What Are The Main Arguments Against The Book Of Abraham

[omni]

JS asked questions about everything including mundane daily tasks of others and then provided the individual with revelation. I find it ironic that we are told to pray to get a spiritual witness and get questions answered but then when we pray and don't get answers we're told we shouldn't be praying about that particular thing. This is foolishness. If I need to know something about the workings of God, and I pray about the BoAbraham and the mode of revelation, I cannot understand why this would be an inappropriate prayer. It's not like I'm praying for my sports team to win or my boss to get fired.

I've often wondered if after gaining his prophetic mantle, JS ever uttered the phrase, "I don't know". He seemed to have an answer for any question - big or small. Now it seems "we don't know" is the default answer for any difficult questions by our current prophets.

[Robert F. Smith]

Nothing about the seer stones JS used seems ordinary, from the descriptions surrounding their use to how they were found. Certainly the story about Harris switching out the stones to try and fool Joseph Smith would make no sense if it was just an ordinary rock. If they were ordinary stones why would they have been taken back from Joseph Smith when he lost the 116 pages?

The extraordinary stones taken from Joseph (together with the plates) were the Nephite "interpreters," which were then replaced by Joseph's personal seerstone (which he had had for some time).  That latter is the "ordinary stone" we have been discussing.

[Robert F. Smith]

My recollection is that Joseph found one of the stones in a buried kettle and the other while digging a well. The story about Harris switching the stones to try to fool Joseph Smith doesn't convince me that Joseph's stone had magical properties. If I had a rock that I had carried around with me for years and looked at/in regularly, I think I'd be able to distinguish it from a similar-looking rock pretty easily. I don't think Martin really thought that experiment through. Anyway, I realize some people still believe Joseph's seer stones were magic—I don't doubt he did—but I fall more in line with Brant Gardner's conclusion that "there was no magic in any of the stones. They were simply rocks that served the person with seeric talent as a means of expressing that talent" (Brant A. Gardner, The Gift and Power: Translating the Book of Mormon [salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2011], 264).

I don't think that they have "magical" properties either.  However, people living in Joseph's time might well have considered a solid state device with an LED screen to be very magical -- even though it is a device which we use every day in our time.

[Robert F. Smith]

I think that when the POGP was received as scripture by the former LDS Apostles, it was believed and taught to the church membership that it was a 'translation'.  But now it seems the LDS Church is shifting to 'interpretation'  instead.   If the Book of Mormon as a whole ever becomes an 'allegory', then the historical aspect of it may go down the tubes. And by doing so, the latter church apostleship will be saying to the former apostles that you were all wrong.

 

Regards,

Jim

I see no such "shift."

The late Herbert W. Armstrong considered himself a literal "apostle" of Jesus Christ, but that has about as much relevance to the status of the Pearl of Great Price and Book of Mormon as your imaginary dispute among current and former LDS apostles on that issue.

 

I suggest, Jim, that we consider the issue of the status of parts of the Mormon Canon on the basis of their content as compared to historical reality.

Otherwise we are reduced to talking around the subject and engaging in all manner of non sequiturs.  This doesn't seem to me to be at all productive.

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

Robert, have you read Orson Scott Card's essay on Book of Mormon authorship? I like that explanation a lot better than the concept of the LCD-rock. Personally, I guess I'm more with, say, Quinn/Gardner, in that the cultural folk-magic of the time was the conceptual/linguistic milieu in which God had to work within, but which would be rather artificial if replicated in the modern context. That is, the stones were nothing special, but in the cultural context of the time, they could function as a useful conduit for Joseph to receive revelation in his mind, which is where the real magic happened. (BTW, I think we're getting the causality backwards here, folks; that is, the entire earth will "become" an Urim and Thummim not in that it will transmogrify into a giant magic stone, but that revelation will become clearer to all people. The U&T is the metaphor.)

