The Book of Abraham and the Joseph Smith Papyri

A showman in Kirtland

On 3 July 1835 a travelling exhibitor named Michael H. Chandler brought four Egyptian mummies and two or more rolls of papyrus to Kirtland, Ohio. He had already worked the eastern cities — Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Cleveland — charging admission and selling off pieces of the collection as he went. Americans in the 1830s would pay to look at a mummy; Egyptomania had been running since Napoleon's expedition, and Chandler was in the business of it.¹

The collection came from a pit tomb on the west bank of the Nile opposite Thebes, excavated by workers hired by Antonio Lebolo, an agent of the French consul general Bernardino Drovetti. The church's own published account says Lebolo entered the catacombs on 7 June 1831, obtained eleven mummies, died at Trieste in 1832, and willed the whole to his nephew Chandler. Richard Bushman notes that Lebolo's probate papers mention neither Chandler nor mummies, and that Chandler most likely bought the artifacts in New York and invented the inheritance.²

Joseph Smith and other church leaders paid a fee to view them, and Smith was allowed to take the papyri home to study. Oliver Cowdery later wrote that on the morning Chandler first presented his papyrus, Smith showed him characters previously copied from the Book of Mormon plates, and gave him the interpretation of a few for his satisfaction. On 6 July Chandler signed a certificate saying that Smith's readings corresponded 'in the most minute matters' with everything he had learned from the most learned men in many cities. Latter-day Saint scholars now grant that neither Chandler nor any American of the day could have made that judgment.³

Within days some of the Saints bought the whole collection. The 1856 bill of sale puts the price at twenty-four hundred dollars — a very large sum at a moment when the Kirtland temple was unfinished and money short. Joseph Coe, a wealthy member of the high council, described arranging it in thirds with Simeon Andrews and Smith, and complained years later that he had carried his share far longer than promised.⁴ Smith recorded that with W. W. Phelps and Oliver Cowdery as scribes he 'commenced the translation of some of the characters or hieroglyphics, and much to our joy found that one of the rolls contained the writings of Abraham; another the writings of Joseph of Egypt.'⁵ Nothing was ever produced from the Joseph roll.

An alphabet and a grammar

What followed is unusual in Joseph Smith's career. He did not simply dictate. His history says that for the rest of July 1835 he was 'continually engaged in translating an alphabet to the Book of Abraham, and arrangeing a grammar of the Egyptian language as practiced by the ancients.'⁶ The result is a body of about sixteen documents now called the Kirtland Egyptian Papers: three loose 'Egyptian Alphabet' sheets, one principally in Smith's own hand, one in Cowdery's and one in Phelps's; a bound volume titled 'Grammar & aphabet of the Egyptian language' with thirty-four written pages scattered through nearly two hundred blank ones; character-copying notebooks; and the Book of Abraham manuscripts themselves.

The grammar assigns meanings to characters through a system of 'parts' and 'degrees,' each degree expanding the sense. 'Kolob,' the volume says, 'signifies first beginning to the bodies of this creation, the first creation, also having been appointed for the last time, the last or the eldest.' Another entry defines a character as 'the land of Egypt which was first discovered by a woman while underwater, and afterwards settled by her Sons she being a daughter of Ham.'⁷ The Joseph Smith Papers editors write that no evidence indicates any of the men involved knew of the unfolding European decipherment of Egyptian, and that their work 'does not comport with modern Egyptological understanding of Egyptian characters.'⁸

The translation stalled almost at once. In September Phelps wrote to his wife that 'nothing has been doing in the translation of the Egyptian Record for a long time, and probably will not for some time to come.' On 1 October Smith's journal records labor on the Egyptian alphabet with Cowdery and Phelps, and that 'the system of astronomy was unfolded.' Warren Parrish was hired as scribe on 29 October. On 17 November Smith exhibited 'the Alphabet of the ancient Egyptian Records' to a visiting inquirer, Erastus Holmes, and walked him over to Frederick G. Williams's house to see the mummies.⁹ By the end of the year the men in Kirtland had turned to studying Hebrew.

