Did Joseph Smith Translate the Book of Abraham?

Draft status. Every quotation in this article was checked word for word against a source opened on Aug 8, 2026, and is logged in quotes. Joseph Smith Papers material was re-checked with bin/jsptext.py, which marks words the writer struck out, so that no canceled reading has been promoted into a quotation. Claims stated from general knowledge, without an opened source, are listed one by one in the unopened-source footnote at the end.¹ See literature-review for the full ledger.

Summary

Joseph Smith bought four Egyptian mummies and several papyrus rolls in July 1835. He said one of the rolls held the writings of Abraham. He produced an English text, published it in 1842 as the Book of Abraham, and printed three woodcuts from the papyri as Facsimiles 1, 2, and 3. In 1967 the Metropolitan Museum of Art gave the Church eleven papyrus fragments from that collection. Egyptologists have read them.

Four things are settled and are not in serious dispute, including among Latter-day Saint Egyptologists.

First, the surviving fragments are ordinary Egyptian funerary texts. They are a Document of Breathings Made by Isis copied for a Theban priest named Hor, a Book of the Dead copied for a woman named Semminis, and a single illustrated fragment from a Book of the Dead for a woman named Neferirnub. The Church's own documentary edition, The Joseph Smith Papers, Revelations and Translations, Volume 4, says so plainly and dates them to between the third and the first century BC, more than a millennium and a half after any date proposed for Abraham.²

Second, the original of Facsimile 1 survives. It is the opening vignette of Hor's Breathing Document. Klaus Baer in 1968 and Robert Ritner in 2000 identify the same figures: a lion-headed funerary couch, the jackal-headed god Anubis attending the mummy, the four sons of Horus as canopic jar lids, and the deceased man's human-headed ba-bird above his head. Joseph Smith identified these as an altar, an idolatrous priest of Elkenah, four idolatrous gods, and the Angel of the Lord. The published engraving also gives Anubis a human head and a knife. Baer, who examined the papyrus, wrote that the vignette was in essentially its present damaged condition in 1835 and that the restorations "are not copies of the missing parts."³

Third, Facsimile 3 is a standard scene of the deceased brought before the enthroned Osiris. The Egyptian labels above the figures are still legible in the engraving. They name Osiris, Isis, Maat, Hor, and Anubis. Joseph Smith identified the same figures as Abraham on Pharaoh's throne, King Pharaoh "whose name is given in the characters above his head," a prince, a waiter named Shulem, and a slave named Olimlah. The figure whose name Joseph said was written above the head is labeled, in the surviving characters, "Isis the great, the god's mother."⁴ That is a testable claim about specific writing, and it fails.

Fourth, in the 1835 Book of Abraham manuscripts, Egyptian characters stand in the left margin beside blocks of English. The Joseph Smith Papers editors state that these characters were copied from "the Book of Breathing for Horos, the Egyptian Alphabet documents or the Grammar and Alphabet volume, and possibly other unknown sources."⁵ Baer matched several of them, character group by character group, against the surviving papyrus. A handful of hieratic groups from one column of a funerary rubric sit beside paragraphs of Abraham's life story. That column of Egyptian translates to about ninety-seven English words. The Book of Abraham runs to 5,506.⁶

What follows from all this is narrower than critics often claim. "The surviving papyri do not say what Joseph Smith said they say" is a direct Egyptological result. "Therefore no model in which the papyri prompted rather than supplied the text can be true" is a different and weaker claim, and this article does not make it. A God who can give a prophet a lost book can give it to him while he holds an unrelated scroll. The question is not whether that is conceivable. It is whether the surviving evidence looks like that, and what the catalyst model costs when it is stated honestly.

The costs are real. Joseph Smith and his scribes ran a parallel project to build an Egyptian alphabet and grammar, which means they thought the characters carried the meaning. The Book of Abraham manuscripts place characters beside text, which is what a person does who believes the characters are the source. The facsimile explanations are not general symbolic readings; they are numbered identifications of particular figures and, twice, claims about what specific written characters say. A catalyst model has to treat the alphabet project as a mistake, the marginal characters as a mistake, and the facsimile explanations as either mistakes or as revelation unconnected to the drawings they are printed beside. That is a coherent position. It is not a cost-free one, and the Church's Gospel Topics essay does not name those costs.

The missing-scroll model fares worse than its advocates present it, but the dispute is genuine and quantitative. John Gee argued from roll geometry that up to 1,250.5 centimetres, about 41 feet, could be missing from the interior of the Hor roll. Andrew Cook and Christopher Smith re-derived the winding lengths from the repeating tear pattern in the papyrus and concluded that no more than about 56 centimetres can be missing.⁶ Their figure independently matches Baer's 1968 estimate of a 150–155 centimetre roll, made by a completely different method, from parallel manuscripts of the same text. The Church's own edition of the papyri prints 150–156 centimetres in its own text, and records Gee's figure only in a footnote.²

The ancient-parallels argument is the strongest thing the Latter-day Saint side has, and it deserves to be split into three questions rather than answered at once. Some parallels are real and were not available to Joseph Smith: a third-century Egyptian magical papyrus does put Abraham's name beside a lion-couch scene, and Egyptian temple texts do connect such scenes with the destruction of enemies. Some parallels were available in his environment: Josephus, apocryphal Abraham legends in circulation, and standard nineteenth-century speculation about Egyptian astronomy. Some are too loose to test: "Kolob," "Olishem," and a generic association of Abraham with astronomy. The honest reading is that the parallels establish that the Book of Abraham is not a naive fabrication by a man who knew nothing, and that they do not establish that the text is ancient. No parallel yet offered predicts anything about the Book of Abraham that could have failed.

The overall verdict is split, and stated separately below. On the papyri themselves the Egyptological result stands and Joseph Smith's readings of specific characters and figures are wrong. On the wider question of whether revelation produced a genuinely ancient text through a wrong translation, the evidence weighs against but does not close the matter, and the strongest remaining case for the Book of Abraham is not the papyri at all — it is the text.

The claim being tested

Four separate propositions are usually blurred together. They need different evidence and they can come apart.

1. The papyri Joseph Smith owned contained a text written by Abraham. This is the claim printed at the head of the Book of Abraham in 1842: "A translation Of some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands, from the Catecombs of Egypt, purporting to be the writings of Abraham, while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus."
2. Joseph Smith rendered the characters of those papyri into English. This is the ordinary meaning of "translation" and the meaning implied by the alphabet-and-grammar project and by the characters set in the manuscripts' margins.
3. The Book of Abraham is an authentic ancient record of Abraham, however it reached English. This is compatible with the papyri being a prompt rather than a source.
4. The Book of Abraham is true scripture. This is what the Church defends and, on its own account, is not settled by any of the above.

Evidence against 1 and 2 is not automatically evidence against 3. Evidence for 3 would not by itself rescue 1 or 2. The Church's own position now separates them. Its Gospel Topics essay concedes that "the relationship between those fragments and the text we have today is largely a matter of conjecture"⁷ and that "the veracity and value of the book of Abraham cannot be settled by scholarly debate concerning the book's translation and historicity."⁷

For how the Church's teachings are ranked by authority — and why "not current doctrine" is never a complete answer to a historical problem — see what counts as Mormon doctrine. The Book of Abraham sits at the top of that ranking. It was canonized in 1880 as part of the Pearl of Great Price and is a standard work.

The strongest case for the Latter-day Saint claim

Stated at full strength, without objections.

Joseph Smith never claimed to know Egyptian, and no one who watched him said he read it. The only surviving statement from anyone actually present is Warren Parrish, one of the 1835 scribes: "I have set by his side and penned down the translation of the Egyptian Hieroglyphicks as he claimed to receive it by direct inspiration of Heaven." Parrish wrote that after leaving the church, as a hostile witness, and he still described the process as inspiration rather than scholarship. John Gee, who prints the sentence, calls it "the only recorded statement of anyone directly involved in the translation about how it was done."⁸ Later accounts that have Joseph Smith using the Urim and Thummim on the papyri are, on Gee's own account, thirdhand and come from no one who watched.⁸ The Gospel Topics essay agrees that "neither the Lord nor Joseph Smith explained the process of translation of the book of Abraham."⁷ If the claim was always revelation, then testing it as a philologist's translation tests something Joseph Smith never claimed.

Most of what he owned is gone. The Church's own edition says that "the surviving papyrus fragments represent only a portion of the original collection."² Oliver Cowdery in December 1835 described the collection as including "two or three other small pieces of papyrus, with astronomical calculations, epitaphs, &c."⁸ Only fragments of two of those documents survive. Facsimile 2's original hypocephalus is gone. Facsimile 3's original is gone. The 1871 Chicago fire destroyed part of the collection. Judging a translation against a fraction of the source is a weak test.