 

As Card notes, this makes translation issues much clearer; Joseph wasn't "translating" in the sense of knowing reformed Egyptian in the Book of Mormon, or Greek or Hebrew or whatever in the D&C/book of Moses, and as Nibs noted long ago in MotJSP, the BoA wasn't on the Hor scroll - I don't think Ritner has closed the case, but for whatever reason, we have to admit we've got a very unconventional 'translation', and for whatever reason, Joseph needed the reassurance of some tangible artifacts to receive the revelations. Whether he just earnestly hallucinated the new scriptures or was deliberately deceptive or really was receiving wi-fi mentalese information from an external source via Catalyst Theory or whatever is of course what is up for debate, but it can't be solved empirically or even historically since we have no way to reproduce or verify the subjective mental state of a dead man!  

 

From Card's essay:

 

I speak of the witnesses' claim that the words "appeared" in English, in Roman letters, on the seerstone, and that Joseph's "translation" consisted of reading out the words phrase by phrase, new phrases appearing as soon as prior ones were transcribed. While Skousen rejects (correctly, I think) the witnesses' claim that the appearance of a new phrase was contingent on the correct transcription, right down to the spelling, of the current phrase, he barely considers the possibility that in fact Joseph Smith was not seeing English words in Roman letters at all. This despite the fact that these witnesses actually saw the outward process of translation and heard Joseph Smith dictating the words and phrases, while not one of them ever witnessed what the Prophet actually saw when he put his face into the hat that held the seerstone.

 

And let there be no doubt on that score. If Joseph Smith had ever told any of them that he saw English words in regular letters, it is unthinkable that the person whom he told this to would fail to assert, over and over, that he had this information straight from Joseph Smith's own lips. And yet, at least from the evidence available to me (which consists only of the evidence presented in Skousen's article and my fallible memory of articles I've read earlier), no such claim was ever made. Not even when David Whitmer was asserting that Joseph Smith was a fallen prophet specifically because of his revisions of revelations in the Doctrine & Covenants did he make any claim that Joseph himself had ever said that the Book of Mormon merely appeared to him word by word on the urim and thummim. While this is negative evidence, and any such claim by one of the witnesses would still not constitute proof, it is still a point worth remembering. We have no claim from these witnesses that their beliefs about the method of translation came from Joseph Smith himself. When they make statements about what Joseph saw, they are reporting only what they believed. And their unanimity is completely explainable by the fact that they all talked to each other repeatedly over many years before any of these statements were recorded.

 

Thus, when David Whitmer calls it "luminous writing" that the Prophet saw, it is more likely to be Whitmer's own reasoning that we're getting: The Prophet dictated smoothly and clearly, phrase by phrase, which sounded to Whitmer like someone reading; and since there was no light in that hat by which to read anything at all, the (supposed) writing on the seerstone must have been luminous. The result of this extrapolation is an early nineteenth-century description of an active-matrix LCD display; unfortunately, this description is likely to have been nothing more than science fiction, invented to explain what to Whitmer (and the others) seemed otherwise inexplicable.

 

 

 

[VideoGameJunkie]

I trust Joseph Smith.

[theplains]

I suggest, Jim, that we consider the issue of the status of parts of the Mormon Canon on the basis of their content as compared to historical reality.

 

In your opinion, are there any parts of the Mormon Canon which are historical fallacies?

If so, which?

 

Thanks,

Jim

[Freedom]

I've often wondered if after gaining his prophetic mantle, JS ever uttered the phrase, "I don't know". He seemed to have an answer for any question - big or small. Now it seems "we don't know" is the default answer for any difficult questions by our current prophets.

I think you will find you are quite wrong on that point. Clearly, looking at his financial predicaments and numerous other temporal challenges that came his way, not to mention the numerous times he did not receive answers to pleadings, he did not get answers to any question he asked. I would suggest you read his revelations and books such as Rough Stone Rolling, You will find he was left in the dark on many matters. 

[Freedom]

JS asked questions about everything including mundane daily tasks of others and then provided the individual with revelation. I find it ironic that we are told to pray to get a spiritual witness and get questions answered but then when we pray and don't get answers we're told we shouldn't be praying about that particular thing. This is foolishness. If I need to know something about the workings of God, and I pray about the BoAbraham and the mode of revelation, I cannot understand why this would be an inappropriate prayer. It's not like I'm praying for my sports team to win or my boss to get fired.

