Dr. Robert Ritner has passed away

[blueglass]

On 9/3/2021 at 10:05 AM, Tacenda said:

I am coming into this conversation late, but I thought the Gospel Topic Essay on the BoA pretty much sums it up to being more a translation that comes from God not the papyri. 

As both "Mormon and non-Mormon Egyptologists agree that the characters on the fragments do not match the translation given in the book of Abraham", it is clear that if we discovered another 40meters or more of the joseph smith papyri the conclusion would not change.  Joseph Smith's mission was to reveal new scripture and to clarify doctrine concerning Jesus Christ and salvation not to interpret demotic Egyptian characters.  

[blueglass]

On 8/31/2021 at 5:15 PM, Kevin Christensen said:

"Have any of the rulers, or of the Pharisees believed on him?"  (John 7:48)

There is an important difference between appealing to authority, and, more specifically to authories who just happen to be ideologically committed to unbelief and skepticism, and exploring the evidence at hand, and watching the ongoing conversations over the years.   Choosing referees for Journals means choosing which community's assumptions, rules, methods, and standards of solution are used, in service of which community.   If you were being taken to court, would you want to be tried by a group of people who had no interest in seriously exploring or defending your position, because, "Why bother?  Everyone knows there is nothing to see here."  Would you call that objectivity?  Or would you think, perhaps, it would not be such a bad thing to have someone with not only good credentials, but also inclined to believe you, arguing your case?

Journals exist to serve communities who share the basic assumptions that define that community that publishes them.  

There are now several LDS scholars who have the credentials to make reasonable assessments for the LDS community, and they have been published for those who wish to be informed.  John Gee, for instance is widely published in the journals, and occassionally publishes on the Joseph Smith papyrus and the Book of Abraham.  And every now and then, we have informed amateurs making interesting observations that generations of credentialed scholars have overlooked.  See Tim Barker's "Under the Head" presentation at FAIR  in 2020 for an important example of this. Did Ritner, (or any other critic of Joseph Smith) in his comments on Facsimile 2 and the interpretations thereon, and the significance for claims that Joseph Smith thought that the Hor Book of Breathings was an Abraham autograph and mistakenly or fraudulently translated it, anywhere notice what Tim Barker noticed?  Does that make a difference in whether we approach outside scholars and skeptics as the only trusted and true judges of the validity of our faith?    

https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference/2020-fairmormon-conference/the-answer-under-our-heads

And for the record, I have been published in peer reviewed publications many times. One from Oxford University Press.   Getting published in a journal is only the first part of peer review.  The next part continues in discussion of what appears in the journals.

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

Skimmed through the Tim Barker article.  He has 3 points to make which have all been refuted already.  1)  Joseph didn't get involved with the egyptian and grammar alphabet project, 2) Joseph didn't interpret the hieratic added from JSPXI to the part eaten by white ants in the hypocephalus therefore all is good.  3)  There were red rubrics on the missing scroll and all of the extant JSP papyri don't have red rubrics so therefore missing scroll theory is not dead.  Maybe I missed something.  What were the specific reasons you feel this was a compelling paper?  

[blueglass]

On 9/1/2021 at 7:36 PM, OGHoosier said:

I highly doubt a series of articles on the prophetic provenance of the Joseph Smith translations would be of interest to an Egyptological journal. Why is this? Because the information they have to convey would not advance the study of Egyptology. There's nothing new to be gained here. Everything apologists have written on the subject has been sourced from other Egyptological works discussing the several meanings of the symbols involved. There's no new data relevant to Egyptology to be derived from looking at the JSP - it's relevance is purely theological, in which case an Egyptology journal is probably not an appropriate place. 

John Gee and Muhlstein don't agree with the late Ritner on matters pertaining to the egyptology in the JSP papryi.  that' s a problem.  Citing footnote 3 from Ritner's paper “The Breathing Permit of Hôr” Among The Joseph Smith Papyri, July 2003, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 62(3):161-180

3) Facsimile No. 2, Explanation. Attempts to salvage these pseudo-Egyptian transcriptions reach desperate levels in suggestions by current apologists Michael Rhodes and John Gee to explain “Jah-oh-eh” as “O the earth” (¡·˙.t), although this is impossible by both pho-netics (with three h's) and sense (·˙.t) “arable field” is not used to indicate the whole earth), contra Gee, “A Tragedy of Errors,” Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 4 (1992): 113, n. 58. Similarly, Gee’s interpretation (ibid.) of Sue-e-eh-ni as s n ¡ m (“who is the man?”) is untenable phonetically (Sue-e-eh cannot represents/, and the final m of n ¡ m is preserved in all dialects) and grammatically (the proper sequence should be n¡m pw s >n

