Introduction and Episode Overview

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am one of your hosts for today, John Dehlin. It is November 17, 2022 and we are here in episode 30 of an amazing series on LDS Church Truth claims with Mike from LDS Discussions. For those of you who don't know, there's this amazing website called LDSDiscussions.com where my friend Mike has spent untold hours reviewing and discussing Mormon Church truth claims from as neutral and as dispassionate of a perspective as is possible. Mike himself is a convert. He's in a mixed faith marriage right now and he is a great guy and he's really super, almost just freakishly smart. Anyway, today we're going to be covering the episode ldsdecessions.com Abraham translation. That's the location for the text version of this essay. And of course we want to remind everyone that We've assembled all 30 at this point LDS discussions episodes on Spotify in both audio and video format so you can share them with other people or watch them all, or listen to them all in sequence. You can also find them on YouTube under Mormon Stories podcast in the LDS Discussions playlist. And of course it's also available on, you know, Apple Podcasting app under LDS Discussions or wherever you get your podcasts. And of course it's integrated into the Mormon Stories podcast feed. No discussion of the Book of Abraham would be complete without mentioning Dr. Robert Rittner. Here is a photo of Dr. Robert Rittner for those of you who are watching. But Robert Rittner sat in an Endowed Chair of Egyptology at the University of Chicago for multiple decades. And one of the honors of my professional life was doing like a 13 hour series with Dr. Robert Rittner and the great Radio Free Mormon digging into the Book of Abraham in depth with a real live Egyptologist. And again, the only endowed Chair of Egyptology in North, Central or South America. That's who Robert Ritter was. Robert Ritter literally passed away in the past year along with Dr. Michael Coefficient. A real loss to all of us. But just a shout out to Robert Rittner and A link to Dr. Rittner's series with me and RFM can be found at MormonStories.org we'll include a link to that in the show notes. And of course that begs the question as we bring on our beloved fearless leader, Mike. Mike, why in the world do we even need to include the Book of Abraham in this amazing series if We've already got 13 hours of Robert Rittner and I don't want you to shy away because I think this is going to be an important series. We do.

Mike [00:02:45] Yeah. And actually that's a great question, because if you've listened to the 13 hours with Dr. Rittner that you had done, there are countless other podcasts that have been done. I know RFM has done a bunch on the Book of Abraham, so there's a lot out there. I would argue the reason that these are important is because we're trying to cover kind of the truth claims of the Mormon Church and we're trying to cover all of them. And the Book of Abraham is the most important way that we can really discern whether or not Joseph Smith had the ability to translate ancient languages. And I think what will make these podcasts maybe a little bit different is that we're going to tie them back into what we've already done in the previous episodes to really kind of drive the point that we've been making this whole series, which is that when you look at all these problems in totality, these are common threads. These problems aren't isolated to the book Abraham, Joseph Smith, as we know, the translation doesn't match the scrolls. Well, you would sit there and go, well, that, that's a one time thing. But as we've talked about in our previous episodes, there are a lot of details in the Book of Abraham that are going to mirror some of the problems we see with the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and covenants, you know, DNC132, as we talked about. And so to be able to bring it, I think, back to our earlier episodes, to really drive home the fact that these are not isolated issues, as we'll see as we go through the apologetics will be important. I think, combined with the fact that this is the one area, as we'll go through with this presentation, that we could show source material for what Joseph is translating. And so with the Book of Mormon, we don't have the ability to do that because obviously the gold plates, if they ever existed in the form Joseph said they did, we can't look at. So being able to do that and evaluate his claims is very important. But obviously, if you really want a fuller picture, interviews with Dr. Rittner, the RFM podcast with David Bachoy, all of those are great series that you'll want to do. In addition to this, to get an even deeper view into the Book Abraham

John Dehlin [00:04:36] as a whole, we also should mention Dan Vogel has an amazing series on on YouTube where he also goes into the Book of Abraham in depth. And Dan Vogel of course, is a scholar of Joseph Smith, probably the world's foremost scholar on Joseph Smith. And shout out to Dan Vogel. We love him. And of course, my Brent Metcalf episode with Mormon Stories also covers a lot of this. So lots of different ways and angles that you all can get up to speed on Book of Abraham really quickly. We also want to bring in for today's discussion the one, the only, the great Nemo, the famous. Hey, Nemo.

Nemo [00:05:17] Hi, John.

John Dehlin [00:05:18] Is it okay if I introduce you? Is Nemo the Famous. You don't mind, right?

Mike [00:05:23] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:05:25] Nemo. Nemo is obviously. He's joining us from the UK and he's got a wonderful channel on YouTube called Nemo the Mormon. And he is one of the Brit vengers, which is a group of UK YouTubers. Nemo, you really wanted to do Book of Abraham, is that right?

Nemo [00:05:42] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:05:43] Yeah, that's one of my favorite things, because the. The. What is it called? The. In the. In the British Museum? The. The code.

Nemo [00:05:51] What is it the Rosetta Stone?

John Dehlin [00:05:53] Is that because the Rosetta Stone is in the British Museum? Is that why you want to do

Nemo [00:05:57] all the good old stuff's in the British Museum? Because that's what we do. We go around to different parts of the world and we take stuff.

John Dehlin [00:06:03] Yeah. So all the good stuff's here, like any good colonialist. That's what you guys do?

Nemo [00:06:08] Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:06:10] All right, well, well, Nemo, we love your contribution, so thanks so much for joining us.

Nemo [00:06:14] Pleasure.

Background and Context of the Book of Abraham

John Dehlin [00:06:15] All right, well, I'm going to. Mike, I know you've got several slides introducing all of this, but I'm going to go ahead and give a John de Lynn to the Book of Abraham for those who have never been Mormon. So obviously, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints believes that the Holy Bible, the New and the Old Testament are part of their scriptural canon. So Mormons definitely believe in the Holy Bible. And of course, we've already covered in depth now the Book of Mormon, which would be the keystone of our religion as we call it. Mormons actually view the Book of Mormon as superior to the Bible. And I can explain that if anybody wants to disagree with me. But there's no doubt that the Joseph Smith called the Book of Mormon the most correct book on earth and that you'll get closer to Jesus by the Book of Mormon than any other book, including the Bible. So there's the Bible, there's the Book of Mormon. And then, of course, we've covered already on the series the Doctrine and Covenants, which is a compilation 130 revelations that Joseph Smith received compiled into the Doctrine and Covenants, which we've talked about extensively. And then we've talked a little bit about the final two. But we did talk about the Book of Moses a little bit, which is a one off for Joseph Smith, Book of Moses and of course the Book of Abraham. So the Book of Abraham and the Book of Moses combined are called what Mormons call the Pearl of Great Price. And I think the Joseph Smith first vision story is also lumped in there. And together those kind of four, those four major books are called the quad or that represents the Mormon canon. And so when we talk about the Book of Abraham, we're talking about, let's just say 25% of Mormon scripture when it comes to actual books. So it's hugely important. And I'm just going to say that a lot of people come to me and say, John Dehlin, what was the first thing that really caused you to start questioning the more mature truth claims? And, and it literally was learning the story you're about to hear today. Learning the story of the Egyptian papyrus. When I was about 30 or 31 years old, after three decades in the church for the first time, I learned the real story about the Book of Abraham papyrus. And that's what we're going to be hearing today. So that's my introduction. Mike, what would you like to add before we just jump into the slides?

Mike [00:08:36] No, nothing. I think it's a good thing to mention just because of the fact that as we'll go through the timeline to show how it was published, this was canonized, this is something that's considered scripture. So when we talk about it today, it's really hard. Even though it's not nearly taught to the same degree as the Book of Mormon, it still is on the same level within the church as being upheld a scripture from God. And I think that's something we need to keep in mind as we go through this too, because of the fact that it is something that is supposed to have come through the power of God and there are very testable claims made. So as you said, this is something that if you're not a member of the church, you might not understand why this is so important. But the fact that it's scripture means that, you know, you can't just make it go away, I guess is the point I would make.

John Dehlin [00:09:20] It's crucial. Nemo, I'm going to bring you in in just a second, but I'm going to say one last thing. Excluding the fact that the Book of Commandments, as we learned in a previous episode, began by saying that Joseph Smith will claim no other gift. That the words that were used, Mike, after the Book of Mormon.

Mike [00:09:36] Yeah, yeah. In that first revelation that says basically he'll claim no other gift outside of translating the Book of Mormon. And then they change it to I think I forgot what it says, like no other gift until the translation's completed or whatever it is. Yeah, but what.

John Dehlin [00:09:47] But what the Doctrine and Covenants ends up saying about Joseph Smith ultimately, once it's revised, is Joseph Smith is referred to as a prophet, seer, revelator and translator. And this is really important to understand Joseph Smith. The one of the main way I believe that Joseph Smith obtained his fame and his power when you study his, let's just say 1820 to 1935. What made him sought out all over New England, let's just say, was his claim to be able to produce ancient scripture through a magic seer stone. And the Book of Mormon was his first production. We've already talked about how he produced the Book of Mormon by looking at a peepstone in a hat and claiming to translate ancient records. But once he's described as a prophet, seer, revelator and translator, of course that leads to the expectation, kind of of what have you done for me lately? So the Book of Abraham becomes very important because as Joseph Smith needs to keep people following him and believing in him, he's got to live up to the title that he gives himself, which is to continue to seeing with his seer stone as a seer and translated because that's what the Doctrine and Covenants or that's what the Revelation said. So the Book of Abraham along with the book of Moses and ultimately, you know, DNC and even the Kinderhook plates all become instances of Joseph Smith trying to live up to his calling as a translator because that was his special gift. Nemo, anything else you want to add before we jump into the beginning of the slides?

Nemo [00:11:22] Yeah, I mean, not to take it on a tangent, so it's just a statement, but it surprises me that if you look at Community of Christ's copy of Doctrine and Covenants, it's full of sections. There's so many more than there are in the Brighamite sect because they can. They. They practice what they preach. When it comes to an open canon of Scripture, they actually canonize stuff. They write it down. I find it fascinating that after Joseph Smith, barely anyone contributes to canonized in the quad LDS scripture. Which just goes to show how special Joseph is. Perceived to be in his ability to translate and bring forth scripture that will be written down in this way.

John Dehlin [00:11:57] Absolutely. Most Latter Day Saints or members of the Mormon Church don't even know that Brigham Young didn't like the term prophet. He preferred president. And it wasn't, as I understand it, until David O. McKay that the presidents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints started allowing themselves to be called prophet again. That's how special they all viewed, in my understanding, Joseph Smith. So. All right, Mike, so let's go ahead. Now that we've got that introduction up, should we jump to our first slide?

Timeline of Joseph Smith's Translation Claims

Mike [00:12:25] Yeah, so we're just gonna. The first slide is just really quickly for anyone watching or listening, just to give you kind of a preview of how we're gonna break this up. We're gonna do the same thing we do with polygamy, which is to kind of do a mini series on the Book of Abraham, just because we wanna make sure we give enough time to both the critical side of the arguments and the apologetic side regarding the Book of Abraham. Joseph Smith. And so today we're gonna focus mostly on the translation process. So we're gonna look at what Joseph Smith claimed the scrolls said against what we now know they actually say. And then our next episode is going to basically be the. Almost the apologetic response to this episode. So the next episode is going to be looking at the apologetic responses. If you've ever paid any attention to this subject before, you're going to be familiar with, like, the Long and Lost scroll theory, the Catalyst theory. And so we're going to focus on kind of those and what the evidence and history says about those. And then we're going to have a third episode which could possibly be broken into two, depending on how long it goes. Because one of the things John was saying, how this was one of the first hits to his faith. One of the things to me is when I first started learning about the book Abraham, everyone is focused on the translation and for good reason, as we'll cover today. But it was an episode that John had done with David Bachavoy, and David Bachavoy had. He's a religious professor. He's, you know, got a doctorate. He's a scholar of all things Bible. He knows what he's talking about. And he spent, I think, about like 15 or 20 minutes in one of the episodes explaining why you can look at the Book of Abraham text. And without even looking at the translation process or the scrolls or any of that, you could show that it is not an ancient text. And so I wanted to do an episode that focuses on the Book of Abraham in the same way we did with the Book of Mormon, which is to say, what does the text show us with regard to biblical scholarship as to its credibility as an ancient text? And so the third episode is going to be looking at just the text of it. And then on the flip side of that, we're going to look at the apologetic talks about the. What they. What apologists will claim will be hits by Joseph Smith. So there is a famous one, which is Olishem, and we'll talk about all that stuff in the third or fourth episode, depending on how long it goes. So that is just basically an overview of how we're going to proceed. So if anyone's watching today and they're thinking you're not covering the apologetics, it's just because we wanted to make sure we put these in kind of episode chunks that aren't going to be so long that people are going to zone out. We want to do it and. Or we won't zone out, do it in kind of concise episodes so that we can stay on track and give enough time to everything.