I would ask for some supporting references to back up this claim. He received no guidance on his temporal affairs despite constant pleading, he struggled to organize the saints, had many failed ventures, and knew not what to do when people fell sick and died. You are quite wrong. 

[HappyJackWagon]

I would ask for some supporting references to back up this claim. He received no guidance on his temporal affairs despite constant pleading, he struggled to organize the saints, had many failed ventures, and knew not what to do when people fell sick and died. You are quite wrong. 

Yes, he had many failed ventures and yes people died despite blessings. That doesn't mean he didn't claim revelation in those cases. Think Zion's camp.

There are so many examples of JS being asked questions by members after which he took it to God and then shared the revelation. My source is Doctrine and Covenants. Are you claiming that he didn't receive revelations on mundane things that were a part of every day life? I'm not saying he received revelation on EVERYTHING but he received revelation on many things, people on this board seem to think are too insignificant to ask. It didn't seem anything was too big or too small for him to seek revelation about.

 

Can anyone think of an example where JS had a question and then said, "No, I won't ask that because it pertains too much to the mysteries of godliness."?

[JLHPROF]

Yes, he had many failed ventures and yes people died despite blessings. That doesn't mean he didn't claim revelation in those cases. Think Zion's camp.

There are so many examples of JS being asked questions by members after which he took it to God and then shared the revelation. My source is Doctrine and Covenants. Are you claiming that he didn't receive revelations on mundane things that were a part of every day life? I'm not saying he received revelation on EVERYTHING but he received revelation on many things, people on this board seem to think are too insignificant to ask. It didn't seem anything was too big or too small for him to seek revelation about.

 

Can anyone think of an example where JS had a question and then said, "No, I won't ask that because it pertains too much to the mysteries of godliness."?

 

Specific instance - not off the top of my head.

Teaching on the subject - yep:

 

"And again we never inquire at the hand of God for special revelation only in case of there being no previous revelation to suit the case; and that in a council of High Priests. * * * It is a great thing to inquire at the hands of God, or to come into His presence; and we feel fearful to approach Him on subjects that are of little or no consequence, to satisfy the queries of individuals, especially about things the knowledge of which men ought to obtain in all sincerity, before God, for themselves, in humility by the prayer of faith; and more especially a Teacher or a High Priest in the Church." 

JOSEPH SMITH, JUN.—DHC 1:338-339.

Edited October 11, 2014 by JLHPROF

[HappyJackWagon]

Thanks, JLHPROF.

[Robert F. Smith]

Here are five that I can think of off the top of my head right now:

 

 

1. The surviving fragments we have are not the Book of Abraham.

 

2. Joseph Smith's commentary on the facsimiles are not in in accordance with the interpretations of  trained Egyptologists.

 

3. There are alleged historical inaccuracies, such as the origin of Egypt, described in the text. 

 

4. The astronomy is all wrong.

 

5. The text seems to provide a doctrinal basis for the priesthood and temple ban.

Excellent list.

Yes, although one must hasten to add that ##2-5 are false arguments.  However, they are indeed some of the main arguments, and that seems to be what DBMormon wants listed.  What he does with his list after he gets it is the question which remains in limbo.

Edited October 11, 2014 by Robert F. Smith

[emarkp]

All these pages and no one has linked the wiki?   http://en.fairmormon.org/Book_of_Abraham

[volgadon]

Yes, although one must hasten to add that ##2-5 are false arguments.  However, they are indeed some of the main arguments, and that seems to be what DBMormon wants listed.  What he does with his list after he gets it is the question which remains in limbo.

 

Certainly. I like to be able to frame the problem before solving it, which is why I think that the list is good.