This has gone on for a long time in which professional egyptologists have published on the joseph smith papyri and mormons have not answered in professional journals. Quoting Ritner: 

Quote

By 1861, T. Devéria had noted a series of anachronisms and absurdities in the supposed translation and woodcut vignettes, and in 1912 a solicitation for professional opinions on the matter drew uniformly derisive assessments from A. H. Sayce, W. M. F. Petrie, J. H. Breasted, A. C. Mace, J. Peters, S. A. B. Mercer, E. Meyer, and F. W. von Bissing.

 

[Kevin Christensen]

6 hours ago, blueglass said:

Skimmed through the Tim Barker article.  He has 3 points to make which have all been refuted already.  1)  Joseph didn't get involved with the egyptian and grammar alphabet project, 2) Joseph didn't interpret the hieratic added from JSPXI to the part eaten by white ants in the hypocephalus therefore all is good.  3)  There were red rubrics on the missing scroll and all of the extant JSP papyri don't have red rubrics so therefore missing scroll theory is not dead.  Maybe I missed something.  What were the specific reasons you feel this was a compelling paper?  

In skimming you missed the key observations which justified the article, something directly noted in the title, "Translating the Book of Abraham: The Answer Under Our Heads", the "under our heads" being both an reference to the traditional Egyptian placement of the hypocephus under the head of a mummy, and the evidence in Facsimile 2 in the the published Book of Abraham.

Back in January, I started a thread on his talk, making this summary:

Quote

For all of the detail, figures, and commentary he provides, at the center of it all is one very clear observation about information provided by Tanner and Heward in an early Dialogue essay claiming that the Book of Abraham is a bogus translation from the Hor Book of Breathings.  Tanner and Heward made the important observation that Joseph Smith directed Rueben Hedlock to fill out gaps in the engraving for Facsimile 2 (the hypocephalus) with some characters from the Hor Book of Breathings and a figure from elsewhere. Unlike the previous 50 years of commentators, Tim Barker notices that while Heward and Tanner match up characters from the Hor Book of Breathings to marginal characters in the Egyptian papers, they did not match up to their influential thesis the fact that Joseph Smith's comments in the annotated portions of the published, reconstructed facsimile plainly show that Joseph Smith openly declares that had expressly NOT translated those characters (taken from the Hor Book of Breathings).  That means that the source of the Book of Abraham must be something else, despite long standing assumptions to that effect by a great many critics.

As Tim Barker puts it in the talk leaving out his figures:

Quote

Ironically, however, what we do have is commentary directly from Joseph Smith about JSP XI, and it was Grant Heward and Jerald Tanner who actually made this observation, but they stopped just short of its implications, just as every single one of their successors have done. Tanner and Heward wrote, “It is interesting to note that not only the manuscripts of the Book of Abraham but also Facsimile No. 2 includes portions of this “Book of Breathings.” Evidently the original of Facsimile No. 2 was damaged…. The missing areas on this drawing have been filled in with insertions from other documents to make Facsimile No. 2 as it now exists…”

...

The lucanae for Facsimile No. 2, did indeed come from other parts of the Joseph Smith Papyri collection. I’ve highlighted 1/3rd of the hypocephalus rim or Figure 18 (the right hand side of the rim), and half of Figures 13, 14, and 15 on the right-hand side as well, just as Heward and Tanner depicted in their 1968 article. These highlighted portions can all be traced back to JSP XI.

...

 The transfer of hieratic characters to the hypocephalus isn’t as clean as one might have hoped for, but a clear match can be made when looking closely at JSP XI and Facsimile No 2, and in the case of JSP XI row 4, from Book of Abraham Manuscript C....

 Fortunately, we know what Joseph had to say about this text since he provided the explanations to Facsimile 2....

It just so happens that literally every Figure containing any hieratic text from JSP XI, Joseph’s response is that the explanations “will be given in the own due time of the Lord.” And he concludes by saying, “The above translation is given as far as we have any right to give at the present time.” In other words, literally all of the JSP XI hieratic characters included in Facsimile 2, Joseph Smith deliberately declined from commenting upon because he believed that the translation would at some future time be given in the own due time of the Lord. Joseph clearly indicates that he did NOT translate JSP XI.

