematic "translation" Joseph Smith made of the Book of Abraham facsimiles. In response, there have been some obvious red herrings and some honest admissions from TBMs that it is indeed problematic. The interesting post for me is David Bokovoy's statement that the obvious error in translation does not mean the book isn't inspired.

If the argument here is that Joseph Smith could not “translate” ancient Egyptian and by extension ancient reformed Egyptian in a traditional manner, then I whole-heartedly agree.

If the argument, however, is that Joseph Smith could not produce an inspired “translation” I.e. “interpretation” (see “translate” no. 6 in Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language; 1828), then I couldn’t disagree more.

To me, this is pretty much throwing in the towel on the Book of Abraham. Essentially, he's telling us that "wrong but inspired" is good enough.

That's great. I love that excuse. So the Book of Abraham, like everything else in Mormonism, comes down to taking Joseph Smith's word for it, since there is no evidence to support it, and all the evidence goes against it. Actually the Book of Abraham comes down to taking the apologists word for it over Joseph Smiths. Joseph Smith and his contemporaries said he was translating the characters on the Egyptian scrolls. The apologists want us to believe that Joseph Smith was really getting a revelation in his head that had nothing to do with the characters on the scroll, he just thought he was translating the characters. Joseph Smith as idiot Prophet is their best chance at saving The Book of Abraham. It's the funniest apologetic excuse they've come up with.

David has very much dodged the issue. Rather than evaluating Joseph Smith's interpretation of the vignette, he evaluates his own interpretation of it. And he does not provide a solution to the problem posed by the OP, which is quite simply that the Egyptian characters do not say what Joseph Smith said they say. This is not a problem that can be resolved by appeal to "Semitic adaptation" unless we presume that the hypothesized Jewish-Egyptian redactor completely reconceptualized the Egyptian system of phonetics. By the time we arrive at a solution that ad hoc, we might as well just shoot ourselves in the head, because it's not like we were using it anyway.

I mentioned this in a thread at FAIR a while ago. I was basically trying to make the case that the only method to retain belief in the Book of Abraham was to take the 'inspiration' route. I tried to point out that Joseph Smith's 'translation' methods were unconventional, and I tried to tie this into the KEP. The apologists have been so gung ho on attempting to distance the KEP from the Book of Abraham, because the symbols obviously don't match up to the text. I was trying to point out - 'hey, it's ok, because there's all these other reasons that make the 'inspiration' method the only viable method'.

I just don't see how anyone could hold out hope of a missing papryi matching the Book of Abraham text, when you've got things like this that make it apparent that Joseph Smith wasn't 'translating' Egyptian text.

Who Knows wrote:I mentioned this in a thread at FAIR a while ago. I was basically trying to make the case that the only method to retain belief in the Book of Abraham was to take the 'inspiration' route. I tried to point out that Joseph Smith's 'translation' methods were unconventional, and I tried to tie this into the KEP. The apologists have been so gung ho on attempting to distance the KEP from the Book of Abraham, because the symbols obviously don't match up to the text. I was trying to point out - 'hey, it's ok, because there's all these other reasons that make the 'inspiration' method the only viable method'.

I just don't see how anyone could hold out hope of a missing papryi matching the Book of Abraham text, when you've got things like this that make it apparent that Joseph Smith wasn't 'translating' Egyptian text.

That's pretty much what you have to do with a lot of Joseph's claims: reinterpret them so they don't mean what he said they mean. My friend in Oklahoma tells me that he knows a prominent LDS historian who says that the Nephites must have lived in another dimension.

Now that Schryver made his glorious return, let's see if he gets into the thread.

Dear God in heaven, that was an imbecilic thread. Joseph got everything wrong on his Book of Abraham translation because "well I can imagine that sometimes Joseph Smith didn't get it right, maybe he had a fight with Emma and didn't have the Spirit (Hammer)"

Cuz he had a bad day?

Joseph's frequent bad days somehow ended up in the LDS canon. Can you imagine the bad day that produced D&C 132? "Dear Lord, Emma is really giving me a hard time about this whole multiple wives issue. How can we help her understand she must get with the system here and allow me to boink the community? I know, we'll canonize it."

Schryver's back?

My thread is now descending into obfuscation and testimony-time. I think I'll bow out shortly. Those who have ears to hear have probably already heard enough. As for the rest, well, nothing will move them. I should have put this in pundits so I could at least carry on a halfway rational conversation with Bokovoy about it without being shouted down by the mob.

-CK

CaliforniaKid wrote:Schryver's back?

My thread is now descending into obfuscation and testimony-time. I think I'll bow out shortly. Those who have ears to hear have probably already heard enough. As for the rest, well, nothing will move them. I should have put this in pundits so I could at least carry on a halfway rational conversation with Bokovoy about it without being shouted down by the mob.

-CK

I like David, and I'm actually kind of impressed that he isn't going to defend the indefensible. Yeah, the "we don't know what translation means" is a major cop-out, but at least he's honest enough to say that what Joseph wrote doesn't match reality at all.

Hi CK,

Your post was spot on. There is no wiggle room. Anyone trying to find some just comes across as lame. Pharaoh and Pharaoh's son were reenacting a ritual drama and that is why the other names came up in a literal translation? Oh me. Oh my.