Book of Abraham, Part 2: Translation Apologetics w/ LDS Discussions – 31

Introduction and Episode Overview

John Dehlin 0:00 Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am your host for today, John Dehlin. It is December 1, 2022 and we are back for another epic episode with Mike of LDS discussions where we are examining Mormon Church truth claims. I think we're around episode 30 or 31 in this series. What we're trying to do for those who are new to this series is we're trying to just take a thoughtful evidence based look at Mormon Church truth claims specifically for people that want to know the truth based on evidence. We're trying to do it in as unbiased and as a dispassionate way as possible. And the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. So that's what we're doing today. We're going to be covering part two of a discussion of the Book of Abraham, the Book of Abraham translation from the Papyrus. We've already covered part one. If you haven't checked that out, go back and listen to that and then you can listen to today for a series that builds upon itself. I also want to make sure and mention the epic 13 hour series that Radio Free Mormon and I did with Dr. Robert Rittner. You can check that out on Mormon Stories podcast. But if you want a legit Egyptologist, may he Rest in peace, Dr. Robert Rittner analyzing the Book of Abraham papyrus and the translation with top notch world class scholarship, that's the source to dig deep today. And in this series we're kind of doing an analysis at a bit of a higher level for people who want to learn this stuff faster and maybe not as in depth. I also just want to make sure, number one, I want to ask everybody if you're watching us on YouTube, it would be really useful if you would subscribe to the YouTube channel. We're trying to break a hundred thousand YouTube subscribers that would be really helpful for us to help us reach as many people as possible and to be able to make this program sustainable. So please subscribe to YouTube if you're watching on YouTube. Also if you're watching on Facebook, please subscribe to our Facebook channel. That's super helpful and it'll help notify you when new content comes out. I also want to make sure everyone knows really briefly that this series can be found on Spotify and the LDS discussion series can be found on Spotify with both audio and video formats. You can go to Spotify, type in LDS discussions and you can just see it all there in sequence without any of the other Mormon stories episodes mixed in. We also have a playlist on YouTube, where you can watch all the LDS discussions episodes in sequence on. On YouTube. So please check that out if that's. Or if you want to share it with somebody and you don't want to. All the other stuff mixed in. That's a great way to share it. So we are joined today. Nemo was not able to join us today. We love Nemo and we are eager to. For him to join us in a. In a future episode. But we have no slouch. With us today. We have Gerardo Simano. Hey, Gerardo.

Gerardo Sumano 3:01 Hey.

John Dehlin 3:01 Thanks for being willing to come in.

Gerardo Sumano 3:02 Yeah, no problem.

John Dehlin 3:03 It's good to have you.

Gerardo Sumano 3:04 Thanks.

John Dehlin 3:05 Yeah. All right. And of course, we have the star of our show, Mike from LDS discussions joining us. Hey, Mike. How's it going?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 3:16 Hey, everybody. How's it going? It's good to be back and, you know, tackle part two of our first of our first episode on Book Abraham. So it'll be an interesting, you know, as John said, kind of a one, two kind of thing. So it'll be fun to conclude what we were kind of starting in the last one.

John Dehlin 3:32 Yeah. All right, well, let's go ahead and, and dive in. We've got some slides and some videos today. So for those who are listening only know that if you join us on YouTube or on Spotify video, you'll be able to see these visuals that might be helpful, but we'll also do our best to describe the, you know, what, what's being seen for those who need it. So, Mike, let's jump in.

Recap of Part One

Mike (LDS Discussions) 3:59 Yeah, let's do it. And so, you know, the first slide, we're just going to kind of really quickly go over what we did in the last episode and kind of let, you know what we're going to go over this episode just to kind of show because, you know, it's the same subject, kind of looking at it from two different lenses. Okay, so let's bring up the first slide.

John Dehlin 4:20 Okay, we'll get this. So we've got an introduction slide. And then, yeah, let's. Let's go at it.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 4:27 Yeah. And so just, you know, to point out if you haven't watched part one, I would recommend doing that first because everything we covered in the first episode is about the history of the Book of Abraham, the papyri, how Joseph Smith purchased them, how he translated the Book of Abraham, kind of how both, you know, Joseph Smith talked about it versus, you know, kind of how maybe the kind of historical look at the timeline and all of that. We then covered just basically how Egyptologists can show that Joseph Smith's translations are demonstrably wrong. And we know what the papyri fragments say. We know what the papyrus fragment next to facsimile1 is a source material because it matches the manuscripts. And that's going to be hugely important to today's episode because of the fact that we can show that and it also is an incorrect translation. We then talked about how the Church admits in its own essay that the book of Abraham, the papyri that we do have is not what Joseph Smith claims it to be. So basically, the Church admits that the fragments have nothing to do with Abraham. They do not mention Abraham or the story of the book Abraham whatsoever, and that they're about a thousand years more recent than Abraham would have lived. Meaning that this idea that Joseph Smith states that this is the Book of Abraham written by his own hand upon papyrus is impossible, given that they date to a thousand years after Abraham would have lived and the fragments have absolutely nothing to do with Abraham whatsoever. We talked about that in the first episode about how Joseph Smith claimed there was a literal signature of Abraham in its libations table. And so in today's episode, going to cover the Church's apologetic responses that try to answer how the Book of Abraham can still be from God when we know that, you know, from a more straightforward view, Joseph Smith got the translation completely wrong.

John Dehlin 6:20 Okay, so if I can just summarize for the people that like multiple voices to kind of summarize. We, you know, Joseph Smith claimed to translate what we now have as the Book of Abraham from papyrus that he bought in 1830, whatever, right. In Kirtland, we have the, the papyrus today. Professional Egyptologists have translated it. The word Abraham doesn't appear anywhere in the papyrus. And for that and many, many other reasons that we cover in part one episode, we know that it's a completely false and erroneous translation and that the papyrus themselves, if Abra, lived as a historical figure, the papyrus themselves are dated to be much, much later than Abraham would have lived, like a thousand plus years later. And what is on the papyrus, it's just a basic common funerary text, which is information about the times and the person that were buried with the, with the papyrus, which is exactly what we would expect the them to be about, is all that. Did I get that right?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 7:32 Yeah, I think that's a fair way to just, you know, it's a fair way to kind of just explain that what Joseph Smith claimed that papyrus was, what Joseph Smith claimed the translation was, is demonstrably not what it is. And so at that point that leads us to today, which is, well then how does the church try to make sense of the fact that Joseph Smith, who claimed to get this through the gift and power of God, got it completely wrong, given that when Joseph Smith translated it, no one could translate Egyptian. So at the time the this was looked at as a real miracle that somebody could crack an ancient language that no one thought we'd ever be able to do. And then shortly thereafter the Rosetta Stone is deciphered and all of a sudden Egyptologists are able to look at that and go, yeah, this is not at all what he claimed it to be.

John Dehlin 8:13 And I'll just throw one more plug in for this series because we've got like 29 or 30 episodes prior which talk about Joseph's history as a quote translator. And whether it's with the Golden Plates, the Book of Mormon or the Doctrine and Covenants Book of Moses. We've laid a lot of groundwork about other problems with Joseph's claim to be a translator, you know, in prior episodes. And that's really important background. So if you haven't checked that out, make sure you go back listeners and viewers and watch these past episodes because they really do build to to now. Right, Mike?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 8:54 Yeah. And that like when I started doing the project on the website on ldsdiscussions.com the whole intention was at the time I was trying to make sense of it. And so you do these. I was trying to do them in somewhat of a chronological or at least a kind of a logical order. But when you're doing them, you start to see that these problems are not just one off things like the Book of Abraham problems are more demonstrable because of the fact we have the source material. But at the same time they're not any different than you see with the Book of Mormon, the Book of Moses. And we've talked about a lot of those. We're going to do an episode in I think like four or five episodes from now. That's going to be kind of an overview of the translations themselves to try to show the common threads that we see. So yeah, I mean these episodes build on each other because of the fact that they're being done in a way that's trying to look at this from a bigger picture as opposed to what you often see from apologists, which is to say, let's pinpoint this one little thing, give you an answer, and then we'll go to this other thing and give you an answer. Now those two answers might not work with each other, but there'll be answers. And so that's why we're trying in the series to say, if you do this over here and you do this over here, these don't mesh together. And that's why apologetics gets really tricky. And we're going to show that in this episode as well. Just kind of, it becomes kind of almost like a shell game where you're trying to just basically take care of one thing at a time, realizing that what you're doing is going to impact other problematic areas of the church in a negative way. Because you cannot answer all of these things with the apologetics. It's almost like in the cartoons when they used to sweep all the crap under the rug and then they try to flatten it out and it just pops up somewhere else. And it's just the same thing here. And that's why it's important to try to go through these like John said throughout, through, through all these episodes, because of the fact that we're going to refer back to the earlier episodes to show like, this is a pattern. This is not just a one time thing.

John Dehlin 10:37 Yeah, it's almost like it's one thing if you've got a sick tree to have an apologist say, hey, the tree's not sick, and here's why. But if you scan back out and you realize that there are multiple sick trees and that the forest itself might be not doing so well. Apologists want you to always focus on the micro level. But what we're trying to do is focus on the macro level because there is a macro picture here that the evidence lines up to show. So let's jump into the next slide talk scope of today's episode.

The Book of Abraham Problem Summarized

Mike (LDS Discussions) 11:10 Yeah, and this is just. We talked at the end of the last episode about how in reality the Book of Abraham miniseries should be like one 15 minute episode where we look at what Joseph Smith claimed the papyri said. We look at what the Egypt tells can now tell us what they say. We look at how Joseph Smith wrote in his journal over and over again that he was translating against the church, saying, well, he wasn't really translating, he was getting Revelation. And it would be about a 15 minute episode to show that Joseph Smith could not translate ancient Egyptian, that Joseph Smith did not know what he was doing. And at the end of the day, his prophetic claims about the Book of Abraham are wrong. And it really should be like a 15 minute episode. And yet we're going to spend about six hours talking about this because the church has Expanded kind of the universe of reality to try to find ways to preserve Joseph Smith as a prophet of God. And what I mean by that is they will not let you look at these things in face value and just say, we're going to do that in this episode. But they won't look at the manuscript and say, oh, yeah, look, the symbols are right there. They'll say, no, what actually happened is the scribes added them later without Joseph knowing. And they were just guessing, which is one of those things where you look at it like, this is the most ridiculous kind of answer. But there's a lot of that. And so we're going to try to go through them because if you just did a 15 minute episode, the apologist would say, but you're not talking about this, this and this. So we want to cover that. That being said, as John mentioned at the start, they did 13 hours with Dr. Robert Rittner. And Dan Vogel has done a series, I think, of eight videos he's put out. Two recent videos going through apologetic videos from Kerry Muelstein and John Gee, who we'll talk about in this episode. All of those things are going to go so much further in the weeds than we're going to do because they take, you know, you're talking 13 hours with Dr. Rittner. Dan Vogel's done four or five hours just in the, just this year alone. And then his eight or nine part series is another eight or nine. And so what I'm going to say is this is meant to be an overview of the apologetics, to look at the Church's main points of contention about the Book of Abraham. And then we'll give you show notes if you want to go further. Because one of the things that I've learned from doing this is people will say if you just go deeper and deeper, it'll make more sense. And it's like, no, no, no. The deeper you go, the more obvious it is that this does not add up. It is certainly not. It's not that we're not going into the weeds because it would be helpful to the Church's causes, because we don't want to be here doing 16 hours on apologetics when it's been done in a lot of different ways. So we'll give you a lot of show notes to other videos. I know John's got the Dr. Rittner links, obviously through Mormon stories. And so I highly recommend anyone who interest, who's interested to go through all of them, because I've listened to all of them and they are fascinating. But again, this is just for today. It's more of an overview of the problems, and then you can kind of go for it. So if there's something where you're like, why are you not talking about this thing I want you to talk about? Uh, it's just because we're trying to trim this down to, like, a two, two and a half hour episode. Um, but I promise you, all of those things will be addressed in some form on our website, but also through these videos as well.

John Dehlin 14:04 Yeah, and I forgot to mention, the essay is LDS discussions.comabraham-reply this whole project is based on these essays that you've put up on the LDSDiscussions.com website. So that's for people who like footnotes and who, like, text you. You can always just jump straight to that.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 14:23 Yeah.

Apologetic Frameworks and Kerry Muhlstein

John Dehlin 14:24 All right, so let's go ahead and go to the next slide that's entitled Book of Abraham Apologetics with the amazing Dr. Kerry Muhlstein.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 14:36 Yeah. And this is where I want you to start with.

John Dehlin 14:38 Why are you laughing, Gerardo?

Gerardo Sumano 14:41 Because you're a little bit sarcastic.

John Dehlin 14:46 I'm trying to add drama.

Gerardo Sumano 14:47 Yeah, No, I love it, but the amazing Dr. Gary Millestein.

John Dehlin 14:51 Sorry. Okay, sorry. Go ahead, go ahead.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 14:55 No, no, I was just gonna say this is where I want to start, because I think this is where we want to show, like, how apologists within the church operate. And this is a video clip from Carrie from 2020 at a fair Mormon conference. And he is going to talk about how he uses his academic scholarship to approach the Book of Abraham. And I think it's the most enlightening clip you're ever going to see on Apologetics. And it's almost one of those things where it's almost like saying the quiet part out loud. And so I think it's where we need to start this episode with this video clip.

John Dehlin 15:25 In fact, if it's. All right, Mike, I'm going to back up just a tiny bit really quickly. For those of you who are just totally new to this. To this, you know, who are totally new to this entire discussion, I think there's a tiny bit of background I want to throw in. The first thing is, is that around 1912, you know, and did we talk about this last episode, Mike? We did. Right. That around 1912 was the first time that, you know, Egyptologists really publicly tried to translate the facsimiles, and there was, like, a nationwide article that the Book of Abraham is not legitimate. The second time that the church really tried to address it was in the 1960s when the Tanners and I just finished the book Lighthouse that really goes into this. When the Tanners and a few of their colleagues found out that the papyrus had been recovered, the Tanners, along with some colleagues, you know, started making a lot of noise about the Book of Abraham being a problem. That's when it really started to strike the public consciousness of the church. And that's when we have the emergence of Hugh Nibley, which will be a name familiar to many of our listeners and viewers. We. When I was at byu, I learned about Hugh Nibley and you know, he, he was, is this UCLA level PhD ancient scripture guy that emerged as the first chief arch apologist around the Book of Abraham. And he defended the Book of Abraham for a few decades until he passed the baton to John Gee, who then brought on Kerry Muhlstein as a supporter. So you really can't understand the Book of Abraham apologetics without understanding those three name names. Hugh Nibley, John Gee, who we're going to talk about in a second and Kerry Mohlstein. Is that an okay background in Gerardo and, and, and Mike? Do you guys want to add anything to that?

Gerardo Sumano 17:21 I would say that, you know, although he knew a lot. Oh my goodness.

John Dehlin 17:29 Nibbly.

Gerardo Sumano 17:29 Yeah, nibly.

John Dehlin 17:31 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 17:32 His expertise was not an Egyptologist.

John Dehlin 17:34 Exactly.

Gerardo Sumano 17:35 So he was basically just coming up with. Basically what he did was trying to find connections between Egypt and Abraham in other literature in history to try to prove. Oh yeah. So because the papyri is Egyptian and Joseph Smith said that that's the Book of Abraham, then there should be a connection. But really he didn't do a lot to address the real issue, which is why is the facsimiles not, not translating to what Joseph Smith said? But, and then John G. You know, came in and added his abjectologist background and, and carried some of, of the arguments that didn't really hold a lot of water, but he brought a lot of those arguments from Nibali to his current, more modern apologetics.

John Dehlin 18:32 Yeah, that's super important. The. Hugh Nibley was not an Egyptologist. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. And his, his apologetics were pretty much worthless other than, you know, the, the apologetic play with Hugh Nibley was I'm smart, hun, saying I'm smart. I have a PhD, I speak a lot of languages and so don't you Mormons worry about this Book of Abraham papyrus, Egyptology stuff? I figured it all out. Just trust me and my PhD and my reputation and, and you all don't have to worry about it. Is that unfair as a characterization that.

Gerardo Sumano 19:08 I mean, even a lot of smart people who I know that have read his books, they say they don't understand what he's talking about.

John Dehlin 19:15 It's just gibberish, and it's almost intentionally technical and. Gibberish.

Gerardo Sumano 19:19 Yeah.

John Dehlin 19:20 Just so the people, like, kind of like an average active Mormon, their eyes would. They'd start reading it. Their eyes would glaze over and there'd be like, this is too hard to understand. And Hugh Nibly smart and faithful. I'll just trust him.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 19:33 Yeah, right.

