The Book of Abraham: The Papyri, the Facsimiles and What Egyptology Says

Most scriptures cannot be tested. The Book of Abraham can. It is part of the Pearl of Great Price, which Latter-day Saints receive as scripture, and it says of itself that it is "a Translation of some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt," "written by his own hand, upon papyrus." Part of the papyri survived, and so did the illustrations Joseph Smith published and explained. Egyptologists have read them. The persons involved, and the Latter-day Saints who hold this book dear, deserve courtesy; the claim deserves a straight answer.

It continues our infographic and video The Book of Abraham: Mormonism's Biggest Problem, and belongs with the Kinderhook plates, Reformed Egyptian and the Anthon transcript and the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible. For the faith the book departs from, see One God or a Council of Gods? and our Why Orthodoxy page.

In brief

In 1835 Latter-day Saints in Kirtland, Ohio, bought Egyptian mummies and papyri from a travelling exhibitor, Michael Chandler, and Joseph Smith said that one of the rolls contained "the writings of Abraham." He published the Book of Abraham and three illustrations with explanations in 1842, and it became scripture in 1880. In 1967 the Metropolitan Museum of Art transferred to the Church a group of fragments, among them the original of Facsimile 1. They are Egyptian funerary texts of the last centuries before and the first after Christ, copied for individual Egyptians, and none of them mentions Abraham. Egyptologists, Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint alike, agree that the characters on the fragments do not match the book. The Church now offers two explanations that set the surviving papyri aside: that the real source is a lost part of the papyri, or that the papyri were only a "catalyst" for a revelation.

Thesis: The Book of Abraham is not a translation of the papyri that Joseph Smith owned, the explanations he gave of the facsimiles are wrong, and the book is not the ancient writing of Abraham that he said it was. The Church's two explanations each contradict something Joseph Smith or his book said. The book is not scripture, and its teaching about God is not the faith of the apostles.

What Joseph Smith claimed

The claim is stated in the book itself. Its title reads: "The Book of Abraham Translated from the Papyrus, by Joseph Smith. A Translation of some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt. The writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus."¹ Joseph's history records that, after examining the papyri and beginning "the translation of some of the characters or hieroglyphics," "much to our joy [we] found that one of the rolls contained the writings of Abraham."² That July William W. Phelps wrote home that the papyri "contained the sacred record kept of Joseph in Pharaoh's Court in Egypt, and the teachings of Father Abraham."³

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints states the same in its own words: "The book originated with Egyptian papyri that Joseph Smith translated beginning in 1835." The five chapters and three facsimiles appeared in the Nauvoo newspaper Times and Seasons between March and May 1842, and the book was canonized in the Pearl of Great Price in 1880.²

The book ties itself to a picture. Abraham says of the altar on which the priests tried to kill him: "that you may have a knowledge of this altar, I will refer you to the representation at the commencement of this record" and "I have given you the fashion of them in the figures at the beginning, which manner of figures is called by the Chaldeans Rahleenos, which signifies hieroglyphics" (Abraham 1:12, 14).¹ That picture is Facsimile 1, and Joseph's explanation reads: "Fig. 2. Abraham fastened upon an altar. Fig. 3. The idolatrous priest of Elkenah attempting to offer up Abraham as a sacrifice."⁴

What the papyri were

Joseph Smith's family sold the papyri in 1856, and most are believed to have been lost in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. In 1967 the Metropolitan Museum of Art transferred a group of fragments to the Church, and a further fragment turned up in the Church Historian's Office, making eleven in all. One fragment holds the vignette that Joseph published as Facsimile 1.²

