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CES Letter

The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 14

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Part 14: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section E]

 

by Sarah Allen

 

We’re talking about Facsimile 2 today. I’ll have to discuss the facsimile explanations next time, since there’s background we need to cover for those to make sense. Anyway, Facsimile 2 is what is known as a hypocephalus:

Facsimile 2 belongs to a class of Egyptian religious documents call hypocephali (Greek: ipokefalos, hypokephalos), “under the head,” a translation of the Egyptian hry-tp with the same meaning). A hypocephalus is a small, disk-shaped object, made of papyrus, stuccoed linen, bronze, gold, wood, or clay which the Egyptians placed under the head of their dead. They believed it would magically cause the head and body to be enveloped in flames or radiance, making the deceased divine. The hypocephalus symbolized the Eye of Re or Horus, that is, the sun. The scenes portrayed on it relate the Egyptian concept of resurrection and life after death. To the Egyptians, the daily rising and setting of the sun was a vivid symbol of the resurrection. The hypocephalus itself represented all the sun encircles, the whole world. The upper portion represented the world of men and the day sky, and the lower portion (the part with the cow) represented the netherworld and the night sky.

Pearl of Great Price Central elaborates:

Today there are 158 known hypocephali which have been catalogued and/or published. Based on their attested chronological and geographical distribution, “it is clear that the hypocephalus [did] not become a widespread funerary object” in ancient Egypt. Instead they “remained exclusive pieces of funerary equipment reserved for the high clergy and for the members of their families who occupied” high-ranking positions in the temple, especially the temple of Amun at Karnak, the temple of Min at Akhmim, and the temple of Ptah at Memphis. Although hypocephali themselves appear to be later creations, the mythological and cosmological conceptions contained in hypocephali have apparent forerunners in earlier Egyptian texts.

According to Spell 162 of the Book of the Dead, hypocephali served a number of important purposes: to protect the deceased in the afterlife, to provide light and heat for the deceased, to make the deceased “appear again like one who is on earth” (that is, to resurrect them), and to ultimately transform the deceased into a god. Hypocephali were also conceived of (and even sometimes explicitly identified as) the magical eye of the sun god Re that consumed enemies with fire. Their circular shape and function to provide light, heat, and protection naturally lent themselves to this conceptualization in the minds of the ancient Egyptians.

While these might perhaps have been the primary purposes of hypocephali, it is clear from the explanatory rubric of some copies of Spell 162 of the Book of the Dead and from other surviving evidence that they also served non-funerary roles. For example, hypocephali or objects that served the same purpose as hypocephali were used as divinatory devices in the Egyptian temple and as astronomical documents. This is especially significant since Joseph Smith’s interpretation of Facsimile 2 draws connections to the temple and features several astronomical elements. Hypocephali also shared a conceptual link with temple gates. In this capacity they served, among other things, to keep out enemies and admit friends into sacred space and shared a focus on creation motifs. Once again, this parallels some of Joseph Smith’s explanations of Facsimile 2 which emphasize creation.

In summary, while hypocephali served a number of important religious and ritual purposes for the ancient Egyptians, they ultimately “point[ed] toward the Egyptians’ hope in a resurrection and life after death as a divine being.”

 

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The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 13

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Part 13: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section D]

 

by Sarah Allen

 

Today, we’re going to start talking about the facsimiles, beginning with Facsimile 1. Facsimile 1 is pretty unique, not just among the other Book of Abraham facsimiles but also among other similar known scenes, which are often referred to as “lion couch scenes.” This is the only facsimile that we actually have the original copy of. We don’t have the originals of Facsimile 2 and Facsimile 3 anymore. Facsimile 3 was described on one of the scrolls in the 1863 Wood Museum catalog, showing that it was among that papyri that burned in the Chicago Fire.

To begin with, this is what we have in our scriptures today. It’s an engraved copy of the original with numbered explanations of what the figures mean. This is the papyri fragment showing the facsimile. You’ll note that in the fragment, there are pencil markings filling in missing pieces, which I’ve circled in teal on this copy. We don’t know who penciled in those missing pieces or when they did it, but eyewitness testimony does suggest at least some of those missing pieces were intact when Joseph first received the papyri. There are at least two eyewitness descriptions of what seem to be the original vignette. So, maybe Joseph filled it in, maybe he didn’t. We honestly don’t know. There are claims it was filled in incorrectly, which seems to be partially true and partially untrue.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 12

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Part 12: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section C]

 

by Sarah Allen

 

As the beginning of the next question in the CES Letter is basically a retread of the previous one, I’m just going to skim over it really quickly as a brief recap.

