Kerry Muhlestein on the Book of Abraham

[_aussieguy55]

http://blog.fairmormon.org/2013/11/14/e ... uhlestein/

"SR: How did Joseph Smith translate these papyri?

Muhlestein: We do not know the exact process by which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham, besides that it was done by the power of God. There is some evidence that suggests he used the Urim and Thummim, or possibly his seer stone. It is not completely clear whether he was actually translating from the papyri, something akin to how he translated the golden plates of the Book of Mormon, or if he was translating by receiving pure revelation, as he did with the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, or if there was a combination of these two methods, or even something else entirely. We just don’t have enough information."

Give me strength
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something , when his salary depends on him not understanding it" Upton Sinclair

[_Brackite]

Oh Boy!!

From That FAIR Blog:

SR: Some scholars have argued that we’re missing a substantial portion of the Joseph Smith Papyri. Others deny this, and say we’re only missing a few scraps. How much of the Joseph Smith Papyri do you think are we’re missing, and why is that significant?

Muhlestein: The historical documents make it clear that we have very little of the papyri Joseph Smith had. Even after several fragments were mounted to paper and put under glass (presumably this is what we have now), the eyewitnesses say that there was a large roll and another roll (smaller, but presumably still sizable) of papyri. This means that the largest portion of the papyrus collection is not the fragments that we now have, but rather has been lost.

From Fence Sitter:

I consistently run into references that the Charlotte Hevan account proves the Hor scroll was very long. Here is a description by Charlotte

She (Lucy) receives a little pittance by exhibiting The Mummies to strangers. When we asked to see them, she lit a candle and conducted us up a short, narrow stairway to a low, dark room under the roof. On one side were standing half a dozen mummies, to whom she introduced us, King Onitus and his royal household, -- one she did not know. Then she took up what seemed to be a club wrapped in a dark cloth, and said "This is the leg of Pharaoh's daughter, the one that saved Moses." Repressing a smile, I looked from the mummies to the old lady. but could detect nothing but earnestness and sincerity on her countenance. Then she turned to a long table, set her candle-stick down, and opened a long roll of manuscript, saying it was "the writing of Abraham and Isaac, written in Hebrew and Sanscrit," and she read seven minutes from it as if it were English

If this is the correct quote, what it proves is that a long scroll was opened on a table, nothing more. You cannot infer the length of the scroll from that reference. Certainly the unrolled section was not longer than the table. Apologetic claims about the missing portion length run from a few feet to almost 40'-0". How long was this long table? Certainly not long enough for most of the missing scroll predictions, remember it is inside a house in an upstairs room up a narrow stairway. The table would have to be carried up those stairs or built out of pieces that could fit up the stairway. If the entire scroll was opened then the length of the scroll would be limited to the table, and if she only saw a portion of it she would have no idea how long the unwound portions was. We don't even know if the unrolled scroll covered the length of this long table whose length we also do not know. By the way the scroll she unrolled in this quote would have been the missing section from the Hor scroll because by the time of Nauvoo, Facsimile#1 and the fist two sections of the Hor scroll were already pasted onto backing paper and would no longer be part of a roll. We know this was not the Joseph scroll because further on in Charlotte's account she says:

Then in the same way she (Lucy) interpreted to us hieroglyphics from another roll. One was Mother Eve being tempted by the serpent, who -- the serpent, I mean -- was standing on the tip of his tail, with which his two legs formed a tripod, and had his head in Eve's ear. I said, "But serpents don't have legs."

They did before the fall," she asserted with perfect confidence

Which is clearly a scroll of Joseph description or The Book of the Dead of Ta-Sherit-Min.

viewtopic.php?p=634017#p634017

More on the missing scroll theory & the length of the missing scroll.

As has been already mentioned, the canonized version of the Book of Abraham translation is only partially complete. There are numerous references to significant portions left to translate or whose translations had been completed or lost. Oliver Cowdery expected the completed translation to fill volumes. In 1843 Joseph Smith promised to furnish further extracts from the Book of Abraham beyond what we have now, and there are several involved descriptions of those future (lost?) translations from people like Anson Call, William West, Sarah Leavitt, William Clayton and William Appleby.