Gerardo Sumano 19:34 Yeah.

John Dehlin 19:34 Mike, do you want to add anything to that, or is that an okay?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 19:37 No, I mean, I think it's. I heard when I was first starting to research this stuff, and I can't remember who said it, so I'm not sure who to attribute it to, but they called Hugh Nible's work Bookshelf Apologetics, and so they said Bookshelf Apologetics. Yeah, they said it is intentional or it's typical to hear a believing member say, have you read Hugh Nibley? And you'll say, no, have you? And they'll say, no, but he writes all these books. And so the idea is you have these books that he wrote. You know, they're big. You know, they're written by someone I've heard the word prolific use so many times. For Hugh Nibley, it's one of those things that's almost. It's almost funny how so many people use that word. They'll say, he's prolific. And it's like, yes, he's written a lot of stuff, but the problem is his works don't hold up over time. And as I said, like, you. You mentioned that it fits into that Bookshelf apologetic, which is you put the book on your shelf, you go, someone smarter than me has figured it all out. I don't need to worry about it. And that really does serve a purpose because you. You hear that. I've heard that. That variations of that phrase over the years since I started researching this, where you'll. You'll hear church leaders kind of make some sort of a reference to people smarter than me have gone through it, and they, you know, have understood it. So I realize I don't have to worry about it. And you're like, you know, that that really is kind of a dodge to me, but at the same time, I would just argue that Hugh Nibley's approach. And I have not read all of his books. I've only read some articles and stuff that's been sorted or cited. You know, it Just doesn't hold up as well. And so when people refer back to Hugh Nibley, it's always like, but we're in 2022. We don't need to keep relying on something that has been kind of, you know.

John Dehlin 21:06 Yeah, it's as simple as you go to an Egyptologist to understand the papyrus and he's in. Nibley's not an ecologist. Like, case closed. Not a. Credible. Not a credible source.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 21:18 Yeah, yeah. And it's just. It wouldn't override an Egyptologist. And so someone might say, well, you're not an Egyptologist. Why you're doing an episode in the Book of Abraham. That's because I'm working within the, you know, kind of the parameters that are set by Egyptologists who have looked at this. I'm not trying to tell you something beyond what they're saying, and I think that might be, to me, a big difference. But, yeah, I. Cause, you know, I hate saying, like, well, if you're not an Egyptologist, you, you know, you can't be reliable because obviously there are a lot of people like Dan Vogel has done. I mean, the amount of work Dan Vogel has done on the manuscripts and the papyrus and the Egyptian characters, it's insane. Watch his videos. It's like there's so much detail in there, you can't possibly absorb it all because it's just so much data. That being said, you know, he's not an Egyptologist, so a lot of people might go, what does he know? He's not. But he is using the works of actual Egyptologists to. To do it, which Nibbly would say he's doing as well. And so that's why you just. No matter what you do, you have to be willing to. To back up the data. And that's where I think that falls short sometimes.

John Dehlin 22:15 Yeah. And. And I think that going back to this slide now, and Kerry Mohlstein. What, what Kerry Mohlstein is about to tell us is his epistemic framework. He's basically going to say, here is what motivates our Book of Abraham apologetics. And this is what it's based on. And if you listen carefully, what you'll hear is that it's not based on Egyptology, even though he's an Egyptologist. So.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 22:41 Yeah, and that's. And that's. That's why this is such an important. Like, it's one of those quotes. When you hear it, you're like, there's no way he actually said. Said that. Because it really is. It's saying the quiet Part out loud.

John Dehlin 22:50 It starts with the end. All right, so let's just go ahead and roll the video. Is that okay?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 22:55 Yeah.

John Dehlin 22:56 So this is BYU professor and Egyptologist Kerry Molstein telling us the foundation of his Book of Abraham apologetics.

Gerardo Sumano 23:05 All right, so I start out with an assumption that the Book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon and anything else, excuse me, that we get from the restored gospel is true. Therefore, any evidence I find, I will try and fit into that paradigm. I don't feel that I need to defend that paradigm. I feel that I want to understand the evidence that I find within that paradigm, because to me, it's a given that it's true.

John Dehlin 23:34 All right, Mike. Well, it's obvious to me. But what's wrong with that statement from your perspective? Mike?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 23:41 I think that this is where you start to see how the Church will employ apologists with the idea of using your academic background to push theology. And I think it doesn't work. And so if you're starting with the conclusion that the Book of Abraham is true, then you're no longer doing scholarship. And I think that's one of those areas where you'll see Carrie Milstein say this at the fair conference, but when he writes articles for Ensign or Ensign, however, I know people say it both ways, or he does these firesides, he doesn't start off by telling the members of the church, hey, just so you know, this goes against what everybody says in the Egyptological world. And I just fit whatever I like, whatever promotes faith into the conclusions. If he said that at the start, it would make more sense, but he doesn't say that. And I think it shows that apologists know what they're doing. They know that they're starting with the conclusion that the church is true. And I think that's a dangerous approach because of the fact that the people you're telling this to don't know that you are using your academic background to push theology. They think you're using your academic background to give real scholarship. And I think that is a huge difference. And I do appreciate that he admits it. I just think that every single article he writes and every book he writes for Deseret Books should start with this statement, because it is so important for anyone reading it to understand.

John Dehlin 24:57 Yeah, and I'll just restate. Just science 101 is you start. You know, the whole basis of science and academia is you start from a neutral position, and then you gather the evidence, and then you make sense of the evidence without a. A clear intentional bias. And that's Just Science and Academia 101. And he's basically saying, we're not doing that. But then I'm going to use my PhD and my reputation and my knowledge of Egyptology to then make evidence that make people feel like they're scholarly when he's saying we're not starting from a scholarly scientific perspective. So. Yeah, all right, so let's. Did you want to add anything to that, Herodo?

Gerardo Sumano 25:42 No, I've heard him defending his point and this point saying that, you know, other who are not Mormon might start with the assumption that Joseph Smith could not have translated the Book of Abraham. So they try to prove. Disprove the translation. I mean, that's debatable. Like he's trying to put whatever he feels or whatever he thinks in other people's minds. I don't think people like Robert Rittner are like, oh, I gotta disprove Joseph Smith. He's just looking at what his translation was and the Papyrian saying, yeah, this doesn't add up.

John Dehlin 26:24 Yeah, because, I mean, I, I got to know Dr. Rittner and it wasn't. There wasn't any benefit to him to spend years writing books and articles about the Book of Abraham. He literally sat in the only endowed chair of Egyptology in the entire Western hemisphere at the University of Chicago. And it wasn't like he needed it to get tenure. It wasn't like any of his publications on this stuff helped him in his career. He was doing it because truth mattered to him and the, the field of Egyptology and its integrity mattered to him. And when someone like he graduates from Yale and, and that's a reflection on the field as a whole, he almost feels like he needs to defend the discipline of Egyptology when he gets involved. But it's not like he was some Mormon hater or even religion hater.

Gerardo Sumano 27:14 Right.

John Dehlin 27:15 And he was trying to just destroy faith and he destroy Mormonism or destroy religion. That is not what he was doing.

Gerardo Sumano 27:21 Yeah, and he's not the only one, you know, like his, the Claus bear, like his, he was his mentor. And like whoever has been on that chair has been doing this for a really long, long time.

John Dehlin 27:34 Basically, any non Mormon reputable Egyptologist has

Gerardo Sumano 27:38 dealt with the Book of Abraham at

John Dehlin 27:40 one point and reached the same conclusion.

Gerardo Sumano 27:42 Right.

John Dehlin 27:42 Yeah. Okay.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 27:44 The problem is, we talked about this last episode, but any Egyptologist who looks at the fragments that they have can immediately look at them and go, I know exactly what this is because it's a very common funerary text. This is not unique. And so what Kerry Muhlstein will say, and what John Gee will say is everyone except for us looks at it, rolls their eyes and says, joseph Smith, what an idiot. And they start with the conclusion it's false. And then therefore they're just basically looking to prove it false. But the truth is, if you show somebody, you know, if I give you a copy of Moby Dick and I'm like, this is the lost writings of so and so, you're like, no, it's Moby Dick. And then if I say, haha, you don't like my approach. And therefore, you know, that's the problem. Like, this is not something where we're starting with a material that nobody knows. Like, it would be one thing if you had the character's document from the Book of Mormon and you showed it to someone today and they said this is gibberish when we've talked about that in previous episodes, because at least that is unique. This is something that people can immediately go look at and go, oh yeah, that's a funerary text to help a someone in ancient Egyptian funeral rites to pass on to the next life. And so the idea that they're starting with the conclusion it's false comes from the fact that they can look at it immediately and know what it is. And so that's why we're going to talk about this today, where apologists and expand, they keep moving every time they expand the field. And so well, maybe we'll throw this in the middle. And that's what we're going to talk about today because it doesn't work. And so then they do that and then turn around, label people who go, well, that's out of the bounds of reality. They label them anti Mormon or critics. And I think that is where you see the games being played here with words to try to kind of poison the well, which we're going to see in the next, in the next slide in order to keep people who are believing in the church looking skeptically with a very skeptical lens at anybody who questions this stuff.

John Dehlin 29:27 Yeah, just, just because it's fun to make this analogy. It would almost be like if you uncovered a Mormon that was buried, you know, a thousand years from now and you, you open this tomb and, and you know, there's, there's a skeleton, but there's a green apron and a white hat on the skeleton and a white robe. And then let's just say they were buried with their temple recommend and like, let's just even say the text of the endowment ceremony, everyone would know exactly what that was, there would be no question what that was. It was, it was, it would be an endow. Proud Mormon being buried with artifacts from the temple ceremony. It would be that obvious to anyone. It's this is, is that level of obvious, right?

Gerardo Sumano 30:14 For. Yeah, for edge of, for the experts.

Gerardo Sumano 30:16 Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin 30:17 For Egyptians.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 30:17 Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it's. Yeah, yeah, that's what it comes down to. It's like, that's why I keep saying, like, this should be like a 15 minute episode. And yet we're gonna keep doing this because of the way they play games with kind of what is and is not right, you know, possible.

John Gee and Church Scholarship on the Papyri

John Dehlin 30:30 Okay, so that's a good segue to this next slide where we're going to talk about John Gee, who is the church's current expert on the Book of Abraham. Go ahead, Mike.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 30:39 Yeah, and so just to kind of intro this video, it's like we're going to cover, we're going to have an episode that's all about apologetics, but obviously this one is all about apologetics for the Book of Abraham. And so we've been talking about the church's responses to all these issues through the 30 episodes. And so as we already talked about, the Church has two prominent Egyptologists that are employed by the church, which is Kari Milstein and John Ge. And both of them have spent a career writing in peer reviewed journals. And so they do have peer reviewed articles that bulk up their academic credentials so that members will look at them and go, smarter men have looked at this and remain faithful, so why can't you? And what they don't tell you is that they never ever put their Book of Abraham writings up for peer review because they know full well that they will be destroyed by the overall community. And so what they'll do is they play this game where they're like, oh, everybody respects us within the, you know, Egyptologist community. But what they don't say is that it's because they don't put forward any of their theology to the community. And also the fact is that there are multiple Egyptologists who've gone on the record to talk about how bad their scholarship is when it comes to church stuff as opposed to regular Egyptologists. And so in this video, it's kind of the intro to a fireside that John Gee had done with Fairmormon. I don't know if you call it a fireside. I think that's, I think, yeah, they call it the fireside. And they kind of ask him, like, why do people dislike your scholarship? And he'll explain that. I just want people to understand kind of. And listen for kind of the ways they do some of these games. And his answer, because it's pretty clear that they're trying to have it both ways, to say, oh, I'm a super by the books Egyptologist, and that's why everybody respects me and that's why you should believe me. But at the same time, why do people not like what I do? And it's just. It's a game here. And we'll see it.

John Dehlin 32:24 All right, let's roll the tape.

Gerardo Sumano 32:26 Why is it on the Internet?

John Dehlin 32:27 Some people think you're such a terrible scholar or such a terrible person. Why does that come up?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 32:35 I don't know. Well, there are a number of reasons that it might, but it's a. One of these vague general accusations that doesn't have any details. And it's a form of the. The typical expression for it is called poisoning the well. And it's where you. It's a form of an. Of an ad hominem fallacy. It's one where you shift the attention from the argument to the arguer. And rather than deal with the substance of the argument, you attack the person. So by claiming that you're a terrible scholar, terrible person. This isn't really something my Egyptological colleagues say to me, or at least not to my face, and some of them are actually fairly complimentary.

John Dehlin 33:43 But, I mean, you've edited an Egyptological journal. You've been on the board for different organizations. Certainly they wouldn't invite you to be on the board if they thought you were a terrible scholar. One would think.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 33:57 Yeah, one would think. But it's. It's a matter of way of distracting the argument. So you don't actually deal with the argument, you just attack the person. And it's something that we actually should expect as Christians. You know, we have statements of Jesus, Ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake, but he that entereth to the end shall be saved. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of his household? And he also said, blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding ye glad, for great is your reward in heaven for so persecuted they. The prophets which were before you.

John Dehlin 35:01 Yeah, I mean, without. Without getting too grouchy, I. I have at least three quick responses to that. The first is that it's really Disturbing to hear fair Mormon and any of the Mormon apologists, you know, accuse other people of ad hominem and poisoning the well, because that's been the primary tool or technique of Mormon apologetics all the way back to Hugh Nibley for literally like 50 years. So for them to now accuse others of doing what they're world class champions are doing, that's super disturbing to me. The second thing is now he's hiding behind this sort of like victimized Christian cloak of like, oh, see, we're just like Jesus. We're going to be persecuted just like Jesus. That's kind of pathetic to me. And then the third thing is to, to claim that people like Robert Rittner or others are employing ad hominem is just outrageous. Robert Rittner has published significant peer reviewed books and articles on his Book of Abraham scholarship that Guy and Mulstein haven't. Robert Rittner spent 13 hours laying out not attacks on Molstein and Guy or Nibley substantively. He laid out the evidence and the scholarship. Now it's true that people like Guy and his peers would, would classify Guy and Muhlstein's Egyptology scholarship around the Book of Abraham as being unprofessional, irresponsible and poor and dishonoring to the field of Egyptology. But that's not ad hominem. Ad hominem would be to say John Gee is a pedophile. Right? John Gee is, is adulterer. Like that would be, that would be Ritter or others engaging in ad hominem. But to say that Guy and Mosttein are engaging in irresponsible, bad scholarship as it relates to the Book of Abraham, that's just factual in my opinion. Gerardo, what would you want to say?

Gerardo Sumano 37:14 Yeah, I would agree. I agree.

John Dehlin 37:17 Okay. Mike, you want to add anything there?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 37:21 You know, actually I had my thoughts on the next slide. So we. I agree with you. I think, you know, for me, an ad hominem would be to say, I think John G. Is a terrible person. Nobody should give him the time of day. And then you leave it at that. But the problem is everybody who's talking about this stuff is saying John G. Is doing it is doing a disservice to Egyptology and here's why. And I'm gonna show you all of it. Like, Dr. Robert Ridner didn't just say John G. Sucks. I worked with him and he's a bad person. He said John Gee's scholarship is terrible. Let me show you this gigantic book detailing why and Dan Vogel's done the same thing. And so they call it ad hominem. It's just. No, it's.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 37:54 It's.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 37:54 People are fact checking your work. They're realizing it is completely just irresponsibly bad, and they're calling you out on it. That is not the same thing. It's not. You're not being persecuted when because of that, you just aren't.

John Dehlin 38:06 Okay. All right, so let's go to the next slide, which is a few notes on these two videos.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 38:12 Yeah. And so it kind of covers, you know, what you said. And I just want to point out at the start. We'll have it in the show notes. But Dan Vogel did a very thorough rebuttal to this video that John Gee did with Fair Mormon. And he goes through in such detail that when you leave, when you watch that episode at the end, you're like, oh, my goodness, how does John G. Get up there and put the stuff out there? And again, it just shows that you could. You could say, I'm poisoning the well by telling you that. But what I'm saying is watch it and judge for yourself. But, you know, no one's trying to poison the well by calling John Gee a terrible scholar. But it's because we're illustrating with evidence, with things you can see with, with all sorts of previous research, why his claims are not only wrong, but the fact is, as an Egyptologist, he knows why they are wrong and he continues to promote them anyways. And John Gee, you know, Fair Mormon, they mentioned that John Gee was an editor of a journalist. But what they don't tell you, and this is something you get in the 13 hours with Dr. Rittner. John Gee was an editor of a journal, and they had to basically kick him off because he had used that journal to attack Dr. Robert Rittner because Dr. Robert Ridner had gone after his scholarship on the Book of Abraham. And so that's a really long story. It's in the interviews that John and RFM had done with Dr. Rittner. But they don't tell you that he basically got removed from that periodical because of the fact that he used it. He used his position as editor to attack somebody who was questioning his work. And I think that is the kind of context that people really kind of need to have, especially when you're trying to frame this as if you're being persecuted.