The eyewitnesses describe a long roll, and the surviving fragments were not a roll after 1837. This is John Gee's central historical argument and it is a real one. The extant fragments were pasted onto backing paper and put behind glass in the 1830s. Visitors in the 1840s and 1850s were nevertheless shown a roll said to contain Abraham's writings. Whatever those visitors saw, it was not the mounted fragments now in Salt Lake City.

Joseph Smith's other "translations" behaved the same way. He produced Doctrine and Covenants 7 as a translation of a parchment written by John that he never physically possessed. He revised the Bible for three years without any manuscript in the original languages. The Book of Mormon was dictated with the plates covered or absent. On this pattern, holding a scroll while receiving a revelation about Abraham is ordinary rather than anomalous.

The text contains things a New York farmer had no evident way to know. A third-century AD Egyptian magical papyrus from a temple library shows a lion-couch scene with Abraham's name written under it, and the instructions say the picture and the inscription belong together. Egyptian temple inscriptions accompanying comparable scenes speak of burning the corpses of enemies and of a "strong one who subjugated the evil doer."⁸ A later Egyptian text has Pharaoh try to sacrifice Abraham until an angel delivers him, after which Abraham teaches the court astronomy. The Book of Abraham has an Egyptian-style attempted sacrifice, an angelic deliverance, and Abraham teaching astronomy in Pharaoh's court, in that order.

The book names things not in the Bible that later turned up. "The plain of Olishem" is not a biblical name; an inscription of Naram-Sin names a place Ulisum in northern Syria. "Elkenah" is not biblical; the Church's essay notes that scholars have identified a deity of that name among ancient Mesopotamian gods. Abraham 3:22–23 is built as Semitic poetic parallelism.

The Church has never specified which papyrus. Gee is right that no canonical or official statement identifies the Breathing Document as the source. The 1842 publication described the book only as "a translation of some ancient records that have fallen into [Joseph Smith's] hands from the catacombs of Egypt," without naming which of the four or five papyri it came from.⁸

A believing reader should find that summary fair. Everything below is the evaluation.

What was bought, and what survives

The 1835 purchase

Antonio Lebolo, an agent of the French consul-general Bernardino Drovetti, dug mummies and papyri out of tombs near Thebes between 1817 and 1822. He died in 1830. A power of attorney drawn up after his death listed eleven mummies. They reached the United States by 1833. A showman named Michael Chandler exhibited them city by city, selling as he went, until only four mummies, two papyrus rolls, and additional fragments were left.

Chandler reached Kirtland, Ohio, in late June or early July 1835. Joseph Smith inspected the papyri. Chandler let Oliver Cowdery copy "some four or five different sentences or separate pieces." Joseph Smith gave Chandler a sample decipherment, and Chandler gave him back a certificate saying the translation corresponded "in the most minute matters" to what he had gleaned "in many eminent cities . . . [from] the most learned." The Joseph Smith Papers editors note dryly that Egyptological scholarship was so new in 1835 that "neither Chandler nor any other American at that time would likely have been able to make such an attestation authoritatively," and that Chandler "may have issued the certificate to ingratiate himself to the Latter-day Saints and increase the likelihood of a sale."⁹

The Latter-day Saints paid $2,400. The man tasked with making the purchase later said the sum was split three ways, $800 each from himself, "S. Andrews," and Joseph Smith "& Co." Joseph Smith wanted only the papyri; Chandler insisted the mummies be included.

The reaction split along the lines that would define the next two centuries. The church member Albert Brown wrote to his parents that "Many of the Learned have been to kirtland to examine the characters but none of them have been able to tell but very little a bout them and yet Joseph without any of the wisdom of this world can read them and know what they are."⁹ The Cleveland Whig of 5 August 1835 ran a squib headed "Another Humbug," reporting that "the prophet Joe has ascertained, by examining the papyrus through his spectacles, that they are the bodies of Joseph, (the son of Abraham,) and King Abimeleck and his daughter."⁹

W. W. Phelps wrote to his wife Sally in late July 1835 that Joseph Smith "soon knew what they were and said they, the 'rolls of papyrus,' contained the sacred record kept of Joseph in Pharaoh's Court in Egypt, and the teachings of Father Abraham."⁹ So by late July 1835 two identifications were already in place: a Book of Joseph and a Book of Abraham.

What survives

Emma Smith and her second husband sold the mummies and papyri to Abel Combs in 1856. Combs split the collection. Part of it went to a museum that burned in Chicago in 1871. The other part passed through Combs's housekeeper to her daughter's widower, who sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1947. On 27 November 1967 the Museum gave eleven fragments to the Church.¹

The Joseph Smith Papers describe what those eleven fragments are:

• two fragments of the Book of Breathing for Horos — the Document of Breathings Made by Isis, copied for a Theban priest named Hor, son of Osorwer and Taikhibit;
• four fragments and several scraps of the Book of the Dead for Semminis, a woman also called Tshenmin in other transliterations;
• one fragment of the Book of the Dead for Nefer-ir-nebu, which carries a vignette from chapter 125.

The editors state the date: "According to Egyptologists, the papyri purchased by JS and his associates originated in Thebes, Egypt (the present-day city of Luxor), and date to sometime between the third century and the first century bc." Elsewhere in the same volume they say the fragments were "created for individuals who died sometime in the third or second centuries bc."²

Gee gives the range Egyptologists have used over time: second century BC to second century AD, with a shift after the 1980s toward the second century BC for the Hor material on the strength of family names and writing instrument. Ritner reports the same revision, crediting Jan Quaegebeur and Marc Coenen, and calls it "controversial, though possible."⁴ Nothing in that range is close to Abraham.

Note what this dating does and does not do. It does not prove the Book of Abraham false. Ancient texts survive in late copies; the Church's essay makes exactly this point, and it is correct.⁷ What the dating does is remove any possibility that the surviving papyrus is Abraham's autograph. The 1842 heading says the record was "written by his own hand, upon papyrus." Whatever that phrase means, it cannot mean these fragments.

What the surviving papyri say

The Hor Breathing Document

The identification was made quickly and has never been overturned. In the summer 1968 issue of Dialogue, John A. Wilson and Richard A. Parker identified fragments in the collection as a late funerary text of the Book of Breathings type, copied for a priest named Hor. Their articles were not opened for this draft.¹ In the autumn 1968 issue Klaus Baer of the University of Chicago published the first extensive translation, under a title that said what he thought it was: "The Breathing Permit of Hôr: A Translation of the Apparent Source of the Book of Abraham." In 2000, Robert Ritner — Baer's successor at Chicago — re-edited the text with better photographs and access to Baer's own notebooks, and reported that "changes from Baer's understanding of the document are few and do not challenge his basic understanding of the text."⁴

The document is a passport for the dead. Ritner explains the genre: the Egyptian title means "Document of Breathing," using the ordinary word for an official letter, so that these "books" serve as formal "permits" — "or perhaps more accurately 'passports'" — to the world of the gods. To work, they "had to accompany the corpse."⁴ The papyrus itself gives the directions, and they are unambiguous:

Osiris shall be towed into the great lake of Khonsu, and likewise the Osiris Hor, the justified, born of Taikhibit, the justified, after his two arms have been placed at his heart, while the Breathing Document, being what is written on its interior and exterior, shall be wrapped in royal linen and placed (under) his left arm in the midst of his heart. The remainder of his wrapping shall be made over it.⁴

The named people are a family. Hor is son of Osorwer and born of Taikhibit, and Ritner identifies the same trio in Papyrus Louvre 3207, a Book of the Dead belonging to "the Osiris Hor, the justified, son of Osorwer, the justified, and born by the housewife and sistrum-player of Amon-Re, Taikhibit, the justified."⁴ The Joseph Smith Papers note that at least ten funerary papyri made for this same multigenerational family have been identified in collections around the world; Drovetti's men appear to have emptied a family vault.

Ritner's closing assessment: "The text is a formal document or 'permit' created by Isis and copied by Thoth to assure that the deified Hor regains the ability to breathe and function after death, with full mobility, access to offerings and all other privileges of the immortal gods. The implications, basic symbolism and intent of the text are certain."⁴

This is not a contested reading. Michael Rhodes, a Latter-day Saint Egyptologist at BYU, published his own edition, The Hor Book of Breathings: A Translation and Commentary, in the FARMS series that Gee edits.² Gee's own book states flatly: "The Book of Abraham is not on the surviving fragments of the Joseph Smith Papyri."⁸ He argues that the text was elsewhere, not that the Egyptologists misread what is there.

