Themis wrote:
I thought you meant this separate document was part of Joseph's collection, but now I think you are suggesting it was never part of Joseph's collection or put in with the mummy that had the Sensen Papyrus. Is that correct?
Yes. It was never part of Joseph's collection, and was never with the mummy.
Themis wrote:Now given that all the text and pictures used are from the sensen papyrus, and that these papyrus are unique to some extent are you suggesting that the person or persons were the same people that made the sensen papyrus for Hor?
Yes, but they could have done it with any papyrus like this, and so the use of the Sensen papyrus of Hor was not necessarily the one that had to be used, because it was something that could have been done with any Sensen Papyrus and hypocephalus, which would have sufficed for the job, with similar vignettes. Because these types of practices appear to have been more generalized than just something Hor or someone connected to him was doing with a papyrus. Keep in mind that this is theoretical at this point.
Themis wrote:It sounds as though you are saying one document/key was made that just has text and pictures taken from the sensen papyri in which they were written on one side with the adjacent meaning written next to them. So this key or document would be needed to get the Book of Abraham story without God's help, and that Joseph never had the key anyways.
Yes.
Themis wrote:I cannot help but think you are presenting a catalyst theory with an unnecessary step in hopes of salvaging the KEP and that Joseph was being told by God what each hieroglyph and picture meant.
I am coming up with a theory to fit the evidence. The catalyst theory does have some things in common here and there with this theory, as does others, and that is unsurprising, because there is somewhat of a catalyst here, so to speak, and just as with William Schryver's theory, there is somewhat of a code table here, and so, its unsurprising that it would have attributes in common with that too. But the catalyst doesn't explain the rationality behind the usage of Sensen symbols. This does. William Schryver's theory tries to put upon William W. Phelps the responsibility for the KEP and say that it wasn't translation activity at all. I put upon Joseph Smith all responsibilty, as the evidence calls for. I explain EGYPTIAN relationships between symbols and text, even though it is a loose linkage. But I do have the evidence for it. So, it so happens that the catalyst theory has part of the truth, the modern cipher theory of William Schryver has part of the truth. The Semitic Adaptation theory of Kevin Barney has part of the truth where he suggests Iconotropy, but fails to explain the iconotropy in the "little pictures" in the text, where the KEP uses them the same way the Facsimile Explanations use the Facsimile pictures.
Themis wrote: This theory has zero evidence since you suggest Joseph never had this key document, or why someone would even create one when they could just write down the story like everyone else does.
that's not true. A reverse engineering of the KEP reveals the underlying Egyptian character of it. For the same reason that the Jews artistically used the Hebrew Alphabet for acrostics in the Psalms in the Old Testament. For the same reason that people play scrabble with the Latin Alphabet in English. For the same reason the Egyptians performed rituals with the games Senet and Mehen acting out the afterlife with those games as if it was Dungeons and Dragons to them. It's artistic. Its fun, and its ritualistic. And its not our culture.
Themis wrote: It is a key that can only be used for one document, the sensen papyri, but why since it already has a normal story and no way to get another story unless you have the document that someone copied from the sensen papyri and created new meanings.
Nobody created new meanings of anything. They harnessed existing meanings to play word games with them. Word games very similar to what we know as acrostics.
Themis wrote: May as well have buried it with the sensen document, but then if you are going to take some of the text and pictures from the sensen document and add meanings why not just remove the legend which has no real value and you have the Book of Abraham story.
Because we have it as it came down to us. We can't help the shape and form it comes to us. We deal with the evidence as best as we can as we have it. If you don't want to believe it, or discover the underlying rationality and background of the ancient practices that naturalistically led to these circumstances as we have them, and you opt for the simplest explanation only for the sake of disbelief in something more complex as the evidence that we do have demands, then you can continue to be uninterested if you wish. But just because Einstein was a denialist of quantum physics doesn't mean that Neils Bohr wasn't right about the underlying complexity. You could remain in a state similar to Einstein as a denialist, but quantum physics is one of the most counter-intuitive things that modern science has revealed, and there is nothing to it that simple reductionist, denialist thinking would have led to. Rather, people had to keep plowing forward in the face of denialism, until finally, the truth was plainly evident. I didn't expect you to be a believer in my theory. At the very least, you are actually trying to understand it, for which fact I thank you. That's more than can be said for Lemmie or the rest on here.
Themis wrote:I don't think this shows how Joseph was presenting what he claimed to know about Egyptian and how their writing supposing had different levels of meaning. He wasn't presenting how to translate this one document, but how to translate any Egyptian writing. He claimed that each hieroglyph was made up of various levels of meaning that could result in quite a bit of English text or meaning. This is why they assign so much text to each hieroglyph in the KEP.
Actually, no, Joseph didn't make the claim you say he did. He did not make the claim that a ton of stuff was jammed in to one character. You have no evidence that he claimed this. I have evidence that he did not claim this, but that these things only represented themes of the things they are paired with.
If anything has proven true in the restoration of Mormonism, it is the fact that any revelation any prophet ever got in our day has been a partial one. I don't expect that I am going to back up every assertion Joseph Smith made. Rather, I intend to show that this is Abrahamic, and that it is ancient. If evidence can be shown for that, then Joseph Smith can be pardoned for only having part of the picture, just like Brigham Young can be pardoned for being a racist and denying blacks the priesthood and that he was wrong about that part, and Spencer W. Kimball fixed what Brigham Young had only partial revelation on. Yes, I don't expect you people to forgive them for their faults necessarily, but I am willing to work with what was given to me by flawed men and hopefully improve upon the case that they only partially understood using modern day evidence.
Work on uploading yourself into the matrix before the Singularity, though. That's time well spent.