About the Book

I see that the book has been announced, and has been getting some publicity. At least one of the advertisements claims that this is an update of my book A Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri. Well, yes and no. The other book focused on the papyri and their relationship to the Book of Abraham. This one focuses on the Book of Abraham. So let's focus on some basic questions.

How are the books similar?

Both books will be informative to a scholarly audience but both are designed to be accessible to a non-scholarly audience. This means that I have tried to write it in a clear manner without scholarly jargon. Footnotes have been generally limited to direct quotations. Neither is terribly verbose.

How are the books different?

1. The Introduction has fifteen more years of research behind it.


2. The Introduction is focused on the Book of Abraham rather than the papyri, which is the subject more people are interested in.


3. The Introduction is longer than the Guide. It has a different set of topics and covers more topics than the Guide did. It has about three times as many chapters.


4. The Introduction provides annotated bibliography of works for further reading so that the reader has an idea of what might be hiding behind some of the mysterious titles in the bibliography.

What the book is not

This book is not a second edition of the Guide. There is some material in the Guide that is not covered in the Introduction. Where the two overlap, the Introduction is more up-to-date.

This book is not a fat scholarly tome that will necessarily answer every technical question about the Joseph Smith Papyri.

This book is not a commentary on the Book of Abraham. It follows the introduction genre that is generally well known and established in scholarly literature.

The book does deal with the facsimiles from the Book of Abraham, but this book is not a point by point analysis of the figures in the facsimiles. I have written that book but do not expect to ever see it appear in print.

Some other points

Over the last five years publication outlets for scholarly work on the Book of Abraham from a faithful perspective have mostly disappeared. I had about a five year backlog of research on the Book of Abraham that I had not published at that point. What I have been able to publish in scholarly venues has consequently slowed to a trickle. I now have an essentially ten year backlog of material that I have not been able to publish. This book is compatible with the unpublished research up to the time that the manuscript was closed.

On Being Held an Offender for a Word

It is hardly a secret that I have persistently and publicly argued that the Book of Abraham is historically authentic.

Some people are spreading the gossip that I do not believe in the Book of Abraham. They are taking something I said out of context for their own malicious ends.

Here is what I actually said two years ago at the FAIR conference:

It will probably come as a surprise to many that I do not have a testimony of the Book of Abraham. That is, I have never received a spiritual confirmation of the truth of the Book of Abraham. I do not need one. I have those for the Book of Mormon, the restoration of the gospel, the calling of the Prophet Joseph Smith and the continuation of those keys and authority through the present day. If you have these things confirmed to you, you do not need to get a cold from every wind of doctrine that blows.

I have never had a spiritual confirmation of the truth of the Book of Abraham. I do not know many Church members who have. I have never really heard a convincing case that one is necessary. No question on the subject shows up in the baptismal interview or the temple recommend interview. In the Church, we are urged to get a spiritual confirmation of the Book of Mormon, but not the Doctrine and Covenants or the Pearl of Great Price or the Bible.

Without a spiritual confirmation I rely on scholarship, that is on evidence and argument. Perhaps there are better means but that is what I have to work with and I have no other authority.

Based on the research I have done, I am convinced that the historical setting that most closely matches the Book of Abraham is: for the first chapter, an Ur located in the area of north-west Syria or southern Turkey during the end of the Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt (the reign of Sesostris III or more likely Amenemhet III); by the time the text has reached the end of the published account we have moved into the area of modern Israel during the Thirteenth/Fourteen Dynasty in Egypt. That setting is based on a careful reading of the text and current scholarship. Like everything based on scholarship, it is subject to refinement and revision as new evidence comes in.

The Church on the Book of Abraham

The Church has released a statement on the Book of Abraham. I, of course, did not write it. I do like it. It seems to be cautious and careful general statement of the issue. People who want to say what the Church's position on the Book of Abraham should take it as a starting point.

On the Book of Abraham as Pseudepigrapha II

In an incoherent argument by a commenter over here I am accused of a number of things:

John Gee has gone so far as to state that “the Book of Abraham is not like the Book of Mormon; it has no equivalent of Moroni’s promise; it is not a sign of the prophetic calling of Joseph Smith.” Gee has also said publicly that “the Book of Abraham is not central to the restored gospel of Christ.”

Yes, the scriptures define the gospel as:

1. Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ
2. Repentance
3. Baptism
4. the gift of the Holy Ghost
5. enduring to the end.

