In Case You Were Wondering

In the announcement in the Deseret News for the new volume of the Joseph Smith Papers, there are a number of nice pictures. The first one is a picture of a papyrus, one I have looked at a number of time. It is P. Joseph Smith XI. Unfortunately, the papyrus is shown upside down. Oops.

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 III

Mr. Lauer's third question is:

Who has access to view/study the Joseph Smith papyri [sic] in the LDS church’s possession?

Those who can best answer this question are the owner's of the papyri. I have made some observations about the process here.

The question can further be asked what can one gain by looking at the original that one cannot observe from the high resolution photographs available in this publication. Unless one has some specialized training working with papyri, I cannot see what a typical person would get that they could not get in the already available material.

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.