What is Truth? Part 5

Answering Mormons Questions by Bill McKeever and Eric Johnson deals with thirty-six commonly asked questions by your LDS friends and neighbors. It's a great resource for Christians who want to share their faith with friends and loved ones.

Be sure to pick up your copy today at your favorite Christian bookstore. Mormonism Research Ministry has been dedicated to equipping the body of Christ with answers regarding the Christian faith in a manner that expresses gentleness and respect. And now, your host for today's Viewpoint on Mormonism. We've been discussing the fact that many times when people are presented with evidence, they tend to want to disregard it because it makes them uncomfortable or they just don't want to believe it. And in the recent shows that we've been doing, we've been talking specifically about Dr. Carey Muhlstein, who works at Brigham Young University, and how he has come to the conclusion that it's okay to still believe that the Book of Abraham, a part of Mormon scripture found in the Pearl of Great Price, should still be believed as, in fact, a revelation from God. What Dr. Muhlstein does is he basically places a huge cloud of suspicion over some of the evidence that scholars, those of course in the field of Egyptology, have come to the conclusion that Joseph Smith's translation, quote-unquote, of the Book of Abraham is certainly not accurate and they would say should not be believed as understood by most Latter-day Saints. Now, why would Dr. Muhlstein object to this? He feels that revelation from God trumps the scholars. And we would argue that yes, true revelation from God should trump man's presuppositions, but the question remains is what Dr. Muhlstein believing really revelation from God?

That becomes the problem. Epistemology is the study of how knowledge happens, and so when we understand that there's a process in learning, you use academics. Like when we try to understand the Bible, if it's accurate or not, we go back to the earliest manuscripts, we put all of those things together, we look at what's called textual criticism. And so we want to believe as Christians what is true, while we certainly have presuppositions.

And unfortunately, in Mormonism, as we've talked about in previous shows, a lot of Latter-day Saints are prone to just receiving whatever the leaders want them to believe. And this is why I think we have this article in the Inside Magazine trying to get people to believe in the Book of Abraham when the evidence very clearly says that it's not an English equivalent. And Dr. Muhlstein in his opening salvo in his article says, While education is valuable and important, as we become increasingly educated, we must guard against the tendency to respect the world's methods of learning more than God's. And I asked the question yesterday, well, what is he talking about? Well, I think he's talking about some of the claims that have been made by experts in the field of Egyptology that goes against what Dr. Muhlstein wants to believe about the Book of Abraham.

And yesterday I introduced Dr. Stephen E. Thompson. He was one of the first LDS scholars to earn a doctorate degree in Egyptology, and he gave a talk back in 1993 in Salt Lake City on this very issue. It was titled Egyptology and the Book of Abraham. Now, in yesterday's show, I read from the 1992 edition of the Encyclopedia of Mormonism in reference to the facsimiles that Joseph Smith allegedly translated in The Pearl of Great Price, where it says in volume one, page 136 to 137, Moreover, the prophet's explanations of each of the facsimiles accord with present understanding of Egyptian religious practices. But what did Dr. Stephen Thompson say about this in his talk? And I might mention again, the talk he gave in 1993 was published in 1995 in Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought, volume 28, number one, and it starts on page 143.

This is what he said about that quote that I just cited. In the entry on the facsimiles from the Book of Abraham in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, we are told that the prophet's explanations of each of the facsimiles accord with present understanding of Egyptian religious practice. This is a truly remarkable statement in view of the fact that those Egyptologists who have commented on Joseph's interpretations of the facsimiles have stated emphatically that his interpretations are not correct from the perspective of the Egyptologist who attempts to interpret Egyptian religious literature and iconography as he or she believes the ancient Egyptians themselves would have. You see, folks, this is why the Mormon Church has had to back off on how it describes the word translation. They've had to come up with this phrase, this inspired translation, and the Church today readily admits that what they find in the Book of Abraham, which is still a part of Mormon scripture today, is not in fact an English equivalent of the papyri that Joseph Smith had in his possession.

There might be a lot of people here who are listening to our show today who may not know much about this whole issue. There is a book that we can recommend, and it was written by Charles Larson, and it was called By His Hand Upon Papyrus. That book has some amazing photography in it.