In a strict sense, the Book of Abraham is not central to that. I have also written about what the significance of the Book of Abraham is. It is not insignificant and its rejection loses a number of important things. Without the Book of Abraham we lose much of what it means to be Mormon, not the gospel, but plain and precious things nonetheless.

The argument then becomes completely incoherent:

if Gee and Muhlestein are correct in their arguments that the BofA literally appeared on the papyri Joseph possessed, the BofA would be a late pseudepigraphic text authored by either an Egyptian or Jewish scribe who syncretized Jewish and Egyptian religious traditions.

This is absolutely false. My have never believed that the Book of Abraham was a pseudepigraphic text. I have always believed and argued that it was written by Abraham. My latest article on the subject implies that the pseudepigraphic position is false.

The incoherent argumentation reveals some intriguing clues:

The BofA revises the opening chapters of Genesis which scholarly consensus attributes to two separate Judean sources that date long after the time period associated with Abraham.

The author does not mention that there is no hard physical evidence of the Judean sources ever existing. They are imaginary inventions of the nineteenth century. So the irony of this is that the Judean sources are pseudepigrapha, and not even ancient pseudepigrapha. So, ironically, someone must accept two modern pseudepigrapha to argue that the Book of Abraham is ancient pseudepigrapha.  If the Pentateuch was really compiled from documents that never existed until they were invented in the nineteenth century then a number of valid propositions become untenable and incomprehensible. If we limit ourselves to real documents, however, there is no basis to the claim.

One of the advantages of Near Eastern studies over biblical studies is that one must work with real documents. Scholars of the ancient Near East don't have to indoctrinate our students into the blind acceptance of imaginary documents as an article of faith. For the Book of the Dead, for example, we have thousands of manuscripts extending over thousands of years. We can, if we choose, investigate how the text developed over time. We do not have to hypothesize or invent sources, we have them. We do not have to speculate about the processes of text formation, we can explore them.

As one author wrote:

We possess and thus can present good-quality, original comparative data, all with very clear date limits; therefore, will all respect, one cannot possibly consider substituting physically unsupported theories or wholly theory-originated "works" in their place. (K. A. Kitchen, Treaty, Law, and Covenant [Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012], 3:241.)

So, with the Idrimi inscription, we possess and can present good-quality, original comparative data with clear date and space limits. This trumps wholly theory-originated works, no matter what consensus might support it.

The only way one can take my arguments as indicative that the Book of Abraham is ancient pseudepigrapha is if one privileges nineteenth century pseudepigrapha to actual ancient documents.

On the Book of Abraham as Pseudepigrapha I

The notion of the Book of Abraham as pseudepigrapha fits into a continuum of theories about (or ways of looking at) the authenticity of the Book of Abraham.

There are four basic positions on the authenticity of the Book of Abraham:

1. The Book of Abraham as Abrahamic: Under this way of looking at things, the Book of Abraham is a work written by Abraham. It was translated by Joseph Smith under the inspiration of God.


2. The Book of Abraham as pseudepigrapha:  In this view, the Book of Abraham is ancient but not actually written by Abraham. It was written by someone else centuries or millennia later. It was translated by Joseph Smith under the inspiration of God.


3. The Book of Abraham as inspired fiction: In this view, the Book of Abraham was not ancient at all but God inspired Joseph Smith to produce a story about Abraham that is not true but teaches some edifying or inspiring concepts.


4. The Book of Abraham as a fraud: In this view, Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Abraham in the nineteenth century and God had nothing to do with it.

There are theoretically some other possibilities but they are either logically incoherent or historically impossible.

So taking the Book of Abraham as pseudepigrapha is to claim that it is ancient and Joseph Smith was inspired to translate it, but it is an ancient fraud. That is what is claimed by those who claim that the Book of Abraham is pseudepigrapha.

There are those who have claimed that I promote the idea that the Book of Abraham is pseudepigrapha. For the record, I reject the idea that the Book of Abraham is pseudepigrapha.

Follow-up on the City of Abraham

I noted a couple of days ago a news report on an archaeological site (Oylum Höyük) that either its excavator or a newsman connected with Abraham. I have now had a chance to read through a recent (2012) report on the Early Bronze (EB) and Middle Bronze (MB) Age finds and a surface survey of the surrounding area. It is a bit more sober than the news reports. I note the following features:

• The site is the largest archaeological site of the Kilis plain during the EB and MB periods. It was the major city (town) of the area. For those proposing that it is the site of Ulisum mentioned in the Naram-Sin inscription, this is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.


