Book of Abraham Pt. 2 - Translation Apologetics
Original Air Date: 2022-12-16
This video, featuring host John Dehlin, Mike from LDS Discussions, and guest Gerardo Samano, serves as "Part 2" of a series on the Book of Abraham. While the previous episode established that Joseph Smith’s translation of the papyri does not match the actual Egyptian text, this episode critiques the specific apologetic arguments—primarily the "Long Scroll" and "Catalyst" theories—offered by the LDS Church to reconcile these discrepancies 1, 2.
Here is a detailed summary of the arguments and evidence presented in the video:
The hosts begin by analyzing the epistemic frameworks of the Church’s two primary Egyptologists, Kerry Muhlestein and John Gee.
This theory suggests that the Book of Abraham was translated from a portion of the papyri that is now lost (potentially burned in the Chicago Fire), and that the fragments the Church currently possesses are not the source text 10. The video dismantles this theory using three main points:
As the "Long Scroll" theory has become untenable, many apologists have pivoted to the "Catalyst Theory." This argues that the papyri were merely physical props that inspired Joseph Smith to receive a revelation about Abraham, meaning the text was never intended to be a literal translation 20. The hosts argue this fails for several reasons:
4. Specific "Smoking Guns" and Misrepresentations
The video analyzes specific instances where apologists allegedly manipulate data to maintain belief.
Conclusion
The video concludes that the LDS Church is in a precarious position, funding two distinct groups of apologists (Gee supporting the Long Scroll, Muhlestein supporting the Catalyst) whose theories contradict one another 34. The hosts suggest that the Church is effectively "deceiving" members by promoting theories that contradict the Church's own resources (like the Joseph Smith Papers) and standards of honesty, ultimately creating an environment where the "One True Church" relies on confusing and irreconcilable explanations to retain members 35, 36.
Insight: The hosts argue that the apologetic strategy creates a "shell game" where the goal isn't to provide a consistent answer, but to offer any answer to create plausible deniability, even if those answers (like the Catalyst Theory) render Joseph Smith's own claims about his prophetic powers untrue 37, 38.
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hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon stories podcast I am your host for today John delin it is December 1st 2022 and we are back for another epic episode uh with Mike of LDS discussions where we are examining Mormon church truth claims I think we're around episode 30 or 31 in the series um what we're trying to do for those who are new to this series is we're trying to just take a thoughtful evidence-based look at Mormon church truth claims specifically for people that uh want to know the truth based on evidence we're trying to do it in as unbiased and as a dispassionate way as possible and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive so that's what we're doing today we're going to be covering uh this is going to be part two of a discussion of the book of Abraham the book of Abraham translation um from the Papyrus we've already covered part one if you have uh check that out go back and listen to that and then you can uh listen to today for um you know a series that builds upon itself I also want to make sure and mention the Epic 13 hour series that radio free Mormon and I did with Dr Robert rittner you can check that out on Mormon stories podcast but if you want a legit egyptologist may he rest in peace Dr Robert Ridner um analyzing uh the the book of Abraham Papyrus and the translation with uh top-notch world-class scholarship that's the source to dig deep today uh and in this series we're kind of doing an analysis at a bit of a higher level for people who want to learn this stuff faster and maybe not as in-depth I also just want to make sure number one I want to ask everybody if you're watching us on YouTube it would be really useful uh if you would subscribe to the YouTube channel we're trying to break hundred thousand YouTube subscribers that would be really helpful for us to help us reach as many people as possible and to be able to make this program sustainable so please subscribe to YouTube if you're watching on YouTube also if you're watching on Facebook please subscribe to our Facebook Channel that's super helpful and it'll help notify you when new content comes out I also want to make sure everyone knows really briefly that this series can be found on Spotify the LDS discussion series can be found on Spotify [Music] um with um both audio and video formats you can go to Spotify type in LDS discussions and you can just see it all there in sequence without any of the other Mormon stories episodes mixed in we also have a playlist on YouTube where you can watch all the LDS discussions episodes in sequence on on YouTube so uh you know please check that out if that's or if you want to share it with somebody and you don't want to leave all the other stuff mixed in that's a great way to share so we are joined today Nemo was not able to join us today we love Nemo and we we uh are eager to for him to join us in a in a future episode but uh we have no slouch with us today we have Gerardo Samano hey Gerardo hey thanks for being willing to come in yeah no problem it's good to have you thanks yeah all right and of course we have the star of our show um Mike from LDS discussions joining us hey Mike how's it going hey everybody how's it going it's good to be back and uh you know tackle part two of our first of our first episode on book Abraham so it'll be an interesting you know as John said kind of a one-two uh kind of thing so it'll be fun to conclude what we were kind of starting in the last one yeah all right well um let's go ahead and uh and dive in we've got some slides and some videos today so for those who are listening only know that if you join us on YouTube or on Spotify video you'll be able to see these visuals that might be helpful but we'll also do our best to describe um the you know what what's being seen for those who need it so Mike let's jump in yeah let's do it and so um you know the first slide we're just gonna kind of really quickly go over uh what we did in the last episode and and kind of let you know what we're gonna go over this episode just to kind of show um because you know it's the same subject kind of looking at it from two different lenses okay so um let's bring up the first slide okay I guess we just so we've got an introduction slide and then uh yeah let's let's go at it yeah and so just you know to point out if you haven't watched part one I would recommend doing that first because everything we covered in the first episode is about the history of the book Abraham the papyri um how Joseph Smith purchased them uh how he translated the book of Abraham kind of how um both you know Joseph Smith talked about it versus you know kind of how maybe the kind of historical look at the timeline and all that um we then covered uh just basically how egyptologists can show that Joseph Smith's translations are demonstrably wrong um and we know what the papyri fragments say we know what the Papyrus fragment next effect simile one um is a source material because it matches the manuscripts and that's going to be hugely important to today's episode um because of the fact that we can show that and it also is an incorrect translation we then talked about how the church admits in its own essay that the book of Abraham the the papyri that we do have is not what Joseph Smith claims it to be um so basically the church admits that the fragments have nothing to do with Abraham they do not mention Abraham or the story of the book Abraham whatsoever and that they're about a thousand years um more recent uh than Abraham would have lived meaning that this idea that Joseph Smith states that this is um the book of Abraham written by his own hand upon Papyrus is impossible given that they date to A Thousand Years After Abraham would have lived and the fragments have absolutely nothing to do with Abraham whatsoever we talked about that in the first episode about how Joseph Smith claimed there was a literal signature of Abraham in its uh Libations table and so in today's episode we're going to cover the church's apologetic responses that try to answer um how the book of Abraham can still be from God uh when we know that you know from a um more straightforward view Joseph Smith got the translation completely wrong okay so if I can just summarize for the people that like multiple voices to kind of summarize we you know Joseph Smith claimed to translate what we now have as the book of Abraham from Papyrus that he bought in 1830 whatever right in Kirtland uh we have the the Papyrus today professional egyptologists have translated it the word Abraham doesn't appear anywhere in the papyrus and um for that and many many other reasons that we cover in part one episode we know that it's a completely false and erroneous translation and that the Papyrus themselves if Abraham even lived as a historical figure the Papyrus themselves are dated to be much much later than Abraham would have lived like a thousand plus years later and um what is on the Papyrus it's just a basic common funerary text which is information about the times and the person that were buried with the with the Papyrus which is exactly what we would expect them to be about is all that did I get that right yeah I think that's a fair way to just you know it's a fair way to kind of just explain that what Joseph Smith claimed that Papyrus was what Joseph Smith claimed the translation was is demonstrably not what it is and so at that point um that leads us to today which is well then how does the church try to make sense of the fact that Joseph Smith who came to get this through the gift and power of God got it completely wrong given that when Joseph Smith translated it no one could translate Egyptian so at the time this was looked at as a real miracle that somebody could crack an ancient language that no one thought we'd ever be able to do and then shortly thereafter the Rosetta Stone is deciphered and all of a sudden egyptologists were able to look at that and go yeah this is not at all what he claimed it to be and I'll just throw one more plug in for this series because we've got like 29 or 30 episodes prior which talk about Joseph's history as a quote translator and whether it's with the Golden Plates The Book of Mormon or the Doctrine and Covenants book of Moses we've laid a lot of groundwork about other problems with Joseph's claim to be a translator um you know in Prior episodes and that's really important background so if you haven't checked that out make sure you go back ever listeners and viewers and watch these past episodes because they really do build to to now right Mike yeah and that like when I started doing the project on the website on LDS discussions.com the whole intention was at the time I was trying to make sense of it and so you do these I was trying to do them in somewhat of a chronological or at least a kind of a logical order um but when you're doing them you start to see that these problems are not just one-off things like the book of Abraham problems are more demonstrable because of the fact we have the source material but at the same time they're not any different than you see with the Book of Mormon the book of Moses um and we've talked about a lot of those we're going to do an episode in I think like four or five episodes from now that's gonna be kind of an overview of the translations themselves to try to show the common threads that we see so yeah I mean these episodes build on each other because of the fact that they're they're they're they're being done in a way that's trying to look at this from a bigger picture as opposed to what you often see from apologists which is to say let's pinpoint this one little thing give you an answer and then we'll go to this other thing and give you an answer now those two answers might not work with each other but there'll be answers and so that's why we're trying in the series to say if you do this over here and you do this over here these don't mesh together and that's why apologetics gets really tricky and we're going to show that that in this episode as well just kind of it becomes kind of almost like a shell game where you're trying to just basically take care of one thing at a time realizing that what you're doing is going to impact other problematic areas of the church in a negative way because you cannot answer all these things um with the Apologetics it's almost like in the cartoons when I used to sweep all the crap under the rug and then they try to flatten it out and it just pops up somewhere else and it's just the same thing here and that's why it's important to try to go through these uh like John said throughout through through all these episodes because of the fact that we're going to refer back to the earlier episodes a show like this is a pattern this is not just a one-time thing yeah it's almost like it's one thing if you've got a sick tree to have an apologist say hey the tree's not sick and here's why but if you scan back out and you realize that there are multiple sick trees and that the forest itself might be uh not doing so well apologists wants you to always focus on the micro level but what we're trying to do is focus on the macro level because there is a macro pitcher here that the evidence lines up to show so let's jump into the next slide um let's talk scope of today's episode yeah and this is just we talked at the end of the last episode about how in reality the book of Abraham miniseries should be like one 15 minute episode where we look at what Joseph Smith claimed the papyri said we look at what the Egypt tell us can now tell us what they say uh we look at how Joseph Smith wrote in his journal over and over again that he was translating against the church saying well he wasn't really translating he's getting Revelation and it would be about a 15 minute episode to show that Joseph Smith could not translate ancient Egyptian uh that Joseph Smith did not know what he was doing uh and at the end of the day his prophetic claims about the book of Abraham are wrong and it really should be like a 50-minute episode and yet we're going to spend about six hours talking about this uh because the church has expanded kind of the universe of reality to try to find ways to preserve Joseph Smith as a prophet of God and what I mean by that is they will not let you look at these things in face value and just say and we're going to do that in this episode but they won't look at the manuscript and say oh yeah look the symbols are right there they'll say no what actually happened is the the scribes added them later without Joseph knowing and they were just guessing which is one of those things where you're looking at like this is the most ridiculous kind of answer uh but there's a lot of that and so we're going to try to go through them because if you just did a 15-minute episode The apologist will say but you're not talking about this this and this so we want to cover that that being said as um John mentioned at the start they did 13 hours with Dr Robert rittner and um Dan Vogel has done a series I think of eight videos he's put out two recent videos um going um through apologetic videos from Carrie mulestein and John Gee who we'll talk about in this episode all of those things are going to go so much further in the weeds than we're going to do because they take you know you're talking 13 hours with Dr rittner Dan vogel's done four or five hours just in the just this year alone and then his eight or nine part series there's another eight or nine hours and so what I'm gonna say is this is meant to be an overview of apologetics to look at the church's main points of contention about the book of Abraham and then we'll give you show notes if you want to go further because one of the things that I've learned from doing this is people will say if you just go deeper and deeper it'll make more sense and it's like no no the deeper you go the more obvious it is that this does not add up it is certainly not it's not that we're not going into the weeds because it would be helpful to the church's cause it's because we don't want to be here doing 16 hours on apologetics when it's been done in a lot of different ways so we'll give you a lot of show notes to other videos um I know John's got the Dr rittner links obviously through Mormon stories and so I I highly recommend anyone who interests who's interested to go through all of them because I've listened to all of them and they are fascinating but again this is just for for today it's more of an overview of the problems and then you can kind of go for it so if there's something where you're like why are you not talking about this thing I want you to talk about uh it's just because we're trying to trim this down to like a two two and a half hour episode um but I promise you all of those things will be addressed in some form form on our website but also through these videos as well yeah and I forgot to mention the essay is ldsdiscussions.com Abraham Dash translation this whole project is based on these essays that you've put up on the LDS discussions.com website so that's for people who like footnotes and who like text you you can always uh just jump straight to that yeah all right so let's go ahead and go to the next slide uh it's entitled book of Abraham apologetics with the amazing Dr Carrie molstein yeah and this is where I wanted to start with why are you laughing um because you're a little bit sarcastic I'm trying to add drama yeah I love it but the amazing doctor sorry okay sorry go ahead go ahead no no I was just gonna say this is where I want to start because I think this is where we want to show like how apologists within the church operate and this is a video clip from Carrie from 2020 at a fair Mormon conference and he is going to talk about how he uses his academic scholarship to approach the book of Abraham and I think it's the most enlightening clip you're ever going to see on apologetics and it's almost one of those things where it's almost like saying the quiet part out loud and so I think it's where we need to start this episode with this video clip in fact if it's all right Mike I'm going to back up just a tiny bit really quickly for those of you who are just totally new to this to this um you know who are totally new to this entire discussion I think there's a tiny bit of background I want to throw in the first thing is is that around 1912 um you know and and did we talk about this last episode Mike we did right we did yeah 1812 was the first time that you know egyptologists really publicly tried to translate the facsimiles and there was like a nationwide article that the book of Abraham is not legitimate the second time that the church really tried to address it was in the 1960s when the Tanners and I just finished the book Lighthouse that really goes into this when the Tanners and a few other colleagues found out that the Papyrus had been recovered the Tanners along with some colleagues um you know started making a lot of noise about the book of Abraham being a problem that's when it really started to strike the public consciousness of the church and that's when we have the emergence of Hugh Nibley which will be a name familiar to many of our listeners and viewers when I was at BYU I learned about humibly and you know he he was is this UCLA level PhD ancient scripture guy that emerged as the first Chief Arch apologist around the book of Abraham and he defended