The Egyptologist Klaus Baer, a Chicago scholar who had been one of Hugh Nibley's tutors in reading Egyptian, published the first translation of them in 1968. He reported that the eleven fragments are "the surviving parts of three ancient papyri," two of them copies of the Book of the Dead (one for a lady named Tshenmin, in handwriting of about 100 B.C.) and the third "the Breathing Permit belonging to the priest Hor," in handwriting "of the late Ptolemaic or early Roman Period, about the time of Christ." Of the last he wrote: "Joseph Smith thought that this papyrus contained the Book of Abraham."⁵ The Breathing Permit opens: "Here begins the Breathing Permit, which Isis made for her brother Osiris in order to revive his ba, to revive his corpse, and to make his entire body young again."⁵ Robert K. Ritner of the University of Chicago re-examined it in 2000: "The true content of this papyrus concerns only the afterlife of the deceased Egyptian priest Hor."⁶

The Church agrees on the essentials. Its essay on the subject says: "None of the characters on the papyrus fragments mentioned Abraham's name or any of the events recorded in the book of Abraham. Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologists agree that the characters on the fragments do not match the translation given in the book of Abraham." It adds that "scholars have identified the papyrus fragments as parts of standard funerary texts that were deposited with mummified bodies," dated "between the third century B.C.E. and the first century C.E., long after Abraham lived."² Michael D. Rhodes, writing in the Church's Ensign, puts the Hor papyrus "around A.D. 60" and concedes that, compared with a translation of it, the book "clearly" is not the same text.⁷

{{very-strong: The surviving papyri that Joseph Smith owned are Egyptian funerary texts of the last centuries B.C. and the first century A.D., and none of them contains the text of the Book of Abraham.}}

The facsimiles

The facsimiles can be checked without any of the lost text. In 1912 Bishop Franklin S. Spalding of Utah sent the three plates to leading scholars of Egypt and the ancient Near East, among them Flinders Petrie, James H. Breasted and Arthur C. Mace. Their replies are printed in his pamphlet. James H. Breasted of Chicago wrote that Facsimile 1 shows "Osiris rising from the dead," a scene "depicted on Egyptian funeral papyri, on coffins and on late temple walls, unnumbered thousands of times," that Facsimile 2 is a "hypocephalus," a small disc placed under the head of the mummy, and that Facsimile 3 is "the judgment scene, in which the dead man, led in by Truth, is to be judged by Osiris." Arthur C. Mace of the Metropolitan Museum wrote that the plates were copies of "well known scenes on funeral papyri."⁸ Those were Egyptologists writing in 1912, with the knowledge of their day, and some of their detail has been refined since. The core identification has stood.

In 2000 Ritner, working from the original papyri, reached the same result on Facsimile 3. Joseph Smith's explanation identifies figure 1 as Abraham and figure 2 as "King Pharaoh, whose name is given in the characters above his head."⁴ Ritner replies: "Osiris (fig. 1) is certainly not 'Abraham,' nor is it possible that the altar of Osiris (fig. 3) 'signifies Abraham.' Maat (fig. 4) is not a male 'prince,' Hor (fig. 5) is not a 'waiter,' nor is Anubis (fig. 6) a 'slave'" and the name above figure 2 "is unquestionably that of the female Isis." Facsimile 1, he writes, "has been grotesquely misrepresented as a human sacrifice in the labels and text of The Book of Abraham." The vignette, he explains, depicts "the resurrection of the Osiris Hor on the customary lion-headed funerary couch, attended by the jackal-headed Anubis."⁶

The Church's essay concedes that "long before the fragments were published by the Church, some Egyptologists had said that Joseph Smith's explanations of the various elements of these facsimiles did not match their own interpretations of these drawings."²

How Joseph Smith worked: the Egyptian "alphabet and grammar"

Other manuscripts show the process. The essay says that "Some evidence suggests that Joseph studied the characters on the Egyptian papyri and attempted to learn the Egyptian language," that his history reports that in July 1835 he was "continually engaged in translating an alphabet to the Book of Abraham, and arranging a grammar of the Egyptian language as practiced by the ancients," and that the surviving "grammar" consists of "columns of hieroglyphic characters followed by English translations." It then says: "Neither the rules nor the translations in the grammar book correspond to those recognized by Egyptologists today."² Phelps wrote home that "As no one could translate these writings... they were presented to President Smith. He soon knew what they were."³ Latter-day Saint scholars such as Muhlestein argue that the surviving Egyptian papers were made after the translation, not as its method,⁹ and the essay says their relationship to the book "is not fully understood." But Joseph's own history speaks of translating characters and composing an alphabet, which is the picture of a translation attempted by interpreting Egyptian characters, not of a revelation that merely accompanied them.

