Is there any possibility that the egyptologists are wrong?
by angelina5 Dec 2011
studies on the Joseph Amith papyri are wrong? What are the proofs? I hope I am not posting too many new topics.
lazarus
Re: Is there any possibility that the egyptologists that conducted
Don't feel bad about posting too much at all. I am only two years into this journey, and this board was a great help for me.
If the egyptologists were wrong, why would FAIR list four different theories as to why the text doesn't match the translation?
http://en.fairmormon.org/Book_of_Abraham/Joseph_Smith_Papyri/Text
The Motrix
Re: Is there any possibility that the egyptologists that conducted
Joseph Smith?
There's absolutely no way for everything real scholars know about Egyptian studies.
This link is will give you good, quick information, but there is a plethora more out there. It gets a little christian preachy at the end: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcyzkd_m6KE
Heresy
Re: Is there any possibility that the egyptologists that conducted
Mormons believe that Abraham wrote this thing 'by his own hand' on papyrus in Egyptian when he was in some other country, and then a thousand years later it got into Egypt was put in with a mummy, and a couple thousand years later it found its way to the Midwest and Joseph Smith.
This isn't even remotely likely. Why would Abraham write in Egyptian to start with?
All non LDS egyptologists who have ever looked at it say the same thing. It is a common book of breathings that went into many tombs. It has the marks Smith made on it, there is no question but what the papyrus is the right one.
The only half reasonable defense Mormons can put up is that maybe a whole bunch of it is missing - but there is no reason to think that is true. There are any real reports of the size of it that were made at the time it was seen.
The whole Book of Abraham issue is one of the simplest and most obvious frauds that the church tries to get away with. There is absolutely nothing to indicate it is what they say it is. There is a ton of evidence they are wrong.
Greyfort
Re: Is there any possibility that the egyptologists that conducted
You don't even need the papyrus to prove it wrong. One can read the characters right from the facsimiles shown in the Book of Abraham. The Legend you can read under them are entirely wrong.
There are similar depictions found in old Egyptian art, where the true meaning of those pictures can be found.
For instance, just one example is found in Facsimile 3. The character at the left is clearly the Goddess Isis. You can tell that by her headgear.
You can watch this video. It certainly helped me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcyzkd_m6KE
Greyfort
Re: Is there any possibility that the egyptologists that conducted
Oops. Someone else already put in that link. See? It's a good video. LOL
SL Cabbie
No...
Watch the video; it's clear that one of the leading Egyptologists in the world, Robert Ritner, has a tough time keeping a straight face discussing the matter. Dr. Ritner is to be commended for taking the time to address this issue; most Egyptologists can't be bothered. One whom I took a class from a professor who decided--for political reasons, not to discuss the subject in class; I got e-mail confirmation later. She told me she had been hurt professionally simply by her association with Utah, even though she taught and did research at the University of Utah and had no affiliation with BYU.
You can also get a free copy of Charles Larson's "By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus" if you need to close that sarcophagus yourself... Click on the link on the right hand corner. Larson was fired from a teaching position in Provo, Utah as a direct result of his authorship of this book...
http://www.irr.org/mit/bhoh-br.html
MJ
Well, you can actaully do some research for yourself.
You can research and find that there are other papyri that are very similar and see what the Egyptology that have nothing to do with JS and have never seen or heard of the JS papyri say about them. You can look at facsimile 1, look at the figures under the table and compare them to Egyptian canopic jars.
You can actually verify this for yourself. You can actually find enough evidence on your own to know that JS was wrong.
baura
Re: Is there any possibility that the egyptologists that conducted
Sorry, even THAT insane scenario doesn't fit.
The papyri were WRITTEN a couple of thousand years after Abraham and they fit exactly with Egyptian funerary texts.
So it would have to be: (1) Abraham writes the BOA and then (2) somehow gets the Egyptians to include it, in an unbreakable coded form, as part of their religious observances. (3) Two thousand years later is copied by someone into a "book of breathings" buried with a 1st century AD Egyptian mummy (named "Hor") and then (4) the Mummy is later dug up and (5) JS translates the coded message in a way that is totally unknown to Egyptologists.