...

So according to Heward and Tanner, Joseph Smith published his translation of the first 3 and 1/3rd lines of hieratic text from JSP XI as Abraham 1:1 – 2:18 on March 1, 1842, only to include half of those hieratic characters on Facsimile 2 with the admonition that the explanation for these characters would be given in the due time of the Lord, and that he had no right to translate those characters at the present time.

My argument and rebuttal to Heward and Tanner, and the hundreds of accounts since 1968 by others who have repeated this argument is that Joseph Smith concretely provided direct evidence in Facsimile 2 that he never translated JSP XI, and that the answer has been under our heads this entire time

 

Odd that you missed that, since that is the foundational observation that justified the talk.   But then, Barker's point is that everyone missed it.  

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

[blueglass]

17 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

In skimming you missed the key observations which justified the article, something directly noted in the title, "Translating the Book of Abraham: The Answer Under Our Heads", the "under our heads" being both an reference to the traditional Egyptian placement of the hypocephus under the head of a mummy, and the evidence in Facsimile 2 in the the published Book of Abraham.

Back in January, I started a thread on his talk, making this summary:

As Tim Barker puts it in the talk leaving out his figures:

Odd that you missed that, since that is the foundational observation that justified the talk.   But then, Barker's point is that everyone missed it.  

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

Read through the excerpts copy pasted here, and it can be summarized as follows, "Joseph himself didn't translate the hieratic on the rim of fac2 which were copy pasted from XI".  This is barkers attempt to produce distance between Joseph and the embarrassing egyptian alphabet and grammar project where characters would be written in a column on the left and sentences and paragraphs would be shown adjacent on the right.  This is easily refuted using 1) the JSP historical commentary based on contemporary writings including JS journal entries from this time period, and 2) the JSP papers handwriting analysis which proves JS and Oliver Cowdery's handwriting and involvement in hieratic character and dubious translations including JS signature approving the project, and 3) JS involvement in the earlier book of mormon character alphabet project with Joseph Knight and Martin harris.

 

 

[OGHoosier]

24 minutes ago, blueglass said:

Read through the excerpts copy pasted here, and it can be summarized as follows, "Joseph himself didn't translate the hieratic on the rim of fac2 which were copy pasted from XI".  This is barkers attempt to produce distance between Joseph and the embarrassing egyptian alphabet and grammar project where characters would be written in a column on the left and sentences and paragraphs would be shown adjacent on the right.  This is easily refuted using 1) the JSP historical commentary based on contemporary writings including JS journal entries from this time period, and 2) the JSP papers handwriting analysis which proves JS and Oliver Cowdery's handwriting and involvement in hieratic character and dubious translations including JS signature approving the project, and 3) JS involvement in the earlier book of mormon character alphabet project with Joseph Knight and Martin harris.

 

 

I am at a loss to determine what exactly it is you're trying to prove here. 

You're jumping around to and from various claims, blueglass. The discoveries in Barker's essay distance the Book of Abraham from the characters on Papyrus XI, since it is evident that Joseph did not regard those as translateable. All the things you cite do nothing to refute this conclusion; you've simply shifted the target of your attack to the Alphabet and Grammar project. 

Interestingly, Barker's conclusions actually do throw some doubt onto your conclusions. You see, the characters on Papyrus XI were involved in a character-matching exercise with the twin manuscripts of early Book of Abraham chapters. On a prima-facie assessment, it would seem that those characters were attached to the associated paragraphs, but after Barker's analysis, we have more evidence to suggest that they were not than that they were. That is, we have a direct statement from Joseph Smith that the characters on Papyrus XI were not translated, and only circumstantial evidence that they were. Given that conclusion, we must reassess the nature of all character-matching projects - were they experimental, doctrinal, mystical, or something in between? This does, in fact, impact the security of your conclusions. 

You're also forgetting the sizable role W.W. Phelps played in all this, with his search for the Pure Language. 

[Kevin Christensen]

Regarding the excerpts,  why not actually carefully read and understand the whole of Tim Barker's important presentation, rather than superficially scan to dismiss?  You are more likely to learn something that way.

Regarding " Joseph and the embarrassing egyptian alphabet and grammar project where characters would be written in a column on the left and sentences and paragraphs would be shown adjacent on the right."