Characters in the margin

In November 1835 three manuscripts of the first part of the Book of Abraham were written out. Frederick G. Williams and Warren Parrish produced closely parallel versions, apparently from dictation and revised in step. Parrish and Phelps then produced a fuller version in a bound volume, carrying prefatory material that resembles the definitions in the grammar.¹⁰

All three have the same striking feature. A ruled margin runs down the left of each page, and into that margin the scribes copied Egyptian characters — taken, in order, from the Book of Breathing for Hor, from the Egyptian Alphabet documents or the grammar volume, and possibly from other sources.¹¹ Beside a single hieratic sign stands an entire paragraph of English. The heading of two of the manuscripts reads, in the language of the grammar rather than of scripture, 'sign of the fifth degree of the second part.'

This is the fact around which everything since has turned, and it is not in dispute; only its meaning is. Critics read it as a working record of the translation: characters first, English derived from them, the disproportion simply the measure of how far Smith's imagination ran from the sign in front of him. Faithful readers, following Nibley, read the papers as a by-product — an attempt to work backward from a text already received by revelation toward a key to the language, or a study exercise conducted largely by the scribes. FAIR's own summary concedes that the disproportion is so marked that Smith and his trained scribes must have noticed it, and that 'it is not enough merely to observe the disproportion, it must be explained.'¹²

One further wrinkle bears on the later theories. Two insertions in Williams's manuscript, squeezed into the margin and between lines in smaller handwriting, are the passages telling the reader to look at 'the representation at the commencement of this record' and 'the figures at the beginning' — the verses that tie the text to Facsimile 1. Gee argues these are nineteenth-century editorial additions and that the text reads smoothly without them. Critics reply that they are in the earliest manuscripts either way, and that the church has canonized them as Abraham's words.¹³

Nauvoo, 1842: the book in print

Seven years later, editing the Times and Seasons in Nauvoo, Smith published. On 23 February 1842 he gave the engraver Reuben Hedlock instructions 'concerning the cut for the altar and gods in the Records of Abraham'; on 1 March he was at the printing office correcting the first plate; on 4 March he exhibited the papyri to Hedlock so the blocks could be sized and gave instructions about the arrangement of the writing on the large astronomical cut.¹⁴

The issue of 1 March 1842 carried Facsimile 1 with Smith's numbered explanation — the angel of the Lord, Abraham fastened upon an altar, the idolatrous priest of Elkenah attempting to offer him as a sacrifice, the idolatrous gods of Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, Korash and Pharaoh — followed by the heading, 'A TRANSLATION Of some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands, from the Catecombs of Egypt, purporting to be the writings of Abraham, while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus.'¹⁵ The issue of 15 March carried the hypocephalus as Facsimile 2 in a fold-out plate, with Kolob, Oliblish, Enish-go-on-dosh and Jah-oh-eh, and the rest of the text through the creation chapters. On 16 May, Facsimile 3.

Facsimile 3's explanation is the one that would prove hardest. Figure 1 is Abraham on Pharaoh's throne; figure 2 is 'King Pharaoh, whose name is given in the characters above his head'; figure 4 is the prince of Pharaoh, 'as written above the hand'; figure 5 is Shulem, one of the king's principal waiters; figure 6 is 'Olimlah, a slave belonging to the prince.'¹⁶ Smith is pointing at specific hieroglyphs and telling the reader what they say. That is a testable claim, and it was tested.

The phrase 'purporting to be' was dropped from the heading in the 1878 Salt Lake edition of the Pearl of Great Price and never came back. In February 1843 the paper promised subscribers further extracts. None appeared.