John Dehlin 39:41 Yeah. And there's actually an episode, Mormon Stories, episode 1397, Civil War, John Gee versus the Joseph Smith Papers Project, where RFM and I go into this in. In Detail. So we'll. We'll include that in the show.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 39:54 Notes?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 39:55 Yeah, definitely.

John Dehlin 39:56 Okay.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 39:56 And just the last note on that slide is just to say, you know, John Gee, at the end of this kind of talk, and these are questions that he's getting that he's prepared for, because he obviously has slides for them and he's reading off of them. You know, he quotes about the persecution complex, and he quotes basically almost saying, like, yeah, I should expect to have this because Jesus was persecuted too. And it's just. That's the kind of stuff that drives me nuts, because that is targeted to members who want to look at critics as people who are untrustworthy, who are people that are only looking to tear down without any reason. And he is, you know, while he's sitting there saying that these critics don't want to address, you know, the actual details. They don't want to address the reasons he's actually doing the exact same thing. And, you know, the last thing I'll say is when Dr. Rittner was on with you and RFM, you had invited John Gee or Kerry Mohlstein to come on and talk. They don't do that because they know full well that their. Their positions are completely untenable. And so they don't go out into public and have these discussions. They do it in these safe spaces and such as Fair Mormon, because they know the moment they're questioned that they're doomed. And we're going to go through that in this episode. They almost show their cards on that as well. It's just like I said, it gets silly sometimes when you look at the games that they're playing with this stuff.

John Dehlin 41:07 All right, well, let's jump to. Should we jump to the next slide, then?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 41:12 Yeah.

John Dehlin 41:13 Okay, so the next slide is the. So this is one of the main. So if you. If you kind of are, like, gonna. Gonna address Book of Abraham, Mormon Church, Book of Abraham, Apologetics 101. The first issue that always comes up is the lost or the long scroll theory. So that's what we're going to talk about first, right?

The Lost Scroll Theory Examined

Mike (LDS Discussions) 41:35 Yeah. And so this is one. This is from the official church essay, and it says 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. Eyewitnesses spoke of a long roll or multiple rolls of papyrus, since only fragments survived. It is likely that much of the papyri accessible to Joseph when he translated the Book of Abraham is not among these Fragments. The loss of a significant portion of the papyri means the relationship of the papyri to the published text cannot be settled conclusively by reference to the papyri. And so what they're effectively saying is that because we've only gotten fragments and they didn't recover like an, kind of like an unrolled scroll or a rolled up scroll, I guess I should say that it means we only have a fraction of what Joseph Smith translated. And because of that, the actual Book of Abraham papyri could be forever have lost in the Chicago Fire. And we're going to go over. There are a lot of problems with this theory, and you're going to notice that the Church does not mention these problems in their essay, which again, the Church in their essay kind of references critics or they reference that not everyone's in agreement, but they're very careful to never actually tell members why. Critics are pointing out that these reasons don't work.

John Dehlin 42:54 Okay, yeah, yeah. And I'll just say that this is. If you look at Mormon apologetics from a macro perspective, what you always, what a Mormon apologists always want to do is create plausible deniability. In other words, Oaks and others, Maxwell apostles, have said we don't need good answers. We just need answers that leave room for continued belief. And so what you have to do is just create the possibility of credibility, even if the answers aren't actually credible. And that's what the long or the Lost scroll theory is an example of. It's basically to say, okay, the, the papyrus that we have now, that was uncovered, that emerged in the 60s, we have the papyrus, but it's clear that it's missing something, that they're fragments, they're not like a perfect scroll intact. And so there must be something that's missing. So maybe the, the translation that Joseph Smith produced was directly from parts of the missing parchment that theoretically could have existed.

Gerardo Sumano 44:08 Yeah.

John Dehlin 44:08 Is that right, Gerardo?

Gerardo Sumano 44:10 Yeah, that's right.

John Dehlin 44:11 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 44:11 And as we know, that doesn't hold water. Are we going to explain why, Mike?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 44:15 All right, yeah, yeah. We've got a bunch of slides.

John Dehlin 44:18 Okay, so let's go to the next. Do you want to go to the next slide, Mike?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 44:22 Yeah. The only thing I would add is there are missing, there are missing pieces. Like we, we don't have facsimile three. We don't, I don't think we have facsimile two. And so there are missing pieces. And we'll go through that as we do this, but because we know there are missing Pieces from an apologetic standpoint that goes, okay, we can expand that out as far as we want to, but the problem is, we'll go through it. What we do have doesn't match. And what the Church published as the facsimiles. We talked about this last episode, Facsimile 3, and we'll touch on this throughout this episode. Facsimile 3 has Egyptian characters that Joseph Smith translate. They are incorrect. And so it would be like saying, well, if we only had more material, you'd show, you'd see that I was correct somewhere else. But if we have a bunch of areas where you're wrong, it. It kind of stops mattering if there's more, because what we do have shows you couldn't do it. So why are we supposed to believe there's going to be this magical other set that we have no evidence for that's going to all of a sudden flip the fact that you're wrong with what we do have? And I think that's where this, this facsimile 3 kills everything we're going to talk about today out of the water without even dealing with this. But, yeah, you know. Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 45:24 And in fact, anyways, I think the evidence is pretty conclusive that because of how the roll, the fragments that we have, you know, people have done analysis on what it's called, the like, cuny or you know, the missing sections. They have calculated how big the role should be and they've done in several different ways to calculate, and pretty much Egyptologists and experts agree that the missing part would not have been enough to contain the Book of Abraham in it.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 46:01 Right. There's no chance. And we talked about last week, there's two symbols in the Book of Abraham manuscript that Joseph Smith, I want to say, got four verses out of, and those two symbols mean one word. And so not only would you need extra space for the Book of Abraham before the translation, as Joseph Smith made it, to be correct, you'd have to have a massive amount of missing space because Joseph Smith mistakenly thought that one character meant like a paragraph or a sentence worth of information. And that's another thing he got wrong. And so that's why it's like layer upon layer upon layer of impossibilities here in order to make it work. And with that said, we could jump into more specifically about the Lost scroll theory, why it doesn't work.

John Dehlin 46:41 Yeah, and I'll just, I'll just. To. To extend an anal analogy I started with. It would be the lot to me, the lost or the long scroll theory would be like archaeologists in a thousand years finding, you know, a coffin with a skeleton that had the green apron and the cap and the robe and, you know, the endowment ceremony text, but was missing the temple recommend and saying, you know, oh, well, maybe this isn't a Mormon. You know, a dead Mormon buried in their temple clothes. Maybe it's a different church because we don't have the temple recommend. You know. You know what I'm saying?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 47:24 Yeah.

John Dehlin 47:25 Like, it's, It's. It's creating the possibility of some other explanation just because a tiny bit is missing. It's creating some sort of plausible explanation out of nothing to create the. The possibility of doubt.

Gerardo Sumano 47:40 Yeah.

John Dehlin 47:40 For the scholarship, that does prove what. What we want to prove. So let's go ahead. Oh, go ahead.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 47:45 Yeah. No, I was gonna say I think it's even worse because. Yeah, some of it.

Gerardo Sumano 47:50 And so like saying, like, oh, maybe this. This person, this coffin is an alien.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 47:56 And.

Gerardo Sumano 47:56 But because we don't have the temple recommend, that proves that it's not an alien. Right, like that.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 48:00 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 48:01 I think that it would be like if you were doing a paper for school and they said, we want you to do this. You want me to translate this document? The document is about the history of dogs. And you're translating it and you turn in four pages, and the four pages are about why you like McDonald's french fries. And the professor's like, dude, these are about dogs. And you gave me a thing about French fries. And you're like, oh, you know what? There's six pages. I forgot those six pages. We do have some of it. So you can't then say that he. Because he got it wrong here. It's really hard to go. But if we had more material, you'd see it was right. Because we are. Everything we have is like a failing grade.

John Dehlin 48:39 Right.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 48:40 And so I don't. It's like, to me, even if they. Even if they drove a truckload of documents over, I guarantee you they're not going to work. Because if he got all of this other stuff wrong, why are we supposed to believe that all of a sudden? It's. It just it. That life doesn't work. It just doesn't work that way.

Manuscripts Reveal the Translation Source

John Dehlin 48:53 Okay. All right, so let's jump to the manuscripts of the Book of Abraham. Match the papyrus.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 48:59 Yeah. So we talked about this last week. And so if you're listening, what we have are two images of the manuscripts for the Book of Abraham on the left and on the right, you can see where the symbols are being pulled From. From the papyrus fragment that is next to facsimile 1. And what they show is that they are translating the symbols off of the papyri and they're doing it in sequential order. And so this is something in that fair video we showed a few minutes ago where John Gee tries to make it sound like they're bouncing all over. And Dan Vogel explains why. Dan Vogue. Why John Gee is very misleading with that. But you could look at it for like, these are one of those things where it's like, do you believe your eyes or do you believe what apologists are telling you you're seeing? Because you could see that the scribes are dictating for Joseph character by character in sequential order. And it matches up perfectly. And so if there was a long or lost scroll, why do the manuscripts match up perfectly with the papyrus fragment that was recovered that happens to basically be where the Book of Abraham tells us to look for it.

Gerardo Sumano 50:01 Yeah, let me say this too. If you can put back the screen up just because on the image, it shows the papyri on the right and then on the left, we have, you know, the translation documents. That's an interesting argument that John Gi tries to make that they're bouncing all over and just copying characters randomly. Like you said, Mike, it's not that way. We have. We have the translation documents and they go character by character from left to right. Sorry, from right to left. And you. So the reason why it might. One of the reasons why it might look like they're bouncing all over is because there's missing papyri that. That that section was missing, missing when Joseph Smith got this papyri. And so what's interesting is that you'll see that the characters that are before the ones that are written right on the image on the right, like, those ones are not Egyptian characters. So tells us that, you know, they invented characters from the. The missing part when they were reading, trying to read from right to left. Joseph Smith was inventing characters, and that's how we know that he was going line by line. But to the Egyptologists, they can't admit that Joseph Smith was inventing characters. So that's why they can say, oh, Joseph was bouncing all over. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's a really big piece of evidence that when I started studying, this was big to me, how Joseph was inventing characters. And that corresponds to how he was taking characters from right to left.

John Dehlin 51:47 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 51:50 All right, then Dan Vogel covers that. So again, if anybody wants to, like, really Understand what Hero is talking about. Watch the damn. We'll have a link. The Dan Vogel video about that John G. Video. He literally shows where John. Where John Gee is basically pulling these characters and saying, oh, this is that. And Dan Vogel's like, no, it's not. You could see where it actually is from. And yet he's pulling from here. Because he wants to give credibility to the idea that the scribes are bouncing around. Because if he can make the scribes bouncing around from a believing standpoint and go, well, they weren't then translating in sequential order. Because he needs that to be basically debunked. Because if, if, if Joseph Smith was translating in sequential order, we have the source material. If we have the source material, there's no missing scroll. And so again, this. This is one of those games they play where they're just trying to find parallels to other characters to say, see, it wasn't quite that one. If you just have this little fleck here, it's this one. And Dan Vogel just. I mean, he. Like I said, it's. He almost does it in almost too much detail because there's. There's nothing left afterwards to give any credibility to John Geese claim that they were not doing it in sequential order.

John Dehlin 52:51 All right, let's jump to the next slide, which is the manuscripts tell us where the translation is from.

Gerardo Sumano 52:58 Yep.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 52:59 And we talked about this last episode as well, which is, you know, the Book of Abraham in chapter 1, verses 12 to 14 tells us that the facsimiles for facsimile 1 and that the book of Abraham are on the same scroll. So there's no chance of some secondary scroll that would have contained a separate text from facsimile one. And so I'm going to read verses 12 through 14. It says, and it came to pass that the priests laid violence upon me that they might slay me also, as they did those virgins upon this altar. Altar. And that you may have a knowledge of this altar. I will refer you to the representation at the commencement of this record. I meant to make that yellow, but basically, I will refer you to the representation at the commencement of this record. That's very important. And then verse 14 says that you may have an understanding of these gods. I have given you the fashion of them in the figures at the beginning. Which manner of figures is called by the Chaldeans? Ranos. I'm not sure how to say that which signifies hieroglyphics. And so Abraham chapter one is literally telling you where the characters are being translated from. And they're telling you that at the end of the characters, you're going to have the representation of the figures.

John Dehlin 54:05 So basically, Joseph Smith writes into the Book of Abraham text which refers to what, the facsimiles.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 54:13 Yeah. So if you go to the next slide, we could. It'll show you exactly what I'm talking about. So in the next slide, if you're listening to this only, there are a set of characters with the lacuna that Gerardo had mentioned, and that's where the manuscripts are pulling the characters from. Just to the right of that is facsimile one. And so when the book Abraham says, so that you may understand this, I have placed the representation at the commencement of this record. It's literally telling you the images next to the characters we're translating is the representation of it. And that's why facsimile one is like. It's one of those things where you look at this, there's no. No way around this. You have the characters to the left, facsimile one to the right, exactly where the book Abraham tells you to look. The facsimile is supposed to illustrate what the text is in. In Abraham 1. You know, it's one of those things where it's like they're telling you where to look. We have the source material that is all extant, and that is in the church's possession now.

John Dehlin 55:04 Yeah, that's absolutely a slam dunk.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 55:06 Totally.

John Dehlin 55:07 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 55:08 And.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 55:08 And that's why John G. Is trying to say, well, they're not actually pulling from those characters. There's actually other characters. Because if you look at that picture, there's no way around it. Like, that picture tells you 100% that the book of Abraham is telling you where to look. It's exactly where you think it would be. I don't know what else to say. There's no way anybody would ever argue with that unless you are doing what Kerry Milstein said, which is to say the book of Abraham is true. And therefore, I'm going to do whatever I need to do to the evidence to make that the case. Because this tells you the exact opposite.

John Dehlin 55:38 Yeah, it's a direct. It's a direct line between the papyrus, the facsimile, the writings on the papyrus, Joseph Smith's attempt at, quote, translating all the way through to the actual Book of Abraham text that we have today, it just. It connects them all in a way that can't really be challenged. Right?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 56:01 Yeah.

John Dehlin 56:01 Yeah. Okay, let's go to the next slide, which is around the math. How math tells us that there is no long scroll. And Dr. Rittner does talk about this, but go ahead.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 56:13 Yeah, and Gerardo mentioned this earlier, but basically, because there's these lacunas, which is basically these gaps in the papyrus that happens due to damage. And remember, these are, these are rolled up. And so as they're rolled up when there's damage, they can then use the math to say, okay, if there's, you know, one measurement here and then the next unrolling is here, you can kind of tell what's missing just by, you know, figuring out how much it accelerates, expands out, or, you know, contracts, I guess. So they did a bunch of math formulas on this. And so what they found in a big study that was done in dialogue, it shows that the Book of Abraham text would need at least 511cm to fit the scroll's interior. But at most there'd be no more room than 56cm missing, which means they wouldn't have enough room to fit even one tenth of the Book of Abraham in the missing interior of the scroll, let alone the Book of Abraham is published by Joseph Smith. So when they sometimes say that, you know, there was a section inside that contained the Book of Abraham, but that was lost, there's, there's no room for it. Like, mathematically speaking, everything that should be with the scroll is there with one tiny little area. And a lot of Egyptologists can tell you basically what would normally be there. So there's just no, there's no variation in this scroll that would tell you that this is something unique or special.

Gerardo Sumano 57:24 Yeah, before this article was done in dialogue, that calculated mathematically, Klaus Baer, who was an Egyptologist, he, he calculated just based on what was supposed to be there. Because this document is something that we, you know, it's a common funerary text just based on, on what, what text was missing. He calculated, you know, that it was around 23 inches that was missing and that's super close to the mathematically number that dialogue got. So we have two different studies, one done by just Egyptology alone, based on what's supposed to be there and what's missing, and one done mathematically and both basically tell us the same number of inches that are missing, which is around 22 inches.