John Dehlin [00:14:58] Yeah, and I'll just. I'll just back up your. Your, you know, statement that we need multiple episodes for this. If there were one single topic, you know, for somebody who's really just trying to know, is this church true? Was Joseph Smith a prophet? Did he really have the power to do what he said he had to do? You know, the way he set up the Book of Mormon, with golden plates that get taken away with a language that he called reformed Egyptian, that, you know, none of us, no one's able to discover what that really means. Someone could say that the Book of Mormon is sort of completely undisprovable. If you wanted one single issue of all the issues that would allow you to really fairly and scientifically determine whether Joseph Smith had the powers he claimed he had? It is the Book of Abraham, because you can see the source text. We have the source text. We have the ability to read Egyptian, and we have expert Egyptologists that have translated the original source text or the papyra, and they've told us what's on them. And so there's just no way it's one issue. It's such a crucial issue. Nemo, anything you want to add before we jump on?

Nemo [00:16:10] Just that you called it reformed. You talked about the reformed Egyptian. I'd love to explore or just put forward the idea that maybe, because then a genuine bit of Egyptian kind of artifact came into his possession or came into his vicinity. He will have felt pressure then to translate it because he's made claims previously about being able to translate reformed Egyptian. And it's not a far swing for people.

John Dehlin [00:16:33] Absolutely. Okay, so this is a crucial issue. All right, so, Mike, let's go to the next slide. A quick introduction to the Book of Abraham. Purchased the history behind the book.

Nemo [00:16:46] Yeah.

Mike [00:16:46] And so this is going to take it directly from the church's Gospel topics essay on the Book of Abraham. And they kind of describe how Joseph Smith came to possess these scrolls. And so they say. In the summer of 1835, an entrepreneur named Michael Chandler arrived at church headquarters in Kirtland, Ohio, with four mummies and multiple scrolls of papyrus. Chandler found a ready audience. By the time the collection arrived in Kirtland, all but four mummies and several papyrus scrolls had already been sold. A group of Latter Day Saints in Kirtland purchased the remaining artifacts for the church. After Joseph Smith examined the papyri and commenced the translation of some of the characters or hieroglyphics, his history recounts, recounts much to our joy, we found that one of the roles contained the writings of Abraham. I would also note that they. Joseph Smith says that one of the roles contains the writings of Joseph. I don't think the essay puts it in there because obviously that draws more attention to, I think, Joseph's claims. But the church paid $2,400 for the. For those mummies and scrolls, which is about $68,000 in today's money. And if you've studied church history, the church did not have a lot of money at that point. So this was obviously a massive purchase. And. And, you know, basically Joseph Smith conducts this very brief inspection of the rules and says, I commence a translation. And I'm highlighting that word on. On the screen because of the fact, as we've talked about, that word means a lot and so he says of some of the characters of hieroglyphics. And much to our joy, found that one of the roles contained the writing of Abraham, another the writings of Joseph of Egypt, etc. A more full account of which will appear in its place as I proceed to examine or unfold them. Truly, we can say, the Lord is beginning to reveal the abundance of peace and truth.

John Dehlin [00:18:28] Okay. And if it's okay if I give a tiny bit of background just to add to this, what you have to understand, if you want to understand Joseph Smith, is that he grew up reading the Bible and loving the Bible, and he particularly really paid a lot of attention to the Old Testament. We've already talked about how polygamy came out of Joseph Smith, at least in part, asking God, wait, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, you know, Israel or Jacob, Israel. Also Solomon and David. They all had plural wives. Hey, God, why do they get plural wives? And I don't. You know, that's basically. But also, when Joseph was reading the Bible, he would have been very familiar with the fact that Abraham, Father Abraham, who you could say is the father of the Israelite people, basically, Abraham and his family migrated to Egypt in the Old Testament because of famine. So Joseph would have read these stories. I think it's Genesis, 12, 11, 20. He would have read that father Abraham spent time in Egypt. And so when. When Michael Chandler comes into Kirtland, Ohio, with these mummies and papyrus, immediately in Joseph's mind, it would have been, whoa, Abraham and Moses, they hung out in Egypt. And he automatically would have been thinking Abraham. And so that's why Joseph is excited to buy the mummies and he's excited to get the papyrus, because in his mind, he associates Egyptian with. With the Old Testament and with Abraham. Does that sound. Does that sound fair, Mike? I think that's an important foundation to lay.

Mike [00:20:07] Yeah. I think just from listening to other people have talked about this, it's like one of those things where there weren't a lot of other people Joseph could have associated the scrolls with other than Abraham and Joseph at that point. So it fits into Joseph kind of what Nemo said. It's like, you know, one of the things that's funny about it is, you know, the essay talks about how Michael Chandler found a ready audience. Ready audience. And it's because Michael Chandler's got these scrolls. They're mysterious, right? Because the whole idea of, like, Egyptian artifacts is fascinating to basically the whole world at this point. And so everyone is fascinated by trying to decipher the language, trying to understand what they're all about. And then all of a sudden, you get near Kirtland and there's all these people who are like, oh, we've got a prophet who already translated, you know, reformed Egyptian. And as Nemo said, all of a sudden you bring it to Joseph. And Joseph's like, yeah, I could do it. Of course I could do it. And maybe that sounds facetious, but as Nemo said it, it puts a lot of pressure on Joseph because if he says he can't do it, everyone in the church is going to be like, why can't you do it? And so Joseph immediately is going to try to find what he can Connect knowing it's Egyptian to the Bible. And that makes a lot of sense, that he would immediately jump to Abraham

John Dehlin [00:21:13] and Joseph and Nemo. I'm going to bring you in. I'm just going to say one last thing. Probably one other really important historical element that sets the context for the Book of Abraham is the fact that Napoleon, who was, I don't know, the emperor of France, he conquered Egypt in July of 1798. So, you know, we're talking 30, you know, 33, 35 years, let's say 37 years after Michael Chandler strolls into Kirtland. And so from that point, you know, this. This phenomenon called Egyptomania, I believe it was called, started sweeping the world because all these mummies and pyramids and artifacts and scrolls were now available to the world. But we. But we hadn't sort of cracked the. The Egyptian hieroglyphics code yet. I believe that before Joseph Smith got the. Got the papyra, the Rosetta Stone had been discovered, and maybe it had been translated, but it wasn't broadly known yet that it had been. And nobody, I can tell you, nobody in upper New England thought that anyone had had translated, figured out how to crack the hieroglyphic code. But there was a huge global fascination called Egyptomania. And so, again, that's why Michael Chandler was touring through New England showing these mummies, showing these scrolls, because people would put down a lot of money because they were fascinated with all things Egyptian. Nemo. Any other historical tidbits, as a Brit that you want to add?

Nemo [00:22:49] I mean, yeah, Thomas Young, a Brit and a Frenchman, just looking up his name, Jean Francois Champagne, I think his name was. They were the two guys that cracked the Rosetta Stone. And that was kind of 1822, as they started publishing what was on it. So you've then got like 20, 30 years before that makes its way into kind of mainstream American knowledge or even kind of American academia, I guess. So, you know, this is really still quite early on. And, you know, Howard is not. I don't think he's discovered Tutankhamun at this point. It's all, you know, because the thing to remember is this is all buried, right? The Egyptians buried all this in pyramids. This is all funerary stuff. This was all designed to be sealed away. These spirits have been whisked off to the afterlife, surrounded by their gold and all their treasures and all the things the Egyptians thought would bring them forward. They were all kept out of view of the world. And so when this stuff starts getting unearthed, thousands of years later. Yeah. It's taking everyone's imaginations by storm. And people had all sorts of theories for what hieroglyphics meant. And the only. I don't know how much we're going to cover the Rosetta Stone, but it's only because it contained Greek that people already understood that you could then start to compare the languages.

John Dehlin [00:23:59] Yeah. And Mike, I'll bring you back in. But obviously, if Joseph Smith claims to have the power of translation, that only works if he's translating languages that nobody else knows. So it's crucial to realize that Joseph Smith thought that nobody could read Egyptian, and so he would see that as an opportunity to make people think he could. Or maybe in his mind, he thought he was actually translating Egyptian. That's what modern Mormon believing apologists would say. Either way, it was crucial that in Joseph's mind, nobody else in the world could read these hieroglyphics or make sense of them. That's why. That's another reason why he was so excited to pursue.

Nemo [00:24:38] No one can prove him wrong.

John Dehlin [00:24:39] Yep. So no one could prove him wrong. Well said.

Nemo [00:24:42] Yeah.

Mike [00:24:42] And that was one of those eye opening moments for me when I was starting to do the deep dive into all of this. And I always thought it was weird that Jerusalem came to the Americas and then ended up writing in reformed Egyptian because it's like, why would you write in Egyptian when you left a system that, you know, wrote in, you know, Hebrew language and someone. I forgot who it was. I was listening to a podcast. They're like, yeah. The reason the Book of Mormon gold plates were not claimed to be written in Hebrew is because Joseph Smith would have no claim to be a prophet, because you could just take it to a scholar who could translate Hebrew at the time into English. And so the reason that reformed Egyptian, and I'm looking at this from the. From the perspective, of course, that the gold plates were not what Joseph claimed them to be. The reason Joseph would have chosen not just Egyptian, but reformed Egyptian is to make sure there's absolutely no way for there would be anybody who could walk in and say, oh, I can do that without any need for God. And so that fits into the Book of Abraham in the sense of this is the one language Joseph Smith felt confident nobody else could fact check him on, because at that point, no one knew what the word said. And so in his mind, you could say whatever you wanted to, because who is going to tell you you're wrong? Because he doesn't understand that this Rosetta Stone is going to Completely change the game and is already happening as he's translating, but not in. As you said, not in his neck of the woods.

John Dehlin [00:25:58] Okay, so Michael Chandler brings these mummies and papyrus in papyri into Kirtland. Joseph lays down 2,400 bucks, or $68,000 in today's US dollars, purchases these. These artifacts, and almost immediately says, oh, they're the writings of Abraham, probably even before really looking at them. Is that right?

Mike [00:26:20] Yeah. Well, and that's one of those things. It's another one of those things where you look at and you're like, what a coincidence. You know, and. And obviously, we'll get into all of that as we do these episodes. But, yeah, it's just this. I talked with Nemo a little bit before we started, and you as well, about how this is one of those episodes where on some level you're like, this is such a simple thing. And yet we have to go through all of this because we have to acknowledge what the church is presenting as far as making this plausible. But, yeah, it's one of those things where you go, what are the odds that the last few scrolls and last few mummies just happen to be the writings of Abraham that just happened to make it to Kirtland that Joseph Smith just happened to buy? And, you know, but again, we don't need to think about quintessence because we can look at the source material.

John Dehlin [00:26:58] Absolutely. All right, so the next slide is Joseph Smith translates and releases the Book of Abraham.

Joseph Smith Acquires the Papyri and Begins Translating

Mike [00:27:05] Yeah, and so this is just kind of like. So they purchase the scrolls, and in that same year, which is 1835, Joseph begins translating the Book of Abraham papyri. According to his scribe, W.W. phelps, he says he's writing in the first person. He says, I, meaning Joseph, was continually engaged in translating an Alphabet of the Book of Abraham, in arranging a grammar of the Egyptian language. And while there's not a universal agreement on when the book Abraham was actually translated, Dan Vogel, who John had mentioned earlier, who does an absolutely amazing job with this, he points to a lot of evidence in the text itself and in the journals which shows that Book of Abraham, chapter one through chapter two, verse 18, was done in 1835, but the remainder of the book Abraham was not produced until they got to Nauvoo, likely all of it in 1842. Parley Pratt said in 1842 that the Pearl of great price is now in course of translation by means of the Urim and Thummim and proves to be a record written partly by the Father of the faithful Abraham, and finished by Joseph when in Egypt, which kind of works off of the claim we talked about in the last slide, which is that he claims it's both Abraham and Joseph who are on the scrolls. And then if you go back, let's see. Oh, yeah. And then they're going to release the Book of Abraham. They're going to serially publish it in the times and season. So it's going to be published, like, bit by bit. And they start that on March 1, 1842. It finishes up in May. And the heading of the Book of Abraham was written as follows. A translation, again, emphasis added, of some ancient records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs 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.