[cinepro]

FWIW, I posted this "solution" for the Church and the Book of Abraham a while back. I think it still works, and wouldn't be surprised to see the Church transition to this approach over the next 50 - 100 years:

There are several apologetic defenses for The Book of Abraham (BoA), all successful to varying degrees. Personally, I find each of them lacking in some critical regard. So I'm pleased to offer a solution for the Church to "The Book of Abraham" problem. It will probably take a while to implement, but if done correctly, I suspect the attrition rate for BoA doubters could be dropped almost to zero. I won't rehash the problems people have with the BoA; read up on it elsewhere if you're not familiar with it.

That being said, here's what the Church needs to do:

Take The Book of Abraham out of Egypt.

Step One: How many people do you know that have left the Church because of The Book of Moses? I've never met one. Yet the Book of Moses is longer than the BoA. It is just as "canonized" and official. It came forth only a few years before the BoA. It's actually quite similar. But no one cares about The Book of Moses. Why is that? Because the Book of Moses is just what it says it it. Joseph Smith was "translating" (or revising) the Bible and he gave us the Book of Moses. That's it. It survives (and is bulletproof) because it claims to be nothing more than a revelation from God.

That's what The Book of Abraham needs to become.

"Question: What is The Book of Abraham?"

"Answer: A revelation to Joseph Smith about the life of Abraham"

"Question: Where did it come from?"

"Answer: Joseph Smith received it through revelation while living in Kirtland in the 1830's."

"Question: But what about this story I heard about mummies and egyptian writing?"

"Answer: Joseph Smith had an interest in ancient and modern languages, including Hebrew, Egyptian, German and others. While his study of Egyptian in Kirtland may be related to the revelation on The Book of Abraham, in spite of speculation at the time, we don't know much about it."

See? It's that easy.

Step Two: Get rid of the facsimiles.

Immediately. Stop the presses, take them out. If the Book of Moses had this picture in it, we'd be screwed:

But it doesn't, and no one cares about The Book of Moses.

No one even cares about the facsimiles anyway. No one would miss them. File them alongside the other "Kirtland Egyptian Papers" and let someone bang their head against them. The only purpose they serve is for LDS to assume Joseph Smith could translate Egyptian, and then to get really freaked out when they find out he could only "translate" "Egyptian".

Now that the facsimiles are gone, you've got a few chapters of The Book of Abraham, revealed to Joseph Smith around the same time he was also involved in other projects like mummy collecting and speculative Egyptian translation, but doctrinally separate.

Problem solved. You'd still have a few die-hards carping about the mummy story 50 years from now, but you wouldn't have Church members freaking out about it.

This solution has the added bonus of not negating anything currently published by the Church or apologists about The Book of Abraham. Other than making the defenses almost totally unneeded, it doesn't contradict them. It just takes the issues about the papyrus and facsimiles off the table (and off the "shelf").

It would be like with the Priesthood Ban: "We don't know" might not be the most satisfying answer, but it can sometimes be the best one.

[Robert F. Smith]

Scientific discovery and revelation are not related any more than  eating bananas with yogurt and revelation is related. Unless you can provide examples of where scientific discoveries came about through revelation rather than through examining tangible evidence there is just no connection. It is possible to received guidance when pursuing an investigation, but there are no examples I know of where prophets have revealed information that has been accepted by the academic community as a scientific breakthrough. 

That's where you're wrong.

Take, for example, the Ouroboros-serpent (on the book cover in the 1984 film “The Neverending Story”), the “Gnostic and alchemical symbol” of (1) “the unity of all things, material and spiritual,” as well as of (2) perpetual “change . . . in an eternal cycle of destruction and re-creation.”  The ouroboros-serpent with its own tail in its mouth is familiar throughout Egyptian history as a protective symbol, from the Coffin Texts, Book of the Dead, Demotic literature, and late antiquity, through medieval (Corpus Hermeticum) and modern times.  “In the 19th century, a vision of Ouroboros gave the German chemist Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz the idea of linked carbon atoms forming the benzene ring.” -- Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., 9:13.