John Dehlin 58:20 Yeah, and you don't even need the math. You just, you know, this, this type of a funerary text or scroll appears all over Egypt. And so you've got Egyptologists today that will tell you we've got dozens and dozens of these and we know how long they are. And they're not 80ft long. You know, we know exactly how long these scrolls tend to be. And they're all saying that, that there's no way that the type of plausible deniability that Mormon Book of Abraham Egyptologists are trying to inject into the scroll to make it long or lengthy, to invent this fictional potential, there's just no way that's real. It's made up. And, and, and then when you match that with, with Carrie Molstein admitting that they start with the fact that the Book of Abraham is true, that gives away their motivated reasoning for why they're creating the long or the lost scroll theory. They've got to do that to somehow make room for Joseph's clearly false translation. Right.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 59:32 To make it as simple as possible. If you look at facsimile 3 and you look at the characters that are on there that Joseph Smith translates, if Joseph Smith gets them correct, if he gets those, those translations correct, not a single person on earth is going to say Joseph Smith got it wrong, because you don't need it. You don't even care if there's a missing scroll, because he got that right. And he shouldn't have been able to get it right. On the flip side, because Joseph Smith got that wrong, and because he got the parts wrong on the papyrus fragment that we just showed that end up being in the early parts of the Book of Abraham, it just doesn't matter if you create new material, because he couldn't do it. And that's why I keep harping on this. But at some point it feels silly that apologists are trying to tell us that if you just look for more material, it's going to flip the script. It's not. And that's why it just becomes kind of like one of those things where everybody outside of the Mormon Church that knows Egyptian scholarship just looks at this and rolls their eyes because they're like, they know exactly what they're looking at. There's no surprise here. There's nothing on that scroll that says that this is any different than the other dozens of scrolls that we have. So there's just no reason to expect anything different.

Gerardo Sumano 1:00:34 Yeah, I have an image that I just want to show really quick. Just. But this one. So this one shows the whole scroll. What we have right now, you know, this is what Mike was showing the facsimile number one. The text here is the text in which Joseph was translating. And then, you know, we still have all this. And this is what's missing. Like this section 21 inches like, that's how long

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:01:05 it would be.

Gerardo Sumano 1:01:06 And that's basically Claus bears that two columns of Egyptian text. There's no way the book of Abraham could fit there.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:01:14 Yeah. And if you look at the picture that Gerardo is showing, the beginning of it is facsimile 3. The end of it is facsimile 1. And so when the book Abraham tells you that one of the images is at the beginning of the record, one's at the commencement of the record, that's what we have. And so it's not, again, that there'd be some other book that would have something different. It's just.

John Dehlin 1:01:31 Yeah, it'd be like Finding Green Eggs in Ham by Dr. Seuss with, like, three pages missing and claiming that the remainder that's missing is the text for Les Miserables.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:01:43 Yeah, right. Yeah, right. I mean, it is. And. And this is when I was doing the website and doing these slides. You just. Sometimes you sigh because if Carrie Milstein or John Gee were presented with that similar scenario for literally anything else, they would immediately go, oh, no, they're totally making it up. And yet you invoke this special pleading against the evidence. And I've tried saying this in other episodes as well. A lot of times they'll say, well, if Joseph Smith had gotten the translation correct, there would be no need to have faith because we would already have evidence. And I always, like, flip that around. I say, you know, faith is. And I was taught this both as a convert and in my previous, more Protestant background, that faith is believing in things we can't see, we can't prove. And I would argue that faith is not believing in things that we can prove did not happen. Like, you know, it's one of those things where, you know, I. You know, I could have faith that the sky is going to turn, you know, purple tomorrow, But. But if it doesn't turn purple and I continue to believe it, that that's not faith. That is something different. And so that apologetic drives me nuts because they know from their background that they are on the shakiest of ground. And they kept. They keep presenting it with such confidence to members because they want members to trust in their academic background. And it is just so dishonest. Even if they don't intend it to be, it ultimately is a very dishonest approach to this data.

John Dehlin 1:02:58 Yeah, yeah. It would kind of be like a doctor, like a medical doctor that basically tells people a tumor was caused by possibly aliens. You know what I mean? Like. Like that we. We don't. It's Not a doctor's job. If you're going to use your credentials in your education as a way to have credibility for your argument, to then make an argument that completely defies the discipline that you're supposedly an expert of. That's. That's why Ghee. Sorry. That's why Rittner and Klaus Bear and others are so angry at Guy and Molstein. Not because of ad hominem attacks, but because they're using their. Their pedigrees, their education, their degrees, and their claims as scholars to make irresponsible arguments. So we. We beat. We. We've kind of covered that. Okay.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:03:51 No, I want to beat that dead horse just one more time. Here's the thing. When you are going to join, like, for me, as a convert or anyone who's born in the church, you are being asked to dedicate your life to a church. You are being asked to. To give 10% of your money, to give countless hours of time, to give unending loyalty, to wear underwear with Masonic symbols on it, to join this church. And these apologists know that they're using their academic backgrounds to push something that does not work. And so it would be one thing if this was just some fun club. This is something you have to dedicate your life to. And they know that. They are pushing apologetics that would not pass peer review in any journal, which is why they do not publish it there and instead publish it in the church. And so for me, you know, the reason people get upset is because you are using your academic background to encourage people to join and dedicate their lives to a church that does not live up to its own truth claims. And I think that is why I don't view it just as, like, a small amount of dishonesty. I view it as bringing somebody in under false pretenses and full well knowing that what they're telling people in these articles are in these Deseret books. I know Kerry Mohlstein wrote a book called, like, let's Talk about the Book of Abraham. They are not giving members a full picture intentionally so that they stay in. And I think that is why this is so important to cover in greater detail in these episodes.

Late and Problematic Long Scroll References

John Dehlin 1:05:07 All right, well, let's jump to the next slide, which is the long lost scroll. References are late and problematic.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:05:16 Yeah. And this is one you'll hear John Gee talk about this a lot at Kerry Milstein. And it's in the church's essay where they kind of say there are all these references to people talking about the. This long, long scroll which means that it must be lost forever. And therefore we don't have the source material. And you know, the references to the long and lost scroll idea, they come from second and third hand stories told 50 to 60 years later. And so Hugh Nibley unearthed this source, basically saying that they unrolled this long scroll and I think it went through like a hallway or something. And then when you dig into it, it turns out it was something that his uncle claimed to have heard from Joseph Smith's nephew, George A. Smith, when he was just five years old. Nibley heard the story 63 years later. And so, you know, Nibley cites no source for this assertion, but almost certainly refers to the recollection of Joseph F. Smith that Nibley cited earlier in the same year that I think he wrote it in a book. And so this was in a dialogue article. And so, you know, ironically enough, you know, the, the church's essay points to Brian Hoglid, who was someone who defended the long or lost scroll theory for a long time. But as he studied this by working on the Joseph Smith paper project, he actually completely reversed course. And we'll get to that in the next slide. And so, so just for those who

John Dehlin 1:06:30 don't understand what we just said, so there's basically some sort of source that, that Nibley references.

Gerardo Sumano 1:06:38 So there's a few sources, historical sources,

John Dehlin 1:06:41 it's like a 19th century church history figure claim that they unrolled the papyrus and it went all the way down the hall.

Gerardo Sumano 1:06:50 There's one source that mentions that.

John Dehlin 1:06:51 Okay.

Gerardo Sumano 1:06:52 But it turns out that that source is something that nibly heard from someone who saw it when they were five

John Dehlin 1:06:57 years old, 50 years after.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:06:58 Yeah, and he heard it could a

John Dehlin 1:07:00 five year old, 50 years after the, you know, could somebody claim that when they were five they saw a super long scroll? Is that a credible source? Is that right? I just want to make sure. Right, okay.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:07:13 Yeah. And the quote is if. I'm not sure if this is the exact quote from the book, but it says, I think it's just from the dialogue article, it says, we are told that the papyri were in beautiful condition when Joseph Smith got them and that one of them, when unrolled on the floor, extended through two rooms of the mansion house. And so they're basically saying that that quote tells you that those mounted fragments we have cannot possibly be anywhere near the full complete collection. And what they don't tell you is, like I said, this is a quote, an account from someone who is trying to recall when they were 5 years old and I think like I said, 63 years later, it's being, you know, recorded down. That's a problem. And the other problem too is that, you know, the church bought multiple scrolls. We know that they bought a scroll that Joseph had identified as the writings of Joseph. So, you know, that's another problem too because you have these scrolls that would, you know, it doesn't change what we do have. I guess that's why it's so crazy to use a very sketchy account to try to push the idea that that means we have a long scroll, one they would never accept those kind of late recollections from a five year old in any other, you know, venue.

John Dehlin 1:08:21 So Gerardo, what are you showing us there?

Gerardo Sumano 1:08:23 So that's what he was saying is the scroll of Joseph, what Joseph identified as a scroll of Joseph.

John Dehlin 1:08:28 Okay, yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:08:30 So he had this and then he had this one, which was the longer one. We are missing this part, but yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin 1:08:38 So basically Gerardo is showing his visual rep, you know, representation of how long the scrolls could possibly be. And there's no way these scrolls went. Went across two rooms. Yeah, there's no way.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:08:52 And, and you know, I, I get that. But to me, I mean to a

Gerardo Sumano 1:08:55 layp person, because there's, to John and Mun's credit, there are some sources that mention a long scroll. But what does long scroll means? You know, like a, a scroll that's, you know, a couple feet wide. I would say it's a long scroll.

Gerardo Sumano 1:09:13 Right, you know.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:09:14 Yeah, yeah, Yep.

John Dehlin 1:09:16 Okay. All right. So you're saying now that Brian Hagled, Brian Hoglid, we should we talk about who he is? Because Brian Hoglid used to work for BYU as one of their top Book of Abraham apologists. And since then he's left retired from BYU and he has recanted, you know, everything, basically everything. Every Book of Abraham apologetic he used to make, he's, now that he's in safe retirement, recanted and said he no longer stands behind.

Gerardo Sumano 1:09:46 He actually did it when. Well, he was a byu.

John Dehlin 1:09:48 Right, right. Yeah, yeah. But go, go ahead. Do you want to give us this backup background and then tell us what we're about to see?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:09:55 Yeah, and so like I said, the church's essay is going to cite Brian Hoglid as, you know, the person that's telling us that the long scroll is a valid theory. And so if we go to the next slide, Brian Hoglet. This is in 2018. So about, I think four, three or four years after the Book of Abraham essay comes out. You know, it says you know, at the top, just read. There's also an argument that the Book of Abraham was on papyri that we no longer have is. It's called the missing papyri theory, at least from my perspective anyway. I found evidence that argues against that, that they were working off the papyri that we actually have in the church today. So that is Brian Hoglett at a presentation in 2018 where he's basically saying, because, remember, Brian Hoglett worked on the Joseph Smith Paper Project. He had access to everything. And so during that time, during all of the access to all of these documents, he realized by, you know, being open to the evidence, that the missing papyri theory that he had held, that he. I believe he wrote a whole book on it. He realized the evidence actually points completely against it.

John Dehlin 1:10:52 And. Can I read that second quote? Is that okay?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:10:54 Yeah, yeah, please do.

John Dehlin 1:10:55 So this is my. And this is my friend Brian Hagled's a friend of mine. This is what he wrote. Gerardo, you're saying this is while he was still at byu? Yeah, yeah. He writes. For the record, is Brian Hauglet working for the Maxwell Institute at byu, Right.

Gerardo Sumano 1:11:10 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:11:11 For the record, I no longer hold the views that have been quoted from my 2000 book in these, the Dan Vogel videos. In fact, I'm no longer interested or involved in apologetics in any way. I wholeheartedly agree with Dan Vogel's excellent assessment of the Abraham Egyptian documents. In these videos, one can find that I. I've changed my mind in my recent and forthcoming publications. The most recent Joseph Smith Papers, Revelations and Translation, Volume 4, the Book of Paper.

Gerardo Sumano 1:11:42 So this is important because the church's publication of the Joseph Smith Papers Project, which Brian Hugler was an editor of, that volume, he agrees with Dan Bogle, one of the biggest critics of the Book of Abraham and Joseph Smith. Basically, the church's publication agrees with Dan Vogel about not being a missing. Like the missing scroll theory doesn't hold water.

John Dehlin 1:12:10 Right. And this is this, that episode on Civil War, which is basically John Gee and Kerry Molstein against the Church's Joseph Smith Papers project. This is what that talks about in depth as well. Yeah. So to go back, this is again, this is again Brian Hauglet saying, quote, the most as a BYU professor at the Maximal Institute, quote, the most recent Joseph Smith Papers, Revelations and Translation, Volume 4, the Book of Abraham and related manuscripts now on the shelves is much more open to dance. Thinking on the origin of the Book of Abraham, I now reject a missing Abraham manuscript. I agree that two of The Abraham manuscripts were simultaneously dictated. I agree that the Egyptian papers were used to produce the Book of Abraham. I agree that only Abraham 1:1 through 218 were produced in 1835, and that Abraham 219 through 521 were produced in Nauvoo and on and on. I no longer agree with Ghee or Molstein. I find their apologetic scholarship, and he's got scholarship in quotes on the Book of Abraham. Abhorrence. Okay, that's a BYU professor calling Guy and Muhlstein abhorrent. Not them abhorrent. Their scholarship abhorrent. Not ad hominem. He's attacking their scholarship. And my friend Brett Metcalf can attest to my transformative journey. And again, that's a Brian Hauglet Facebook post on Nov. 8, 2018, with emphasis added. So kudos to my dear friend Brian Howgle, Brian Hagled, for being willing to say, I apologize, I was wrong. I was unintentionally misleading people. And I. I now am open about changing. And I would say that, you know, Robin. Robin Jensen and all of the scholars, even Spencer Fluman, all of the scholars who are, like, actually credible, you know, Joseph Smith Papers or church historian scholars, agree with Molstein, Vogel, and the Joseph Smith Papers Project and disagree with and distance themselves from Guy and Molstein. Am I overstating that, Gerardo?

Gerardo Sumano 1:14:34 I don't think so.

John Dehlin 1:14:35 Okay. All right. All right, Mike, do we want to go to the next slide?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:14:41 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:14:41 Yeah, I think we're good. I mean, like I said, it helps to illustrate why the long scroll is so problematic. Once you start to really address the data which we're doing here, obviously Brian Hoglet can do that in a lot more detail. Brent Metcalf could do it. A lot more detail. Dan Vogel. And like I said at the beginning of this episode, if you want to dive in further, please do. But I'm just telling you, it does not get better. It only makes it more clear that this does not work in any possible way.

John Dehlin 1:15:06 All right, let's go to the fact that that Charlotte Haven's account is frequently cited. What's that?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:15:11 And this is one you'll hear John Geese cite this a lot. And Carey Muhlstein will cite this to say that there was absolutely this long scroll that was still intact after the Book of Abraham fragments were already mounted. So what they'll say is that after the. The fragments were mounted, there was still this long scroll, and people would pay the Smith family to go in, and they could see the mummies, and they could see the scrolls. Joseph's mom would constantly tell people, oh, these are the writings of Abraham. I mean, so there's no question there that they believe that was a source material. And so this is an account from Charlotte Haven that's very frequently referenced. And so Dialogue had addressed this in their article about the length of the scroll. And so they say several eyewitnesses were also shown mounted fragments that were identified as Abrahamic writings. These were evidently the extant fragments from the fragile outer end of the horse scroll. Charlotte Haven's descriptions of the writings of Abraham and Isaac as a long scroll of manuscript suggest that the horror document was the longer of the two scrolls in Joseph's possession. However, it should also be recognized that with no congruous reference available to form an impression, the word long to Charlotte likely meant anything longer than the paper on which she wrote to her mother. And that's what Gerardo said earlier. It's like if I took a group of kids and they didn't understand like the sizes of pages and I gave them legal size paper to do a project on, and you went home and you said, hey, what kind of paper did you use? They'd say, well, I used a really long piece of paper because to them it's longer than what you're used to. And so to what Gerardo said earlier, you know, one and a half foot or two foot piece of paper is going to look pretty long. And so when you tell someone about it, you're going to say, oh yeah, they pulled out these really long pieces of paper. It doesn't mean that it's a 20 foot roll that goes across two rooms. And that is where from an apologetic standpoint, you're going to use these little words to try to just drive right through it and say, see, it's super long. But in reality it doesn't actually show anything outside the fact that it's longer than the standard piece of paper.

John Dehlin 1:17:04 Right, right.

Gerardo Sumano 1:17:06 Okay.

John Dehlin 1:17:07 Gerardo, you want to add anything to that?

