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In the 1830's there were a bunch of travelling circuses running around all over the country. One of the more popular exhibits were Mummies imported directly from the tombs in Egypt. With these mummies was usually found a papyrus that said who the dead guy was and what he did for a living as well as a blessing for the afterlife. In Joseph Smiths day nobody but him could read Egyptian. The Gentiles did not learn to translate Egyptian till the 1900's. One such circus crossed Josephs path and they brought him the Papyrus to translate. The result of this translation was the "Book of Abraham" in the Pearl of Great Price. The facsimilies of these papyrus are also included in the POGP for everyone to see. The original Papyrus ended up in a Museum where they were re-discovered in 1966. After being studied by qualified Egyptologists, they were determined to be the funeral papers from the mummy and nothing to do with "The Book of Abraham".

2007-03-23 14:02:08 · 7 answers · asked by Anonymous in Society & Culture Religion & Spirituality

If Joseph was right in his translation I am sure the church would be loudly proclaiming this as evidence the church was true because it would shut the church critics up once and for all. Unless Joseph really just made the whole thing up and really didnt know how to read Egyptian. How ironic that a travelling circus was in possesion of the "Book of Abraham" and just happened to run into the only man in the world who could read it. Hmmmmm.
To all you Mormons, I am not a "Mormon Hater". I just like U.S. History

2007-03-23 14:07:05 · update #1

Remember, this is the same guy who "Translated" a stack of "Golden Plates" given to him by an angel. He put 2 stones in a hat and put his face up against the hat and the translated words magically appeared. That is how he got the "Book of Mormon". Unfortunately we cant examine these plates because when he was done "Translating " the Book of Mormon, the angel came back and took them up to heaven. 12 million people are now paying 10 percent of their income to this church of the golden plates. LDS

2007-03-23 14:58:08 · update #2

After further research I discovered that if the paprii that were used to "Translate" the Book of Abraham were authentic, they would have been the most priceless ancient documents ever discovered eith an immeasurable impact on humanity. At 4000 years old they are twice the age of the Dead Sea Scrolls which were only about 2000 years old. Not only that but Joseph claimed they were written by Abraham himself, the Patriarch of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, clearly one of the most influential humans who ever lived. Yet the museams treated them as common funerary scrolls from Egypt.

2007-03-23 17:53:43 · update #3

Mormon_4_Jesus: Apparantly you are saying that the Book of Abraham Papyrii were authentic but somehow got lost and nobody has them now. So a travelling circus really did have in its posession the worlds greatest archaeological find of all time and sold it to the church (along with a couple of mummies) and then the church apparantly not knowing what they had went and lost it. By the way, 4000 year old scrolls DONT ROLL UP . What a wishy washy answer. You should have stuck with the one about the angel taking it up to Heaven with him. It worked for the Golden Plates of the Book of Mormon. Which BTW would have been the most massive archaeological find ever if true. Poor LDS church. They keep getting all these cool discoveries only to lose them so they would not have any evidence the church is true . Hmmmmmm.

2007-03-26 06:19:42 · update #4

7 answers

REMEMBER, you cant spell mormon without "mor on".

2007-03-23 14:06:05 · answer #1 · answered by hotdawgsoup 3 · 3 4

hotdawgsoup, I can understand logically questioning the LDS church. I can see challenging the members. But personal attacks are uncalled for. If this is the best you can do STOP.
Cathy, Investigators of Mormonism deserve to know the full truth not just what you can get from the church or it's members, they NEVER tell the darker side of the church.
David, Don't use data that you can't prove. the "I heard or this enity states" you have to give a real reference.
KKingS, Smith claimed to translate but the gift and power of God. Some evidence that this is a true gift would be nice. We won't find it through the book of Abraham..