• There is a destruction layer in the EB levels which would match with the destruction of the site under Naram-Sin. (Again a necessary but not a sufficient condition.)


• There are also two destruction layers in the MB levels.


• There is a massive fortification wall dating to the Bronze age (but exact dates are not given and appear not to have been known when the report was written).


• The evidence from the Bronze Age "remains partly patchy and includes gaps."


• No radio-carbon dates from the site are available.


• Burials provide much of the information and it appears from them that the population was poorer in the MB than in the EB. 


• Burials within the houses in the MB period match those of other MB sites in Syria.


• The archaeological report says that there is so far no inscriptional evidence from the site for the periods in question.


• Although the publication date is 2012, the information may not reflect finds from even a couple of years before that. So the archaeologists may now have inscriptional evidence that they did not have when the report was written, or they may have simply ignored the inscriptional evidence they did have because it was from a later time period and hence not relevant to discussing Bronze Age remains. Typically, there can be a ten year lag between the discovery of an inscription and the publication of the inscription.

Oylum Höyük is the largest site in the Kilis plain and clearly dominated the whole plain in the Middle Bronze Age. The site would explain the wording in the Book of Abraham that "Potiphar’s Hill [was] at the head of the plain of Olishem" (Abraham 1:10) Olishem is only mentioned because the whole plains took their name from the city and that Ur was apparently located in the plains, but the text never says that Abraham was at Olishem. Nothing precludes this site from being Abraham's Olishem, but nothing requires it to be either.

The site (possibly of Olishem) is about thirty-five to forty miles north of where I guessed the site of Ur would be. I made my guess based on the confluence of the Egyptian evidence (for Olishem) and the Naram-Sin inscription. (You can see my guess on the map published here.) Ur should be in the same plain and about five to ten miles from Olishem.

If indeed tablets in Hittite from the site identify it as Ullis, then it is probably the Ulisum that Naram-Sin attacked, and is a likely candidate for Olishem. If Oylum Höyük is Olishem, then Ur of the Chaldees would be one of the dozens of MB II sites in the Kilis plain. At present, there are still too many ifs to see this as anything more than promising but not proven.

The City of Abraham?

Turkish archaeologists claim to have discovered the city of Abraham near Kilis in Turkey (news report here, repeated here).

The site (which appears to be Oylum, just a few miles east of Kilis, which is about thirty-five miles north of Aleppo and only five miles from the border between Syria and Turkey) is said to have occupation levels dating to the Chalcolithic, and been occupied since the Early Bronze Age. It is also said to have some Hittite documents, and coins from the time of Alexander the Great. The excavator, Atilla Engin, claims that an Iron Age papyrus says that the site was where Abraham lived. He also refers to clay tablets in Hittite which are said to support the idea that the site was the ancient city of Ullisu.

An overview of past excavations (since the 1980s) can be found here. Surface surveys were conducted in the 1960s, and an Italian team went through in the late 1960s. Since the 1980s the work has been done by the Turks, first under Prof. Dr. Engin Özgen and now under Atilla Engin. Some interesting points: The city was burned twice in Middle Bronze II, and the inhabitants seem to have been poorer than at earlier times.

Whether the claims that this is the city of Abraham, or that this was ancient Ullisu are intriguing but remain to be seen. I have not seen the excavation reports or publications of the clay tablets or the papyrus. The site is in the right general area for the Book of Abraham's Olishem. Whether it is Olishem is too early to tell. News from the site will be worth watching.

A Book of Abraham Bullseye

Middle Bronze Age autobiographies from Syria are, in the words of A. L. Oppenheim, "without parallel in texts of this type from Mesopotamia and Egypt." They are very distinct in form and features. They also differ considerably from the same kinds of texts from the same area from a later date. As it turns out, however, those distinct features appear in the Book of Abraham which depicts Abraham as coming from Middle Bronze Age Syria.

I explore the connections in an article, which just appeared on Friday. The article is:

John Gee, "Abraham and Idrimi," Journal of the Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture 22/1 (2013): 34-39.