John Dehlin [00:28:50] So that kind of leaves. No, it's very unambiguous, Joseph saying that literally that. That Abraham got ink or whatever was used, and on these actual pieces of paper, Father Abraham wrote the hieroglyphics, his story. And that's what the papyrus were. It's. It's unambiguous, right, Nemo?

Nemo [00:29:15] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:29:19] All right. All right, Mike. So that's what they claimed from the start.

Nemo [00:29:23] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:29:24] Okay.

Mike [00:29:24] I mean, they make it very clear. So it's like one of those things every time. Nemo. It's like sometimes with these slides, it's like, yeah, that's what he said. So we'll leave it at that as we go through these slides.

John Dehlin [00:29:33] Now, this is something that, you know, believing Mormons aren't going to really pay much attention to. But it's probably worth noting that most Jewish scholars, and remember, Jewish scholars see the Old Testament as scripture. They will say there's no real evidence that an Abraham ever existed. Because unlike, let's just say some of the, you know, New Testament scrolls or writings that we have, you know, that at least there's some source documents to it. There's no source documents that really provide any evidence that Adam and Eve or Abraham, Isaac or Jacob ever existed. Once you start getting into David and Solomon, then the Jews will basically say that there's writings that maybe you can start associating with actual historical figures. But I would say most secular Jewish scholars or scholars of ancient religions will say that it's more likely than not that just like we've already established that there was no Abraham, there was no Adam and Eve, there's no evidence that there was ever an Abraham, Isaac or Jacob. That doesn't mean they didn't exist, just that there's no evidence that they did. Do either of you have anything to say about that?

Mike [00:30:51] I would just add. So there is a. He's a translation supervisor for the church named Dan McClellan and he does really, really cool work. You can follow him on TikTok, he's on Twitter. He had done a video and I don't mean to throw him. I'm not. I'm throwing him under the bus. I don't mean to pull him into this, I guess I should say. But he had done a video, I think it was last year maybe, maybe even this year. And he basically said look, the, the Moses and Abraham were unlikely historical figures, but if they were historical, they're likely nothing like they are in the Bible because all of those things would have happened so far before they were written down. And so to your point, from a historical standpoint, there's probably no historical Abraham. But even if there was some Abraham that these stories are written after, it would have been through hundreds and hundreds of years of being retold and changed by different communities. So the Abraham in the Bible would be nothing like a historical Abraham. If there was a historical Abraham, this is written after. So yes. And that is someone that works with the church who is also a Bible scholar who does a very good job. I know he definitely has rubbed some people the wrong way because he obviously does take sometimes somewhat of a faith promoting aspect. But yeah, it's. Yeah, he's likely not a historical figure.

John Dehlin [00:32:02] Ne. Nemo. Is there anything you want to add to that?

Nemo [00:32:05] I just, yeah, just to say that Abraham is such a, such an important figure to. They talk about the Abrahamic faith. So Christianity, Islam, Judaism, they all involve Abraham in some way. And so he's, he's at many people to many people and so he's mythologized to the nth degree. And so like, like Mike said, even if he was real, he's not the mythologized man that's presented.

John Dehlin [00:32:30] I think you know, we talk about how the book of Abraham, the topic can be so complex, but it's also so simple. Is. Is my memory from Dr. Robert Ritter is they've actually they can date these scrolls, these scrolls that Michael Chandler gave Joseph Smith, they can date when they were.

Nemo [00:32:48] I've got the dates if you want

John Dehlin [00:32:49] to likely written down and that in and of itself should, should kind of make it really clear that these papyrus aren't what they claim. Nemo, what are the dates?

Nemo [00:32:59] The church admits it on their essay. So I'm looking at the Church's essay now, and it says these fragments date between the 3rd century BCE and the 1st century CE long after Abraham lived.

John Dehlin [00:33:11] Yeah, yeah, the Church even admits it. So right off the bat, how in the world so, so Abraham would have lived how many years before Jesus was it, Was it good?

Nemo [00:33:20] Thousand. At least.

John Dehlin [00:33:21] At least a thousand years. Is that right, Mike?

Mike [00:33:23] Yeah, I think it's at least a thousand. Yeah, it's probably more than that, but it's at least a thousand. And I think the papyrus dating which the Church accepts, I think is a thousand years after Abraham. So, I mean, just the timing of it, you're just. No, there's nowhere to make this mesh together.

John Dehlin [00:33:38] Yeah, it would be, it would be like a document that we could, we could demonstrate was. Was a thousand years old, you know. Sorry. A document that we could demonstrate came from the Civil War era. Like, we could look at the paper, we could look at the ink, we could look at what's written on it. We know it comes from, from the, you know, the 1860s in the United States. Then someone claiming that it, that it, that it, you know, talked about Muhammad in 800 A.D. like, the date of the document alone makes that case. Okay, so. So let's go to the next slide, which is the grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language.

The Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language

Mike [00:34:18] Yeah, and so we just mentioned in the last slide how Joseph talks about in the journal about how he's putting together this grammar and Alphabet. And this is kind of known as the Gael. And I've also heard people say that the Kirtland Egyptian papers. So after he purchases the fragment, he's beginning to translate the characters both in the book of Abraham, but also in what is now known as the grammar and Alphabet of the English. Sorry, grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language. And you know, it's one of those things. This is going to be important as we do the next episode as well. So just remember the. The grammar and Alpha, the Egyptian language, because Joseph Smith is going to make all these translations as to what these symbols mean and they're all wrong. So this is another area where we could show that Joseph Smith is claiming these, these characters say one thing. And now, obviously now we know it's just completely wrong.

Nemo [00:35:04] You look at the size of the source material he was working with, the amount of characters he had to work with in order to manufacture the entire book of Book of Abraham. He was having to and did ascribe entire paragraphs of meaning to a single symbol, which is not how hieroglyphics Work.

John Dehlin [00:35:19] Yeah. And we're gonna. Well, I'm sure we're gonna go into that in depth. I'll just say this, that this document is so important, because it really is. It's showing how Joseph Smith. His thought process and the actual text that. That show the fingerprints of how he translated papyrus. And the one thing that I'll just say is that this grammar in Egyptian, this grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language has been in the church's possession for a long, long time. At least 50 to 100 years, if not for 150 years or more. And what people do need to know about this document is that it was hid from the church membership intentionally until it was kind of uncovered by Sandra Tanner and many people working with Sandra and Gerald Tanner. All of this chronicled in the book Lighthouse by Geraldine Sandra Tanner. I. I've been reading this for an episode we're doing with. With Sandra soon, but in chapter nine, it gives kind of an overview. But it's really important to understand that this document not only is essential, it's something that was hid from the church members until the 1960s.

Nemo [00:36:31] And it does show the sincerity of Joseph's either belief or attempt to genuinely translate this, because we'll go into it in the next episode. But all sorts of things are going to be said about what the word translate really means. But this shows that Joseph was trying to take the symbols he saw and give them meaning.

Mike [00:36:50] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:36:50] Brilliant. Okay, Mike, anything else you want to say about the. Gail?

Mike [00:36:54] No, just. Just to everybody watching or listening, just keep this in the back your head, because this actually is very important, especially in the next episode when we get into apologetics, because this is something that is going to be controversial as far as when this was done and who did it. And we'll get into all that later. But just kind of keep in mind that Joseph was doing this at the same time as he began the Book of Abraham translation. So his first. The first chapter plus was being done at the same time. Or this might have been done right after. I'm not sure the exact timing, but this is being done in between. Or it's done. Let me put this way. It's being done before the bulk of the Book of Abraham is written. And that's very important to note.

John Dehlin [00:37:29] Okay. All right, so the next slide is a brief Book of Abraham timeline. Book, translation, timeline. This is essential to understand the timeline.

Nemo [00:37:38] Yeah.

Mike [00:37:38] And so we've talked about the timeline in so many of these episodes, whether it's first vision or the Book Abraham translation and polygamy. But basically to just give you a real brief overview, obviously, as we talked about, in the summer of 1835, Joseph is going to purchase these Egyptian scrolls for $2,400. That summer and fall, he's going to begin the translation of the Book of Abraham. And that is going to be Abraham chapter one through chapter two, verse 18. Around the same time, they're working on the Kirtland Egyptian papers, which, as we talked about, is also known as the Gael. Gael. I don't know how they. Grammar, you know, grammar and Alpha, the Egyptian language. And then this is going to kind of go on hold. And then in 1842, Joseph Smith is going to pick this project back up and finish the translation of the Book of Abraham. And as I mentioned, this is an area we're going to talk about a ton when we get to the apologetics. But we have in Joseph's own journal where in 1842 he's saying, commenced translating from the Book of Abraham for the. For 10 number, the number 10 issue of the Times and Season. And so, as we just mentioned, this is really important because the church's apologists want the entire Book of Abraham written in 1835, so that the grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language could be considered a project by the scribes to effectively reverse engineer what Joseph Smith was doing when matching up the characters. Because of the fact that the grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language is 100% incorrect.

John Dehlin [00:39:00] Yeah. Nemo, you want to add something?

Nemo [00:39:01] Yeah, I mean, it's really difficult not to get into the apologies apologetics of it, but since you mentioned the apologists there, I think it's really interesting. I talk a lot about. Apologists live in kind of a fantasy land. They try and present a version of the church that works for them and that they think should work for you too. But it doesn't always represent what the church actually is. This is an example of that, because the church, in its essay, which I have in front of me again, the church, in its essay admits that the first few chapters were done. He says the first chapter and part of the second chapter were complete by the summer of fall at 1835. His journal next speaks of translating the papyri in the spring of 1842, after the saints have relocated to Nauvoo, Illinois. So the church admits that it didn't all take place in 1835. So the apologists are trying to make an argument that the church concedes, and they do that all the time. It's. It's crazy.

John Dehlin [00:39:51] Well, part of what's complicated about this is that there's not one group of apologists within the.

Nemo [00:39:56] Exactly.

John Dehlin [00:39:57] There's the Hugh Nibley, John Gee, Kerry Muhlstein, Daniel Peterson branch of sort of old school classic Mormon apologists that need everything scientifically, you know, linguistically. They need it all to make sense. They need Joseph Smith to have known what he was doing and to have been, in fact, a literal translator. And so they're the ones. Ones that are basically trying to say, no, no, no, the. The gale was not, you know, the. The notes that Joseph took or the means or the mechanics by which he was translating the Book of Abraham. The gale was just Joseph playing around trying to figure out, you know, Egyptian so that then he could, you know, he. Then he could do the actual translation. Because. Because the gale is kind of the smoking gun that shows that Joseph Smith didn't know what he was doing. And. And so that's why classic Mormon apologists need to discredit it. Modern Mormon apologists, kind of the neo apologists, they have a different explanation. We're going to talk about that next episode. Do I have that right, Mike? Did I get that right?

Mike [00:41:05] Yeah. And when it comes to this particular one, I think one of the arguments you'll hear about what Nemo said and we just mentioned in 1842, Joseph is repeatedly talking about translating the Book of Abraham. And what you'll hear from some of the key Egyptian apologists for the church is that translate actually means revise. And we'll get into that next episode. But that. That falls up. It falls apart. When you read the. I think there's one journal entry where it actually says, we've engaged in translating and revising. So it's like, well, it can't be, you know, be like, that'd be like me saying I was cleaning and cleaning. It's like, well, that's, you know, so, yeah, it falls apart.

Nemo [00:41:38] Yep.

Mike [00:41:39] Look at that next episode.

Problems With the Book of Abraham Translation

John Dehlin [00:41:40] Okay, so the next slide is problems with the Book of Abraham translation.

Nemo [00:41:44] Yeah.

Mike [00:41:44] And so we're going to get into this pretty quick as far as just why this is such a problem for the church. And so the book Abraham was released in 1840, and at the time, nobody around Joseph Smith knew how to translate Egyptian, which is what made Joseph Smith's translation so momentous in the church. And this is going to all happen while the Rosetta Stone is being cracked. And so as Nemo said earlier, they discovered it in 1799. It took a couple decades to be deciphered, but news of its existence was not Known at least broadly in America until around 1858. That's the first time that it was at the University of Pennsylvania, I believe they actually made an English translation of the Rosetta Stone. Translation. So they translate it into English. I don't know if it was in French at first or what, but. And this is obviously after Joseph Smith is killed. And this discovery allows scholars to decipher ancient Egyptian writings for the first time. And this knowledge is going to lead Egyptian scholars to conclude that the Book of Abraham facsimiles and papyri have absolutely nothing to do with Abraham or the version of the Book of Abraham that Joseph Smith presents as a translation from God.