Egyptologists have also since translated the source material for the Book of Abraham and have found it to be nothing more than a common pagan Egyptian funerary text for a deceased man named “Hor” around the first century C.E.

As we went over previously, the papyri fragments have been translated and do reflect funerary texts, which the Church confirmed just over a month after they received them. As we also went over, we certainly cannot say they were the source material for the Book of Abraham. Joseph himself said otherwise, and even if you don’t believe him, numerous other eyewitnesses all confirmed that it was the long roll that was the source material, not the fragments mounted under glass. Since the fragments are all we have today, we can’t confirm the eyewitness testimony. However, whether you believe in the catalyst theory, the missing scroll theory, or some other theory entirely, if we trust in Joseph Smith, the one thing we know for certain is that the fragments are not the source material for the Book of Abraham, no matter how many times Jeremy Runnells insists that they are.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 11

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Part 11: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section B]

By Sarah Allen

 

Before I get started, I just wanted to reiterate that these are all answers that work for me personally. They may not work for you, and that’s fine. My point in all of this was not to say that this is the only way to view something, but to show that there are answers out there if you go looking for them. If someone who is not a scholar or a professional apologist or researcher can find the stuff I’m posting with a little digging, imagine what else you could find out there if you tried, you know? And some evidences that are convincing to me won’t be convincing to you, and vice versa. That’s okay. Find what is convincing to you. Investigate the stuff you have questions about. Don’t just take my word for it, or the words of critics. Dive in yourself and do the research and see what you can find. Don’t just take one source at its word. Evaluate the different sources, as Reddit user lord_wilmore recently advised. You’ve all seen just how many different sources I’m drawing from to write these posts. There’s never just one. Even when I find a response from someone whose opinion I trust, I still often look for additional sources. I read the footnotes, and I read the sources my sources draw their opinions from. My hope is that these posts will encourage all of you to do the same when you come across a question you can’t immediately answer.

So, that said, let’s dive into some controversy, shall we?

We know this is the papyrus that Joseph used for translation because the hieroglyphics match in chronological order to the hieroglyphics in Joseph’s Kirtland Egyptian Papers, which contains his Grammar & Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL). Additionally, the papyrus were pasted onto paper which have drawings of a temple and maps of the Kirtland, Ohio area on the back and they were companied by an affidavit by Emma Smith verifying they had been in the possession of Joseph Smith.

First of all, that second sentence is completely out of place. No one from the Church that I’m aware of with any degree of authority has never denied that the papyrus fragments the Church has in its possession are some of the papyri that Joseph had. If someone out there did ever make that claim, it certainly was not in an official capacity while speaking for the Church. As I stated last week, the Church announced the fragments were in fact Joseph’s and that they were funeral documents a month after receiving them. This has never been in dispute, and tacking on the sentence to imply that it was in dispute is sketchy. [Read more…] about The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 11

The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 10

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Part 10: CES Letter Book of Abraham Questions [Section A]

by Sarah Allen

 

The Book of Abraham is perhaps our most controversial book of scripture, maybe even more so than the Book of Mormon though it is less well-known. It is a complicated, messy subject with a lot of different parts to it. This is something I’ve studied a fair bit over the years, and it’s actually one of my favorite things to study. I know enough about the subject to talk about the various theories and viewpoints, but I suspect a lot of people won’t agree with my stance on things and that’s okay. We all need to come to our own opinions about these sorts of things. I’ll try to keep from getting too esoteric in my comments, but please understand that some of the current controversies involve minor details that seem silly to quibble over, but which end up making a rather large difference once you get deeper into the study of this book.

Perhaps even more than the translation method, this subject bothers Jeremy Runnells the most. I believe he even says at one point that the Book of Abraham is what officially broke his testimony, which is unfortunate. He makes a lot of misstatements throughout this section, so I’m not sure if the issue is that he just doesn’t understand the Book of Abraham and its scholarship, or if he’s doing it deliberately. The critics of the Church have been particularly successful in framing the arguments on this topic in such a way that it really hurts a lot of people, so I’m willing to give Jeremy the benefit of the doubt regarding this section and believe that he just doesn’t know enough about the topic. If so, it’s especially sad that he let it destroy his testimony when some further study might have saved it. I may be wrong; maybe he knows exactly what he’s doing when he makes those misstatements and frames things incorrectly. He certainly does that knowingly in other sections of this Letter.