the book of Abraham for a few decades until he passed the Baton to John Gee who then brought on Kerry molstein as a supporter so you really can't understand the book of Abraham apologetics without understanding those three names humibly John Gee who we're going to talk about in a second and Kerry molstein is that an okay background in Gerardo and and and Mike do you guys want to add anything to that um I would say that you know although he knew a lot um my goodness the Nibley yeah oh neighborly uh he's expertise was not an egyptologist exactly so he was basically just coming up with uh basically what he did was trying to fight connection find connections between Egypt and Abraham uh in other literature in you know in in history to try to prove oh yeah so because you know the Papyrus Egyptian and and Joseph Smith said that that's the book of Abraham then there should be a connection but really he he didn't do a lot to address you know the real issue which is why is the facsimiles not not translating to what Joseph Smith said um but and then John Gee you know came in and added his abjectologist background and and carried some of of the arguments that didn't really hold a lot of water but uh he brought a lot of those arguments from nibly to his current more modern apologetics yeah that's super important the humidity was not an egyptologist yeah right yeah yeah in his his apologetics were pretty much worthless other than you know the the apologetic play with Hugh Nibley was I'm smart unibly saying I'm smart I have a PhD I speak a lot of languages and so don't you Mormons worry about this book of Abraham Papyrus egyptology stuff I figured it all out just trust me and my PhD and my reputation and you all don't have to worry about it is that unfair as a characterization uh that's I mean even a lot of smart people who I know that have read his books they say they don't understand what he's talking about it's just gibberish and it's almost intentional yeah Technical and gibberish yeah just so the people like kind of like a an average active Mormon their eyes would they'd start reading it their eyes would glaze over and they'd be like this is too hard to understand humility smart and faithful I'll just trust him yeah right yeah Mike do you want to add anything to that or is that an okay no I mean I think that's fine I heard um when I was first starting to research this stuff and I can't remember who said it so I'm not sure who to attribute it to but they called Hugh nibley's work bookshelf apologetics and so they said shelf Apollo jokes yeah they said it it is intentional uh or it's typical to hear a believing member say have you read Hugh Nibley and you'll say no have you and they'll say no but he writes all these books and so the idea is you have these books that he wrote you know they're big you know they're written by someone I've heard the word prolific use so many times for you Nibley it's one of those things that's almost it's almost funny how so many people use that word they'll say he's prolific and it's like yes he's written a lot of stuff but the problem is his Works don't hold up over time and as I said like you you mentioned that it fits into that bookshelf apologetic which is you put the book on your shelf you go someone's smarter than me has figured it all out I don't need to worry about it um and that really does serve a purpose because you hear that I've heard that that variations that phrase over the years since I started researching this where you'll you'll hear church leaders kind of make some sort of a reference to people smarter than me have gone through it and they you know have understood it so I realize I don't have to worry about it and you're like you know that that really is kind of a a Dodge to me but at the same time um I would just argue that Hugh nibley's approach and I have not read all his books I've only read some articles and stuff that's been sorted or cited you know it just doesn't hold up as well and so when people refer back to who Nibley it's always like but we're in 2022 we don't need to keep relying on something that has been kind of you know irrelevant it's as simple as you go to an egyptologist to understand the Papyrus yeah he's in in hid nibley's not an egyptologist like Case Closed not a credible not a credible Source Yeah well yeah and it's just it wouldn't override in any egyptologists and so right someone might say well you're not an egyptologist why are you doing an episode in the book of Abraham that's because I'm I'm working within the you know kind of the parameters that are set by egyptologists who have looked at this I'm not trying to tell you something beyond what they're saying and I think that might be to me a big difference but yeah I because you know I hate saying like well if you're not an egyptologist you know you can't be reliable because obviously there are a lot of people like Dan Vogel has done I mean the amount of work Dan Vogel has done on the manuscripts and the Papyrus and the Egyptian characters it's insane watch his videos it's like there's so much detail in there you can't possibly absorb it all because it's just so much data that being said you know he's not an idiotologist so a lot of people might go what does he know he's not but he is using uh The Works of actual Egypt ecologist to do it which Hugh nibbly would say he's doing as well and so that's why you just no matter what you do you have to be willing to to back up the data and that's where I think that falls short sometimes yeah and and I think that going back to this slide now in Kerry molstein what what Kerry molstein is about to tell us is his epistemic framework he's basically going to say here is what motivates our book of Abraham apologetics and this is what it's based on and if you listen carefully what you'll hear is that it's not based on egyptology even though he's an egyptologist yeah and that's and that's that's why this is such an important like it's one of those quotes when you hear it you're like there's no way he actually said that because it really is it's saying the quiet part out loud it starts with the end all right so let's just go ahead and roll the video is that okay yeah so this is BYU professor and egyptologist Kerry molstein telling us the foundation of his book of Abraham apologetics all right so I start out with an assumption that the book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon and anything else excuse me that we get from uh the restored gospel is true therefore any evidence I find I will try and fit into that Paradigm I don't feel that I need to defend that Paradigm I feel that I want to understand the evidence that I find within that Paradigm because to me it's a given that it's true all right Mike it's obvious to me but what's wrong with that statement from your perspective Mike I think that this is where you start to see how the church WIll employ apologists with the idea of using your academic background to push Theology and I think it doesn't work and so if you're starting with the conclusion that the book Abraham is true then you're no longer doing scholarship and I think that's one of those areas where you'll see Kerry mostly and say this at the fair conference but when he writes articles for enzyme or enzyme however I know people say both ways or uh he does uh these fire sides he doesn't start off by telling the members of the church hey just so you know this goes against what everybody says in the egyptological world and I just fit whatever I like whatever promotes faith into the conclusions if he said that at the start it would make more sense but he doesn't say that and I think it it shows that apologists know what they're doing they know that they're starting with the conclusion that the church is true and I think that's a dangerous approach because of the fact that the people you're telling this to don't know that you're using your academic background to push theology they think you're using your academic background to give real scholarship and I think that is a huge difference and I do appreciate that he admits it I just think that every single article he writes in every book he writes for Desert books should start with the statement because it is so important for anyone reading and to understand yeah and I'll just restate just science 101 is you start the whole basis of Science and Academia is you start from a neutral position and then you gather the evidence and then you make sense of the evidence without a a clear intentional bias and that's just science in Academia 101 and he's basically saying we're not doing that but then I'm going to use my PhD and my reputation and my knowledge of egyptology to then make evidence that make people feel like they're scholarly when he's saying we're not starting from a scholarly scientific perspective so yeah all right so uh let's join anything that hurt no I I've heard him defending his point and he uh this point saying that you know other edu colleges who are not Mormon might start with the assumption that Joseph Smith could not have translated uh the book of Abraham so they try to prove these prove the translation um I mean that's debatable like he's trying to put you know whatever he feels or whatever he thinks in like other people's minds I don't think people like Robert redner are like oh I gotta disprove Joseph Smith he's just looking at what his translation was and the higher and you know the papyrian saying yeah this doesn't add up yeah because I mean I I got to know Dr rittner and it it wasn't there wasn't any benefit to him I spent years writing books and articles about the book of Abraham he literally sat in the only endowed chair of egyptology in the entire Western Hemisphere at the University of Chicago and it wasn't like he needed it to get tenure it wasn't like any of his Publications on this stuff helped him in his career he was doing it because truth mattered to him and the the field of egyptology and its Integrity mattered to him and when someone like gee graduates from Yale and and that's a reflection on the field as a whole he almost feels like he needs to defend the discipline of egyptology when he gets involved but it's not like he was some Mormon hater or even religion hater right and he was trying to just destroy faith and he destroy Mormonism or destroy religion that is not what he was doing yeah and he's not not the only one you know like his though like his uh who was his mentor and like Whoever has been on that chair has been doing this for a really long long time basically any non-mormon reputable egyptologist has dealt with the book of Abraham at one and reached the same conclusion right yeah yeah okay the the problem is we talked about this last last episode but any egyptologist who looks at the the fragments that they have can immediately look at him and go I know exactly what this is because it's a very common funerary text this is not unique and so what Carrie mulestein will say with John what John Gill says uh everyone except for us looks at it rolls her eyes and says Joseph Smith one idiot and they start with the conclusion it's false and then therefore they're just basically looking to prove it false and but the truth is if you show somebody you know if I give you a copy of Moby Dick and I'm like this is the Lost writings of so-and-so you're like no it's Moby Dick and then if I say haha you don't like my Approach and therefore you know that's the problem I'm like this is not something where we're starting with a A material that nobody knows like it would be one thing if you had the characters document from The Book of Mormon and you showed it to someone today and they said this is gibberish when we've talked about that in previous episodes because at least that is unique this is something that people can immediately go look at and go oh yeah that's a funerary text uh to help a um someone in ancient Egyptian uh funeral rights to pass on to the to the next life and so the idea that they're starting with the conclusion it's false comes from the fact that they can look at it immediately and know what it is and so that's why we're going to talk about this today where apologists and expand they keep moving every time they expand the field and so well maybe we'll throw this to them and that's what we're gonna talk about today because it doesn't work and so then they do that and then turn around label people who go well that's out of the bounds of reality they label them anti-mormon or critics and I think that is where you see the games being played here with words to try to uh kind of Poison the Well which we're going to see in the next in the next slide in order to keep people who are believing in the church uh looking skeptically uh with a very skeptical lens that anybody who who questions this stuff yeah just just because it's fun to make this analogy it would almost be like if you uncovered a Mormon that was buried you know a thousand years from now and you you open this tomb and and you know there's there's a skeleton but there's a green apron and a white hat on the skeleton and a white robe and then let's just say they were buried with their Temple recommend and like let's just even say the text of the endowment ceremony everyone would know exactly what that was there would be no question what that was it was it was it would be an endowed Mormon being buried with artifacts from the temple ceremony it would be that obvious to anyone it's this is is that level of obvious right foreign that's what it comes down to it's like that's why I keep saying like this should be like a 15 minute episode and yeah we're gonna keep doing this because of the way they play games with kind of what is and is not right you know possible okay so that's a good segue to this next slide where we're going to talk about John Gee who is the church's current expert on the book of Abraham go ahead Mike yeah and so just to kind of intro this video it's like we're going to cover we're gonna have an episode that's all about apologetics but obviously this one is all about apologetics for the book of Abraham and so we've been talking about the church's responses to all these issues through the 30 episodes and so as we already talked about the church has two prominent egyptologists um that are employed by the church which is caramelstein and John Gee and both of them have spent a career writing in peer-reviewed journals and so they do have peer-reviewed articles that bulk up their academic credentials so that members will look at them and go smarter men have looked at this and remain faithful so why can't you and what they don't tell you is that they never ever put their book of Abraham writings up for peer review because they know full well that they will be destroyed by the overall community and so what they'll do is they play this game where they're like oh everybody respects us within the the you know egyptologist Community but what they don't say is that it's because they don't put forward any of their theology to the community and also the fact is that there are multiple egyptologists who have gone on the record to talk about how bad their scholarship is when it comes to um Church stuff as opposed to regular egyptologists and so in this video it's kind of the intro to a Fireside that John Gee had done with Fair Mormon I don't call it a Fireside I think that's I think yeah they call it a fire set and they kind of ask them like why do people dislike your scholarship and he'll explain that I just want people to understand kind of and listen for kind of the ways they do some of these games and his answer because it's pretty clear that they're trying to have it both ways to say oh I'm a super uh by the books egyptologist and and that's why everybody respects me and that's why you should believe me but at the same time why do people not like what I do and it's just it's it's a game here and and we'll we'll see it all right let's roll the tape why is it on the internet some people think you're such a terrible scholar or a terrible such a terrible person why does that come up um I don't know well there are a number of of reasons that it might but it's a one of these vague General accusations that doesn't have any details and it's a form of the the typical uh expression for it is uh called poisoning the well and it's where you it's a form of an uh of an ad hominem fallacy it's one where you shift the attention from the argument to the arguer and rather than deal with the substance of the argument you attack the person so by claiming that you're a terrible scholar terrible person this isn't really something like egyptological colleagues say to me or at least not to my face um and some of them are actually fairly complementary but I mean you've edited a usological journal you've been on the board for different organization certainly they wouldn't invite you to be on the board if they thought you were a terrible scholar one would think oh yeah one would think um it's but it's a it's a matter of a way of distracting uh the argument so you don't actually deal with the argument you just attack the person uh and it's something that we actually should expect as Christians um you know we have statements of Jesus he shall be hated of all men for my name's sake but he that endureth to the end shall be saved if they have called The Master of the House Bales above how much more shall they call them of his household and uh he also said blessed are ye winmen shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely uh for my sake rejoice and be exceeding be glad for great is your reward in heaven uh for so persecuted the day the prophets which were before you yeah I mean without without getting too grouchy I have at least three quick responses to that the first is that it's really disturbing to hear Fair Mormon in any of the Mormon apologists you know accuse other people of ad hominem and poisoning the well because that's been the primary uh tool or technique of Mormon apologetics all the way back to Hugh Nibley for literally like 50 years so for them to now accuse others of doing what their world-class Champions are doing that's super disturbing to me the second thing is now he's hiding behind this sort of like victimized Christian cloak of like oh see we're just like Jesus we're going to be persecuted just like Jesus that's kind of pathetic to me and then the third thing is um to claim that people like Robert rittner or others are employing at homonym is just outrageous Robert Ritner is published significant peer-reviewed uh books and articles on his book of Abraham's scholarship that gee and molstein haven't Robert Ritter spent 13 hours laying out not attacks on molstein and ghee or Nibley substantively he laid out the evidence in the scholarship now it's true that people like gee and his peers would would classify ghee and molstein's egyptology scholarship around the book of Abraham as being unprofessional um irresponsible and uh poor and a dishonoring to the field of egyptology but that's not ad hominem ad hominem would be to say John Gee is a pedophile right John Gee is is a adulterer like that would be that would be rittner or others engaging in ad hominem but to say that gee and molstein are engaging in irresponsible bad scholarship as it relates to the book of Abraham that's just factual in my opinion Gerardo what would you want to say yeah I would agree I agree okay Mike you want to add anything there uh you know I actually I had my thoughts on the next slide so we I agree with you I think you know for me and ad hominem would be to say uh I think janki's a terrible person nobody should give him the time of day and then you leave it at that but the problem is everybody who's talking about this stuff is saying John Gee is doing is doing a disservice