Book of Abraham — The Facsimiles

The Facsimiles — What Joseph Actually Claimed, and What He Didn’t

The CES Letter argues that Joseph Smith misidentified the figures in the Book of Abraham facsimiles — calling Anubis an “idolatrous priest,” naming gods Egyptologists don’t recognize, and confusing females with males. The figures on the facsimiles really are standard Egyptian funerary vignettes; on that narrow point Jeremy is correct. The question is what follows from it — and that is where he took the shorter road.

The CES Letter Claims

The CES Letter’s Argument

In Facsimile 1, Joseph Smith identifies figure #3 as “the idolatrous priest of Elkenah.” Egyptologists identify the same figure as Anubis, the jackal-headed god associated with mummification in Egyptian funerary scenes.

The CES Letter’s Argument

In Facsimile 3, the CES Letter argues, Joseph Smith mislabeled Egyptian gods as human figures — Osiris as Abraham, Isis as Pharaoh, Maat as the Prince, Anubis as a slave — and labeled female figures as male. It cites the Egyptologist James H. Breasted, who concluded from such identifications that Joseph Smith “was totally unacquainted with the significance of these documents.”

Notice what is true here, because a faithful answer has to begin by admitting it. Yes: Facsimile 1 is a lion-couch embalming scene. Yes: the standing jackal-associated figure follows the iconographic type of Anubis. Yes: Facsimile 3 is a presentation-before-Osiris scene of a well-known Egyptian type, and by ordinary Egyptological reading two of its figures are goddesses. None of that is in dispute. The whole argument turns on one hidden assumption — and that assumption is where Jeremy quietly chose the weaker path.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

Every misidentification charge in the CES Letter rests on a single unstated premise: that Joseph Smith was attempting a standard Egyptological decipherment of these drawings — the same thing a Yale philologist would produce — and simply got it wrong. On that premise the case is airtight. Anubis is not a priest; Isis is not a king. Case closed.

But that premise is a choice, and it is the wrong one. Joseph never labeled the facsimile notes a “translation.” He titled them Explanation. The distinction is not a modern dodge — it is printed on the documents themselves and was public in the 1842 Times and Seasons. A translation tells you what the Egyptian scribe meant. An explanation tells you what the figures signify within the Book of Abraham’s narrative — what role they play in Abraham’s account of near-sacrifice, deliverance, and instruction. Those are two different genres with two different standards of success.

The strongest version of the objection presses exactly here, and it deserves to be stated at full strength rather than stepped over. Joseph did not treat the Book of Abraham as a loose meditation: he published it in the 1842 Times and Seasons under the banner “A Translation of some ancient Records … purporting to be the writings of Abraham,” and the Kirtland-era Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language shows Joseph and his scribes pairing single Egyptian characters with long strings of English — which looks like nothing so much as an attempt at literal, character-by-character decipherment. So, the critic concludes, Joseph plainly believed he was translating Egyptian, and reclassifying the facsimile notes as mere “Explanations” is a modern escape hatch bolted on after the fact. This is the argument the fork must survive on its own terms, and it does — for two reasons drawn from Joseph’s own hand.

First, the two labels are Joseph’s own, side by side in the same 1842 publication, and he did not use them interchangeably. The running narrative of Abraham is headed “a Translation;” each of the three figure-captions is headed “Explanation” of the cut above it. The same man, in the same magazine, drew the line himself — whatever he thought he was doing with the text, he did not present the facsimile notes as a word-for-word rendering of the drawings. The distinction the CES Letter needs to erase is one Joseph printed. Second, the Grammar and Alphabet does not carry the weight the argument loads onto it. Its very relationship to the Book of Abraham is unsettled — Latter-day Saint and non-LDS scholars alike are divided over whether it fed the translation or was reverse-engineered from an already-existing English text — and much of it is in the handwriting of scribes, not Joseph. A document whose direction of dependence is genuinely in dispute cannot be made to prove that the facsimile Explanations were failed literal decipherments. The fork, then, is not a semantic dodge invented to rescue Joseph after the papyri were found. It is printed on the 1842 documents in Joseph’s own two words — and the hardest form of the objection, met squarely, still lands on it.

So the fork is this:

The path Jeremy took: Treat the “Explanations” as failed Egyptology. Line up Joseph’s labels against the textbook identifications, note that they differ, and conclude fraud.

The path he stepped over: Ask what kind of claim Joseph was making, and whether the reuse and re-labeling of Egyptian symbols by a non-Egyptian religious tradition is a real, documented ancient phenomenon — which it is.

The second path is not special pleading invented to rescue Joseph. It is how the ancient world actually handled inherited iconography — and it is better supported by the evidence than the flat “he was just wrong” reading. The rest of this page shows why.