In fact, it has a pullout of the papyrus itself. If you are somebody who would like to learn more, because this past week we haven't really spent much time talking about the reasons why we don't agree that the Book of Abraham is actually a translation of something that was written by the patriarch Abraham. There are reasons for that, and he in that book does a great job of explaining that, and that's available on the internet. And I might mention, in light of that book, By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus, in the Q&A session of that symposium talk that Dr. Thompson gave, that question came up about that very book. Dr. Thompson said, in my opinion, it's the best source to go to if you want to know what's been going on with the Book of Abraham in the Church. I mean, he, speaking of Charles Larson, has a pretty good summary of all the types of approaches that have been made. He does a pretty good job of explaining what they are, what the papyrus are. Now, it's not that Dr. Thompson felt it was a perfect book. He does say it does have some minor things that probably could be corrected.

But to give the book those kind of accolades, I think, is quite impressive when you think about it. And yet, it's this kind of evidence that Dr. Muhlestein, in my impression from reading his article, is trying to get people to disbelieve. When he's trying to throw the academics under the bus and say, no, we have to go by revelation from God. And again, folks, I want to raise the question, how do we know for sure that what Joseph Smith was saying is in fact revelation from God? Though he says it may have been, doesn't necessarily mean it is.

And that becomes the real tricky part of coming to the final conclusion on things like this. For Dr. Muhlestein, how does he know what he knows? And according to what he says, he knows it by revelation. Listen to what he says on page 57 toward the end of the article. He says, I know from revelation that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God who translated the book of Abraham by inspiration. Receiving such revelation is a real and powerful method of learning truth, a method I refuse to ignore or dismiss just because others haven't experienced the same method of learning. And then listen to his conclusion to this article on page 57. He writes, I know through the same kind of revelation Oliver Cowdery experienced, and Oliver Cowdery was one of the original witnesses of the Book of Mormon and one of the early leaders of Mormonism, that the book of Abraham is inspired. I trust that sooner or later the academic process will catch up and I will find satisfactory answers to all my questions.

And he admits in this article that he doesn't have all the answers to the book of Abraham. I have seen this happen numerous times throughout my life and have full confidence that it will happen again in the future. I can expect this not only because of my past experience but also because I trust so fully in the revelatory method of learning.

I recommend this as a model in everything we do. Bill, there's a book that was written by Norm Geisler and Frank Turek that says I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. What I have to say about this quote to me is astounding that he wrote this, that I don't have enough faith to be a Mormon if the evidence is so geared against the Mormon message, including the book of Abraham as talked about here, and I have to admit that I have to trust in the revelation that Joseph Smith supposedly had, I have to trust in the leaders when they get up that they're actually telling the truth. I'm sorry, I don't have that kind of faith.

I think you raise a good point and it only goes to support what we've been saying often on this show and in our writings over the past several decades. When you have a presupposition that Joseph Smith is in fact a prophet of God, you've basically given him permission to tell you just about anything and you're going to believe it. Now I'm not saying that any one statement that Joseph Smith might make should be the deal breaker on whether you should be a Latter-day Saint. I've never taught anybody that Mormons should get on their knees and renounce Mormonism simply because one problem area was demonstrated to that individual. Things like the book of Abraham is just one chink in the armor, it's just one piece of the puzzle that after a while becomes so large that if you were an honest person, I would hope that you would have to take all of this available information and realize, hey, this amount of contradiction is just too much contradiction for me to still defend something where the evidence tends to be pointing against it.

And that's the point we're trying to make here. If you're going to reject all this evidence, ask yourself this, Dr. Muhlstein wants to believe the book of Abraham regardless of what he calls the world's methods, but yet you have another LDS person who in 1993, and I've got to be quite honest, I'm not quite sure where spiritually Dr. Stephen Thompson is now when it comes to Mormonism, but when he was a member of the church, I would assume that he was faithful to the cause, but he was being honest enough to admit there's a problem here. He also has a degree in Egyptology. Muhlstein has a degree in Egyptology. Who are you going to believe? The one that has the evidence to support the claims that he's making, even though when it goes against the grain of the church that he apparently is a member of at that time, or in the case of Dr. Kerry Muhlstein, who is a teacher at Brigham Young University and wants to believe what he calls the revelation from God over the evidence that's been presented. Remember, he's talking about this evidence eventually confirming the revelation, but what we've seen in recent years is that the revelation has been discounted because of the evidence, and that's why the Mormon Church had to come out with the essay that it came out with showing that whatever Mormons had believed up until that time regarding the translation was not quite the way you thought. So this is why they had to come up with that phrase, inspired translation.

They have to redefine everything. Why? Because the scholarship, the evidence, undermined what was originally thought to be revelation from God. We hope you will join us again as we look at another viewpoint on Mormonism. Click there and follow the instructions. MRM is a Christian nonprofit 501c3 organization, and your gifts are tax deductible. Not only that, they are greatly appreciated. Thank you for your support of this ministry.