It not quite that simple, as Will Schryver observed in 2010:

Quote

Of the “substantial words” attested in all three of the Egyptian Alphabet documents, over 90% are correspondingly attested in the first three chapters of the Book of Abraham, while being rarely attested, if at all, in Abraham 4 and 5 and Genesis 12 and 15.

Slide#: 60
(Substantial Words Study Summary Conclusion)

Summary Conclusion: Analysis by substantial words strongly suggests a dependency of the Alphabet on a pre-existing text of much of the first three chapters of the Book of Abraham.
...

The Alphabet and Grammar is dependent on a story that has already been written.  We are able to discern within the Alphabet and Grammar the complex contextual elements of the Book of Abraham only because we already know the story.  And the complex, interrelated aspects of the references we find simply could not have been achieved unless the whole story had already been produced.
 
Slide#: 95
(The rest of the story.)

In short, there is too little of the story of the Book of Abraham in the Alphabet and Grammar for it to have been used to produce the story, yet too much of the story for it not to be dependent on the rest of the story.
 

And one crucial issue in assessing the Alphabet and Grammer in relation to the Book of Abraham translation is the presence of texts which are not part of the Book of Abraham.

Quote

I discovered that several of the explanations in the Alphabet and Grammar documents were dependent not on text from the Book of Abraham …

… but rather on very recognizable passages from others of Joseph Smith’s prior revelations, most prominently sections 76 and 88 of the Doctrine & Covenants.

...

Thus we see, in the explanations given to four successive characters from the Alphabet and Grammar, very particular references to specific passages from those two giants of Joseph Smith’s previously received revelations—sections 76 and 88.  Right in order, this so-called Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language is making reference to the Celestial, Terrestrial, and Telestial kingdoms, followed immediately by the kingdom which is not a kingdom of glory!

After discussing more evidence, Schryer went on to observe:

Quote

To the extent this lexicon was built partially on texts that have no relationship to the Egyptian papyri; texts that were written not in Egyptian at all, but in English, then the Alphabet and Grammar simply could not have been intended as a tool to decipher the papyri.  Indeed, the more I considered the evidence in this new light, the more I came to believe that these men were not focused on translating the Egyptian papyri at all!

One of the keys to this conclusion was my discovery that, of the 69 characters to which explanations were assigned, most of them are not even Egyptian and do not appear on the papyri!  

(Many, if not most of the A&G characters are not Egyptian; they do not come from the Egyptian papyri.”)

Let me repeat: Most of the characters explained in the Egyptian alphabet documents are not Egyptian, and do not appear on the Egyptian papyri in question.  

...

A few of the characters are Egyptian and can be found on the papyri, but not in any one place, and not in any order, and not with any discernible relationships.  They appear to have been selected arbitrarily.

Of the 69 characters given explanations, some of them are clearly invented; some are composites—in other words they are formed by combining two or more previously used characters …

 Slide#: 112

(Several of the Egyptian Alphabet characters can be traced to ciphers employed by the Knights Templar.)

 … and, much to my surprise, I discovered that several of the characters can be traced to ciphers used by the Knights Templar and the Freemasons.

...

What is most interesting, however, is that the characters in the Egyptian Counting document are very obviously not Egyptian!  They have no relationship whatsoever to the papyri.

https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference/august-2010/the-meaning-of-the-kirtland-egyptian-papers-part-i

I notice that Don Bradley's 2011 FAIR presentation on Joseph Smith in 1843 Nauvoo apparently comparing one character from the Kinderhook plates with an explantion of one character in the 1835 GAEL does not account for any of the details that Schryver mentioned here.  Bradley did conclude that "A larger conclusion, then, that we can draw is that Joseph Smith translated from the Kinderhook plates not by revelation, but by non-revelatory means."   Wheresas Schryver concluded that "The evidence also strongly suggests that the text of the Book of Abraham must have been translated by Joseph Smith in the same way he had produced the text of the Book of Mormon, the Book of Moses, and the translated parchment of John known as D&C 7: by revelation."   The only near contemporary first hand eye-witness account of the Book of Abraham translation is Warren Parrish, who in 1838 stated "I have set by his side and penned down the translation of the Egyptian Hieroglphicks as he claimed to recieve it by direct inspiration."  And we know from Tim Barker that in Joseph Smith's published comments on  Facsimile 2, Joseph states that he did not translate the characters from the Hor Book of Breathings, which characters are included in the Alphabet and Grammar, as Schryver reports "most of the characters in the left-hand column (as John Gee has just shown us) correspond to bona fide Egyptian characters that can be found on the portion of the Joseph Smith Papyri known as the Book of Breathings."  And Joseph Smith's direct comments on the Book of Breathings characters included in the gaps in Facimile 2 is "If the world can find out these numbers, so let it be."

