BYU scholar; church's designated respondent
Hugh Nibley
1910–2005
1 topic · 1 dated event
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The Book of Abraham and the Joseph Smith Papyri
BYU scholar; church's designated respondent
Nibley was assigned to lead the church's response after 1967. He argued that the only evidence for what Smith thought he was translating was the side-by-side arrangement of brief characters with long English passages, that this proves nothing, and that the Kirtland Egyptian Papers were a by-product — either 'studying it out' or an attempt to reverse-engineer a revealed text. Critics, including Thomas Stuart Ferguson, complained that he spent his early articles attacking Spalding's 1912 panel rather than the papyri.
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Nibley's reading of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers
Hugh Nibley published 'The Meaning of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers' in BYU Studies, arguing that the papers were either a preliminary 'studying it out' stage or a failed attempt to reverse-engineer an already-revealed English text, and portraying the work of Phelps, Cowdery and Parrish as largely independent of Smith. FAIR describes this reading as having become the dominant Latter-day Saint view.
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