Either way, this is a difficult subject for a lot of people, so I’m going to try to break it all down in such a way that it makes sense, and that it helps you guys see that there are faithful explanations out there. We’ll go slowly and I may have to break some questions into multiple parts because he covers so much ground in a single question. I don’t want to skim over anything too lightly because it is such a controversial subject. If anything isn’t clear as we go along, please let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to clarify. I love the Book of Abraham and I think its doctrine is beautiful, so I hope you guys come away with that feeling, too.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 9

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Part 9: CES Letter First Vision Questions

by Sarah Allen

 

Like last week, this is another section with just one main question, the multiple accounts of the First Vision.

There are at least 4 different first vision accounts by Joseph Smith, which the Church admits in its November 2013 First Vision Accounts essay

Yep, and there are also five secondhand accounts written by people who heard the story from Joseph, too. First, though, I have to object to the fact that he’s saying the Church “admits it” in the essay, as if it’s the first time the Church has ever made mention of those other accounts or something. They’ve been published repeatedly in Church magazines and other publications, comparing and contrasting all of them together since at least 1970, and at least a few of them were published many times over apart from that. Add this item to the list of things that Jeremy Runnells could have known, even if I don’t necessarily think he should  have known it.

Here they are, in case you guys want to read them for yourselves and make your own comparisons:

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The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 8

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Part 8: CES Letter Book of Mormon Translation Questions

by Sarah Allen

 

This section really only has one question/point in it. There are maybe a few different parts to it, but it’s all basically one question and it’s one that comes up over and over and over and over again throughout the rest of the CES Letter. Honestly, I think this the first of only two major hang-ups—the other is the Book of Abraham—and everything else was just Jeremy Runnells throwing everything he could find at the wall and hoping something else would stick. He seems to have a very real problem with the translation method for the Book of Mormon. Few other issues in the Letter receive as much call-back attention as this one particular issue. I’m talking about, of course, the infamous “rock in the hat.”

Unlike the story I’ve been taught in Sunday School, Priesthood, General Conferences, Seminary, EFY, Ensigns, Church history tour, Missionary Training Center, and BYU…Joseph Smith used a rock in a hat for translating the Book of Mormon.

First of all, Ensigns absolutely should not be on that list, because guess where I first learned about Joseph putting his seer stone in his hat to block out the light? Yep, the Ensign. More on that later, though.

Jeremy doesn’t actually say what he originally believed the translation method was, and that’s a little problematic because people seem to vary on the exact details when you press them. Was there a curtain between Joseph and his scribes? Were the plates on the table beside him, or kept out of view? Did Joseph wear the spectacles with the Nephite Interpreters and basically “read” the translation from plates themselves? Or did he look in them and see the words without looking at the plates through the Interpreters? Did he attach them to the breastplate, or wear them separately? Did he take the Interpreters out of the spectacles, or did he try to wear them the entire time, despite the widely acknowledged fact that they didn’t fit him properly? If he took them out, what did he do with them? Did he hold them in his hands, or place them on top of the plates, or what? Etc.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 7

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Part 7: CES Letter Book of Mormon Questions [Section F]

By Sarah Allen

 

In this one, we’re going to discuss possible sources for the Book of Mormon that critics love to throw out: View of the Hebrews by Ethan Smith, The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain by Gilbert Hunt, and The First Book of Napoleon by Michael Linning. I spoke last week about how these types are arguments are really weak and badly presented, which I hope will come to be obvious by the end of this post. Just to get this out of the way up front, here are PDFs of each of the books in question if you want to compare them for yourselves:

To begin with, back at the 2014 FAIR Conference, Matt Roper and Paul Fields gave a presentation talking about the “pseudo-Biblical” writing style and how the Book of Mormon compares to both the KJV and to other books from the same period, including The Late War. (Stanford Carmack wrote a similar article for the Interpreter here.) They demonstrated pretty aptly that the Book of Mormon and KJV writing styles are very, very similar, and that other attempts at imitating it, such as The Late War and The First Book of Napoleon, are actually not very similar at all. It’s an interesting presentation that is well worth your time if you’re inclined to check it out. (There is also a funny chart showing the extremely high correlation between the divorce rate in Maine and the consumption of margarine in the US over the same time period.)