Gerardo Sumano 1:17:08 Yeah, no, just, just. I agree. Like whenever John. Because John and Jungi and Kerry Mulchin love these quotes about mentioning long scrolls. Some of them are questionable. And I mean, at the end of the day, what long would mean anything longer than the papers that they were usually are used to seeing. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:17:35 Like, you know, if you buy a pair of shorts at the store and some of them go above your knee and some may go like, you know, wear like basketball shorts, they might go a couple inches below your knee. You're gonna say, you might say, hey, I Bought a pair of long shorts, I go play basketball. And then John Gee would say, oh, that must mean that the shorts were 20ft long and we're dragging behind you. They're trying to make something out of a reference that is completely not demanding that kind of inference. And it just shows that, like I said, these are the ways that you find these little words to attach to, to say, see, this could work. And it just, it just doesn't. And I don't know how else to say it. And I, I feel like if you're a believer watching this, you might be looking at me, rolling your eyes and going, every time we talk about this, you just shut it down. But it's just because there's nowhere where the evidence says that this is possible. And yet they keep finding these quotes and then misrepresenting them. And there was a part in, I believe it's in your series with Dr. Rittner where John Gee, in one of his writings, takes two separate quotes, combines them and kind of melds them into one quote to make it sound a lot more helpful than it is. And it's one of those things where it's like you could see the games they're playing by taking two quotes and just basically making it into one to make it sound a lot more powerful when the two quotes by themselves don't say what he's trying to make it say. And it just shows the lengths they're going to, to make this work, even though they know from their own background and study it. Just there's no way.

John Dehlin 1:18:50 Right, okay. So that kind of puts to bed the Long or the Lost scroll theory. Now we're going to jump to the next major Book of Abraham theory, which really is where the church is today. And it's called the Catalyst Theory. And just because I like to do this, I'm going to give quick, this super, like 30 second introduction, the catalyst Theory. And I know we're going to talk about it in detail, but it's basically the argument that even though Joseph Smith said he was translating Egyptian papyrus, even though in, in the Doctrine and Covenants, Joseph Smith is referred to as a prophecy revelator and translator, he. Even though, you know, everyone understood Joseph to have claimed that he was literally translating papyrus Egyptian from the Papyrus to the Book of Abraham, in spite of all that, the, the Mormon church in 2022, you know, people like Richard Bushman or Terrell and Fiona Givens, Spencer Fluman, even Patrick Mason and others, they would say that what actually was happening was that God sent Michael Chandler to Kirtland to bring the mummies and the papyrus to Joseph so that he would then have some artifacts in his possession that would then inspire him to channel a revelation to produce the book of Abraham. And that. That it was required that he have some sort of papyrus in his hand to then just give him the. The revelatory juice and superpowers that he needed to channel this revelation direct from God, even though he told everybody that he was translating and thought he was. That's the Catalyst theory. Did I. Did I summarize that right, Gerardo and Mike, you got it right? Yeah.

The Catalyst Theory and Its Problems

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:20:49 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:20:49 Okay, fair. So I. I just wanted to give that kind of John, John description. And now Mike will turn it over you to give us the more accurate, detailed description.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:21:00 Well, this, you know, it's always good too, to have like, kind of your description, two verses of this one, because this is going to be directly from the Church's essay. And so, you know, the caleras is one the Church really needs to just focus on because it basically is defending the book of Abraham as scripture by telling us that it's more about revelation than it is about translation. And so from the essay, they say, alternatively, Joseph's study of the papyri may have led to a revelation about key events and teachings in the life of Abraham, much as he had earlier received a revelation about the life of Moses while studying the Bible. This view assumes a broader definition of the words translator and translation. According to this view, 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. And so the Church is really just trying to alleviate the problem of why the papyrus has nothing to do with Abraham while leaving this opening to promote faith that Joseph Smith wasn't just making it up. And really, at the end of the day, the Catalyst theory is just basically saying, take our word for it against the evidence. But honestly, it's really the only place that they should be putting any energy in these days because of the fact that there is no missing scroll, as we've already shown, just by looking at the manuscripts and the text of the book, Abraham itself, even though, as we're going to show, it's still full of problems.

Gerardo Sumano 1:22:33 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:22:33 And we're going to talk about this more in depth right now. I just want to Highlight for me, I've already said this, but the biggest problem for me with the Book of Abraham theory is that it goes against what Joseph Smith himself said he was doing what he told everybody he was doing, what everybody understood him to be doing. And what the introduction of the Book of Abraham actually says, which is that it's from the hand of Abraham, from. From these papyrus. All of that should just destroy this theory before we even dig into it. Am I wrong or you're right? Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:23:08 No, 100%.

John Dehlin 1:23:09 Yeah. Okay. So in spite of the fact that it's just. It's ridiculous and doesn't require any more explanation, there's additional evidence that kills the catalyst theory. So let's go ahead and jump into the next slide, which is the Book of Abraham itself kills the catalyst theory. Go ahead.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:23:25 Yeah. And we don't have to read all these verses, but just to say that the Abraham 1:12 through 14 hurt the catalyst theory in the exact same way it does to the Long scroll theory, because they are referring you to the facsimiles. And so in verse 12, it says that you may have a knowledge of this altar. I will refer you to the representation at the commencement of this record. Verse 14 says that you may have an understanding of these gods. I have given you the fashion of them at the beginning. So they're referring you to facsimile one and three. And so those verses make clear that the book Abraham is directly related to the facsimiles, which means they're directly related to the papyrus fragments that Joseph Smith has. And so to then say that God was tricking Joseph into thinking he was translating something when he wasn't, why would then God refer to facsimiles that have nothing to do with the Book of Abraham? It would be the most ridiculous thing for anyone to do. Like, if you're trying to teach somebody a revelation, you're not going to then add stuff, stuff that makes it, you know, shown, you know, completely to be a fraud. And. And so those verses kill the idea of the catalyst theory, because then you have to say, why is God basically trying to hang Joseph out to look like a fraud?

John Dehlin 1:24:31 Yeah, because the text of the Book of Abraham itself refers to the actual papyrus and claims to be substantiating Joseph's translation in the revealed scriptural text. Which means you can't squeak out of that. Right.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:24:49 You can't.

John Dehlin 1:24:50 You can't squeak out of it without. Without condemning it. Without making God a liar. Yeah, without making God a fool or a liar. And that's why I Heard years ago that that behind the scenes Tarot Givens actually recommended to the Mormon Church that they remove the Book of Abraham from the scriptural canon. Like take it out of the pearl of great price. It's that much of a problem. But as soon as you do that, then it's like, well, why not the Book of Moses? And then why not, why not the Book of Mormon and why not the Doctrine and Covenants? And all of a sudden you show the church, Mormon church leaders to be just making stuff up.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:25:27 Yeah, that's just it. You can't. I mean they'll never do it because it immediately it's the same. But we've talked about this in previous episodes. You'd have the parts of the Book of Mormon that tell us that Native Americans have dark skin because they are wicked. You've got the parts of the Book of Moses which make black skin a curse from God which is added into the Bible. I mean, you could go on and on and on. And you know, Book Abraham has a lot to, you know, a huge impact on this idea of a pre existence. I mean there you just can't remove it without just pulling the whole, you know, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. If you start, you know, taking stuff out of the can, it just would not.

Gerardo Sumano 1:25:59 And the correlation between the Book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon, like if you think about it, you know, one of the reasons why Joseph said he could translate the papyri is because he had just finished translating reformed Egyptian for the book. So if he can't translate real Egyptian, what does that tell us about reformed Egyptian? You know, and when you look at and compare the introduction of the Book of Abraham and the introduction of the Book of Mormon, they're so similar. I've got a slide here, I gotta show it. But like the introduction of the Book of Abraham tells us that it's translated from the papyrus ancient rectors 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.

John Dehlin 1:26:50 Now has the church changed that?

Gerardo Sumano 1:26:51 Oh, and then if we look at the Book of Mormon, like it's basically very similar introduction, an account written by the hand of Mormon upon plates. So instead of up on papyrus, is up on plates and taken from the place of Nephi, translated by Joseph Smith. So it's basically the same wording. Yeah, we just have a different book. So it's just very problematic when you try, you know, when you go from. If the Book of Abraham was a wrong translation and we gotta get rid of it. What does that tell us about the Book of Mormon?

John Dehlin 1:27:25 And it's worth, it's worth injecting that, that Robert Rittner, the, you know, the world's expert on Egyptology, may rest in peace. You know, we asked him, is there any such thing as reformed Egyptian? And he said, no, that doesn't exist. That's a made up thing.

Gerardo Sumano 1:27:41 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:27:41 And why did, why did Joseph make up reformed Egyptian? Because he had to claim that the Book of Mormon plates and the characters from the plates were a language that no one could possibly, possibly know or translate so that he could never be revealed as a fraud. So he could have chose Hebrew. Right. He could have chose Greek, could have chose Mayan. Right. But he had to invent a fake language so he could never be uncovered as a fraud. And we have Robert Ritter saying reformed Egyptian isn't a thing. It's. It's a church's burden to disprove Robert Rittner, not the other way around. Right?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:28:23 Yeah. And if you look at the. We talked about that in the translation episode, the reformed Egyptian. If you, if you look at the characters, it's just Joseph Smith taking the English Alphabet, English letters, I guess Latin, and just turning them around. I mean, you can, we showed it back then. You can make every single letter and number in our Alphabet into reformed Egyptian by just twisting it around. So the idea that people came here and they would have spoken, they would have used Hebrew.

Gerardo Sumano 1:28:47 Right.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:28:48 When they came here, then they switched to Egyptian somehow. It doesn't even make sense. And yes, the reason they didn't write in Hebrew on the plates is because if they had done that, you would not need somebody to claim they were the only ones who could translate it. But at the time, there was a huge fascination with Egyptians, you know, all over the world, Egyptian stuff. And Joseph knew nobody could basically tell him he was wrong. And I believe that's the case with the Book of Abraham because he did not know the Rosetta Stone was cracked at this point. So when he does this, he probably feels pretty confident that, you know, he can use this as a vehicle to, to basically canonize his ideas on the priesthood idea, you know, which book Abraham is heavily about the priesthood. And so he uses this as a vehicle for his theology. The problem is, of course, now we know that what he's doing is not actually ancient. And the next episode will go into the actual text, which tell you without even looking at the translation, you can look at the Book of Abraham and go, this is a 19th century writing, just like we did with the Book of Mormon. So the translation is obviously the obvious problem, but the text doesn't make it any better.

John Dehlin 1:29:48 Really quickly, two things. One is one of the most damning things about the Book of Mormon is that if we had a major civilization with hundreds of thousands or millions of warriors killing each other on mountaintops that all knew and, and read and spoke, quote, reformed Egyptian or even Hebrew, then there would be artifacts or remnants of those languages in Aztec and Mayan and Incan civilizations. And there's none. And, and that's, that's a definitely. If you care about science and evidence and linguistics, that's a smoking gun in and of itself. The only other thing I just, I either I've never got a good answer for this or I keep forgetting the answer, but I still don't understand why Joseph Jidn didn't just claim that the, the golden plates were written in Egyptian. Because if he, if he knew that nobody could translate Egyptian hieroglyphics, why did he go to the trouble of adding reformed to it? Because, because clearly he didn't think people could read and understand Egyptian. Why the need to take it even one step further and call it reformed Egyptian? Do we have an answer for that? Do I just keep forgetting it or is no one explained that?

Gerardo Sumano 1:30:59 I don't think I haven't heard an explanation. But he had to invent the characters, right? So like, at some point someone could have brought real Egyptian characters and say, oh, these are not Egyptian.

John Dehlin 1:31:11 Maybe he hadn't seen right enough real Egyptian characters, right. To be able to create them. Okay, that makes sense.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:31:23 Reformed Egyptian was a way to further condense the amount of material you could get per character. But I don't. I think Gerardo's is actually a better example because if you said, like, if I said, hey, I just got this really cool set of ancient records that were written in, you know, ancient Hebrew, and I don't know the Hebrew characters, it would look really, it would look horrible.

Gerardo Sumano 1:31:41 Because if you.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:31:42 Sorry.

Gerardo Sumano 1:31:43 Because if you look at what he's doing in the Book of Abraham when he's inventing characters on the sections that we're missing, he's grabbing characters that already exist and like flipping them or, you know, using the characters that already exist, exist and modifying them a little bit to create new invented characters. But because he has, you know, he has a lot of examples on where to grab from. But he didn't. He didn't. For the Book of Mormon, that makes total sense.

John Dehlin 1:32:06 Actually. All right, well, let's jump to the next slide, which is the Catalyst Theory against the actual source material.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:32:13 Yeah. And this is the same image we showed earlier for the Long scroll idea, which is just. It's just a show that the Book of Abraham is telling you to look at facsimile 1 to understand the story that's being told. And they're telling you that the characters that are being translated are right next to the facsimile. So, again, if, you know, if God is just giving Joseph Smith a revelation, why is he then going out of his way to then point readers or something? That actually would show you that this is the source material. It's one of those things where, like I said, this is a problem for the Lost scroll idea. It's also a problem for the Catalyst here, because if the Catalyst Theory were more feasible, I don't think you'd have so many things pointing directly to the scroll as the source of the translation.

John Dehlin 1:32:57 Yeah, okay. All right, let's go to the next slide, which is. Let's look again against the source material of the Book of Abraham.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:33:07 Yep. And so these are two different pictures of the manuscript from earlier. Maybe they're the same ones, actually, I can't remember. But it's just. I think these are the. A different copy of the manuscript, but it's just showing that Joseph Smith is pulling these characters. He's pulling them sequentially. The second image, if you're listening it, show. The first image shows him pulling from three sets of characters on the top line. The second image shows him. Shows him pulling from three different. Four different groups of characters on the second line of the papyrus. And so it just shows that we could see exactly where they're translating from. And so the only way to make the Catalyst Theory work, if you want to approach it this way, is to say that God is literally tricking Joseph into thinking these characters are specifically lined up with certain verses. And I think that just really stretches the bounds of reality because of the fact that, you know, as I said earlier, why would God set Joseph Smith up to look like a fraud? If God truly wants to grow his church to save us, why is he making the founding prophet look like a complete fraud? It. You cannot reconcile this problem with a God that actually wants to save everybody.

John Dehlin 1:34:14 And the thing that people don't understand is that Joseph's early credibility was rooted in his claim of having special powers like it started. And that's why, again, this LDS discussion series builds in really important ways. It starts with him claiming to be Able to find buried treasure using a stone and a hat. That makes Joe. And claiming to have magic artifacts. Let's not forget that. So, like, word spreads through New York and New England. Whoa. There's this dude with special powers, with special artifacts that are magic who can do powerful magic things. Once that becomes a, you know, once he starts getting put in jail and his livelihood is threatened and his reputation starts to smear, he simply, he kind of like extends that and says, well, I'm still magical. I'm still magically powerful. I still have magical artifacts. I'll call him a Urim and Thummim now. And instead of taking people on illegal treasure digs where we never actually find any treasure. Well, I'm going to create. I'm going to. I'm going to produce. I'm going to use my magic and my magic artifacts to do something no one else can do, which is translate ancient languages that are unknown. And so it's an extension of his claim to have special powers to special artifacts to produce a book that then he mixes with Christianity as a way to say, I'm going to now become a religious genius and produce more scripture. We've got the Bible, but it's not solving enough theological problems. There are all these questions, there are all these sects. So I'm going to produce more scripture that helps to resolve. I'm going to claim to produce more scripture through translation, through special power, so that I can resolve all these disputes and then claim to be a modern Moses, a modern Abraham, a modern David or Peter or whatever. That's the whole. I don't want to call it a conversation. That's the whole game that Joseph Smith was playing. So you've got to remember that, that, that, you know, that's where his early power drew from. If he's actually not having special powers and actually not using special artifacts to do exactly what he says he does, well, then it's a bait and switch. Then all these people are following him and believing in him and joining when really he's just. I don't want to swear, but he's just making stuff up, right? Yeah, just making stuff up. That's a totally different proposition. If he's just in 1830, whatever, just making stuff up, doing what, what we call fan fiction kind of Bible fan fiction and just is. Is literally no different than like somebody that takes a, you know, like a J.K. rowling Harry Potter sort of series and creates a new Harry Potter book in the Harry Potter universe, you know, using some of the same names. That were in J.K. rowling series. That's the equivalent of what he did, which is a lot less special than if he's using special powers to translate unknown ancient languages. Right.