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

[Tweed1944]

Tamis Mekis sent me a copy of his book (free) The Hypocephalus:an Ancient Egyptian Funery Amulet. Great coloured plates of hypcephalus in various complete and incomplete examples. https://www.amazon.com/Hypocephalus-Egyptian-Funerary-Archaeopress-Egyptology/product-reviews/1789693330/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_show_all_btm?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews  In this time of lockdowns etc I have something to get my teeth into. Royal Skousen seems to believe Smith got things wrong. What do we have left? The english copy  and a theory that the original manuscript was lost.

https://humanities.byu.edu/wp-content/uploads/royal-skousen-J2019.pdf

 

 

[OGHoosier]

3 hours ago, Tweed1944 said:

Tamis Mekis sent me a copy of his book (free) The Hypocephalus:an Ancient Egyptian Funery Amulet. Great coloured plates of hypcephalus in various complete and incomplete examples. https://www.amazon.com/Hypocephalus-Egyptian-Funerary-Archaeopress-Egyptology/product-reviews/1789693330/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_show_all_btm?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews  In this time of lockdowns etc I have something to get my teeth into. Royal Skousen seems to believe Smith got things wrong. What do we have left? The english copy  and a theory that the original manuscript was lost.

https://humanities.byu.edu/wp-content/uploads/royal-skousen-J2019.pdf

 

 

Mekis' book is interesting.

Skousen's work is also plausible, though I am not entirely convinced of his arguments. 

[Tweed1944]

If the LDS church dropped the facsimiles and references within the text I do not think most LDS would care. They would adjust.

[blueglass]

Interesting that Tim Barker looked under the head found fac2 and couldn't find the top first line of hieratic from XI. 

Also weird that he tries to resurrect the missing papryi theory again because he can't find red ink anywhere.  He constrains this to the Isis document when the quote he uses from Horne 1893 contains no such constraint, “The records which I saw were some kind of parchment or papyrus, and it contained writing in red and black. Mother Lucy told me that one was the writings of Abraham and the other the writings of Joseph, who was sold in Egypt,”  So where's the red ink?

Beautiful scans with carbon black and rubrics in iron oxide red:

https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/fragments-of-book-of-the-dead-for-semminis-a-circa-300-100-bc/1

Cowdery's Enoch pillar and walking serpent (Nehebkau) - and it has red rubrics Semminis would be proud - who knows maybe in the afterlife he turned into the Hoffman/Oaks white salamander ? :

https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/fragment-of-book-of-the-dead-for-semminis-b-circa-300-100-bc/1

Barker dogs "secular" translation and quotes that "we know he got his translation by revelation" through the seer stone or cipher magic etc.  yet he seems to ignore the weight of evidence that the book of mormon began with secular egyptian alphabet attempts as requested by Joseph.  Egyptian alphabet first then seer stone translation.  BofA - same pattern. 

Let's look at the BofM egyptian alphabet evidence https://rsc.byu.edu/approaching-antiquity-joseph-smith-ancient-world/git-them-translated-translating-characters-gold

Quote

Joseph Knight recalled Joseph Smith excitedly describing the plates to him, saying, “Now they are written in Caracters [sic] and I want them translated.” According to Joseph Knight’s memory, Joseph Smith recognized that he could not read the characters on the plates, and, in frustration, knowing that the angel had told him that he would translate the plates, he quickly expressed his desire to get them translated.

Knight explained that once Joseph Smith had moved to Harmony, he took an additional step to have the plates translated by copying “of[f] the Caricters exactley [sic] like the ancient” so that he could send them to scholars for translation.[22]

Lucy Smith asserted that as Joseph Smith took “some measures to accomplish the translation . . . he was instructed to take off a fac simile of the . . . characters” and by sending it to “learned men” he could acquire a “translation of the same.”[23] Though Lucy Smith focused on the secular translation of just a sample of the characters, both she and Joseph Knight Sr. remembered that Joseph Smith was trying to find someone who could translate the characters. This is striking because both of them knew that Joseph Smith would declare that he had translated the plates by the power of God, as stated in the preface of the Book of Mormon.