Gee does make one methodological objection worth recording, because it is fair. Hor's copy is an abbreviated version — the earliest known manuscript of the Document of Breathings Made by Isis, and an abridged one. Translators therefore fill from parallel manuscripts, and Gee complains that "most purported translations of the Joseph Smith Papyri are not actually translations of the Joseph Smith Papyri."⁸ Baer and Ritner both say the same thing openly: Baer marked restorations in italics, Ritner in brackets, and both name Papyrus Louvre 3284 as the standard text used for filling. The complaint is about presentation, not about what the surviving words mean.

The Semminis and Neferirnub material

The other fragments are from a Book of the Dead for a woman named Semminis, daughter of Eschons, and a single vignette-bearing fragment from a Book of the Dead for a woman named Neferirnub. Rhodes published the edition of these in 2010, under the title Books of the Dead Belonging to Tshemmin and Neferirnub.² Gee summarizes their contents: the introductory chapter, transformation spells letting Semminis appear as various birds and animals, texts for boarding the boat of the supreme god, texts providing food, and a text asserting her worthiness to enter the divine presence. He then writes, in his own book: "The contents of the papyri do not seem to match the Book of Abraham."⁸

That is the state of the question. Nobody defends the surviving fragments as the Book of Abraham. The disagreement is entirely about what that fact implies.

The Kirtland Egyptian Papers and the characters in the margin

This is the part of the record that a catalyst model has to absorb, and it is worth setting out exactly.

What the documents are

Between July 1835 and about November 1835, Joseph Smith and his scribes produced two related bodies of work. The Joseph Smith Papers publish both in full, with photographs.

The Egyptian-language documents¹ are three "Egyptian Alphabet" manuscripts (one in the handwriting of Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, and W. W. Phelps; one in Cowdery's; one in Phelps's and Warren Parrish's), an "Egyptian Counting" document, several sheets of copied characters, and a bound ledger inscribed "Grammar & A[l]phabet of the Egyptian Language." The ledger had been used in 1833 for indexing Joseph Smith's Bible revision and was repurposed. The editors describe the system: the meaning of a character "was shaped by its position in a language hierarchy made of five tiers (which they called 'parts' or 'degrees')," each successive degree "more complex or detailed than in the previous degree," and "marks such as underlining could be added to a character to change its meaning."⁹

The Book of Abraham manuscripts from Kirtland are three: manuscript A in Frederick G. Williams's hand covering Abraham 1:4–2:6, manuscript B in Warren Parrish's hand covering Abraham 1:4–2:2, and manuscript C in Parrish's and Phelps's hands covering Abraham 1:1–2:18.

Joseph Smith's own history describes the alphabet work as his. The Church's Gospel Topics essay quotes it: "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.'"⁷ The essay adds that the grammar "consisted of columns of hieroglyphic characters followed by English translations recorded in a large notebook by Joseph's scribe, William W. Phelps."⁷ His journal for 1 October 1835 records that he "labored on the Egyptian alphabet, in company with brsr. O. Cowdery and W. W. Phelps: The system of astronomy was unfolded." On 7 October he "recommenced translating the ancient records." Later entries have him "transcribing Egyptian characters from the papyrus." These journal entries are quoted here as Gee prints them; the manuscript pages were not opened.⁸

The characters in the margin

The Kirtland Book of Abraham manuscripts have a ruled vertical line down the left of the page, "ranging in width from ½ inch to ¾ inch (1–2 cm)," making a margin. The Joseph Smith Papers describe Manuscript A precisely: the first and second pages carry a graphite line, the third an ink line, and the fourth no line at all.⁵ Egyptian characters were written in that margin, beside blocks of English.

The Church's own edition states where the characters came from. The source note for manuscript A: "Characters from the Book of Breathing for Horos, the Egyptian Alphabet documents or the Grammar and Alphabet volume, and possibly other unknown sources were copied in the margins."⁵ The volume introduction repeats it, and the second half of its sentence matters too: "The Kirtland-era manuscripts contain the first portion of what would later be published as the Book of Abraham, along with Egyptian characters copied in the left margin. Most of these characters were copied from the papyri, but few of them are found in the Egyptian Alphabet documents or in the Grammar and Alphabet volume."⁹ That is, the marginal characters were taken mainly from the papyrus itself rather than from the alphabet project — which strengthens rather than weakens the point, because it means the scribes were working straight from the scroll.

So the arrangement is not in dispute, and it is not a critic's construction. The Church published it.

What is in dispute is what the arrangement means and who made it. Gee's position is that the Egyptian-language documents "seem to have belonged to W. W. Phelps and are in his handwriting, with additions by Warren Parrish," and that attributing them to Joseph Smith "depends more on assumption and assertion than on demonstration."⁸ That is a genuine caution. Joseph Smith's handwriting appears in only two of the Egyptian-language documents.

But the caution does not reach far enough. Joseph Smith's own history and journal say he worked on the alphabet. The Book of Abraham manuscripts are a different set of documents from the alphabet documents, and they are in the hands of three different scribes — Williams, Parrish, and Phelps — all of whom worked for Joseph Smith. Whoever set the characters in those margins, three scribes did it in parallel, while producing the text Joseph Smith published in 1842 without material change.

What the characters actually are

Baer did the decisive work here, in 1968, by matching Joseph Smith's copies against the papyrus itself. His findings:

• The characters set beside the English come from column i, lines 1–3, of Papyrus Joseph Smith XI — that is, from the directions for use, the rubric telling the embalmer where to put the document in the wrappings.
• Specific groups can be matched. A group Joseph Smith rendered as "The priest of Elk Kener" is a real character group on the papyrus. So is one rendered "And as they lifted up their hands." So is one rendered "Behold Potiphers hill."
• Some of the character groups Joseph Smith wrote are not on the papyrus at all and never were. In column i, line 1, he supplied three groups where nothing survives. Baer checked against parallel manuscripts of the Breathing Document, established what the missing signs must have been, and found that "this is not what Joseph Smith drew, and it follows that the three groups in question are only his suggested restoration." The same happens in line 2, where three of four groups "are clearly proposed restorations that bear no resemblance to the signs that certainly were on the papyrus before it was damaged."³

The last point matters more than it is usually given credit for. The lacunae were already there in 1835. Somebody filled them by guesswork and then attached English meanings to the guesses — including the group standing beside Abraham 1:26, the verse about Pharaoh's lineage.

Then there is the arithmetic. Cook and Smith counted it: the hieratic text of that instructions column translates to about ninety-seven English words. The canonized Book of Abraham runs to 5,506 English words in its main text. Oliver Cowdery, writing in December 1835, expected the completed translation to fill "large volumes."⁶ That expectation is exactly what the Grammar and Alphabet implies, where one character carries five escalating degrees of meaning; it is not what Egyptian is.

What this does and does not establish

It establishes that the men producing the Book of Abraham in Kirtland believed the characters carried the text. You do not build an alphabet and grammar for a language you are not reading. You do not rule a margin and copy characters into it beside the English unless you think the two are related. You do not fill a hole in a papyrus with invented signs and then translate them unless you think the signs are the source.

It does not establish that Joseph Smith personally wrote every one of those documents, and it does not by itself refute a model in which the papyri prompted revelation. A person can be wrong about his own method. But a catalyst model that wants to keep the revelation has to say that Joseph Smith and three scribes spent months systematically doing something that had nothing to do with how the text was actually produced, and that the Lord let them.

The facsimiles, figure by figure

Joseph Smith published three engravings from the papyri, each with a numbered key. Reuben Hedlock cut the plates. The keys are short statements identifying each numbered figure. They are the most testable thing in the whole Book of Abraham, because two of them make claims about what specific written characters say.

The summary follows; each figure is compared against the Egyptological reading, and the quotation ledger in quotes carries the wording of both sides.

Facsimile 1

This is the only facsimile whose original papyrus survives. It is the opening vignette of the Hor Breathing Document.