Nemo [00:42:51] And just to explain to people what's on the Rosetta Stone, if you can pull up that image, there's three types of writing on there. There's hieroglyphics, then there's demotic, and then there's Greek. So demotic is kind of like a cursive form of hieroglyphics. So it's kind of like more similar to a sort of handwritten handwriting type form. And then you've got the Greek. And because people knew how to read ancient Greek, they were then able to compare certain repeating phrases and frequency of repetition and work out, well, that word is then that. And then they start to build a picture. That's how they do it. But what's really fascinating about this is for a long time it was thought that what you're seeing there is a Greek text that is, you know, being written because of what's been written in the Egyptian. But actually it's the other way around. The Egyptian is a translation of the Greek text, which was just a little fun fact for you.

John Dehlin [00:43:44] And basically this would have been produced around, I guess 196 BC. The Rosetta Stone would have been produced. What is a way to help people translate between the three languages? Is that why it would have been originally created?

Mike [00:44:03] I don't, I don't. Yeah, I'm assuming so. I mean, it would make sense.

John Dehlin [00:44:07] Why would they put. Why else would they put the same text written three different ways with three different languages on the same stone?

Nemo [00:44:15] This is where I need my best friend who's studying classics at university because he knows this stuff, but I believe there was, there was obviously there was interaction between the Greek civilizations. Go on.

John Dehlin [00:44:26] Actually, I found it. You got it is thus one of many mass produced stelae S T E L A E designed to widely disseminate an agreement issued by a council of priests and in 196 BC. Okay. So they wanted to communicate an agreement, but they wanted to do it in three languages. And so by disseminating the same text in three languages, they were able to communicate with multiple. With multiple people who could read in

Nemo [00:44:55] multiple languages, because the Greeks and the Egyptians interacted. So any Greeks involved can also understand.

John Dehlin [00:45:00] Yeah, that's what it was.

Nemo [00:45:01] All right.

John Dehlin [00:45:01] It wasn't created as a translation aid. No, it was. It was a message that needed to get out in three different languages. We just use it that way by people who knew all three languages. Right?

Nemo [00:45:12] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:45:12] Okay. All right, Mike. So that's the Rosetta Stone. Okay.

Mike [00:45:16] Yep. So that makes sense. Yeah. And so this obviously creates massive problems.

John Dehlin [00:45:21] And so. Yeah, and so what the church admits in its Gospel topics essay, which we'll cover later, and I'm repeating what you just said, Mike, is that. Is that the church admits that once you. Once you have a knowledge of Egyptian based on the Rosetta Stone, you read through the papyrus, and the word Abraham doesn't appear anywhere on any of the papyrus, and nothing that's written on the papyrus has anything to do with Abraham. And that makes perfect sense because the papyrus themselves date to a thousand years after Abraham would have even lived in if he was a. If he was an actual historical figure at all. Correct.

Nemo [00:46:02] That's it. We can go home.

Mike [00:46:03] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:46:05] Isn't that. Isn't it really that simple? Like, we could end the Book of Abraham discussion right now.

Nemo [00:46:10] Yeah. Yeah.

Mike [00:46:11] I mean, it is. That's why this is. On some level, it just feels like, you know, to quote Zoolander, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because you're going through this, and you're like, you know, we'll go through it as we do this episode. But, yeah, there's just all these arguments are being made, and you're like, but he got it wrong. Like, why are we still doing this? And yet we're gonna spend six hours. So, you know.

John Dehlin [00:46:28] Yeah. Okay. All right, so the next slide is that Egyptologists knew as early as 1856 that Joseph got it wrong. So you're. You're telling me that Egyptologists, you know, were able to kind of look at the documents Joseph Smith produced either in Scripture or in the Times and Seasons or the publications, and they were already starting to say Joseph got it wrong as early as 8, 50, 1856.

Mike [00:46:53] Yeah, I mean. Yeah. And that's why it's so crazy. So the discovery of the Rosetta Stone led many early Egyptologists to note that the Book of Abraham was not a True translation, along with the advancement in knowledge about the common funerary texts, scrolls that the book Abraham was actually produced from. And so this is kind of not really has nothing to do with the Rosetta Stone. But as early as 1856, an Egyptologist named Gustav, I think it's Seifarth. I'm not sure if I'm doing that right. But he looked at the roles and he said the following. The papyrus role is not a record but an invocation to the deity Osiris, in which occurs the name of the person and a picture of the attendant spirits introducing the dead to the judge Osiris. And so that's from Robert Rittner's book about the Egyptian papyri. And so it's not so much that they could translate the language in 1856, but they could look at that and know this is not some sort of a record of anyone. This is literally a funerary text, which is what the church, of course now admits. And so Egyptologists were able to look at the facsimiles and know immediately that they were funeral documents with no connection to Abraham. Theodore Deveria, an Egyptologist at the Louvre Museum, put it bluntly when he said the facsimiles were common Egyptian funerary documents, of which he had examined hundreds. And so it's kind of like, you know, if you went up to, you know, someone who was familiar with different currencies in the world and you gave them a coin and they could look at that and go, oh, that's an ancient Roman, Roman coin. Because they've seen so many. This is nothing unique to someone who studies this stuff. And that's what makes, you know, Joseph Smith turning this into a. One of a kind document so egregious, because they can look at this immediately without even looking at the text to go, I know what this is. This is not what, what it's being claimed to be.

John Dehlin [00:48:36] It'd be like if they found a dreidel from a thousand bc, they would go, oh, that's a little top that you spin as part of a Hanukkah game slash ritual. You wouldn't call it a weapon, you wouldn't call it a bullet, you would call it a dreidel. And, you know, if we, if we take it that, if we take the dates that we know the papyrus sort of date to, and we look at the context that they were found in, which is in burying mummies, right? Burying, you know, leaders, Egyptian leaders, what would we expect to be on the papyrus? Not even having the ability to read Egyptian, it would be. They were, they would be funerary texts. They would be funeral related documents that talk about the person who's being buried, that talk about his burial or even the afterlife in some sort of religious sense. That's what we would expect the documents to be. And that's in fact what Egyptologists who have read the documents say that they are. And that's why they don't have the word Abraham there. It would be weird to have scrolls buried with a mummy, a dead person that was an Abraham, you know, dated a thousand years after Abraham would have lived. It would be weird for those papyrus buried with that dead Egyptian leader to be talking about Abraham versus talking about the dead person who's buried with the scrolls. Nima, what would you add?

Nemo [00:49:58] Yeah, I would just, just say, you know, the hypocephalus, for example, that round facsimile, it's found under the head of the mummy. That's where it lives. So anyone that finds it in context, anyone that knows where that ought to be, knows exactly what it's for. It's like me getting. I've got a US Quarter here, right? Yeah. A little bit of money. And if someone doesn't know what that is, then they could try and tell me. It's all sorts of things. But you guys being Americans, you look at that and you instantly know what it is.

John Dehlin [00:50:23] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's what Egyptologists know can do.

Nemo [00:50:27] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike [00:50:29] It's like there was a show here, I think they still do it, but it's called Antiques Roadshow. I don't know if Nemo's ever heard that, if they do a version of that in the uk, but absolutely, yeah. So this show, they'll have like this, this nice old lady and she'll come up and she'll be like, my great grandmother has passed this down from generation to generation. And she actually told us that General George Washington used this in the Revolutionary War. They only made 12 of them. They gave it to the best generals and the dude who's like a specialist on the show is like, yeah, no, this is actually a, you know, a cane that was made in mass production in 1913 by XYZ Co. Because that's their specialty. They know what these things are. So this is the exact same thing where, you know, Joseph Smith, if he were alive today, would go to the Antiques Roadshow and he goes, I have the writings of Abraham and Joseph. And an Egyptologist be like, no, this is like literally a very common funerary scroll with no connection whatsoever. I mean, it's, it's that black and white. This is not, you know, there's no middle ground here.

Nemo [00:51:25] I'd love to see Joseph Smith on Antiques Roadshow. That would be amazing.

Mike [00:51:29] Well, there should be a skit for that, actually. That'd be kind of fun. But, yeah, there needs to be like

John Dehlin [00:51:33] a post Mormon version of Saturday Night Live that does skip.

Mike [00:51:37] Yeah, apparently. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:51:38] Really, really quickly when you talk about Gustav Seyfarth, Egyptologist, declaring what. What was in the translation. Tell me if I'm, if I'm right about this. What he would have seen would not have been the actual scroll. He would have seen the facsimiles that were produced, what, in the times and seasons. So here's facsimile one, here's. Here's facsimile two. And most of us as Mormons would have seen the facsimiles. And that's what he, that's all he really needed to talk about. What would have been on the papyrus? Because the papyrus themselves, the text or the writings of the papyrus were not made publicly available. Is that right, Mike?

Mike [00:52:20] Well, they were publicly made available and they actually charged people to see them.

John Dehlin [00:52:24] I mean, written in a newspaper, published in a newspaper. Is that right?

Mike [00:52:28] No, I don't think they ever were. So, I mean, again, I don't know if it's possible that, that this guy was in America and they, they, he came to. To look at them or if he, like you said, just looked at what was printed in the book, like in the facsimiles and in the Book of Abraham. I'm not sure. But I do know that the Smith family held on to him after Brigham Young went to Utah. I don't know exactly when they sold them. And they did charge people and they, they would show them these scrolls to look at. So anyone who had, I think they charge a quarter or something could go in there and look at the scrolls. They would bring them out for him. So, you know, I'm not sure if he saw him in person or just the facsimiles.

Rediscovered Papyrus Fragments Contradict the Translation

John Dehlin [00:53:03] Okay, all right, so let's go ahead and go to kind of the second death blow to Book of Abraham, authenticity. And this is something that I talked a lot about in the, in the Shannon Caldwell Montez Secret Mormon meetings of 1922 episode. We've got this amazing New York Times article. Because the church, obviously, Joseph Smith is killed in 1844. You know, we didn't mention this in the previous slide, but the church moves to Utah, Brigham Young takes the Utah Saints to Utah. And what many people don't know is that those papyrus were thought, as you write on this slide, to have been lost in the Chicago Fire. And all we really had were the facsimiles to go on. And so everyone had thought, you know, by the early 1900s, that the papyrus had been lost. But Egyptologists could opine on the facsimiles. And that's exactly what they did in 1912. Right?

Mike [00:54:02] Yeah, exactly.

John Dehlin [00:54:03] Talk us through that.

Nemo [00:54:04] Yeah.

Mike [00:54:05] And so this one was one of the ones that blew my mind too, because this is from December 29, 1912, and it's a New York Times headline that proclaims, museum Wallace proclaim fraud of Mormon profit. And the article is literally the New York Times going to a bunch of Egyptologists and having them compare the work on the facsimiles to the hundreds of similar. Similar documents that museums have already studied and translated at this point. And as we mentioned, this is all while the world still believes that the source material was lost in the Chicago Fire. And this tells you that Nemo has said it. I think you said it too. You don't even need to see the remaining fragments because of the fact that they printed the facsimiles directly in. So we know what the facsimiles were. And in 1912, the church and the world knew that Joseph Smith got it completely wrong.

John Dehlin [00:54:54] Yeah. And for the historical context there, like in the United States, everyone was kind of upset about polygamy. The Mormon Church had promised to stop practicing polygamy by night. By 1890, it kept secretly practicing polygamy until, like, the early 1900s. There were these Smoot hearings where the, you know, Utah was wanting to be a state, but it. But it was secretly lying to the world. And so there are these hearings where the Mormon Church is on trial and Mormons are viewed with kind of suspicion and disgust. And so it would have been that context where probably journalists from the New York Times would have said would have been motivated to go, hey, all of this trouble that's going on with polygamy and Utah and the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints, like, it's based on Joseph Smith and his credibility as a leader. So it's fair game to. To sort of explore. It wasn't sort of just base hatred of Mormons or like, quote, anti Mormon sentiment. It's just like, wow, the Mormon Church is causing all this stress. Should we even use modern Egyptologists to kind of determine whether Joseph Smith was even a credible guy? And it was in that context that these credible Egyptologists just literally studied the facsimiles, translated them, and again agreed with, with the previous scholar that these facsimiles were funerary. You know, were part of funerary texts, buried with a mummy, and literally the word Abraham didn't appear anywhere on them. Nemo, what would you add?