Yes, even THIS insane scenario has been proposed by apologists.
MexMom
Re: Is there any possibility that the egyptologists that conducted
"A figaro of nonsense" is what one expert said about The Book of Abraham. But find out for yourself. It is a verifiable fraud of the highest order.
Read, read, read and set yourself free of the fraud of the cult.
SL Cabbie
Here's an Excellent Discussion...
http://www.conchisle.com/pg.htm
Years ago, a group of us watched the IRR video when it was first released. Several of the FAIR crowd were there, and one of them was handing out a photocopied "rebuttal." One of our group queried him about the video, and he said what bothered him was that they had left out Hugh Nibley (who was still alive then).
"When I say physics, who do you think of? Einstein, right?"
"So when I say languages, don't people automatically think of Nibley?"
More Mormon cultural ethnocentricity at its absolute worst...
Incidentally, the FAIR "rebuttal" consisted of an expression of dismay at the presence of the Egyptian scholars in the video. They felt it should've been "beneath them" to attack the sacred beliefs of another people's religion...
scooter
Angelina5, I mentioned this in a previous posting to you
but the BoA is called "the place where testimonies go to die" for a reason.
it's the only slam dunk you will ever need.
remember the only wiggle room in kolobianism is for the ferret hanging halfway out of your ass.
there's no wiggle room in the BoA. that scroll is rolled and sealed.
bottom line. they can't show you the plates because an angel took them back to heaven.
but they have the BoA. It's actually in their grubby little hands. why won't they show that? Hell, it's an artifact so rare it ended up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Why don't they show that as proof of kolobianism?
wooden submarines.
Stray Mutt
"You don't even need the papyrus to prove it wrong."
Yeah. The translations given the Facsimiles are SO bogus that it doesn't take a congress of leading Egyptologist years of careful study and correlation to determine whether it's authentic or not. It's like someone offering up a 50 peso note and claiming it's a coded math text written by Klingons. Uh, no, it's not.
Makurosu
Facsimile 3 is particularly ridiculous.
That person on the left is, um, Isis. Not Phaoroh as Joseph Smith says in the explanation. You can find other old drawings of Isis all over the Internet, with that round thing on her head. Once you see who the characters in that facsimile really are, Smith's explanation is really funny.
Also, the person on the throne is Osiris, not Abraham sitting on Phaoroh's throne "by the politeness of the King." That sounds like something a con man with delusions of grandeur would imagine.
Jesus Smith
Re: Is there any possibility that the egyptologists that conducted
angelina5 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> studies on the Joseph Amith papyri are wrong? What
> are the proofs? I hope I am not posting too many
> new topics.
yeah, the scholars with decades of meticulous study are wrong and an arrogant 19th century farmboy stands alone in knowing more about Egyptian.
While we're at it, physicists are wrong - all the technology around us is made up by these PhD crackheads. The earth is really only 6000 years old like the farmboy said (d&c 77:6)
nebularry
Re: No...
"By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus" by Larson is a thorough discussion of the subject. Should tell you everything you need to know.
Marcionite
Re: Is there any possibility that the egyptologists that conducted
And after all the testimonies that have been given that the BoA is an obvious fraud, this is the testimony that I give you Angelina5 -- since we have the papyri, and The Church claims to have prophets, this would be cleared up in a moment if the church really had prophets. But they have no answers.
They just lay low and hope the apologists can come up with a creative excuse. Sad. The church was founded by a false prophet, and continues to be led by false prophets.
imaworkinonit
The B of A was the final nail in the coffin of my faith.
If JS got it right, when NOBODY could read Egyptian, and without access to the Rosetta Stone, it truly would have been a miracle.
If he got it wrong, he was either delusional or a conman, but certainly NOT a prophet.
If JS HAD gotten it right, the church would also be shouting it from the rooftops. And yet most members don't even know the church owns the original papyri. Most are shocked when they learn of it. Why don't they even KNOW?
