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do We Believe Joseph Smith or Lds Apologists? Joseph Says He Could Translate Egyptian.


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3 hours ago, stemelbow said:

So was it revelation which inspired Joseph to declare the papyri included writings of Abraham and Joseph?  

Yes.  Otherwise how would he know what the texts were?  How exactly do you envision the inner workings of the mind of a prophet of God?

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2 hours ago, Tacenda said:

He lied pretty creatively, he said he only knew but one wife. So maybe in his mind he's thinking that by law only one wife counted!

Or maybe you just can't envision how a man with the keys of the kingdom of God could have been sealed to a woman without him considering her to be a wife, but rather in some other type of relationship?

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3 hours ago, Ahab said:

Yes.  Otherwise how would he know what the texts were?  How exactly do you envision the inner workings of the mind of a prophet of God?

I suppose it works similar to everyone else's mind with perhaps a penchant for seeing oneself as extra special and privileged.  

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7 hours ago, Ahab said:

Or maybe you just can't envision how a man with the keys of the kingdom of God could have been sealed to a woman without him considering her to be a wife, but rather in some other type of relationship?

Right...some 30+ times. 🙄

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18 hours ago, Bob Crockett said:

Is there evidence, anywhere in the world, that KEP phrases he translated or Egyptian phrases he uttered in the Green Mountain letter or Times & Seasons articles matched up with what scholars agree today is Egyptian?

Don't bother.  I already know the answer.

Based on what I said why would you even ask me this question?  I'm not sure if you just misread what I posted, or if you are intentionally trying to turn things around for some other purpose.  

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12 hours ago, Ahab said:

i envision Joseph translating the texts something like this:  When preparing to translate the texts, Joseph placed the source documents in front of himself and then thought something like this: 

Here are the plates Moroni helped me to find and I know God can help me to translate them, so I will now proceed to do what God has told me to do so that I can now translate them.

The idea that Joseph didn't think he "knew" how to translate the texts seems at least a little bit off to me... but you got more likes on your post than I got on my post so at least other people like your idea.

My point about Joseph "knowing" how to translate was from a purely academic point of view, and your description of the process above isn't the normal academic method of doing a translation.   Joseph didn't personally know how to recognize words in another language and translate them in the same way someone proficient in foreign languages would do it.  If there was something to be revealed from a text, it was given to him by the gift and power of God.  And it's obvious that he didn't even need to have whatever text it was to be translated in front of him when doing the translation, because Joseph didn't seem to require the physical gold plates to be in front of him for most of the translation of the Book of Mormon.  And then we have "translations" like Doctrine and Covenants section 7, which is a "translated version of the record made on parchment by John and hidden up by himself".  In that situation the parchment wasn't even in his possession.  It's just not the normal way anyone would translate another language. 

Edit:  I think you are saying that Joseph knew how to receive revelation from God in order to translate a text when it was relevant to do so, and if that is what you are saying then I agree.

Edited by InCognitus
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On 8/15/2020 at 6:04 PM, Bob Crockett said:

Although the Rosetta Stone had been found, it had not been translated.  Nobody knew Egyptian.

Bob, be careful to believe something just because Ritner said it must be true.
 

Champollion translated Egyptian in 1822 - some 20 or so years before the quoted text. And that says nothing of Young having cracked the nature of Egyptian script before Joseph Smith was born. 

Young’s work was published in the Americas. I find it shocking to believe that JS wasn’t aware of it. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-François_Champollion#:~:text=Here he presented the first correct translation of,having deciphered the script when he wrote that%3A

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Young_(scientist)

Edited by PacMan
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8 hours ago, InCognitus said:

Based on what I said why would you even ask me this question?  I'm not sure if you just misread what I posted, or if you are intentionally trying to turn things around for some other purpose.  

Please don't attribute bad motives or malicious intent to my question.  What is the answer to my question,?

I'm an active Latter-day Saint.  I have courage to post in my own name. 

Edited by Bob Crockett
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8 hours ago, PacMan said:

Bob, be careful to believe something just because Ritner said it must be true.
 

Champollion translated Egyptian in 1822 - some 20 or so years before the quoted text. And that says nothing of Young having cracked the nature of Egyptian script before Joseph Smith was born. 

Young’s work was published in the Americas. I find it shocking to believe that JS wasn’t aware of it. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-François_Champollion#:~:text=Here he presented the first correct translation of,having deciphered the script when he wrote that%3A

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Young_(scientist)

That's pure speculation on your part.  There is exactly zero evidence to support such a claim.

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1 hour ago, ttribe said:

That's pure speculation on your part.  There is exactly zero evidence to support such a claim.

