Royal Skousen and the facsimiles in the Book of Abraham.

[Tweed1944]

In Royal Skousen's CV  he has written his views on the facsimiles  in the Book of Abraham.

page 39   https://humanities.byu.edu/wp-content/uploads/royal-skousen-J2019.pdf

"The Book of Abraham was a revelation given to Joseph Smith, who later (mistakenly thinking it was a translation from the papyri he had in his possession) tried to connect the revealed text to the papyri by inserting two sentences, verse 12c and verse 14, into Abraham 1. The secondary nature of these two inserted sentences can be directly observed in the photos of folios 1a and 1b in the document identified as Ab2. Verse 12c is totally inserted intralinearly, not partially (as incorrectly represented in the accompanying transcription – and without comment). Verse 14 is not written on the page as are other portions of this part of the text (instead, it is written flush to the left), which implies that it is a comment on the papyri and that it was added to the revealed text. Overall, these results imply that all the facsimiles from the papyri (1-3 in the published Pearl of Great Price) should be considered extracanonical and additions to the revealed text of the Book of Abraham, not integral parts of the original text of the book."

I don't think dropping the facsimiles would to the average LDS member cause much heartburn. One could also not worry about a missing BOA papyri.

 

[InCognitus]

4 hours ago, Tweed1944 said:

In Royal Skousen's CV  he has written his views on the facsimiles  in the Book of Abraham.

page 39   https://humanities.byu.edu/wp-content/uploads/royal-skousen-J2019.pdf

"The Book of Abraham was a revelation given to Joseph Smith, who later (mistakenly thinking it was a translation from the papyri he had in his possession) tried to connect the revealed text to the papyri by inserting two sentences, verse 12c and verse 14, into Abraham 1. The secondary nature of these two inserted sentences can be directly observed in the photos of folios 1a and 1b in the document identified as Ab2. Verse 12c is totally inserted intralinearly, not partially (as incorrectly represented in the accompanying transcription – and without comment). Verse 14 is not written on the page as are other portions of this part of the text (instead, it is written flush to the left), which implies that it is a comment on the papyri and that it was added to the revealed text. Overall, these results imply that all the facsimiles from the papyri (1-3 in the published Pearl of Great Price) should be considered extracanonical and additions to the revealed text of the Book of Abraham, not integral parts of the original text of the book."

I don't think dropping the facsimiles would to the average LDS member cause much heartburn. One could also not worry about a missing BOA papyri.

 

I commented on this in your prior thread here.

You keep adding to what Skousen is saying here by implying that the facsimiles should be "dropped" (as in removed) and that's not how I read Skousen at all.

As I noted previously, Jeff Lindsay talks about that statement on his site here:  https://www.arisefromthedust.com/royal-skousens-interesting-theory-on/

Relevant to the above, Lindsay says the following:

Quote

I agree in part: I think Joseph could have received the revealed text without being sure where it came from, but because Facs. 1 and 3 came from one of the scrolls, it’s plausible that he or his scribes thought the text must have some connection to that particular papyrus, the same one used for some of the characters that were placed in the margins of three early Book of Abraham Manuscripts (Manuscript A, Manuscript B, and Manuscript C at the wonderful Joseph Smith Papers Website, where you can review these documents at high resolution).

However, I think Skousen’s statements about the intralinear insertion of comments by Joseph need to be tempered. The text corresponding to our current Abraham 1:12c does look like Frederick G. Williams stuffed that phrase into some open space (see image below) and the JSP volume on the BOA recognizes that Williams has made an insertion of text there (JSPRT vol. 4, pp. 1954-195), but the twin manuscript being written by Parrish at apparently the same time does not show the same feature. Thus, it’s unlikely to represent a dictated on-the-fly correction by Joseph. As for verse 14, it does look like it has a different left margin at the top of page 2 of Williams’ manuscript, but that need not mean it was an afterthought for page 4 of his manuscript also begins with a margin shifted to the left as on page 2.

Final lines on p. 1 of Frederick G. Williams BOA Manuscript A showing an apparent   insertion in the last portion of Abraham 1:12.

There is also adequate vertical space for that text, and if it were inserted after the following paragraph was already written down as some kind of afterthought, the amount of white space that would have been left in that scenario seems excessive compared to his other pages. So it may have been an insertion in Manuscript A but it’s unclear.

Further, the twin manuscript by Parrish has this text flowing nicely and showing no sign of being an afterthought from Joseph’s live dictation.