Baer's description, from the papyrus: a man on a lion-couch, attended by Anubis, "the jackal-headed god who embalmed the dead and thereby assured their resurrection." Below the couch are four canopic jars whose lids are the four sons of Horus — from left to right Imsety, Hapi, Qebehsenuef, and Duamutef, protecting liver, lungs, intestines, and stomach. At the head of the couch is a small offering stand with a jug and flowers. Above the man's head hovers his ba, drawn with a human head. In the water below swims a crocodile. Below that is "a decorative pattern derived from the niched facade of a protohistoric Egyptian palace."³

Ritner's description of the same scene, thirty-two years later: "a vignette depicting the resurrection of the Osiris Hor on the customary lion-headed funerary couch, attended by the jackal-headed Anubis and (probably) the winged Isis, while the human-headed ba-spirit of Hor hovers above his head."⁴

Joseph Smith's key reads: Fig. 1, "The Angel of the Lord." Fig. 2, "Abraham fastened upon an altar." Fig. 3, "The idolatrous priest of Elkenah attempting to offer up Abraham as a sacrifice." Fig. 4, "The altar for sacrifice by the idolatrous priests, standing before the gods of Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, Korash, and Pharaoh." Figs. 5–9, the five idolatrous gods. Fig. 10, "Abraham in Egypt." Fig. 11, "Designed to represent the pillars of heaven, as understood by the Egyptians." Fig. 12, "Raukeeyang, signifying expanse, or the firmament over our heads."

(Figure-number note: Baer numbered only figures 1 through 10 in his description. Figures 11 and 12 are given here from the published key itself, which reads "Designed to represent the pillars of heaven, as understood by the Egyptians" and "Raukeeyang, signifying expanse, or the firmament over our heads." Which drawn elements those numbers point to has not been checked against a numbered plate.)

Item by item: the couch is a couch, not an altar. The attending god is Anubis, and Baer notes, of the countless parallels, "He is, of course, not holding a knife."³ The bird is the deceased man's soul, not an angel; Baer credits Dee Jay Nelson with first noticing that the papyrus bird has a human head, and adds, "I must confess with some embarrassment that I also 'saw' the falcon's head before reading Nelson's study."³ The four "idolatrous gods" are canopic jars holding a dead man's organs. The offering stand called "Abraham in Egypt" is a jug and some flowers.

Two of Joseph Smith's identifications are less wrong than the rest, and honesty requires saying so. Figure 9, the crocodile, he called "the idolatrous god of Pharaoh," and the crocodile in such scenes does represent a deity; Baer reads it as Horus in crocodile form. Figure 12, the zigzag water in which the crocodile swims, he called the expanse or firmament, and the Church's essay notes correctly that Egyptians conceived of heaven as a heavenly ocean. These are real, if thin, correspondences of the kind that a symbolic reader might land on.

The restoration question. The published engraving differs from the papyrus in places where the papyrus is broken. The standing god's head, the upper part of the reclining figure's body, and parts of the bird are lost. The engraving supplies a bald human head for the standing figure and puts a knife in his raised hand.

Who supplied them? Gee is right that the engraving was made by Reuben Hedlock, and right that critics often assign the artwork to Joseph Smith with no evidence. He is also right that Hedlock's 1842 engraving is a careful, close copy of what survives, printed at the original size, and that later editions — especially 1907 — degraded it badly.

But that answers a different question. Baer examined the papyrus and the penciled sketch on its backing paper and concluded: "the vignette was probably in essentially the same condition in 1835 that it is now, and the restorations, both that sketched on the backing and that in 'Facsimile No. 1' in the PGP, are not copies of the missing parts."³ That is, the damage predates Joseph Smith, and the filled-in areas are guesses. The knife in Anubis's hand is not on the papyrus and never was, and the Book of Abraham text depends on it: Abraham 1:12–15 has a priest with a knife.

Baer also notes that the missing part of the reclining figure was almost certainly ithyphallic, as in the parallel scenes at Dendera, since the vignette shows the resurrection of Osiris and the begetting of Horus. Richard Parker suggested that what the engraving shows as a second hand raised to the face is the wingtip of Isis in falcon form, hovering. Either way, the restored figure is a resurrection scene, not an execution.

Facsimile 2

This one is not part of the Hor roll at all. It is a hypocephalus — a disc placed under a mummy's head — and Baer notes that it was made for an "Osiris Shoshenq," a different person entirely. Baer's flat statement: it "cannot possibly reproduce a portion of the Breathing Permit of Hor, though it also is supposed to be 'from the Book of Abraham.'"³

Gee turns this into an argument for his side, and the move is a good one. Since Facsimiles 1 and 3 come from Hor's roll and Facsimile 2 from a different document, "at least one of the facsimiles, and perhaps all three, had to have come from a different papyrus than the text of the Book of Abraham, and it is hard to see how Joseph Smith would not have known this."⁸ The facsimiles were published at 1:1 scale and the originals were on public display in Nauvoo. So Joseph Smith cannot have thought that a facsimile always came from the text beside it.

That argument works, but it cuts both ways. It means the Book of Abraham's own statement that Facsimile 1 stood "at the commencement of this record" (Abraham 1:12) is a claim about layout that Joseph Smith could check and did assert. Gee's own answer is that both references to the facsimiles inside the text — Abraham 1:12 and 1:14 — are "nineteenth-century editorial insertions," squeezed into the earliest manuscript in smaller handwriting, and that "the Book of Abraham actually reads smoothly without these additions."⁸

That is a striking concession, verifiable from the manuscript images, and it should be granted. It also removes the text's own internal claim to be attached to the picture.

Joseph Smith's explanations of Facsimile 2 are mostly not testable, and this must be said plainly rather than mocked. Figure 1 is "Kolob." Figure 5 is "Enish-go-on-dosh." Figure 8 "contains writings that cannot be revealed unto the world." Figure 9 "ought not to be revealed at the present time." Figures 12 through 21 "will be given in the own due time of the Lord." No Egyptological finding can contradict a claim that a figure means something not disclosed. Where the explanations do make checkable claims, one lands: Joseph Smith called figure 6 "this earth in its four quarters," and the Church's essay reports correctly that scholars have argued the same for identical figures elsewhere — the four figures are the four sons of Horus, conventionally associated with the four cardinal directions.

One further fact belongs here, because Gee reports it himself: a sketch of Facsimile 2 made in 1842, possibly by Willard Richards, "shows damaged areas of that facsimile that Reuben Hedlock filled in for the publication."⁸ The original is lost, so the fill cannot be checked against it.

Facsimile 3

This is the strongest single test in the case, because Joseph Smith twice said that a figure's name was written in the characters beside it.

His key: Fig. 1, "Abraham sitting upon Pharaoh's throne." Fig. 2, "King Pharaoh, whose name is given in the characters above his head." Fig. 3, "Signifies Abraham in Egypt." Fig. 4, "Prince of Pharaoh, King of Egypt, as written above the hand." Fig. 5, "Shulem, one of the king's principal waiters, as represented by the characters above his hand." Fig. 6, "Olimlah, a slave belonging to the prince." Below: "Abraham is reasoning upon the principles of Astronomy, in the king's court."

Baer, reading the engraving: a man (5) with his hand raised in adoration, wearing a cone of perfumed grease and a lotus flower, "being introduced by Maat (4), the goddess of justice, and Anubis (6), the guide of the dead, into the presence of Osiris (1), enthroned as king of the Netherworld. Behind Osiris stands Isis (2), and in front of him is an offering-stand (3) with a jug and some flowers on it."³

Ritner, reading the same engraving from the surviving Egyptian labels:

• above figure 1: "Recitation by Osiris, Foremost of the Westerners, Lord of Abydos(?), the great god forever and ever(?)."
• above figure 2: "Isis the great, the god's mother."
• above figure 4: "Maat, mistress of the gods."
• above figure 5: "The Osiris Hor, justified forever."
• above figure 6: "Recitation by Anubis, who makes protection(?), foremost of the embalming booth."

Ritner's judgment: "Smith misunderstood 'Pharaoh' as a personal name (cf. Abraham 1:25), and the name above figure 2 is unquestionably that of the female Isis. 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' (because of his dark skin)."⁴

Baer, independently and thirty-two years earlier, read the line of hieroglyphs below the scene as "O gods of . . . , gods of the Caverns, gods of the south, north, west, and east, grant well-being to Osiris Hor, justified" and the characters above and to the left of the man as "probably to be read: 'Osiris Hor, justified forever.'"³ Two Egyptologists, working from the engraving alone, in different decades, name the same five figures.

Joseph Smith did not say "this scene symbolizes." He said the name is given in the characters above his head. The characters are legible. They say Isis.

Gee's answer to Facsimile 3 is not to defend the identifications. It is to argue that the scene type is a presentation or initiation scene, that parallel scenes on temples are labeled as initiations, that Greco-Roman Egyptian initiations included instruction in astronomy, and that the standard formula accompanying such scenes about living in the presence of Osiris later gets rewritten with Abraham in Osiris's place. That is a real observation about a late formula. It does not touch the question of who figure 2 is.