Scattered, burned, and mostly lost

After Smith's death the mummies and papyri stayed with his mother, Lucy Mack Smith, who exhibited them for a quarter each to visitors. Her son William took them on a lecturing tour, became stranded along the Illinois River, and sold or leased them with an understanding he might repurchase; he never did. Twelve days after Lucy's death in May 1856, Emma Bidamon, her husband Lewis and Joseph Smith III signed a bill of sale for 'four Egyptian Mummies with the records of them' to a man known to history only as A. Combs.¹⁷

Two mummies and some papyri went to Wyman's St. Louis Museum, which advertised them that August. In 1863 the collection moved to Chicago and by January 1864 was in the hands of Joseph H. Wood, a showman Stanley Kimball describes as 'the P. T. Barnum of the West.' Charles W. Penrose saw the papyrus rolls there in 1865. The Chicago fire reached Wood's Museum shortly after midnight on 9 October 1871 and reduced it to brick and ash; the Tribune reported the only object spared was a silver-mounted revolver.¹⁸

What survived did so because Combs had kept the fragments that were mounted on backing paper and framed — the very ones that had been glued down for display in Kirtland — and gave them to his housekeeper. Her descendants sold them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1947. That is the whole reason there is anything to argue about.

1912, then 1967

Before any papyrus resurfaced, the facsimiles alone had already been submitted for expert judgment. The Louvre's Théodule Devéria read them in the 1860s. Then, in 1912, Franklin S. Spalding, the Episcopal bishop of Utah, mailed the three cuts to eight scholars — Sayce at Oxford, Petrie at London, Breasted at Chicago, Mace at the Metropolitan, Peters at Pennsylvania, Mercer, Meyer at Berlin, von Bissing at Munich — and published their replies, noting that 'in no case did one man know the opinion of another.' Sayce: 'It is difficult to deal seriously with Joseph Smith's impudent fraud… Smith has turned the Goddess into a king and Osiris into Abraham.' Petrie: 'It may be safely said that there is not one single word that is true in these explanations.'¹⁹ B. H. Roberts, defending the church, conceded there were then no Egyptian scholars among the Latter-day Saints who could answer them, and confined the reply to the survey's method.

Fifty-four years later, in the spring of 1966, Aziz S. Atiya — a Coptic historian at the University of Utah, not a Latter-day Saint — opened a file of papyrus at the Metropolitan and recognized a damaged vignette: a man on a lion-shaped couch, a figure standing beside him, a bird in the air, with the arms, torso and one head missing and crudely drawn in on the backing sheet. It was the original of Facsimile 1. Ten other fragments were with it, and an 1856 certificate signed by the Bidamons and Joseph Smith III.²⁰ On 27 November 1967 the museum's director handed the collection to N. Eldon Tanner of the First Presidency, and the Church published photographs in the Improvement Era in January and February 1968.

Many members expected vindication. Instead, Dialogue commissioned readings from the photographs. In the summer 1968 issue John A. Wilson and Richard A. Parker identified the fragments as a late Book of Breathings copied for a Theban priest named Hor plus Books of the Dead belonging to a woman named Tshemmin and to Neferirnub; Parker described the Facsimile 1 scene as 'a well-known scene from the Osiris mysteries, with Anubis, the jackal-headed god, on the left ministering to the dead Osiris on the bier,' and noted that the pencilled restoration was incorrect.²¹ In the same issue Grant Heward and Jerald Tanner published the identification of the Small Sensen fragment as the source of the characters in the manuscript margins. In the autumn issue Klaus Baer — who had been one of Nibley's own teachers in Egyptian — published the first full translation, under the title 'The Breathing Permit of Hôr: A Translation of the Apparent Source of the Book of Abraham.'²²

What the fragments say, and what the Church now says

The Hor document is a permit created by Isis and copied by Thoth so that the deified Hor may breathe and move after death. It gives directions for wrapping the document under the mummy's left arm. Robert Ritner's 2000 re-edition, and his later complete translation of the whole collection, changed Baer's column numbering, dating and a title, and concluded that 'the basic understanding of the papyrus remains unchanged from Baer's interpretation of thirty-four years ago.'²³ Michael Rhodes, a Latter-day Saint Egyptologist at BYU, published his own translation of the same text and does not contest the identification.

