Josiah Quincy And The Book Of Abraham

[ElGuapo]

So I'm finally getting around to reading No Man Knows My History. I don't want to debate the merits of the book in this thread, but I was surprised by one comment from the episode of Josiah Quincy's visit to Nauvoo. Quincy "wrote in his journal a detailed account of their conversation" (p. 293) and was clearly impressed with Joseph. (Bushman starts Rough Stone Rolling with the same story.) Here's the paragraph that got my attention, though, and I'm interested in your thoughts, since I'd never heard this one before:

As they entered the Nauvoo Museum, Joseph introduced Lucy Smith: "This is my mother, gentlemen. The curiosities we shall see belong to her. They were purchased with her own money at a cost of six thousand dollars." Opening pine presses along the wall, he disclosed four black, shrunken bodies. "These are mummies," he said. "I want you to look at that little runt of a fellow over there. He was a great man in his day. Why that was Pharaoh Necho, King of Egypt!" He pointed to various hieroglyphs on the papyri, which were preserved under glass. "That is the handwriting of Abraham, the Father of the Faithful; this is the autograph of Moses, and these lines were written by his brother Aaron. Here we have the earliest accounts of the Creation, from which Moses composed the first Book of Genesis."

I'm no expert in apologetics (that's why I'm here), but I thought there was a complicated workaround for the wording at the head of the translation that says Abraham's account was written "by his own hand upon papyrus." Joseph's comment seems to confirm that it was indeed Abraham's handwriting on the papyrus. What say you?

[Bernard Gui]

So I'm finally getting around to reading No Man Knows My History. I don't want to debate the merits of the book in this thread, but I was surprised by one comment from the episode of Josiah Quincy's visit to Nauvoo. Quincy "wrote in his journal a detailed account of their conversation" (p. 293) and was clearly impressed with Joseph. (Bushman starts Rough Stone Rolling with the same story.) Here's the paragraph that got my attention, though, and I'm interested in your thoughts, since I'd never heard this one before:

I'm no expert in apologetics (that's why I'm here), but I thought there was a complicated workaround for the wording at the head of the translation that says Abraham's account was written "by his own hand upon papyrus." Joseph's comment seems to confirm that it was indeed Abraham's handwriting on the papyrus. What say you?

I say, maybe those aren't Joseph's exact words. They may have experienced

a bit of dressing up or down by the good Mr. Quincy.

Bernard

[ElGuapo]

I say, maybe those aren't Joseph's exact words. They may have experienced

a bit of dressing up or down by the good Mr. Quincy.

Bernard

So do you find it troublesome as written?

[Rommelator]

A few thoughts:

The phrase "by his own hand upon papyrus" is not problematic when we consider how the ancient Egyptians viewed their scriptures and sacred canon.

As Kerry Shirts explains:

"It is obvious from reading the Hebrew Bible that the phrase by his own hand is a Hebrew idiom beyadh, which means "by the authority of," as we can clearly see in the Stuttgartensian Hebrew text that Kohlenberger translates. He renders Exodus 9:35 as "just as the Lord said through Moses," while the Hebrew has beyadh, that is "by the hand of." Clearly it was the Lord's handâ??the Lord's authority, which had led Moses against Pharaoh, that is, by the Lord's authority. Though we don't get it that way in the English, the Hebrew definitely has "by the hand of."10

At 1 Samuel 28:15 we see another exampleâ??the English translation reads that God would not appear to Saul either by the prophets or by dreams. In the Hebrew we again find beyadh, "by the hand of," or in other words, by the prophet's authority from God.

In other words, Abraham may not even have touched the documents that bear his name, the very ones that fell into Joseph's hands in the 1830s, since Abraham could have had them commissioned and written for him. Yet for all this, the documents would still bear his signature, since they were authorized by him, "by his own hand," even though a scribe may have written it instead of Abraham. Isn't it interesting that our critics take this one instance with sheer concrete literalness, yet they guffaw when we take other scriptures literally, for example, that God is our real Heavenly Father, embodied as a man in yonder heavens?"

http://farms.byu.edu/publications/review/?...um=1&id=310

Or as Hugh Nibley put it:

"This is important, since much misunderstanding has arisen from the assumption that the Joseph Smith Papyri were the original draft of Abraham's book, his very own handiwork. I discussed the sense in which the formula is to be understood some years ago:

Two important and peculiar aspects of ancient authorship must be considered when we are told that a writing is by the hand of Abraham or anybody else. One is that according to Egyptian and Hebrew thinking any copy of a book originally written by Abraham would be regarded and designated as the very work of his hand forever after, no matter how many reproductions had been made and handed down through the years. The other is that no matter who did the writing originally, if it was Abraham who commissioned or directed the work, he would take the credit for the actual writing of the document, whether he penned it or not.