Nemo [00:56:25] Just, just treat it like any other language for a second. Right? Take, take any piece of writing in any language. Take a piece of writing in German. If I say that means this, I, I believe this says X, Y and Z, and I've put that in my religious documents and I'm making claims about that. It is fair game for anyone with an expertise in that language to come along and check whether I'm telling the truth. It's really that simple.

John Dehlin [00:56:48] Yeah, yeah.

Nemo [00:56:49] There's no motivational hatred behind it. It's just experts in the field of whatever language are going to want to know that things that are being said about that are true or not.

John Dehlin [00:56:58] And we as believing Mormons are always primed to discredit and disbelieve and dismiss anything anyone says that would make us doubt the church as sort of anti Mormon opposition. But if, you know, early 20th century scholars like you say, of German or French or Italian or Greek, if they were opining about any other document, believing Mormons would just, probably just accept that those scholars know what they're talking about. And it probably should be the same thing with Egyptian.

Nemo [00:57:28] It should.

John Dehlin [00:57:29] All right, Mike, so anything else you want to say about this slide?

Mike [00:57:33] No, I think you guys covered it well.

John Dehlin [00:57:34] All right, so the next slide is the papyrus fragments are found but have nothing to do with Abraham. So tell us about that.

Mike [00:57:42] Yeah, and so this really just makes, you know, compounds the problem for Joseph Smith and the truth claims of the Church because they rediscover these fragments that they thought were locked, lost in the Chicago fire in 1966. They're found, I think, at the New York Metropolitan Museum, and they give them back to the church for an anonymous donation. And it includes papyrus fragments that include facsimile one with the surrounding symbols that are going to match like perfectly with the Book Abraham manuscripts. And so this tells us that the source material for the Book of Abraham is now extant, and we can kind of evaluate it. And the church's Gospel Topics essay concedes as much. They say none of the characters on the papyrus fragments mentioned Abraham's name or any of the events recorded in the Book of Abraham. Mormon and non Mormon Egyptologists agree that the characters on the fragments do not match the translation given in the Book of Abraham, though, there is not unanimity even among non Mormon scholars about the proper interpretation of the vignettes on these fragments. Scholars have identified. Yeah, I know. Scholars have identified the papyrus fragments as part of a standard funerary text that were deposited with mummified bodies. And then this one's the big one, the, the other big one. These fragments date to between the 3rd century BCE and the 1st century CE, long after Abraham lived. And so as we said, those two sentences, the beginning and end of that paragraph, should put an end to any discussion about the Book of Abraham being an ancient authentic text.

John Dehlin [00:59:07] Nemo, we heard you kind of gasp in something. Can you tell us what you're gasping about? Just summarize.

Nemo [00:59:12] Sighing at the weaselly way. Try and claw back this. They, they try and claw back some credibility by casting doubt. It's like I'm holding up this quarter again and everyone's going like Joseph Smith said this was a penny. Both Mormon and non Mormon scholars agree this is not a penny. There's not unanimity as to whether it's a dime or a quarter. Fine, but it's definitely not a penny. And that's what Joseph Smith was saying it was. It's definitely not what he was saying it was. It doesn't matter whether everyone agrees on exactly what it therefore is. It's just, it's about what it isn't. That's what's important. And I just hate the Weasley way that they try and cast doubt on the integrity or the knowledge of those experts. It's like using the phrase so called experts. It's just to try and cast doubt on them.

John Dehlin [00:59:59] And Nemo, what was the sentence that caused you to gasp in this, in these statements?

Nemo [01:00:04] It's, it's saying none of the characters on the papyrus fragments mention Abraham's name or any of the events recorded in the Book of Abraham.

John Dehlin [01:00:11] That's the current Church of Jesus Christ,

Nemo [01:00:14] the church's position, right?

John Dehlin [01:00:16] Admitting that.

Nemo [01:00:17] Yeah. And then they say Mormon and non Mormon scholars agree on this, right? Yeah, yeah, they agree that. Yeah, go on.

John Dehlin [01:00:25] No, no, keep going.

Nemo [01:00:26] I was just going to read it. If you just pull it up because I think it bears repeating. It says, it says Mormon and non Mormon Egyptologists agree that the characters on the fragments do not match the translation given in the Book of Abraham. That should then just be another full stop. But then they try and cast out. And this is where I sighed and got frustrated because they say, though there is no unanimity even among non Mormon scholars, the out group about the proper interpretation of the vignettes on these fragments. But that's irrelevant because your scholars and the non Mormon scholars agree that they do not match the translation given in the Book of Abraham. That's it.

John Dehlin [01:01:05] Right, really quickly, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna also refer again to this book, Lighthouse. And there are other books that even deal with this more. But this chapter nine of Lighthouse confirms that the the Mormon Church knew about the grammar Alphabet of Egyptian language, the Gael document. They knew in the 1930s and 40s and 50s that that document existed. This book chronicles different Mormon scholars that had secret access to the Gael. But of course the Gael was never made public at that point. It was hidden and it was kept secret because the Church likely knew that it would expose Joseph Smith as a fraud. And it would have been Joseph Fielding Smith and others like him that would have kept it secret. But then it also talked about the Church discovering a couple years before the Tanners that these papyrus were available. And it was a professor at the University of Utah, Labib Habachi of Cairo, who got tipped off by Klaus Baer that these papyrus were in existence. So the Mormon Church had a couple years of lead time to come clean and tell the world that. Well, they had decades to tell the world that the grammar Alphabet of Egyptian language was existed. They hid that and kept it secret. And they had a couple years of lead time to just say, hey world, hey Mormons. We found the papyrus. It's a miracle. But they didn't. They kept it secret and they hid it. And it wasn't until word got back to the Tanners, and not just the Tanners, but this really important mailman turned, turned kind of scholar named Grant S. Hayward, who was literally a mailman who was friends with the Tanners who started studying Egyptian. And he was one of the first people to actually, you know, as a Mormon, as a faithful believing Mormon. He was one of the first to look at the facsimiles to study Egyptian and to, to kind of call the Church out from a believing Mormon perspective. But the point is, these papyrus, even though they were discovered in 1966, the church hid them until the Tanners and others made it, made it known that they were in existence that that forced the Church's hand. So we don't just have the Church admitting now in 2022 or in 2015 or whenever the essay came out, we don't just have the Church admitting that the word Abraham doesn't appear on the papyrus and they have nothing to do with Abraham. But we have evidence that the church hid this information from the members for as long as it could. Mike, anything you want to add to that? Did I get that wrong?

Mike [01:03:55] No, I mean, that's basically they've known. And so this is not, you know, of course, as we'll go in the next episode, they have a lot of, you know, their own reasons why they try to make this work. But, yeah, they've known that this doesn't match and obviously do not teach members about that until they start to have doubts and they send them to the essay which kind of admits it.

John Dehlin [01:04:13] Yeah. So even though we've already already demonstrated that the Book of Abraham is not an accurate translation, let us continue with more evidence. So should we go to the facsimile number one of the Book of Abraham?

Errors in the Three Facsimiles Explained

Mike [01:04:28] Yeah, and we don't need to read every single one of these problems, but, yeah, so basically, facsimile, describe to our

John Dehlin [01:04:36] listeners what we are showing on the screen so that they understand kind of what we're going to be discussing.

Nemo [01:04:43] Should we put the facsimiles on Instagram, John? Like, so that people that are listening to this could go to your page and look at them for sure.

John Dehlin [01:04:49] But just listening in their car. What are you going to be describing, Mike?

Mike [01:04:53] Yeah, so basically, on the left side, we've got the actual facsimile that's published with the Book of Abraham. And on the right side we've got two columns. And one column is going to have what Joseph Smith claims, each one of these numbered figures in the facsimile representation. And then next to it, we have what Egypt. Egyptologists have, you know, basically declared they mean and. And going, you know, kind of referencing back to our last slide. Yeah, there are some small disagreements maybe about what these mean, and the church wants to use that to make it sound like there's bigger disagreements. This is more like saying. This isn't saying, like, one person's. Like, this is red. No, this is actually some sort of, you know, lime green. They're saying this is royal blue. No, maybe it's a regular blue or sky blue. I mean, we're. These are not big differences. And so just give a tiny bit

John Dehlin [01:05:40] more of a description for those listening. It's facsimile one is the picture of that man with kind of some type of black clothes or black skin, holding what we were taught is a knife over a man lying down. Well, assume what would be assumed to be a man lying down on a table. And then there's a picture of a bird that's flying up above, kind of to the right and the above. And then we've got these jars or animals under the table and then some other kind of earth looking stuff below. So that's the picture that we're talking about. And then we've got kind of a column that says what Joseph Smith said was in the picture and then a column saying what Egyptologists all agree actually is in the scripture. So do you want to tell us how Joseph got it wrong in the facsimile one, Mike?

Mike [01:06:27] Yeah, I mean, just, you know, basically, you know, he's calling, you know, this bird on the right side, the angel of the Lord. And it's actually the spirit of horror. And then there's this, this body that's laying on a table. And this is what Joseph is saying is Abraham being fastened upon an altar to be sacrificed. And what it really is is deceased, the deceased figure of horror being prepared for, for, for burial.

John Dehlin [01:06:50] And would it be Abraham or Isaac on the altar? Am I, am I Abraham?

Mike [01:06:54] It'd be Abraham.

Nemo [01:06:56] Yeah.

Mike [01:06:56] In this one.

John Dehlin [01:06:57] I'm sorry, so I got that wrong. It's not Abraham sacrifice.

Nemo [01:07:01] No, no, no.

Mike [01:07:02] This is Abraham being sacrificed.

Nemo [01:07:03] Abraham being gone after. By a priest. By the priest of Elkanah. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:07:08] Okay, okay, I totally flubbed that. I'm a little fine. Forgive me. Okay, keep going.

Mike [01:07:13] And just, you know, and then number three is to say that this is an idolatrous priest of Elkanah who's attempting to offer up Abraham as a sacrifice. But it's really Anubis, the God of embalming, that's preparing horror for, for burial. And so basically Joseph Smith is painting this as a scene of a human sacrifice being killed, when in reality it's supposed to be a scene, a funerary scene to get someone ready for the afterlife. And so basically all of these different translations that Joseph is making is to make this seem like Abraham's being murdered and when in reality it's about preparing some more for the afterlife. And it just has nothing to do with Abraham. And so every one of these figures, the, the one thing you'll hear apologists say is there are four jars that are under the, the table. And it says Joseph says the idolatrous gods of Elkanah, Libna, Mac, Minara, Koresh and, and Pharaoh. And those are, you know, in reality canopic jars contain the organs of deceased, the. Of the deceased representing the four sons of the God Horus. And so sometimes they'll say, oh, Joseph had a hit there. But the names still don't line up. And just overall, here we've got a figure number 10, which is what Joseph Smith claims is basically like the writing or like the name Abraham, an Egyptian, and it's a libations table with wine, oils and a plant. So it just shows how far off Joseph is on these translations.

John Dehlin [01:08:35] Let me just ask. Why would, in Joseph's mind, would he have, you know, we all know about Abraham sacrificing Isaac? Why. And why in Joseph Smith's mind would he have put Abraham down on the table, you know, potentially to be sacrificed? Was there. Is there anything in the Bible that would have suggested that Abraham was almost killed, you know, you know, by a priest? Do either of you know why?

Nemo [01:09:00] I have a theory.

John Dehlin [01:09:01] Okay.

Nemo [01:09:03] My initial thought would be that Mormonism and religion in general is full of archetypes and repeating patterns. And so the idea that Abraham went through a. A experience of almost being sacrificed and then there being a divine intervention plays into the idea that then he's able to do that to his son, having, you know, it being an example of faith. So there's that repeating pattern.

Mike [01:09:25] Yeah, and we'll get into it, I think, in the third episode. But there's also kind of this folklore. There are. There's one of the books mentions Abraham being sacrificed. And so we'll get into that in the third one. But off top of my head, I'm rusty on that one, so I'm not entirely sure the details, but we will cover that in the third episode for sure.

Nemo [01:09:44] Stay tuned, folks.

Mike [01:09:45] Yeah, exactly.