I do not know that it has appeared in electronic form, but it has appeared in print. (Interested parties can find the reference for the Oppenheim quote in the article.)

So here is the problem. The Book of Abraham was published by Joseph Smith in 1842. The first Middle Bronze Age Syrian autobiography was published in 1949. If Joseph Smith had made up the Book of Abraham, he would have had to compose an autobiography set in a certain time and place and use the correct literary features and publish it a hundred years before anyone else would publish one from an archaeological dig. The process by which he may or may not have done it is simply irrelevant. None of the proposed processes can account for the literary parallels.

Asking the Wrong Questions IV

Mr. Lauer's fourth question is:

I understand that Dr. Ritner’s view of the interpretation of the text differs material [sic] from your view. Are there other ancient Egyptian documents in such dispute?

Which text are you talking about? And what do you mean by interpretation?

If you mean the Book of Abraham, then yes, our view differs. This is a natural consequence of denominational affiliation or lack thereof.

If you mean the Joseph Smith Papyri, then it depends on what you mean by interpretation. If you mean interpretation of the signs, it would depend on which of Professor Ritner's editions you refer to because Professor Ritner's readings of the papyri differ between his editions. If you mean interpretation of the words, then you might find Egyptologists in vigorous debate about which grammar theories are being used and what shade of meaning is given to various terms where you might see slightly different ways of saying the same thing, much as you would experience comparing two different Bible translations. We might see a significant difference where you might not.

The biggest problem is that I have never published my interpretation (in the sense of translation) of either the Joseph Smith Papyri or the Book of Abraham. I simply have not seen any compelling need to publish my own interpretation of more than isolate passages from the Joseph Smith Papyri. As for the Book of Abraham, since I am not one of those who thinks that we currently have the original text of the Book of Abraham, it is pointless to try to make my own translation.

Now for the second part of the question:

Are there other ancient Egyptian documents in such dispute?

Absolutely! Two immediately come to mind. One is the dispute between Martin Stadler and Joachim Quack about the interpretation of a line in Papyrus Insinger. Another would be the disagreements between Joachim Spiegel, Hartwig Altenmuller, Jürgen Osing, James Allen, and Harold Hayes about the Pyramid Texts. One can also look at the long-running disputes between Professor Ritner and Christopher Faraone about the interpretation of one of the PGM, or between Professor Ritner and any of a number of his colleagues.

To see why this is a bad question, one need look only to the Bible. Is a Calvinist going to interpret Romans the same way a Catholic is? Does the fact that the Calvinist does not interpret the text the same way that the Catholic does make the Calvinist automatically wrong?

Asking the Wrong Questions II

The second of Dave Lauer's questions is:

What work (if any) is being done now in regards to the Joseph Smith papyri [sic]? If work is being done, by whom and with what objective?

I am the co-chair of a project dealing with research on the Book of Abraham and the Joseph Smith Papyri. There are a number of individuals doing research on those subjects. I know about their research but I leave them the right to announce their results for themselves. So I am not at liberty to discuss their work in public before they have a chance to do so themselves. To do so would not be fair to them. Nor am I in the habit of announcing my own work until it appears in print. I do have at least article dealing with one aspect of the Joseph Smith Papyri in press in a non-Mormon scholarly venue. I have a number that are already in print. You can find them here, here, here, here, and in a few other publications that do not even have any sort of internet link.

There are thirteen publications that purport to be Egyptological publications of the Joseph Smith Papyri. Thirteen in forty-six years, that is one every three and a half years! (For a list when there were only twelve, see note 42 in this article.) I can think of no other Egyptian papyrus that has been published so frequently. While I can think of fruitful lines of research on the papyri that have not yet been done, I think that most of the publications of the papyri themselves were probably unnecessary and whose main purpose appears to be to boost the egos of the authors rather than advance the understanding of the papyri. I have not felt the need to do my own edition because there are already good editions out there. Some of them even use legal photographs of the papyri with permission of the owners.

Asking the Wrong Questions I

Dave Lauer may be a very nice man. I wouldn't know. What I do know is that (1) he works for Calvary Chapel in Boise, Idaho where he is developing a "Witnessing to Mormons" class called Grace Works, (2) that he misrepresented himself when he first contacted me in November, and (3) that he has been harassing the poor receptionists with his phone calls. (They do not deserve the harassment.)