As to the first point, when a holy book (usually a leather roll) grew old and worn out from handling, it was not destroyed but renewed. Important writings were immortalâ??for the Egyptians they were "the divine words," for the Jews the very letters were holy and indestructible, being the word of God. The wearing out of a particular copy of scripture therefore in no way brought the life of the book to a closeâ??it could not perish. In Egypt it was simply renewed (ma.w, sma.w) "fairer than before," and so continued its life to the next renewal. Thus we are told at the beginning of what some have claimed to be the oldest writing in the world [the Shabako Stone], "His Majesty wrote this book down anew. . . . His Majesty discovered it as a work of the Ancestors, but eaten by worms. . . . So His Majesty wrote it down from the beginning, so that it is more beautiful than it was before."6 It is not a case of the old book's being replaced by a new one, but of the original book itself continuing its existence in a rejuvenated state. No people were more hypnotized by the idea of a renewal of lives than the Egyptiansâ??not a succession of lives or a line of descent, but the actual revival and rejuvenation of a single life.

Even the copyist who puts his name in a colophon does so not so much as publicity for himself as to vouch for the faithful transmission of the original book; his being "trustworthy (iqr) of fingers," i.e., a reliable copyist, is the reader's assurance that he has the original text before him. An Egyptian document, J. Spiegel observes, is like the print of an etching, which is not only a work of art in its own right but "can lay claim equally well to being the original . . . regardless of whether the individual copies turn out well or ill." Because he thinks in terms of types, according to Spiegel, for the Egyptian "there is no essential difference between an original and a copy. For as they understand it, all pictures are but reproductions of an ideal original."7 . . .

This concept was equally at home in Israel. An interesting passage from the Book of Jubilees [a text unknown before 1850] recounts that Joseph while living in Egypt "remembered the Lord and the words which Jacob, his father, used to read from amongst the words of Abraham."8 Here is a clear statement that "the words of Abraham" were handed down in written form from generation to generation, and were the subject of serious study in the family circle. The same source informs us that when Israel died and was buried in Canaan, "he gave all his books and the books of his fathers to Levi his son that he might preserve them and renew them for his children until this day."9 Here "the books of the fathers" including "the words of Abraham" have been preserved for later generations by a process of renewal. [Joseph's own books were, of course, Egyptian books.]

In this there is no thought of the making of a new book by a new hand. It was a strict rule in Israel that no one, not even the most learned rabbi, should ever write down so much as a single letter of the Bible from memory: always the text must be copied letter by letter from another text that had been copied in the same way, thereby eliminating the danger of any man's adding, subtracting, or changing so much as a single jot in the text. It was not a rewriting but a process as mechanical as photography, an exact visual reproduction, so that no matter how many times the book had been passed from hand to hand, it was always the one original text that was before one. . . .

But "written by his own hand"? This brings us to the other interesting concept. Let us recall that that supposedly oldest of Egyptian writings, the so-called Shabako Stone, begins with the announcement that "His Majesty wrote this book down anew." This, Professor Sethe obligingly explains, is "normal Egyptian usage to express the idea that the King ordered a copy to be made."10 Yet it clearly states that the king himself wrote it. Thus when the son of King Snefru says of his own inscription at Medum, "It was he who made his gods in [such] a writing [that] it cannot be effaced," the statement is so straightforward that even such a student as W. S. Smith takes it to mean that the prince himself actually did the writing. And what could be more natural than for a professional scribe to make an inscription: "It was her husband, the Scribe of the Royal Scroll, Nebwy, who made this inscription"? Or when a noble announces that he made his father's tomb, why should we not take him at his word? It depends on how the word is to be understood. Professor Wilson in all these cases holds that the person who claims to have done the work does so "in the sense that he commissioned and paid for it."11 The noble who has writing or carving done is always given full credit for its actual execution; such claims of zealous craftsmanship "have loftily ignored the artist," writes Wilson. "It was the noble who 'made' or 'decorated' his tomb," though one noble of the Old Kingdom breaks down enough to show us how these claims were understood: "I made this for my old father. . . . I had the sculptor Itju make (it)."12 Dr. Wilson cites a number of cases in which men claim to have "made" their father's tombs, one of them specifically stating that he did so "while his arm was still strong"â??with his own hand!13

Credit for actually writing the inscription of the famous Metternich Stele is claimed by "the prophetess of Nebwen, Nest-Amun, daughter of the Prophet of Nebwen and Scribe of the Inundation, 'Ankh-Psametik,'" who states that she "renewed (sma.w) this book [there it is again!] after she had found it removed from the house of Osiris-Mnevis, so that her name might be preserved."14 The inscription then shifts to the masculine gender as if the scribe were really a man, leading to considerable dispute among the experts as to just who gets the credit. Certain it is that the Lady boasts of having given an ancient book a new lease on life, even though her hand may never have touched a pen.15