John Dehlin [01:09:46] Okay, so that's not Abraham sacrificing Isaac. That's. That's Abraham almost being sacrificed by a priest. But anyway, the point is, so pretty much everything in this facsimile Joseph got wrong. In facsimile Joseph got wrong, according to. To modern Egyptologists. Right.

Nemo [01:10:04] Yes.

Mike [01:10:05] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:10:05] Okay. Which is what you would expect for a guy that doesn't know Egyptian. Right, Exactly.

Nemo [01:10:10] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:10:11] Okay. All right, let's go to the next. Joseph incorrectly fills in the gaps of facsimile 1.

Mike [01:10:16] And this is an important one to know. I know Nimon mentioned this to me. We were kind of get. Preparing for this one because, you know, not only do we have the train what Joseph claims these figures mean wrong, but there are these gaps, they call them lacunas in the papyrus fragment. And Joseph Smith is going to fill them in. And so if this is truly. And this will get into the apologetics, we'll get into this a little more next episode. But if this was truly a revelatory process, Joseph Smith should be filling these incorrectly, and yet he fills these in incorrectly, and he's filling them in to match the story he's writing in the Book of Abraham. And so, as we mentioned earlier, this facsimile is a section from the Breathing primitive horror. And Dr. Robert Ridner talks about this, and he says about facsimile 1. Comparison of the surviving initial vignette of the Whore Papyrus with facsimile one proves beyond doubt, as the LDS web host essay agrees, that it was the vignette that became facsimile 1. However, neither facsimile 1 nor 2 is a true copy and both contain added forgeries, including the human head and knife of the supposed idolatrous priest of Elkanah, as can be seen in the crude pencil additions to the original papyrus sheet as mounted and improved for publication by the LDS Church in 1842. And so basically, what he's saying is Joseph Smith here, if you're listening to this, we have this up on the website as well. But you can look at the picture and see where Joseph Smith is going to write in pencil what he thinks these figures should be. And it matches what Joseph's writing in the Book of Abraham. But from a historical standpoint, it's just completely not what is supposed to be there. It should not be a human head sacrificing. It should be a jackal head, and there should not be a knife there either. And so this is another area where you could show Joseph Smith just keeps getting it wrong as he keeps trying to translate and fix this papyrus fragment.

John Dehlin [01:12:01] All right, Nemo, anything you want to add to the gaps?

Nemo [01:12:06] The gaps, we could talk about those for days. And I think that's a lot of what gets talked about in the Robert Rittner episode. So definitely go check those out. But I think it's a telling. I think it will be telling into Joseph Smith's, his mind and the way he was viewing these scenarios in what he chose to add. Because think about it, he's looking at something and he is making a decision based on his ideas or thoughts or feelings as to what he's going to add. What he thinks belongs in that space. He knows ahead needs to go on that torso because it's headless currently. But what type of head?

John Dehlin [01:12:39] A human head.

Nemo [01:12:40] Right, yeah, right. Well, that's what he's thinking because he doesn't know about Anubis. So he's not putting, you know what

John Dehlin [01:12:46] I mean, a jackal head, which any Egyptologist would have done.

Nemo [01:12:51] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:12:52] Draws a human head There.

Nemo [01:12:53] Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:12:54] Yeah.

Nemo [01:12:54] So he's making his best guess at what he thinks should go there. He thinks someone's standing over someone about to sacrifice on a table. So he adds a knife. No knife should be there. So, yeah, I think. I think it's just really interesting to remember that these are decisions Joseph made because he was trying to. He's trying to flesh out a partial story, right? Yep.

John Dehlin [01:13:17] Okay, so that's more very conclusive evidence. All right, what do we learn from facsimile 2? So, again, we're going to be showing here facsimile 2, which is this circle, the hypocephalus. It's. It's also known as the hypocephalus, which was, like you said, Nemo under the

Nemo [01:13:34] head of the back of the head

John Dehlin [01:13:35] of the mummy buried. And it's basically just a bunch of different scenes with. With hieroglyphics around the circumference of the. The circle, and then these almost like cartoonish, like, vignettes of different scenes, all with hieroglyphics in it. So that's. So that's what you're seeing is facsimile, too. And then again, we have a column of what Joseph said each of these items were and what Egyptologists now tell us they are. Mike, do you want to give us just kind of the highlights or the low lights, depending?

Mike [01:14:08] I mean, this is, you know, as Nemo said, you know, he's filling this in to kind of flesh out a story. And I think he's using. He's viewing this. These papyrus fragments he's viewing as a vehicle to push his new theology. We've talked about that in other subjects where Joseph is going to use his surrounding opportunities to use as a vehicle for his new ideas and facsimile really quick, Mike.

John Dehlin [01:14:27] Yeah, So a lot of our new listeners won't be familiar with the term pseudepigrapha, but pseudepigrapha means when somebody basically who. Who is alive today decides that they want to write something that they're going to claim is inspired or claims it's scripture or claim that it's authentic, they're going to write in the voice of someone who's dead as if it's actually that person writing, and then claim that it's. That it's authentic. And. And pseudepigrapha is an important term to understand, because if Joseph just produces scripture, you know, and says it's from him, that's probably going to have a lot less weight to the listeners than if he produces scripture that he claims is from one of the ancient prophets. So the reason why Joseph is going to be claiming to translate isn't just so that he can continue the perception that he has special power to translate, but because he knows that if he's producing the words of sacred righteous father Abraham, then all the, all the people in Kirtland and Nauvoo are going to go, ooh, what else does Abraham have to tell us? And it's going to give special power to what Joseph Smith produces, Nemo or Mike. Do I have that right? Is that fitting here or is that not fitting?

Mike [01:15:47] Yeah, no. And that's something Richard Bushman calls the book of Abraham pseudepigrapha. So this is absolutely something that a lot of people kind of fall back on, which is say Joseph is writing in the name of Abraham to give it credibility so people will listen to it. I mean, it's the short of it.

John Dehlin [01:16:01] Okay, all right, and so, so what? Basically he's got doctrine that he wants to share, but he doesn't want to share it in his own name, so he wants to share it in the name of Abraham. And so he's going to look at this facsimile too, and he's going to inject doctrine he wants to share into these Egyptian images. Right?

Mike [01:16:19] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:16:19] Okay, 100. And how does he get it wrong?

Mike [01:16:22] Yeah, and so just, you know, a couple of them. We don't, we don't need to read all these. But like the, you know, the main one is it says Kolob, the residence of God. It's actually the four headed ram God Kanumu. So obviously it's not the residence of God, it's a ram, you know, and then we've got some other ones. God we'll get to one, we'll get to one of, in a few slides actually. And, and then there's, you know, there's a bunch of them that I'll say like we'll be given in the own due time of the Lord. Except like again, any Egyptologist can look and read what they are. So you know, we have some that'll be talk about, you know, also if the world can find out these numbers. So let it be amen. It's actually oh God, the sleeping ones from the time of creation. So it's not even a number, it's just a phrase. And so it's just kind of weird that in some of these it's almost like Joseph is punting and not kind of translating them. I don't know if it's he was rushed or what. But you know, we have all these wise that say, will be given in the own due time of the Lord, and yet they're not revealed in the temple. They're not revealed by Joseph Smith. They're just figured out by Egyptologists who can read this. And so all of this shows you he's getting it wrong. And what's really interesting about Facsimile too, is I think Nemo mentioned this earlier. This is a hypocephalus, which is buried. It's put under your head to help you move to the next. The afterlife. But what's interesting is this is not from the same mummy as facsimile one or three. So Joseph Smith is utilizing this as if it's Abraham and it's not. So in other words, say john, you pass on, and they put a funerary text for you. And Nemo, you pass on, they put a funerary text for you. And I say, I've got the book of John de Lynn. And all of a sudden I'm using material from. From Nemo's stuff into John's, and I'm still calling it John. It just shows how Joseph Smith didn't understand what he was working with, and so now he's using someone else's funerary text and then still saying it's Abraham. So that alone tells you he has no idea what he's dealing with when he's making these translations.

Nemo [01:18:11] But my funerary text would vastly improve the Book of John de Lynn. We should have to make. Can I just make a quick point? This is my little white copy of the Book of Mormon that I put together myself. And when I was in the temple as a temple worker, this is what I'd sit and read from. Now I was reading one of the temple copies of the the Pearl of Brick, Great price. And in the back here, you can see I wrote out. The audience may not be able to see that very well, but I wrote out some of the little hieroglyphics. There you go, you see them better next to my face. I wrote out some of the hieroglyphics because one of those that you pointed out, Mike says, contains writings that cannot be revealed in the temple of God.

John Dehlin [01:18:56] Joseph wrote that.

Nemo [01:18:58] Sorry, yes.

John Dehlin [01:18:58] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nemo [01:18:59] So Joseph wrote that about those. So I'm here, sat in the temple, spending all my time and all my days in the temple trying to work it out. I've got old men, they're in their 60s, 70s, whatever, who are then Trying to tell me, oh, yeah, no, you'll work this out one day. When you know, you know, you'll understand. And what does that actually say? Mike? Can you just vindicate me? Pull up that thing for me.

John Dehlin [01:19:23] I can read it. It says, grant that the souls of Osiris she shank may live. So Joseph writes. Joseph writes, contains writings that cannot be revealed unto the world but is to be had in the holy temple of God. And what the Egyptian, Egyptians say universally that it actually says is, grant that the soul of Osiris Shishank may live.

Nemo [01:19:49] And the reason I want to bring this up is because if. If things are left vague like that, people will project in their own stuff. If you look at some of these little hieroglyphics, they are three little prongs on top of a line that look like hands in the air. Anyone that's been through the temple throwing your hands in the air three times, significant. So all of a sudden I'm reading into that, going, oh, I wonder then what that is. And then there's three markings together. Oh, I wonder what that is. And so because it's been left vague, people might put that as a downside for Joseph Smith. But actually, some of the success in this being religiously significant to people for so long is that he didn't reveal all of it. He left some of it vague so that people could keep throwing their own meaning into it over the years. Got it.

John Dehlin [01:20:35] All right, Mike, anything else you want to say about facsimile 2?

Mike [01:20:40] Not in that slide, but we've got some more slides on Facsimile two.

John Dehlin [01:20:43] All right, let's go to the next slide. Joseph, again, incorrectly fills in the gaps of facsimile 2. So are we saying that we don't have all of facsimile to. Or at least, you know, Joseph didn't, or what are we saying there?

Mike [01:20:56] Yeah, so basically, just like with Facsimile one, there's going to be these parts of, of, of this facsimile that are missing. And so Joseph Smith is going to fill them in because he feels like he needs to have a full facsimile. And so what I find fascinating, and this is one. If you're listening to this, please go to either go either LDS discussions.com John can post some of these as well on Instagram, but you need to see where Joseph Smith is pulling from to fill in these facsimiles, because this, to me is one of the smoking guns of knowing we have the source material. Because if you look at it you could see that Joseph Smith is filling all of the blank spaces in the facsimile from the papyrus fragment that has been recovered and was not lost as they had originally thought. So this is really important. And John, if you want, you could just go to the next slide.

John Dehlin [01:21:42] Okay, next slide. Here you go.

Mike [01:21:45] So in the next slide, if you. Again, you need to watch this or go to the website, but every part that is being pulled into facsimile 2 is going to be in this area that's circled on the image on the slide right now. And so Joseph Smith is pulling characters into Facsimile two that are just to the left of Facsimile one. And so we'll get into this a lot more in the next episode. But if there was a lost scroll that contained the real book of Abraham, there's no way that Joseph Smith is going to fill in Facsimile two, which has nothing to do with Facsimile one. They're different people's scrolls, except for the fact that this is where he's pulling from, because this is what he believes is the source text of the actual book of Abraham. And so to me, this was one of those ones. It's bad enough he's pulling in the wrong stuff to fill in facsimile too, which we'll show on the next slide. But the where he's pulling from, to me, is just as telling.

John Dehlin [01:22:34] Yeah, all right.

Nemo [01:22:36] I just can't think of a. Of a genuine reason why. If he knows he's making it up, then, sure, just grab any bits of random Egyptian text you like from anywhere and just throw it in to fill in the gaps. If. If he's making up and he knows that's what he's doing, I just can't think of a genuine reason why, if he believes he's truly translating, why he would take it from one piece and put it there randomly. I don't understand it.

John Dehlin [01:22:57] So tell me if what you're saying is that this, this. This fact that he takes text from one facsimile and inserts it in the missing areas of another, you're saying that that might be an indication that he knew he wasn't really translating.