He sent me a list of questions for me to answer. Given that he was willing to misrepresent himself I am certain that he would have little compunction about misrepresenting me so I have elected to make my answers public. So I am posting them in this forum.

The first question is

What do you believe is the relationship between the Joseph Smith papyri [sic] and the Book of Abraham and how have you come to this conclusion?

This is the problem of substituting opinion for evidence. It helps to set up a straw man argument. Drawing one opinion of a group may not be representative of a group. Remember Pauline Kael's famous remark after Nixon won by a landslide in 1972: "I only know one person who voted for Nixon." Pauline Kael's circle of acquaintance was obviously not representative of the larger population. I prefer to deal with the entire spectrum of views rather than the particular one I hold.

As I have discussed here, here, here, here, and here, and elsewhere, there is not one Latter-day Saint position on the relationship between the Joseph Smith Papyri and the Book of Abraham, but three and none of them are the official position of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because there is no official position. I have laid them out as follows:

1. The text of the Book of Abraham was translated from papyri that we currently have. (Or, from the unbelieving perspective, Joseph Smith thought that the text of the Book of Abraham was on papyri that we currently have.)

2. The text of the Book of Abraham was translated from (or Joseph Smith thought the text of the Book of Abraham was on) papyri that we do not currently have.

3. The text of the Book of Abraham was received by revelation independent of the papyri.

Of these three positions, the first seems to be a minority viewpoint espoused by few if any members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Of the remaining two options, the last is preferred by a majority of the members of the church who care about this issue. Most members find the issue unimportant.

(I have a friend I respect very much who is involved in Mormon Studies and who questions my assertion that position 3 is the most popular; he thinks position 2 is. I agree that we need better and more recent data on this issue. Either way, it is clear that those who hold the last two position dwarf the number who hold the first.)

At this point, my personal beliefs are irrelevant because positions 2 and 3 are the positions most favored by believing Latter-day Saints. This has two implications. The easiest straw man to attack to attack is position 1 but few Latter-day Saints believe that position. So if one rails against position 1 then the typical Latter-day Saint who knows anything at all about the issue will simply shrug her shoulders and say: "So what?" One must deal with both positions 2 and 3 on the issue and the two points of view have very different assumptions and implications.

One implication of the two positions that poses a problem for Mr. Lauer and others who deal with this issue is that in neither case is the identification of the texts on the current fragments of the Joseph Smith Papyri important. They happen to be a portion of the Book of the Dead and a portion of an abbreviated version of the so-called Document of Breathings made by Isis, but they could be Homer's Odyssey or the Instructions of Onchsheshonqy, or the Law Code of Hammurapi for all that it matters to Latter-day Saints. Most Latter-day Saints do not think that the Book of Abraham is or was on the current fragments of the Joseph Smith Papyri and so it does not matter to them what text is there. Thus the opinions of Egyptologists and other experts about the identification of those texts is moot.

One does not see much debate between positions 2 and 3 among Latter-day Saints. This is because those who hold these views do not see it as significant enough a matter to debate. In fact, most Latter-day Saints do not care about this issue. It is unimportant to them.

An analogy might help Mr. Lauer here. It is a bit like saying that the Evangelical movement cannot be true because evangelicals have a mistaken view of the historical background of the book of Nahum. How many evangelicals care about the historical background of Nahum? How many could easily find it in their Bibles? Just because some outsider thinks that this should be a big issue for some religious group does not make it a big issue for that religious group. Most evangelicals that I know of care a whole lot more about Paul than Nahum; to me that is understandable. If an individual were developing a program for witnessing to evangelicals and kept harping on a non-issue like the historical date of Nahum and criticizing evangelicals for that, most of them would rightly think that that individual was nuts.

Note also that most members of the Church of Jesus Christ hold positions that are also held by those who are not members. So this issue is neither decisive for separating Latter-day Saints from non-Latter-day Saints, nor possible to attack without either sparing a large group of Latter-day Saints or attacking a sizable group of non-Latter-day Saints.

On Mind Reading

It is a somewhat surreal experience to see someone try to read one's mind about why one wrote the thing one has. And some of these same people wonder why I do not believe them when they try to read Joseph Smith's mind. They wish to tell us exactly what Joseph Smith was thinking when translating the Book of Abraham by using documents that we do not know that Joseph Smith wrote and which are anything but self-explanatory. I'm sorry; that simply is not scholarship.