Nest-Amun hoped to preserve her name by attaching it to a book, and in a very recent study M. A. Korostovstev notes that "for an Egyptian to attach his name to a written work was an infallible means of passing it down through the centuries."16 That may be one reason why Abraham chose the peculiar Egyptian medium he did for the transmission of his recordâ??or at least why it has reached us only in this form. Indeed Theodor B

[Kevin Christensen]

Josiah Quincy's book was published, as I recall, in 1883 or so. Remember that Josiah did not publish his diaries, but an account he wrote decades later based on them. When he visited Nauvoo, he was part of a group of friends, and others in his party kept diaries, and at least one of those provides a check on his memory. Plus, other people wrote about their visits to Mother Smith and the Mummies.

Another check on his account comes with the finding of actual receipt for the mummies, which was closer to $2500.

Kevin Christensen

Pittsburgh, PA

[ElGuapo]

Here's Joseph's purported comment to Josiah Quincy again: "That is the handwriting of Abraham, the Father of the Faithful; this is the autograph of Moses, and these lines were written by his brother Aaron. Here we have the earliest accounts of the Creation, from which Moses composed the first Book of Genesis."

I would tend to agree that the simplest way to resolve this is to conclude that Joseph was mistaken about who did the actual writing on these papyri. Otherwise, if we take these words as prophetic, it would seem to blow up the whole Shirts/Nibley argument that "by his own hand" doesn't really mean "in his own handwriting." Was he likewise wrong about the autograph of Moses then? And the idea that these were the earliest accounts from which Moses composed Genesis? That seems like a meaningless distinction if this is actually a passed down copy like the Book of Genesis itself.

By the way, is there any reason to doubt that Quincy's account is a fair representation of what he was told? For instance the part about Lucy Smith buying the mummies with her own moneyâ??don't most historians believe the Saints took up a collection and purchased them? [ETA: Thanks, Kevin, you read my mind.]

[katherine the great]

What say you?

I say: I liked your mustachioed avatar better.

[ElGuapo]

This guy?

The sweater gets a little hot.

[Chris Smith]

By the way, is there any reason to doubt that Quincy's account is a fair representation of what he was told?

John Gee has argued that since Quincy's traveling companion Charles Francis Adams omitted this detail, the two accounts conflict and thus Quincy cannot be trusted. I am not inclined to agree with Dr. Gee's assertion; an omission does not a contradiction make. There is other testimony supporting Quincy's report that Joseph Smith believed the document to be an Abraham autograph. The National Intelligencer reported the same, citing an "extremely respectable" resident of Washington, D.C. who had recently visited Nauvoo. (Quincy and his traveling companion Charles Francis Adams were Massachusetts men, so I'm not sure who the eyewitness was in this case.) An irenic eyewitness in the Supplement to the Courant reported that JS identified Abraham's signature on the papyrus. A letter from Joseph Smith to the Times & Seasons referred to "the commencement of the Records discovered in Egypt some time since as penned by the hand of Father Abraham". References to the age of the document generally fit Abrahamic authorship. Further arguments for autographic authorship were made by the late Luke Wilson and may be read here.

[ElGuapo]

John Gee has argued that since Quincy's traveling companion Charles Francis Adams omitted this detail, the two accounts conflict and thus Quincy cannot be trusted. I am not inclined to agree with Dr. Gee's assertion; an omission does not a contradiction make. There is other testimony supporting Quincy's report that Joseph Smith believed the document to be an Abraham autograph. The National Intelligencer reported the same, citing an "extremely respectable" resident of Washington, D.C. who had recently visited Nauvoo. (Quincy and his traveling companion Charles Francis Adams were Massachusetts men, so I'm not sure who the eyewitness was in this case.) An irenic eyewitness in the Supplement to the Courant reported that JS identified Abraham's signature on the papyrus. A letter from Joseph Smith to the Times & Seasons referred to "the commencement of the Records discovered in Egypt some time since as penned by the hand of Father Abraham". References to the age of the document generally fit Abrahamic authorship. Further arguments for autographic authorship were made by the late Luke Wilson and may be read here.

Fascinating, I wasn't aware this had been debated before, although I shouldn't be surprised. Incidentally the link to the Luke Wilson paper didn't work, but I believe I found it here.

[Chris Smith]

Fascinating, I wasn't aware this had been debated before, although I shouldn't be surprised. Incidentally the link to the Luke Wilson paper didn't work, but I believe I found it here.

That's the one! Cheers,

-Chris