The Latter-day Saint responses, at their strongest

The Church's own essay does not deny the main Egyptological facts. It and its scholars offer four responses, and each should be heard in its best form.

1. The missing scroll. The text, they say, was on a different, now lost part of the papyri. Rhodes: the Hor papyrus "has no writing in red ink and is in an extremely poor state of preservation," while Joseph described the roll as "beautifully written... with black, and a small part red, ink." Eyewitnesses described "a long roll" as the source, and it burned in Chicago. Kerry Muhlestein of Brigham Young University reports John Gee's estimate that this scroll was about forty-one feet long, and argues that in this period a picture and the text beside it were often unrelated.⁷⁹
2. The catalyst. The essay says that Joseph's study of the papyri "may have led to a revelation about key events and teachings in the life of Abraham," that "the physical artifacts provided an occasion for meditation, reflection, and revelation," and that this "assumes a broader definition of the words translator and translation."²
3. Ancient parallels. The essay argues that details such as "the plain of Olishem," the god Elkenah, and the tradition that Abraham taught the Egyptians astronomy "fit comfortably in the ancient world," and that some of Joseph's readings of the facsimiles have scholarly support, such as his reading of the four figures in Facsimile 2 as "this earth in its four quarters."²
4. Faith. "The veracity and value of the book of Abraham cannot be settled by scholarly debate," the essay concludes; its status as scripture "lies in the eternal truths it teaches and the powerful spirit it conveys."²

The answers

The missing scroll cannot explain the facsimiles. Even if a lost roll carried the text, Joseph's explanations of the facsimiles concern pictures that are well understood (Facsimile 1 survives, and Facsimile 3 is a standard scene known from many other papyri), and they are wrong. The book itself says its text and its picture belong together (Abraham 1:12, 14). Ritner adds that the Hor papyrus was about 150 to 155 cm wide and that "there is no reasonable expectation of any further text."⁶ Most of all, the theory has to explain why the one fragment that Joseph said belonged to the Book of Abraham, the picture with its adjacent writing, is a Book of Breathings. A claim that can be saved only by appeal to what has been lost cannot be tested, and so it can no longer serve as proof.

The catalyst contradicts the book's own claim. The title page says "Translated from the Papyrus" and "written by his own hand, upon papyrus." Joseph's history says he began "the translation of some of the characters." He worked at an Egyptian alphabet. His associates described a translation. The Church's own essay says the book "originated with Egyptian papyri that Joseph Smith translated." If the book is a revelation not tied to the papyri, then the title, the history and the grammar all misdescribe it, and it is a different book from the one the Church canonized.

The ancient parallels do not prove translation. A few agreements with Egyptian symbolism do not turn Osiris into Abraham; the identifications of persons are the part that can be checked, and they fail. They would be equally at home in a nineteenth-century composition drawing on available material. The essay itself notes in an endnote that "Some of these extrabiblical elements were available to Joseph Smith through the books of Jasher and Josephus. Joseph Smith was aware of these books, but it is unknown whether he utilized them."² A claim to translate an Egyptian papyrus is not confirmed by a few names that can be found in other sources.

