Official LDSThe Church's own account
The Church embraces the book of Abraham as scripture and says it originated with Egyptian papyri that Joseph Smith translated beginning in 1835. It grants that many people saw the papyri but no eyewitness account of the translation survives, 'making it impossible to reconstruct the process,' and that only small fragments of the long scrolls exist today, so that 'the relationship between those fragments and the text we have today is largely a matter of conjecture.' It states plainly that none of the characters on the fragments mention Abraham's name or any event in the book, that Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologists agree the characters do not match the translation, and that 'neither the rules nor the translations in the grammar book correspond to those recognized by Egyptologists today.' It then offers alternatives — that the record could have been transmitted as copies, that illustrations could have drifted from an original context, or that Smith received the text by revelation with the papyri as a prompt — and declines to choose among them. Its official narrative history, Saints, tells the 1966 rediscovery story without resolving the translation question.
Faithful / apologeticFaithful defenders — and their internal quarrel
This camp begins from an explicit premise: as Kerry Muhlestein puts it, believing that Joseph Smith could translate with God's help and believing that he could not are both faith-based choices, and each colors everything after. From there it divides. The missing-scroll or long-roll position, argued hardest by John Gee, holds that the extant fragments are not the source, that eyewitnesses described a long roll, and that scroll geometry allows a roll of some ten feet. The catalyst position holds that the papyri prompted a revelation of an ancient Abrahamic text that was never physically on them. Hugh Nibley's reading of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers — as a by-product, a 'studying it out' or a failed reverse-engineering, largely the scribes' work rather than Smith's — remains the most widely repeated. FAIR's answers wiki collects all of these and adds evidences for the text's antiquity: the plain of Olishem against Akkadian Ulisum, Potiphar's Hill, sanctioned killing in Egypt, Shulem in Facsimile 3. Since 2019 the camp has been openly divided: Gee and Lindsay accuse the Joseph Smith Papers volume of bias, its editors reply that they simply read the evidence differently, and Brian Hauglid — a former apologist and one of that volume's editors — has repudiated his own earlier work and said he no longer agrees with Gee or Muhlestein.
Neutral academicEgyptologists reading the papyri
The Egyptological reading has been stable for a century and has not moved with the discoveries. In 1912 eight scholars told Spalding independently that Facsimiles 1 and 3 were inaccurate copies of funerary scenes and Facsimile 2 an ordinary hypocephalus. In 1968 Wilson and Parker identified the recovered fragments as a Book of Breathings copied for a Theban priest named Hor plus Books of the Dead for Tshemmin and Neferirnub; Baer published a full translation of the Hor document that autumn. Ritner's 2000 re-edition concluded that 'the basic understanding of the papyrus remains unchanged from Baer's interpretation of thirty-four years ago,' with changes confined to column numbering, dating and a title. On Facsimile 3, the hieroglyphs above the figures name Osiris, Isis, Maat, Anubis and Hor — precisely where Joseph Smith's explanation names Pharaoh, the prince, Shulem and the slave Olimlah. Michael Rhodes, a Latter-day Saint Egyptologist at BYU, published his own translation of the Hor Book of Breathings and does not dispute the identification.
Critical / secularCritical readings
Critics argue the case is closed by the documents themselves. All three 1835 manuscripts carry, in their left margins, hieratic characters taken in order from the Small Sensen portion of the Hor Book of Breathings — the fragment whose fibres join the original of Facsimile 1. LDS Discussions presses Abraham 1:12 and 1:14, where the text tells the reader to look at 'the representation at the commencement of this record' and 'the figures at the beginning,' as fatal to both the missing-scroll and catalyst theories: the text points at the very fragment we have. Dan Vogel argues the Egyptian papers were Smith's preliminary effort to understand the papyri and to convince followers the translation came from them. The CES Letter makes the Book of Abraham its central exhibit — Jeremy Runnells calls it 'the smoking gun that has completely obliterated my testimony of Joseph Smith' — and MormonThink hosts Ritner's point-by-point response to the 2014 essay. The recurring complaint is definitional: that when translation failed, the word 'translation' was redefined.
Evangelical counter-cultThe Tanners and the counter-cult tradition
Jerald and Sandra Tanner published the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar in 1966 before the Church did, and in 1968 printed Grant Heward's identification of the Small Sensen fragment as the source of the margin characters, with the Egyptological confirmation that followed. Their framing is uncompromising: the papyrus 'is in reality nothing but a pagan funerary document and has nothing at all to do with either Abraham or his religion,' and they quote Joseph Fielding Smith-era statements insisting the book was 'a correct translation' to close the escape routes. They also preserved documents the Church had not published and correspondence — including Thomas Stuart Ferguson's private complaint that Nibley 'could not, he dared not, he did not, face the true issue' — that is now hard to find elsewhere. Their reproductions are a finding aid; the polemical framing and the occasional relish (they reprint a reader's letter wishing violence on Heward) should be read as advocacy, not analysis.
What it cost people
Twenty-four hundred dollars left a poor community at the moment it was scraping to finish a temple, and four embalmed human beings were bought, exhibited for a quarter a head, and eventually burned. Lucy Mack Smith kept house with them and made her living from them. For a century afterward the book they produced was ordinary scripture to millions of people, read in Sunday classes without controversy. Then it became the thing that ended some of their faith: Jeremy Runnells calls it 'the smoking gun that has completely obliterated my testimony,' and it is the topic that has cost more people their belief than almost any other. It also cost careers — Grant Heward was excommunicated for rejecting it, Brian Hauglid lost friendships over changing his mind about it.
The moral question the record poses
Joseph Smith made a claim that could be checked, and it was checked, and it did not come out the way he said. That much is agreed by the Church's own essay. The moral question is what follows: whether a prophet's specific, testable, wrong claim about what a document says invalidates the revelation he says came through it, or whether inspiration can arrive through a mistaken vehicle — a question this record poses but cannot answer. There is a second and sharper question about candor. The phrase 'purporting to be' was quietly dropped from the heading; the fragments were held for decades before publication; the Kirtland Egyptian Papers sat unpublished among the Church Historian's papers until critics printed them first. None of that bears on whether the book is true, but all of it bears on how the institution handled evidence it had reason to worry about.
What it asks of an institution — and of you
For an institution, this is the case study in what it costs to defer a hard disclosure. The 2014 essay says clearly what Egyptologists had been saying since 1912 and what its own scholars had been saying since 1968; the delay is what many members experienced as betrayal, more than the facts themselves. It also asks something of the church's scholars: whether an apologetic conclusion may be settled before the evidence is read, which is the charge Muhlestein makes explicit when he says the prior faith commitment 'colors the way we see everything else.' For an individual, the question is narrower and harder. It is what to do when the strongest available reading of the evidence points one way and a lifetime of religious experience points another — and whether it is honest to hold both, or only comfortable.
Questions to carry away
- If the Book of Abraham did not come from the papyri Joseph Smith owned, what does it mean that he said it did, in print, with pictures?
- Does a revelation that arrives through a mistaken reading of a document count as revelation, and who gets to decide?
- Why did the Church wait from 1967 to 2014 to say plainly in its own voice what its own scholars had concluded?
- When faithful Egyptologists disagree with the Church's own documentary editors about what its founding documents mean, whose reading is 'the Church's position'?
- What would count as evidence that would change your mind — and would you accept that standard applied to a religion not your own?
