Interpreter and Gee Continue Their Attacks on the JSP

[Moksha]

Gee seems pissed about legacy. His name was already looking bad when the church decided to publish this Abraham material as part of the JSP, apparently. I mean seriously, in his mind, how did he get left out? That this embarrassing episode persists at Interpreter speaks to the credibility and seriousness of that venture, if you ask me.

Dr. Gee's article could be seen as a testament to the Interpreter Foundation being mad as hell and thus not willing to take it anymore. It was time someone put his foot down and that foot was Dr. Gee. The Joseph Smith Papers people have undoubtedly learned not to cross the Interpreter, lest they be exposed as anti-Mormons. "Vengence is mine sayeth the Lord, and I have taken a little in a reputable and well-established research journal."

[IHAQ]

Let’s say for a moment that Gee is on the money with his criticism.

Conclusions

I have shown that the theory of translation propounded in The Joseph Smith Papers Revelations and Translations: Volume 4 does not accord with the facts presented in the rest of the Joseph Smith Papers or even with the documents published in JSPRT4. The evidence adduced for a simultaneous dictation appears to be refuted by the documents themselves and the historical use of scribes in 1835 and 1836. The purported simultaneous dictation of manuscripts cannot be demonstrated to have ever occurred, and the documents show that it could not have happened the way the volume editors propose.

https://journal.interpreterfoundation.o ... f-abraham/

The only conclusion available to us in that case is that the team running the Joseph Smith Papers is staffed by incompetent and shoddy historians. I’d suggest the JSP team need to respond to this condemnation of their academic capabilities by Gee, quite promptly, before he blows a hole in their credibility below the water line...

[Gabriel]

I would post this as a comment at the Interpreter but I am in no mood to soften my verbiage and go through all the oriental verbal self-abnenation and flattery required to see a watered-down version of what I wish to say on their site.

Caveat Lector: I pretend to no more than a layperson's grasp of this subject matter; so take my un-credentialed opinion for what it is worth.

First impression - A good editor should have blue-penciled this article from the get-go and sent it back for a good rewrite for a number of reasons (the terrible optics not being the worst among them). That the editors did not leads one to suspect that this article is something of a group manifesto. So any shoddy scholarship contained therein I will lay at the feet of the Interpreter as a whole.

One example (and I am not even sure that this is the most egregious one): It's fairly obvious that the Interpreter lays all the blame for the bogus egyptian-language stuff squarely on the shoulders of W.W. Phelps. When Joseph Smith has semi-reasonable things to say then W.W. Phelps is Joseph's "scribe"; when Joseph Smith spews forth manifest drivel then W.W. Phelps is Joseph's "ghostwriter". The following is from the Interpreter's article under the heading "Authorship". (Notice that the last paragraph undercuts their whole thesis).

Authorship
The volume editors claim “the scribes gradually ceased work on the Egyptian Alphabet documents. After completing about four pages, Joseph Smith and his clerks abandoned this project, moving on to work on the Grammar and Alphabet volume.”68 Without supplying any evidence, they simply beg the question of whether Joseph Smith was involved in the creation of the Grammar and Alphabet. They repeat this assertion later: “The Grammar and Alphabet volume was one piece of a larger attempt to understand the Egyptian language, which was in turn part of a larger effort by Joseph Smith to study ancient languages.”69

This assumption is carried over to other parts of the text: “it appears that at the time Phelps stopped work on the Grammar and Alphabet volume in Kirtland, Joseph Smith and his associates felt their work in studying an Egyptian language system was not finished.”70 The Book of Abraham manuscripts were, according to the volume editors, “also related to Joseph Smith’s efforts to study the Egyptian language.”71

The tendency of the volume editors to assign work by Phelps to Joseph Smith continues in their discussion of a letter that Joseph Smith asked Phelps to ghostwrite for him:

Several months later, on 13 November 1843, Joseph Smith and William W. Phelps drew on the Grammar and Alphabet volume in a letter to sometime Mormon supporter James Arlington Bennet. In the letter, Joseph Smith and Phelps included several phrases in other languages, including an allegedly Egyptian passage based on the Grammar and Alphabet: “Were I an Egyptian,” the letter stated, “I would exclaim= Jah oh=ah: Enish-go=an=dosh. Flo-ees-Flo-isis.”72

This is not the way Joseph Smith talked about the letter in his journal. In his journal, Joseph Smith said he “gave instruction to have it [a letter from James Arlington Bennet] answerd” by W. W. Phelps in his name.73 Phelps spent three or four days working on the draft. [Page 149]On the morning of 13 November 1843, “Phelps read [the] letter to Jas A Bennet. & [Joseph Smith] made some correcti[o]ns.”74 It is clear from the journal that Joseph Smith considered the work that of W. W. Phelps.