[Robert F. Smith]

He asked questions to do with doctrine and principles. I would invite you to get on your knees and start praying for an explanation of the causes of gravity and see how it works out. You would have to provide an example where, in the scriptures, historical or scientific data has been revealed. If you want to understand the world around you do it like everybody else does it. Study the data. If you want to learn about God and how to return to him, get on your knees an pray. If you want help understanding the data to learn about the world around you, pray for wisdom; but no, God will not come down and place a rare artifact in your lap while you are kneeling by your bed. 

 

If revelation reveals all truth, why would the church build institutions like BYU? It would be better to just create a really big celestial room and have people pray all day long. 

Nonsense, and bordering on ridicule or mockery, if not deliberate blasphemy of the kind which Richard Dawkins arrogantly throws around.

 

Great scientific and technological breakthroughs certainly do have careful study and assemblage of data associated with them, but more often than not depend less upon induction and deduction than upon a sudden realization or paradigm shift which allows the imagination to grasp the solution.  This was certainly true for Edison as it was for Einstein, who said that "imagination is more important than knowledge."  Genius is the capacity to make that leap, and only afterward fill in the logical details.  This applies in a more intuitive way to mad geniuses such as the mathematician John Nash, a Nobel laureate (about whom the film "A Beautiful Mind").  Indeed, Nash said: "One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos."  Another mad genius was Isaac Newton, whom some believe to have suffered from BPD or schizophrenia.  http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/curiosity/topics/mad-genius.htm .  Not only was he astronomer, mathematician, and engineer, but he was also a full-blown magus or sorcerer.   Michael White, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer (Basic Books, 1999).

 

 

 

[Robert F. Smith]

Robert, have you read Orson Scott Card's essay on Book of Mormon authorship? I like that explanation a lot better than the concept of the LCD-rock.

I favor the LED comparison only because one can see it in the darkness of the hat, which fits so many witnesses' descriptions.

 

Personally, I guess I'm more with, say, Quinn/Gardner, in that the cultural folk-magic of the time was the conceptual/linguistic milieu in which God had to work within, but which would be rather artificial if replicated in the modern context. That is, the stones were nothing special, but in the cultural context of the time, they could function as a useful conduit for Joseph to receive revelation in his mind, which is where the real magic happened. (BTW, I think we're getting the causality backwards here, folks; that is, the entire earth will "become" an Urim and Thummim not in that it will transmogrify into a giant magic stone, but that revelation will become clearer to all people. The U&T is the metaphor.)

Thank you so much for calling Card's 1998 review article to my attention.  He and I take a similar view on the way in which Joseph translated, even as we disagree as to whether one of the devices used was the seerstone with characters and bright roman letters.  I see no problem at all for God to activate any stone (solid state device) to make it a virtual state receiver or transceiver.

 

..................................................................................   

From Card's essay:

. . . if Joseph Smith, studying out the translation in his mind, had got the language right just as the scribe was called away, and the words therefore did not appear anywhere except in Joseph Smith's own mind at that moment, then he would have some urgency about writing them down in his own hand without waiting for the scribe to return.

*******

I don't know anybody who believes in that "loose control" model, and D&C 8 and 9 deny it almost as surely as they deny Skousen's "tight control" model, we haven't gained much by ruling it out; but there it is, we can all agree that there was nothing vague about Joseph Smith's translation, and it was closely tied to the original text written by Nephi, Jacob, Mormon, Moroni, and various others.

******

. . . translation is used precisely for those products of Joseph Smith's prophetic labors that were based on texts written by others and translated through Joseph Smith's own laborious mental processes.

******

Whatever process Joseph Smith went through, and the Lord describes in D&C 8 and 9, it is not described by any of the three levels of "control" that Skousen enumerates in his article. That is, Joseph Smith was not getting general ideas and casting them in his own language, and he was not being shown already-translated English-language text which he merely read off without any need to study it out in his own mind. All three of Skousen's little men are made of straw.

******

. . . the Prophet was never making it up, but was always having to study it out in his mind.

