Gospel Topics Chapter 11 Taysom Part 5

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Once again, that's MRM.org. And now, your host for today's Viewpoint on Mormonism. Welcome to this edition of Viewpoint on Mormonism. I'm your host, Bill McKeever, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry, and with me today is Eric Johnson, my colleague at MRM. Today we wrap up our look at chapter 11 in the book, The Gospel Topics Series, a scholarly engagement. This chapter had to do with the Gospel Topics essay that dealt with the controversies surrounding the Book of Abraham, which is still to this day a part of Mormon scripture.

This chapter was written by Stephen C. Taysom, and today as we close this segment, I want to go back to the mention of an Egyptologist by the name of Robert K. Ritner. I had mentioned in a previous show that Ritner gets mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, but he also gets another mention at the end of this chapter, and I think Robert Ritner's contribution to this whole discussion is very important, because he says some things that I think the average Latter-day Saint needs to listen to, and this is why. We've talked about another Egyptologist who's a Latter-day Saint, a man by the name of John Gee. Well, Robert Ritner was John Gee's professor, and that becomes very important, so when you have Latter-day Saints looking up to John Gee, I would personally place more emphasis on what Robert K. Ritner might have to say about this subject rather than John Gee. John Gee has a faith to defend. Robert Ritner doesn't.

I look at him as trying to be as objective as possible in this discussion, and I don't see that when it comes to John Gee. Here's what we find at the bottom of page 300, referring to Robert Ritner. During his time as a professor at Yale, Ritner had a role in the education of John Gee, one of the foremost apologists for the LDS Church on the book of Abraham.

For reasons that remain unclear but which have been speculated about endlessly on internet message boards, Gee and Ritner had a falling out that apparently devolved into an ongoing personal animus. He continues, Ritner publicly denigrated Gee in print, writing that, Whatever the reason, Ritner, who teaches at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, felt obliged to involve himself in the book of Abraham controversy after several years of often-anguished requests, apparently by individuals undergoing some sort of faith crisis and looking for answers about the book of Abraham. Ritner obliged by publishing a translation of the Joseph Smith papyrus documents in which he deals, by his own admission, often bluntly, with published criticism by Mormon apologists, often vituperative.

In the prestigious Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Ritner described the book of Abraham as a pastiche of Genesis. Ritner appears to object to what he sees as an attempt to throw a scholarly cloak over outlandish nonsense, his term, particularly when it comes from one of his own former students. Now, that's a pretty serious indictment, and the reason why I felt it was important to look at that is because many Latter-day Saints looked to John Gee as the final authority when it comes to the book of Abraham. Ritner certainly had a lot of problems with some of the beliefs that Gee holds regarding the book of Abraham.

I think that needs to be taken into consideration. Now, you could easily say, Yeah, but Bill, it doesn't matter anymore because now the Church has come out with this idea that he really wasn't translating from the Egyptian into English anyway. It was just a spiritual translation or a revelatory translation, so who really cares what Ritner has to say about it? Well, I think it goes back again to what Taysom brings out in this chapter, and that is the essay is meant to curry favor with the member of the LDS Church in a hope of keeping them a member in the LDS Church.

So am I wrong in assuming that facts, as we understand them, really don't matter in this case? Just pray about it, get a good feeling about it, be loyal to the Church, and just stay in the boat, as Jeffrey R. Holland would instruct. I as an individual have a real problem with that.

I just don't see that as being a viable option. If you're a seeker after truth, I would think that you would agree with what you're saying, Bill, because the facts come out, and the Church has had much lower retention rates as well as conversion rates. People are leaving in droves, one LDS historian even admitted that, and these Gospel Topics essays were meant to try to counteract all that's available on the internet.

People are leaving for a variety of reasons. Maybe secularism could be said to be a reason why people leave, and that's certainly true as well. But we have found that people are bothered by essays such as this one on the Book of Abraham and the other issues we've been talking about the past weeks. If you're going to be a seeker after truth, I don't know if you're going to easily be able to buy the essay that this Church has put together to try to counteract all of its criticism. When I started studying this years and years ago, I think one of the things that I learned about the Book of Abraham, which just screamed out to me, fraud, had to do with Joseph Smith's translation of facsimile 1. Now facsimile 1 is still in the Book of Abraham, however, facsimile 1 doesn't look quite the way a lot of Egyptian papyrus displayed the figures in facsimile 1.