The missing-scroll arithmetic

The missing-scroll model says the Abraham text was on a portion of the roll that is gone. Tested honestly, this is the one place where the argument turns on numbers rather than interpretation, and both sides have published their method.

The space required

Cook and Smith set the target. The Book of Abraham's main text is 5,506 English words. The hieratic instructions column of the Breathing Document translates to about ninety-seven English words and is about nine centimetres wide. If a hieratic Book of Abraham were written in the same hand at the same density, it would need about 9 × (5,506 / 97) ≈ 511 centimetres of papyrus — over sixteen feet — and more than that, since the published translation is incomplete.⁶

That estimate assumes the ratio of Egyptian to English is ordinary. Advocates of the missing-scroll model must assume that too, since their claim is that Joseph Smith translated an actual ancient text. The alternative — one character carrying hundreds of English words, as the Grammar and Alphabet implies — is a claim about Egyptian that no Egyptologist accepts and that the missing-scroll model itself does not want.

Gee's number

John Gee applied a method developed by Friedhelm Hoffmann for the Demotic Papyrus Spiegelberg. The idea is sound. A rolled scroll's successive windings shrink by a fixed amount, the thickness of the papyrus. If you can measure the length of two windings near the outside and the thickness, you can compute how much papyrus fits inside before the winding length becomes physically impossible. Hoffmann's floor, as Cook and Smith quote it, is that "the windings cannot be put into practice under 2.5 cm."⁶

Gee measured the first winding at 9.7 cm and the seventh at 9.5 cm. That is a change of 0.2 cm over six windings, implying a very thin papyrus and therefore a very large number of remaining windings. His result: up to 1,250.5 cm, or about 41 feet, could be missing from the roll's interior.⁶ That is more than double what a hieratic Book of Abraham would need.

Cook and Smith's number

Andrew Cook, a physicist, and Christopher Smith published a re-derivation in Dialogue in 2010. Their objection to Gee is procedural first: he "offered no details concerning his method for identifying the winding end-points," and when they tried to replicate his measurements they "found that his measurements did not seem to be accurate and, in fact, required the papyrus to be impossibly thin."⁶

Their own method removes the eyeballing. When Chandler tore the Hor scroll out of its bitumen-soaked wrappings, he ripped through the rolled layers, leaving a repeating pattern of lacunae — the same tear appearing once per winding, slightly closer together each time. Cook and Smith digitized the upper and lower edges of the mounted fragments as functions, shifted each function against itself, and looked for the shift that maximized the correlation. That shift is the winding length, measured without judgment calls.

Their measurements: winding lengths of about 10.42, 10.34, 10.49, 9.74, 8.48, and 8.99 cm across the extant sections, and four independent estimates of effective thickness — 0.0075, 0.0690, 0.0765, and 0.0649 cm. They rejected the first as an outlier and explained why: fragment pJS 1.2 lost material after 1835 at the point Joseph Smith most often handled, where he pointed out a character he called Abraham's signature to visitors. That extra damage shifts the lacuna edge and inflates the apparent winding length. They took the mean of the remaining three: 0.0701 cm, which they note "is in good agreement with the value of ~0.8 mm reported by Hartmut Stegemann for most of the Dead Sea papyrus scrolls."⁶

The result: "no more than 56 cm of papyrus can be missing from the scroll's interior."⁶

The independent check

Baer had estimated the roll's original length in 1968 by a completely different route: counting the text of the Breathing Document against parallel manuscripts, allowing 21 cm for column iv, 35 cm for columns v and vi, 16 cm for Facsimile 3, "and a small amount for margin around the latter." His total was about 150 to 155 cm.³

Convert Baer's estimate to the same quantity Cook and Smith measured — papyrus missing inward from the innermost surviving fragment — and it comes to 59 cm. Cook and Smith got 56 cm, and note that "the 3 cm difference between Baer's text-based estimate and our geometric estimate is within Baer's 5 cm tolerance for the scroll's overall length."⁶ Two methods with nothing in common — a textual reconstruction from parallel manuscripts and a geometric analysis of tear spacing — agree within three centimetres.

Ritner had already said in 2000 that Baer's 150–155 cm figure was correct and that "there is no justification for Gee's attempt to more than double this figure to '320 cm (about 10 feet).'"⁴

And here is the point that matters most for a Latter-day Saint reader: the Church's own edition of the papyri now prints Baer's range. The Joseph Smith Papers introduction to the papyri says, "Some scholars who have studied the Book of Breathing for Horos estimate that the roll originally measured between 150 and 156 centimeters; the extant portion of the papyrus is roughly 66 centimeters long."² The same paragraph gives Semminis's roll as originally about 300 or about 700 cm, with about 92 cm surviving.² One qualification belongs here in fairness to Gee: the editors' footnote to that sentence also records his estimate, noting that "one scholar posits that the roll could have been as long as about 1,300 centimeters."² So the Church's edition prints both. What it puts in its own text is the shorter range.

What is left of the model

The missing-scroll model does not die here, but it has to move. If the Hor roll had no room, the Abraham text has to have been somewhere else — the Semminis roll, another document, or one of the "two or three other small pieces." Cook and Smith give the reason that is difficult: the Book of Abraham itself places Facsimile 1 at "the commencement of this record" and "at the beginning," and Facsimile 1 is the opening vignette of the Hor roll. Gee's escape is to call those verses nineteenth-century editorial insertions. Once that escape is taken, the missing-scroll model has become a model in which the Book of Abraham was on some unidentified papyrus, no longer connected to any surviving fragment or any facsimile, and unfalsifiable in principle.

Gee's live historical argument survives this: nineteenth-century visitors were shown a long roll after 1837, and the extant fragments were mounted by then. That is genuine evidence that Joseph Smith owned more papyrus than survives, which nobody denies. What it cannot supply is evidence that the additional papyrus contained Abraham, since none of the additional papyrus can be examined.

The catalyst model

State it at full strength first.

The catalyst model says the papyri did not supply the words. They supplied the occasion. Joseph Smith looked at ancient writing about Egypt, and God revealed to him a lost record of Abraham. The Church's essay puts it this way: "Joseph's translation was not a literal rendering of the papyri as a conventional translation would be. Rather, the physical artifacts provided an occasion for meditation, reflection, and revelation. They catalyzed a process whereby God gave to Joseph Smith a revelation about the life of Abraham, even if that revelation did not directly correlate to the characters on the papyri."⁷

This is coherent, and it is not an ad hoc invention for the papyri. Joseph Smith's whole career worked like this. He produced a "translation" of a parchment of John he never possessed. He revised the Bible with no manuscript in front of him but a King James Bible. He dictated the Book of Mormon while looking into a hat. The Joseph Smith Papers editors make this point themselves: "All of these processes—both intellectual and inspired—provided precedents that Joseph Smith could have drawn upon while producing the Book of Abraham."⁹ Warren Parrish's testimony fits it: the translation came, he said, "by direct inspiration of Heaven."⁸

Revelation-by-prompt is also a normal religious claim, not a dodge. Christians hold that biblical writers were moved by the Spirit while doing ordinary work with ordinary sources. A skeptic who says "revelation cannot be tested, therefore it is false" has said nothing; unfalsifiability is a cost, not a refutation.

Now the costs.

It conflicts with the alphabet and grammar project. For four months, Joseph Smith and his scribes built a system in which Egyptian characters carry escalating degrees of meaning.⁹ His history describes him "continually engaged in translating an alphabet to the Book of Abraham, and arranging a grammar of the Egyptian language as practiced by the ancients."⁷ Under the catalyst model this labour was pointless and misconceived from the first day, and God let a prophet spend months on it while producing scripture at the same desk. That is possible. It is not what the model predicts.

It conflicts with the characters in the margin. The catalyst model says the characters and the English are unrelated. Three scribes, on three manuscripts, put them side by side anyway — and where the papyrus was broken, filled the gap with invented characters and translated those too. Baer verified the invented groups against parallel manuscripts. The people doing the work plainly thought the characters were the source.

It conflicts with the facsimile explanations. This is the heaviest cost, and it is the one the Gospel Topics essay never addresses. The explanations are not general symbolic readings. They are numbered keys to particular figures, and twice they say a name is written in the characters beside a figure. A revelation model can absorb a wrong picture. It has a much harder time absorbing a revealed statement that a specific inscription says "Pharaoh" when the inscription says "Isis." That is not a translation being loose. That is a claim about text that the text contradicts.