Apparently that's not something the church wants to discuss anymore. When the papyri were FIRST found, it was touted as a great discovery and featured in church magazines. (BTW, I own some of them). THIS would show that JS truly was a prophet! Church members were recruited to translate them.
That's when things got dicey. The translation didn't turn out right. They started trying to come up with explanations why. All those possible explanations are discussed in the books I reference below.
In my opinion, the best evidence is in the facsimiles. They show exactly which image JS was translating. There is no wiggle room to say he used the papyri for "inspiration" or that we have the wrong papyri, or something like that. He said THIS picture means THESE words. It only takes a rudimentary knowledge of egyptology to know he got it wrong.
"By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus" is an excellent resource. It was the first book I dared read that wasn't from sources friendly to the church. It gave me the only information that mattered to me . . . the translation. And I had an egyptian dictionary where I was able to verify part of the translation (it's not easy or I would have translated it all myself, but lacking 10 years or a lifetime to master the language, I COULD recognize a few obvious things, like the copulating bull mentioned in the round facsimile, and the images of major Egyptian Gods who were renamed by JS).
On the pro-LDS side, you might want to check out "The Joseph Smith Papyri", written by John Gee. Gee worked for BYU, teaching a class on hieroglyphics at the time he published it. (I would have taken the class, had I been willing to attend church again to get my ecclesiastical endorsement).
I love this review of it from Amazon:
"This book tracks the history of the actual papyri, some of the current theories in regard to the canonized translation and a brief discussion on the facsimiles.
In regards to explaining why the papyri have no direct correlation to what was translated, the author mentions the most common theories, argues against the non-Mormon ones, but then fails to commit to the remaining, leaving the reader unsure of what the point was if there was any."
That pretty much sums it up. Nothing resolved.
I knew Gee could READ egyptian, and yet he wouldn't put forward the ONE defense--a correct translation--that could put all the arguments against the book to rest. He danced around all the issues and ignored the most important. That told me all I needed to know: if the translation was correct, we wouldn't need all these explanations/excuses.
RPackham
Even without the papyri...
Even if we did not have the actual papyrus and the testimony of the Egyptologists, proving that it is a hoax, we could recognize the Book of Abraham as such because of the anachronisms in the text of Smith's "translation." In considering the material below, remember that Abraham supposedly lived somewhere between 2100 and 1700 B.C., according to most Bible chronologists.
The BoA uses the word "Pharaoh" as the name of rulers of Egypt (Abr 1:6, 20, 26) and says that the meaning of the word (1:20) is "king by royal blood." The first ruler named "Pharaoh" is identified as a great-grandson of Noah (Abr 1:25).
The word "pharaoh" originally meant "great house." It did not become a title for the king until the beginning of the New Kingdom (18th Dynasty), which began about 1567 B.C. That usage is unknown in Palestine until after 1000 B.C. According to Funk & Wagnall's New Standard Bible Dictionary, article "Pharaoh": "It is certain that in Abraham's time the kings of Egypt were not as yet called Pharaohs." At no time in Egypt was the word used as the actual name of any king. Of course, Genesis has the same anachronism (12:15), but no one has claimed that Genesis was written by Abraham or a contemporary of Abraham.
Abraham, according to the BoA, lived in the "land of the Chaldeans" (1:1) which was governed by Pharaoh (1:8-20). A place of sacrifice there had an Egyptian name, "Potiphar's Hill" (1:20).
There are multiple anachronisms here.
"Chaldeans" do not appear in history until the 12th century B.C., quite a few centuries after Abraham lived. The earliest mention of them in historical records is in the 9th century B.C., in Assyrian records. It was not until 721 B.C. that they established themselves, by seizing the throne of Babylon, ultimately establishing a Chaldean dynasty in Babylonia, which ruled from 625 to 539 B.C. It is only after this that the term "Chaldea" or "land of the Chaldees" came to be used for "Babylon".
This anachronism also occurs in Genesis (11:31), but, as noted above, no one has claimed that Genesis was written by Abraham or a contemporary of Abraham.
