As noted in Reason #116, the 116 pages story is one of the biggest issues I personally had with Mormonism in terms of reason and rationality. But the problem with The Book of Abraham should be a major issue for *everyone* in terms of hard evidence (and also reason and rationality). I don’t care if you are the truest and bluest of believers, this puppy should at least give you some serious pause. You can come out of that pause with a “well, it’s messy, but I choose to believe, anyway,” and I’ll shrug and say, “okaaay,” but that pause at least demands some measure of acknowledgement.

Nutshell background: A guy named Michael Chandler is touring the U.S. with a collection of Egyptian artifacts that he’s acquired, including mummies, papryi, etc. In 1835 he visits Kirtland, OH, where the Mormons are currently living. Joseph Smith purchases several items from him and then says, “I commenced the translation of some of the characters or hieroglyphics, and much to our joy found that one of the [scrolls] contained the writings of Abraham, another the writings of Joseph of Egypt, etc.” He later publishes The Book of Abraham as deriving directly from the “hand of Abraham” on those scrolls/papryi.

Following is a hypothetical, designed in particular for an architect friend of mine (who may never read it), but you could substitute musician/sheet music, chef/recipes, doctor/prescriptions, etc.

A man named Jessie Smythe claims to have come across a set of blueprints that he says is for the ancient Library of Alexandria. Wow! And he’s made a copy of the blueprints and added notes to them: 1) this Egyptian symbol indicates where the pharaoh Ptolemy would sit when he visited; 2) this was where the 50,000+ scrolls were stored; 3) this was the bathroom, etc. Based on this astonishing discovery, Jessie Smythe has started a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to rebuild the structure. Might take several years, but he assures you that your contribution and support will be put to a great cause and that you can feel safe in trusting him with this work.

You, a well-regarded architect, are of course very intrigued by this. You obtain a copy of the blueprints and hold a Skype session with several architect colleagues to review the documents. And you all realize pretty quickly that, um, these are blueprints for an old McDonald’s from the 1950’s. And as for his markings, it’s pretty obvious: 1) that’s not an Egyptian symbol, but a coffee stain; 2) that’s the main dining area; 3) that’s the supply closet, which is next to the bathroom (so vaguely in the ballpark on that one). And so forth. But none of it is even remotely what it was said to be, in any appreciable way.

Question: Would you contribute to Jessie’s Kickstarter campaign and encourage others to join in as well? Would you report Jessie to Kickstarter as a fraud and warn others that it is not as advertised?

I feel pretty certain that in this scenario, you, a level-headed and reasonable architect, would opt for the latter. Or at the very least, you’d shake your head and move on with your life, hoping that not enough people will be gullible enough to back the project. But would you, a believing Latter-day Saint, have the same approach regarding the Book of Abraham and the person who claimed to bring it forth? Why not?

If you open the Pearl of Great Price to the Facsimile images, you are now looking at the canonized equivalent of blueprints for an old McDonald’s. I won’t cover the specific details of the numerous problems (see here for more: http://www.mormonthink.com/book-of-abraham-issues.htm), but suffice to say that this is another prime display of Joseph’s maneuvering looking exactly like the shifty dancing and fast-talking of a con man.

One fun example, though, is that in Facsimile 2, Joseph describes Figure 7 as being “God sitting upon his throne, revealing through the heavens the grand Key-words of the Priesthood,” when it turns out to be Min, who is an Egyptian sex god known for promiscuity and incest. And yes, that’s Min’s erect penis that is seen in the picture. Folks, your Holy Scriptures contain a dick pic from a guy who boned his own mother. The church is aware of that, btw, and removed the offending part of that picture for several publications of the PoGP, though it has now been restored in full for all wholesome Latter-day Saints to gaze upon during Sunday services. (And they’re worried about porn shoulders?)