to egyptology uh and here's why and I'm going to show you all of it like Dr Robert Ridner didn't just say janki sucks I I work with him and he's a bad person he said John geese scholarship is terrible let me show you this gigantic book detailing why and Dan vogel's done the same thing and so yeah they call it ad hominem it's just no it's it's people are fact checking your work they're realizing it is completely just irresponsibly bad yeah and they're calling you out on it that is not the same thing a thought you're not being persecuted when because of that you just aren't okay all right so let's go to the next slide which is a few notes on these two videos yeah and so it kind of covers you know what you said and I just want to point out at the start we'll have it in the show notes but Dan Vogel did a very thorough uh rebuttal to this video uh that John Gee did with Fair Mormon and he goes through in such detail that when you leave when you watch that episode at the end you're like oh my goodness how does jangi get up there and put the stuff out there and again it just shows that you could you could say I'm poisoning the whale by telling you that what I'm saying is watch it and judge for yourself but you know no one's trying to Poison the Well by calling junkie a terrible scholar but it's because we're illustrating with evidence with things you can see with with all sorts of previous research why his claims are not only wrong but the fact is as an egyptologist he knows why they are are wrong and he continues to promote them anyways and um John G the you know Fair Mormon they mentioned that John Gee was an editor of a journal but what they don't tell you and this is um something you get in the 13 hours with with Dr rittner um John Gee was an editor of a journal and they had to basically kick him off because he had used that journal to attack docker Robert Ritner because Dr Robert Ridner had gone after his scholarship on the book of Abraham and so that's a really long story it's in the the interviews that John and um rfm had done with um Dr rittner but you know they don't tell you that he got that he basically got removed from that periodical because of the fact that he he used it he used his position as Editor to attack somebody who was questioning his work and I think that is the kind of context that people really kind of need to have especially when you're trying to frame this as if you're being persecuted yeah and there's actually an episode Mormon stories episode 1397 Civil War John Gee versus the Joseph Smith papers project where rfem and I go into this in in detail so we'll we'll include that in the show notes yeah definitely okay and and just the last note on that slide is just to say you know John John Gee at the end of this kind of talk and these are questions that he's getting that he's prepared for because he obviously has slides for them and he's reading off of them you know he quotes about the persecution complex and he quotes basically almost saying like yeah I should expect to have this because Jesus was persecuted too and it's just that's the kind of stuff that drives me nuts because that is that is targeted to members who want to look at critics as people who are untrustworthy who are people that are only looking to tear down without any reason and he is you know while he's sitting there saying that these critics don't want to address you know the actual details they don't want to address the reasons he's actually doing the exact same thing and you know the last thing I'll say is when um Dr rittner was on with you and rfm you had invited John key or or carry molstein to come out and talk they don't do that because they know full well that their their positions are completely untenable and so they don't go out into public and have these discussions they do it in these safe spaces um such as Fair Mormon because they know the moment their question that they're doomed and we're going to go through that in this episode they almost show their cards on that as well it's just like I said it gets silly sometimes when you look at the the games that they're playing with this stuff all right well let's jump to uh should we jump to the next slide then yeah yeah we're good so the next slide is the so this is one of the main so if you if you kind of are like gonna gonna Address Book of Mormon church book of Abraham apologetics 101 the first issue that always comes up is the lost or the long scroll Theory so that's what we're going to talk about first right yeah and so this is one uh this is from the official Church essay and it says it is likely futile to assess Joseph's ability to translate papyri when we now have only a fraction of the papyri he had in his possession eyewitnesses spoke of a long roll or multiple roles of Papyrus since only fragments survived it is likely that much of the papyri accessible to Joseph when he translated the book of Abraham is not among these fragments the loss of a significant portion of the papyri means the relationship of the papyri to the published text cannot be settled conclusively by reference to the papyri and so what they're effectively saying is that because um we've only gotten fragments and they didn't recover like an uh kind of like an un rolled scroll um or a rolled up Scroll I guess I should say that we it means we only have a fraction of what Joseph Smith translated and because of that the actual book of Abraham Papyrus could be forever have lost in the Chicago Fire and we're gonna go over there are a lot of problems with this Theory and you're going to notice that the church does not mention these problems in their essay which again the church in their essay kind of references critics or they reference that not everyone's in agreement but they're very careful to never actually tell members why critics are pointing out that these reasons don't work okay yeah yeah and I'll just say that this is if you look at Mormon apologetics from a macro perspective what you always what a Mormon apologist always want to do is create plausible deniability in other words Oaks and others Maxwell Apostles have said we don't need good answers we just need answers that leave room for continued belief and so what you have to do is just create the possibility of credibility even if the answers aren't actually credible and that's what the long or the Lost scroll theory is an example of it's basically to say okay the the Papyrus that we have now that was uncovered that emerged in the 60s we have the Papyrus but it's clear that it's missing something that they're fragments they're not like a perfect scroll intact and so there must be something that's missing so maybe the the translation that Joseph Smith produced was directly from parts of the missing parchment that theoretically could have existed yeah is that right Gerardo yeah that's right yeah and as we know that doesn't hold water are we going to explain why Mike are yeah yeah we've got a bunch of slides on this okay so let's go to the next do you want to go to the next slide Mike yeah the only thing I would add is there are missing there are missing pieces like we we don't have facsimile three we don't I don't think we have fact simile too and so there are missing pieces and we'll go through that as we do this but because we know there are missing pieces uh from an apologetic standpoint that goes okay we can expand that out as far as we want to um but the problem is we'll go through it what we do have doesn't match and what what the church publishes the facsimiles we talked about this last episode facsimile three and we'll touch on this throughout this episode vac Simulator 3 has Egyptian characters that Joseph Smith translate they are incorrect and so it would be like saying well if we only had more material you'd show you'd see that I was correct somewhere else but if we have a bunch of areas where you're wrong it does it kind of stops mattering if there's more because what we do have shows you couldn't do it so why are we supposed to believe there's going to be this magical other set that we have no evidence for that's going to all of a sudden flip the fact that you're wrong with what we do have and I think that's where this this effects only three kills everything we're gonna talk about today out of the water without even dealing with this but yeah you know yeah but we'll go and do it anyways I think um the evidence is pretty conclusive that because of how the role uh the fragments that we have you know people have done analysis on well uh it's called the like q a or you know the missing sections they have calculated how big the role should be and you pretty and they've done it in several different ways to calculate and pretty much egyptologists and experts agree that the missing part would not have been enough to contain the book of Abraham in it right there's no chance and we talked about last week there's uh two symbols in the book of Abraham manuscript that um Joseph Smith I want to say got four verses out of and those two symbols mean one word and so not only would you need extra space for the book of Abraham before the translation as Joseph Smith made it to be correct you'd have to have a massive amount of missing space because Joseph Smith mistakenly thought that one character meant like a paragraph or a sentence worth of information and that's another thing he got wrong and so that's why it's like layer upon layer upon layer of impossibilities here in order to make it work and with that said we could jump into more specifically about the Lost scroll Theory why it doesn't work yeah and I'll just I'll just uh to extend an analysis analogy I started with it would be the lot to me the lost or the long scroll Theory would be like archaeologists in a thousand years finding you know a coffin with a skeleton that had the green apron and the cap and the robe and you know the endowment ceremony text but was missing the temple recommend and saying you know oh well maybe this isn't a Mormon you know a dead Mormon buried in their temple close maybe it's a different church because we don't have the temple recommend you know you know what I'm saying yeah yeah it's it's it's creating the possibility of some other explanation just because a tiny bit is missing it's creating some sort of plausible explanation out of nothing to create the the possibility of Doubt yeah for the scholarship that does yeah what we want to prove so let's go yeah no I was gonna say and I think it's even worse because we do have we do have some of it and so like oh maybe this this person uh this coffin is an alien and but because we don't have the temple recommend that proves that it's not an alien right like yeah it would be like if you were doing a paper for school and they said we want you to do this this uh you want me to translate this document the document is about the history of dogs and you're translating it and you turn in four pages and the four pages are about why you like McDonald's french fries and the professor's like dude these are about dogs and you gave me a thing about French fries and you're like oh you know what there's six pages I forgot those six pages are gonna be about dogs we do have some of it so you can't then say that he because he got it wrong here it's really hard to go but if we had more material you'd see it was right because we are everything we have is like a failing grade right and so I don't it's like to me even if they even if they drove a truckload of documents over I guarantee you they're not going to work because if he got all this other stuff wrong why are we supposed to believe that all of a sudden it just it that life doesn't work it just doesn't work that way okay all right so let's jump to the manuscripts of the book of Abraham that's the Papyrus yeah so we talked about this last week and so if you're um listening uh what we have are two images of the manuscripts for the book of Abraham and on the left and on the right you can see where the symbols are being pulled from uh from the Papyrus fragment that is next to facsimile one and what they show is that they are trying translating the symbols off of the papyri and they're doing it in sequential order and so this is something um in that fair video we showed a few minutes ago where John Gee tries to make it sound like they're bouncing all over and Dan Vogel explains why Dan why John key is very misleading with that but you could look at if you're like these are one of those things where it's like do you believe your eyes or do you believe what apologists are telling you you're saying because you could see that the scribes are dictating for Joseph character by character in sequential order and it matches up perfectly and so if there was a long or lost scroll why do the manuscripts match up perfectly with the Papyrus fragment that was recovered that happens to basically be where the book of Abraham tells us to look for it yeah let me say this to um if you can put back this the screen up uh just because on the image it shows the papieri on the ride and then on the left we have you know the the translation documents that's an interesting argument that jongi tries to make that they're bouncing all over and just copying characters randomly like you said Mike it's not that way we have we have the translation documents and they go character by character from left to right sorry from right to left um and you so the reason why it might one of the reasons why it might look like they're bouncing all over is because there's missing papyri that that that section was missing when Joseph Smith got this uh papyri and so what's interesting is that you'll see that the characters that are before the ones that are written right on the image on the right like those one those ones uh are not Egyptian characters so it tells us that you know they invented characters uh from the um the the missing part when they were reading trying to read from right to left uh Joseph Smith was inventing characters and that's how we know you know that he was going line by line uh but to the egyptologists they can't admit that Joseph Smith was inventing characters so that's why they can say oh Joseph was bouncing all over that I don't know if that makes sense but uh but that's a really big piece of evidence that when I started studying this uh was big to me how Joseph was inventing characters and that corresponds to how he was taking characters from right to left yeah yeah and then Dan Vogel covers that so again if anybody wants to like really understand what Herod was talking about watch the damn we'll have a link the Dan Fogel video about that John Gee video he literally shows where John where John Gee is basically pulling these characters and saying oh this is that and Danville was like no it's not you could see where he where it actually is from and yeah he's pulling from here because he wants to give credibility to the idea that the scribes are bouncing around because if he can make the scribes bouncing around from a believing standpoint and go well they weren't then translating in sequential order because he needs that to be basically debunked because if if Joseph Smith was translating in sequential order we have the source material if we have the source material there's no missing scrolling so again this this is one of those games they play where they're just trying to find parallels to other characters to say see it wasn't quite that one if you just have this little Fleck here it's this one um and Dan Vogel just I mean he like I said it's he almost does it in almost too much detail because there's there's nothing left afterwards to give any credibility to um John Gay's claim that they were not doing it in sequential order all right let's jump to the next slide which is uh the manuscripts tell us where the translation is from yep and we talked about this last episode as well which is you know the book Abraham um in chapter 1 verses 12 to 14 tells us that the facsimiles uh for facsimile one and that the book of Abraham are on the same scroll so there's no chance of some secondary scroll that would have contained a separate text from facsimile one and so I'm going to read verses 12-14 it says and it came to pass that the priests laid violence upon me that they might slay me also as they did those versions upon this altar Altar and that you may have a knowledge of this altar I will refer you to the representation at the commencement of this record um I meant to make that yellow but basically I will refer you to the representation at the commencement of this record that's very important and then verse 14 says that you may have an understanding of these Gods I have given you the fashion of them in the figures at the beginning which manner of figures is called by the Chaldeans Rihanna I'm not trying to say that which signifies hieroglyphics and so Abraham chapter one is literally telling you where the characters are being translated from and they're telling you that at the end of the characters you're going to have the representation of the figures so basically Joseph Smith writes into the book of Abraham text which refers to what the facsimiles yeah so if you go to the next slide we could it'll show you exactly what I'm talking about so um in the next slide if you're if you're listening to this only there are a set of characters with the Lacuna that Gerardo had mentioned and that's where the manuscripts are pulling the characters from just to the right of that is facsimile one and so when the book Abraham says so that you may understand this how you place the representation at the commencement of this record it's literally telling you the images next to the characters We're translating is the representation of it and that's why facts only one is like it's one of those things where you look at this there's no way around this you have the characters to the left in fact similarly one to the right exactly what the book Abraham tells you to look the facsimile is supposed to illustrate what the text is in Abraham won you know it's one of those things where it's like they're telling you where to look we have the source material that is all extant and that is in the church's possession now yeah that's absolutely a slam dunk yeah yeah and and that's why John Gee is trying to say Well they're not actually pulling from those characters there's actually other characters because if you look at that picture there there's no way around it like that picture tells you 100 that the book of Abraham is telling you where to look it's exactly where you where you think it would be I don't know what else to say like there's no way anybody would ever argue with that unless you are doing what uh Carey milstein said which is to say the book of Abraham is true and therefore I'm going to do whatever I need to do to the evidence to make that the case because this tells you the exact opposite yeah it's a it's a direct it's a direct line between the Papyrus the facsimile the writings on the Papyrus Joseph Smith's attempt at quote translating all the way through to the actual book of Abraham text that we have today it just it connects them all in a way that can't really be challenged right yeah yeah okay uh let's go to the next slide which is around the math how math tells us that there is no long scroll and Dr rittner does talk about this but go ahead yeah and Gerardo mentioned this earlier but basically because there's these lacunas which is basically these gaps in the Papyrus that happens due to damage and remember these are these are rolled up and so as they're rolled up when there's damage they can then use the math to say okay if there's you know one measurement here and then the next unrolling is here you can kind of tell what's missing just by you know figuring out how much it expands