Gerardo Sumano 1:37:40 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:37:41 I hope that rant was worthwhile.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:37:44 No, I mean, that's why when. When you on Twitter, you'll get people that reply all the time and they'll say, oh, my goodness, he got so many hits in the book. Abraham. And I always go, what do the characters in Facsimile three say? Because that's what Joseph Smith is making a direct claim. Nobody can contend that those characters were lost because they're printed with the Book of Abraham. So if those are wrong, then Joseph Smith's claim that those were written by the hand of Abraham, that's false. When Joseph claims he's translating them, that's false. And so that's why the Catalyst theory falls away from that. But as John said, all of a sudden, you're just completely changing the rules of the game here. Joseph Smith claimed to be able to have powers to translate this papyri, and he didn't do it. And so now we say, well, he did do it or he didn't do it. He wasn't trying to do it. He was just getting revelation. He just didn't realize it. And I think that just shows that the church realizes that they have no leg to stand on. And so you just. You go to something that you can't falsify because you're putting it out there in an area that's indistinguishable from any kind of fraud, and it really diminishes what Joseph Smith claimed he was doing in the 1830s. And at that point, then you got to go, well, if Joseph Smith didn't know what he was doing there, why are we supposed to believe other stuff? And as we've been doing in these episodes, it all ties together. These are all problems that tie together throughout all of this stuff.

John Dehlin 1:38:55 Yeah. So they basically want to say, he wasn't a fraud, he was a fool. Right.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:38:59 He just didn't know any better.

John Dehlin 1:39:00 He thought he was doing something he wasn't actually doing. Is that an improvement? Like, I don't know that that's an improvement. Were you going to show something, Heroda? Are you going to show a slide?

Gerardo Sumano 1:39:11 Well, I was just thinking about. Well, it's not just the papyri, you know, it's not just the translation of the Book of Abraham. He was naming the mummies. He was saying, this is Princess Katuman, this is King Oneidas. This is like, this. The papyri came from Katumin, who is a descendant from Cain, and all this. So, like, he was creating this whole story that's obviously not real because we know that the actual mummy, who the papyri was from was Priest Whore. So, you know, like, the catalyst theory has to extend to all this, like, story and things that don't make a lot of sense. It's not all spiritual and, you know, like, heaven stuff. Like, the church is trying to make it sound.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:39:58 Yeah, yeah. And that's the problem. Like, all of these things, you then have to believe God. Again, I've said this in previous episodes, but the Mormon framing of God is a really bad manager, if you want to believe this, because the Mormon version of God is literally going to make a lot of people not want to join the church or leave the church, because the Mormon version of God is going to make his founding prophet look like. Like he didn't know what he was doing. So if you're a manager and you're trying to grow your church, if you're God and you want to save everybody, why in the world would you take your first prophet and basically hang him out there to look like an absolute fraud by. By proclaiming he's translating documents? It makes no sense. And so like you said earlier, John, like, the church is now giving the catalyst here, but then you take a step back, like, is that really any better? Because now we don't know if we can trust any prophet of this church that they actually are saying what's coming from God or what they think is coming from God, you know, and it just. You're opening up this door to the fact that this is so messy if you want to make it work and it just can't all reconcile back together. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:40:58 Okay.

Gerardo Sumano 1:40:59 Yeah.

How Apologists Frame the Translation Problem

John Dehlin 1:40:59 All right, well, let's go to how Kerry Molstein frames this problem. Do you want to set this up or just play it?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:41:07 Yeah, I just want to just really quickly state that our last few episodes, or. Sorry, last few slides, have been showing the manuscript with the characters and showing how Joseph is translating directly from the characters. So if you're watching this, I want you to pay attention to the image that Carrie Molstein is going to use in this clip. It's very important. If you're listening, I'll explain it after the clip.

John Dehlin 1:41:25 Okay. All right, let's roll the tape.

Gerardo Sumano 1:41:27 And this first assumption is one of the ones that causes people the most problem. Most of the Angst over the Book of Abraham comes from this first assumption. And that is an assumption assumption about the source of the Book of Abraham. As people ask what was the source of the Book of Abraham? There was an immediate assumption made that it was the text that was next to facsimile one, because you can see on the screen that one of the fragments of papyri that survived is the original that facsimile one was made from, and there are columns of text adjacent to it. Now, this was a reasonable assumption that Joseph Smith would be translating from the text adjacent to it. And I want to be clear, it's not making assumptions that it's problematic. We have to make assumptions if we're going to move forward in furthering our knowledge. We just have to test those assumptions. And that's where the process failed. Early on, most people made the assumption that Joseph Smith was translating the text next to facsimile one and didn't ever bother to test it. And so many Latter Day Saints were very excited. They thought, good, now that we can translate Egyptian, we can prove Joseph Smith was a prophet. Other people who were critics of the church were sure they could prove Joseph Smith was not a prophet. We translate the text next to facsimile one and it turns out to be a fairly common Egyptian funerary document called the Book of Breathings. And because everyone had made the assumption that he was translating from the text adjacent to it, an argument that we call an argument of propinquity, which is not typically seen as a wonderful argument. But in any case, this seemed like game over to many people.

John Dehlin 1:43:11 Man Mike and Gerardo are both like, shaking their heads and laughing. Gerardo, I'll let you go first. And then Mike.

Gerardo Sumano 1:43:18 Yeah, I mean, the reason he holds this position is he. Because he dismisses the translation documents, right? So the documents that have the character on the left and the translation on the right, he wants to say that was not Joseph Smith. That was the scribes, you know, decorating the margins on the on of the text, you know, or separating paragraphs by just grabbing random characters. And he doesn't want to admit that they were saying that the paragraph corresponded to the translation of the character itself. So he wants to say, well, because that's not real, because the translation documents are not reliable. We really don't know where the translation from the Book of Abraham came from. What are the characters that correspond to the Book of Abraham. And I mean, all the evidence points out that the translation documents we have, Joseph was actively engaged in that. And, you know, they show us over and over and over again in the Alphabet and grammar and all the translation documents they produce, that they were grabbing the characters, like, from the left of the effectsimally number one.

John Dehlin 1:44:34 Right. And, Mike, you've got a slide that takes us right into that.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:44:37 Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:44:38 Do you want to jump into it?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:44:39 Yeah. So I just want to point out that's why I told people, anyone watching this, to pay attention to the image she shows. Because if you look at the image on the screen, this has got facsimile one. This is the image we've shown a couple times in this episode. And then on the left are the characters he translated from. So Karen Milstein is going to spend that entire clip only showing you facsimile one and the characters on the right to tell us that we were making a bad assumption in thinking he was translating the characters to the right of facsimile 1 while not putting on the screen the characters on the left that we do know he translated from. It is the most dishonest framing you're going to see because he's not showing you the full picture. He's intentionally showing you the wrong side of the facsimile because he knows that the right side was not translated in the Book of Abraham manuscripts. So he's showing you the wrong side on purpose to say if you thought he was translating these characters, you made a bad assumption, and he's not giving you the full information. Like it is so badly dishonest to show the image that way and then to blame people who made the assumption he was actually translating from the papyrus fragment. I came and frayed it. And then, you know, he keeps saying, well, we need to have assumptions, but we can't make wrong assumptions. Do you know who's making the assumption that Joseph Smith is translating the characters next to facsimile one? It's the Book of Abraham. Like Cary Mohlstein is doing this talk affair, and he's making it sound like it's critics of the Church making the assumption. The Book of Abraham tells us they are translating next to facsimile one. And we can show from the fragment that we have that the Church has in their possession and the manuscripts that he's translating from the characters just to the left of it. So not only is he completely misleading on who's making the assumption because it's written in the book Abraham, but he's not showing the audience the full image because he doesn't want them to see. On the left side is where he's actually pulling from it is the most dishonest bait and switch you're ever going to see. To show the wrong side of the image and then to kind of like, you know, blame the people who read the Book of Abraham and said, oh, he's translating next to the facsimile. It's just, it's, it's incredible to me.

John Dehlin 1:46:38 Yeah, it's, it's both creating plausible doubt, creating plausible deniability out of nothing, misinforming, withholding information. And then what, what, what is called in the cult literature blame reversal. You're blaming the victims when, when this is, you know, Joseph Smith himself said what he was doing. The text of the Book of Abraham itself says, you know, what's going on here. So, yeah, it is really detestable and it's why Guillen Molstein, you know, invokes such past passion and nibbly, invokes such passionate anger, you know, from people like Rittner and RFM and you know, Brett Metcalf and Dan Vogel and all the others. Because it really is their temple, you know, Kerry Mohlstein and John Gee, their temple recommends should be taken away for, for deception and dishonesty because they know what they're doing. Well, yeah, they're too smart. They're, they're again, they're trading on their, their backgrounds as alleged scholars to intentionally deceive and mislead people.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:47:50 Yeah, that he would not have had that image without intentionally wanting to keep the right side in and the left side out. Because every image I've seen when you read about the book Abraham focuses on the left side of the facsimile because that's where we know the characters are coming from. So for him to intentionally leave that out just tells you that he doesn't want people to see it. It would be like, you know, you've got a group photo and let's just say I'm trying to think of like a completely non controversial personality, say Adam Sandler. And you're like, yeah, a lot of people assumed Adam Sandler was there, but if you look at this photo, he wasn't. And then you find out later that the presenter just cropped out the left side where Adam Sandler was standing there giving, you know, thumbs up. It's just, it's, it's so dishonest because he knows what these source materials look like. So to do that image tells you that he's trying to withhold information. And as you said, the church's own definition of honesty in their manual tells you that leaving out information Is. Is not being honest, and he is doing that. And it's just. It's so frustrating to see that combined with blaming people for making it an assumption that's written into the Book of Abraham. It's just crazy to me.

John Dehlin 1:48:50 Yeah. All right, so let's go to your next slide, which is that the cow's theory makes a trickster God look like a foolish God.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:48:58 Yeah. And so this I've kind of already highlighted on, so we don't really need to harp on this. But it's just the manuscript images show Joseph Smith is translating the symbols next to facsimile one, which we've talked about a lot. And that's explicitly where they're pointing the reader to look to from the Book of Abraham. And so it eliminates the long lost scroll, because we could see that we have the source material, at least for that early part of the book, Abraham. It also eliminates the Catalyst Theory, because why in the world would God want to make Joseph Smith look like a fraud by referring the readers to something that doesn't match what the text says? And so, just to say, if Joseph was studying the Egyptian words and characters led to an inspired revelation or vision of the story of Abraham, why would that vision also lead Joseph Smith to direct the reader to something completely unrelated to the actual story? You know, and again, you don't see the church mention this in their essay. And you can understand why they don't want to do that, because the entire theory that they're putting forth in these essays falls apart if they were to put up the image of the source material next to the manuscripts. And so just to kind of finish that, if you look at facsimile one, which we've shown a lot, you could see the portions that Joseph Smith filled in the lacuna, and they don't match what Egyptologists know should be there. And so if Joseph Smith was truly receiving a revelation of this story, wouldn't he then be given the correct information and inspiration from God to fill in the lacuna correctly? We showed that last episode. He got the lacuna in facsimile one. Wrong. He improperly filled in facsimile two. And so it just shows that if the Catalyst Theory was. Was real, why is Joseph filling in with improper characters? It just wouldn't make any sense.

Gerardo Sumano 1:50:31 Yeah, I have a good image of that here. So, again, this is what you were talking about, the facsimile number one, and then the left are the characters where they're grabbing from. And the sections that were missing, they were Just inventing characters. And this is in the order they're put in the translation documents. So that's why we know they were grabbing them. They were grabbing the characters in order and going one by one, translating paragraph by paragraph.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:51:02 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:51:03 Yep.

John Dehlin 1:51:03 That's good.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:51:03 It's a good way to look at it. Yeah.

John Dehlin 1:51:06 And then I, I just had the thought to extend the trickster God theory just a little bit further in. In addition to all the absurdities that you highlighted, Mike, you know, in 2022, the. The Trickster God continues his tricks by having half of his Egyptian scholars within the modern Mormon Church support one theory that is non credible and then an entire another church sponsored, church funded set of Egyptologists and scholars who, who agree with me. You know, Mormon Voldemort and Gerardo and Dan Vogel and Brett Metcalf, people that have literally been excommunicated for telling the truth based on evidence and science for decades now. We're supposed to believe that the church itself is funding competing theories about the Book of Abraham, paying your tithing dollars at work to pay for competing irreconcilable theories on the Book of Abraham and that God would allow that to happen in his one true church, that God would use sacred tithing dollars to fund competing irreconcilable opposite theories around the Book of Abraham and somehow we're supposed to make sense of that as members of the church. That's a, you know, if God speaks to his prophets, he should just say, hey, Russell M. Nelson, shut down those, those losers guy and Molstein they're making, they're causing people to leave the church. Shut those fools down. Stop using precious tithing money to allow those fools to mislead people and to deceive people. And let's just get the whole church on the same page regarding what the true argument is. That's what a honest, straightforward God would do in my opinion, if God were leading his one true church with a prophet that's got the bat phone directly to God. And maybe that's unreasonable, but that's. If God's any other way. I'm not sure that's a God I want to follow. Follow and base my life on. That's me, Gerardo.

Gerardo Sumano 1:53:14 I agree.

John Dehlin 1:53:15 Yeah. You agree?

Gerardo Sumano 1:53:16 Yep.

John Dehlin 1:53:17 Okay. All right.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:53:18 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:53:19 So,

John Dehlin 1:53:21 so let's go ahead and go to the next slide, which is John Gee explaining. So John Gee is attacking the theory that, that Richard Bushman and Taro Givens in the entire Joseph Smith Papers project, along with Patrick Mason and Spencer Fluman here, we're going to have church funded scholar John Gee attack a theory that actually is the prevailing theory. That's in, that's in the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham. Right?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:53:51 Well, yeah, I mean it's just to me it's funny just because this is John Gee basically going directly after Kerry Mohlstein because I mean he's not personally but Kerry Mohlstein as everyone associates with the Catalyst Theory.

Gerardo Sumano 1:54:00 John Gear Givens scroll, do you mean Terrell Givens or.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:54:04 No, Kerry Mohlstein is the one that really pushes the Catalyst theory more so and so John G. I mean obviously the progressive scholars within Mormonism all go Catalyst Theory because they can see what we've shown. It doesn't work. And like Richard Bushman literally calls the Book of Abraham pseudepigrapha. So Richard Bushman in a presentation said Joseph Smith was engaging in pseudepigrapha with the Book of Abraham, meaning that he's writing in the name of someone else in order to give it credibility. So there's no doubt there. But yeah, I mean I think this is funny just because what John said. You've got two Egyptologists in the church. One is long story scroll, one is Catalyst and here the long scroll proponent is going to tell you why the other person's theory doesn't make sense.

John Dehlin 1:54:45 So you're about to hear the Mormon Church attack Excel attack itself.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:54:49 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 1:54:49 In a.

John Dehlin 1:54:49 Regarding Abraham scholarship. All right, so let's hear John G.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:55:01 I'm, I'm open to the, the Catalyst theory. I considered it seriously for years. I haven't considered it seriously in years because there's not enough evidence for it. And there's more evidence to indicate that Joseph Smith. So one of the pieces of evidence besides the statement that Joseph Smith makes when he introduces the Book of Abraham, that this is records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt. But there's also one of the last discourses he made in Nauvoo quotes language from the Book of Abraham. And Joseph Smith said that he got that it says it's Abraham's reasoning and says that he learned it from just translating a papyrus that's in his house.

John Dehlin 1:56:03 I mean this is where I'm going to actually side with Guillenmolstein because he's right. The chemist theory is, is made out of nothing and it makes, it makes again Joseph and God look like either frauds or tricksters. And all the evidence shows that, that what Joseph Smith claimed was that he was translating Egyptian. So in that sense Guy and Mosttein are actually right that there's no evidence for the Catalyst Theory other than it being an argument made out of desperation that respects scholars, Egyptian scholarship and science that then makes up a weird theory out of whole cloth to try and rescue Joseph Smith and. Or God from being either frauds or tricksters. So in that sense, Guy and Molstein, I actually side with them. You like them on this part? Just on this part. Right.

Gerardo Sumano 1:57:00 I think it's interesting that he was quoting the introduction of the book of Abraham and he started saying these are documents that came to us from the catacombs of Egypt. But then he forgets to quote also that it was supposed to be written by Abraham on his own hand up of Pyra. He forgot that part.

John Dehlin 1:57:26 Right. Mike, anything you want to add to that?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:57:28 No, I guess I just, I think it's true because that's, that's the problem is once you understand the Catalyst theory goes against how Joseph Smith was portraying it, then you can't. You have to abandon it. And then once you abandon it, you have to find something. Which is why now we just go, well, there must be some lost scroll ahead. You know, as Gerardo said, that was with mummies that were done a thousand years later, but they got this thousand year earlier scroll attached to it. You know, it's just right, no matter which way you go, it's going to work. But yeah, I, I agree with, with John Gee, as far as why the Catalyst series just doesn't work and just

John Dehlin 1:58:00 to kind of provide more evidence for. For this is against the Catalyst Theory basically is just you, you've got like what, 10 quotes of Joseph Smith writing that it was an explicit translation. Do you want to take us through that, Mike?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:58:16 Yeah. And so we did that. We. I had the slide in the last episode too, so we don't need to read them all. But there's all these different data points from Joseph Smith's journals where he's talking about translating the book of Abraham. And so you've got. In July of 1835, there's two entries about him translating the characters or hieroglyphics. October and November of 1835. We've got more where he's talking about translating the Egyptian records.