Me, To claim an artifact is somehow connected to Abraham and the wittings a form of scripture. When translated by men with or without inspiration it had better be a close fit.. The Mormons, I guess, can claim Smith had a revelation and wrote it as the Book of Abraham but has it ANYTHING to do with the NO..
In 1966 the papyri were rediscovered in one of the vault rooms of the New York’s metropolitan Museum of Art. This gave the church the chance to give strong evidence that Joseph Smith was indeed a true prophet all we had to to is translate the papyri. Now, since we have the Rosetta Stone a translation was indeed possible. Oh darn... The translator involved pronounced the translation to be a fraud.... Data taken from.. Joseph Smith Among the Egyptians, by Wesley P. Walters. 1973, Reprinted by Utah Lighthouse Ministry, Box 1884, Salt Lake City, Utah 84110. Jim

2007-03-23 14:54:53 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 1 0

In the state of Vermont our local history states that Joseph Smith was run out of the state for what he was trying to start because he was a trouble maker and a known pathological liar. The Mormons still like to go to Windsor Vt which is where he first got the idea to start his movement, but to this day they do not have a big following here. To most Vermonters local history is enough for us to think Mr. Smith was making things up.

2007-03-23 14:08:13 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 1 0

There are many stories surrounding Joseph Smith more damning then this one, people need to make up their minds for themselves.

2007-03-23 14:07:12 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

I didn't even know he could read Egyptian writings. I must say, I don't agree with half of what he did, but I have to give him at least some credit.

2007-03-23 14:09:09 · answer #5 · answered by KS 7 · 0 0

There is also a book titled: "Who really wrote the book of mormon", by Solomon Spaulding. check it out if you really want to know about fraud.

2007-03-23 14:46:40 · answer #6 · answered by Waitingfortherightquestion 3 · 1 1

If you do your homework, you will know that the papyrus we now have is not anywhere complete, that the parts that Joseph used to translated the Book of Abraham, is missing still. Using Joseph Smiths own description of what the papyrus looked like, it's just too obvious that most of the papyrus is missing still.

>>But, as noted, the evidence appears altogether different than many critics claim. In 1842, the fragments we now have in P. JS were apparently mounted in `a number of glazed slides, like picture frames, containing sheets of papyrus, with Egyptian inscriptions and hieroglyphics.' The next year, in 1843, a non-Mormon named Charlotte Haven visited Joseph Smith's mother, Lucy Mack Smith, and wrote a letter to her own mother about it.

Haven writes: Then she [Mother Smith] turned to a long table, set her candlestick down, and opened a long roll of manuscript (yes it was not a modern document - they didn't come in long rolls! Furthermore, old papyrus scrolls can be remarkably well preserved and "rollable"), saying it was "the writing of Abraham and Isaac, written in Hebrew and Sanscrit [sic]," and she read several minutes from it as if it were English. It sounded very much like passages from the Old Testament-and it might have been for anything we knew-but she said she read it through the inspiration of her son Joseph, in whom she seemed to have perfect confidence. Then in the same way she 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, which with his two legs formed a tripod, and had his head in Eve's ear.

The picture of a serpent Haven described fails to match any of the Joseph Smith papyri we have from the Metropolitan Museum. According to this contemporary non-LDS source, there were two long rolls left after the present fragments of the Joseph Smith Papyri were mounted. If the claim of some critics is correct and there were only two papyrus rolls from the beginning of Joseph Smith's ownership of the papyri, we must conclude that P. JS I-XI were not on them and that only the outer portions of the rolls were taken off to preserve them and that the rolls remained intact.

Another eyewitness from the Nauvoo period supports the same conclusion, i.e., that the book of Abraham text was thought to come from something other than P. JS I-IX: "Oh, here is the Pearl of Great Price," said Brother Horne, picking up that book. "I've seen these records with my own eyes," referring to the Book of Abraham, "and handled them with these hands. Mother Lucy. . . showed them to me. . . . The records which I saw were some kind of parchment or papyrus (verifies that the "manuscript" seen by Haven was a papyrus roll,) and it contained writing in red and black. Mother Lucy told me that one [scroll!] was the writings of Abraham and the other the writings of Joseph, who was sold in Egypt."