Ancient Symbols Were Borrowed and Re-Labeled Constantly

The premise that an Egyptian figure “means exactly one thing” would surprise anyone who studies how symbols traveled in the ancient Near East. Semitic and Jewish communities routinely took over Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Canaanite imagery and re-read it through their own theology. The same lion-couch scene that an Egyptian priest read as Osiris’s embalming could be re-purposed to illustrate a very different story for a very different community.

This matters directly for the Anubis charge. In actual Egyptian practice the embalming rites were performed by a human priest who wore the Anubis mask — a man acting in the character of the jackal god. The figure on a lion-couch vignette is not simply “the god Anubis” in every reading; it is also “the officiating priest as Anubis.” Read through the Book of Abraham’s narrative — in which a priest attempts human sacrifice on an altar — identifying that standing officiant as “the idolatrous priest” is not the howler the CES Letter needs it to be. It is one of the readings the image will genuinely bear. This is exactly the “inverted priestly imagery” explored in depth in The Facsimiles — Inverted Priestly Imagery, where the visual vocabulary of Egyptian ritual is shown carrying a second, deliberately transferred layer of meaning.

The Strongest Form of Jeremy’s Argument — Met Head-On

A serious reader will say: “Fine — but you’ve picked the easy figure. Give me the two hardest cases.” Here they are, stated as strongly as the critic could want.

Hard case 1 — the Facsimile 1 restorations

The original papyrus for Facsimile 1 survives (Joseph Smith Papyrus I), and it has gaps — lacunae — where the ancient document was damaged. The published woodcut fills some of those gaps: a head on the standing figure, wings on a bird, details of the couch. Critics argue those restorations are wrong by Egyptological standards, and that where the reconstruction departs from a typical embalming scene, Joseph “invented” the difference. This is the strongest single point, and it deserves a straight answer.

First, the honest limits: we do not know for certain who inked the restorations, whether Joseph directed each stroke, or exactly what stood in the lacunae. That is a genuinely open question and we will not pretend otherwise. Second, the point critics skip: the “typical scene” they measure against is itself a reconstruction — an averaging of other vignettes, not a photograph of this one. Egyptologist John Gee has documented lion-couch scenes that do not conform to the assumed template, including ones where the reclining figure is clothed and alive rather than a mummy, and where a standing figure is a threat rather than a tender embalmer. The claim “every such scene must look like X, therefore Joseph’s differs, therefore fraud” assumes a uniformity the surviving corpus does not actually show. The most one can say is that the restoration is uncertain — not that it is demonstrably false.

Hard case 2 — the whole scene of Facsimile 3

The gender labels are only the surface of this one, and it is a mistake — the critic’s mistake and ours if we answer only the surface — to shrink it to that. By ordinary Egyptological reading the vignette is a single, well-known scene type: a named deceased Egyptian is led into the presence of the enthroned Osiris, with Isis behind the throne, Maat attending, and Anubis at hand. Joseph’s Explanation re-presents that entire scene — not two stray figures — as the living Abraham seated upon Pharaoh’s throne, reasoning upon the principles of astronomy before the king’s court. A dead man before the god of the dead becomes a living patriarch instructing a royal audience. That is the real claim, and it is a whole-scene claim; the “a man is labeled where a goddess stands” point (Isis under “King Pharaoh,” Maat under “Prince of Pharaoh”) is one detail inside it. Stated at full strength: the entire Egyptological identity of the scene differs from Joseph’s.

And that is exactly why the genre distinction carries the weight here rather than any single figure. If Joseph had been captioning the Egyptian scene, transforming a funerary judgment into a throne-room lecture would be a catastrophic error. But an Explanation that reads the drawing through Abraham’s narrative is doing the very thing the label announces: taking an inherited Egyptian vignette and telling you what it signifies within Abraham’s account — who sits in the seat of authority, who attends, who instructs whom. On that reading the throne-occupant is named for the office the scene depicts, not for the Egyptian deity’s biology; and Egyptian royal art was itself fluid about such representation, depicting ruling queens with the regalia and ceremonial beard of male kingship and letting deities cross gender lines in royal ideology. The surface mismatch is real and we mark it as mildly open; but it is a long way from “totally unacquainted,” and it dissolves the moment you stop demanding that an Explanation behave like a caption in a museum catalogue.

The Abrahamic Interpretive Framework

LDS Egyptologist Michael Rhodes and the wider work of Hugh Nibley in Abraham in Egypt converge on one framework: the facsimiles are Egyptian documents carrying an Abrahamic re-reading. The Book of Abraham itself flags this — though not without a complication worth naming out loud. When the text pauses to say, in effect, “that you may have a knowledge of this altar, I will refer you to the representation at the commencement of this record” (Abraham 1:12–14), it ties the drawing to a literal altar and to the specific gods the narrative goes on to name — Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, Korash, and a god like unto Pharaoh’s. A critic can fairly press that this cuts against a purely symbolic “Explanation” reading: the text seems to treat the facsimile as a depiction of a real altar and real deities, not merely a figure to be re-interpreted. That tension is real, and we do not paper over it. But notice what the verse is actually doing with the image — it anchors the scene to Abraham’s account of near-sacrifice and to the gods of Abraham’s persecutors, directing the reader to view an Egyptian drawing through Abraham’s eyes, not through a Ptolemaic priest’s. The verse does not neutralize the objection; it locates the whole document inside the very interpretive frame the Explanation claims.