John Dehlin 1:58:39 These are quotes, right?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:58:41 These are from the journals where he is having his scribes write down for him what he did that day.

John Dehlin 1:58:47 So he's writing like I, you know, I commence the translation of some of the characters, right?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 1:58:53 Yeah. And I think, I think in the history of the Church, he. It was written, I think originally the journals were written in third person. And then when they did the history of the church, they changed it to first person. So, like, say, Warren Parish was his scribe. He might write, you know, President Smith spent the afternoon recommencing translation from the ancient records. And then when they did it for the history, they changed it to first person. But it's the same thing. It's just depending how you want to frame it. And then it just shows all the way. In 1842, commenced translating from the Book of Abraham. In the afternoon continued. The translation of the Book of Abraham, which we talked about last episode, is important because one of the issues for the gale was that it all had to have been written in 1835, or else they lose that reverse engineering argument. You know, it just shows Joseph Smith believed he was translating, and it gives you the time frame. That's why Brian Hoglid agrees with Dan Vogel about when the first part was written in 1835. The rest of it was in 1842. And to then fall into the catalyst theory means you have to basically argue that everything Joseph believed he was doing is wrong. You have to go. It's just. It goes against everything. And it just. It really shows that once to me, it me once you do the catalyst theory, I mean, they're going that way with the Book of Mormon, too, by calling it. You know, some of the leaders are starting to call it his grandest revelation. Well, it's because with the Book of Mormon too, we have all of the textual problems that tell you it's not what it claims to be. And it's just how many times you have to have somebody redefine what Joseph himself was saying he was doing before you take a step back and go, oh, yeah, he had no idea what he was doing. To me, that's what it's just like, how many red flags do you need before you go, oh, this, you know, these, these. You cannot wish these away.

John Dehlin 2:00:26 Yeah, right.

Gerardo Sumano 2:00:27 And again, it's the. The problem is that it's not just the Book of Abraham. I think the catalyst theory would make a lot more. A little bit more sense to me if Joseph had sat down and started dictating the Book of Abraham. What we have right now, the reality is that he sat down for months and months and months and was dictating just random stuff, you know, like things that are not published by the church today other than in the Joseph Smith papers project. But there's a whole thing about the astronomy of the Egyptians that he translated. And again, the story of Princess Katuman and all this stuff that he was translating had nothing to do with the Book of Abraham, but that he was using to show his powers that he could actually translate Egyptian. It just. That all falls apart. If you are trying to say that this was all for spiritual purposes. God was just revealing this little book of Abraham here.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:01:29 Yeah.

Gerardo Sumano 2:01:29 Doesn't make sense.

John Dehlin 2:01:30 It kind of begs the question, though, you know, did Joseph think he was actually translating? You know, so the one option is he was knowingly, intentionally deceiving everyone around him. But that's a kind of an elaborate con because he's sitting there, you know, creating the grammar and Alphabet. He's. He's, you know, creating what becomes the, what, Abraham Egyptian papers or whatever. And he's got all these dudes around him watching him claim to be translating. So either he was deluded and thought he was translating, or it was an elaborate con. Do you guys have an opinion about which it might have been?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:02:09 No, I mean, it sounds kind of weird to say. I just. To me, that doesn't matter because he still didn't get it right. So it's kind of like, you know, because you have a lot of people. I think if you look through history, I mean, even like, look at something like the Waco series or Warren Jeffs, I think on some level they believe that they have this divine gift, but we obviously know they did not. And so maybe he did start to believe in himself a little too much. I don't know. But I guess to me, it's like the finished product tells you it's not ancient, it's not from. You know, like I said, our next episode will go into the text of it. Even the text of it. You can see all sorts of anachronisms and biblical scholarship errors. So, I mean, even the text doesn't really line up with it being historical in any way either. So I guess to me, it doesn't matter. Although I guess it does. It obviously is important to Joseph Smith's character as to whether or not he knew he was deceiving people or not. But I guess from. From the perspective of, like, is it real? I guess it doesn't matter to me.

Facsimile Three as the Strongest Evidence

John Dehlin 2:03:02 Got it. Okay, well, let's now jump to the next slide, which is facts. Only three creates the biggest smoking gun for Joseph Smith.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:03:10 Yeah, and so we've hit on this a few times now. But again, this is like, to me, facsimile 3 is the most important part of the Book of Abraham. Because no matter what argument you want to make, if you want to say there's a Missing scroll or a chaos theory, this kills it. And so if there was a missing scroll, facsimile 3 tells us it doesn't even matter because Joseph Smith could not translate Egyptian characters. If you're looking at this on video, you obviously could see it. If you're listening on Facsimile three, there are different figures that Joseph Smith gives explanations for. And he literally will say, king, Pharaoh, whose name is given in the characters above his head. And so he's directly translating characters on facsimile 3. Nobody can argue those are missing. Nobody can argue that they're incorrect. So Joseph Smith is translating things that they copied down perfectly. He got them wrong. And so if there was a missing scroll, like I said earlier, it wouldn't matter because we know he can't translate Egyptian. And then if you're going to go with the papyrus being a catalyst, why is God giving Joseph Smith incorrect explanations of these figures when they would have no relevance to the story, that God would have just skipped it and said, or just not given any revelation? There's no reason to give revelation for something that would. Would show you to be making it up.

John Dehlin 2:04:18 Yeah, that's pretty clear. And we talked about that last episode, right?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:04:23 Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin 2:04:24 All right, so next slide is. Look at how Joseph Smith describes. Describes the translation process.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:04:30 Yeah, and this is a quote that I think is actually important to. Kind of a lot of times we'll say, well, translation doesn't mean translation. You know, that's a hat tip to Brother Jake. If you've never seen his YouTube channel, he does a video about that with the book Abraham. And so they'll say, translation doesn't mean translation. But look at how Joseph Smith describes the process of translating the title page of the Book of Mormon. He says, I wish to mention here that the title page of the Book of Mormon is a literal translation taken from the very last leaf on the left hand side of the collection or Book of Plates, which contain the record which has been translated, the language of the whole, running the same as all Hebrew writing in general. And that said title page is not by any means a modern composition, either of mine or of any other man who has lived or does live in this generation. Therefore, in order to correct an error which generally exists concerning it, I give below that the part of the title page of the English version of the Book of Mormon which is a genuine and literal translation of the title page of the original Book of Mormon as recorded on the plates. So I just want to make clear Joseph Smith is literally viewing translation here using the word literal as taking one language and putting it to another. And so when you say Joseph Smith meant translation differently than. Than we do today. Just read that quote. I know it's about the Book of Mormon and not the Book of Abraham, but again, that's how he views translation. And so then to say that the book Abraham Introduction, it says, you know, records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt, written by Abraham upon papyrus by his own hand. He means translation in the same sense as he does here. There's no way to get around that. And so to try to play these games of like, well, he didn't mean translation, he meant translation. I think it's just a dishonest grasping of trying to find a way out when there isn't one.

John Dehlin 2:06:14 Gerardo, why are you laughing?

Gerardo Sumano 2:06:15 Because that quote. I mean, I've heard that quote before, but I never put it into this context of apologists trying to say that, well, translation might mean something else. Let's look what the dictionary said about translation during that time and see if Joseph was meaning something else. Maybe he didn't understand what he was saying. He's using the word literal. This is a literal translation. And he says it, like, three times, and then tells you where he found it, in what plate he found it, like there. Yeah, there's no way around it.

John Dehlin 2:06:49 And sometimes. Go ahead.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:06:50 No, go. Go ahead, John.

John Dehlin 2:06:51 So, yeah, sometimes I've gotten. I've shown frustration with Richard Bushman or Terrell and Fiona Givens or Patrick Mason, and I felt bad about that. And I haven't always been able to put a pinpoint on why. Because they're good people. They're smart people. They're doing good things. But it's because this sort of stuff shows that they should know better. And so it is. It is. It is beyond any reasonable, credible, you know, argument or doubt to. To argue for the Catalyst Theory. I think any reasonable, credible, honest person will just say, you know what, Joe, this is a. This is an error. This is a miss. We need to take the Book of Abraham out, and we need to admit that Joseph got it wrong and the church got it wrong. But to try and offer again, Bushman using his Harvard credentials, Patrick Mason using his endowed chair, Enter Arrington chair. You know, pick any of them. They're good people. They're smart people. They're doing good work. But to. To then prop up the Catalyst Theory as their modern response to all these problems, it does feel irresponsible to me. Me. They. They should be able to. They know, all the stuff that we're laying out today. And they should know that it's beyond any credible, you know, shadow of a doubt that, that this is just a bad, dishonest argument. I don't know.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:08:19 Yeah, yeah, I agree.

John Dehlin 2:08:21 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:08:23 I was just gonna say, you know, we, we talk in this, these, all of these episodes about how they tie together this quote about the Book of Mormon. You know, again, we, we did a bunch of episodes on the Book of Mormon translation and I talked about how a lot of scholars like you said Terrell Givens is bricolage, right? Joseph Smith takes these ideas around him, combines it with the revelation of the Book of Mormon. That's why he's a co author. Michael Ash has written a book which basically calls Joseph Smith a co author to the Book of Mormon. But this quote is telling you that Joseph Smith, if you had said that to him while he was alive, he would have taken you out and beat the crap out of you. Because he is making clear that nobody could possibly think Joseph Smith had any input whatsoever on even the title page of the Book of Mortal Mormon. And yet you want us to believe that Joseph Smith was a co author to the Book of Mormon and that the Book of Abraham was not a translation, but just Joseph getting a stream of consciousness. And I just. You have these quotes. Everyone, like you said, John, everyone has access to these quotes. Joseph Smith is in no way leaving room open for him being the author of these things or for him, you know, giving his own 19th century input. He's not, he's closing the door on that in every possible way in this quote. So then say, yeah, it just, it boggles my mind that people keep going to it, but it's because most people don't know where these quotes are. And so they're hoping you don't pop open the hood and look at the engine and start seeing all the parts. It's, you know, and this is why

John Dehlin 2:09:37 so many people in the modern era are leaving the Mormon Church. It's not necessarily because Joseph Smith goofed up, you know, with this non translation. It's because they feel like they're being deceived by the church itself. Because all these dudes are on the church payroll in one way or another, or they're making money off the church and people are just saying the church is deceiving us. Right. Yeah, because. Because technically, as much as I love someone like Patrick Mason, he's. He has to answer the temple recommend question. Are you being honest in your dealings with your fellow men? And I'm not saying he's intentionally being dishonest, but the evidence shows that the, and that the, that the Catalyst theory is a dishonest argument. And it's obvious to everyone and it should be obvious to these people. So in essence, through these, these quote, apologist scholars, the church is deceiving people, you know, and that's why people, that's why people are leaving in droves. You know, I think many people, many people would be willing to forgive the problems, call it myth, call it metaphor, call it scripture, just don't call it a translation. You know, don't call Joseph Smith a prophet, seer and revelator and a translator. But they're not willing, they're not willing to be fully honest. The church isn't willing to be fully honest.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:11:02 Who's going to join it? Who is going to join a church when the selling point is here are all these things Joseph Smith produced. They're completely debunked by history and by evidence, but we still value them as scripture. I mean, that's the problem. Like, yeah, people leave because they find out it's not true and they find out the church wasn't being honest. And I could say that as a convert. But on the flip side, no one's joining if, if, if you were to go. If the missionaries came to my door and said, we want to talk to you about the Book of Mormon. It was written on gold plates. Joseph Smith never actually used them. Everything he's written in there has been, you know, debunked. As far as the Native Americans coming from Jerusalem, then he produced the Book of Abraham. But Egypt tells us has shown that's completely wrong, but we still value it. I mean, who's gonna. No one's joining that. And so to your point, John, yeah, people are leaving because they find out it's not true. But no one's joining if they have the whole story. And so the church is in a bad position because, you know, I'm sure they feel like they're justified in lying. But if they, if they're honest about their history, no one's joining. No one's joining this church. If, you know, you know, if the Saints book is honest about polygamy, if the Saints book, you know, I think they have a very small entry about the Book of Abraham. You know, they don't give you the details because, yeah, you're not going to join and you're certainly not going to stay.

John Dehlin 2:12:05 What were you going to add?

Gerardo Sumano 2:12:06 I was just going to say that the Catalyst Theory Makes the translate the Book of Abraham translation indistinguishable from a fraud. And I. I think this is a point that I've heard in several other places, but they're trying to come up with. They come up with a theory that you can't distinguish is this fraud or is this, you know, from God? And as soon as you can not distinguish between both of them, we're all good.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:12:33 That.

Gerardo Sumano 2:12:33 I mean, and that's not a good argument, in my opinion. If you can't distinguish it from Joseph. Lying versus telling the truth and receiving revelation. Yeah, that's a problem.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:12:49 It's certainly not a God of order, as we were told in these past episodes. I'm a God of order, not a God of confusion. And yet we've got these, you know, apologetics that are confusing, convoluted, and completely ridiculous. So, yeah, it. You cannot, like I said, you can't put all this into a box that makes sense with each other. Everything, you know, just falls apart when you look at them.

John Dehlin 2:13:08 Right.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:13:09 As we've done.

John Dehlin 2:13:09 Because what's at stake is people's eternal salvation in the long run. This decides whether or not they go to the celestial kingdom and become gods and all get to be with their family. Again, that's the celestial stakes, the temporal stakes, as we've already mentioned, 10% of your income for life, how you spend your time, your reputation, what jobs, you know, kids, family. The stakes are just super high.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:13:33 Yeah.

Apologists Expanding the Universe of Reality

John Dehlin 2:13:33 All right, so let's go to how apologists expand the universe of reality.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:13:37 Yeah. And so we're going to. We've been hitting on this a bit with the Book at Mormon before, but if you take the Book of Abraham at face value and you only look at the material we have, the manuscripts, the papyrus fragments, the timeline we talked about in the last episode, it's really clear that we have the source material, at least for that early part of the Book of Abraham. And so this leads apologists to expand kind of that universal reality, which is something that we talked about with the Book of Mormon in DNA, where they'll, you know, originally they said, oh, every Native American came from their descendants of people that came from Jerusalem. DNA says that's not true. So now the Church is like, well, the Book of Mormon is just a small community in this massive civilization. John, you actually kind of pointed to that earlier in this episode. And now with the Book of Abraham, we have to focus on missing scrolls because everything we do have tells us Joseph Smith could not translate Egyptian, or that Joseph Smith, as Gerardo just Said he's dictating a revelation that has become completely indistinguishable from outright fraud. And so they're expanding this reality to the point where you can't debunk it. But every truth claim that the church is making now, they're just saying it's irrelevant. And. And it's a really bad position for the church to be in because you're telling members, basically, all these claims we've made throughout history, they're not. They're not correct, but it's only because we haven't gone big enough. And I think that is a pretty telling sign that they don't have confidence on their own truth claims.

John Dehlin 2:14:57 Yeah. All right, well, let's jump to the next slide. And it's a video that talks about how Kerry Molstad misrepresents Abraham and the lying couch. This one gets RFM pretty riled up.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:15:11 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:15:11 And this one, just as a really quick intro to this. This is.

John Dehlin 2:15:15 Oh, this gets ridner. This got ridner riled up, as it should, because.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:15:19 Yeah, we talked about, in the last episode, Facsimile 1, and we talked about how this is not a representation that any Egyptologist would. Would even consider to be in the realm of possibility, which is to say that it's a image of human sacrifice, because facsimile 1 is an image of preparing someone for the afterlife. And so Joseph Smith is saying, notice is Abraham being sacrificed on the altar. And so Egypt, you know, the church itself, their Egyptologists are saying, well, Joseph Smith filled it in correctly because there are some papyrus fragments or recovered papyri that show that this is actually about Abraham. And so this is Kerry Muhlstein, and he is going to basically insert this as evidence. And we'll just play the clip first because it's. Yeah, there's a reason people get riled up about this.

John Dehlin 2:16:05 All right, let's roll the tape.

