What the Joseph Smith Papyri actually are

The papyri Joseph Smith said contained Abraham's own writings survive in part, and they are ordinary Egyptian funerary documents written some 1,500+ years after Abraham.

What the Church claims

The Book of Abraham is 'a translation of some ancient Records ... purporting to be the writings of Abraham, while he was in Egypt ... written by his own hand, upon papyrus' (1842 heading), translated by Joseph Smith from papyri bought in 1835.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Untenable. The identity and date of the surviving papyri are conceded by the Church, by LDS Egyptologists and by the Joseph Smith Papers; the traditional claim that these documents are Abraham's writings is untenable.

The record

  • Michael Chandler reached Kirtland about the end of June/start of July 1835; four mummies, two papyrus rolls and extra fragments were bought for $2,400, in three $800 shares (Joseph Coe, S. Andrews, and 'Joseph Smith & Co.'). The JSP editors judge that roughly market value.
  • Joseph's history says that on translating some characters he found one roll contained the writings of Abraham and another the writings of Joseph of Egypt (History of the Church 2:236, as quoted in S61); the 1842 Times and Seasons heading says the record was written by Abraham's 'own hand, upon papyrus'.
  • The Book of Abraham was printed in three Times and Seasons installments (1 March, 15 March, 16 May 1842) with Joseph as editor and Reuben Hedlock as engraver; Joseph's journal for 8 March 1842 has Joseph translating 'from the Book of Abraham' for the next issue, and further extracts were promised in February 1843 but never appeared.
  • After Joseph's death the collection stayed with Lucy Mack Smith; in 1856 Emma and Lewis Bidamon sold it to Abel Combs. Part went to a St. Louis museum, moved to Chicago and burned in 1871; the mounted fragments passed through Combs's housekeeper's family to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1947, which gave them to the Church on 1967-11-27.
  • The Joseph Smith Papers identify the surviving pieces as a Book of Breathing for Horos (dated between 238 and c.153 BC), a Book of the Dead for Semminis/Ta-sherit-Min, and a Book of the Dead vignette for Nefer-ir-nebu (both c.300-100 BC), from Thebes. Ritner's edition adds a Book of the Dead fragment of Amenhotep and the lost hypocephalus of Sheshonq (known from Facsimile 2).
  • Klaus Baer (University of Chicago) published the first full translation in 1968 under the title 'the apparent source of the Book of Abraham'; John A. Wilson and Richard A. Parker published parallel identifications in Dialogue the same year. Baer, Wilson and Parker dated the Hor papyrus late Ptolemaic/early Roman; Coenen and Quaegebeur later argued for the first half of the second century BC, the dating the JSP now adopts.
  • Ritner's 2000 retranslation confirms the text concerns only the afterlife of the Theban priest Hor: a 'Document of Breathing Made by Isis', a funerary passport placed under the mummy's arms.
  • The JSP editors state that Egyptologists, 'both Latter-day Saints and others', consider the 1835 decipherment efforts 'of no actual value in understanding Egyptian'.
  • The Church's 2014 essay concedes that none of the characters on the fragments mention Abraham and that LDS and non-LDS Egyptologists agree the characters do not match the Book of Abraham; it dates the fragments between the third century BC and the first century AD.

The moving target

  • 1842-03-01: Published the text as a translation of records written by Abraham's own hand on papyrus from the catacombs of Egypt.
  • 1880-10: Book of Abraham with facsimiles and explanations canonized as scripture.
  • 2014-07-08: Fragments are funerary texts far later than Abraham and do not match; the source may be lost, or the papyri may have been a catalyst for revelation.
  • c. 2023: Translated 'by revelation'; existing fragments estimated at 2.5% to 45% of the original holdings; no position between lost-papyri and catalyst views; scriptural status 'cannot be settled by scholarly debate'.

The exchange

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

What survives is a small fraction of what Joseph owned, so comparing the fragments with the Book of Abraham tells us little.

The answer: The Book of Abraham itself points to the surviving vignette: Abr. 1:12 and 1:14 send the reader to 'the representation at the commencement of this record', i.e. Facsimile 1, which is the opening vignette of the Hor Book of Breathings; the 1835 manuscripts set characters from the columns immediately beside that vignette against the English text. And the physical roll was only about 150 cm long (see missing-scroll topic). The loss is real for the other roll and for the hypocephalus, but not for the document Joseph himself identified as Abraham's.

What they get right: It is true that much of the 1835 collection is gone (the second roll, the inner part of the Hor roll, the hypocephalus), and the Church is right not to claim the surviving text reads as Abraham.

Gospel Topics essay; Smoot & Muhlestein (transmission theory, listed by FAIR)

The papyri need not be Abraham's autograph: 'by his own hand' can mean authorship, and a late copy could transmit an old text.

The answer: A late copy is possible in principle, but no Egyptian-language Abraham narrative exists on any of these papyri, and Joseph and his contemporaries spoke of Abraham's own handwriting and signature (visitors were shown a character as 'the signature of the patriarch Abraham', per sources collected by Cook & Smith). The move rescues the date but not the content.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

Every line of evidence that can be checked converges. The vignette Joseph printed as Facsimile 1 survives; the Joseph Smith Papers call it the opening illustration of the Book of Breathing for Horos. Baer (1968) and Ritner (2000), both University of Chicago Egyptologists, translate the adjoining text as a routine funerary 'breathing permit' for a Theban priest named Hor, written in the Ptolemaic period, more than 1,500 years after any plausible date for Abraham. The Book of Abraham's own text says the scene is 'at the commencement of this record'. The Church's essay and its own documentary editors now concede that the surviving characters do not say what Joseph said they said, and that the Kirtland-era decipherment has no Egyptological value. What remains disputed is not what the papyri are but what to do about it: posit a lost source, or redefine 'translation'. Those moves are assessed in their own topics.

The apologetic case

Joseph never explained his method; he claimed no linguistic expertise, and his other 'translations' (Book of Mormon, Bible revision) were revelatory, not philological. Only part of the collection survives, 19th-century witnesses describe rolls, and the Church has never officially tied the Book of Abraham to any particular fragment. On that view the Egyptological identity of the fragments is simply beside the point: the text must be judged by its content and spiritual fruits.

What would change this

Recovery of the lost portions showing an Abraham narrative in Egyptian, or any independent ancient Egyptian-language text paralleling the Book of Abraham.

Closely related

Sources

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