END OF "Authorship".


So, in the last paragraph, we read that Joseph Smith instructs Phelps to write a letter in his (ie. Joseph Smith's) name. Phelps writes it. 3 or 4 days later he brings a draft of the letter back to Joseph. Joseph Smith makes corrections. And then the Interpreter states nothing more than an evidence-free, bald assertion that "It is clear from the journal that Joseph Smith considered the work that of W. W. Phelps".

But it is worse than that. Much worse. And this can't be blamed on just shoddy scholarship. Rather the Interpreter is being deliberately deceptive. They fail to mention that among the corrections that Joseph made to the letter involved switching the order of the "Egyptian" words that Phelps had written. That begs the question: If Joseph Smith pretended to no knowledge of the Egyptian language then why did he see fit to correct W.W. Phelps' use of it?

Below is the link to this letter on the JSPP website. Am I missing something here?

https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper ... ber-1843/4

There are a few other issues I have with this article regarding what (I think) is a creative use of footnotes but I don't have time to get into it right now. If there is any interest I might post something about it in the future.

[Dr Exiled]

I would post this as a comment at the Interpreter but I am in no mood to soften my verbiage and go through all the oriental verbal self-abnenation and flattery required to see a watered-down version of what I wish to say on their site.

Caveat Lector: I pretend to no more than a layperson's grasp of this subject matter; so take my un-credentialed opinion for what it is worth.

First impression - A good editor should have blue-penciled this article from the get-go and sent it back for a good rewrite for a number of reasons (the terrible optics not being the worst among them). That the editors did not leads one to suspect that this article is something of a group manifesto. So any shoddy scholarship contained therein I will lay at the feet of the Interpreter as a whole.

One example (and I am not even sure that this is the most egregious one): It's fairly obvious that the Interpreter lays all the blame for the bogus egyptian-language stuff squarely on the shoulders of W.W. Phelps. When Joseph Smith has semi-reasonable things to say then W.W. Phelps is Joseph's "scribe"; when Joseph Smith spews forth manifest drivel then W.W. Phelps is Joseph's "ghostwriter". The following is from the Interpreter's article under the heading "Authorship". (Notice that the last paragraph undercuts their whole thesis).

Authorship
The volume editors claim “the scribes gradually ceased work on the Egyptian Alphabet documents. After completing about four pages, Joseph Smith and his clerks abandoned this project, moving on to work on the Grammar and Alphabet volume.”68 Without supplying any evidence, they simply beg the question of whether Joseph Smith was involved in the creation of the Grammar and Alphabet. They repeat this assertion later: “The Grammar and Alphabet volume was one piece of a larger attempt to understand the Egyptian language, which was in turn part of a larger effort by Joseph Smith to study ancient languages.”69

This assumption is carried over to other parts of the text: “it appears that at the time Phelps stopped work on the Grammar and Alphabet volume in Kirtland, Joseph Smith and his associates felt their work in studying an Egyptian language system was not finished.”70 The Book of Abraham manuscripts were, according to the volume editors, “also related to Joseph Smith’s efforts to study the Egyptian language.”71

The tendency of the volume editors to assign work by Phelps to Joseph Smith continues in their discussion of a letter that Joseph Smith asked Phelps to ghostwrite for him:

Several months later, on 13 November 1843, Joseph Smith and William W. Phelps drew on the Grammar and Alphabet volume in a letter to sometime Mormon supporter James Arlington Bennet. In the letter, Joseph Smith and Phelps included several phrases in other languages, including an allegedly Egyptian passage based on the Grammar and Alphabet: “Were I an Egyptian,” the letter stated, “I would exclaim= Jah oh=ah: Enish-go=an=dosh. Flo-ees-Flo-isis.”72

This is not the way Joseph Smith talked about the letter in his journal. In his journal, Joseph Smith said he “gave instruction to have it [a letter from James Arlington Bennet] answerd” by W. W. Phelps in his name.73 Phelps spent three or four days working on the draft. [Page 149]On the morning of 13 November 1843, “Phelps read [the] letter to Jas A Bennet. & [Joseph Smith] made some correcti[o]ns.”74 It is clear from the journal that Joseph Smith considered the work that of W. W. Phelps.


END OF "Authorship".


So, in the last paragraph, we read that Joseph Smith instructs Phelps to write a letter in his (ie. Joseph Smith's) name. Phelps writes it. 3 or 4 days later he brings a draft of the letter back to Joseph. Joseph Smith makes corrections. And then the Interpreter states nothing more than an evidence-free, bald assertion that "It is clear from the journal that Joseph Smith considered the work that of W. W. Phelps".