Faith in the book is the problem, not the answer. A person may be moved by the book's teaching. But the book does not offer itself as a devotional text; it offers itself as the writing of Abraham, translated by gift from an Egyptian papyrus, and that is what fails. A similar pattern appears with the Kinderhook plates of 1843, which the Church now acknowledges were forged; Joseph's clerk recorded him saying they contained "the history of ... a descendant of Ham," though the Church holds that he did not attempt a revelatory translation.¹⁰

{{strong: The Book of Abraham's own claim to be a translation of an Egyptian papyrus, and the explanations Joseph Smith gave of the facsimiles, are contradicted by the surviving evidence and by the Egyptologists who have examined it, and the Church's own essay concedes that Egyptologists have long said so.}}

What the book teaches

The question is not only historical. Abraham 3 describes "the intelligences that were organized before the world was," among them souls whom God made "rulers," and tells how "one among them that was like unto God" proposed to "make an earth whereon these may dwell" (3:22-24). Spirits "have no beginning... for they are gnolaum, or eternal" (3:18). Abraham 4 has "the Gods" organizing and forming the heavens and the earth (4:1), and "the Gods took counsel among themselves" to form man (4:26). This is not the God of the prophets and apostles. In Isaiah the Lord says, "before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me" and "beside me there is no God" (Isaiah 43:10; 44:6). Paul says: "to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things" (1 Corinthians 8:6). The Church confesses "one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible," and the Son "of one essence with the Father."¹¹ The Book of Abraham teaches a council of gods and eternal intelligences. The Church teaches one God, who created all things from nothing and calls human beings to share by grace in his life. See theosis versus Mormon exaltation and Mormonism versus Nicene Christianity.

What this means for Joseph Smith's claim

Joseph Smith did not claim a private impression. He claimed to translate real documents, and he published the drawings and his explanations for anyone to check. The Book of Mormon's plates are not available. The Book of Abraham's papyri are, and what they are is not in doubt. A man who is mistaken about what an Egyptian funerary papyrus says, and about who the figures on it are, did not translate it. The Church receives the Book of Abraham, with the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants, as scripture on the strength of his authority. When the authority fails the test, the writings that rest on it are not scripture. They are not the word of God, and Joseph Smith was not a prophet of God. Latter-day Saints who begin to see this should know that the faith of the apostles has always been open to them, and that it is found in the Church that kept it.

What we can say confidently

• The Book of Abraham claims to be a translation of Abraham's own writing from papyri Joseph Smith owned (title page; Abraham 1:12, 14).
• The surviving fragments are Egyptian funerary texts (a Book of Breathings and Books of the Dead), none of which mentions Abraham, and the Church and its Egyptological critics agree that the characters do not match the book.
• Egyptologists from 1912 to 2000 have identified the facsimiles as standard funerary scenes, not as Abraham in Egypt.
• Joseph Smith's Egyptian "grammar" does not correspond to Egyptian as recognized by Egyptologists, as the Church's essay says.
• The Church has not officially said that the book is false; it holds it as scripture and now allows that "translation" need not mean a literal rendering of the papyri.

What remains disputed

• Whether another, lost part of the papyri contained a text that Joseph Smith used cannot be settled, since the long roll is believed to have burned in 1871.
• How the Kirtland Egyptian manuscripts relate to the published text (which came first, who wrote what) is debated.
• Details of the Egyptological readings of particular vignettes still differ among scholars; the essay notes there is "not unanimity, even among non-Latter-day Saint scholars, about the proper interpretation of the vignettes." This does not restore the identification with Abraham.
• The Church's essay holds that features of the book are consistent with the ancient world; that is claimed and answered, not settled.

Conclusion

The Book of Abraham was offered as Abraham's own record, translated from Egyptian papyri by a prophet. The papyri came back, and they speak of the afterlife of an Egyptian priest called Hor. The pictures Joseph Smith explained are pictures of Osiris, Isis and Anubis. The Church has not abandoned the book, but the two defences it now allows each give up something the book and its translator said. That is why the matter is not one of historical curiosity: a book whose origin is not what it claims, from a man whose claim to translate it failed, is not the word of God. The word of God is Jesus Christ, "the Word... with God," by whom "all things were made" (John 1:1-3), and the faith that confesses him is the one handed on in the Church of the apostles. For the passages that lead from here to that faith, continue to Why Orthodoxy.

