Posted by:
sherlock
(
)
Date: January 19, 2011 01:22PM
This may be completely obvious to everyone else here, but I just realised something about the whole Joseph Smith / Book of Abraham debacle.
Recognising that JS never really had any gold plates with reformed Egyptian to translate from, but he'd nevertheless managed to dupe so many people and get this religion going, just how keen must he have been to get his hands on some real bonafied Egyptian scroll when it rolled into town via Mr. Chandler?
Probably enough to call on believers to raise a significant amount of money to make the purchase. If he'd managed to do what he had with a pretend book, just think what he could do with a physical scroll that actually did exist and could be paraded for all to see and marvel at.
In a sense, his obvious desperation to purchase the scroll and own the physical evidence, undermines his whole BoM story and how the evidence there wasn't so important (as it didn't really exist of course). Now he would have some real old world document to translate and show off and there's no doubt that he would never have let some angel dude bearing his open bosom come down and take it off him.
Shame for him (and good fortune for us) that the Rosetta stone was found and Egyptian could them be translated!