Please, do not misuse the word "evidence."  It's a pet-peeve.  Further, don't try to summarily refute a claim you know nothing about. 

Thomas Young's work was published in both the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Encyclopedia Americana.  I'd actually point you to it, but given your intellectual constipation it's literally not worth my effort to turn around in my chair and pull out my file that is 3 feet away from me.

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30 minutes ago, PacMan said:

Please, do not misuse the word "evidence."  It's a pet-peeve.  Further, don't try to summarily refute a claim you know nothing about. 

Thomas Young's work was published in both the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Encyclopedia Americana.  I'd actually point you to it, but given your intellectual constipation it's literally not worth my effort to turn around in my chair and pull out my file that is 3 feet away from me.

I am not intellectually constipated.  I post with my own name.  I am a published scholar.  Humor me.

1.  Any of those phrases in the Green Mountain letter or in the times and seasons claimed to be Egyptian, are they so?

2.  Is there evidence that Joseph Smith was aware of Champollion's translation?

Edited by Bob Crockett
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9 minutes ago, Bob Crockett said:

  Is there evidence that Joseph Smith was aware of Champollion's translation?

I hope so. That could erase this whole pseudo issue in one stroke.

After his Anthon experience he would never have claimed to have "translated" anything a scholar could refute, and would be a proof that he never intended the BOA to be a literal translation and we could get on without wasting all this energy on defending the catalyst theory- also for the BOM - it would virtually prove that the catalyst view is the best solution, at least for now 

Edited by mfbukowski
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7 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

I hope so. That could erase this whole pseudo issue in one stroke.

After his Anthon experience he would never have claimed to have "translated" anything a scholar could refute, and would be a proof that he never intended the BOA to be a literal translation and we could get on without wasting all this energy on defending the catalyst theory- also for the BOM - it would virtually prove that the catalyst view is the best solution, at least for now 

Any evidence at all to answer my questions?

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2 hours ago, Bob Crockett said:

Please don't attribute bad motives or malicious intent to my question.  What is the answer to my question,?

I'm an active Latter-day Saint.  I have courage to post in my own name. 

I wasn't trying to attribute any bad or malicious intent in what you asked.  But what you asked me simply had no relationship to what I said that I could tell, so it seemed like you were trying to turn things around for some other purpose (whatever that may be), different than what I was talking about.   After asking your question you said "Don't bother.  I already know the answer".   What kind of response from me did you really expect after saying something like that?

You asked:  "Is there evidence, anywhere in the world, that KEP phrases he translated or Egyptian phrases he uttered in the Green Mountain letter or Times & Seasons articles matched up with what scholars agree today is Egyptian?"

So I'll ask this again:  Based on what I said earlier, why would you even ask me about the KEP?  I thought I made it clear that I understand the KEP and everything else to be a completely separate secular endeavor from the Book of Mormon and book of Abraham translations.  So to me the KEP and other academic translation attempts are completely irrelevant.   Consequently, I don't care enough about those personal pursuits on their part to research their translations to find out if they got anything right at all.  It's just not important to me.

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1 hour ago, Bob Crockett said:

I am not intellectually constipated.  I post with my own name.  I am a published scholar.  Humor me.

1.  Any of those phrases in the Green Mountain letter or in the times and seasons claimed to be Egyptian, are they so?

2.  Is there evidence that Joseph Smith was aware of Champollion's translation?

Thanks for admitting you are trolling with a second handle (so much for your anti-anonymity superiority complex).  In any event, you being published (I am too) has no bearing on your intellectual constipation.  Just say'n.

1. Don't think so.  Irrelevant to the question at hand.
2. Yes.  A major hurdle here, as Ritner has promulgated, is that Champollion's 1822 (not simply 1824 or 1828) work had not crossed the pond.  Ritner claims that ignorant America knew nothing about Champollion until after the BoA was produced.  This is wholly, and demonstrably, wrong.  Not only was Thomas Young's work widely-published before the 1800s, but America was publishing the work of Young, Salt, Greppo, etc.  These demonstrated the nature of Egyptian being, at least partially, phonetic.

The North American Review, beginning from 1823, repeatedly covered the progress of Egyptian.  In 1831, it published the following:

"But we can conceive, that the different stages of the written language denote the successive improvement in the art of reading, that is, of converting the written into the spoken language. From using the whole of the picture for the whole of the sound, the progress is natural to using a part of the picture for a part of the sound ; and in the final result of this progress, we find alphabetical writing deduced from hieroglyphical. The recent discoveries in Egyptian hieroglyphics fully establish this, as the order of improvement. We find not only hieroglyphical signs employed as alphabetical characters, in their original shape of animals, plants, utensils, &c. ; but we also find a sort of popular current alphabet formed out of the hieroglyphic, merely by a more compendious delineation."