The really critical issue, though, is whether the apparent dictation represented live creation of newly translated text from Joseph, or whether the scribes were working with an existing translation. Skousen’s proposal only makes sense if Joseph were dictating either newly translated text or previously recorded text with live emendations. But given that there is significant textual evidence that the scribes were working with an existing manuscript and that most likely the reader was Warren Parrish, reading aloud for the benefit of his fellow scribe as they both created Book of Abraham manuscripts from an existing text, the two passages Skousen sees as Joseph’s insertion cannot accurately be said to have been improvised in the session where the twin manuscripts were recorded. Joseph may have made a correction in a previous manuscript, and the correction may have caused Parrish to stumble in his reading to Williams, resulting in the need to insert Abraham 1:12c in Williams’ document.

In other words, Lindsay points out that there could be other ways of interpreting the evidence leading to Skousen's statement.

Edited July 24, 2023 by InCognitus

[Kenngo1969]

@InCognitus

It's  Jeff Lindsay.  

[InCognitus]

6 minutes ago, Kenngo1969 said:

@InCognitus

It's  Jeff Lindsay.  

You don't "say".    Thank you sincerely, I corrected that.  I spelled it wrong in my original post too, where were you when I needed you then?  

Edited July 24, 2023 by InCognitus

[Pyreaux]

I don't think some of the paintings and maps they put in the scriptures are very updated or accurate and should be considered extracanonical and additions to the revealed texts, and not integral parts of the original text of the book. Yet, whether I think that means we should remove them from the book is a completely different question.

The Sinai Peninsula was actually still a part of Egypt. If Moses escaped the Egyptian army through the sea to the Sinai Peninsula, there was another Egyptian army near this "Mt Sinai" candidate overseeing their silver mines. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Edited July 24, 2023 by Pyreaux

[Tweed1944]

A knife or a jar?   gods or  canopic jars below?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P1llnhvfouDJwhhGFoVBzXpf3-Feor1WHO-xWnHNVYg/edit?usp=sharing

 

King Pharoah  cross dressing?

The "slave" with his ears in tact and escorting someone in before the figure on the throne. Definitely  not a waiter 

Like fac 3 their names above their heads. 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/15X6yX5C2YzXNQkSd3hy1JrzFkKhDJeJs7t2_sF5xgz0/edit

 

Facsimile 2 with writing that does not belong there

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1It7wOu1Hog3SADHI8F4RPQSH2HElCUrHpCmsIL08ktw/edit

[Benjamin McGuire]

14 hours ago, Tweed1944 said:

"The Book of Abraham was a revelation given to Joseph Smith, who later (mistakenly thinking it was a translation from the papyri he had in his possession) tried to connect the revealed text to the papyri by inserting two sentences, verse 12c and verse 14, into Abraham 1. The secondary nature of these two inserted sentences can be directly observed in the photos of folios 1a and 1b in the document identified as Ab2. Verse 12c is totally inserted intralinearly, not partially (as incorrectly represented in the accompanying transcription – and without comment). Verse 14 is not written on the page as are other portions of this part of the text (instead, it is written flush to the left), which implies that it is a comment on the papyri and that it was added to the revealed text. Overall, these results imply that all the facsimiles from the papyri (1-3 in the published Pearl of Great Price) should be considered extracanonical and additions to the revealed text of the Book of Abraham, not integral parts of the original text of the book."

For me, part of the challenge is that Skousen comes to this with some sort of idea of what scripture should be (I don't think that I agree with him). Even if the couple of lines of text are later insertions (something I myself have been arguing for at least 30 years or so), doesn't necessarily disqualify the use of the facsimiles. It simply suggests that the facsimiles were appropriated - repurposed - by Joseph Smith. And this would mean that the meaning of the facsimiles in the context of the Book of Abraham should NOT be understood as translations of some Egyptian text but rather that they should be understood as documents produced by Joseph Smith that borrowed from earlier documents in a purely aesthetic fashion. What matters isn't the original context, or their original meaning (which has been tossed aside) but the meaning and context given to them by Joseph Smith. It would be an application of the Book of Mormon idea of "likening scripture" - by ignoring that original context, we make them useful to ourselves by using them to explain or interpret or contextualize modern revelation.

This particular issue also points to the reason why someone like Bokovoy would label the Book of Abraham as Pseudepigrapha. Skousen wants the text to be ancient scripture (in some way). Bokovoy would argue that it is modern scripture.

