Book of Abraham — The Papyri

The Papyri — What the Egyptologists Actually Say

The CES Letter argues that the recovered papyri are common Egyptian funerary texts unrelated to Abraham, and that both Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologists confirm Joseph Smith’s translation does not match the characters. The single fact is true. The conclusion Jeremy draws from it is not the only reading — and it is not the best-supported one.

The CES Letter Claims

The CES Letter’s Argument

The surviving papyrus fragments are ordinary Egyptian funerary texts, written long after Abraham lived, and Egyptologists — Latter-day Saint and otherwise — find nothing of Abraham’s name or the events of the book of Abraham anywhere on the recovered characters.

The CES Letter’s Argument

Egyptologists have identified and translated what the CES Letter treats as the source of the Book of Abraham, finding it to be a common Egyptian funerary text prepared for a deceased Theban man named Hor — not a record from Abraham’s own hand.

Let us concede everything checkable here. The surviving fragments — recovered in 1966 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and given to the Church in 1967 — are genuine. The largest is a Book of Breathings (a late Egyptian funerary text) prepared for a Theban priest named Hor. Latter-day Saint Egyptologists agree the visible characters are funerary, not biographical. It is worth noticing that none of this was hidden. The recovered fragments were published and translated openly from 1968: non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologists Klaus Baer, Richard A. Parker, and John A. Wilson printed the funerary identification of the Hor document in the independent journal Dialogue that year, and Hugh Nibley’s response ran in the Church’s own Improvement Era the same year — decades before Jeremy wrote the CES Letter in 2013. The Church’s Gospel Topics essay, “Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham” (2014), came a year after the original CES Letter and simply restated that long-public fact; it was a summary of what Latter-day Saint scholarship had said openly in print for nearly half a century, not a forced confession. The disagreement, then, is not about whether the papyrus is funerary. Both sides grant that. The entire dispute is over the interpretation of a fact everyone accepts: what “translation” meant for Joseph Smith — and whether we even possess the document the Book of Abraham came from.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

At the heart of this issue is a single premise, and Jeremy takes the easier side of it — presenting his reading as the only one, when a choice is in fact being made.

The simplistic path: “Translation” must mean what it means in a modern classroom — a scholar decoding the characters directly in front of him. The characters in front of Joseph are a Book of Breathings. Therefore Joseph mistranslated, and the Book of Abraham is a fabrication. Clean, fast, and devastating — if the premise holds.

The nuanced path Jeremy walks past: Joseph Smith never once translated the way a modern Egyptologist does. Every scripture he produced — the Book of Mormon dictated with a seer stone in a hat, the Book of Moses received while studying Genesis with no ancient text at all, the vision of Doctrine and Covenants 76 — came by revelation, with the physical object serving as an occasion for inspiration rather than raw material to be decoded letter by letter. On the historical record of how this prophet actually worked, a mismatch between the surviving characters and the English text is exactly what we should expect, not a scandal.

Jeremy’s argument only works if you adopt the modern definition and treat Joseph as though he worked like a modern Egyptologist — when Joseph, his scribes, and every witness to his work describe a different one. That is the fork: the decontextualized dictionary reading versus the documented, in-context method of the man himself. The second is more consistent with how Joseph produced every other scripture — and it is the reading the Church’s own Gospel Topics essay lays out plainly. He was aware of the revelation model; he simply set it aside in favor of the reading that makes the sharper accusation.

The Strongest Form of the Objection — and It Deserves an Answer

A fair reader will object that we are dodging. The catalyst idea, they will say, is a retreat invented after 1966 to explain away an embarrassing find. And the single strongest piece of evidence for that charge is real, so let us state it in full force rather than hide behind the missing scroll.

In the Kirtland-era manuscripts — the working papers Joseph and his scribes produced in 1835 — several pages of the Book of Abraham text appear with individual Egyptian characters copied into the left margin and blocks of English to their right. And those margin characters are drawn from the very Hor Book of Breathings fragment we now possess. To a critic this looks decisive: Joseph’s own scribes lined up the surviving funerary papyrus against the Book of Abraham, one squiggle generating whole paragraphs of English. If that is the method, the missing scroll is irrelevant — the source is right here, and it says nothing about Abraham. Jeremy does raise this: the CES Letter points out that characters from the surviving papyrus appear, in order, in Joseph’s Kirtland Egyptian Papers — the working documents that include his “Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language” (GAEL) — alongside the English of the Book of Abraham. That is the strongest version of his case, and it deserves a direct answer rather than a dodge.

