Posted by:
Cr@ig P@xton
(
)
Date: December 03, 2010 05:35PM
One of the apologetic arguments currently being thrown around to support the claim that the Book of Abraham is a real translation...is the proposition that we don't have all of the papyri that was used to translate the BoA. That the part of the papyri that it did come from is missing and that the papyri referred to as the "Scroll of Hôr" was much longer than what we have... that the BoA actually came from this missing part.
New research has now been presented that cast doubt on that argument being a possibility. Thought you RFMers might like to know about it.
In the winter 2010 issue of Dialogue, Andrew W. Cook and Christopher C. Smith make a very convincing argument that the original papyri from which the Book of Abraham was inspired was significantly smaller than the length necessary to contain all of the content found in the Book of Abraham.
LDS Egyptian scholar and apologist John Gee has asserted that in order to contain all of the content found in the Book of Abraham, the original papyri must be missing up to 1250.5 centimeters (41 Feet) from the interior end of the scroll of Hôr, the papyri from which the Book of Abraham was allegedly translated. Cook and Smith’s analysis puts Gee claim into serious doubt ...showing that the original papyri could not have been longer than 150 centimeters (5 feet).
Why is the total length of the papyri important? When Smith produced his translation he would assign whole sentences, and sometimes paragraphs to a single Egyptian character taken from the papyri. How do we know this…because his scribes wrote out the translations first showing the Egyptian symbol followed by the English translation. Using this model, Gee extrapolated that the original papyri was missing 41 feet in oder for there to be enough charactors to produce the Book of Abraham. We now know that there was not enough papyri to produce the Book of Abraham...at least not from the papyri...leaving only the papyri acting as a muse for inspiration.
In any case I'll let you draw your own conclusions. Just thought you’d like to know.
Cheers,
Cr@ig
You can read the entire article here.
https://dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/The-Original-Length-of-the-Scroll-of-Hor.pdfAn interesting sidenote in the article was the story of Joseph pointing to a particular Egyptian charactor on the papyri claiming that it was the signature of Abraham. Again I'm not going to make any conclusions...just present the facts.