It changes what the 1842 heading meant. "Written by his own hand, upon papyrus" was printed at the head of the book. Under the catalyst model no papyrus was written by Abraham's hand and no surviving papyrus is connected to Abraham at all. Defenders argue that "by his own hand" is a scribal formula meaning authorship rather than autograph, which is a fair reading of Egyptian and biblical usage. But the phrase was printed to tell readers what the physical object was.

It removes the evidential value the papyri were bought for. The papyri mattered in 1835 because Joseph Smith could read what scholars could not. Cowdery wrote that experts had failed and Joseph succeeded. Chandler's certificate was displayed as an outside confirmation. If the characters were never the source, then the certificate confirmed nothing, and the 1835 apologetic was mistaken at the moment it was made.

None of that refutes the catalyst model. It prices it. The model survives at the cost of saying that Joseph Smith was systematically, publicly, and repeatedly wrong about what he was doing, while nevertheless doing it under divine direction.

Loose or expansive translation

A third position holds that Joseph Smith worked from a real ancient text but rendered it expansively — filling, harmonizing, and modernizing, in the way that his Bible revision plainly does.

The evidence for expansive method is good. The Joseph Smith Papers note that in his Bible revision "some revisions, like minor grammatical changes, may well have been considered to be the result of human reason rather than divine revelation," that a subset appears to harmonize the gospels, and that "evidence also suggests that Smith and his scribes consulted Adam Clarke's biblical commentary as they considered the text."⁹ The Book of Abraham is written in King James English, which is itself a rendering choice rather than an artifact of any Egyptian original.

The model's problem is that it needs an original. Expansive translation of a Book of Breathings does not yield Abraham; there is nothing in the ninety-seven-word rubric to expand into a biography. So the loose-translation model collapses into either the missing-scroll model, and inherits its arithmetic problem, or the catalyst model, and inherits its costs. It is best treated as a description of Joseph Smith's style, which it accurately is, rather than as an independent account of where the Book of Abraham came from.

The ancient-parallels argument

This is where the serious modern case lives, and it deserves to be taken apart carefully rather than dismissed. The right question is not "is there a parallel?" Parallels are cheap. The right questions are three, asked separately of each item:

1. Was the parallel available to Joseph Smith in 1835, in English, in a form he plausibly encountered?
2. Is the match specific enough that a nineteenth-century writer could have missed it?
3. Would the Book of Abraham have looked different if the parallel did not exist — that is, does the parallel predict anything?

Abraham traditions of near-sacrifice

Genesis has no attempted sacrifice of Abraham. A large body of non-biblical tradition does — the Apocalypse of Abraham, Jubilees, Pseudo-Philo's Biblical Antiquities, and later rabbinic material all preserve versions in which Abraham is threatened with fire and delivered. None of those three texts was opened for this article, and the summary of each is provisional; what is used here is the characterisation of the tradition as a whole given by Gee and by the Church's essay, both of which were opened.¹ The Book of Abraham has an Egyptian-style priest with a knife and an angel who delivers him.

Gee's version of the argument is careful and worth quoting in full because it is the strongest form:⁸ "while many of the accounts have Abraham saved from the fire in Ur, most of those accounts have God himself saving Abraham, and only a few accounts, not available in English until after Joseph Smith's death, have Abraham saved by an angel—as it is in the Book of Abraham. If Joseph Smith were to borrow one of the accounts available to him, we would expect him to borrow the details as well."

That is a real argument about a specific detail. Its weakness is that the differences cut the other way too. The dominant tradition has fire; the Book of Abraham has a knife and an altar. The dominant tradition places the danger in Ur under Nimrod; the Book of Abraham places it under an Egyptian-derived priesthood. If Joseph Smith were copying, he departed a great deal; if he were translating an ancient text, he landed on a version of the story that resembles the general tradition in outline and matches no known version in detail. A single differing detail — angel versus God — is weak evidence either way, because a storyteller who knows a tradition and improvises will produce exactly this pattern. Verdict: real tradition, genuine partial availability, no predictive content.

The lion-couch and Abraham

This is the best item in the whole file, and it comes from Gee.

A demotic magical papyrus from an Egyptian temple library, dated to the third century AD, contains a scene resembling a lion-couch vignette with the name of Abraham written under it, and the instructions say the picture and the inscription go together. The text is a love charm. Gee observes that Egyptian love charms were built on earlier ritual representations of human sacrifice: the threat was that an unresponsive object of desire would suffer the tortures of a sacrificial victim.

That is a genuine ancient Egyptian association between a lion-couch scene and Abraham, in a document Joseph Smith could not have seen — the Leiden and London demotic magical papyrus was not published until 1904–1909. The Church's essay cites it too: "A third-century papyrus from an Egyptian temple library connects Abraham with an illustration similar to facsimile 1."⁷ The demotic papyrus itself was not opened for this article.¹

The limits must be stated as plainly as the strength. The papyrus is roughly two thousand years after Abraham and four hundred years after the Hor scroll. It is a magical text in which many names of power appear, including Hebrew and Christian ones, because Greco-Roman magicians borrowed prestigious foreign names freely. The association it establishes is between the name Abraham and a scene type, in a syncretistic magical context, not between Abraham and Hor's vignette. And it does not make Facsimile 1's figures come out right: Anubis is still Anubis.

Still, this is evidence, and a fair account has to say so. If someone had predicted before 1904 that Egyptian sources would connect Abraham with lion-couch imagery, they would have been vindicated. Verdict: real, unavailable to Joseph Smith, genuinely surprising in kind, but far too late and too syncretistic to establish an ancient Abrahamic source, and it does not rescue any specific figure identification.

Human sacrifice in Egypt

Kerry Muhlestein's Violence in the Service of Order: The Religious Framework for Sanctioned Killing in Ancient Egypt is the standard Egyptological study of ritual killing in Egypt, and Muhlestein and Gee have applied it to the Book of Abraham. The Church's essay summarizes the payoff: "People who challenged the standing religious order, either in Egypt or in the regions over which it had influence (such as Canaan), could and did suffer execution for their offenses."⁷ Muhlestein's book was not opened here.¹

This is a legitimate correction of an old objection. Critics used to say Egypt had no human sacrifice at all, so the Book of Abraham's scene was impossible. That is no longer the state of the field, and the article should not repeat it. Ritner, who is not friendly to the Book of Abraham, still writes that "human sacrifice in Egypt was rare and more properly political execution."⁴

But note what the correction buys. It removes an objection; it does not supply evidence. "Egypt sometimes executed religious offenders" is compatible with the Book of Abraham and with a nineteenth-century invention alike. Verdict: the old critical claim is retired; the LDS claim gains no positive support.

Olishem and Ulisum

Abraham 1:10 names "the plain of Olishem." An inscription of the Akkadian king Naram-Sin names a place Ulisum in the north-west, and Attila Engin, who directs the excavation at Oylum Höyük in south-eastern Turkey, has argued that his site is ancient Ulisum and has connected it with the Book of Abraham's Olishem.

Gee's own assessment is the honest one and is worth using against over-claiming on his own side: in his 2013 article "Has Olishem been Discovered?" he concludes, in his book's own summary of it, that "although the initial work is promising, the identification is not yet certain."⁸ The excavation reports themselves were not opened.¹

Three problems limit the value. The consonants match loosely, and place-names of the form ʾ-l-š-m are not rare. The site is in northern Syria or south-eastern Turkey, which fits the Book of Abraham only if one also accepts the northern location for Ur of the Chaldees, which is itself a minority position argued by Latter-day Saint scholars including Paul Hoskisson and John Tvedtnes. And a name match is not a narrative match: nothing at Ulisum corroborates anything the Book of Abraham says happened there. Verdict: a possible but unconfirmed name correspondence, doing no independent work.

Astronomy, Kolob, and the hypocephalus

Ancient writers do connect Abraham with astronomy. Eupolemus, writing under Egyptian rule in the second century BC, says Abraham taught astronomy and other sciences to Egyptian priests. Josephus says the same, and Josephus was on American bookshelves in 1835 in Whiston's translation. Gee adds that known Greco-Roman Egyptian initiation rituals included instruction in astronomy, and that scenes parallel to Facsimile 3 are labeled as initiations on temple walls.

