As you know Gee put up his infamous review of the Jensen/Hauglid Book of Abraham volume of the Joseph Smith papers to which I responded.
https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/the-joseph-smith-papers-project-stumbles/#more-26764
In this response, I only dealt with Gee's criticism of Jensen's and Hauglid's transcription. It was up for a while before it was removed and I was sent this email 28 August.
The decision was made to review all comments on this article after noon on Sunday. Yours got posted due to a wrong discussion setting. Once the review is finished your comment will either be reposted or you will receive an email.
Then, Grant Gardner sent me this email on 30 August.
John Gee’s article has been revised after discussions and suggestions from colleagues who had concerns. As a consequence, it is possible that comments on the original article might not apply to the revision. Please see if your comments still apply and resubmit updates. Thank you.
Yesterday, Gee put up his revised review and this morning I resubmitted my comment about Gee's transcription criticisms, which I also revised and added to:
Gee’s discussion of the different practices of ancient and American historians is not relevant since most of his examples do not deal with visual versus authorial intent. I find the attempt to avoid the problem of authorial intent to be an illusion that produces some very unreadable texts. It is one of the things about Royal Skousen’s transcriptions of the Book of Mormon manuscripts that I find unnecessarily annoying.
As someone who has transcribed thousands of pages of documents, let me tell you that it is not a science. The Joseph Smith Papers editors have clearly stated this: “Text transcription and verification is therefore an imperfect art than a science” (e.g., Vol. 1, p. lix of the Journals series). Most of the transcription errors Gee has listed are not due to a difference in methodology but are merely judgment calls. When I looked at Gee’s 23 examples, I found that only 7 were probably right, 9 were probably wrong, 5 were only possibly right, and 2 were undetermined.
In several of Gee’s examples, he wants to show overwrites of the same letters, whereas Jensen and Hauglid chose not to indicate them. This seems to be the reason for other transcribing differences such as where Gee reads “possession<s>” instead of “possessions.” Jensen and Hauglid evidently read the terminal “s” as an overwrite, whereas Gee sees it as an insertion. However, it might be a strikeout. Note also that Gee does not use the long-s in the two “ss” as one might expect of a transcription that “prioritizes what the scribe actually wrote.” In Willard Richards’ 1842 transcription, Gee wants to change “canaanites” to “canaanite<s>”. However, a close examination shows that the terminal “s” is touched-up as is also the first “a”.
There are several instances where Gee is less conservative than Jensen and Hauglid, when Gee deciphers characters that Jensen and Hauglid use diamonds. For example, Gee changes “I{◊◊\at}a” to read “I{to\at}a”—which I found was possible, although I remained uncertain and wondered how Gee could be so sure as to criticize Jensen and Hauglid. In his first example, Gee tells us to replace “{◊\B}ethcho” with “Bethcho” and criticizes Jensen and Hauglid because “there is no overwriting on the character although there is some touch-up.” In my judgment, Gee is overly confident that it is a touch-up instead of an overwrite. It doesn’t look like a normal touch-up and the result is an anomalous-shaped “B.”
Gee writes as if the issue of scribal intent can be avoided, but it can’t. Going by appearance only, Gee transcribes “desendemt fron” instead of “desendent from.” Trying to transcribe Willard Richards’ treacherous handwriting without considering authorial intent would be impossible, especially since he had a habit of amalgamating characters into something that was idiosyncratic and impossible to represent in type. In my view, for example, Jensen and Hauglid correctly transcribed “Behold Potiphars,” I suspect because they know Richards’ handwriting well, whereas Gee transcribes it “Behod Potiphas.” Those familiar with Richards’ habits know that his terminal “d” is often just the riser without first part so that “ed” can appear to be “d,” which in this instance is “ld” to the trained eye. Similarly, the terminal “rs” can appear to be just a large “s,” when in fact it is a standing “r” followed by a downward stroke.
All transcriptions have problems, even Gee’s.
Finally, Gee argues, “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.” There are two instances in the Jensen/Hauglid transcription that fit Gee’s worry expressed here, only they actually follow what Gee has previously transcribed himself. In transcribing Frederic G. Williams’ Book of Abraham manuscript, Jensen and Hauglid have placed Abraham 1:12 and 14, which refer to the gods and altar in Facsimile 1, within angled brackets, indicating that they are later insertions. Gee and other apologists have suggested this because they know that the vignettes do not date to Abraham’s time and it is difficult to argue that Abraham’s record was appended to the Book of Breathings when it refers to “the representation that is at the commencement of this record.” Gee, Jensen, and Hauglid give as a pretext for this reading that the writing looks cramped. The first instance appears at the end of a paragraph and slants upward, which also happens at the end of the previous paragraph due to the page being unlined. These writers place the beginning of the insertion where the line begins to slant upwards, which makes the sentence incoherent. The second proposed insertion appears at the top of the next page, which these authors argue was inserted into the blank top margin in cramped writing. However, Williams had a habit of not maintaining a top margin and the writing is not cramped. All transcriptions have problems, even Gee’s, but readers and researchers should beware of this bias more than any of the others Gee has pointed out.
I also added comments about his complains that apologetic interpretations were not included in Jensen and Hauglid's notes:
Gee complains that equal time was not given to apologetic scholarship dealing with the reverse-translation, long-scroll, and disputed-authorship theories as if it were only a matter of interpreting the historical sources differently. It’s not. The scholarship Gee and others have produced on what is known as the Kirtland Egyptian Papers is unsound and cannot be recommended.
For example, Gee criticizes the date Jensen and Hauglid give for the Egyptian Alphabets—“circa Early July-circa November 1835”—which is as vague as you could get. Yet, Gee states, “This date provided for the Egyptian Alphabet documents by the editors does not match that provided by Joseph Smith’s journals, which indicate a specific date for these documents (1 October 1835)” (Gee, 179).