The fact that Joseph Smith knew something of Egyptian is evident by the fact that they knew to search out Charles Anthon at all.  He was a foremost American expert in this field of antiquity, and it is implausible that Martin Harris simply stumbled upon Anthon without first knowing his expertise.  To know of an expert's existence as an expert requires one to also know the existence of his field of expertise.  Ritner's baffling claim is that a knowledge of Egyptian's phonetic nature didn't exist at all in the Americas--a notion contradicted by JS's and Martin Harris's simple familiarity with Anthon.

Edited by PacMan
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29 minutes ago, PacMan said:

Thanks for admitting you are trolling with a second handle (so much for your anti-anonymity superiority complex).  In any event, you being published (I am too) has no bearing on your intellectual constipation.  Just say'n.

1. Don't think so.  Irrelevant to the question at hand.
2. Yes.  A major hurdle here, as Ritner has promulgated, is that Champollion's 1822 (not simply 1824 or 1828) work had not crossed the pond.  Ritner claims that ignorant America knew nothing about Champollion until after the BoA was produced.  This is wholly, and demonstrably, wrong.  Not only was Thomas Young's work widely-published before the 1800s, but America was publishing the work of Young, Salt, Greppo, etc.  These demonstrated the nature of Egyptian being, at least partially, phonetic.

The North American Review, beginning from 1823, repeatedly covered the progress of Egyptian.  In 1831, it published the following:

"But we can conceive, that the different stages of the written language denote the successive improvement in the art of reading, that is, of converting the written into the spoken language. From using the whole of the picture for the whole of the sound, the progress is natural to using a part of the picture for a part of the sound ; and in the final result of this progress, we find alphabetical writing deduced from hieroglyphical. The recent discoveries in Egyptian hieroglyphics fully establish this, as the order of improvement. We find not only hieroglyphical signs employed as alphabetical characters, in their original shape of animals, plants, utensils, &c. ; but we also find a sort of popular current alphabet formed out of the hieroglyphic, merely by a more compendious delineation."

The fact that Joseph Smith knew something of Egyptian is evident by the fact that they knew to search out Charles Anthon at all.  He was a foremost American expert in this field of antiquity, and it is implausible that Martin Harris simply stumbled upon Anthon without first knowing his expertise.  To know of an expert's existence as an expert requires one to also know the existence of his field of expertise.  Ritner's baffling claim is that a knowledge of Egyptian's phonetic nature didn't exist at all in the Americas--a notion contradicted by JS's and Martin Harris's simple familiarity with Anthon.

I am not trolling anybody, with or without a second handle.  I don't have a second handle here. 

1.   What is the "question at hand?"  What do you mean, "I don't think so."  Joseph Smith claimed to know Egyptian and he ostensibly used Egyptian phrases.  How is that "not relevant?"

2.  You say, "Joseph Smith knew something of Egyptian."  What is the evidence for that? 

Showing Charles Anthon "reformed Egyptian" does not answer my question:  "Is there evidence that Joseph Smith actually could translate Egyptian, and what is the best evidence for that?"  How about a good faith response?  I appreciate positive, good faith responses supported by evidence.  Thanks.

Edited by Bob Crockett
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4 minutes ago, Bob Crockett said:

"Is there evidence that Joseph Smith actually could translate Egyptian, and what is the best evidence for that?"  How about a good faith response?  I appreciate positive, good faith responses supported by evidence.  Thanks.

You do realize the Book of Abraham was translated from records/writings found by archaeologists in Egypt, don't you?... or that at least that is what we claim and tell the whole world.  And that we still have portions of those original writings?

How much more of a good faith response do you think you are entitled to?

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26 minutes ago, Bob Crockett said:

I am not trolling anybody, with or without a second handle.  I don't have a second handle here. 

1.   What is the "question at hand?"  What do you mean, "I don't think so."  Joseph Smith claimed to know Egyptian and he ostensibly used Egyptian phrases.  How is that "not relevant?"

2.  You say, "Joseph Smith knew something of Egyptian."  What is the evidence for that? 

Showing Charles Anthon "reformed Egyptian" does not answer my question:  "Is there evidence that Joseph Smith actually could translate Egyptian, and what is the best evidence for that?"  How about a good faith response?  I appreciate positive, good faith responses supported by evidence.  Thanks.