This is the parallel most damaged by availability. "Abraham taught the Egyptians astronomy" is a commonplace of the tradition, and Josephus preserves it in a work that circulated widely in English. Neither Josephus nor Eupolemus was opened for this article, and the claim that Whiston's Josephus circulated widely in 1830s America is stated from general knowledge — which matters, because the availability of this parallel is one of this article's own arguments.¹ Facsimile 2's astronomical reading also fits the general nineteenth-century assumption, which the Joseph Smith Papers editors document at length, that Egyptian symbols concealed cosmic and philosophical wisdom — the tradition running from Athanasius Kircher, whose three-volume hieroglyphic dictionary "explored the symbolic nature of the hieroglyphs, projecting his own Neoplatonic philosophy onto them."⁹

Kolob is a different case. It is not a parallel at all; it is a name with no attested ancient counterpart, in a cosmology with no attested ancient counterpart. It cannot be evidence for antiquity because nothing ancient corresponds to it. It equally cannot be evidence against, since a lost text could contain anything. Verdict: the astronomy connection is real, ancient, and fully available to Joseph Smith; Kolob is untestable.

Elkenah, and names generally

The Church's essay says of Facsimile 1's Elkenah that "modern scholars have identified it as being among the gods worshipped by ancient Mesopotamians."⁷ The claim is worth handling carefully. The proposed identification connects Elkenah with a Canaanite or Mesopotamian divine name of the form ʾl-qn-ʾrṣ, "El, creator of the earth," or with the element Kenah. The essay does not name the scholar or the inscription, and this article has not verified a primary attestation of a deity called Elkenah. Until a specific inscription is produced and read, this should be treated as an unverified claim, not as evidence.

The same caution applies to the whole onomastic argument. Gee and Stephen Ricks have built a case that the Book of Abraham's names fit a Middle Kingdom northern-Levantine setting. Name-matching across languages with loose consonantal correspondence is a method that produces hits by chance at a rate very few papers estimate. Until someone publishes a false-positive rate — how often randomly invented names of similar structure match something in the vast Near Eastern onomasticon — the hits cannot be scored.

The overall shape of the parallels case

Sorting them:

Two items in that table are real evidence: the demotic lion-couch papyrus and the four-quarters reading of figure 6. Both are worth more than critics usually allow. Neither is worth what the Book of Abraham needs, because both are compatible with a symbolic reader landing on a workable guess, and neither touches the failures on Facsimile 3.

The strongest Latter-day Saint responses

The Gospel Topics essay

The Church's Gospel Topics essay "Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham" is the official treatment. On this series' authority ranking it is a current, correlated Church publication issued without named authorship — below the standard works and below a signed First Presidency statement, but above any individual scholar. The Book of Abraham itself sits at the top of that ranking: it is canonized scripture. So the essay is the Church's current explanation of a text whose status is not in question. It concedes more than most members realize and should be quoted rather than characterized.

On the papyri: "Only small fragments of the long papyrus scrolls once in Joseph Smith's possession exist today. The relationship between those fragments and the text we have today is largely a matter of conjecture."⁷

On the characters: "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."⁷

On the grammar: "Neither the rules nor the translations in the grammar book correspond to those recognized by Egyptologists today."⁷

On the date: "These fragments date to between the third century B.C.E. and the first century C.E., long after Abraham lived."⁷

On method: "Neither the Lord nor Joseph Smith explained the process of translation of the book of Abraham."⁷

On the whole question: "The veracity and value of the book of Abraham cannot be settled by scholarly debate concerning the book's translation and historicity."⁷

These concessions are honest and the essay deserves credit for them. Three criticisms remain.

First, the essay's central historical move is the missing papyri: "it is likely futile to assess Joseph's ability to translate papyri when we now have only a fraction of the papyri he had in his possession."⁷ That is true of the Book of Abraham's text and false of the facsimiles. Facsimile 1's original survives. Facsimile 3's Egyptian labels survive in Joseph Smith's own engraving. The essay does not tell the reader that the two most testable items are still testable.

Second, the essay's answer to the marginal characters is to address only the adjacency of Facsimile 1 to the Breathing text: "this claim rests on the assumption that a vignette and its adjacent text must be associated in meaning."⁷ That answers a different objection. The objection is not about the vignette's placement. It is that three Book of Abraham manuscripts have Breathing Document characters ruled into the margin beside the English, and that a grammar was built to make those characters mean it.

Third, the essay's positive evidence is uneven. Its two strongest items — the demotic lion-couch papyrus and the four-quarters reading of figure 6 — are real. Its weakest, the Elkenah identification, is asserted without a named source. Its Olishem claim is presented more confidently than Gee himself presents it. Presenting evidence of very different strength in a single list is the essay's main rhetorical flaw.

John Gee

Gee is the most sustained scholarly defender and his An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (2017) is the best short statement. His strongest arguments, restated fairly:

• Most of what Joseph Smith owned is gone, and testing a translation against a fraction is weak.
• Nineteenth-century eyewitnesses describe a long roll after the surviving fragments were already mounted and framed, so the roll they saw is not among the surviving fragments.
• Illustrations in Egyptian papyri frequently do not match adjacent text. In Hor's own Book of the Dead, written by the same scribe and illustrated by the same artist, "more than half of the pictures do not match up with the proper texts," and the same mismatching runs through papyri owned by his descendants.⁸ Since no other copy of the Document of Breathings Made by Isis has anything like Papyrus Joseph Smith I, the picture and the text there are probably unrelated to each other.
• The Egyptian-language documents are in Phelps's and Parrish's hands, and Phelps had run a similar project before the papyri arrived.
• The references to the facsimiles inside the Book of Abraham text are visibly later insertions in the earliest manuscript.

The mismatched-illustrations argument is genuinely good scholarship and it lands. It removes an inference critics often make too quickly, that a picture must belong to its neighbouring text. What it does not do is supply a positive location for the Book of Abraham, and Gee is candid about that: "for none of the theories is the evidence as neat or as compelling as one might wish."⁸

The place where Gee's case is weakest is the arithmetic. His 41-foot figure has been challenged in detail by a published method that he has not, so far as this research found, matched with a published re-derivation, and the Church's own documentary edition has adopted the shorter estimate. A defence of the Book of Abraham that rests on a roll length the Church's own editors do not use has a structural problem.

Kevin Barney

Barney's contribution is the most interesting because it changes what would count as evidence. In "The Facsimiles and Semitic Adaptation of Existing Sources," he points to cases where Jewish authors took Egyptian iconography and reinterpreted it for Jewish purposes, and proposes that the facsimiles are that kind of artefact — an Egyptian vignette given a Jewish reading by an ancient Jewish redactor. As Gee summarizes the position: "it does not matter how ancient Egyptians or modern Egyptologists interpret the scene, since such will not reflect ancient Jewish interpretations of the same scenes."⁸ Barney's own article was not opened.¹

This is the most serious answer available to the facsimile problem and it should not be waved away. Ancient Jewish reinterpretation of Egyptian imagery is real; the Testament of Abraham does exactly this with the weighing-of-the-heart scene, as Gee notes.

Its cost is that it moves the goalposts to a place where nothing can be scored. Under Barney's model, an Egyptologically wrong reading is not evidence against the Book of Abraham, because the reading was never meant to be Egyptological. But then no reading could ever be evidence against it either, and the facsimile explanations stop being a test of anything. It also does not fit the explanations as written: Joseph Smith did not say a Jewish redactor took this to mean Pharaoh. He said the name is given in the characters above the head. A redactor's gloss is not a claim about what the inscription says.

Hugh Nibley

Nibley's The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri (1975) was the first book-length Latter-day Saint engagement and the first modern commentary on the Document of Breathings Made by Isis in any language, which Gee correctly notes. Its method — reading later Egyptian religion as a degraded memory of an original revealed temple religion — is not testable and has aged badly, and Gee himself writes that Nibley's historical work "has a tendency to use myth for history and to flatten the chronology of sources from a variety of periods."⁸ Nibley's book was not opened here.¹

Nibley's substantive objections, that Baer's title assumed his conclusion and that the papyri were described in 1835 as beautifully written while the Hor text is coarse, were answered by Ritner. On the first, Ritner notes that Baer explained his reasoning in a footnote and across seven pages of his article. On the second: "Modern scholars have examined many hundreds of hieratic documents and can, therefore, determine the standards of contemporary Egyptian handwriting. Joseph Smith had no such experience. With no frame of reference beyond his own limited collection, he had no reason or incentive to consider the writing poor."⁴

Common objections and responses

"Egyptologists are biased against Joseph Smith"

The reading of the Hor papyrus does not depend on any non-Latter-day Saint scholar. Michael Rhodes, a Latter-day Saint Egyptologist at BYU, published the standard editions of both the Hor Breathing Document and the Semminis and Neferirnub Books of the Dead, in a series edited by John Gee.² Gee's own book states that the Book of Abraham is not on the surviving fragments.⁸ The Church's Gospel Topics essay says Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologists agree.⁷ There is no dissenting Egyptological reading to appeal to.