John Gee writes,

. . . there is still more evidence that Joseph Smith had additional papyri. Egyptian papyrus documents almost universally pertain to only one individual. So from an Egyptological perspective how many papyri do we know that Joseph Smith had? We know that there was a Book of Breathings belonging to Hor, son of Remnyqay and Taykhebit, a Book of the Dead belonging to Tasheritmin , a Book of the Dead belonging to Neferirnub , a hypocephalus belonging to Sheshonq, and a document belonging to Amenhotep, the son of Hor. Here we have documents from at least five different individuals. If we have all the papyri Joseph Smith had, where, we might ask, are Facsimiles 2 and 3, the roll belonging to Amenhotep, or all the strange vignettes which those who saw the papyri in Nauvoo describe? If there are documents we do not have, by what clairvoyance do critics proclaim what was . . . or was not on them?

Hugh Nibley cites a personal reference to scrolls clearly different from the recovered papyri. In 1906, while visiting Nauvoo, President Joseph F. Smith related to Preston Nibley his experience as a child of seeing his Uncle Joseph in the front rooms of the Mansion House working on the Egyptian manuscripts. According to President Smith, one of the rolls of papyri "when unrolled on the floor extended through two rooms of the Mansion House. Anyone who has been in the building (well preserved by the RLDS Church) can see that a scroll of considerable size was seen. Clearly it was an impressive experience for the (then) boy. This would have been sometime between 1843 when the Mansion House was completed and the Prophet's death in June 1844, one or two years after other parts of the papyri had been cut up and placed under glass. Cf. ANP Improvement Era 71 (March 1968): 17-18, and Nibley, 1979, 6-7. We can conclude that:

1) There was much more papyrus available than we have now.

2) Haven saw a long unrolled scroll after other papyri (P. JS among them) were cut up.

3) It is clear from the Smith and Horne accounts that Haven's "manuscript" really was a scroll (as though Haven wouldn't have said so if what she saw was foolscap!)

4) The Joseph F. Smith account, while not contemporary, was not given under duress (there was no pressure from critics about what sort of papyri Joseph Smith had), was clearly impressive to the then boy (anyone who has been to the Mansion House knows what this means) that he recalled such details without prompting and clearly supports the fact that long scrolls were intact after 1842.

It is clear therefore that

*

Joseph Smith had a much more extensive collection of papyri than the current fragments. [We deal with the part of 3 concerning Facsimile No.1 below.]
*

The book of Abraham text was claimed to arise from, not the little breathings text, but long rolls which have rubrics (and evidently not P. JS V - furthermore, the breathings text has no rubrics.)

Hence what might be called the manuscript argument, contained in points 1-4 is effectively disabled. That particular argument must therefore be classed as pure speculation from individuals who have a subjective interest, sincere or otherwise, in concluding that Joseph Smith was a faker or was deceived himself. [See 6a-b above for example.]<<

addition:

waitingfor... says
There is also a book titled: "Who really wrote the book of mormon", by Solomon Spaulding. check it out if you really want to know about fraud.

I say
waiting, have you ever read this book? Prove it to me. What is it's Library of Congress number?

It's not a book. Solomon Spaulding wrote an unpublished book, now known as “Manuscript Found”.
Although it's now been found and published (by the church, no less) so that everyone can see that they are nothing alike.



David m says
In the state of Vermont our local history states that Joseph Smith was run out of the state for what he was trying to start because he was a trouble maker and a known pathological liar. The Mormons still like to go to Windsor Vt which is where he first got the idea to start his movement, but to this day they do not have a big following here. To most Vermonters local history is enough for us to think Mr. Smith was making things up.

I say:
Hardly! Joseph Smith Sr. moved his family to New York in about 1815. When Joseph Smith Jr. (later to be prophet) was TEN YEARS OLD. How much of a trouble maker was he then?

And Jim B. I wouldn't really trust anything Wesley Walters says. He IS a thief. He found some old records in the Bainbridge Co. Courthouse that was supposedly a record of Joseph Smith Jr. appearing before a court. No verdict, no judgment, but he STOLE those records from the courthouse to use as fodder for his anti-Mormon works. He only returned them when the county filed a law suit.

2007-03-25 10:18:20 · answer #7 · answered by mormon_4_jesus 7 · 0 1

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