******

This is one area where it seems obvious to me that Joseph Smith received divine help -- for he seems never to have come upon a passage whose meaning was so unclear that he had to stop the onward flow of his translation. The "studying out in his mind" may have been limited entirely to coming up with accurate-enough English language to convey the meaning of foreign text that he understood readily; 

******

. . . may also go a long way toward explaining his use of the hat. If the Prophet was struggling to concentrate, shutting out all visual distractions would be very helpful; the hat may have been used, not to allow him to see luminous writing on a stone, but to allow him, while his eyes were open, to nevertheless see nothing at all, except what came by revelation to his mind -- whatever that might have been.

******

. . . these flaws and/or inconsistencies in English usage in Joseph Smith's translation merely prove -- as if we needed more proof -- that God works with human beings, not puppets, and he requires our prophets to do their human best to convey to human beings, in our imperfect language and to our inadequate understanding, the pure knowledge vouchsafed them by God. 

******

. . . as he read and/or heard the original writing, he was able to understand it. However, the understanding flowed into his mind as pure knowledge, not as English translation, and so to render it into English, Joseph Smith had to study it out in his mind, searching for English words that would faithfully convey, phrase by phrase, the meaning that he had received so perfectly.

******

. . . if we are forced to imagine that God translated the Book of Mormon and Joseph merely read the result off the stone, most of these problems come back in full force, along with the others I have mentioned before. If it was Joseph Smith mixing up his -eths and his -eses, it is a meaningless inconsistency from an imperfect mortal. But if it was God doing it, we have to wonder what in the world he meant by such apparently pointless confusion.

[Robert F. Smith]

In your opinion, are there any parts of the Mormon Canon which are historical fallacies?

If so, which?

 

Thanks,

Jim

The literal, historical interpretation of some parts of the Bible (and parallel accounts in Mormon Scripture) are sometimes fallacious or at least incorrect simply because much of it is meant to be figurative, metaphorical, or simply poetic.  The Brethren have, for example, insisted repeatedly that the Creation and Garden story are meant to be figurative in certain respects.  They have in fact become part of our esoteric liturgy.  Moreover, even non-Mormon scholars regard them as temple texts, not as historical narratives or scientific texts.

[Robert F. Smith]

THE MAIN ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM: “the main criticisms against the translation of the BOA as scripture” (DBMormon [bill Reel])

 

A.  “the facsimiles do not translate directly from the egyptian to the Book of Abraham” (JLHPROF); “Joseph Smith's commentary on the facsimiles are not in in accordance with the interpretations of  trained Egyptologists.” (Rivers); the facsimiles are the key weakness of the BofA, and without them the BofA would be “bulletproof.” (cinepro)

 

B.  “The surviving fragments we have are not the Book of Abraham.” (Rivers); “the papyri don't match up with the BoA.” (omni); “not sure the evidence leads us to the notion that Joseph took any text and converted it's writings into what became our scripture. It just doesn't seem like that was what was going on” (stemelbow)

 

C.  “the most difficult aspect is that the most faith-promoting argument I have heard (catalyst theory) directly conflicts with the story told by Joseph and his scribes. Joseph certainly thought he was translating in a traditional sense. If I discard his testimony that the translation was literal, that may help to save the BOA as still containing valuable information from God, but it comes at the cost of killing off any historical or tangible reality.” (Buckeye); “The BoA is a very real issue that in my estimation has caused thousands of good strong members to lose their testimonies.” (omni)

 

D.  Dr. Robert Ritner’s overall critique, including his reply to apologists at http://signaturebooks.com/2014/08/a-response-to-translation-and-historicity-of-the-book-of-abraham-by-dr-robert-ritner/ .

 

E.  “There are alleged historical inaccuracies, such as the origin of Egypt, described in the text.” (Rivers)

 

F.  “The astronomy is all wrong.” (Rivers)

 

G.  “The text seems to provide a doctrinal basis for the priesthood and temple ban.” (Rivers)

 

H.  “believed and taught to the church membership that[bofA] was a 'translation'.  But now it seems the LDS Church is shifting to 'interpretation'  instead.” (theplains [Jim]); “pretending that the things that were taught and said just never were or demanding that that which was clearly said was not ever said.” (stemelbow)

 

I.  the BofA is vulnerable to criticism because it is not considered just a revelation like the Book of Moses (cinepro)

[cinepro]

The literal, historical interpretation of some parts of the Bible (and parallel accounts in Mormon Scripture) are sometimes fallacious or at least incorrect simply because much of it is meant to be figurative, metaphorical, or simply poetic.  The Brethren have, for example, insisted repeatedly that the Creation and Garden story are meant to be figurative in certain respects.  They have in fact become part of our esoteric liturgy.  Moreover, even non-Mormon scholars regard them as temple texts, not as historical narratives or scientific texts.