"The characters were too damaged to read"

They are damaged, and the surviving text is an abbreviated version, and translators fill from parallel copies. All three of those facts come from the Egyptologists themselves. None of them creates room for Abraham. The names, titles, and burial instructions are legible; the parallels used for filling are numerous and closely similar; and Ritner's re-edition with better photography reported that "changes from Baer's understanding of the document are few and do not challenge his basic understanding of the text."⁴

"Joseph Smith never said the Book of Abraham came from the Breathing Document"

Correct, and this must be granted. He never named a papyrus in print. But the 1842 heading says the record came from the papyri he owned, Abraham 1:12 and 1:14 point the reader to a picture that is the Hor roll's opening vignette, three manuscripts of the text carry Hor-roll characters in the margin, and in his last months he said in a sermon, "I learned it by translating the papyrus now in my house." Gee, who quotes that sermon, cautions correctly that it survives only in fragmentary listener's notes.⁸

"Champollion's decipherment was barely known in America, so Joseph Smith cannot be blamed"

True, and relevant to how he came to think as he did. The Joseph Smith Papers document that Champollion's findings reached America through a small number of French readers and English summaries, and that Joseph Smith and his associates approached the papyri with assumptions belonging to the pre-Champollion tradition — multiple meanings per character, hierarchies of significance, symbolic depth. That is a good historical explanation of the alphabet project. It is not a defence of the results, and it makes the results more explicable as a product of 1835 rather than less.

"The 1912 Egyptologists were amateurs"

In 1912 Bishop Franklin Spalding asked eight scholars to evaluate the facsimiles and published their negative replies. Nibley attacked their competence. Gee has quoted Anthony Leahy's remark that "in 1914 Egyptology was essentially an amateur subject." Ritner answers that Leahy's point was about the small number of paid posts and restricted access to information, not about ignorance, and that the 1912 assessments "remain valid in 2001."⁴ Spalding's 1912 pamphlet was not opened here.¹ The relevant fact is that the 1912 judgments have been confirmed by every later specialist, including Latter-day Saint ones, working from photographs the 1912 scholars never had.

"Joseph Smith got some things right, so the whole cannot be invention"

He did get some things right, and this article has said so: the crocodile as a deity, the water as heaven, figure 6 as the four quarters of the earth, an Egyptian setting for a threatened sacrifice, an Abraham associated with astronomy. The problem is the base rate. A symbolic reader guessing at Egyptian pictures with a rich imagination and a Bible will land some guesses. What would count is a hit that could not be reached by guessing — a proper name, a grammatical form, a reading of a specific inscription. On the two occasions where Joseph Smith made precisely that kind of claim, on Facsimile 3, figures 2 and 5, he was wrong both times.

"Only a small fraction of the papyri survive, so nothing can be concluded"

This is true of the Book of Abraham's text and false of everything else. The surviving material is enough to establish that the collection was ordinary Theban funerary material from one family's vault, that the roll from which Facsimile 1 comes was about 150 cm long, that the characters copied into the Book of Abraham manuscripts come from that roll, and that the figures in two of the three facsimiles are identifiable. The lost papyri are a real limit on one question and no limit at all on the others.

"The Book of Abraham teaches true doctrine, so its origin does not matter"

This is the Church's final position and it is not a foolish one. A text can be edifying whether or not it is ancient, and Latter-day Saints who value Abraham 3's premortal council are not obliged to defend Facsimile 3 to keep it. But the Book of Abraham is not offered as edifying literature. It is canonized scripture presented as a translation of a specific physical object, and it is the source of distinctive LDS doctrines including premortal spirits, a plurality of gods organizing pre-existing matter, and, historically, the priesthood restriction's proof-texts. What the origin question tests is not whether the doctrines are comforting. It is whether Joseph Smith's claim to render ancient records is reliable — which is the same claim on which the Book of Mormon rests. That is why this episode matters more than its length suggests, and it connects directly to testing Joseph Smith's prophetic gift.

Separate verdicts

On the facsimiles: the Latter-day Saint claim fails, and Facsimile 3 fails hardest. Facsimile 1's original survives and its figures are identified consistently by Egyptologists across five decades, including by the two who held the Chicago chair in succession. Facsimile 3's Egyptian labels are legible in Joseph Smith's own engraving and name Osiris, Isis, Maat, Hor, and Anubis where he named Abraham, Pharaoh, a prince, a waiter, and a slave. Because he claimed the names were written in the characters, this is not a symbolic reading that can be re-described as prophetic. Two of his twelve figure identifications on Facsimile 1 — the crocodile as a god, the water as the firmament — and one on Facsimile 2 are defensible. The rest are not.

On the marginal-character manuscripts: the men producing the Book of Abraham believed the papyri were the source. The characters in the margins of all three Kirtland manuscripts, the parallel alphabet and grammar project, the invented characters supplied for lacunae and then translated, and the ratio of a ninety-seven-word rubric to a 5,506-word book together establish this beyond reasonable doubt. This verdict does not depend on establishing that Joseph Smith personally inscribed each document, and the Church's own edition supplies the key facts.

On the missing-scroll arithmetic: the Hor roll had no room. Cook and Smith's 56 cm, derived from tear-spacing correlation, matches Baer's independent 59 cm derived from parallel manuscripts. Gee's 41-foot figure requires an implausibly thin papyrus and has not been reproduced. The Church's own edition of the papyri prints 150–156 cm as the roll's original length. Additional lost papyri certainly existed, and the Book of Abraham could in principle have been on one of them; but that version of the theory is no longer connected to any facsimile or any surviving fragment, and cannot be tested.

On the catalyst model: not refuted, but expensive. A revelation prompted by an unrelated scroll is a coherent religious claim, has precedents in Joseph Smith's other work, and cannot be disproved by Egyptology. It requires holding that the alphabet project, the marginal characters, the restored characters, and the facsimile keys were all systematic errors made while genuine scripture was being produced. The Gospel Topics essay presents the model without naming those costs, which is its main weakness as an argument.

On the ancient parallels: real but not probative. The demotic lion-couch papyrus with Abraham's name is a genuine and unexpected find that critics should stop ignoring. It does not establish an ancient Book of Abraham, because it postdates Abraham by two millennia and postdates Hor's scroll by four centuries, and because syncretistic magical texts borrow prestigious names freely. The astronomy parallels were available through Josephus. Olishem is unconfirmed. No parallel yet published makes a prediction that could have failed.

Overall: the Book of Abraham is not what its 1842 heading says it is. No surviving evidence supports the claim that Joseph Smith rendered Egyptian writing into English, and the specific claims he made about specific characters are contradicted by those characters. Whether God nevertheless revealed a genuine ancient record to him through the occasion of the papyri is a question the papyri cannot settle, and this article does not claim to settle it. What can be said is that every physical test the episode offered has been run, and the Book of Abraham has failed all of them.

What evidence would change the conclusion?

Strengthening the Latter-day Saint claim. A papyrus fragment from the Joseph Smith collection carrying Abrahamic content would settle the matter immediately. So would a published, replicable re-derivation of the Hor roll's winding geometry that recovers Gee's thickness figure and survives the tear-correlation test — the dispute is quantitative and can be resolved. So would an ancient Egyptian or Jewish source giving a lion-couch figure a name matching one of Joseph Smith's, or a hypocephalus text using anything like "Kolob." So would an inscription naming a deity Elkenah, published with a locator. So would a genuinely ancient text containing the Book of Abraham's distinctive material — the premortal council, the Kolob cosmology, the specific sequence of Abraham's Egyptian ordeal — in a form Joseph Smith could not have reached.

Weakening it further. Recovery of the Egyptian Alphabet documents' full production sequence showing Joseph Smith's hand throughout would remove Gee's Phelps defence. A contemporary document in which Joseph Smith names the Breathing Document as the Abraham source would close the identification question. Publication of a false-positive rate for the onomastic method would let the name matches be scored, and would probably reduce them.

What would not change anything. More Egyptological confirmation that the fragments are funerary texts. That result has been secure since 1968, is accepted by the Church, and adding a tenth expert to a unanimous nine tests nothing. Equally, more parallels between Abraham legends and the Book of Abraham will not decide the question unless somebody first states what the theory forbids.

Working files: literature review, quotation ledger.

Sources

Book of Abraham verses and facsimile explanations are quoted from the Church's current online edition of the Pearl of Great Price, read on Aug 8, 2026, and are cited inline by chapter and verse or by figure number. The full quotation ledger is in quotes.