Notes

1. The Pearl of Great Price, "The Book of Abraham," title page and Abraham 1, 3 and 4, at https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/pgp/abr (chapter pages /abr/1, /abr/3, /abr/4).
2. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham," Gospel Topics Essays, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/translation-and-historicity-of-the-book-of-abraham. The essay was first posted on 8 July 2014 (reported the same day by the Deseret News, "LDS Church publishes new Web essay on Book of Abraham"); the Church's current citation line dates it 2016. The quotation about Jasher and Josephus is from the essay's endnotes.
3. W. W. Phelps to Sally Waterman Phelps, 19-20 July 1835, as cited in the Joseph Smith Papers, "Book of Abraham and Facsimiles, 1 March-16 May 1842," Historical Introduction, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/book-of-abraham-and-facsimiles-1-march-16-may-1842 (the first quotation), and in the Church's essay (note 2 above) for "As no one could translate these writings."
4. The Pearl of Great Price, Facsimile 1 and Facsimile 3, with Joseph Smith's explanations, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/pgp/abr/fac-1 and /fac-3.
5. Klaus Baer, "The Breathing Permit of Hor: A Translation of the Apparent Source of the Book of Abraham," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3, no. 3 (Autumn 1968), https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V03N03_111.pdf. Baer's own description of himself as a tutor of Nibley is in the editors' introduction.
6. Robert K. Ritner, "The 'Breathing Permit of Hor' Thirty-four Years Later," Dialogue 33, no. 4 (Winter 2000), beginning p. 97, https://dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V33N04_107.pdf.
7. Michael D. Rhodes, "Why doesn't the translation of the Egyptian papyri found in 1967 match the text of the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price?" Ensign, July 1988, 51-53, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1988/07/i-have-a-question/why-doesnt-the-translation-of-the-egyptian-papyri-found-in-1967-match-the-text-of-the-book-of-abraham-in-the-pearl-of-great-price.
8. Franklin S. Spalding, Joseph Smith, Jr., as a Translator (Salt Lake City, 1912; the author's dedication is dated 1 November 1912), pp. 23-27 of the printed pages, the opinions of Petrie, Breasted and Mace, as read in the Internet Archive text of the 1912 pamphlet, https://archive.org/details/josephsmithjrast00spala.
9. Kerry Muhlestein, "Egyptian Papyri and the Book of Abraham: Some Questions and Answers," Religious Educator 11, no. 1 (2010), https://rsc.byu.edu/sites/default/files/pub_content/pdf/Egyptian_Papyri_and_the_Book_of_Abraham_Some_Questions_and_Answers.pdf.
10. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Kinderhook Plates," Church History Topics, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/kinderhook-plates, which also cites Stanley B. Kimball, "Kinderhook Plates Brought to Joseph Smith Appear to Be a Nineteenth-Century Hoax," Ensign, August 1981.
11. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, Orthodox Church in America text, https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/prayers/symbol-of-faith. Scripture other than the Pearl of Great Price is quoted from the King James Version (1769 text), checked against https://honestapologist.com/api/bible/connections/texts?v=kjv.

Bibliography

Latter-day Saint sources

• The Pearl of Great Price: the Book of Abraham and Facsimiles 1-3.
• "Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham." Gospel Topics Essays.
• Rhodes, Michael D. "Why doesn't the translation of the Egyptian papyri found in 1967 match the text of the Book of Abraham?" Ensign, July 1988.
• Muhlestein, Kerry. "Egyptian Papyri and the Book of Abraham: Some Questions and Answers." Religious Educator 11, no. 1 (2010).
• Joseph Smith Papers. "Book of Abraham and Facsimiles, 1 March-16 May 1842."

Egyptological and historical sources

• Baer, Klaus. "The Breathing Permit of Hor." Dialogue 3, no. 3 (1968).
• Ritner, Robert K. "The 'Breathing Permit of Hor' Thirty-four Years Later." Dialogue 33, no. 4 (2000).
• Spalding, Franklin S. Joseph Smith, Jr., as a Translator. 1912.

Scripture and creed

• The Holy Bible, King James Version (1769 text).
• The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. OCA text.