Joseph Smith’s journal states no such thing. On 1 October 1835, Oliver Cowdery wrote in Joseph Smith’s journal: “This after noon labored on the Egyptian alphabet, in company with brsr. O. Cowdery and W. W. Phelps: The system of astronomy was unfolded.” Because the astronomy appears in the bound Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL), not the Alphabets, Gee has attempted to argue that working on the “Egyptian alphabet” and the unfolding of astronomy were separate activities. However, aside from a few brief discussions of grammar, the GAEL is mostly an expansion of the Alphabets into five degrees of meaning. There is no reason Cowdery could not have referred to the Grammar and Alphabet as simply the “Egyptian alphabet.” In fact, some of the pages of the Grammar have the heading “Egyptian Alphabet.” Gee’s contorted reading of the passage is unnecessary. Besides, the journal entry says nothing about when the document was begun, only that they were working on it.
Joseph Smith’s history states, “The remainder of this month [July 1835], I was continually engaged in translating an alphabet to the Book of Abraham, and arrangeing a grammar of the Egyptian language as practiced by the ancients” (HC, 1:238). This tells us when the Alphabets were begun—in July, not October. It also tells us by whom—Joseph Smith, not Phelps. The passage is important because it was composed by Willard Richards on 16 September 1843, no doubt with the help of Joseph Smith and/or W. W. Phelps, two of the participants. In his recent book, Gee neglects to quote this passage as well as the previous statement that in July 1835 Joseph Smith, with scribes Cowdery and Phelps, “commenced the translation of some of the characters or hieroglyphics, and much to our joy found that one of the rolls contained the writings of Abraham; another the writings of Joseph of Egypt, &c.” Yet, Gee asserts that all the Book of Abraham that we have and possibly more was translated in July 1835 without ever documenting that claim.
The only reason Gee wants the entire Book of Abraham translated in early July 1835 is so he can argue the old Nibley apologetic that the Alphabets and GAEL are attempts by Phelps to reverse engineer Joseph Smith’s translation. The problem with that theory is that the Alphabets and GAEL only relate to the Book of Abraham indirectly. In fact, they are translations of characters from Amerhotep and Ta-sherit-Min papyri as well as the columns from Joseph Smith Papyrus I that flank Fac. 1, whereas the characters in the margins of the Book of Abraham manuscripts come from Joseph Smith Papyrus XI. Since the reverse translation theory cannot be maintained, there is no need to insist that the entire Book of Abraham was translated in July 1835.
Continuing with Gee’s historical theories:
Gee complains, “Others have put forth historical arguments that W. W. Phelps, not Joseph Smith, authored many of the documents published in the volume. These arguments are ignored” (Gee, 183). The only evidence Gee has given is his own misreading of a passage in Joseph Smith’s journal under 13 November 1843, which Gee thinks describes Joseph Smith going to Phelps’ house for the GAEL. His reading is incorrect, because it describes either Smith going to his own office where Phelps worked or Phelps going to the Mansion House where Smith lived. Besides, Phelps probably helped Richards compose the entry in Smith’s history that assigned authorship to Joseph Smith.
Gee objects to Jensen and Hauglid’s assumption that the translation in Kirtland in 1835 ended with Abraham 2:18, and complains that they “are ignoring a great deal of evidence that others have adduced for precisely the idea that Joseph Smith had translated more of the Book of Abraham than that at that time” (Gee, 184). Both Gee and Kerry Muhlestein have argued that the entire Book of Abraham was dictated in 1835, even the last three chapters that show signs of Joseph Smith’s Hebrew lessons in early 1836. Gee cites Muhlestein and Megan Hansen’s theory that the Hebrew words and other Hebrew influenced translations were added in Nauvoo before publication in 1842. There is no credible evidence that Joseph Smith inserted the Hebrew-inspired material in Nauvoo or that he translated beyond Abraham 2:18 in Kirtland, which he published in the first installment in the Times and Seasons (1 March 1842). His journal records that he and Richards were working on the next installment on 8-9 March, which appeared in the 15 March 1842 issue.
Gee attempts to provide evidence that the translation in Kirtland extended beyond Abraham 2:18 by pointing out the disparity between what Jensen and Hauglid believe was translated in Kirtland and what they think was produced in Nauvoo. “Joseph Smith’s Kirtland period journals record him translating on 7 October 1835, 19 November 1835, 20 November 1835, 24 November 1835, and 25 November 1835. This is a minimum of five sessions. In Nauvoo, there is only a day and a half of translation” (Gee, 184-85). Gee assumes that the Alphabets and Grammar were not translations by Smith, but derive from Phelps’ reverse engineering of the Book of Abraham. However, the entry in Smith’s history states that he was “engaged in translating an alphabet to the Book of Abraham.”
Because of identical or nearly identical corrections in the Book of Abraham manuscripts scribed by Frederick G. Williams and Warren Parrish, it is clear that they wrote simultaneously from Joseph Smith’s dictation. The probable date for that to have occurred was 19-20 November 1835, when Joseph Smith’s journal mentions all three were together and toured the temple, after which “I returned home and spent the day in translating the Egyptian records” and on the next day “spent the day in translating, and made rapid progress.”
Because they have a size limit, I tried to get through by breaking my comments up. Regardless of what Interpreter does you now have my comments and you can judge if they are valid or not. I find it ironic that Gee complains about not being considered by Jensen and Hauglid when he says he doesn't care what the critics say and ignores their arguments on a regular basis. I find it irksome that he continues to spout his discredited apologetic arguments although he undoubtedly knows about Hauglid's statements about his "abhorrent" scholarship and endorsement of my videos. Is he willing to give my scholarship equal time. I doubt it!