For the BofA where can we find this learned man to help us "git them translated"?  https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/380315

https://ensignpeakfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/The-“Caractors”-Document.pdf

Quote

 By the mid-1830s in Kirtland, Ohio,
interest  in  ancient  languages  was  growing  in  part  because  of  a  visit  from
Michael  Chandler,  who  brought  with  him  several  mummies  with  accompanying scrolls of Egyptian papyri. As a result, some revisited Joseph Smith’s translation  of  the  reformed  Egyptian  on  the  gold  plates  by  viewing  and
copying  documents  containing  the  gold  plate  characters.  At  least  two documents  purporting  to  include  Book  of  Mormon  characters  were  created during this period by Oliver Cowdery and Fredrick G. Williams. Both made copies of Book of Mormon characters and their translation (see Figures 3 and 4). After  Joseph  Smith  arranged  for  the  purchase  of  some  of  the  mummies and the papyri, he showed Chandler his own copies of the Book of Mormon characters.
16
  Smith  apparently  continued  to  show  the  characters  to  various
visitors later in Nauvoo, such as Reverend George Moore.

He began by drawing numerous characters on paper, perhaps attempting to compile an alphabet or list of characters.
[3] Joseph Smith later created a similar kind of alphabet to account for the characters found on the Egyptian papyri he purchased in the summer of 1835. “Egyptian Alphabet,” circa July–December 1835, in Kirtland, Egyptian Papers, CHL. See Samuel Brown, “Joseph (Smith) in Egypt: Babel, Hieroglyphs, and the Pure Language of Eden,” Church History 78, no. 1 (2009): 26–65.

 

Barker is convinced the book of abraham did not come from XI so he thinks it could have come from no longer extant hieratic on a missing scroll.  We have some evidence of these copied hieratic characters.  Ritner says they likely are from Ch 77 and 78 for Amenhotep.  No abraham relation. 

Quote

These lines of hieratic characters do not appear in any extant papyri. According to one Egyptologist, they may come from chapters 77 and 78 of the Book of the Dead for Amenhotep. (Ritner, Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri, 212; see also Rhodes, Books of the Dead, 5; and Gee, Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri, 10–13.)   
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/notebook-of-copied-egyptian-characters-circa-early-july-1835/9#source-note

Can we get back to how cool it is that Ritner is cited 18 times in JSP vol 4?   https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/introduction-to-egyptian-papyri-circa-300-100-bc/1

 

Edited September 9, 2021 by blueglass

[blueglass]

1 hour ago, Tweed1944 said:

If the LDS church dropped the facsimiles and references within the text I do not think most LDS would care. They would adjust.

agreed.

[OGHoosier]

1 hour ago, blueglass said:

Interesting that Tim Barker looked under the head found fac2 and couldn't find the top first line of hieratic from XI.

Please elaborate on how this objection is relevant. Barker clearly found characters from the 4 lines on the manuscripts and Facsimile 2. He doesn't need to find every character from the manuscripts on Facsimile 2 in order to establish his point. 

I also object to your characterization of the Book of Mormon translation process on historical grounds. Your sources only establish that Joseph Smith copied down the BofM characters to send elsewhere, they do not represent him engaging in an alphabet development project similar to the KEP. This is an extremely broad and tenuous parallel with little interpretive value. I should also note that Michael Chandler was a salesman, not a scholar, and it is unlikely that Smith was seeking his "learned, scholarly" input on the Book of Mormon characters. 

You also haven't done anything with Schryver's arguments yet.

Edit: I should also add that nothing in the notebook you linked to appears to have anything to do with Abraham either. 

Edited September 9, 2021 by OGHoosier

[blueglass]

On 9/8/2021 at 11:49 PM, OGHoosier said:

Please elaborate on how this objection is relevant. Barker clearly found characters from the 4 lines on the manuscripts and Facsimile 2. He doesn't need to find every character from the manuscripts on Facsimile 2 in order to establish his point. 

I also object to your characterization of the Book of Mormon translation process on historical grounds. Your sources only establish that Joseph Smith copied down the BofM characters to send elsewhere, they do not represent him engaging in an alphabet development project similar to the KEP. This is an extremely broad and tenuous parallel with little interpretive value. I should also note that Michael Chandler was a salesman, not a scholar, and it is unlikely that Smith was seeking his "learned, scholarly" input on the Book of Mormon characters. 