[Teancum]

20 hours ago, Tweed1944 said:

In Royal Skousen's CV  he has written his views on the facsimiles  in the Book of Abraham.

page 39   https://humanities.byu.edu/wp-content/uploads/royal-skousen-J2019.pdf

"The Book of Abraham was a revelation given to Joseph Smith, who later (mistakenly thinking it was a translation from the papyri he had in his possession) tried to connect the revealed text to the papyri by inserting two sentences, verse 12c and verse 14, into Abraham 1. The secondary nature of these two inserted sentences can be directly observed in the photos of folios 1a and 1b in the document identified as Ab2. Verse 12c is totally inserted intralinearly, not partially (as incorrectly represented in the accompanying transcription – and without comment). Verse 14 is not written on the page as are other portions of this part of the text (instead, it is written flush to the left), which implies that it is a comment on the papyri and that it was added to the revealed text. Overall, these results imply that all the facsimiles from the papyri (1-3 in the published Pearl of Great Price) should be considered extracanonical and additions to the revealed text of the Book of Abraham, not integral parts of the original text of the book."

I don't think dropping the facsimiles would to the average LDS member cause much heartburn. One could also not worry about a missing BOA papyri.

 

What pablum.  What nonsense.  How poor LDS apologetics is. They have to run away from things now because it is clear JS did not translate anything that became the BoA.  So Skousen knows better than JS?  Smith said he translated it.  He clearly lied.  But now he was just mistaken.  🤣

Edited July 24, 2023 by Teancum

[Kenngo1969]

I respect Royal Skousen's work on the Book of Mormon and his (et al) attempts to recover its original text tremendously.  I'm not sure, however, why that respect obligates me, also, to accept his views regarding the Facsimiles and the Book of Abraham.

[mfbukowski]

50 minutes ago, Teancum said:

What pabum.  What nonsense.  How poor LDS apologetics is. They have to run away from things now because it is clear JS did not translate anything that became the BoA.  So Skousen knows better than JS?  Smith said he translated it.  He clearly lied.  But now he was just mistaken.  🤣

Look it up.

1828 Webster dictionary says one of the legitimate definitions of "translate" is "change" and all the others include somehow interpretation or even removing one authority from one area to another.

You flipped burgers in West Jordan and now you flip 'em in Salt Lake?

You have been translated! 🤨

This old language just won't quit changing.  Latin becomes several new languages in a couple of thousand years.

[Teancum]

4 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Look it up.

1828 Webster dictionary says one of the legitimate definitions of "translate" is "change" and all the others include somehow interpretation or even removing one authority from one area to another.

You flipped burgers in West Jordan and now you flip 'em in Salt Lake?

You have been translated! 🤨

This old language just won't quit changing.  Latin becomes several new languages in a couple of thousand years.

Sorry.  Ain't buying it. JS and the church used TRANSLATE.  From the papyri. The word translate was never interpreted as revelation.  Until now.  Now they want to gaslight us.

[Calm]

11 minutes ago, Teancum said:

The word translate was never interpreted as revelation

“By the gift and power of God” does not imply revelation to you?  (Not a gotcha, but serious question)

Edited July 24, 2023 by Calm

[Benjamin McGuire]

48 minutes ago, Teancum said:

The word translate was never interpreted as revelation.

How do you define the word translate?

[Teancum]

35 minutes ago, Calm said:

“By the gift and power of God” does not imply revelation to you?  (Not a gotcha, but serious question)

When they say translate by the gift and power of God it means that God gave a gift to translate that they would not have had without it.  One can construe that as some sort of revelation I guess but that is not how it was ever used in the church until recently.  It was viewed that the Gold Plates and the papyri were in a language JS did not know and God gave him the power to read it and put it into English.  I mean really until recent history did you ever understand it differently?  Did the church teach it differently?  I don't think so.  Now that they are backed into a corner they change the narrative, reinterpret words and gaslight.

[Teancum]

1 minute ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

How do you define the word translate?

I define it the way the LDS Church and its leaders did, as JS did,  from 1829 till recent history.  See my post to @Calm

[Teancum]

2 minutes ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

How do you define the word translate?

By the way this is why as a former hobby apologist, I find apologetics a disingenuous and even often a dishonest endeavor.  Start with "I have the truth" and do anything to make the so called truth work.  You are not typically this way by the way. 

[Benjamin McGuire]

1 hour ago, Teancum said:

I define it the way the LDS Church and its leaders did, as JS did,  from 1829 till recent history.  See my post to @Calm

You didn't provide a definition.

You can provide a definition that you believe matches what the LDS Church and its leaders and Joseph Smith understood it to mean if you want to, but I am interested in how you define the word translation.

[Benjamin McGuire]

1 hour ago, Teancum said:

You are not typically this way by the way.

