Internal Evidence For Or Against The Book Of Abraham

[California]

On that note, you might be interested in the following essay:

Staker, Susan. "'The Lord Said, Thy Wife Is a Very Fair Woman to Look Upon': The Book of Abraham, Secrets, and Lying for the Lord." In The Prophet Puzzle: Interpretive Essays on Joseph Smith, edited by Bryan Waterman, 289-318. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1999.

I know someone who talked to the Tanners about some stuff they had put in a book of theirs for which this person found no sources. The sources they had come up with were false. The Tanners refused to "talk about it." God will never lie. So if God tells you something, you must stick with it. I go to God.

[kamenraider]

I came across a document called "Why I no Longer Believe" (or something like that) on the internet recently which mentioned some internal things in the "against" category that I hadn't come across before. I believe that the Book of Abraham really was written by Abraham and is scripture, but I haven't studied the background of it much, so I wondered if this guy is way off base or what -- here's a quote:

Oops. I posted that in haste without reading the first page. Looks like most of it was dealt with. What about the Pharaoh thing though? Was that covered too and I missed it? Sorry again if it was, I'm a bit distracted right now.

[milkyway]

I know someone who talked to the Tanners about some stuff they had put in a book of theirs for which this person found no sources. The sources they had come up with were false. The Tanners refused to "talk about it."

Do you think the Tanners are somehow connected with the credibility of every single book published by signature?

And the same has been said about LDS authors as well. Does that mean everything published by Momrons is untrustworthy? Of course not.

As a percentage, considering the massive volumes the Tanners have published, I'd say the number of demonstrable errors is quite low considering the fact that they are not scholars.

I am not so gullible as to believe whatever someone writes.

Nobody is asking you to believe "whatever" someone writes. I suspect what is expected is that you open your mind to different perspectives, take them in and deduce from that a reasonable conclusion. But when you're so adamant about rejecting anything not published by LDS authors, I guess that is an unreasonable expectation.

People turn into liars, lying to themselves and others when they veer away from truth, and the only Person immune to that 'bug' is God.

And Joseph Smith lied about polygamy too. This is established fact that only the spin doctors among the apologists would even try to deny. The rest accept it and try to make excuses for it. But he lied. Do you therefore denounce his character just the same?

God will never lie.

But writers critical of LDS history always will?

So if God tells you something, you must stick with it.

With this kind of reasoning, there is really absolutely no reason why LDS adherents should engage scholarship at all; not if they are consistent anyway. Ultimately, what really matters is what God tells them behind closed doors. It seems they like to flirt with scholarship for apologetic purposes, assuming knowledge about historical facts is important at times when they think it helps people think "evidence" has been found, but when those facts reflect poorly on the Church and its founder, it is time to suddenly revert back to the mentality that everyone lies except God.

Bryan Waterman is an idiot for spending so much of his time writing some book about something that does not lead anyone to God.

That isn't how others feel about it. Many people feel they have been led to God by discovering the "truth" that the LDS Church is not what they thought it to be. You can't expect former members to reasonably hold any other view. And not all ex-Mormons become atheists.

What sort of faith is that?

A non-Mormon one. Is that OK?

An anti-faith where the whole purpose of your work is to destroy faith?

One can argue that this is precisely what LDS missionaries do when they convince people their current faith is really just an apostate faith. At least Waterman is doing it through scholarship and not ogmatic preaching within a controlled environment. I mean its just a book for crying out loud. Why be afraid of it unless you think it has some powerful truths that could persuade?

I don't need some fallible, limited mortal to tell me where to go for eternal salvation

Then you reject Joseph Smith, who is presumably, just as fallible and mortal as Waterman?

I go to God. Going anywhere else is a mistake.

Many people claim to go to God when they follow other faiths, but that explanation doesn't seem to dissuade LDS missionaries.

You're dismissing a book you haven't even read. That's silly.

[MormonMason]

MormonMason,

I am aware of that argument. However, those who originally made it (before it was adapted for LDS purposes) held that there was an earlier version of Genesis that just said "Ur" (referring to a northern city) and that a post-exilic redactor decided to "clarify" it by adding "of the Chaldees". The problem in the BoA is exacerbated by the fact that not only does it follow the Bible in identifying Ur as being "of the Chaldees", it has also actually woven the Chaldeans into its narrative.

-Chris

Regardless of what was considered by some scholars as the original reading, there is another side to this coin as well. We know that the Chaldeans did not make their way into what came to be called Chaldea untill far too late for the Abraham story. But consider that they may well have been known in the northern regions until the time they migrated to the southern location. Consider that if they did live in or near the northern Ur, that the ancients may well have referred to that one originally as "Ur of the Chaldees" (literally "Ur of the Casdim") in order to distinguish it from the southern Ur. I believe that this is a possibility for a few reasons, four of which are that:

1. The journey of Abraham makes most sense for a direct route, especially considering mountain passes and obstacles and how they make a journey from the Ur near Bablylon impractical and come from the wrong directions, requiring considerable backtracking and turns not recorded anywhere.

2. Abraham sends his servant to obtain a wife for Isaac to what he identifies as the land of his nativity. His servant goes to the region of Aram Naharaim. It is more likely that Ur would have been in or near that region, not hundreds of miles out of the way in the wrong direction. All of the cities that Abraham mentions are in a direct route following a well known ancient road. He nowhere mentions Babylon or Nineveh as being in his journeys. Why not mention these important cities whether he merely passed through them or visited them?

3. There are passages of the Hebrew Bible that are translated in some versions of the Bible as Mesopotamia but which are in reality the region of Aram Naharaim according to the Hebrew.

4. If I recall corectly, there is demonstrable Egyptian influence that reaches as far as that region but very little, if any at all, that reaches into the region of the southern Ur.