Three sober facts blunt it. First, we do not know that these margin markings were the engine of translation rather than a scribe’s later attempt to study, index, or reverse-engineer a text Joseph had already received — the manuscripts were copied by Warren Parrish, W. W. Phelps, and Frederick G. Williams, and no eyewitness ever described Joseph deriving the text by decoding those characters. Second, and decisively, the characters run out long before the text does: the margin markings track only the opening portion of the Book of Abraham and then stop, while chapters of revealed narrative continue with no papyrus beside them at all. A method that produces paragraphs from single glyphs would not politely halt partway through. Third, a distinction the debate often blurs: it is not enough to point to the missing end of the Hor scroll itself. Critics such as Andrew Cook and Christopher Smith have argued, from the scroll’s winding pattern, that the portion physically lost from the Hor roll was too short to have held the Book of Abraham — and on that narrow point they may be right. But the catalyst case does not rest on the Hor scroll’s missing tail. It rests on the other documents in the 1835 purchase: the long rolls, described by contemporaries and dispersed and largely lost after Joseph’s death, which were never among the recovered fragments at all. The scribes correlating a few characters from the surviving Hor fragment tells us what those particular men were doing in 1835; it does not tell us that the larger material Joseph handled was silent about Abraham.

There is one more thread a fair critic will pull, and it belongs here rather than on a sibling page. Facsimile 1 — the lion-couch scene — is printed on the surviving Hor fragment, and the Book of Abraham text points to it directly, referring the reader “to the representation at the commencement of this record” (Abraham 1:12; see also 1:14). So the narrative is tethered to a scrap we actually possess — this is not a document conveniently lost in Chicago, and that is the sharpest form of the objection. But notice what it establishes and what it does not. It shows that Joseph associated the vignette with the record of Abraham; it does not show that he generated the English by decoding the funerary hieroglyphs printed around it. A prophet who received the account by revelation would naturally anchor it to the illustration his papyri contained — the facsimile serving, once again, as the occasion that draws the eye while the text arrives by inspiration. Whether the Egyptological reading of that vignette can be reconciled with Joseph’s explanations is a separate and detailed question, which we take up in full on the facsimiles page. The point here is narrower: the presence of Facsimile 1 on the Hor fragment ties the book to a surviving document, but it does not convert revelation into decipherment.

The Incomplete Record

The Missing Scroll Is History, Not Apologetics

The CES Letter treats the papyri as though the full collection sat under a microscope. It did not. Joseph acquired a substantial collection of Egyptian material in July 1835, described by contemporaries as including long rolls of papyrus. After his death the collection was sold, dispersed through several owners, and the bulk of it is believed to have burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The fragments recovered in 1966 — the ones the CES Letter leans on — are the survivors that had been separated from the main body and mounted on backing paper. By the estimate of the specialists who have worked with them, they are a small fraction of what Joseph once handled.

This is not a convenient story assembled after the fragments turned up. Long before the Metropolitan Museum fragments were identified in 1967, the general understanding among Latter-day Saints and outside observers alike was that the bulk of Joseph’s papyri had been lost — widely assumed to have burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The observation is simply what an honest look at a broken archaeological chain requires: we cannot declare that the source of the Book of Abraham was among the surviving scraps, because most of the collection no longer exists to be examined. The Church’s own Gospel Topics essay makes the same point plainly — only small fragments of once-long scrolls survive today, and no eyewitness left a description of the translation process that would let us reconstruct it.

The Catalyst Model Was Never a 1966 Invention

Even granting, for argument’s sake, that the surviving fragments are all Joseph ever had, the CES Letter’s conclusion still depends on the mechanical definition of translation it never defends. The pattern of Joseph’s prophetic work runs the other way. The Book of Moses was revealed as he studied the Bible — with no ancient artifact present at all. Doctrine and Covenants 76 came as a vision during contemplation of scripture; Doctrine and Covenants 138 came to Joseph F. Smith while he meditated on the writings of Peter. His own revealed instruction was to “study it out in your mind; then… ask me if it be right” (D&C 9:8). The plates, the papyri, and the seer stones consistently function as occasions that open prophetic sight, not as puzzles to be solved character by character.

Under this model the papyri were the catalyst by which God revealed to Joseph the record of Abraham — whether that record once stood on a portion of scroll now lost, or was given directly to a prophet whose attention the ancient documents had drawn heavenward. The Church’s Gospel Topics essay describes exactly this possibility: Joseph’s study of the papyri may have led to a revelation about the life of Abraham, much as his study of Genesis had earlier yielded the revealed Book of Moses. Read that way, the gap between the funerary characters and the English text is not a failure of translation. It is the signature of revelation, which is how this prophet always worked.