Sure, the blueprints analogy isn’t perfect. Most analogies aren’t. But I would argue that the reality is even worse than the analogy in an important way…

During the time of The Book of Abraham’s writing and publication (mid-1830’s-early 1840’s), the Egyptian language was not known across the world. The Rosetta Stone (such an amazing and important artifact!) was being translated in France, but the results had not yet reached America, or had only just begun to be circulated among some Egyptian scholars in America. The public-at-large had no idea that Egyptian was about to be able to be read and understood. And most people (including Joseph Smith) still thought that hieroglyphics represented their images in some kind of narrative way, and weren’t phonetic, as they turned out to be.

So just like the Book of Mormon conveniently hid its supposed language within the guise of “reformed Egyptian,” Joseph used the still unknown-to-many language of Egyptian as a cover for his “translation” of The Book of Abraham and his descriptions of the facsimiles. Does purporting to be able to translate ancient Egyptian records from a language that nobody can understand, because someone has powers from God, sound like something spectacular, or what? It sure does! And hey wow, there’s the “translation” he produced and some descriptions of the pictures. He really did it! But then… well… wait… they’re all wrong. Oh, you kidder! You got me. Is it April 1st?

It’s simple enough for virtually every other human who is not already a believing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to look at that and say, “Pass. Nice try. Fraud. Moving on.” This is the very rational and expected response for such a thing as this, and believing Mormons surely employ that exact same type of reaction when they learn about things like Ponzi schemes, Theranos, the Hitler diaries, Mark Hofmann’s forgeries, etc. You can clearly see that the actual evidence does not remotely match the claim, and rightly conclude that these are dupesters who were duping people.

I put “translation” in quotes earlier because this has now become the only answer that apologists have left for this problem; “the catalyst theory.” This states, in essence, that Joseph didn’t translate The Book of Abraham directly from the papryi (which they acknowledge included only standard Egyptian afterlife reading fare such as The Book of Breathings and Book of the Dead), but by looking at those artifacts it opened up a connection to ancient Egypt, through which Joseph was able to see and receive The Book of Abraham and his interpretations of the imagery from the facsimiles.

And with that, they have now moved the goalposts right out of the stadium. And it’s one of many Orwellian examples within Mormonism, where the meanings of words need to be redefined. “Translation” doesn’t mean ‘translation,’ silly.

Okay sure, I suppose the catalyst theory is one possible way to explain this, other than him just being a fraud and making it all up. Anything is *possible,* right? I mean, that would make him different from all of the other fraudsters who just made up stuff to further their frauds. But you know, he could be the one who was really legit. And there’s always “God works in mysterious ways” to fall back on if you need to. But come on. Let’s be real here. If it walks and quacks like a quack…

When my belief was crumbling down around me, one of the phrases that seemed relevant was, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” And I was seeing smoke coming out of every window of Mormonism. But the Book of Abraham, well, there’s dark, billowing smoke pouring out of that window. I haven’t even gotten into the content of the book, itself, which has some doozies, but those can be counted later as separate ‘Reasons.’ And the Book of Mormon has many large and glaring problems with it, too, which I’ll get to soon enough, but many of those problems are a little bit more under-the-surface compared to the “This is from Abraham!/Oh hell no, it isn’t!” starkness of this.

For several people I know who have left the church, the Book of Abraham issue was enough, or was their final shelf-breaker. It certainly has that kind of power. For me, though, it was an earlier weight on the shelf, and a very heavy one, but it forced me into a place of thinking, well okay, maybe he got that wrong, but I can still hold onto the Book of Mormon, at least. Perhaps his prophetic gift went off course at some point. (That certainly helped to explain a lot of other screwy things.) But it turns out that was just an example of me moving my “belief goalposts.” What became more instructive was to look at the Book of Abraham situation and then move backwards in time to see if there was any kind of pattern of fraud and fudging things evident with earlier works like D&C and The Book of Mormon. And there definitely was, as we will see in several of the remaining 114 reasons.

Soundtrack: https://weirdalma.bandcamp.com/track/not-like-real-egyptian