out or you know contracts I guess so um they did a bunch of math formos on this and so um what they found in a big study that was done in dialogue it shows that the book of Abraham text would need at least 511 centimeters to fit the Scrolls interior but it most would be no more room than 56 centimeters missing which means they wouldn't have enough room to fit even one tenth of the book of Abraham in the missing interior of the scroll uh let alone the book Abraham is published by Joseph Smith so what when they sometimes to say that you know there was a section inside that contained The Book of Abraham but that was lost there's there's no room for it like mathematically speaking everything that should be with the scroll is there with one tiny little area and a lot of egyptologists can tell you basically what would normally be there so there's just no there's no variation in this scroll that would tell you that this is something unique or special yeah before this article was done in dialogue that calculated mathematically Claus bear who was an egyptologist um he he calculated just based on what it was supposed to be there because this document is something that we you know it's a common funery text just based on um on what what text was missing he calculated you know that it was around 23 inches that was missing and that's super close to the mathematically uh uh number that that dialog gone so we have two different studies one done by just you know egyptology alone based on well it's supposed to be there and what's missing uh and one done mathematically and both basically tell us the same number of inches that are missing which is around 22 inches yeah and you don't even need the math you just you know the this this type of a funerary text or scroll appears all over Egypt and so you've got egyptologists today that will tell you we've got dozens and dozens of these and we know how long they are and they're not 80 feet long you know we know exactly how long these Scrolls tend to be and they're all saying that that there's no way that the type of plausible deniability the Mormon book of Abraham egyptologists are trying to inject into the scroll to make it long or lengthy to invent this fictional potential there's just no way that's real it's made up and and and then when you match that with with Carrie bolstein admitting that they start with the fact that the book of Abraham is true that gives away their motivated reasoning for why they're creating the long or the law scroll Theory they've got to do that to somehow make room for Joseph's clearly uh false translation yeah and to make it as simple as possible if you look at facsimile three and you look at the characters that are on there that Joseph Smith translate if Joseph Smith gets them correct if he gets those those translations correct not a single person on Earth is going to say Joseph Smith got it wrong because you don't need it you don't even care if there's a missing scroll because he got that right and he shouldn't have been able to get it right on the flip side because Joseph Smith got that wrong and because he got the parts wrong on the Papyrus fragment that we just showed uh that end up being in the early parts of the book of Abraham it just doesn't matter if you create new material because he couldn't do it and that's why you know I keep harping on this but at some point it feels silly that apologists are trying to tell us that if you just look for more material it's going to flip the script it's not and that's why it just becomes kind of like one of those things where everybody outside of the Mormon church that knows Egyptian scholarship just looks at this and rolls her eyes because they're like they they know exactly what they're looking at there's no surprise here there's nothing on that scroll that says that this is any different than the other does the Scrolls that we have so there's just no reason to expect anything different yeah um I have an image that I just want to show really quick just uh but this one so this one shows the whole scroll what we have right now you know this Mike was showing uh the uh facingly number one the text here is the text in which Joseph was translating and then you know we still have all this and this is what's missing like this section 21 inches like that's how long uh it would be and that's basically Claus bear said two columns of Egyptian texts there's no way the book of Abraham could fit there yeah and if you look at the picture that Gerardo is showing the beginning of it is facts only three the end of it is fact simile one and so when the book of Abraham tells you that one of the images is at the beginning of the record once at the commencement of the record that's what we have and so it's not again that there'd be some other book that would have something different it's just it is like finding Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss with like three pages missing and claiming that the remainder that's missing is the text for Les Miserables yeah it is it is I mean it's just it is and yeah and and this is when I was doing the website and doing these slides you just sometimes you sigh because if Carrie milstein or John Gee were presented with that similar scenario for literally anything else they would immediately go Oh no they're totally making it up and yet you're invoke this special pleading against the evidence and I've tried saying this in other episodes as well well a lot of times they'll say well if Joseph Smith had gotten the translation correct there would be no need to have faith because we would already have evidence and I always like flip that around I say you know faith is and I was taught this both as a convert and in my previous um more Protestant background that faith is believing in things we can't see we can't prove um and I would argue that faith is not believing in things that we can prove did not happen like you know it's one of those things where you know I you know I could have faith that the sky is going to turn you know purple tomorrow uh but but if it doesn't turn purple and I continue to believe it that's not faith that is something different and so that apologetic drives me nuts because they know from their background that they are on the shakiest of ground and they kept they keep presenting it with such confidence to members because they want members to trust in their academic background and it is just so dishonest even if they don't intend it to be It ultimately is a very dishonest approach to this data yeah yeah it would kind of be like a doctor like a medical doctor that basically tells people a tumor was caused by possibly aliens you know what I mean like like that we we don't it's not a doctor's job if you're going to use your credentials in your education as a way to have credibility for your argument to then make an argument that completely defies the discipline that you're supposedly an expert of that's that's why ghee sorry that's why rittner and class bear and others are so angry at gee and molstein not because of ad hominem attacks but because they're using their their pedigrees their education their degrees and their claims as Scholars to make irresponsible arguments so we we've been we've kind of covered that okay and I want to beat that dead horse just one more time because here's the thing when you are going to join like for me as a convert or anyone who's born in the church you are being asked to dedicate your life to a church you are being asked to give 10 of your money to give countless hours of time to give ending loyalty to wear underwear with Masonic symbols on it to join this church and these apologists know that they're using their academic background to push something that does not work and so it'll be one thing if this was just some fun Club this is something you have to dedicate your life to and they know that they are pushing apologetics that would not pass peer review in any Journal which is why they do not publish it there and instead publish it in the church and so for me you know the reason people get upset is because you are using your academic background to encourage people to join and dedicate their lives to a church that does not live up to its own truth claims and I think that is why I don't view it just as a as like a a small amount of dishonesty I view it as bringing somebody in under false pretenses and full well knowing that what they're telling people uh in these articles or in these Deseret Books I know Kerry molstein wrote a book called like let's talk about the book of Abraham they are not giving members a full picture intentionally so that they stay in and I think that is why this is so important to cover in in Greater detail in these episodes all right well let's jump to the next slide which is the long lost scroll references are late and problematic and this is one you'll hear John Gee talk about this a lot at Kerry milstein and it's in the church's essay where they kind of say there are all these references to people talking about this long long scroll which means that it must be lost forever and therefore we don't have the source material and you know the references to the long and lost scroll idea um they come from second and third hand stories told 50 to 60 years later and so Hugh Nibley Unearthed this um Source basically saying that they unrolled this long scroll and I think it went through like a hallway or something and then when you dig into it it turns out it was something that his uncle claimed to have heard from Joseph Smith's nephew George A Smith when he was just five years old nibbly heard the story 63 years later and so um you know Nibley cites no source for this assertion but almost certainly refers to the recollection of Joseph F Smith that nibbly cited earlier in the same year that I think he wrote it in a book and so this was in a dialogue article and so you know ironically enough you know the the church's essay points to Brian hoglid um who was uh someone who defended the long or lost scroll theory for a long time but as he studied this by working on the Joseph Smith paper project he actually completely reversed course and we'll get to that in the next slide and so they're using a sword just for those who don't understand what we just said so there's basically some sort of source that that Nibley so there's a few sources historical sources it's like a a 19th century church history figure claims that they enrolled the Papyrus and it went all the way down the hall there's one source that mentions that okay but it turns out that that source is something that nibbly heard from someone who saw it when they were five years old 50 years after and then he heard could a five-year-old 50 years after the you know could somebody claim that when there were five they saw a super long scroll is that a credible source is that right I just want to make sure right okay yeah and the the quote is if I'm not sure if this is the exact quote from the book but it says this I think this is from the dialogue article it says we are told that the papyri were in beautiful condition when Joseph Smith got them and that one of them went unrolled on the floor extended through two rooms of the mansion house and so they're basically saying that that quote tells you that those mounted fragments we have cannot possibly be anywhere near the full complete collection and what they don't tell you is like I said this is a a a quote an account from someone who is trying to recall when they were five years old and I think like I said 63 years later it's being you know recorded down that's a problem and the other problem too is that you know the church bought multiple Scrolls we know that they bought a scroll that Joseph had identified as the writings of Joseph so you know that's another problem too because you have these Scrolls um that would you know it just it doesn't change what we do have I guess that's why I just it's so crazy to to use a a very um sketchy account to try to push the idea that that means we have a long scroll one I they would never accept those kind of late Recollections from a five-year-old in any other you know venue so Gerardo what are you showing us there so that that's what he was saying is this girl of Jose what Joseph identified as a scroll of Joseph okay yeah so he had this and then he had this one which was the longer one uh we are missing this part but yeah Yeah so basically Gerardo is showing his visual rep you know representation of how long the Scrolls could possibly be and there's no way these Scrolls went went across two rooms yeah there's no way and and you know I I get that they'll say that I mean to a lay person because there's uh two junkies and Nielsen's credit there are some sources that mention a long scroll but what does long scroll means you know like a scroll that's you know a couple feet uh wide I would say it's a long scroll right you know yeah yeah okay all right so you're saying now that Brian haglid uh Brian hoglet we should we talk about who he is because Brian hoglid used to work for BYU as one of their top book of Abraham apologists and since then he's left retired from BYU and he has recanted um you know everything basically everything every book of Abraham apologetic he's to make he's now that he's in safe retirement recanted and said he no longer stands behind he actually did it when well he was a BYU right right yeah yeah but go ahead do you want to give us this back up background and then tell us what we're about to see yeah and so like I said the church's essay is going to cite Brian hoglet as you know the person that's telling us that the long scroll is a valid Theory and so if we go to the next slide uh Brian hogler this is uh in 2018 so by I think four three or four years after the book Abraham essay comes out um you know it says you know at the top just read there's also an argument that the book Abraham was on papyri that we no longer have it's called The Missing papyri Theory at least from my perspective anyway I found evidence that argues against that um that they were working off the papyri that we actually have in the church today so that is Brian hoglet Eddie presentation of 2018 where he's basically saying because remember Brian hogland worked on the Joseph Smith paper project he had access to everything and so during that time during all of the access to all of these documents he realized by you know being open to the evidence that the missing Papyrus theory that he had held that he I believe he wrote a whole book on it he realized the evidence actually points completely against it and can I read that second quote is that okay yeah yeah please do this is my and this is my friend Brian hogwood's a friend of mine this is what he wrote Gerardo you're saying this as well he was still at BYU yeah yeah he writes for the record is Brian hogwood working for the Maxwell Institute at BYU right yeah for the record I no longer hold the views that have been quoted from my 2000 book in these the Dan Vogel videos in fact I'm no longer interested or involved in apologetics in any way I wholeheartedly agree with Dan vogel's excellent assessment of the Abraham Egyptian documents in these videos one can find that I I've changed my mind in my recent and forthcoming Publications the most recent Joseph Smith papers Revelations and translation volume 4 the book of April so this is important because the the the church's publication of the Joseph Smith papers project which Brian hugley was an editor off of that volume he agrees with Dan Vogel one of the biggest critics of you know the book of Abraham and Joseph Smith basically the church's publication agrees with them Vogel about not being a missing like the missing growth Theory doesn't hold water right and this is this that episode on Civil War which is basically John Gee and and Kerry molstein against the churches Joseph Smith papers project this is what that talks about uh in depth as well um yeah so to go back this is again um this is again Brian howgood saying quote the most as a BYU professor at The maximal Institute quote the most recent Joseph Smith papers Revelations and translation volume 4 um the book of Abraham and related manuscripts now on the shelves is much more open to dance thinking on the origin of the book of Abraham I now reject a missing Abraham manuscript I agree that two of the Abraham manuscripts were simultaneously dictated I agree that the Egyptian papers were used to produce the book of Abraham I agree that only Abraham won one um through 218 were produced in 1835 ended Abraham 219 through 521 were produced in Nauvoo and on and on I no longer agree with ghee or molstein I find their opponent energetic scholarship and he's got scholarship in quotes on the book of Abraham abhorrent okay that's a BYU professor calling Gian molstein abhorrent not them abhorrent their scholarship abhorrent not ad hominem he's attacking their scholarship and um my friend Brett Metcalf can attest to my transformative journey and again that's a Brian hoglid Facebook post on November 8 2018 with emphasis added so kudos to my dear friend Brian hoglid Ryan hoglett for being willing to say I apologize I was wrong I was unintentionally misleading people and I I now am open about changing and I would say that you know Robin Robin Jensen and all of the scholars even Spencer fluman all of the scholars who are like actually credible you know Joe Smith papers or church historian Scholars agree with molstein Vogel and the Joe Smith papers project and disagree with and distance themselves from ghee and molstein am I overstating that Gerardo no I don't think so okay all right all right Mike uh do we want to go to the next slide yeah yeah I think we're good I mean like I said it's just it helps to illustrate why the long scroll is so problematic once you start to really address the data which we're doing here obviously Brian hoglett can do that in a lot more detail Brent Metcalf could do a lot more detail Dan Vogel and like I said at the beginning of this episode if you want to dive in further please do but I'm just telling you it does not get better it only makes it more clear that this does not work in any possible way all right let's go to the fact that Charlotte Havens account is frequently cited what's that and this is one you'll hear John Gee cite this a lot and Carol molstein will cyphus to say that there was absolutely this long scroll that was still intact after the book of Abraham fragments were already mounted so what they'll say is that after the the fragments were mounted there was still this long scroll and people would pay the Smith family to go in and they could see the mummies and they could see the Scrolls um Joseph's mom would constantly tell people all these are the writings of Abraham I mean so there's no question there that they believe that was a source material and so um this is an account from Charlotte Haven that's very frequently referenced so dialogue had addressed this in their article about the length of the scroll and so they say several eyewitnesses were also shown mounted fragments that were identified as abrahamic writings these were evidently the extent fragments from The Fragile outer end of the horse scroll Charlotte Haven's descriptions of the writings of Abraham and Isaac as a long Scroll of manuscript suggests that the horror document was the longer of the two Scrolls in Joseph's possession however it should also be recognized that with no congruous reference available to form an impression the word long to Charlotte likely meant anything longer than the paper on which she wrote to her mother and that's what Gerardo said earlier it's like if I took a group of kids and they didn't understand like the the sizes of pages and I gave them legal size paper to do a project on and you