There is no historical evidence that Egypt controlled any part of Mesopotamia at any time when Abraham might have lived. Thus, it is a gross error to claim that Egyptian sacrifices were taking place in "Chaldea" at a sacrificial place with an Egyptian name.
The BoA says that "Egyptus" was the wife of Ham (the son of Noah) and the mother of Pharaoh who established the first government of Egypt. (Abr 1:23). The name "Egyptus" is obviously intended to be the source of the name of the country. But here is the linguistic problem: the name "Egypt" is not Egyptian, but Greek ('Aigyptos'), and thus was not used for the name of the country until the Greeks had contact with it, long after Abraham's time.
The Greek name is a corruption of an Egyptian name for the capital city of Memphis, 'Hat-kaptah'. Perhaps the real name of Ham's wife was Hat-kaptah? No, because Abr 1:23 says that "Egypt" is a "Chaldean" word (see above on "Chaldea"), and it means "forbidden".
The Hebrew word for Egypt and the Egyptians is 'Mizraim,' which adds to the confusion, because the Bible says that Mizraim was a son of Ham (Gen 10:6, 13) and the ancestor not of the Egyptians, but of the Philistines.
"Kokob" and "Kokaubeam" appear at Abr 3:13, and are interpreted respectively as "star" and "stars". These are genuine Hebrew words. "Shinehah" in the same passage, meaning "the sun" is probably based on the Hebrew word for "year" ("shanah"). "Olea" for the moon is a word invented by Smith. "Kolob" (Abr 3), which is supposed to be the "star" nearest to the throne of God, is perhaps intended to be the Hebrew word 'keleb' ("dog") and may refer to the star Sirius, nicknamed the "Dog Star" (Alpha Canis Majoris), the brightest star in the northern-hemisphere sky.
Do these Hebrew words provide weighty evidence in defense of the Book of Abraham? Hardly. At the time Smith was producing the Book of Abraham he was also intently studying Hebrew with a private tutor.
Here, too, Joseph Smith was perhaps trying to be too clever: Abraham lived at a time long before the Hebrew language had even developed. Hebrew did not develop until the 13th century BC. Thus, Abraham could not possibly have spoken Hebrew.
In addition to these linguistic problems in the BoA text, consider the scientific nonsense: the sun gets its light from Kolob? time is measured differently on different planets?
Who needs the papyri? We don't need no stinkin papyri!
Quoth the Raven "Nevermo"
Re: Is there any possibility that the egyptologists that conducted
Do what MJ suggested. Look up canpoic jar images. Look at the figures under the table that Joe the 'ho labeled as "gods". They are not statues of gods they are canopic jars. They contained the internal organs of the person who was being embalmed (the guy on the table).
case solved!
Joe was a world class con man, that if for sure.
guynoirprivateeye
HOLY SHITE!
they didn't teach me That in Seminary!
Abraham WASN'T EGYPTIAN! (Why would he write in Egyptian???)
end of story.period.
Makurosu
Thank you for posting that, Richard.
I didn't know most of that. It seems that the internal problems are even more glaring than the external ones.
Thread Killer
Re: Is there any possibility that the egyptologists that conducted
Another way to look at the BoA is to consider someone finding a Volkswagen manual and translating it as an ancient religious text, when dozens of trained auto mechanics see it as...a VW manual.
And for the facsimilies, imagine someone finding a picture of the typical "Jesus in the manger" scene and saying it's a description of a scene from an episode of 'South Park'.
anagrammy
Re: Is there any possibility that the egyptologists that conducted
The hilarious part of the apologists' useless attempts to explain The Book of Abraham fiasco is the one that contradicts itself.
The Book of Abraham was written on the missing pieces from the Book of Breathings. Joseph Smith was so confident no one would ever know the truth that he graciously provided an ALPHABET for us-- we have this, his Rosetta Stone where he tells what each hieroglyph means.
According to experts, the missing two triangles would have to be 48 feet long to hold the Book of Abraham.
Anagrammy
angelina5
Re: Even without the papyri...
Wow excellent!!! Thank you Richard! Your site has also helped me tremendously!
"Recovery from Mormonism - www.exmormon.org"