 

Other than President Kimball stating that the Eve's creation from a "rib" is figurative, what "respects" of the Creation and Garden story have been so indicated by Church leaders?  As far as I can tell, the literal and historical nature of the creation and fall are core tenets of LDS Doctrine, and if they are figurative in any way, it would be extremely damaging.

Edited October 13, 2014 by cinepro

[Robert F. Smith]

Other than President Kimball stating that the Eve's creation from a "rib" is figurative, what "respects" of the Creation and Garden story have been so indicated by Church leaders?  As far as I can tell, the literal and historical nature of the creation and fall are core tenets of LDS Doctrine, and if they are figurative in any way, it would be extremely damaging.

Of course the so-called "Creation" and "Fall" are core tenets of LDS doctrine, and certainly took place.  However, both terms are fraught with dogmatic theological baggage from before the rise of Mormonism, and that dogma is virtually negated by LDS doctrine in that there is not so much a creation (from nothing) as an organization of preexisting matériel and a transmission from another planet.  Indeed, man himself is not made from the dust of the Earth, so much as he is made metaphorically from the elements of earth (listed on the Periodic Table), while in reality he is conceived, gestates, and is born like all humans.  So too with Eve and all other living things.  Ritual is not reality, but a representation of reality in allegorical, figurative, and symbolic form.

 

Brigham Young explained this concept very clearly:

 

Though we have it in history that our Father Adam was made of the dust of this earth and that he knew nothing about his God previous to being made here, yet it is not so; and when we learn the truth we shall see and understand that he helped to make this world and was the chief manager in that operation.

He was the person who brought the animals and the seeds from other planets to this world and brought a wife with him and stayed here. You may read and believe what you please as to what is found written in the Bible. Adam was made from the dust of an earth, but not from the dust of this earth. He was made as you and I are made, and no person was ever made upon any other principle.      Journal of Discourses, 3:319.

 

Bruce R. McConkie:

    For those whose limited spiritual understanding precludes a recitation of all the facts, the revealed account, in figurative language, speaks of Eve being created from Adam's rib. (Moses 3:21-25.) A more express scripture, however, speaks of "Adam, who was the son of God, with whom God, himself, conversed." (Moses 6:22. Italics added.) In a formal doctrinal pronouncement, the First Presidency of the Church (Joseph F. Smith, John R. Winder, and Anthon H. Lund) said that "all who have inhabited the earth since Adam have taken bodies and become souls in like manner," and that the first of our race began life as the human germ or embryo that becomes a man. (See Improvement Era, November 1909, p. 80.)    (From "Eve and the Fall," in Woman [1988] p. 60).

 

His own son quotes Elder Bruce R. McConkie, "the account is speaking figuratively. What is meant by partaking of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is that our first parents complied with whatever laws were involved so that their bodies would change from their state of paradisiacal immortality to a state of natural mortality."  Elder McConkie also wrote elsewhere: "We do not know how the fall was accomplished any more than we know how the Lord caused the earth to come into being and to spin through the heavens in its paradisiacal state."  See Joseph Fielding McConkie and Robert Millet, Man Adam, 26-29, citing B. R. McConkie, “Christ and Creation,” Ensign, 12/6 (June 1982), online at https://www.lds.org/ensign/1982/06/christ-and-the-creation?lang=eng , and also TPJS, 157-158, 167-169.