went home and you said hey what kind of paper did you use they'd say well I used a really long piece of paper because to them it's longer than what you're used to and so to what Gerardo said earlier you know one and a half foot or two foot piece of paper is going to look pretty long and so when you tell someone about you're gonna say oh yeah they pulled out these really long pieces of paper it doesn't mean that it's a 20-foot roll that goes across two rooms and that is where from an apologic standpoint you're going to use these little words to try to just drive right through it and say see it's super long but in reality it doesn't actually show anything outside the fact that it's longer than the standard piece of paper right right okay Gerardo you want to add anything to that yeah no just just I agree like uh whenever John because John and and uh jungi and Carrie Nielsen love these quotes about mentioning long Scrolls some of them are questionable and I mean at the end of the day what long would mean anything longer than the papers that they were usually or used to seeing so yeah yeah it's like you know if you buy a pair of shorts at the store and some of them go above your knee and some might go like you know wear like basketball shorts they might go a couple inches below your knee you're gonna say you might say hey I bought a pair of long shorts I go play basketball and then then John Key would say oh that must mean that the shorts were 20 feet long and we're dragging behind you it just it they're trying to make something out of out of a reference that is completely not demanding that kind of inference and it just shows that like I said these are the way it's that you find these little words to attach to to say see this could work and it just it just doesn't and I don't know how else to say it I I feel like if you're a Believer watching this you might be looking at me rolling your eyes and going every time we talk about this you just shut it down but it's just because there's nowhere where the evidence says that this is possible and yet they keep finding these quotes and then misrepresenting them and there was a part in I believe it's in your series with Dr rittner where John Gee in one of his writings takes two separate quotes combines them and kind of melds them into one quote to make it sound a lot more um helpful than it is and it's it's one of those things where it's like you could see the games they're playing by taking two quotes and just basically making it into one to make it sound a lot more powerful when the two quotes by themselves don't say what he's trying to make it say and it just shows the lengths they're going to to make this work even though they know from their own background and study it just there's no way right okay so that kind of puts to bed the long or the law scroll Theory now we're going to jump to the next um major book of Abraham Theory which really is where the church is today and it's called The Catalyst Theory and just because I like to do this I'm going to give quick this super like 30 second introduction the Catalyst Theory and I know we're going to talk about it in detail but it's basically the argument that even though Joseph Smith said he was translating Egyptian Papyrus even though in in the Doctrine and Covenants Joseph Smith is referred to as a prophecy Revelator and translator even though you know everyone understood Joseph to have claimed that he was literally translating Papyrus Egyptian from the Papyrus to the book of Abraham in spite of all that the the Mormon Church in 2022 you know people like um Richard Bushman or Terrell and Fiona Givens Spencer fluman even Patrick Mason and others they would say that what actually was happening was that God sent Michael Chandler to Kirtland to bring the mummies and the Papyrus to Joseph so that he would then have some artifacts in his possession that would then Inspire him to channel a revelation to produce the book of Abraham um and that that it was required that he have some sort of papyrus in his hand to then just give him the the revelatory juice and superpowers that he needed to channel this Revelation direct from God even though he told everybody that he was translating and thought he was that's the Catalyst Theory did I did I summarize that right uh Gerardo and and Mike he got it right yeah that's okay so I I just wanted to give that kind of John John description and now Mike will turn it over you to give us the more accurate detailed description well you know it's always good too to have like kind of your description too versus this one because this is going to be directly from the church's essay and so um you know the cattle series is one the church really needs to just focus on because it basically is defending the book of Abraham a scripture uh by telling us that it's more about Revelation than it is about translation and so from the essay they say alternatively Joseph's study of the papyri may have led to a revelation about key events and teachings in the life of Abraham much as he had earlier received a revelation about the life of Moses while studying the Bible this view assumes a broader definition of the words translator and translation according to this view Joseph's translation was not a literal rendering of the papyri as a conventional translation would be rather the physical artifacts provided indication for meditation reflection and Revelation they catalyze a process whereby God gave to Joseph Smith a revelation about the life of Abraham even if that Revelation did not directly correlate to the characters on the papyri and so the church is really just trying to alleviate the problem of why the Papyrus has nothing to do with Abraham while leaving this opening to promote faith that Joseph Smith wasn't just making it up and really at the end of the day the Catalyst theory is just basically saying take our word for it against the evidence but honestly it's really the only place that they should be putting any energy in these days because of the fact that there is no missing scroll as we've already shown just by looking at the manuscripts and the text of the book Abraham itself even though as we're going to show it's still full of problems yeah and we're going to talk about this more in depth right now I I just want to highlight for me I've already said this but the biggest problem for me with the book of Abraham theory is that it goes against what Joseph Smith himself said he was doing what he told everybody he was doing what everybody understood him to be doing and what the introduction of the book of Abraham actually says which is that it's from the hand of Abraham from these Papyrus all of that should just destroy this Theory before we even dig into it am I wrong or you're right yeah 100 yeah okay so in spite of the fact that it's just it's ridiculous and doesn't require any more explanation there's additional evidence that gives the Catalyst Theory so let's go ahead and jump into the next slide which is the book of Abraham itself kills the capital city go ahead yeah and we don't have to read all these verses but just to say that the Abraham won 12-14 her the callus area in the exact same way it does it along scroll Theory because they are referring you to the facsimiles and so in in verse 12 it says that you may have a knowledge of this altar I will refer you to the representation at the commencement of this record verse 14 says that you may have an understanding of these Gods I have given you the fashion of them uh at the beginning so they're referring it effects only one and three and so those verses make clear that the book Abraham is directly related to the facsimiles which means they're directly related to the Papyrus fragments that Joseph Smith has and so it to just to then say that God was tricking Joseph into thinking he was translating something when he wasn't why would then God refer to in fact somebody have nothing to do with the book Abraham it would be the most ridiculous thing for anyone to do like if you're trying to teach somebody a revelation you're not going to then add stuff that makes it you know shown you know completely to be a fraud and so those verses kill the idea of the Catalyst area because then you have to say why is God basically trying to hang Joseph out to look like a fraud yeah because the text of the book of Abraham itself refers to the actual Papyrus and claims to be substantiating Joseph's translation in the revealed scriptural text yeah this means you can't squeak out of that right you can't you can't squeak out of it and you know again without condemning it without making God a liar yeah right making God a fool or a liar and that's why I heard years ago that that behind the scenes Terrell Gibbons actually recommended to the Mormon church that they removed the book of Abraham from the scriptural Canon like taken out of the Pearly gray price it can't you can't that much of a problem but as soon as you do that then it's like well why not the book of Moses and then why not why not Mormon and yeah the Doctrine and Covenants and all of a sudden you show the church Mormon church leaders to be just making stuff up yeah that's just it you can't I mean they'll never do it because it immediately it's the same but we've talked about this in previous episodes you'd have the parts of the Book of Mormon that tell us that Native Americans have dark skin because they are wicked you've got the parts of the book of Moses which make black skin a curse from God which is added into the Bible I mean you could go on and on and on and you know book Abraham um has a lot to you know a huge impact on this idea of a pre-existence I mean there you can't remove it without just pulling the whole you know the whole house of cards comes tumbling down if you start you know taking stuff out of the cannon it just would not and the color relation between the book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon like if you think about it you know the re one of the reasons why Joseph said he could translate the Papyrus because he had just finished translating reformed Egyptian for the so you if he can't translate real Egyptian what does that tell us about reformed Egyptian you know and when you look at compare and compare the introduction of the book of Abraham and the introduction of the Book of Mormon they're so similar um I've got a slide here I go I gotta show it but like the the introduction of the book of Abraham tells us that he's translated from the Papyrus uh ancient records that have fallen into our hands uh from the catacombs of Egypt the writings of Abraham while he was an object called The Book of Abraham written by his own hand upon Papyrus now does the church change that and and then if we look at the Book of Mormon like it's basically very similar introduction and a cat written by the hand of Mormon above blates so instead of a bumped by Pirates is up on plates and taken from the place of Nephi translated by Joseph Smith so he's basically the same wording yeah uh we just have a different book uh so it's just very problematic when you try you know when you go from um if the book of Abraham was a wrong translation and we gotta get rid of it what does that tell us about the Book of Mormon and it's worth it's worth injecting that that Robert written or the you know the world's expert on egyptology May rest in peace you know we asked him is there any such thing as reformed Egyptian and he said no that doesn't exist that's a made-up thing yeah yeah and why did why did Joseph make up reformed Egyptian because he had to claim that the Book of Mormon plates and the characters from the plates were a language that no one could possibly know or translate so that he could never be revealed as a fraud yeah he could have chose Hebrew right he could have chose Greek I could have chose Mayan right yeah but he had to invent a fake language so he could never be uncovered as a fraud and we have Robert rittner saying he reformed Egyptian isn't a thing it's it's a Church's burden to disprove Robert rittner not the other way around right yeah and if you look at the we talked about that in the translation episode The reformed Egyptian if you if you look at the characters it's just Joseph Smith taking the English alphabet English letters I guess Latin and just turning them around I mean it you can we showed it back then you can make every single letter and number in our alphabet into reformed Egyptian by just twisting it around so the idea that people came here and they would have spoke they would have used Hebrew right when they came here then they switched to Egyptian somehow it doesn't even make sense and yes the reason they didn't write in Hebrew on the plates is because if they had done that you would not need somebody to claim they were the only ones who could translate it but at the time there was a huge fascination with Egyptians you know all over the world Egypt stuff and Joseph knew nobody could could basically you know tell him he was wrong and I believe that's the case with the book Abraham because he did not know the Rosetta Stone was cracked at this point so when he does this he probably feels pretty confident that you know he can use this as a vehicle um to you to basically uh canonize his um ideas on the priesthood idea you know which book Abraham's heavily about the priesthood and so he uses this as a vehicle for his theology the problem is of course now we know that what he's doing is not actually ancient and the next episode will go into the actual text which tell you without even looking at the translation you can look at the book Abraham and go this is a 19th century writing just like we did with the Book of Mormon so the translation is obviously the obvious problem but the text doesn't make it any better really quickly two things one is uh one of the most damning things about the Book of Mormon is that if we had a major civilization with hundreds of thousands or millions of Warriors killing each other on mountaintops that all new and and read and spoke quote reformed Egyptian or even Hebrew then there would be artifacts or remnants of those languages in Aztec and mine and Incan uh civilizations and there's none and and that's that's a definitely if you care about science and evidence and Linguistics that's a Smoking Gun in and of itself the only other thing I just I either I've never got a good answer for this or I keep forgetting the answer but I still don't understand why Joseph didn't just claim that the the Golden Plates were written in Egyptian because if he if he knew that nobody could translate Egyptian hieroglyphics why did he go to the trouble of adding reformed to it because it because clearly he didn't think people could read and understand Egyptian why the need to take it even one step further and call it reformed Egyptian do we have an answer for that do I just keep forgetting it or is no one explained that I don't think any I I haven't heard an explanation but uh he had to invent the characters right so like at some point someone could have brought real Egyptian characters and say oh these are not Egyptians maybe he hadn't seen right enough real Egyptian characters right to be able to to to to to improve them okay that makes sense I heard someone else once say that reformed Egyptian was a way to further condense the amount of material you could get per character um but I don't I think Gerardo's is actually a better example because if you said like if I said hey I just got this really cool set of ancient records that were written in you know ancient Hebrew and I don't know the Hebrew characters it would look really it would look horrible um what he's doing in the book of Abraham when he's inventing characters on the sections that we're missing he's grabbing characters that already exist and like flipping them yeah you know using the characters that already exist and modifying them a little bit to create new invented characters but because he has you know he has a lot of examples of where to grab from but he didn't he didn't for the Book of Mormon that makes totally yeah all right well let's jump to the next slide which is the Catalyst Theory against the actual Source material yeah and this is the same image we showed earlier for the long scroll idea which is just it's just to show that the book of Abraham is telling you to look at facsimile one uh to understand the story that's being told and they're telling you that the characters that are being translated are right next to the facts Emily so again if you know if God is is is just giving Joseph Smith a revelation why is he then going out of his way to then uh Point readers of something that actually would show you that this is the source material it's just it's one of those things where like I said this is a problem for the long the the Lost Girl idea is also a problem for the Catalyst here because if the Catalyst area were more uh feasible I don't think you'd have so many things pointing directly to the scroll as a source of the translation yeah okay all right let's go to the next slide which is let's look again against the source material of the book of Abraham yep and so these are two different pictures of the manuscript um from earlier maybe they're the same ones actually I can't remember but um it's just I think these are a different copy of the manuscript but it's just showing um that Joseph Smith is pulling these characters he's pulling them sequentially um the second image if you're listening um it show the first image shows him pulling um from three sets of characters on the top line uh the second image shows him shows him pulling from uh three different uh four different groups of characters on the second line of the Papyrus and so it just shows um that we could see exactly where they're translating from and so the only way to make the Catalyst Theory work if you want to approach it this way is to say that God is literally tricking Joseph into thinking these characters are specifically lined up with certain verses and I think that just really stretches the balance of reality um because of the fact that you know as I said earlier why would God set Joseph Smith up to look like a fraud if God truly wants to grow his church to save us why is he making it the founding prophet look like a complete fraud it you cannot reconcile this problem with a god that actually wants to save everybody and the thing that people don't understand is that Joseph's early credibility was rooted in his claim of having special powers like it started and that's why again this LDS discussion series builds in really important ways it starts with him claiming to be able to find buried treasure using a stone and a hat that makes Jo and claiming to have magic artifacts let's not forget that so like word spreads through New York and New England whoa there's this dude with special powers with special artifacts that are magic who can do powerful magic things once that becomes a you know once he starts getting put in jail and his livelihood is threatened and his reputation starts to smear he's simply he kind of like extends that and says well I'm still magical I'm still magically powerful I still have magical artifacts I'll call him a urum and thumb them now and instead of taking people on illegal treasure digs where we never actually find any treasure well I'm going to create I'm in a reduce I'm going to use my magic and my magic artifacts to do something no one else can do which is translate ancient languages that are unknown and so it's an extension of his claim to have special powers to Special artifacts to produce a book that then he mixes with Christianity as a way to say I'm going to now become a religious genius and produce more scripture we've got the Bible but it's not solving enough theological