Nemo [01:23:13] Yeah, to me. Yeah, to me, that points that he's trying to build a story rather than actually genuinely translate the text in that meaning of the. Of the word.

John Dehlin [01:23:20] Yeah, let's just say you're translating the Source text of Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham, that it was originally written in French, and all of a sudden you know, part of the documents missing. You wouldn't go to Casper the friendly gh just insert text from a totally different book into. Because that would make no sense for. For the story and for the reader. You just wouldn't do that.

Nemo [01:23:45] Yeah, yeah. You would just. You would just acknowledge that it's missing and either say that God gave you the missing parts and filled in the gaps for you, or that you just don't. It's not there. God didn't give you that part.

John Dehlin [01:23:58] Yeah. And so, Mike, tell me if I'm right. What we see in the next slide that's Entitled what facsimile 2 should have been restored to. We've got Joseph Smith filling in the blanks and in black is what he would have had in the facsimile 2. And then orange is what he filled in to the parts that were missing. And we know where that fill in text comes from. And then we have next to it what it should have looked like based on actual legitimate Egyptologists. Is that what that slide is telling us?

Mike [01:24:38] Yeah. And to me, the biggest takeaway, besides the fact he's pulling from what I believe is the source material for the book Abraham, is that a lot of the text, he pulls in a lot of those Egyptian characters. He was pulling them in because he thought they were lost on the. On the Hypocephalus, but they actually weren't. They were in. They were meant to be blank. And he's pulling in characters there because I think he's like, why is the left side got all these characters but the right side doesn't? So he's just pulling in these characters where he. What? It's not even that he got it wrong in that case. They just. They shouldn't have been there in the first place.

John Dehlin [01:25:06] Okay, that makes sense. Let's jump to the next slide, which is the Mormon Church castrates God and then reattaches his manhood. I guess we need to give a PG13 or even a R rating. Not really. Yeah, but in reality, we're going to be talking about an Egyptian depiction of a penis that the church removed and then put back in and Joseph Smith's mistranslation of it. Go ahead, Mike.

Mike [01:25:31] Yeah, and this is one we don't have to spend much time on, but to me, that I just found this kind of both humorous and also troubling. Not because of the fact that it's an erect penis, but Joseph smith interprets Figure 7 effects Emily 2 as God sitting on his throne, revealing through the heavens the grand keywords of the priesthood. In reality, this is the Egyptian God Min, the God of fertility with an erect penis. And the fact is. So now he's saying God sitting on his throne, revealing through the heavens the grand keywords of the priesthood is actually an Egyptian guy with an erect penis, which is troubling by itself. But what happens is the church at some point realizes this, as, you know, Egyptologists start to tell them that they got it wrong. And at some point, they actually remove the penis out of the facsimiles when they print the Book of Mormon. And then sometime, I think it actually happens a little bit before 1981, they start putting. They basically reattach this erect penis to this facsimile because of the fact that people are now calling him out for altering the facsimile because of the fact that Joseph Smith got it so embarrassingly wrong. And so in today's Book of Mormon, you'll see basically, God sitting on his throne with an erect penis. And again, it's not. I don't want to hype on, you know, I'm not trying to make it sensationalistic as far as the. I just find it kind of humorous because the church obviously was embarrassed by what Joseph Smith did because he got it wrong and took it out because they didn't want to be showing an erect penis in their facsimile. But it's there.

John Dehlin [01:26:51] I'm seeing. I'm hearing three things wrong there. Number one is that the Church is ashamed at penises, and so it's feeling like it needs to remove them because, what, it's pornography or it's graphic even though it's an ancient document. But the second is the Church would take liberties to be altering a document from its original form. That's a little bit problematic. But then the most problematic thing of all is that Joseph just completely misnames who that figure should be. Nemo. Anything you want to add?

Nemo [01:27:19] No, I mean, from what I remember, he ejaculates the world into existence. If we want to make this even more PG13 unfriendly, but it's just a genuine part of Egyptian kind of mythology and the way that. That they view the world. And like I said, I think the most telling thing is that they recognize that's what it was and then tried to censor it through their sensibilities.

Mike [01:27:41] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:27:41] All right, so what's the bigger problem with facsimile two, Mike?

Mike [01:27:44] Yeah, and this is what we talked about a few minutes ago. It's just this is not part of the same mummy or the same person that Facsimile one and Facsimile three is from. And so I already kind of mentioned this, but the fact that Joseph is pulling someone else's scroll into, you know, into Facsimile two just shows you he had no idea what he was translating. And so, as I mentioned earlier, again, it'll be like, if I had the Book of John and I thought there was a piece missing, I just started writing in stuff from the Book of Nemo. That's not. It just. It would show that I have no idea what the story of John was, because I'm all of a sudden just randomly throwing in stuff from Nemo. And so the fact that he's pulling this in into the book, Abraham tells you he doesn't understand what he's working with, which is a big problem that'll be talked about in this episode and the episode on Apologetics as well.

John Dehlin [01:28:33] All right, so the next slide is that facsimile 3 creates the biggest smoking gun for Joseph Smith. So this is important.

Mike [01:28:39] Yeah, so this, to me, is like, you know, the smoking gun for the Book of Abraham, because as we've talked about, even if you don't have the source material, this is printed, this is. No one denies that this is what Joseph Smith is working with with regards to Facsimile three. And in Facsimile three, there are Egyptian characters that Joseph Smith is going to translate. And so, for example, Figure 4 says, Prince of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, as written above the hand. So he's saying that's what. That's what's written in the Egyptian characters. And what it actually says is the goddess. I think it's Matt. So it's a female figure, not a prince, the goddess of justice, identified by the feather on her hair, on her head and the writing above her hand which states Matt, mistress of the gods. And so Joseph Smith here, without any. There's. There's no way to argue that Joseph Smith is translating Egyptian characters and he's getting them wrong. So even if you want to say that he got the figures wrong because the figures are more like illusionary, like an allegory, whatever, these are Egyptian characters that he is translating wrong. So to me, this tells you that even without the source material, we can tell you without any doubt, without any question, that Joseph Smith could not translate Egyptian characters.

John Dehlin [01:29:49] So we don't even need. What I'm hearing you say is we don't even need the scrolls, the papyrus, to show that Joseph couldn't translate, because these facsimiles specifically facsimile 3. He's not just interpreting the figures, but he's actually translating hieroglyphics in facsimile 3. And he's basically calling Osiris, Abraham, he's calling Isis king, Pharaoh. He's calling, you know, the goddess, mat, Prince, Pharaoh, and getting the gender wrong. Like, he's getting it all wrong. The, the, the hieroglyphics and the figures. Is that right?

Mike [01:30:29] Yeah, and. And not only that, but then if you go back to that slide, the figure on the right he is going to identify is

John Dehlin [01:30:40] Anubis.

Mike [01:30:41] No, that's what, that's what actually is Anubis. Joseph Smith, alum La. A slave belonging to the prince. So Joseph Smith here. And remember that we talk about this in the episodes on race and the priesthood. The Book of Abraham is basically where the priesthood ban is going to come from because it talks about how the people with the curse of Cain or curse of Ham come from a race that could not help the priesthood. So he's saying people with black skin can't hold the priesthood. Well, he looks at this facsimile, he sees one black figure, he identifies him as a slave. You know, in fact, similarly three, you know, Joseph Smith, not only is he translating the characters wrong, he's identifying females as males. Because, of course, you can't have a primary female character, you know, as Joseph Smith does not do in the book Abraham or Book of Mormon. And then now you've got Joseph Smith seeing a figure that's black and identifying them as a slave, because that has to fit in to what they are doing in the 19th century of slavery. And what he's doing by saying that having black skin is a curse, you can't have it be a God, because it wouldn't fit with the theology of the Mormon Church.

John Dehlin [01:31:39] Yeah, so we've got justice, basically. Seeing someone black. Oh, it must be a slave. And then immediately associating it with the curse of Cain, which now the Mormon Church denounces as folklore, not as doctrine. So that really is condemning Nemo. Were you gonna add something?

Nemo [01:31:55] Yeah. What's crazy, though, is you go back to facsimile one, and there's also a black figure, but that black figure is some kind of priest, someone with some sort of authority.

John Dehlin [01:32:06] Right.

Nemo [01:32:07] Until he put a head on that made them white, their hands still black. So it's like, it kind of. It's strange, it's not even internally consistent because in one hand he's seen a black figure and just made them a slave. But in the other, he's seen a black figure put a white head on it, but there's still a black figure. And he's made them a priest, right?

Mike [01:32:30] Yeah. And it's the same character. I mean, they're both Anubis. And so, yeah, it just shows he has no idea what he's working with. I mean, in every testable way he's showing, I, you know, he can't do it. And like, we've talked about this whole episode. I don't. Sometimes you just go, why do we need to keep doing this? But we do because we want to make sure we give it proper detail. But, yeah, this is, it's pretty clear

John Dehlin [01:32:51] to take it a little bit further. Now if we go back, it turns out that that figure that Joseph Smith calls a slave, which is Anubis, if we go to the actual.

Mike [01:33:01] Yeah, this is the woodcut that they use to print. This is what they're using to print in the Book of Mormon. And this is Paul Osborne. He had posted about this, I think about two or three years ago. So this is pretty recent. He was looking at the super high resolution image of this woodcut. And if you look and this is something, if you're listening, go to LDSDiscussions.com and check out these images. But basically you could see these chisel marks that line up perfectly with what would be the snout of Anubis. And so of course, we can't know for sure if Joseph Smith really had the woodcut altered to make it look more human, but it certainly looks like by looking at the, the high resolution image of the woodcut that Joseph, I think at some point realizes you can't have a slave with, with the kind of that snout. And so he cuts off the snout of Anubis and makes it more of a round head so that it fits with his, his basically translation of that figure. And it just further shows how Joseph is altering these papyrus fragments in ways that are just so badly incorrect.

John Dehlin [01:33:59] So you're saying the woodcut should show a snout like what, like some type of jackal? Yeah, jackal had somebody's, somebody's chipped off the snout to make it look like a human so that it can look like a human slave. Is that what you're saying?

Nemo [01:34:14] Yeah, Joseph could have easily passed off as a mask or something. You know, he could have easily passed it off as something decorative or whatever. I'm, I, I remain confused as to why he did that.

Mike [01:34:25] Yeah, yeah, I don't, I don't know why, because sometimes you just. I had this discussion with someone recently about something else entirely. They were talking about, like, why do people do these things once they're kind of caught up in stuff? And it's like, I think sometimes you just do it because you keep trying to make it work, and you just keep thinking if you do it, no one will figure it out. But eventually, in this case, you could figure it out by like 10 different ways. And it just shows he couldn't do it. And it's so simple. Yet again, we still have so much more to talk about. So it's such a weird subject to me sometimes.

John Dehlin [01:34:55] All right, well, Dr. Rittner sums up the problem with what you call the smoking gun. Facsimile three. Mike, what is it?

Mike [01:35:02] Yeah. And so this is what Dr. Rittner said about facsimile three. He says, and again, this is because of the fact that Joseph is translating actual characters and not just figures now. And so he says in Facsimile three, Smith confuses human and animal heads and males with females. No amount of special pleading can change the female Isis the Great, the God's mother, into the male king of Pharaoh, whose name is given in the characters above his hand, as even the LDS author Michael D. Rhodes accepts. Here, Smith also misunderstands Pharaoh as a personal name rather than a title meaning king. So he reads King king for a goddess's name that he claims to have understood on the papyrus. So it's just like we talked about, even if you don't have any of the fragments ever found. Facsimile 3 alone allows us to measure Joseph's prophetic claims, because not only do we have the figures that can be understood today by Egyptologists, but those Egyptian characters that he claims to be translating tell us that there is no way that you can reconcile his translation of Egyptian characters with what they actually say. And so, as we mentioned earlier, we've got a libations table that he says is the literal signature of Abraham, or the female Isis is King Pharaoh, which is problem not just from the translation of the characters, but just a complete misunderstanding of the gender of the idea that Pharaoh's the is a title. It's just all of this everywhere. It's just so bad that if someone turn this in for like a school assignment, you would get like a 0% because there's just nothing, nothing works here at all. It's just. It's crazy sometimes to take a step back and just look at all of the things he got wrong and the fact that he's adding in things that are Even more wrong. It's just, it's mind boggling sometimes.