 

Scant knowledge is available to us of Eve (the wife of Adam) and her achievements in pre-existence and in mortality. Without question she was like unto her mighty husband Adam in intelligence and in devotion to righteousness during both her first and second estates of existence. She was placed on earth in the same manner as was Adam, the Mosaic account of the Lord creating her from Adam's rib being merely figurative. (Moses 3:20-25.)  [McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, 2nd ed. [1966], p. 242]

 

The earthly ordinances of the Gospel are themselves only reflections of heavenly ordinances.  For instance, baptism, the gift of the Holy Ghost and temple work are merely earthly symbols of realities that prevail throughout the universe; but, they are symbols of truths that must be recognized if the Great Plan is to be fulfilled.  The acceptance of these earthly symbols is part and parcel of correct earth life, but being earthly symbols they are distinctly of the earth, and cannot be accepted elsewhere than on earth.  John A. Widtsoe, 1915 Melchizedek Priesthood Manual (“Work for the Dead,” UGHM, 6:33).

 

Symbolism. Naturally, the very essence of these fundamental truths is not known to man, nor indeed can be. We know things only so far as our senses permit. Whatever is known, is known through symbols. The letters on the written page are but symbols of mighty thoughts that are easily transferred from mind to mind by these symbols. Man lives under a great system of symbolism. Clearly, the mighty, eternal truths encompassing all that man is or may be, cannot be expressed literally, nor is there in the temple any attempt to do this. On the contrary, the great and wonderful temple service is one of mighty symbolism. By the use of symbols of speech, of action, of color, of form, the great truths connected with the story of man are made evident to the mind.  John A. Widtsoe, Rational Theology (1915), 120.

 

There are two things in every Temple: mechanics, to set forth certain ideals, and symbolism, what those mechanics symbolize. I saw only the mechanics when I first went through the Temple. I did not see the spiritual. I did not see the symbolism of spirituality.  *  *  *  I was blind to the great lesson of purity behind the mechanics. I did not hear the message of the Lord, . . . * *  *  How many of us young men saw that? We thought we were big enough and with intelligence sufficient to criticize the mechanics of it and we were blind to the symbolism, the message of the spirit. And then that great ordinance, the endowment. The whole thing is simple in the mechanical part of it, but sublime and eternal in its significance.  David O. McKay, quoted in Gregory Prince and William Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (SLC: Univ. of Utah Press, 2005), 277, citing address at Mesa, Arizona, Temple, Dec 30, 1956.

[CA Steve]

I am not certain if one can classify David Bokovy's approach to the Book of Abraham as critical since he believes it to be scripture, but certainly for those scholars who are defending the translation as deriving from what is/was actually written on the Joseph Smith papyri, David's suggestion that it then must be a pseudepigraphic text authored by either an Egyptian of Jewish scribe, would be criticism, at least to some. I do think David's observation below should be seriously considered as part of the discussion when talking about Book of Abraham issues since he points out that the text we have today cannot have been written by Abraham himself.

 

 

Besides the new understandings of the Book of Abraham brought on by modern Egyptology, the conclusions of Historical Criticism and the Documentary Hypotheses pose challenges for traditional perspectives on this book of scripture. Chief among these is the Book of Abraham textural dependency on late Judean sources that came into being over a millennium after the time of Abraham, making it impossible to directly connect the book of scripture with the ancient Patriarch

Authoring the Old Testament by David Bokovoy pg 165

 

[wenglund]

The main argument I see against the Book of Abraham is that in one respect its production has in some instances become a stumbling block for vulnerable saints, distracting their attention away from the intended purpose and value of the book and the gospel it illuminates, causing them to pridefully rely on man rather than the ways of God in godly matters. 

 

In another respect, an argument for the Book of Abraham is that its production and content has acted as a refiners fire, focusing the attention of inclined members more intently on the purpose and value of the book and the gospel it illuminates, causing them to humbly rely more and more on God in godly matters.

 

In short, the Book of Abraham, as with many elements of the restored gospel, is a purposeful trial of faith that results in either weakening or strengthening depending upon the inclination and temperament, etc., of the saints being tested, separating the wheat from the tares so to speak as prophesied.

 

Thanks, -Wade Englund-