If the Book of Abraham was written in hieratic characters by the same scribe and on an extension of the same scroll it would take around 16'-0' (511 cm) more of scroll to do so. (See Cook & Smith "The Original Length of the Scroll of Hor".) Allowing for about 2'-6" of extant pieces results in a minimum scroll length of 18'-6" just to write the current text of The Book of Abraham,The Breathing Permit of Hor and the 2 facsimiles. We haven't begun to factor in how much more papyri would be needed to include the unplublished references mentioned above. So now we have a papyri roll that by any reasonable standard must exceed 25'-0" to contain all the extant pieces, all the current Book of Abraham and all there other references (excluding Oliver Cowdery's) and it must fit within the diameter defined by the length of the first winding. The length of the first winding is around 4 1/4" so the diameter is about 1 1/3". The question becomes, is it even possible to roll up a 25'-0" piece of papyri into a 1 1/3" diameter roll?

viewtopic.php?p=634130#p634130

Recently I discovered another issue which is interesting. We know that there were two scrolls connected to the old man mummy who was Hor. (Pharaoh himself according to contemporary descriptions.) They are a Book of Breathings (the Hor scroll and the generally accepted source of the Book of Abraham) parts of which are still in the possession of the Church and a Book of the Dead. The Book of the Dead papyrus which was prepared for Hor is in the Louvre. These two scroll date to about 150 BCE.
The Louvre Hor Book of Dead is also badly damaged but its dimensions are about 58" long and 12-13 1/2" tall.
Somewhere between Lebolo removing Hor from his tomb in Egypt and Chandler selling the remaining artifact collection in Kirtland, the Hor Book of the Dead was separated from the mummy and made its way to the Louvre. It would be interesting to compare the two scrolls to see if they were created by the same scribe, but I digress.

In addition to the Hor scroll, the Joseph Smith collection contained another scroll, which he identified as the Book of Joseph. This is actually a Book of the Dead prepared for someone named Ta-sherit-Min which I presume was one of the female mummies; in any case it was not from Hor. The age of this scroll is somewhere after 500 BCE.

So in order for The Book of Abraham and The Book of Joseph to reach Joseph Smith one is required to believe the following:
1.Two complete, long, unknown works by Abraham and Joseph were kept in Egypt for around 2000 years.
2. Egyptian scribes would take common vignettes from Egyptian funerary documents and just slightly change them so they represented scenes from the Book of Abraham. Note that an Egyptian scribe would not have included a vignette of a sacrifice scene (someone holding a knife) as part of a funerary document because the Egyptians believed these scrolls had actual power and a knife wielding caricature would not be included as it would be a threat to the deceased. Maybe we have a Jewish scribe?
3. Two different scribes working hundreds of years apart took two different extremely rare Jewish texts and inscribed them in the middle portions of common burial documents for members of a different religion, in the case of the scroll with Facsimile #1 that scribe would been able to place the scroll unexamined by anyone else on the mummy because of note#2 above.
4.The two scrolls are buried hundreds of years apart on separate mummies neither of which had reason to have Jewish texts like these included as part of their funerary documents.
5. These two mummies make their way to Joseph Smith two thousand years later with the only known copies of these two texts.
6. Joseph Smith translates a portion of one scroll and promises volumes to come from the rest of both scrolls.
7. After Joseph Smith's death every single piece of text from both scrolls that contained either the Book of Abraham or the Book of Joseph was lost, in spite of the fact that the length of the scrolls required to contain those books would far exceed those portions in existence. None of the extant fragments or torn piece, of which there are dozens have anything to do with Abraham or Joseph.

In the end, we are not asked just to believe that we happen to be missing the entire portion of a one of a kind scroll that was buried with Hor which made its way to Joseph Smith and then was lost, we are asked to believe this happened twice, once with Hor and once with another mummy buried at a different time, perhaps hundreds of years apart.

Fool me once.

viewtopic.php?p=640599#p640599

[_Brackite]

Bumping this Thread up since LDSFaqs recently started a thread in the Terrestrial Forum that linked to a Youtube video of Kerry Muhlestein.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=37988

[_just me]

How was the translation of the 'golden plates' any different from anything else Joseph did? Has the church forgotten that it wasn't an actual translation process rather he was supposedly reading words off a rock? He never used the plates, he never used the scrolls. Sounds the same to me.

[_Tator]

"SR: How did Joseph Smith translate these papyri?

Muhlestein: We do not know the exact process by which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham, besides that it was done by the power of God. There is some evidence that suggests he used the Urim and Thummim, or possibly his seer stone. It is not completely clear whether he was actually translating from the papyri, something akin to how he translated the golden plates of the Book of Mormon, or if he was translating by receiving pure revelation, as he did with the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, or if there was a combination of these two methods, or even something else entirely. We just don’t have enough information."

But I bet when he did his magic on the JST he had a Bible in his possession written in English and not Egyptian or Reformed Egyptian.