“The Papyri” Was Not One Document

The CES Letter speaks of “the papyri” as a single object with a single verdict. Joseph in fact possessed several documents, of which the Hor Book of Breathings is only one. Granting that this particular scroll is funerary settles the identity of this scroll — not the leap to “therefore the whole collection, including whatever generated the narrative, was funerary and nothing more.” That leap is the load-bearing move in Jeremy’s argument, smuggled in as though it were an observation rather than an assumption.

A Late Copy Is Not a Late Text

The CES Letter also presses the dating: the fragments were written long after Abraham lived, in the Ptolemaic era, so they cannot be Abraham’s. But this proves nothing about authorship, and every biblical scholar knows why. Ancient texts survive in copies made centuries or millennia after their composition — the oldest complete Hebrew Bibles are medieval, yet no one dates Genesis to the Middle Ages. The Book of Abraham presents itself as a record preserved and handed down “for the benefit of my posterity” (Abraham 1:31). A late Egyptian copy of an Abrahamic tradition is precisely what a transmitted ancient text looks like. That a priest named Hor was buried with a second-century-B.C.E. Book of Breathings tells us when his funerary roll was written; it tells us nothing about the age of the tradition preserved on the other documents in the same purchase.

What the Serious Scholarship Actually Shows

Hugh Nibley’s The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment (1975) argued that Egyptian funerary literature and the Abrahamic material share ritual vocabulary, cosmological themes, and structural patterns that point to a common ancient religious inheritance — a relationship of kinship, not word-for-word identity. Trained Latter-day Saint Egyptologists have carried that work forward: John Gee (PhD, Yale) and Kerry Muhlestein (PhD, UCLA) have published peer-reviewed studies showing that the religious and cultural world depicted in the Book of Abraham is historically at home in the ancient Near East — a world a self-taught farmer in 1835 upstate New York had no ordinary means of reconstructing.

This matters because it cuts against the fraud thesis from the other direction. It is not enough for a critic to note what the surviving characters do not say. He must also explain the ancient texture the book does contain — the plausible astronomical and cosmological framework of Abraham chapter 3, and the priestly imagery of the facsimiles that fits patterns Joseph could not have known. On our sibling page we take up the facsimile identifications directly, testing how the facsimile explanations hold up against the Egyptological readings, and elsewhere we set the papyri within the broader case for the Book of Abraham as revealed scripture.

The “Cover-Up” That Was Public From 1968

One implication readers absorb from the CES Letter is that the funerary nature of the papyri was a secret the Church kept until it was forced to confess in a modern essay. The published record says otherwise, and the dates are checkable. When the fragments were returned in 1967, the identification did not stay buried — it went straight into print in the open scholarly literature. In 1968, non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologists Klaus Baer, Richard A. Parker, and John A. Wilson published the funerary translation of the Hor document in the independent journal Dialogue, and Hugh Nibley’s own multi-part series engaging the Pearl of Great Price ran in the Church’s Improvement Era that same year. The funerary character of the Hor fragment was discussed openly — by Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint scholars alike — for decades afterward. The identification the CES Letter frames as a modern admission was in print long before Jeremy wrote; the later Gospel Topics essay restated a long-public fact rather than leaking a hidden one.

Verdict

What is resolved. The factual claims are conceded and were never in dispute: the Hor fragment is a funerary text, its characters are not a biographical account of Abraham, and Egyptologists of every persuasion read it the same way. None of that touches the actual question, because Jeremy built his conclusion on one answer to a question he treats as settled — “did Joseph decode these characters like a modern scholar?” — when the historical record of Joseph’s every translation, the survival of only a fraction of the original scrolls, and the Church’s own decades-old published account all point elsewhere. Presented with a fork between the decontextualized dictionary reading and the documented method of the prophet himself, the CES Letter takes the first and dismisses the second — even though the Church’s own Gospel Topics essay lays that second reading out in full. That is the lesser choice, and it is the whole of its force here.

What remains genuinely, and only mildly, open. Honesty runs both ways. We cannot produce the source scroll, because most of the collection is ash. We cannot fully reconstruct what Joseph and his scribes intended by the character-and-margin manuscripts, because no eyewitness described the process. A believer should hold those as real and unfinished questions rather than pretend the case is airtight in the opposite direction. What the evidence will not bear is the CES Letter’s confidence — the leap from “this surviving scrap is funerary” to “therefore the revelation is fraudulent.” The gap in that leap is exactly where the missing scroll, the catalyst method, and a century of serious scholarship all stand. The mystery is real; the refutation is not.

Further Study