If you don't have a second handle, then why did you respond to my comment to "ttribe" retorting, "I am not intellectually constipated."  You are so full of it (<<giggle, giggle>>).

CFR.  I've never posited that JS could actually translate Egyptian.  Thank you for the straw man.

Edited by PacMan
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1 hour ago, mfbukowski said:

I hope so. That could erase this whole pseudo issue in one stroke.

After his Anthon experience he would never have claimed to have "translated" anything a scholar could refute, and would be a proof that he never intended the BOA to be a literal translation and we could get on without wasting all this energy on defending the catalyst theory- also for the BOM - it would virtually prove that the catalyst view is the best solution, at least for now 

The conclusion gets even better without having to tread into the catalyst ground.

When I get around to it, I'm going to write a paper on the topic.  But I think BoA apologetics have completely missed the boat.  The criticism is that the characters in the manuscript were the source for BoA text, noted by the fact that the characters were written before the texts.  Apologists accept this chicken-egg paradigm, but flip which is the chick and which is the egg by suggesting that the handwriting shows that the text comes before the character.  The fact is, there is no chicken.  There is no egg.  And both, at times, are right.

At times, the characters were written first with the text added after.  At others, the text was written first with the characters added later.  This suggests that there is no casual relationship between the two.  They are merely comparative.  It was an old-fashion split screen to compare them for the grammar analysis.  The characters and text were lined up together for comparison purposes--nothing more.  The document was created because JS and his scribes intended to analyze whether a relationship existed.  I don't doubt that they hypothesized the two were related, but I think the analysis supports a much more intermediate and vanilla purpose.  Once we understand that, we realize that the most promulgated issue surrounding the BoA is much a do about most literally, nothing.

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1 hour ago, InCognitus said:

I wasn't trying to attribute any bad or malicious intent in what you asked.  But what you asked me simply had no relationship to what I said that I could tell, so it seemed like you were trying to turn things around for some other purpose (whatever that may be), different than what I was talking about.   After asking your question you said "Don't bother.  I already know the answer".   What kind of response from me did you really expect after saying something like that?

You asked:  "Is there evidence, anywhere in the world, that KEP phrases he translated or Egyptian phrases he uttered in the Green Mountain letter or Times & Seasons articles matched up with what scholars agree today is Egyptian?"

So I'll ask this again:  Based on what I said earlier, why would you even ask me about the KEP?  I thought I made it clear that I understand the KEP and everything else to be a completely separate secular endeavor from the Book of Mormon and book of Abraham translations.  So to me the KEP and other academic translation attempts are completely irrelevant.   Consequently, I don't care enough about those personal pursuits on their part to research their translations to find out if they got anything right at all.  It's just not important to me.

Do you know the answer to my questions?  Again:

1.  Any of those phrases in the Green Mountain letter or in the times and seasons claimed to be Egyptian, are they so?

2.  Is there evidence that Joseph Smith was aware of Champollion's translation?

 

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29 minutes ago, PacMan said:

If you don't have a second handle, then why did you respond to my comment to "ttribe" retorting, "I am not intellectually constipated."  You are so full of it (<<giggle, giggle>>).

CFR.  I've never posited that JS could actually translate Egyptian.  Thank you for the straw man.

I don't have a second handle.  I can assure you that I am not Tim Tribe.  I don't think I am intellectually constipated.  I don't know what is funny about my questions.

What straw man?  What am I "full of?" 

The questions at hand:

1.  Any of those phrases in the Green Mountain letter or in the times and seasons claimed to be Egyptian, are they so?

2.  Is there evidence that Joseph Smith was aware of Champollion's translation?

I don't care if you have ever posted anything that says that Joseph Smith could translate Egyptian.  But I am asking you now.

Edited by Bob Crockett
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38 minutes ago, Ahab said:

You do realize the Book of Abraham was translated from records/writings found by archaeologists in Egypt, don't you?... or that at least that is what we claim and tell the whole world.  And that we still have portions of those original writings?

How much more of a good faith response do you think you are entitled to?

I'd like answers to my questions.  Can you answer them?  Your statement about how the Book of Abraham was translated is not responsive to my questions.

1.  Any of those phrases in the Green Mountain letter or in the times and seasons claimed to be Egyptian, are they so?

2.  Is there evidence that Joseph Smith was aware of Champollion's translation?

I mean, question no. 1 goes straight to the heart of the Opening Post and is a good question.  Instead, I am met with responses questioning my faith, accusing me of being a troll and using a straw man.  How is that even possible?  My question No. 1 is merely a rephrase of the title to the OP.

Edited by Bob Crockett
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