The missing scroll / 'long roll' theory

Apologists place the Book of Abraham on a lost length of papyrus; physical measurement of the Hor roll leaves room for about half a metre of missing text.

What the Church claims

The Book of Abraham was translated from a portion of the papyri that no longer exists, so the surviving fragments are irrelevant to testing Joseph's translation.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Weak. Converging physical and textual measurements, accepted by the JSP, leave no room on the Hor roll; the theory survives only by moving the text to an unevidenced location and ignoring Abr. 1:12-14.

The record

  • John Gee argued (2000) for an original Hor roll of about 320 cm and later, applying Friedhelm Hoffmann's winding formula, that some 1250.5 cm (41 feet) could be missing from its interior.
  • Cook and Smith (Dialogue, 2010) measured the winding periodicity from the repeating damage pattern and found no more than about 56 cm missing from the interior; Baer's independent text-based estimate implies 59 cm; total length about 150 cm. They could not replicate Gee's winding measurements, which would require impossibly thin papyrus.
  • A hieratic Book of Abraham in the same script would need roughly 511 cm for the existing 5,506 English words.
  • Gee replied (FAIR conference, 2012) alleging five errors in Cook's formula; Cook answered (Dialogue, 2012) that the two formulas are mathematically equivalent expressions of an Archimedean spiral and restated the ~56 cm maximum.
  • The JSP papyri introduction adopts 150-156 cm for the Horos roll with about 66 cm extant (citing Cook and Smith among others); Ritner calls Gee's attempt to more than double Baer's figure without justification.
  • Abr. 1:12 and 1:14 locate the sacrifice vignette 'at the commencement of this record' and 'at the beginning'; Fac. 1 opens the Hor roll and Fac. 3 closed it.
  • Eyewitnesses mention 'a long roll' (e.g. Charlotte Haven, 1843); Cook and Smith note the most reliable witnesses describe two rolls, Hor's and Ta-sherit-Min's, the latter identified by Joseph's circle with Joseph of Egypt.
  • Hauglid, who once argued for a missing source, said after editing the documents that Joseph and his scribes 'were working off of the papyri that we actually have'.

The moving target

  • 2014-07-08: Eyewitnesses spoke of 'a long roll' or 'rolls'; since only fragments survive, much of what Joseph had is likely lost; vignettes were sometimes placed at a distance from their commentary.
  • c. 2023: Surviving fragments are between 2.5% and 45% of the original papyri.

The exchange

John Gee; Kerry Muhlestein; BYU Studies 61:4 (2022); Gospel Topics essay

Eyewitnesses, Mormon and non-Mormon, place the Book of Abraham on a long intact roll that still existed in the 1840s-50s, not on the mounted fragments under glass; Egyptian rolls often carry several texts, and vignettes can be far from the text they illustrate.

The answer: The mounted fragments are the outer end of that same roll, cut off to preserve them, so 'the roll' and 'the fragments' are one document. Two independent methods (winding geometry and Baer's textual reconstruction) converge on c.150 cm with c.56-59 cm lost - room for the rest of the Breathing text and Fac. 3, not for an additional 5 m composition. The Book of Abraham says its illustration is at its own commencement. Composite rolls exist, but a Semitic patriarch narrative appended to a Ptolemaic priest's breathing permit would be unparalleled.

What they get right: Eyewitness language about a 'long roll' is real, and the second (Ta-sherit-Min) roll was indeed long (JSP: 300 or 700 cm). The Church's 2.5%-45% range honestly reflects that uncertainty about the whole collection.

John Gee (2012)

Cook and Smith's mathematics is flawed; corrected, the roll comes out several times longer.

The answer: Cook's published reply shows the formulas are equivalent and the dispute is about input measurements; Gee has not published winding-by-winding data that others can replicate, whereas Cook and Smith did. The JSP editors, a Church project, adopted the short figure. BYU Studies (2022) merely notes the dispute without defending Gee's number.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

The theory requires a specific physical fact - metres of lost papyrus on the Hor roll - and that fact has been tested. Cook and Smith's replicable winding analysis and Baer's line-by-line reconstruction agree within 3 cm: about 56-59 cm are missing, and what stood there was the remainder of the Breathing text and the Fac. 3 vignette. The Church's own documentary edition accepts a c.150 cm roll. Gee's 41-foot figure has never been reproduced, and his teacher Ritner rejected even his earlier 10-foot figure. Independent of length, the theory must explain away the Book of Abraham's self-reference to the vignette at its 'commencement', the scribes' pairing of Abraham 1-2 with characters from the columns next to that vignette, and the testimony of the editor of those manuscripts that the men in the room were working from the papyri we have.

The apologetic case

Much of the 1835 collection unquestionably perished; witnesses describe rolls, not just framed scraps; ancient rolls could hold multiple unrelated texts; and the winding-length method has error bars that depend on judgment calls about where each turn begins. If even a few metres survived into the 1850s on either roll, an Abraham text could have been there, and its absence today proves nothing.

What would change this

A published, replicable winding-by-winding measurement showing several metres missing, or a period description of an Abraham text located after Facsimile 3 on the roll.

Closely related

Sources

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