problems there are all these questions they're all these sex so I'm going to produce more scripture that helps to resolve I'm going to claim to produce more scripture through translation through special power so that I can resolve all these disputes and then claim to be a modern Moses a modern Abraham a modern David or Peter or whatever that's the whole I don't want to call it Khan that's the whole game that Joseph Smith was playing so you've got to remember that that that that you know that's where his early power Drew from if he's actually not having special powers and actually not using Special artifacts to do exactly what he says he does well then it's a bait and switch then all these people are following him and believing in him and joining when really he's just I don't want to swear but he's just making stuff up right yeah just making stuff up that's a totally different proposition if he's just in 1830 whatever just making stuff up doing what what we call fan fiction kind of Bible fan fiction and just as is is literally no different than like somebody that takes a a um you know like a JK Rowling Harry Potter these sort of series and creates a new Harry Potter book in the Harry Potter universe you know using some of the same names that were in JK Rowling series that's the equivalent of what he did which is a lot less special than if he's using special powers to translate unknown ancient languages right yeah yeah I hope that rant was worthwhile no yes that's why when when you on Twitter you'll get people that reply all the time and they'll say oh my goodness he got so many hits in the book Abraham and I always go what do the characters in fact simile 3 say because that's what Joseph Smith is making a direct claim nobody can contend that those characters were lost because they're printed with the book Abraham so if those are wrong then Joseph Smith's claim that those were written by the hand of Abraham uh that's false when Joseph claims he's translating them that's false and so that's why the catalystory Falls away from that but as John said all of a sudden you're just completely changing the rules of the game here Joseph Smith claimed to be able to have powers to translate this papyri and he didn't do it and so now we say well he did do it or he didn't do it he wasn't trying to do it he was just getting Revelation he just didn't realize it and I think that just shows that the church realizes that they have no leg to stand on and so you just you go to something that you can't falsify because you're putting it out there in in an area that's indistinguishable from any kind of fraud and it really diminishes what Joseph Smith claimed he was doing in the 1830s and and at that point then you got to go well if Joseph Smith didn't know what he was doing there why are we supposed to believe other stuff and as we've been doing in these episodes it all ties together these are all problems that tie together throughout all of this stuff yeah so they basically want to say he wasn't a fraud he was a fool yeah he just didn't know any better yeah he thought he was doing something he wasn't actually doing is that an improvement like I don't know that that's an improvement we're going to show something harder we're going to show a slide uh no well I was just thinking about well it's not just a Papyrus you know it's not just the translation of the book of Ibraham he was naming the mummies he was saying this is Princess this is like this the papyri came from katumin who is a descendant from Kane and all this so like he was creating this whole story that's obviously not real because we know that the actual mummy who who the Papyrus was from was uh uh priest so you know like the cattle's theory has to extend to all this like yeah absolutely things that don't make a lot of sense because that's the thing well and you know like heaven stuff like the church is trying to make it sound yeah yeah and that's the problem like all of these things you then have to believe God again I've said this in previous episodes but the Mormon framing of God is a really bad manager if you want to believe this because the Mormon version of God is literally going to make a lot of people not want to join the church or leave the church because the Mormon version of God is going to make his founding Prophet look like like he didn't know what he was doing so if you're a manager and you're trying to grow your church if you're God and you want to save everybody why in the world would you take your first prophet and basically hang them out there to look like an absolute fraud by by proclaiming he's translating documents it makes no sense and so like you said earlier John like the church is now giving the Catalyst here but then you take a step back like is that really any better because now we don't know if we can trust any prophet of the this church that they actually are saying what's coming from God or what they think is coming from God you know and it's just you're opening up this door to the fact that this is so messy if you want to make it work and it just can't all reconcile back together you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube okay yeah all right well let's go to how Kerry molstein um frames this problem do you want to set this up or just play it yeah I just want to just really quickly state that our last few episodes or sorry last few slides have been showing the manuscript with the characters and showing how Joseph is translating directly from the characters so if you're watching this I want you to pay attention to the image that Carrie molstein is going to use in this clip it's very important if you're listening I'll explain it after the clip okay all right let's roll the tape in this first assumption is one of the ones that causes people the most problem most of the angst over the book of Abraham comes from this first assumption and that is an assumption about the source of the book of Abraham as people ask what was the source of the book of Abraham there was an immediate assumption made that it was the text that was next to facsimile one because you can see uh on on the screen that one of the fragments of papyri that survived is the original that facsimile one was made from and there are columns of text adjacent to it now this was a reasonable assumption that Joseph Smith would be translating from the text adjacent to it and I want to be clear it's not making assumptions that it's problematic we have to make assumptions if we're going to move forward in in furthering our knowledge we just have to test those assumptions and that's where the process failed early on most people made the assumption that Joseph Smith was translating the text next to facsimile one and didn't ever bother to test it uh and so many Latter-Day Saints were very excited they thought good now that we can translate Egyptian we can prove Joseph Smith was a prophet other people who were critics of the church were sure they could prove Joseph Smith was not a prophet we translate the text next to uh facsimile one and it turns out to be a fairly common Egyptian funerary document called The Book of readings and because everyone had made the assumption that he was translating from the text adjacent to it uh an argument that we call an argument of propinquity which is a not typically seen as a wonderful argument uh but in any case they this seemed like game over to many people um and Mike and Gerardo are both like shaking their heads all right I'll let you go first and then Mike yeah I mean the reason he holds his position is he because he dismisses the translation documents right so that documents that have the characters on the left and the and the uh translation on the right he wants to say that was not Joseph Smith that was the script uh the scribes you know decorating the margins on the um on of the text you know or separating paragraphs by just grabbing random characters and he doesn't want to admit that they were saying that the paragraph corresponded to the translation of the character itself so he wants to say well because that's not real because the translation documents are not reliable we really don't know um what the uh where the translation from the book of Abraham came from uh what are the characters that correspond to the book of Abraham and I mean it's all the evidence points out that the translation documents we have Joseph was actively engaged in that and you know they show us over and over and over again in the outfit and grammar and all the translation documents they produce that they were grabbing the characters like from the left of the um oh facingly number one right and Mike you've got a slide that that takes us right into that yeah yeah into it yeah so I just want to point out that's why I told people uh anyone watching this to pay attention to the image she shows because if you look at the image on the screen this has got facsimile one this is the image we've shown a couple times in this episode and then on the left of the characters he translated from so Kerry molstein is going to spend that entire clip only showing effects only one and the characters on the right to tell us that we were making a bad assumption in thinking he was translating the characters to the right effect similarly one while not putting on the screen the characters on the left that we do know he translated from it is the most honest framing you're going to see because he's not showing you the full picture he's intentionally showing you the wrong side of the facsimile because he knows that the right side was not translated in the book of Abraham manuscripts so he's showing you the wrong side on purpose to say if you thought he was translating these characters you made a bad assumption and he's not giving you the full information like it is so badly dishonest to show the image that way and then to blame people who made the Assumption he was actually translating from the Papyrus fragment I came afraid and then you know he keeps saying well we need to have assumptions but we can't make wrong assumptions yeah so do you know who's making the assumption that Joseph Smith is translating the character's next effects Emily one it's the book of Abraham like Kerry molstein is is in doing this talk at fair and he's making it sound like it's critics of the church making the Assumption the book of Abraham tells us they are translating next to facsimile one and we can show from the fragment that we have that the church has in their possession and the manuscripts that he's translating from the characters just to the left of it so not only is he completely misleading on who's making the Assumption because it's written in the book Abraham but he's not showing the audience the full image because he doesn't want them to see on the left side is where he's actually pulling from it is the most dishonest bait and switch you're ever going to see to show the wrong side of the image and then to kind of like you know blame the people who read the book Abraham and said oh he's translating next to the facsimile it's just it's it's incredible to me yeah it's it's both um creating plausible doubt creating plausible deniability out of nothing misinforming withholding information and then what what is called in the cult literature blame reversal you're blaming the victims when this is you know Joseph Smith himself said what he's doing the text of the book of Abraham itself says you know what's going on here so yeah it is really detestable and it's why Gian molstein you know invokes such past passion and nibbly invokes such passionate anger uh you know from people like rittner and rfm and you know uh Brett Metcalf and Dan Vogel and all the others because it really is their Temple you know Carrie molstein and John Gee their Temple recommends should be taken away for for deception and dishonesty because they know what they're doing well yeah they're too smart they're they're again they're trading on their their backgrounds as alleged Scholars to intentionally deceive and mislead people yeah that he would not have had that image without intentionally wanting to keep the right side in in the left side out because every image I've seen when you read about the book Abraham focuses on the left side of the facts only because that's where we know the fact the the um characters are coming from so for him to intentionally leave that out just tells you that he doesn't want people to see it it would be like you know um you know you've got a group photo and let's just say I'm trying to think of like a completely non-controversial person but let's say Adam Sandler and you're like yeah um a lot of people assumed Adam Sandler was there but if you look at this photo he wasn't and then you find out later that the presenter just cropped out the left side where Adam Sandler was standing there giving you know thumbs up it's just it's it's so dishonest because he knows what these Source materials look like so to do that image tells you that he's trying to withhold information and as you said the church's own definition of honesty in their manual tells you that leaving out information is is not being honest and he is doing that and it's just it's so frustrating to see that combined with blaming people for making it an assumption that's written into the book of Abraham it's just crazy to me yeah all right so let's go to your next slide which is that the cows Theory it makes a trickster God look like a foolish God yeah and so this I've kind of already highlighted on so we don't really need to harp on this but it's just the manuscript images show Joseph Smith is translating the symbols next to facsimely one which we've talked about a lot and that's explicitly where they're pointing the reader to look to from the book of Abraham and so it eliminates the long lost scroll because we could see that we have the source material at least for that early part of the book Abraham it also eliminates the Catalyst Theory because why in the world would God want to make Joseph Smith look like a fraud by referring the readers to something that doesn't match what the text says um you know and so just to say if Joseph was you know studying the Egyptian words and characters led to an inspired Revelation or vision of the story of Abraham why would that Vision also lead Joseph Smith to wreck the reader to something completely unrelated to the actual story um you know and again you don't see the church mention this in their essay and you can understand why they don't want to do that because the entire theory that they're putting forth in these essays falls apart if they were to put up the image of the source material next to the manuscripts and so um just to kind of finish that if you look at facsimile one which we've shown a lot you could see the portions that Joseph Smith filled in the Lacuna and they don't match what egyptologists know should be there and so if Joseph Smith was truly receiving a revelation of this story wouldn't he then be given the correct information and inspiration from God to fill in the Lacuna correctly we showed that last episode he got the Lacuna in affectionately one wrong he improperly filled in fact simile too um and so it just shows that if the Catalyst theory was was real why is Joseph filling in with improper characters it just wouldn't make any sense yeah I have a good image of that here so again this is what you were talking about the fact similar number one and then the left is are the characters where they're grabbing from and the sections that were missing they were just inventing characters um and we and and this is in the order they're put in the translation documents so that's why we know they were grabbing them uh they were grabbing the characters in order and going one by one translating paragraph by paragraph yep yeah it's a good way to look at it yeah and then I I just had the thought to extend the trickster God Theory just a little bit further in in addition to all the absurdities that you highlighted Mike you know in 2022 the the trickster God continues his tricks by having half of his Egyptian Scholars within the modern Mormon church support one theory that is non-credible and then an entire another church-sponsored church funded set of egyptologists and Scholars who who agree with me you know Mormon Voldemort and Gerardo and Dan Vogel and Brett Metcalf people that have literally been excommunicated for telling the truth based on evidence and science for decades now we're supposed to believe that the church itself is funding competing theories about the book of Abraham paying your tithing dollars at work to pay for competing irreconcilable theories on the book of Abraham and that God would allow that to happen in his one true church that God would use sacred tithing dollars to fund competing irreconcilable opposite theories around the book of Abraham and somehow we're supposed to make sense of that as members of the church that's that's a you know if God speaks to His prophets he should just say hey Russell M Nelson shut down those those losers ghee and molstein they're making they're causing people to leave the church shut those fools down stop using precious tithing money to allow those fools to mislead people and to deceive people and let's let's get the whole church on the same page regarding what the true argument is that's what a honest straightforward God would do in my opinion if God were leading his one true church with the prophet that's got the bat phone directly to God yeah maybe that's unreasonable but that's if God's any other way I'm not sure that's a God I want to bother follow and base my life on that's me Gerardo I agree yeah you agree yep okay all right so um so let's go ahead and go to the next uh slide which is John Gee explaining so John Gee is attacking the theory that that Richard Bushman and Terrell Gibbons and the entire Joseph Smith papers project along with Patrick Mason and Spencer fluman here we're going to have church funded scholar John Gee attack uh a theory that actually is the prevailing Theory that's in that's in the gospel topics essay on the book of Abraham right yeah I mean it's just to me it's funny just because this is John Gee basically going directly after Kerry molstein because care I mean he's not personally but Kerry molstein is everyone Associates with the Catalyst Theory John Key everyone Associates do you mean terrible Givens or no uh Kerry molstein is the one that really pushes the Catalyst Theory more so and so John I mean obviously uh the progressive Scholars within Mormonism all go cattle series because they can see what we've shown it doesn't work and like Richard Bushman literally calls the book Abraham pseudopigrapha so Richard Bushman in a presentation said Joseph Smith was engaging in pseudopigraphy with the book of Abraham meaning that he's writing in the name of someone else in order to give a credibility so there's no doubt there uh but yeah I mean I think this is funny just because what John said you've got two egyptologists in the church one is long scroll one is catalyst and here the long scroll proponent is going to tell you why the other person's Theory doesn't make sense so that you're about to hear the Mormon Church attack itself attack itself yeah in a roundabout way yeah Abraham scholarship all right so let's hear John Gee I'm I'm open to the the Catalyst Theory I considered it seriously for years I haven't considered it seriously in years because it does there's not enough evidence for it and there's more evidence to indicate that Joseph Smith okay so one of the pieces of evidence besides the statement that Joseph Smith makes when he introduces the book of Abraham that this is records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt but there's also one of the last discourses he