The founding claims

The Book of Abraham

The one translation we could check. The Church now admits the characters do not match.

The point in one sentence

The Book of Abraham is the only case where we have both Joseph Smith's claimed source document and the independent ability to read it, and the source turned out to be an ordinary Egyptian funerary text that says nothing about Abraham.

The world the mummies came from

To understand what happened in Kirtland, you have to understand what the world was doing with Egypt in 1835.

Thirty-seven years earlier, Napoleon had invaded Egypt with an army and a corps of scholars, and what they carried back lit a fire under the whole Western world. The Rosetta Stone, found by his soldiers in 1799, ended up in the British Museum. The Church’s own essay describes what followed: “Due partly to the exploits of the French emperor Napoleon, the antiquities unearthed in the catacombs of Egypt had created a fascination across the Western world.” Egypt was fashion, science, and show business at once, and its graves were a market.

The essay traces exactly how that market reached Ohio: “These artifacts had been uncovered by Antonio Lebolo, a former cavalryman in the Italian army. Lebolo, who oversaw some of the excavations for the consul general of France, pulled 11 mummies from a tomb not far from the ancient city of Thebes.” He shipped them to Italy; after his death they ended up in New York, and eventually with an entrepreneur named Michael Chandler, who “capitalized on this interest by touring with ancient Egyptian artifacts and charging visitors a fee to see them.” Dead Egyptians, dug from a tomb on one continent, were touring another as a ticketed attraction. Nobody thought this was strange. It was the age’s blockbuster exhibit.

By the time Chandler reached Kirtland in the summer of 1835, “all but four mummies and several papyrus scrolls had already been sold.” A group of Latter-day Saints purchased what remained for the Church.

One more piece of context, and it is the one this whole page turns on. Champollion had announced the decipherment of hieroglyphs in Paris only in 1822, and he died in 1832 with his grammar still being published. That knowledge had not crossed the Atlantic in any usable form. For practical purposes, nobody in America in 1835 could read a word of Egyptian, which means a claim to translate papyri was, at that moment, a claim no one present could check, in either direction.

What Joseph and those around him said

The exhibits

What follows is the case as it stands in the primary record: the Church’s own words, Joseph Smith’s own published captions, and the verdicts of the leading Egyptologists of his day. Every quote is verbatim and every source is linked.

James Henry Breasted, founder of the Oriental Institute at Chicago, was the third of the 1912 panel and concurred that Joseph’s captions showed no knowledge of Egyptian; his exact wording is not reproduced here because it could not be verified verbatim to the page, and this site does not print a quote it cannot source. The two above are enough.

The facsimiles, figure by figure

Joseph did not leave his reading of these drawings to interpretation. He published all three with numbered explanations, figure by figure, and those explanations were canonized. They are still printed in the Pearl of Great Price today. Below is each facsimile, with what Joseph said each numbered figure is, next to what Egyptology reads in the same figure. The left column is quoted verbatim from the Pearl of Great Price; the right column is the reading given by the 1912 examiners and every published analysis since.

Facsimile 1. Egyptology reads this whole scene at a glance: it is the standard embalming vignette, the god Anubis attending a dead man on a lion couch, found on countless funerary papyri. Joseph read it as an attempted human sacrifice.

Facsimile 2. This is a hypocephalus, a common funerary disk placed under a mummy’s head. The original was damaged, and the missing sections in the 1842 engraving were filled in with characters copied from a different papyrus. The figures Joseph numbered include:

Facsimile 3. A standard judgment scene: the dead man led before the enthroned Osiris. Joseph read it as Abraham lecturing Pharaoh’s court on astronomy, and named each figure:

Twice, characters “above the head” are cited as giving a figure’s name. Those characters can be read now. They name Isis and Maat.

The common rebuttals

“We only have a few fragments. The writings of Abraham were probably on the part of the scroll that was lost.”

Three things remove this one. First, the scholar the Church leans on for it, BYU Egyptologist John Gee, concedes the decisive point himself: the length of the scroll does not tell us what was on the scroll. A missing portion is a place where an answer could hide, not evidence that one is there. Second, the facsimiles are not missing. Joseph published all three with his own explanations, they are still printed in the Pearl of Great Price, and Egyptologists read them directly: his identifications are wrong on every figure. No lost footage can rescue the part he published. Third, remember what the book’s own heading claims: written by Abraham’s own hand, upon papyrus. The Church’s essay dates the papyri more than a thousand years after Abraham. Whatever was on the missing portion, it was not his handwriting.

“Maybe the papyri never contained the Book of Abraham at all. Maybe handling them simply inspired Joseph, and God revealed the book to him directly.”

This is the Church’s essay’s own proposal, usually called the catalyst theory: the scroll as a prompt rather than a source. Taken on its own it is coherent, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a wave. The answer is that Joseph forecloses it. He said the roll contained the writings of Abraham. The canonized heading says written by his own hand, upon papyrus. And by his own account he spent that period “continually engaged in translating an alphabet to the Book of Abraham, and arranging a grammar of the Egyptian language as practiced by the ancients.” That is not the behavior of a man receiving revelation that merely began near a scroll. It is the behavior of a man who believed he was translating the document in front of him, and the document survived, and it does not say what he said it says. If “translate” can be redefined to mean “write something unrelated to the text,” then the claim that Joseph could translate can never be tested by any text, which is the same move the testimony method makes: an answer that no possible evidence could ever count against.

What this means

Strip everything else away and hold just this. Joseph Smith looked at the embalming god Anubis and wrote, in what is now canonized scripture, that it was a priest with a knife. He looked at four jars made to hold a dead man’s organs and gave them the names of four gods no record on earth has ever mentioned. He looked at the fertility god Min, drawn aroused, and called it God the Father on His throne revealing the sign of the Holy Ghost. He looked at two goddesses and called them a king and a prince, and pointed to the characters above their heads as proof of their names, and the characters name Isis and Maat.

Every numbered label is wrong. Not loosely wrong, not debatably wrong. Wrong on every line, and still in print as scripture today.

He claimed the same gift for the Book of Mormon and for the revelations. The gold plates are gone; those translations can never be checked. This one could be, and it failed completely. If a man can be this wrong while publishing it as the word of God over a document we can now read, the question is not whether he was also wrong about the documents we cannot. The question is what reason remains to assume he was not.