Facsimile 3, on the Egyptological reading, is the judgment scene familiar from chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead: the deified Hor brought by Maat and Anubis before the enthroned Osiris, with Isis behind him. The hieroglyphs Smith pointed at name gods where he named mortals. The label above the figure he called 'King Pharaoh' reads, as Ritner and others give it, as Isis; the one above the 'prince of Pharaoh' names Maat; the black figure Smith called 'Olimlah, a slave belonging to the prince' is Anubis, whose recitation is written above him.²⁴

In July 2014 the Church published 'Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham.' It grants that no eyewitness account of the translation survives, 'making it impossible to reconstruct the process'; that only small fragments of the long scrolls exist, so that 'the relationship between those fragments and the text we have today is largely a matter of conjecture'; that 'none of the characters on the papyrus fragments mentioned Abraham's name or any of the events recorded in the book of Abraham'; that the fragments are standard funerary texts dating from the third century BCE to the first century CE; and that 'neither the rules nor the translations in the grammar book correspond to those recognized by Egyptologists today.'²⁵

What it does not do is choose. It offers that an ancient record could survive as copies of copies, that illustrations could drift from their original context and be reinterpreted, that the reverse could also be true — that illustrations with no ancient connection to Abraham could by revelation shed light on him — and that the phrase 'by his own hand, upon papyrus' can be read as a claim of authorship rather than of physical handwriting. Critics read the essay as the church conceding the facts while redefining the word 'translation' to keep the conclusion; LDS Discussions in particular argues that the essay's appeal to a lack of unanimity 'even among non-Latter-day Saint scholars' about the vignettes converts small technical disagreements into apparent support.²⁶

The argument now runs inside the faithful camp

For thirty years the faithful reply divided into two theories that could coexist. The missing-scroll or long-roll theory holds that the text was translated from a portion of papyrus that burned in Chicago; it rests on nineteenth-century descriptions of a 'long roll' — Charlotte Haven's, and Lucy Mack Smith's identification of one as 'the writings of Abraham and Isaac' — and on calculations of scroll length. The catalyst theory holds that the papyri prompted a revelation of a genuinely ancient Abrahamic text that was never physically on them. Both must contend with Abraham 1:12 and 1:14, which point the reader to the picture at the beginning of the record.²⁷

The scroll-length dispute has been fought empirically. Andrew Cook and Christopher Smith calculated in Dialogue that no more than about 56 centimetres of the interior of the Hor scroll can be missing, close to Baer's independent estimate; Gee, who had proposed a roll of perhaps ten feet, revised his figure to about 314 centimetres. Even sympathetic reviewers concede they cannot independently judge the mathematics.²⁸

Then the disagreement moved inside. In 2018 the Joseph Smith Papers published Revelations and Translations, Volume 4, edited by Robin Scott Jensen and Brian M. Hauglid — the whole Egyptian corpus, photographed and transcribed. John Gee reviewed it as 'The Joseph Smith Papers Project Stumbles.' Jeffrey Lindsay charged bias and, in doing so, quoted a public statement by Hauglid himself: 'I now reject a missing Abraham manuscript… I no longer agree with Gee or Muhlestein. I find their apologetic “scholarship” on the BoA abhorrent.'²⁹ The series editors replied that they had consulted Egyptologists throughout, cited nine of Gee's own works, and simply read the evidence differently: they hold that Smith translated portions in Kirtland and more in Nauvoo, where Gee holds that all translation occurred in Kirtland.³⁰

A related test case sits just outside this record. In May 1843 William Clayton wrote that he had seen six brass plates found near Kinderhook, Illinois, and that 'Prest J. has translated a portion,' identifying their owner as a descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh. The plates were a forgery made to trap him. Faithful writers argue Smith made only a cursory one-character comparison against the Grammar and Alphabet volume; critics read the entry at face value.³¹ The Joseph Smith Papers, whose scope covers the documentary edition itself, holds no Kinderhook material at all — a limit worth naming, because it means this corpus cannot settle the Kinderhook question from primary sources the way it can settle the Book of Abraham manuscripts.