made in Nauvoo quotes language from the book of Abraham and Joseph Smith said that he got that it says it's Abraham's reasoning and says that he learned it from just translating a Papyrus that's in his house I mean this is where I'm an actually side with Gian molstein because he's right the canvas theory is com is made out of nothing and it makes it makes again Joseph and God look like either frauds or tricksters and all the evidence shows that that what Joseph Smith claimed was that he was translating Egyptian so in that sense Gian molstein are actually right that there's no evidence for the Catalyst Theory other than it being an argument made out of desperation to that respects Scholars Egyptian scholarship and science that then makes up a weird Theory out of whole cloth to try and rescue Joseph Smith and or God from being either frauds or or tricksters so in that sense gee and mostin I actually right I side with them you like them on this part yeah just on this part yeah right I think it's interesting that he was quoting the introduction of the book of Abraham but he and he started saying these are uh documents that came to us uh from the catechisms uh catacombs of Egypt but then he forgets to to quote also that it was supposed to be written by Abraham on his own hand upon Papyrus he forgot that part right Mike anything you want to add to that no like I said I just I think it's true because that's the problem is once you understand the Catalyst Theory goes against how Joseph Smith was portraying it then you can't you have to abandon it and then once you abandon it you have to find something which is why now we just go well there must be some lost scroll that had you know as Gerardo said that was with mummies that were done a thousand years later but they got this Thousand-Year earlier scroll attached to it you know it's just right no matter which way you go it's gonna work but yeah I I agree with with uh John G as far as why the callus series just doesn't work and just to kind of provide uh more evidence for for this is against the Catalyst Theory basically is just you you've got like what 10 quotes of Joseph Smith 's writing that it was an explicit translation do you want to take us through that right yeah and so we did that we I had the slide in the last episode too so we don't need to read them all but there's all these different data points from Joseph Smith's um journals where he's talking about translating the book Abraham and so you've got in July of 1835 there's two entries about him translating uh the characters of hieroglyphics um October in November of 1835 we've got more where he's talking about translating the Egyptian records um right these are from the journals where he is having his scribes write down form what he did that day so he's writing I you know I commence the translation of some of the characters right and I think I think in the history of the church he It Was Written I think originally the journals were written in third person and then when they did the history of the church they changed it to first person so um like say Warren Parish was described he might Roy you know president Smith spent the afternoon uh recommencing translation from the ancient records and then when they did it for the history they changed it to first person but it's it's the same thing it's just depending how you want to frame it and then you know it just shows all the way into 1842 commence translating from the book of Abraham in the afternoon continued the translation of the book of Abraham um which we talked about last episode is important because one of the um issues for like the uh the Gale uh was that it all had to have been written in 1835 or else they lose that reverse engineering argument you know it just shows Joseph Smith believe he was translating um and it gives you the time frame that's why Brian hogland agrees with Dan Vogel about when the first part was written in 1835 the rest of it was in 1842 and to then fall into the Catalyst Theory means you have to basically argue that everything Joseph believed he was doing is wrong um you have to go it's just it goes against everything and it just it really shows that once to me once you do the Catalyst Theory I mean they're going that way with the Book of Mormon too by calling it you know some of the leaders are starting to call it his grandest Revelation well it's because with the Book of Mormon 2 we have all of the textual problems that tell you it's not what it claims to be and it's just how many times you have to have somebody redefine what Joseph himself was saying he was doing before you take a step back and go oh yeah he had no idea what he was doing I I to me that's what it's just like how many how many red flags do you need before you go oh this you know these you cannot wish these away yeah right and again it's the the problem is that it's not just the book of Abraham I think the Catalyst Theory would make a lot more a little bit more sense to me um if Joseph had sat down and started dictating the book of Abraham what we have right now the reality is that he sat down for months and months and months and was dictating uh just random stuff you know like things that are not published by the church today other than in the Joseph Smith papers project but um you know you know there's like a whole thing about uh the astronomy of the Egyptians that he translated you know and you know this again the story of uh princess katumin and all like all this stuff that he was translating it had nothing to do with the book of Abraham uh but that you know he was using to show his powers that he could actually translate Egyptian um it just that all falls apart if you are trying to say that this was all for Spirit spiritual purposes God was just revealing this little book of Abraham here yeah it doesn't make sense I kind of begs the question though you know did Joseph think he was actually translating you know so the one option is he was knowingly intentionally deceiving everyone around him but that's a kind of an elaborate con because he's sitting there you know creating the grammar enough that he's he's you know creating what becomes the what Abraham Egyptian papers or whatever and he's got all these dudes around him watching him claim to be translating so either he was deluded and thought he was translating or it was an elaborate con do you guys have an opinion about which it might have been uh no I mean it sounds kind of weird to say I just to me that doesn't matter because he still didn't get it right so it's kind of like you know because you have a lot of people I think if you look through history I mean even like look at something like the Waco series or Warren Jeffs I think on some level they believe that they have this Divine gift but we obviously know they did not and so maybe he did start to believe in himself a little too much I I don't know but I guess to me it's like the finished product tells you it's not ancient it's not from you know like I said our next episode of going to the text of it even the text of it you can see all sorts of anachronisms and biblical scholarship errors so I mean even the text doesn't really line up with it being historical in any way either so I guess to me it doesn't matter although I guess it does it obviously is important to Joseph's mischaracter as to whether or not he knew he was deceiving people or not but I guess from from the perspective of like is it real I guess it doesn't matter to me got it okay well let's now jump to the next slide which is facts only three creates the biggest Smoking Gun for Josie Smith yeah and so we've hit on this a few times now but again this is like to me facts only three is the most important part of the book Abraham because no matter what argument you want to make if you want to say there's a missing scroll or callous Theory this kills it and so if there was a missing scroll facsimile 3 tells us it doesn't even matter because Joseph Smith could not translate Egyptian characters if you're looking at this um on video um you obviously could see it if you're listening on facts only three there are different figures that Joseph Smith gives explanations for and he literally will say uh king Pharaoh whose name is given in the characters above his head and so he's directly translating characters on facts only three nobody can argue those are missing nobody can argue that they're incorrect so Joseph Smith is translating things that they copied down perfectly got him he got him wrong and so if there was a missing scroll like I said earlier it wouldn't matter because we know he can't translate Egyptian and then if you're gonna go with the Papyrus being a catalyst why is God giving Joseph Smith incorrect explanations of these figures when they would have no relevance to the story that God would have just skipped it and said or just not given any Revelation there's no reason to give Revelation for something that would show you to be making it up yeah it's pretty clear and we talked about that last episode right yeah yeah all right so uh next slide is look at how Joseph Smith describes the translation process yeah and this is um a quote that I think is actually important to kind of a lot of times they'll say well translation doesn't mean translation you know um that's a hat tip to uh brother Jake if you've never seen his YouTube channel he does a video about uh that with the book Abraham um and so they'll say translation doesn't mean translation but look at how Joseph Smith describes the process of translating the title page of the Book of Mormon he says I wish to mention here that the title page of the Book of Mormon is a literal translation taken from the very last leaf on the left hand side of the collection or book of plates which contain the record which has been translated the language of the whole running the same as all Hebrew writing in general and that said title page is not by any means a modern composition either of mine or of any other man who has lived or does live in this generation therefore in order to correct an error which generally exists concerning it I give below that the part of the title page of the English version of The Book of Mormon which is a genuine and literal translation of the title page of the original Book of Mormon as recorded on the plates so I just want to make clear Joseph Smith is literally viewing translation here using the word literal as taking one language and putting it to another and so when you say Joseph Smith meant translation differently than than we do today just read that quote I know it's about the Book of Mormon not the book of Abraham but again that's how he views translation and so then to say that the book of Abraham introduction it says you know records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt written by Abraham a Papyrus by his own hand he means translation in the same sense as he does here there's no way to get around that and so to try to play these games of like well he didn't mean translation he meant translation I think it's just a dishonest grasping of trying to find a way out when there isn't one Gerardo why are you laughing because I quote I mean I've heard that quote before but I never put it into into this context of you know apologies trying to say that World Translation might mean something else let's look what the dictionary said about translation during that time and see if Joseph was meeting something else maybe you understand what he was saying you know he he's using the word literal this is a literal translation and he says it like three times and then tells you where where he found it and what plate he found it like yeah there's no way around it yeah it's like no go go ahead John yeah sometimes I've gotten I've shown frustration with Richard Bushman or Terrell and Fiona Givens or Patrick Mason and I felt bad about that and I haven't always been able to put a pinpoint on why because they're good people they're smart people they're doing good things but it's because this sort of stuff shows that they should know better and so it is it is it is beyond any reasonable credible you know argument or doubt to to argue for the Catalyst Theory I think any reasonable credible honest person will just say you know what Joe this is a this is an error this is a Miss I need to take the book of Abraham out and we need to admit that Joseph got it wrong and the church got it wrong but to try and offer again Bushman using his Harvard credentials Patrick Mason using his endowed chair enter Arrington chair you know we pick any of them they're good people they're smart people they're doing good work but to to then prop up the Catalyst Theory as their modern response to all these problems it does feel irresponsible to me they they should be able to they know all the stuff that we're laying out today and they should know that it's beyond any credible you know shadow of a doubt that this is just a bad dishonest argument I don't know yeah yeah no I agree yeah yeah yeah I was just gonna say you know we talk in these all of these episodes about how they tie together this quote about uh The Book of Mormon you know again we we did a bunch of episodes on the Book of Mormon translation and I I talked about how a lot of Scholars like you said Terrell Givens is bricolage right he Joseph Smith takes these ideas around him combines it with the revelation of the Book of Mormon that's why he's a co-author Michael Ash has written a book which basically calls Joseph Smith a co-author to the Book of Mormon but this quote is telling you that Joseph Smith if you had said that to him while he was alive he would have taken you out and beat the crap out of you because he's making clear that nobody could possibly think Joseph Smith had any input whatsoever on even the title page in the Book of Mormon and yet you want us to believe that Joseph Smith was a co-author to the Book of Mormon and that uh the book Abraham was not a translation but just Joseph getting a stream of Consciousness and I just I you have these quotes everyone like you said John everyone has access to these quotes Joseph Smith is in no way leaving room open for him being the author of these things or or for him you know giving his own 19th century input he's not he's closing the door on that in every possible way in this quote so then say yeah it just it boggles my mind that people keep going to it but it's because most people don't know where these quotes are and so they're hoping you don't pop open the hood and look at the engine and start seeing all the parts it's you know and this is why so many people in the modern era are leaving the Mormon church it's not necessarily because Joseph Smith goofed up you know with this non-translation it's because they feel like they're being deceived by the church itself because all these dudes are on the church payroll in one way or another or they're making money out the church and people are just saying the church is deceiving us right yeah because because yeah it technically as much as I love someone like Patrick Mason he's he has to answer the temple recommend question are you being honest in your dealings with your fellow men and I'm not saying he's intentionally being dishonest but the evidence shows that the in that the that the Catalyst theory is a dishonest argument and it's obvious to everyone and it should be obvious to these people so in essence through these these quote apologist Scholars the church is deceiving people you know and that's all people that's why people are leaving in droves you know I think many people many people would be willing to forgive the problems call it myth call it metaphor call it scripture just don't call it a translation you know yeah Smith a prophet Syrian Revelator and a translator but they're not willing they're not willing to be fully honest the church is fully honest who is going to join it who is going to join a church when the selling point is hear all these things Joseph Smith produced they're completely debunked by history and by evidence but we still value them in scripture I mean that's the problem like yeah people leave because they find out it's not true and they find out the church wasn't being honest I could say that as a convert but on the flip side no one's joining if if you were to go if the missionaries came to my door and said when I talked about the Book of Mormon it was written on gold plates Joseph Smith never actually used them um everything he's written in there has been you know debunked as far as the Native Americans coming from Jerusalem uh then he produced The Book of Abraham uh but Egypt tell us this has shown that's completely wrong but we still value it I mean who's gonna no one's joining that and so to your point John yeah people are leaving because they find out it's not true but no one's joining if they have the whole story and so the church is in a bad position because you know I'm sure they feel like they're justified in lying but if they if they're honest about their history no one's joining no one's joining this church if you know you know if the Saints book is honest about polygamy if the Saints book you know that I think they have a very small entry about the book of Abraham you know they don't give you the details because yeah you're not going to join and you're certainly not going to stay or what were you gonna add I was just going to say that the Catalyst Theory makes uh the translate the book of Abraham translation indistinguishable from a fraud and I I think this is a point that I've heard uh in several other places but they're trying to come up with they come up with a theory that you can't distinguish is this fraud or is this you know from God and as soon as you can not distinguish between both of them we're all good that I mean that and that's not that's not a good argument in my opinion if you can't distinguish it from Joseph lying versus telling the truth and you know receiving revelation yeah that's the problem it's certainly not a god of order as we were told you know in these past episodes yeah I'm a God of order not a god of Confusion And yet we've got these you know apologetics that are confusing convoluted and completely ridiculous so yeah it you cannot like I said you can't put all this into a box that makes sense with each other everything you know just falls apart when you look at them right as we've done so what's the name is people's Eternal salvation in the long run this decides whether or not they go to the social Kingdom and become gods and all that get to be with their family again that's the celestial Stakes the temporal Stakes as we've already mentioned 10 of your income for Life how you spend your time your reputation what jobs you know kids family the stakes are just super high yeah all right let's go to how apologists expand the universe of reality yeah and so we're gonna if we've been hitting on this a bit with the book at Mormon before but if you take the book of Abraham at face value and you only look at the material we have the manuscripts the Papyrus fragments um the timeline we talked about in the last episode it's really clear that we have the source material at least for that early part of the book of Abraham and so this leads apologists to expand kind of that Universal reality which is something that we talked about with the Book of Mormon and DNA where they'll you know originally they said oh every Native American came from their descendants of people that came from Jerusalem DNA says that's not true so now the church is like well the Book of Mormon is just a small community in this massive civilization John you actually kind of pointed to that earlier in this episode um and now with the book of Abraham we have to focus on missing Scrolls because everything we do have tells us