Look, we have a problem here. I am not sure what you are actually trying to suggest. No one, in their right mind, would agree with the idea that reading the text of the Book of Mormon - reading words that Joseph Smith claimed to see through the seer stone/Nephite interpreters - actually amounts to translating something. We can say that he provided a translation. But we cannot say that he is the one who is translating the text. When Joseph Smith adopts the phrase "by the gift and power of God," he does so by taking it from Omni 1:20. This is the phrase he used consistently to publicly describe the process of producing the Book of Mormon. Joseph's purpose in using this verse (perhaps) was to suggest that he was doing exactly what the Nephite prophets had done. I am not sure we can call what they did "translating" either. You can find my critique of Skousen's ideas about translation in my presentation here.

This isn't to say that there aren't a whole lot of members of the Church (leaders among them) who believe that Joseph Smith was actively engaged in translation of some sort. We have all of this artwork with Joseph carefully studying the text. But, at this point, there isn't any real idea that Joseph Smith was playing an active role as a translator. As the Church's page on the seer stones suggests (emphasis mine):

Quote

During the translation of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith apparently used both of these instruments—the interpreters and his seer stone—interchangeably. They worked in much the same way, and the early Saints sometimes used the term “Urim and Thummim” to refer to the seer stone as well as the interpreters. The Prophet also received several of the revelations found today in the Doctrine and Covenants by means of these instruments of revelation.

Joseph Smith is doing as much translating when he is receiving the text of the Book of Mormon using these 'instruments of revelation' as he was translating when he received the sections of the D&C referred to. That is, he wasn't translating at all in any real sense of the word. To say that the early members of the Church weren't aware of the distinction, and believed that Joseph Smith was somehow an active translator simply denies most of the early witnesses that we have. They believed that the text of the Book of Mormon was a translation of the Gold Plates, but they didn't believe that Joseph Smith was translating it the way that people normally translate texts. And they resorted to the same sorts of definitional games that people sometimes play today. I'll give an example about a different term - applied to the text of the Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith applied for a copyright for the text of the Book of Mormon, and, according to state law, listed himself as the author. He was challenged on how he could possibly be the author of a text he didn't compose himself. Oliver Cowdery discusses this in a letter he wrote on November 9, 1829, in which he answered some questions that had been posed to Martin Harris:

Quote

Your first inquiry was, whether it was proper to say, that Joseph Smith Jr., was the author? If I rightly understand the meaning of the word author, it is, the first beginner, or mover of any thing, or a writer. Now Joseph Smith Jr., certainly was the writer of the work, called the book of Mormon, whch was written in ancient Egyptian characters, - which was a dead record to us until translated. And he, by a gift from God, has translated it into our langauge. Certainly he was the writer of it, and could be no less than the author.

Oliver relies here on a dictionary definition provided by Webster. Here is the 1828 definition of the word author:

Quote

1. One who produces, creates, or brings into being; as, God is the author of the Universe.

2. The beginner, former, or first mover of any thing; hence, the efficient cause of a thing. It is appropriately applied to one who composes or writes a book, or original work, and in a more general sense, to one whose occupation is to compose and write books; opposed to compiler or translator.

Do you see how Oliver is to some extent splitting hairs here? My point here is to suggest that early members of the Church (Joseph Smith included) weren't always terribly worried about semantics in the way that they describe things. And if all we are concerned about is the idea of reproducing a text from one language into another - then we can call what Joseph Smith did 'translation.' But our definitions today tend to be more nuanced. I wouldn't call this translation, because this isn't what we usually mean when we refer to translation. And so I ask you what you mean when you use the word translation because I am interested in seeing if your definition is as broad as the early members of the LDS Church, or if it is more narrow and technical in the ways that we use the term today.

Edited July 25, 2023 by Benjamin McGuire

[InCognitus]

2 hours ago, Teancum said:

Sorry.  Ain't buying it. JS and the church used TRANSLATE.  From the papyri. The word translate was never interpreted as revelation.  Until now.  Now they want to gaslight us.

Here's a sincere question for you.  Take a look at the preface to the 1833 Book of Commandments, Chapter VI (which corresponds to Doctrine and Covenants Section 7 in our current editions).  It says:

"A Revelation given to Joseph and Oliver [Cowdery], in Harmony, Pennsylvania, April, 1829, when they desired to know whether John, the beloved disciple, tarried on earth. Translated from parchment, written and hid up by himself."

It says this this section was "translated from parchment".  What is the meaning of "translated" in this context? 

Edited July 25, 2023 by InCognitus

[Calm]

4 hours ago, Teancum said:

I mean really until recent history did you ever understand it differently?