But it is worse than that. Much worse. And this can't be blamed on just shoddy scholarship. Rather the Interpreter is being deliberately deceptive. They fail to mention that among the corrections that Joseph made to the letter involved switching the order of the "Egyptian" words that Phelps had written. That begs the question: If Joseph Smith pretended to no knowledge of the Egyptian language then why did he see fit to correct W.W. Phelps' use of it?

Below is the link to this letter on the JSPP website. Am I missing something here?

https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper ... ber-1843/4

There are a few other issues I have with this article regarding what (I think) is a creative use of footnotes but I don't have time to get into it right now. If there is any interest I might post something about it in the future.

Nice comment and keep it coming. As for the deliberate deception, that is what one must do when defending Joseph Smith or BY. So, I'm not surprised at yet another deception on the apologists' part. And you aren't missing anything.

[Gabriel]

The Interpreter article also devotes a lot of attention to the term "Shinehah" (as if to emphasize the point that the JSPP suffers from the lack of a qualified Egyptologist to guide it).

I am using ellipses to begin the quoted section because I am starting from the middle of a paragraph.


".....One further translation session would bring the translation to Abraham 3:28. This is indicated because the term Shinehah from Abraham 3:13 appears as a code name for Kirtland in the 1835 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants.117 Other translation sessions could have possibly occurred and further material produced, but my theory does not require them.

[Page 157]Some might hypothesize that the term Shinehah was borrowed into the Book of Abraham from its use in the Doctrine and Covenants. This hypothesis assumes that the Book of Abraham is a modern fictional work written by Joseph Smith. The assumption, though unstated, is essential for the argument to be comprehensible. The problem with the assumption is that this term in the Book of Abraham is a known Egyptian term. For at least two decades this term has been known to be an Egyptian term for the path of the sun around the earth, the ecliptic,118 which matches with the Book of Abraham’s description that “this is Shinehah, which is the sun” in the context of the movement of heavenly bodies (Abraham 3:13). A look at the ancient Egyptian usage of the term provides a more informative view of its usage. The ancient Egyptian term is either written mr-n-ḫꜣ or š-n-ḫꜣ. The pronunciation of the latter can be reconstructed as *šī-ne-ḫaʾ.119"

End of Quote

I recall that Dr. Ritner spent some time discussing this in the Mormon Stories Interviews. If memory serves me right he argued that Shinehah is something of a texas bullseye that one could create only by arbitrarily adding the middle syllabic vowel and artificially mashing up two hieroglyphs together that have never been found less than 10 characters apart in any known source.

Yet the Interpreter argues: "For at least two decades this term has been known to be an Egyptian term for the path of the sun around the earth, the ecliptic,118 which matches with the Book of Abraham’s description that “this is Shinehah, which is the sun” in the context of the movement of heavenly bodies (Abraham 3:13)."

One rather gets the impression that if Dr. Ritner had dropped the ball on this one and is at least two decades behind the cutting-edge world of Egyptology then last August would have been the opportune time for LDS Egyptologists to really strut their stuff and spike their footballs.

Nevertheless, in support of what everyone in the world of Egyptology has known "for at least two decades," we can scroll down to footnote 118.

118. Rolf Krauss, Astronomische Konzepte und Jenseitsvorstellungen in den Pyramidentexten (Weisbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997), 14–66.

I don't know much German and there appears to be no English translation of the text (at least, none that I could find online). I don't know if all 42 pages from page 14 through 66 are devoted to explaining Shinehah or if it is only marginally referenced somewhere within that span. A brief English translation of the relevant information would have helped here if the Interpreter was really trying to convincingly argue their case.

As regards the unique pronunciation of Shinehah the Interpreter says in the last sentence: "The ancient Egyptian term is either written mr-n-ḫꜣ or š-n-ḫꜣ. The pronunciation of the latter can be reconstructed as *šī-ne-ḫaʾ.119"

Scrolling down to footnote 119 we get:

119. For the general principles behind the phonetic reconstruction, see James P. Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 11–30.

To be charitable, at least this reference is in English and one only has to wade through 19 pages of text to get to the point. That being said, why do I have the sneaking suspicion that there are "general principles" and then there are "general principles" and that some "general principles" are more general than others and that LDS Egyptologists are probably applying these "general principles" in a manner that is generally different from everyone else?

[Moksha]

Reminds me of a common saying from 1800 BCE Thebes, "You don't know poop from Shinehah".

[Dr Exiled]

Too bad for Dr. Gee. He can't seem to get that the church wants to have at least some respectability here and won't continue to gaslight like it did in the past. Too many know the real story behind the KEP and how absurd it is to continue to blame the scribes. The weak catalyst theory is the only viable one and that is problematic too, but not as much as Gee's missing scroll theory. I personally like the Joseph made it up theory, just like he made up the Book of Mormon and the D&C.

[Lem]

Reminds me of a common saying from 1800 BCE Thebes, "You don't know poop from Shinehah".

now that's funny.