What are the Kirtland Egyptian Papers and how do they relate to the Book of Abraham? Some critics have claimed that these papers are evidence that Joseph Smith made up the Book of Abraham.
The Kirtland Egyptian Papers (KEP) are a collection of documents written by various individuals, mostly dating to the Kirtland period of Church history (early to mid-1830's) consisting of some sort of study documents relating to the Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri.
(For a chart showing pertinent identifying information,, including dates, size, handwriting, title and contents see the full FAIR wiki article linked at the end of this article.)
The KEP comprise 16 documents, encompassing a total of about 120 pages, divided into two categories. One is the so-called Egyptian alphabet and grammar documents (KEPE) and Book of Abraham manuscript documents (KEPA).
Provenance
An inventory of Church records to be taken west from Nauvoo, prepared by Thomas Bullock in 1846, included an entry for “Egyptian Grammar in Jennetta's Trunk.” This document, presumably was KEPE 1. The Jennetta spoken of was the late wife of Willard Richards, the Prophet Joseph's secretary. Mentioned several times in inventories, these documents were placed in the Church Historian's office. However, they were unused and eventually knowledge of them was lost.
They were rediscovered in that office by Sidney Sperry in 1937.
The KEPA 1 has a separate provenance. This document was given by Emma Smith, to her second husband, Lewis Bidamon, who gave it to his son, Charles Bidamon. A great collector of Mormon artifacts, Wilford Wood, obtained it from him. Wood presented this document to the Church in 1937.
The various provenances of these documents raise the possibility that the collection we have today may not be complete, with some of the documents having been lost. Many scholars believe that a large portion of the papyri were destroyed in the Chicago fire, even though the small recovered portion evidently had not been.
Publication history
The KEP have never been formally published. Several informal publications exist. These are also listed in the full wiki article.
The Critic's approach to the KEP
The attitude of the critics to the KEP is straightforward. They claim that:
- The KEP represent the translation working papers for the Book of Abraham.
- The KEPE demonstrate that Joseph did not understand Egyptian.
- The KEPA demonstrate that the Sensen Papyrus was believed to be the source of the Book of Abraham; and
- Since the Sensen Papyrus is in fact not the Book of Abraham but an Egyptian Book of Breathings, whatever else the Book of Abraham may be, it is not a translation of an ancient Egyptian text.
LDS Approaches
LDS approaches to the KEP have been more varied. One theory was that the Sensen Papyrus may have represented a mnemonic device to bring to mind a longer oral tradition — a tradition that corresponded to the narrative of the Book of Abraham as we know it.
While a fascinating study, the mnemonic device theory never really caught on.
Another possibility was that the KEP represent either a preliminary "studying it out" stage in the process, or a (failed) attempt to reverse engineer the English translation so as to decipher the Egyptian language. In other words, the English text of the Book of Abraham was received by revelation as opposed to a purely mechanical process. While Joseph was involved in the KEP project, a theme of this view is to portray the efforts of Phelps, Cowdery, and Parrish as largely independent of Joseph. This view has become the dominant LDS view, and has been echoed more recently in several publications by John Gee.
A small minority of LDS commenters on the KEP seeks to defend the supposed revelatory character of these documents, viewing them through the lenses of kabbalism or extreme symbolism.
Directions for further research.
The KEP have been understudied to date. Although preliminary studies have appeared from various perspectives, much more work needs to be done. In many ways, apologetic or polemical approaches to these documents are premature. Rather, they first must be studied rigorously from a scholarly perspective.
An essential tool that is a prerequisite to further progress is a critical edition of the texts. While the microfilm photocopy editions are sufficient for limited purposes and to get a feel for the documents, they are totally inadequate for serious scholarly study. Ideally such scholarship should be grounded in a study of the original documents. To the extent that they are not available for such study, the color photographs that are in existence would be the next best basis for such an edition.
In addition to a careful and clear presentation of the texts, such a study needs to focus on understanding the documents. Too much energy has been devoted to attack and defense, and not enough to basic comprehension of what those involved in the project thought they were doing and how they went about their work. Such a study needs to bring the same standards and attention to detail to these texts as Royal Skousen has brought to his study of the original text of the Book of Mormon. Some of the contested issues for which such a study could bring enlightenment include the following:
Involvement of Joseph Smith. That Joseph was involved to some degree in the project is clear. His handwriting appears on two of the documents, and there are references to the project in his journals. The extent to which Joseph dominated the process, or the scribes acted independently, or they all acted in a collaborative manner, needs to be clarified.
Sequencing issues. Although the handwriting of the various scribes on the various texts has been identified, there are numerous sequencing issues that need to be explored. Is there a way to determine in what sequence the documents were created? Were the KEPA documents created at the same time from dictation, or were they visually copied from a single source, and if so, which is the source document? Which was written first on the page, the hieratic symbols in the left margin of the KEPA documents or the English text to the right? Were the hieratic symbols visually copied from the Sensen Papyrus, and if so, can we determine who copied them?
Why does the scope of the English text not match the scope of the hieratic symbols in the margins of the KEPA? There is a substantial and obvious disproportion between the hieratic symbols in the left margins of the KEPA and the accompanying English text to the right. Critics often trot this fact out as an obvious artifact of Joseph's ignorance. But this begs the question why such a disproportion exists. The disproportion is so marked that surely even Joseph must have been aware of it, and even if he were not, the scribes involved in the project had training in other languages, such that they would have noted and objected to the disproportion. It is not enough merely to observe the disproportion, it must be explained. What did these men think they were doing? Does the juxtaposition of a hieratic symbol and an entire paragraph of English text intend to reflect a translation process, or is some other process at work, and if so, what?
What is the source of the English Book of Abraham?
It would appear that the English text is a revelation to the Prophet Joseph Smith, whatever he thought he was doing in the KEP project. There is ample precedent for the Prophet receiving such coherent revelations before that did not require him to wrestle with deciphering the ancient language of the source text. For example, Joseph translated the Book of Mormon almost entirely without reference to the gold plates themselves, and Doctrine and Covenants 7 is a revealed translation of ancient parchment that was never physically given to Joseph.
Many LDS scholars believe that the relevant portions of the papyri were destroyed in the Chicago fire. We do not have and are unlikely to ever see those materials. Therefore the questions by the critics are not well founded in the facts surrounding the translation materials or process.
At any rate, the coherent words of the Book of Abraham did not really come from an analysis of the Egyptian materials before Joseph or his scribes; rather, they were uttered by the Prophet and recorded by his scribes in much the same way that all of his revelatory translation projects were done. To the critic, this simply means that Joseph made up the coherent text and dictated it; to the believer, it means that Joseph received the text by revelation and dictated it. The difference between these two points of view is a matter of faith, and not something that any amount of wrangling with the KEP can resolve definitively one way or the other.
The full wiki article may be accessed by clicking here.