As a child (early and mid 60’s)I first understood it as him looking through the glasses attached to the breastplate and seeing the characters change into English.  (I am pretty sure that story was in a child’s version of Book of Mormon stories*** that I first read and reread as a kid, but I gave away my copy I had bought once my kids were older…they were racist so I didn’t want to save them for my grandkids, so I can’t check it.) I know the books were popular and they were still publishing them when I had my first.

My thought back then was if Joseph removed the glasses, the characters would be back to nonsense for him. Had nothing to do with any language knowledge he had. He only needed to know English. It was a different form of a vision though I am not sure I thought of it that way back then. I thought the glasses worked for anyone else at first too iirc (my memory has me picturing myself trying them out with the plates, I always put myself in stories I read that I liked). Probably when youngest I thought the glasses were the translator without any help from Joseph. When I learned how he couldn’t translate when he got in a fight with his wife, etc, I can’t remember how exactly I interpreted that as not long after (in my teens) I found out about seerstones (early 70’s) and him using something besides the glasses (I think learning about the hat so it stuck and I started using the hat in my mental image of translation was quite a few years later, in my late 20s or 30s as I wasn’t into church history.). The seerstones made me rethink the mechanism, but I first learned of them through the story of the words showing up on them. Again, it wasn’t so much Joseph’s knowledge, but more a gadget that was given him by God that he read English off of, something that worked by the Spirit…which started out as more or less magical in my view when I was young and then morphed as I grew to understand how the Spirit communicates.  Though my memory is I didn’t think the words were actually written on the stone, since only Joseph could see them as I understood it. 

***looks like it was first published in 1949 and was still being published in the 80’s. Pretty easy to find these days, so my guess is it was pretty popular among Saints.

Edited July 25, 2023 by Calm

[mfbukowski]

8 hours ago, Teancum said:

Sorry.  Ain't buying it. JS and the church used TRANSLATE.  From the papyri. The word translate was never interpreted as revelation.  Until now.  Now they want to gaslight us.

Look it up.  Now I guess you are saying Webster is in the conspiracy, and using a time machine.

Pretty clever

Edited July 25, 2023 by mfbukowski

[Teancum]

11 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

You didn't provide a definition.

How about you provide a definition.  And yes I did provide a definition.  I said I define it the same way JS did.  The same way the LDS Church leaders have up until recently.

11 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

You can provide a definition that you believe matches what the LDS Church and its leaders and Joseph Smith understood it to mean if you want to, but I am interested in how you define the word translation.

I am not interested in word games. It is a pretty simple proposition.  What do LDS members think when the read JS translated the BoA from papyri?  What did you think it meant before you had to become more nuanced?

[Teancum]

10 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Do you see how Oliver is to some extent splitting hairs here? My point here is to suggest that early members of the Church (Joseph Smith included) weren't always terribly worried about semantics in the way that they describe things. And if all we are concerned about is the idea of reproducing a text from one language into another - then we can call what Joseph Smith did 'translation.' But our definitions today tend to be more nuanced. I wouldn't call this translation, because this isn't what we usually mean when we refer to translation. And so I ask you what you mean when you use the word translation because I am interested in seeing if your definition is as broad as the early members of the LDS Church, or if it is more narrow and technical in the ways that we use the term today.

I define it in the more narrow way and that is how I was taught.  As were you.  You can do all the word smiting and mental gyrations you want to define it in some other way because  you need to.  And you need to because JS did not translate.  Not how a linguist would. Not even how he might from the "gift and power of God."  Nowhere has the Church tried to teach, until recently, that the BoA or the BoM was a revelation in the way we understand that word (like the revelations in the D&C).  Such is the ever moving target of Mormonism and it apologetics. 

[Teancum]

10 hours ago, InCognitus said:

Here's a sincere question for you.  Take a look at the preface to the 1833 Book of Commandments, Chapter VI (which corresponds to Doctrine and Covenants Section 7 in our current editions).  It says:

"A Revelation given to Joseph and Oliver [Cowdery], in Harmony, Pennsylvania, April, 1829, when they desired to know whether John, the beloved disciple, tarried on earth. Translated from parchment, written and hid up by himself."

It says this this section was "translated from parchment".  What is the meaning of "translated" in this context? 

This particular section of the D&C is much different than what has been taught and claimed by the church for the BoM and BoA. 

[Teancum]

6 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Look it up.  Now I guess you are saying Webster is in the conspiracy, and using a time machine.

Pretty clever

So tell me kind sir, how did the church interpret and teach this until recently?