There's a reason for that. The papyrus that Joseph Smith had was torn, so a section of that facsimile was not in Smith's possession. Now you might have Mormons say, well, yeah, but we don't have all of the papyrus. I think we have enough to show that Joseph Smith was trying to pull a con job, and facsimile 1, at least to me, tends to prove that.

The section that is missing from facsimile 1, and I know it's difficult when doing this on the radio because you can't see what I'm talking about, but facsimile 1, as it is in the Book of Abraham, shows what looks to be a dark-skinned person on the left-hand side holding what looks like a long knife, or you could even say a feather, over a person who is lying down on a couch of some sort that has a lion head at one end and a tail at the other. Smith gives his interpretation that this individual standing to the left is the idolatrous priest of Elkanah attempting to offer up Abraham as a sacrifice. Now some Mormon apologists argue, well, there's a Mesopotamian deity by that name.

See, that shows there's a comparison. This isn't talking about some Mesopotamian deity. This is actually supposed to be Anubis. The head of this body wasn't included in the papyrus that Joseph Smith had, so he ad libs and he puts what looks like a human head where a jackal's head is supposed to be.

It's the Egyptian god Anubis. And the portion that's missing is the torso of the individual that is on the lion-headed couch that I described earlier. What's missing is the midsection, where if you have the original, according to how it's been interpreted by qualified Egyptologists, it says, Isis, meanwhile, has taken the form of a falcon and hovers over the groin of Osiris, who holds his phallus.

Hence, this is known as an ethophallic drawing. Smith didn't have that part. It only makes you wonder what he would have said had he had that portion of the papyrus. But see, to me, that shows Smith is trying to perpetrate an outright fraud. Somebody wants to see that, because it's hard maybe to understand everything you just said, Bill, but they can go to the internet and they can just type in facsimile 1, Book of Abraham, and in the images, there are lots of places where you can see that.

But I think one of the best resources that we know of to be able to help you with this is a book that was written back in 1992. It's called By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus, A New Look at the Joseph Smith Papyri. This was written by Charles M. Larson.

He's a Christian believer. This has stood the test of time. It was printed well over two decades ago, almost three decades ago, but probably the most important part to this book is its pullout. It has a three-page pullout that has on one side— It's full color. It's all full color, and it's beautifully done, and it's called The Book of Abraham Papyrus Scroll. On the one side, it shows you what Joseph Smith had. On the other, it shows you the untranslated Book of Joseph Scroll. What's valuable about this book is the number of illustrations that he includes there, including on page 65 showing this facsimile 1 and what Anubis looked like, what it really should have been. But page 64 on the other side includes what Joseph Smith thought it should have been. But it has nothing to do with the common fumar papyri that facsimile 1 really was.

You had mentioned also in an earlier broadcast about a film that deals with The Book of Abraham. We should mention, though, that By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus is on the internet. You can read the entire book online at irr.org.

How would a person be able to find that? You can just go to irr.org and just type in By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus, and you can read the book there. I think better is buying the book. You can get it on Amazon or used book places as well. The book is worth the price just for the four-color pullout, as well as the many illustrations that he includes throughout. And if I remember correctly, it was Stephen Thompson, an Egyptologist, that actually recommended this book by Charles M. Larson.

And so on that recommendation alone, I would think you might want to look into it. It's very easy to read. It has a lot of information that has to do with this subject. And I'm sure that even if a thoughtful Latter-day Saint was to take their time and go through this book, By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus, they would agree that there's something very wrong in the LDS Church, which of course makes it necessary for them to switch gears in how they're defending The Book of Abraham today. The bottom line, folks, is even though Latter-day Saints for many decades were told that The Book of Abraham was an actual translation into English from the Egyptian text, now the Church has had to switch gears and make it appear that that wasn't really true. It was more of an inspirational or a revelatory translation of the Egyptian text. Thank you for listening. If you would like more information regarding Mormonism Research Ministry, we encourage you to visit our website at www.mrm.org, where you can request our free newsletter, Mormonism Researched. We hope you will join us again as we look at another viewpoint on Mormonism.