The right question is therefore not “does Joseph’s label match a modern Egyptology textbook?” It is “is this a plausible reading that an Abrahamic tradition could attach to these figures?” That is a harder, more interesting question — and it is precisely the one the CES Letter never puts on the table, because the shorter path did not require it. The fuller doctrinal case for the book as revealed scripture is laid out at The Book of Abraham.

Facsimile 2 — Where the Coincidences Get Uncomfortable for the Critic

John Gee, a trained Egyptologist with a Yale doctorate, has documented that several of Joseph’s explanations of Facsimile 2 (a hypocephalus) align with authentic themes in Egyptian religious texts that were not deciphered until the 20th century — associations between the central figure and the creative, governing sun-god, and language about a figure holding the “key” of celestial power. We should not overstate this: the parallels are partial, some are contested, and Gee himself does not claim every question is resolved. But they are real enough that the flat verdict — “pure invention” — does not survive contact with the material. Joseph’s reading of the facsimile as a diagram of governing heavenly bodies also dovetails with the astronomy of Abraham 3 — whose model of hierarchically ordered times and reckonings some Latter-day Saint writers have read as loosely resonant with later ideas about the relativity of time, and whose cosmology is examined in Abraham, Kolob, and Egyptian Cosmology.

The Breasted Quote in Context

The CES Letter’s Breasted quotation comes from Bishop F. S. Spalding’s 1912 pamphlet Joseph Smith, Jr., As a Translator, which solicited opinions from several Egyptologists. Breasted was a giant of the field, and it would be a mistake — and a weaker answer — to pretend later scholarship has quietly reversed him on the figures. It has not. The non-LDS Egyptologist Robert Ritner, in his 2011 edition of the papyri, reaffirms the very same identifications, and does so more forcefully than Breasted did: by ordinary Egyptological reading the figures are Anubis, Osiris, Isis, and Maat, and the modern consensus still says so. On the narrow Egyptological question, Breasted was not out of date; he was right.

Which is exactly why the quotation proves less than the CES Letter needs. Breasted’s judgment — that Joseph “was totally unacquainted with the significance of these documents” — is an answer to an Egyptological question: what did the Egyptian scribe mean by these drawings? Joseph never entered that contest. He offered Explanations keyed to Abraham’s narrative, not decipherments of Egyptian religion. Measuring an Explanation against the standard of a translation and pronouncing it a failure is not a decisive verdict against Joseph; it is a category error — the same hidden premise the fork already exposed, now wearing a famous name. The careful move is not to quote the oldest, hardest sentence and stop reading; it is to ask what kind of claim the sentence is actually rebutting.

Was Any of This Hidden?

A doubter’s next worry is disclosure: was the Church quietly hoping no one would notice? The record says otherwise, and it says so from long before the CES Letter appeared in 2013. The Egyptological objections were published by a critic in 1912 and answered by Latter-day Saint writers within the same decade. Nibley’s book-length engagements ran through the 1960s and 1970s in Church magazines and university presses. The identification of the surviving papyri as ordinary funerary texts was discussed openly by LDS scholars from the 1960s onward. This was a century-old, openly argued conversation — not a secret the CES Letter pried loose. For the closely related question of the papyri and what Egyptologists say about them, see The Papyri — What the Egyptologists Actually Say.

Verdict

What is resolved. The core of the CES Letter’s facsimile argument fails not on its facts but on its hidden premise. Joseph offered Explanations, not Egyptological translations; the ancient reuse and re-labeling of inherited symbols is a documented reality; the Anubis-as-officiating-priest reading is one the image genuinely bears; the Breasted verdict — still the correct Egyptological reading, and reaffirmed by non-LDS scholars since — answers a question of decipherment that Joseph’s Explanations never entered; and none of this was ever concealed. Confronted with two roads — “the labels differ, so he’s a fraud” versus “what genre and tradition is he working in?” — Jeremy took the one that required less of him and delivered the cleaner verdict. The cleaner verdict is the weaker one.

What remains genuinely, and only mildly, open. We do not know precisely what filled the lacunae of Facsimile 1 or who inked the restorations. The surface-level gender labels in Facsimile 3 sit at a distance from ordinary Egyptological reading that the Abrahamic-role framework explains but does not erase. These are real loose threads, and a faithful reader can hold them without alarm — they are the ordinary residue of an ancient, damaged, cross-cultural document, not evidence against a prophet. The facsimiles do not indict Joseph Smith. They indict the assumption that a sacred text must answer to the standards of a discipline it never claimed to be practicing.

Further Study