Joseph Smith could not translate Egyptian or that Joseph Smith is uh Gerardo just said he's dictating a revelation that has become completely indistinguishable from outright fraud and so they're expanding this this reality to the point where you can't debunk it but every truth claim that the church is making now they're just saying is irrelevant and it's a really bad position for the church to be in because you're telling members basically all these claims we've made throughout history uh they're not they're not correct but it's only because we haven't gone big enough and I think that is a pretty telling sign that they don't have confidence on their own truth claims yeah all right well let's jump to the next uh slide and it's a video that talks about how Kerry molstein misrepresents Abraham and the lion couch this one gets rfm uh pretty riled up yeah and this one just as a really quick um intro to this this is um we've talked about here this got written around though oh yeah as it should because yeah uh we talked about in the last episode facsimile one and we talked about how this is not a representation that any egyptologist would would even consider to be in the realm of possibility which is to say that it's a image of human sacrifice because facts only one is an image of preparing someone for the afterlife and so but Joseph Smith is saying no says Abraham being sacrificed on the Altar and so um Egypt you know the the church itself their egyptologists are saying well Joseph Smith filled it in correctly because there are some Papyrus fragments or a recovered papyri uh that show that this is actually um about Abraham and so this is Kerry molstein um and he is going to basically insert this as evidence and we'll just play the clip first because it's yeah there's a reason people get riled up about this all right let's throw the tape especially intriguing is a lion couch scene roughly contemporary to the Joseph Smith papyri that mentions Abraham the Leiden demonic Papyrus um which dates to about the same time frame and again from roughly the same location it has a lion couch scene and we don't have the entire uh portion of Papyrus left but there is definitely a lion couch scene with the name Abraham right below it it is associated somehow with that graphic in there is a lion couch scene it's actually part of a love charm and the text says it's got a picture of a man on a lion couch and the text says this or Abraham upon his cow okay so molstein's claiming that this lion couch somehow says Abraham what not the one not not the one that we have not the the Abraham Papyrus but he's claiming that they found another lying couch from another scene that has the name that that and he gives the translation supposedly uh that's on on that but do you want to explain that Mike Yeah so basically um if you go back to that slide um Carrie molstein in that video is going to say that the light and Papyrus says Abraham upon his couch and that is absolutely not true it does not say that and so what's happening here is there's this writing on the bottom of this Papyrus and I believe it's written after the Papyrus was was um was done I'm not positive on that but they write a bunch of names that are associated with different religions it's part of a love charm to attract um you know someone to to fall in love with you and so Abraham is mentioned in there but he's one of a list of people and it does not say Abraham upon his couch and that would be really awkward given that the figure on the couch is actually a woman I think the writing is late and I think it's in Greek I believe the the name Abraham is written on the papyrus in in Greek so it's just like this is just an area where it's like you look at that and you're like Kerry molstein would know that it doesn't say Abraham uh upon his couch he would know that and so to present that in a fair Mormon video to tell members I know better and so you should believe when he is I mean I just these are the things that make me mad because you know from a critical perspective you know people will attack you if you misrepresent material and and I really throughout all these episodes I've tried to stay away from anything that's speculative and this is one where an egyptologist is going to outright lie about what the wording on that Papyrus says and there's no way around it you could call it being dishonest or just being a little bit uh deceptive it's just untrue and he's stating it as fact and like I said it's apparently it's a woman on the couch the same and a guy and of course they want to be taken through this in detail again the Robert Ridner episodes we'll we'll talk about this in depth yeah yeah I'm sure a lot of our listeners and viewers are like what what lion coach what are they talking about yeah and just well just for like a 20 second thing on that facsimile one is what they call a lion couch scene where you've got someone on the on the couch being prepared for the afterlife and so Joseph Smith filled in the missing part with a knife and there should not be a knife there and so the church has tried to find because these are very common things and so they try to find uh all these other Papyrus uh surviving papyri that have a lion couch to try to find parallels that they could say see Joseph Smith might have gotten it right because there's this one that's similar and in doing so they're taking a lot of Liberties here with what it actually with this particular variation um actually has on it and that's why in your episodes with Dr Ritter he could go through it and tell you exactly what it is exactly what it says and what it doesn't say and it's just it's not something that is really up for debate um among anyone who's in the field unless you're trying to promote a theology using your scholarship to do so yeah it is written in Greek I just looked it up on Fair Mormon's website they admit that it's lit it's it's great it's written in Greek yeah um which is oh my goodness yeah let's just say the whole thing is a mess and to have a video on that to have them it's like I said I don't want to be like ranty here but this is so blatantly dishonest and yet we're sitting here discussing it because there are a lot of people are going to dedicate their lives um and hold hold on to the the rod of the book of Abraham because of of videos like this which are just just flat out wrong all right well let's jump to the next slide which is the argument that maybe Joseph Smith got it right and everyone else has it wrong yep and so this is just you know to set a baseball I wrote on here you know this is another apologetic we get where um every time Joseph Smith gets these basic truth claims wrong such as Adam and Eve being the first humans ever in Missouri that Native Americans came from Jerusalem or that these scrolls are literally the writing of Abraham the church will say well maybe everyone else is wrong maybe science is wrong what do we really know about DNA and so Kerry molstein is going to make this argument here so we'll play that clip and then uh then we'll pretty much be starting our conclusion here all right let's roll the tape assumptions that we do know let's let's take one final topic making assumptions about the facsimiles of the book of Abraham and the question is what was Joseph Smith comparing these two people frequently want to see how Joseph Smith says or how he interprets the facsimiles to what ancient Egyptians would have said they meant uh and there's a problem with were there a number of problems with doing this uh one is that we assume that we can figure out what the ancient Egyptians thought uh thought these meant uh and that's not necessarily so easy so for example uh in most of these drawings they don't label not in the ones Joseph had not in any that that we work with as egyptologists and most of them they do not label what various characters are and what they mean sometimes they do the time period they did this the most is what we call the New Kingdom save roughly around um sixteen hundred 1500 BC uh but the drawings that we have were created about 200 BC and so we have over a thousand years in between uh and the way that they might interpret these drawings certainly would change over a thousand year period so the difficulty that we have as egyptologists is trying to figure out what did ancient Egyptians think these drawings meant when we don't have any ancient Egyptians from that time period that actually tell us wow like that argument just is feels really ridiculous to me yeah basically you know that basically whatever it meant a thousand or two thousand years ago might mean something totally different to people who lived a thousand or two thousand years later I mean would Green Eggs and Ham if you know if read a thousand years from now would somebody read green eggs and ham and think it was about you know spaghetti it'll be even worse yeah yeah yeah is it right am I getting that right or no I think you're I think you're being too kind but yeah you're getting it right I just I this this is the same thing we dealt with in the in the Book of Mormon and DNA episode they say well we can't evaluate the DNA of Native Americans because we don't have Lehigh's DNA and it's like that's ridiculous because we do have the DNA of people who lived in that time frame in that part of the world so to then say we and it's the same thing here where it's like they want you to think that a thousand years earlier it actually read the book of Abraham has translated and then all of a sudden over a thousand years it changed from that to this is what we need to prepare you for the next life this is a Libations table whereas originally was Abraham's signature it just defies it it's it's so insultingly bad because again you would never make that argument for anything else because it just it's like Joseph Smith got it wrong and so now you're saying well he didn't really get it wrong it's just all of the Egyptians for the next 1000 Years got it wrong and changed everything I just I don't even know to say I I just I wanted to put that in there because that's a common apologetic you see in other areas too like I said with um Adam and Eve in Missouri they'll say well maybe the first humans were in Missouri maybe the archaeologists are dating it wrong it's just at some point you just go we will have an episode near the end of this series um that I wrote on the website it's called if Joseph Smith got it right who got it wrong because if you want to take this approach we don't know anything about anything you know it's just yeah all right well that brings us to the conclusion of this episode I mean we're not going to quite match in hours the number of hours that Robert written are spent with us but we're gonna at least reach half of that um yeah it's time to talk through all this right anyways the the final slide we're going to say something before we okay the final slide is the conclusion on the Book of Mormon or Abraham translation oh sorry my book of Abraham okay conclusive Abraham translation yeah and so this is actually a point you made earlier which is kind of nice that you said it so it kind of makes us uh more relevant but you know at the end of the day there's a reason that the church has two employed egyptologists and they cannot agree on a uniform theory for translation of the book of Abraham and it's because both of them are easily debunked when you look at the material we have and when you look at what Joseph Smith was saying he was doing and so um the church's essay most people believe was written by Kerry molstein and it really shows how they cannot settle on one Theory because they know it can't work on its own and so it was apparently it was by a committee and Brian Wright was part of the committee yeah it was definitely by a committee but I know John Gee apparently was not involved in the the essay and if you believe the accounts he was not happy about it but yeah but yeah either way it's so sir I believe Kerry molstein was thought to have been on there and he was a big proponent of the um callous Theory Brian hogler was a big proponent of the of the Lost scroll Theory and you know as we've shown in these um slides today and then the videos you know the apologists are playing games with the data and they're using academic credentials to push theology which is not how on a scholarship is meant to be done as John said earlier on a scholarship says you start with a blank slate or you could start with assumptions but you have to test them and be willing to change based on the evidence and so um also just to jump in the the assumptions that you base your arguments on need to be agreed on by by a majority of the experts in that field so they call let's just say gravity or evolution theories right they're not just pulled out of someone's rear pretty much 99 of all credible scientists are okay with gravity and they're okay with Evolution and that's why it's okay to to sort of start with those sorts of assumptions right okay I think that's fair yeah yeah and you know uh that first video we showed of Kerry milstein talking about how he starts with the assumption that it's true and works the evidence into it you know that's something he's telling a group of people with Fair Mormon who are in The Business of Being apologetics who are in the business of trying to defend the faith you know I would argue by any means necessary but at least by means that can stretch or at least excuse the evidence and so um I I just I really don't like the fact that they're willing to say these things um in these more scholarly settings uh same thing would be with Richard Bushman calling the book Abraham pseudopigrapha but then you know if they're out there um you know in a Fireside for just everyday members or if they're writing an article for enzyme like I said Kerry molstein's written a bunch of articles for enzyme or I know it's Alia hona now um he's also written that book for Deseret books called so we want just I think it's called so you want to talk about the book of Abraham he's not going to start the book by saying just so you know I use my scholarship to assume it's true and then I fit whatever evidence I find into the conclusion that it's chewy they don't say that and so I think that just shows the disjointed nature of how the church puts out people who are specialists in a field presents them as if they are operating under the scholarship of that field while in reality they're operating under the church's own uh mode of defense and and I just find that to be a really dishonest approach and I think it is one that shows that the church knows they cannot stand on the evidence alone as I've said before the fact is Carrie molstein and John Gee will go into these Fair fire sides but when you're doing the interviews with Robert rittner and you extend out an invitation they will immediately back down because they cannot put these ideas up against anybody who can basically tell them on on the Fly uh why they're misusing the data and so you know I guess as a conclusion I just I think the Apologetics for the book of Abraham are bad obviously and I think the church really should get to a point where they just say look we have no idea what happened it obviously doesn't match but we still value it a scripture and then just leave it at that yeah so I'll add my conclusion in Gerardo we can hear yours my conclusion on in addition everything you said Mike is just that I you know I spent 45 years as a Mormon until they kicked me out and I know what the church taught me honesty was honesty is to tell the whole truth it's to not leave out information it's stood to not teach things that are false and not to leave out information that would give a wrong impression if I'm a BYU student and I have sex with a woman but then I say we didn't have sex we just hugged and it's true we hugged but we did a lot more than hugging but then I just say we only hugged and then I tell my Bishop that The Bishop's not going to go oh you're good what a words mean what is sex anyway sex is kind of like a hug no I'm gonna get kicked out of BYU I'm going to lose all that money and all that time it's going to wreck my life in many ways because I was dishonest that's complete honesty that's the honesty that the church taught me and like you said Mike the fact that the church allows book of Abraham apologetics that it has allowed it to exist knowingly and that it allows it to continue violates the church's own standards of honesty in a way that for me is is egregious for me book of Abraham was the Catalyst to my faith crisis before the book of Abraham I did not believe there was a Smoking Gun I'm 30 I'm 31. it's the book of Abraham that led me in you know down the rabbit hole into the full faith crisis and it's because the church is just knowingly deceiving people in my opinion Gerardo you get the last word no yeah I agree um while I was going through my faith crisis in uh uh BYU Idaho I decided to take a class on the pearl of great price and uh that started my fascination with the book of Abraham and how bad the apologetic arguments were so we had you know the professor in class spouting out all these uh John Gee Carrie Mills especially nibbly's arguments that just don't hold water and I would challenge him on that and there was really not good answers um there's not good answers and yeah so I think it's important for people to understand it understand the truth of it the implications and you know have them take decisions for their life um yeah yeah well thank you Gerardo for being here with us today you know so much you're so smart and so wise thanks thanks Gerardo thank you Gerardo for being here and for uh jumping in last minute and yeah I think uh one thing I'll say about Gerardo's uh final word is just he talked about how in his class there were no good answers and the problem is there are good answers they're just not faithful answers I think that really is a distinction and um the last thing I'll say is before we go um if you like these episodes I would encourage you to dig in further if you want we'll include some links to the Dr rittner episodes um the Dan Vogel videos which I think are just so telling on the Apologetics and our next episode will be on the text of the book Abraham so if you're wondering why we didn't cover things like olasham um and uh or the chaldees that kind of stuff that'll all be in the next episode because we're kind of leaving in the actual text for its own episode so if you're wondering why those apologetics aren't in there we'll be doing that in the next one all right well Mike you're a freaking Legend people love you and you have a special brain I'm just gonna say it you have a special brain this work you've done is a labor of love you're not getting paid for any of this and um you should be paid honestly and uh I just can't thank you enough and I know that you're helping thousands and thousands if not more of people come to a truer more accurate understanding of the Mormon Church's truth claims and we can't we can't thank you enough brother well thank everybody for listening and uh like I said I just hope it's helpful and uh you know if you feel the need to um you know have questions hopefully this is there for you when you need it and uh you know we'll be here for you so thanks for uh listening all right and just to conclude number one if you're watching on YouTube please subscribe to our YouTube channel it's going to make a huge difference to the 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each other and uh truth matters and I say these things in the name of Mike and LDS discussions amen thanks everybody uh take care join us for more LDS discussions in the weeks and months ahead and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon stories podcast take care everybody