You also haven't done anything with Schryver's arguments yet.

Edit: I should also add that nothing in the notebook you linked to appears to have anything to do with Abraham either. 

No he did not find characters from the 4 lines of the manuscripts.  Quoting barker, "the text can be aligned with hieratic text in JSP XI from rows 2, 3, and 4."  So why did barker include 14 figures in his presentation from row 1 of JSP XI when the characters are no where to be found in facsimile2?  It is significant so I edited the Wikipedia file for the book of Abraham to reflect my insight.

Your objection is noted.  we can disagree that the egyptian alphabet project from the book of mormon relates to the book of abraham EA project, but I concur with Samuel Brown and Michael Mackay.  Quoting Mackay from the reference I provided:

Quote

Labelled “Egyptian Alphabet,” W. W. Phelps and Joseph Smith worked on a secular alphabet of characters taken from an Egyptian papyrus they purchased the summer of 1835, which was later connected with the Book of Abraham. Instead of going to outside scholars, Joseph relied upon Phelps to produce the alphabet. To Joseph, the secular work on the papyri was connected to the translation of the Book of Abraham, just like his attempt to work with characters from the gold plates as connected to the Book of Mormon. Furthermore, Joseph mixed his secular interest in languages and his miraculous translations and revelations together in a handful of other instances, such as his interpretation of the Kinderhook plates, his purported work with a Greek Saltar in Nauvoo, and his use of Hebrew in his speeches.[80] However, his creation of the Egyptian alphabet with Phelps in 1835 demonstrates his sustained interest and expansion of his earlier efforts in bridging his secular and spiritual efforts in the translation of ancient records.

Schryver's arguments?  - I can only find cryptic notes and the video and slides are missing.  Please forward and I can comment

the notebook - as I said these have no abrahamic relation, but Oliver and Phelps working under the direction of Joseph Smith thought some of these copied hieratic characters had relation to "Katumin, Princess, daughter of On-i-tas -[Pharaoh King]- of Egypt, 5 who <began to> reigned in the year of the world 2962." https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/valuable-discovery-circa-early-july-1835/7

https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/valuable-discovery-circa-early-july-1835/12#full-transcript

Quote

These lines of hieratic characters do not appear on any extant JS papyri. According to one Egyptologist, they come from chapters 45 and 46 of the Book of the Dead for Amenhotep. (Ritner, Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri, 210–211; see also Rhodes, Books of the Dead, 5; and Gee, Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri, 10–13.)  

 

Edited September 17, 2021 by blueglass

[OGHoosier]

2 hours ago, blueglass said:

No he did not find characters from the 4 lines of the manuscripts.  Quoting barker, "the text can be aligned with hieratic text in JSP XI from rows 2, 3, and 4."  So why did barker include 14 figures in his presentation from row 1 of JSP XI when the characters are no where to be found in facsimile2?  It is significant so I edited the Wikipedia file for the book of Abraham to reflect my insight.

And those characters...are from the first four lines of JSP XI. The absence of characters from line I is meaningless as long as it can be demonstrated that characters from the twin manuscripts were regarded by Joseph Smith as not being translate-able. 

2 hours ago, blueglass said:

To Joseph, the secular work on the papyri was connected to the translation of the Book of Abraham, just like his attempt to work with characters from the gold plates as connected to the Book of Mormon.

Gonna CFR Mackay on that. Gotta love scholarly mindreading.

2 hours ago, blueglass said:

 

the notebook - as I said these have no abrahamic relation, but Oliver and Phelps working under the direction of Joseph Smith thought some of these copied hieratic characters had relation to "Katumin, Princess, daughter of On-i-tas -[Pharaoh King]- of Egypt, 5 who <began to> reigned in the year of the world 2962." https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/valuable-discovery-circa-early-july-1835/7

Exactly, no Abrahamic relation. Also for what it's worth the Valuable Discovery notebook was not involved in extended translation efforts and appears purely experimental. 

Here's what I've found of Schryver. Makes enough sense to me: https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference/august-2010/the-meaning-of-the-kirtland-egyptian-papers-part-i

His conclusion is actually similar to Samuel Brown's statements in other places, and provides some textual support to Brown's theories. Basically, the KEP were not a back-translation of a language, but a language creation: the creation of what they believed a "pure language" to resemble. 

Edited September 18, 2021 by OGHoosier