One of the things they noted in that presentation was that this style of writing was pretty popular from approximately 1750 to approximately 1850, about 100 years, with the Book of Mormon falling toward the later middle of the period. As such, there are a lot of books and newspaper articles imitating this same style of KJV-like writing that are bound to have some turns of phrase in common, particularly those phrases rooted in the Bible.

Going along with this, Jeff Lindsay offers a pretty hilarious parody of this type of argument on his website, where he declares Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass the very best possible inspiration for the Book of Mormon, despite it being first published in 1855. The reason these claims are so easy to parody is because they’re ridiculous reaches in the first place.

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The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 6

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Part 6: CES Letter Book of Mormon Questions [Section E]

by Sarah Allen

 

I was originally hoping to finish all of the remaining Book of Mormon questions in this entry, but when I started compiling it all, it was just way too long. So I’m going to jump around a little bit on this one. I’ll tackle the View of the Hebrews, The Late War, and The First Book of Napoleon stuff in the final entry for this section next week, and talk about the Vernal Holley maps, Comoros/Captain Kidd, and Trinitarianism in this one.

The ones about the Vernal Holley maps and the ones about the supposed sources for the Book of Mormon crack me up. They’re just really, really bad questions, and so very dishonest in their framing.

Book of Mormon Geography: Many Book of Mormon names and places are strikingly similar to many local names and places of the region where Joseph Smith lived.

Jeremy Runnells fully admits that this is the weakest section of the CES Letter, and at one point, he was almost positive he was going to remove it. However, other members of the Exmormon subreddit convinced him to leave it in because they somehow felt it was effective.

The thing is, he wasn’t wrong. It’s pretty weak.

The first thing he does is post two maps made by Vernal Holley:

The first map is the “proposed map,” constructed from internal comparisons in the Book of Mormon.

Nope. The first map is just the second map with Book of Mormon names scattered around, and they’re in the wrong places they’d need to be in if they were actually “constructed from internal comparisons to the Book of Mormon.”

As Scott Gordon says in “CES Letter: Proof or Propaganda?”: “It isn’t constructed from internal comparisons in the Book of Mormon. Nothing is in the right place from internal directions. This is not a Book of Mormon map. This is a map of upstate New York and Pennsylvania with some Book of Mormon names pasted in on locations that start with the same few letters. It doesn’t even include Zarahemla or Bountiful.”

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The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 5

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Part 5: CES Letter Book of Mormon Questions [Section D]

by Sarah Allen

 

I originally thought I was done with the archaeology section, but while I was going through my sources to figure out which ones I wanted to use this week, I came across a presentation by Neal Rappleye from a FAIR Conference a few years ago that I’d forgotten existed. Neal Rappleye, for those who don’t know, is one of the hard-working team members at Book of Mormon Central, and his presentation is entitled “Put Away Childish Things: Learning to Read the Book of Mormon Using Mature Historical Thought”. I felt very strongly impressed that I should highlight this presentation and discuss it with you guys before moving on to the next questions in the Letter. I linked to both the video and the transcript of the presentation, so you can choose the medium that best suits your learning style.

This talk is all about grappling with and overcoming the more simplistic narratives you were taught as a child and learning to understand that history is messy and incomplete, and how new discoveries and understanding can shift your perspective if you allow it to. It’s something we all need to do as we grow older, or it can lead to problems down the line when our assumptions are challenged.

One of the main flaws in Jeremy’s perspective is that he doesn’t do this. He rigidly holds onto the idea that things have to be exactly what he thinks they are, or they can’t possibly be true. He never allows for the possibility that his assumptions about various things might be what’s wrong, rather than those things themselves. We saw that last week, in his belief that the Hill Cumorah had to be the hill in New York and couldn’t possibly have been anywhere else (which is ironic considering the upcoming Vernal Holley map section), and we’ll see it again and again and again throughout the rest of the Letter. It comes up during the Book of Mormon translation section, the section about prophetic abilities, the Book of Abraham section, etc. He refuses to allow for the possibility that his assumptions might be wrong, and seems to believe that anything that doesn’t conform to those assumptions must be proof that the Church isn’t true.

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