▶ Video Clip 1

Video Clip 1 2:16:11 Especially intriguing is a lion couch scene, roughly contemporary to the Joseph Smith papyri that mentions Abraham, the Leiden demonic papyrus,

Video Clip 1 2:16:21 which dates to about the same time frame and again from roughly the same location. It has a lion couch scene, and

Video Clip 1 2:16:28 we don't have the entire portion of

Video Clip 1 2:16:30 the papyrus left, but there is definitely

Video Clip 1 2:16:32 a lion couch scene with the name Abraham right below it. It is associated somehow with that graphic in. There is a lion couch scene. It's actually part of a love charm. And the text says it's got a picture of a man on a lion couch. And the text says, says this or Abraham upon his couch.

John Dehlin 2:16:52 Okay, so Mulstein's claiming that this lion couch somehow says Abraham. What?

Gerardo Sumano 2:17:01 Not the one. Not. Not the one that we have. Not the. The Abraham papyrus. But he's claiming that they found another lion couch from another scene that has the name that.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:17:12 That.

Gerardo Sumano 2:17:12 And he gives the translation, supposedly that's on that papa. Do you want to explain that, Mike?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:17:18 Yeah. And so basically, if you go back to that slide, Kerry Mohlstein in that video is going to say that the Leiden papyrus says Abraham upon his couch. And that is absolutely not true. It does not say that. And so what's happening here is there's this writing on the bottom of this papyrus, and I believe it's written after the papyrus was. Was. Was done. I'm not positive on that. But they write a bunch of names that are associated with different religions. It's part of a love charm to attract, you know, someone to fall in love with you. And so Abraham is mentioned in there, but he's one of a list of people. And it does not say Abraham upon his couch. And that would be really awkward given that the figure on the couch is actually a woman.

Gerardo Sumano 2:18:02 And isn't it way late, too?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:18:05 I think the writing is late, and I think it's in Greek. I believe the name Abraham is written on the Papa Papyrus in Greek. So it's just like, this is just an area where it's like, you look at that and you're like, Kerry Molstein would know that it doesn't say Abraham upon his couch. He would know that. And so to present that in a fair Mormon video, to tell members, I know better. And so you should believe when he is. I mean, these are the things that make me mad because, you know, from a critical perspective, you know, people will attack you if you misrepresent material. And I really, throughout all these episodes, I've tried to stay away from anything that's speculative. And this is one where an Egyptologist is going to outright lie about what the wording on that papyrus says. And there's no way around it. You could call it being dishonest or just being a little bit deceptive. It's just untrue. And he's stating it as fact. And like I said, it's. Apparently, it's a woman on the couch. It's not even a guy.

John Dehlin 2:18:57 And for those who want to be taken through this in detail, again, the Robert Rittner episodes, we'll. We'll talk about this in depth, you know.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:19:05 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:19:06 Because I'm sure a lot of our listeners and viewers are like, what? What line coach? What Are they talking about.

The Lion Couch Scene and Facsimile One

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:19:10 Yeah, and just, we'll just for like a 22nd thing on that facsimile one is what they call a lion couch scene where you've got someone on the, on the couch being ready, prepared for the afterlife. And so Joseph Smith filled in the missing part with a knife and there should not be a knife there. And so the church has tried to find. Because these are very common things. And so they're trying to find all these other papyrus surviving papyri that have a lion couch to try to find parallels that they could say, see, Joseph Smith might have gotten it right because there's this one that's similar. And in doing so, they're taking a lot of liberties here with what it actually, with this particular variation actually has on it. And that's why in your episodes with Dr. Rittner, he could go through it and tell you exactly what it is, exactly what it says and what it doesn't say. And it's just, it's not something that is really up for debate among anyone who's in the field, unless you're trying to promote a theology, using your scholarship to do so.

Gerardo Sumano 2:20:01 Yeah, it is written in Greek. I just looked it up on Fair Mormon's website. They admit that it's lit.

Gerardo Sumano 2:20:08 It's.

Gerardo Sumano 2:20:08 It's Greek is written in Greek.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:20:10 Yeah. Which is.

Gerardo Sumano 2:20:12 Oh, my goodness.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:20:13 Yeah. Let's just say the whole thing is a mess. And to have a video on that, to have them. It's like I said, I don't want to be like ranty here, but this is so blatantly dishonest and yet we're sitting here discussing it because there are a lot of people are going to dedicate their lives and hold, hold on to the, the rod of the book of Abraham because of, of, of videos like this, which are just, just flat out wrong.

John Dehlin 2:20:34 All right, well, let's jump to the next slide, which is the argument that maybe Joseph Smith got it right and everyone else has it wrong.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:20:41 Yep.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:20:41 And so this is just, you know, to set up, basically wrote on here. You know, this is another apologetic we get where every time Joseph Smith gets these basic truth claims wrong, such as Adam and Eve being the first humans ever in Missouri, that Native Americans came from Jerusalem, or that these scrolls are literally the writing of Abraham, the church will say, well, maybe everyone else is wrong, maybe science is wrong. What do we really know about DNA? And so Kerry Mohlstein is going to make this argument here. So we'll play that clip and then, then we'll pretty much Be starting our conclusion here.

John Dehlin 2:21:06 All right, let's roll the tape.

Gerardo Sumano 2:21:16 In assumptions that we do know. Let's take one final topic, making assumptions about the facsimiles of the Book of Abraham. And the question is, what was Joseph Smith comparing? These two people frequently want to see how Joseph Smith says or how he interprets the facsimiles to what ancient Egyptians would have said they meant. And there's a problem with, well, there are a number of problems with doing this. One is that we assume that, that we can figure out what the ancient Egyptians thought these meant. And that's not necessarily so easy. So for example, in most of these drawings they don't label, not in the ones Joseph Smith had, not in any that we work with as Egyptologists. And most of them they do not label what various characters are and what they mean. Sometimes they do the time period they did this the most is what we call the New Kingdom, say roughly around 1600, 1500 BC. But the drawings that we have were created about 200 BC and so we have over a thousand years in between. And the way that they might interpret these drawings certainly would change over a thousand year period. So the difficulty that we have as Egyptologists is trying to figure out what did ancient Egyptians find, think these drawings meant when we don't have any ancient Egyptians from that time period that actually tell us.

John Dehlin 2:22:46 Wow. Like that argument just is, feels really ridiculous to me that basically, you know, that basically whatever it meant a thousand or two thousand years ago might mean something totally different to people who lived a thousand or two thousand years later. I mean, would Green Eggs and Ham if, you know, if read a thousand years from now, would somebody read Green Eggs and Ham and think it was about, you know, spaghetti?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:23:19 Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin 2:23:20 Is it right? Am I getting that right or no?

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:23:23 I think you're, I think you're being too kind. But yeah, you're getting it right. I just, this, this is the same thing we dealt with in the, in the Book of Mormon and DNA episode. They say, well, we can't evaluate the DNA of Native Americans because we don't have Lehi's DNA. And it's like that's ridiculous because we do have the DNA of people who lived in that time frame in that part of the world. So to then say we. And it's the same thing here where it's like they want you to think that a thousand years earlier it actually read the Book of Abraham, is translated and then all of a sudden over a thousand years it changed from that to this is what we need to prepare you for the next life. This is a libations table. Whereas originally it was Abraham's signature. It just defies. It's so insultingly bad. Because, again, you would never make that argument for anything else, because it just. It's like Joseph Smith got it wrong. And so now you're saying, well, he didn't really get it wrong. It's just all of the Egyptians for the next 1000 years got it wrong and changed everything. I just. I don't even know what to say. I just. I wanted to put that in there because that's a common apologetic. You see, in other areas, too. Like I said, with Adam and Eve in Missouri, they'll say, well, maybe the first humans were in Missouri. Maybe the archaeologists are dating it wrong. It's just at some point, you just go. We will have an episode near the end of this series that I wrote on the website. It's called if Joseph Smith Got It Right, who Got It Wrong? Because if you want to take this approach, we don't know anything about anything.

John Dehlin 2:24:37 Yeah.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:24:38 You know, it's just.

John Dehlin 2:24:39 Yeah. All right. Well, that brings us to the conclusion of this episode. I mean, we're not going to quite match in hours the number of hours that the Robert spent with us, but we're gonna at least reach half of that. Yeah, this is. It takes time to talk through all this. Right. Anyway, the. The final slide. Were you gonna say something, Gerardo, before we. Okay, the final slide is the conclusion on the Book of Mormon or Abraham translation.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:25:09 Oh, sorry, my Book of Abraham.

John Dehlin 2:25:11 Okay. Conclusion of the Book of Abraham translation.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:25:13 Yeah. And so this is actually a point you made earlier, which is kind of nice that you said it, so it kind of makes us more relevant. But, you know, at the end of the day, there's a reason that the Church has two employed Egyptologists, and they cannot agree on a uniform theory for translation of the Book of Abraham. And it's because both of them are easily debunked when you look at the material we have and when you look at what Joseph Smith was saying he was doing. And so the Church's essay, most people believe, was written by Kerry Mohlstein. And it really shows how they cannot settle on one theory because they know it can't work on its own.

Gerardo Sumano 2:25:43 And so it was apparently was by a committee. And Brian Hocklett was part of the committee.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:25:48 Yeah, it was definitely by a committee, but I know John Gee apparently was not involved in the. The essay. And if you believe the accounts, he was not happy about it. But yeah, but. Yeah, either way. So, Sir Carrie Mercer, I believe Kerry Mohlstein was thought to have been on there, and he was a big proponent of the Catalyst theory. Brian Hogler was a big proponent of the, of the Lost scroll theory. And, you know, as we've shown in the. These slides today and then the videos, you know, the apologists are playing games with the data and they're using academic credentials to push theology, which is not how honest scholarship is meant to be done. As John said earlier, honest scholarship says you start with a blank slate, or you could start with assumptions, but you have to test them and be willing to change based on the evidence. And so also just to jump in,

John Dehlin 2:26:32 the assumptions that you base your arguments on need to be agreed on by, by a majority of, of the experts in that field. So they call, let's just say, gravity or evolution theories.

Gerardo Sumano 2:26:45 Right.

John Dehlin 2:26:45 They're not just pulled out of someone's rear. Pretty much 99 of all credible scientists are okay with gravity, and they're okay with evolution. And that's why it's okay to, to sort of start with those sorts of assumptions.

Gerardo Sumano 2:27:01 Right, Right.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:27:01 Okay, that's fair. Yeah. And you know, that first video we showed of Kerry Mohlstein talking about how he starts with the assumption that it's true and works the evidence into it, you know, that's something he's telling a group of people with fair Mormon who are in the business of being apologetics, who are in the business of trying to defend the faith. You know, I would argue by any means necessary, but at least by means that can stretch or at least excuse the evidence. And so I just, I really don't like the fact that they're willing to say these things in these more scholarly settings. Same thing would be with Richard Bushman calling the book Abraham pseudepigrapha. But then, you know, if they're out there, you know, in a fireside for just Everyday members, or if they're writing an article for Ensign, like I said, Karen Molstein's written a bunch of articles for Ensign or I know it's a Leah Hona. Now, he's also written that book for Deseret books called so we want. I think it's called so youo Want to Talk about the Book of Abraham. He's not going to start the book by saying, just so you know, I use my scholarship to assume it's true, and then I fit whatever evidence I find into the conclusion that it's true. They don't say that. And so I think that just shows the disjointed nature of how the Church puts out people who are specialists in a field, presents them as if they are operating under the scholarship of that field, while in reality they're operating under the Church's own mode of defense. And I just find that to be a really dishonest approach. And I think it is one that shows that the Church knows they cannot stand on the evidence alone. As I've said before, the fact is, Kerry Mohlstein and John Gee will go into these fair firesides. But when you're doing the interviews with Robert Rittner and you extend out an invitation, they will immediately back down because they cannot put these ideas up against anybody who can basically tell them on the fly why they're misusing the data. And so, you know, I guess as a conclusion, I just. I think the apologetics for the Book of Abraham are bad, obviously. And I think the Church really should get to a point where they just say, look, we have no idea what happened. It obviously doesn't match, but we still value it, a scripture, and then just leave it at that.

John Dehlin 2:29:00 Yeah. So I'll add my conclusion then, Gerardo. We can hear yours. My. My conclusion on in addition to everything you said, Mike, is just that I, you know, I spent 45 years as a Mormon until they kicked out me out. And I know what the Church taught me. Honesty was. Honesty is to tell the whole truth. It's to not leave out information. It's to not teach things that are false, and not to leave out information that would give a wrong impression. If I'm a BYU student and I have sex with a woman, but then I say, we didn't have sex, we just hugged. And it's true, we hugged, but we did a lot more than hugging. But then I just say, we only hugged. And then I tell my bishop that the bishop's not going to go, oh, you're good. What do words mean? What is sex anyway? Sex is kind of like a hug. No, I'm going to get kicked out of byu. I'm going to lose all that money and all that time. It's going to wreck my life in many ways because I was dishonest. That's complete honesty. That's the honesty that the Church taught me. And like you said, Mike, the fact that the Church allows Book of Abraham apologetics, that it has allowed it to exist knowingly and that it allows it to continue, violates the Church's own standards of honesty in a way that, for me is. Is egregious. For me, Book of Abraham was the catalyst to my faith crisis. Before the Book of Abraham, I did not believe there was a smoking gun. I'm 30. I'm 31. It's the book of Abraham that led me in, you know, down the rabbit hole into the full faith crisis. And it's because the church is disk knowingly deceiving people, in my opinion. Gerardo, you get the last word.

Gerardo Sumano 2:30:47 No, yeah, I agree. While I was going through my faith crisis in byu, Idaho, I decided to take a class on the Pearl of Great Price. And that started my fascination with the Book of Abraham and how bad the apologetic arguments were. So we had, you know, the professor in class spouting out all these Jungi, Kerry, Milser, but especially Nibaly's arguments that just don't hold water. And I would challenge him on that. And there was really not good answers. There's not good answers.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:31:21 And.

Gerardo Sumano 2:31:22 Yeah. So I think it's important for people to understand it, understand the truth of it, the implications, and, you know, have them take decisions for their life.

Gerardo Sumano 2:31:33 Yeah.

John Dehlin 2:31:34 Yeah. Well, thank you, Gerardo, for being here with us today. You know, so much. You're so smart and so wise.

Gerardo Sumano 2:31:41 Thanks.

John Dehlin 2:31:41 Thanks, Gerardo.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:31:42 Thank you, Gerardo, for being here. Thank you for jumping in last minute. And, yeah, I think one thing I'll say about Gerardo's final word is just he talked about how in his class, there were no good answers. And the problem is there are good answers. They're just not faithful answers. I think that really is a distinction. And the last thing I'll say is, before we go, if you like these episodes, I would encourage you to dig in further. If you want, we'll include some links to the Dr. Rittner episodes, the Dan Vogel videos, which I think are just so telling on the apologetics. And our next episode will be on the text of the book, Abraham. So if you're wondering why we didn't cover things like Olishem and Ur, the Chaldees, that kind of stuff, that'll all be in the next episode because we're kind of leaving in the actual text for its own episode. So if you're wondering why those apologies aren't in there, we'll be doing that in the next one.

Closing Reflections and Acknowledgments

John Dehlin 2:32:26 All right. Well, Mike, you're a freaking legend. People love you, and you have a special brain. I'm just going to say it. You have a special brain. This work you've done is a labor of love. You're not getting paid for any of this, and you should be paid honestly. And I just can't thank you enough. And I know that you're helping thousands and thousands, if not more of people come to a truer, more accurate understanding of the Mormon Church's truth claims. And we can't, we can't thank you enough, brother.

Mike (LDS Discussions) 2:32:57 Well, thanks everybody for listening and like I said, I just hope it's helpful and, you know, if you feel the need to, you know, have questions, hopefully this is there for you when you need it. And you know, we'll be here for you. So thanks for listening.

John Dehlin 2:33:11 All right, and just to conclude, number one, if you're watching on YouTube, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. It's going to make a huge difference to the long term sustainability of Mormon Stories in the Open Stories Foundation. Subscribe on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, wherever you can follow and subscribe. Not just because it helps us, because it'll help you. Because you will be notified when new episodes come out that are going to be helpful to you and your family members. Please donate to Mormon Stories by going to MormonStories.org and clicking on the donate button. Becoming a monthly donor that makes this possible. That's how we pay the bills of the staff and of the office and of all our equipment and everything else that goes with it. And then of course, go to ldsdiscussions.com for the source essays. And please know that all of these LDS Discussions episodes can be found on Spotify as its own podcast, audio and video form, and on and on YouTube as a playlist if you want to consume it in sequence that way. Huge thanks to everyone who makes this possible. And most importantly, just be kind to each other, be good to each other, love each other, and truth matters. And I say these things in the name of Mike and LDS discussions. Amen. Thanks everybody. Take care. Join us for more LDS discussions in the weeks and months ahead and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everybody.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.