In the Book of Abraham
you have what are known as facsimiles
Let me pull mine out here
You'll notice this picture here. It looks very similar
to what you see here
Where did this come from?
Well, Joseph Smith in the mid-1830's
met a guy by the name of Chandler
who had some mummies, some Egyptian mummies
who was going around the rural countryside
showing these mummies off
Kind of like a traveling sideshow
When Joseph Smith's followers saw these mummies
they were very intrigued by them
but along with the mummies were these papyri
And they were certain that Joseph Smith
being a prophet, seer, and revelator, could translate
this Egyptian papyri into English
Hey, Joseph Smith did it with the Book of Mormon
from Reformed Egyptian, certainly he could do it
from these Egyptian papyri and translate it
into English
So he has this papyri. Now
this is actually a photograph of the papyri
and if you'll notice here
you see very similar this image also
but you'll notice that parts of the papyri were torn
He did not have the full picture here
So what Joseph Smith does is he ad libs
He fills in the torn parts, so
he puts the head of a human here,
and he puts the torso of this person laying down
with his hands facing up
He fills in the gaps.
And then he proceeds to give an explanation as to what
these things mean.
And there's what he says.
He said that this represents the idolatrous priest
Elkanah, who stands ready to sacrifice Abraham
the patriarch Abraham
The bird on the right, he says, number 1
is supposed to be the angel of the Lord
and the figures underneath this altar
he calls it, actually represent the gods of Elkanah
OK. The problem of course is that he gets it all wrong
He gets it absolutely wrong.
Now this is a guy who does know what he's talking about
And he will say that what we have here is something
that's really not all that unusual
It's a funerary text taken from the Sensen text
of the Book of Breathing
It's not all that uncommon
But if you look carefully here we
don't see the drawing looking quite the same as
Joseph Smith said
We have for instance instead of a human head,
we have the head of a jackle
Which, if you know anything about Egyptian burial rituals,
would be the Egyptian god Anubis
And we also have something missing here
and remember that part of the parchment was gone
I want you to look very carefully at the mid-section of this gentleman
You can wonder why Joseph Smith probably got that one wrong
But anyway, here is what we have according to
an Egyptologist
The jackal head of Anubis, standing left to the dead Osiris
not Abraham
who is on this bier
Oriris is about to magically impregnate Isis
which is this bird above him
and the figures below the bier represent the four sons of Horus
and they are in the shape of what we know as canopic jars
Now what are canopic jars?
The Egyptians believed that in the afterlife
they needed part of their organs to survive
so they would put their organs in these jars
feeling that the deceased would need them later on
What is interesting is that they would put things like
their hearts, and stuff like that in these jars,
but they didn't put the brains in there,
the Egyptians didn't think the brians really had much to do with anything
so, what they would do with the brains when they would
mummify them, is that they would stick sticks of some sort
up the nostrils of the dead and just kind of
swish them around, liquify their brains
I know, it's right after lunch too
Nonetheless, you don't see a real similarity between what Joseph Smith
said and what this Egyptologist says
because Smith was doing what he did years before
with the Book of Mormon
He was faking it.
He was trying to appease the gullible
It worked back then, why isn't it going to work now
What's amazing is you still hear Mormon scholars trying
to defend the Book of Abraham
even though I know of no qualified Egyptologist
outside of the Mormon Church that would
even come close to saying that that's what this
supposedly represents, or I should mean, what Joseph Smith said
This is important though, they have to defend it
I'll close with this quote
The reason they have to defend it, and I think
BH Roberts understood the situation quite well
In his Comprehensive History of the Church, volume 2
page 138, he says this, "... if Joseph Smith's
translation of the Egyptian parchment could be discredited,
and proven false, then doubt would be thrown
also upon the genuineness of his translation
of the Book of Mormon, and thus
all his pretentions as a translator would be exposed
and come to naught."
BH Roberts understood the severity
of this, and this is why I think why
a lot of Mormon scholars continue to defend
the undefendable. They know that once that
dominoe falls, they all start falling.
And we get a chain reaction, and we find
out, what, Joseph Smith wasn't the prophet he claimd to be,
and in fact he was a false prophet,
he was a deceiver, and not one to be trusted.