Nemo [01:36:34] Just to make a quick point, I think that is worth repeating for people is that these are well established funerary texts and scenes. The reason we can say this should be this is because so many of them that exist, that all follow the same patterns. There's a wealth of evidence that these certain scenes, these hypocephaly, all these things that we're talking about are repeated over and over and over and over again and are well understood by people like Dr. Rittner, by Egyptologists. They know what these things should look like.

John Dehlin [01:37:05] I mean, imagine if in Egypt, every time they buried a prince, they buried the book. Green eggs in ham. You would know exactly what every page was, what every figure was. You would know the story because it was literally buried with every prince. Yeah, just every time it's that repetitive. It's almost as if it's the same book published, you know, dozens and dozens.

Nemo [01:37:27] There's no reason why these would be so vastly different with all the additions that Joseph Smith made. Knives where there shouldn't be knives, removal of phalluses, jackal heads gone, human heads added all those things. There's no reason any of those should be there because we know what should be there in their place.

John Dehlin [01:37:44] All right, so tell us about the recovered fragments in the Book of Abraham manuscripts, Mike.

Nemo [01:37:48] Yeah.

Mike [01:37:49] Now this one's going to be extremely important for our next episode. So we're going to talk about this a ton in the next episode. But from the, from the recovered papyrus fragment. And this is right next to facsimile one, which we showed the image of a while back when we were kind of talking about where Joseph's pulling from. All of the manuscripts line up perfectly with the recovered papyrus fragment that's right next to facsimile one. And that's just where the Book of Abraham tells us to look for the language that's being translated. And so as Nemo had mentioned earlier, Joseph, like everybody in his time frame, for the most part, I think all believe that one symbol in Egyptian could contain phrases and even paragraphs of text. So if you're looking at these images, if you're watching this, you could see that each symbol or group of maybe like two or three symbols is going to be an entire paragraph of text. And so if you're, if you're listening to this again, check out the website. But effectively Joseph was taking one character or two characters and creating multiple sentences or paragraphs of text from just one or two symbols.

John Dehlin [01:38:46] And that's something that bears kind of really slowing down to repeat. We all got the impression somehow that one Egyptian character could amount to a sentence or to multiple sentences, and that's just false. That's what Joseph Smith thought. That's what we've all been led to believe. But the truth is, one hieroglyphic in Egypt amounts to a few sounds, to a word or two at most. But here we have the actual evidence. And is this part of the gale, is that right, Mike?

Mike [01:39:18] No, this is the actual Book of Mormon, man. Or, sorry, Book of Abraham manuscript.

John Dehlin [01:39:22] Book of Abraham manuscript. And what you have is, you just have it very clearly demonstrated that Joseph was attributing sentences worth of words to a single Egyptian character or, you know, one or two characters. Is that right?

Nemo [01:39:41] Yeah, yeah, that's what he's doing. Which is bizarre because, like, yeah, at most it's a concept. You know, a lot of these languages, like, you look at Mandarin, you look at, you look at Japanese, you look at any of these languages, Korean, that are based around symbols still, because languages like this exist, hieroglyphics are still a thing. Right? They're just slightly different now. But, yeah, a symbol will, will be at most a concept, if not just.

John Dehlin [01:40:07] And Mike, to drive that home, we've got what Joseph Smith translates what should be the word lake into in the Book of Abraham.

Mike [01:40:15] Yeah, and this is from your episodes with Dr. Rittner. And so if you're watching this, you could see it. If you're listening to it again, you'll. You'll be better, much better served by it by going to either LDS discussions or going to this on YouTube or whatever. But Joseph Smith is going to take two symbols, and those two symbols are going to mean the word lake in Egyptian. And so there's one symbol, it's in the upper right, it's circled in blue. And that's the phonetic part of the word lake. And the symbol right below it, which is a backwards looking E, is the determinative symbol for the word. And so in other words, in Egypt, the first symbol is the spelling of the word lake. The second symbol is the determinative of water. And so Joseph Smith is going to take what actually just means the word lake in the Book of Abraham, and he's going to write four separate verses based on that one word. And so it just shows Joseph's complete misunderstanding of Egyptian here leads him to do something that is just so, so wrong to the point that if you show, like, again, you know, Nemo said it earlier, what would you say if this is another religion or another. Another leader. It's so laughably wrong because it's the word lake, and yet Joseph's gonna write four verses based on it.

John Dehlin [01:41:20] Four verses would represent at least four, if not more sentences from what be what should be a single word, Right?

Mike [01:41:28] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:41:28] And we know what the word means. So not only is it not multiple sentences, it should just say lake, because we know that it's lake. The symbols mean lake, correct?

Mike [01:41:38] Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just that simple. Like, it's like it should not. That alone should tell you he couldn't translate. I mean, the facsimile should tell you that. But even in the manuscript itself, we could look at it, we know what the symbols in the manuscript mean, and obviously nothing like that.

John Dehlin [01:41:53] Okay, so. So obviously apologists are going to say that maybe, well, maybe Joseph didn't really think he was translating. You've got a slide here that basically asserts Joseph Smith. Absolutely claimed. And you're saying, even believed, that this was a translation.

Nemo [01:42:08] Yeah.

Mike [01:42:08] And so this is one we're going to talk about a lot in the next episode because this is really important for apologetics, but it just shows that. But from 1835 to March of 1842, Joseph Smith in his journals is consistently using the word translation and translating when talking about the Book of Abraham. So he'll say this afternoon, this afternoon I recommence translating from the ancient records. Or he'll say, the weather is warm but rainy. We spent the day in translating and made rapid progress at home. We spent the day transcribing Egyptian characters from the papyrus. We commence the work of translating the Egyptian, translating the Book of Abraham. It's just, just to show that this isn't something where we're trying to put the word translation onto Joseph. This is what he's using to describe the process of creating the Book of Abraham.

John Dehlin [01:42:53] So this slide shows nine different entries from Joseph Smith's journal where he himself claims to be translating. And this fits not only with the title page. Right. Which claims to be a translation. We already read that previously. But it fits with the Doctrine and Covenants declaration that Joseph Smith is indeed a prophet, seer, revelator and translator. And the reason why there's going to be a lot of people going, why are you even questioning that anyone would refer to it as a translation? It's because I attended an entire, like multi day conference at Utah State University where Terrell Givens, Richard Bushman, you know, Patrick Mason, Spencer Fluman, a ton of the church's Top scholars dedicated two full days at least to saying why when we use the word translation, maybe other words would have been more relevant or appropriate, like revelation. It's because in the modern Mormon Church, the neo apologists need to walk back the use of the word. Because there's no universe where the word translation actually applies to what Joseph Smith did and the Church, and they know it and the Church now admits it in 2022.

Nemo [01:44:07] And yet that is the word Joseph Smith chose to use.

John Dehlin [01:44:11] Yeah. And the title page claims that is

Nemo [01:44:14] the word on the title page.

John Dehlin [01:44:16] And again, Mike, you know you got this next slide. It's even the Church's own Gospel topics essay that tells us Joseph Smith got it wrong.

Mike [01:44:24] Yeah, and we talked about this earlier. So these are the two sentences from the paragraph. I put paragraph above. I should have meant paragraph earlier in the presentation. That really should put an end to any discussion about the Book of Abraham being an ancient authentic text. One is none of the characters on the papyrus fragments mention Abraham's name or any of the events recorded in the Book of Abraham. And the second is these fragments date to between the 3rd century BCE and the 1st century CE, long after Abraham lived. And just as we said, if, if you had seen this from any other religious leader or any other church that claimed to have this ancient translation that we now know has nothing to do with the subject and is dated well after, would you, what would you say as far as your level of, of belief in, in their claims? Because it, this is the Church's own essay is telling us these very, very basic and testable claims are false.

John Dehlin [01:45:12] Nemo, anything you want to add?

Nemo [01:45:14] It's a massive shelf breaker for people because it's one of the few times in the Church's essay that and the several months shy of her 15th birthday line and Helen Markimbell and all that sort of thing.

John Dehlin [01:45:29] I would add, when the Church downplays our racist teachings as folklore, that would be the third. The Holy Trinity of shelf breakers.

Nemo [01:45:39] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:45:40] Admitting that Abraham, the word Abraham doesn't appear in the papyrus. You know, calling a 14 year old girl, describing her as several months shy of her 15th birthday and denouncing all the Mormon racist doctrine as mere dismissing it as merely folklore. Those are the three.

Nemo [01:45:58] Yeah, I'd say so. And I'd say this is really important. And so many people, when they say, hang on, when they have that, hang on, wait a moment, it's this because the Church has no recourse other than to admit it isn't what they said it was or isn't what? Certainly what Joseph Smith claimed it to be.

Mike [01:46:15] Yeah.

Summary of Evidence and Preview of Part Two

John Dehlin [01:46:17] All right, Mike, so we're at our final slide, which means we did a speed record here. The slide is the Book of Abraham Translation is quite simple. Tell us how quite simple it is, Mike.

Mike [01:46:27] Yeah, and so, like, we've been talking about this throughout the episode, but we're going to spend three or maybe four episodes talking about the Book of Abraham. But it's something you could sum up in really just like, two minutes. Joseph Smith made claims in the voice of God that he could translate ancient languages, and in this case, makes very clear claims about what the papyrus fragments say. And again, this is from the Book of Abraham's trans Introduction, a translation of some ancient records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs 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. All of those claims have turned out to be incorrect. Joseph Smith not only translated the figures in the facsimiles incorrectly, but the Egyptian characters that are contained in facsimile three are completely wrong. So even without the source text, which we also have, and we'll talk about that a lot in the next episode, we could show that they're wrong. The church admits that the dating is wrong. That means it couldn't have been written by Abraham's own hand upon papyrus. And then where Joseph Smith had a chance to fill in the facsimiles, he filled them in incorrectly. And so at the end of the day, like this episode alone, should tell anyone watching that Joseph Smith was not a prophet of God because of the fact that he makes very testable claims, not knowing that Egyptian would be cracked. And then as soon as it's cracked, we know it's just, you know, he got it wrong.

John Dehlin [01:47:42] All right, well, that's case closed. So, Mike, as we're wrapping up this episode, remind us what we've got in store for the next few episodes on Book of Abraham.

Mike [01:47:52] Yeah, so the next episode is going to focus entirely on the apologetics to this episode. So we're going to talk about the long lost scroll theories, the catalyst theory, and then after that, we'll look at the actual text of the book Abraham, which is, I think, a good way to give a different perspective to the Book of Abraham because of the fact that even if you don't have the source material, you can look at the text of the Book Abraham and know that it's full of the same errors that tell you it's not an ancient text that we covered with the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:48:19] Okay, excellent, Nemo. Any final words from Nemo the Great?

Nemo [01:48:25] No, I don't know what else you can say about this, so I just look forward to talking about. I look forward to ripping apart the apologists arguments about this because it's such an indefensible point of view.

John Dehlin [01:48:37] Yeah, for me it really is one of the major smoking guns and yeah. And so thank you, Mike. Thank you Nemo. It's so important to have you all here. We're looking forward to have you on next time. And I'll just conclude the way I started. You can find all of these episodes on Spotify, both audio or video format under the LDS Discussions brand, as well as integrated into the Mormon Stories Podcast feed. You can also go to the YouTube channel under the LDS discussions playlist and view all of these in succession. All of these episodes are available on the Apple Podcast app as well. And then finally, I just can't enough give credit and respect to the late Dr. Robert Ridner. And if you want to check out our 13 Hours with me and Radio Free Mormon and Dr. Robert Ridner, May he rest in peace, you can also find those in the show notes and you can find them at Mormon Stories podcast. So again, thanks so much Mike. Thanks so much Nemo. Thanks to everyone who makes this series possible. If you appreciate the LDS discussion series and you want to see content like this continue, we would really appreciate you becoming a monthly donor. And you can go to MormonStories.org, click on the donate button and just sign up for any monthly contribution that you feel like you can afford. 10 bucks a month, you know, 20 bucks a month, 50 bucks a month, 100 bucks a month. Whatever you can afford. We promise our we are tax deductible in the us. We're transparent in our finances from the very beginning. We release our 990 so that everyone can see how we spend our money. And we promise to work really hard to make sure that every dollar that you donate goes in some way towards this cause of educating Mormons. Educating never Mormons. Educating the world about the truth about the Mormon Church's truth claims and providing healing and support and inspiration to people questioning their Mormon faith or people who choose to leave or need to leave and to help them find support and community on the other end. That's what we do. Please support us if you can. Thanks so much to everyone and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories. Take care everybody.

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