Mormon Stories #1339: Dr. Robert Ritner - An Expert Egyptologist Translates the Book of Abraham Pt 1

huge thank you to bruce mcarthur for making today's episode possible hello everyone and welcome to another edition of mormon stories podcast i'm your host john dulin it is july 30th 2020. uh i apologize for the hyperbole but i do believe that we have one of the most important episodes that we'll ever have on mormon stories podcast this will stand shoulder to shoulder with the michael coe interview with the tom phillips interview with the bart ehrman interview and with our top interviews it'll be an immediate top five uh i'm guessing i am here today with dr robert rittner who is a world famous egyptologist that's what i'll call him he'll we'll we'll have him tell you his official title in just a second we have covered book of mormon scripture historicity a lot in the past on mormon stories podcast uh we've covered book of mormon book of abraham recently we covered the joseph smith translation you know we've had brett metcalf on to talk about a book of abraham we've had david bacavoy we've had dan vogel but what we've never had is a legit never mormon world-class egyptologist to talk to us about the book of abraham and just like we had the amazing dr michael cohen who was the yale mesoamerican uh anthropologist or archaeologist to give us an outsider's view of a book of mormon historicity we have brought dr robert rittner on to give us an outsider's view of book of abraham book of abraham historicity or authenticity and to talk about the apologetics uh that have surrounded the book of abraham from hewnibly to daniel peterson to john gee to carry mulstein and uh and the like so it is going to be an epic multi-hour mormon stories podcast interview and there's more as ron popeil used to say we have with us rfm radio free mormon part of the bill real mormon discussions network of podcasts because rfm is a brilliant analyst and amateur historian of the book of abraham so rfm thank you for joining us today i'm so excited to be here john this is going to be a great podcast thank you for inviting me it may even be up there with your radio free mormon interview from last november yes and you guys should check that out the rfm uh interview was epic as well but but rfm seriously we're so glad to have you shout out to bill reel for uh all his good work too well thank you i'll pass that along before we begin uh our interview with dr rittner we are going to be making a very important announcement at the beginning and at the end of every episode interview that we do you'll you'll hear just today as dr rittner talks about his story that he he comes to egyptology with just a pure love of egyptology and what you'll find is is that his desire and his pursuing of egyptology came and probably a significant financial sacrifice on his part even though he's at a world-class institution maybe the world-class institution for egyptology but having said that he also comes at his interest in the book of abraham from a similarly i'll just say altruistic standpoint in that he'll tell us later that his work on the book of abraham the total amount of money he's made from all of his work which includes books and articles on a book and articles on the book of abraham the total amount that he's received in terms of finances is less than what he has been paid for one presentation so it is out of a pure love for egyptology and for history and for accuracy and honesty that he comes to this discussion having said all that it is also true that dr rittner is experiencing a health condition he is in need of a kidney donor and and so as we begin to end each of our episodes we are going to let people know that with his permission because what rfm and i uh hope to achieve and i brought rfm on not only for his expertise but also we hope that people far and wide share not only this interview but also the the notification that we are in search of a kidney donor for dr rittner because we would love to prolong dr rittner's life so that he can do his amazing work we will be letting everybody know that the way to contact dr rittner is through his contact dana mclean at the northwestern medical transplant coordinator phone number is 312-695-0828 and um if any of you want to help save dr rittner's life in his ongoing research we are going to just make that appeal uh over and over again and without uh any further ado dr robert whitner thank you so much for joining us today on mormon stories podcast and on radio free mormon my pleasure john anything you want to correct about that introduction uh or add to i know you you referred to my title would you like me to give it to you yeah yeah tell us your title and your kind of uh yeah your credentials as it relates to my official title is the row professor of egyptology at the oriental institute of the university of chicago okay and and your your education background um i got my phd from the university of chicago and i got my ba in psychology from rice university in houston go go houston yes fellow houstonian um also just so people know sometimes we tend to think oh elite universities or harvard yale stanford um you know and i and i understand that you were teaching at yale at some point and then you transferred to chicago tell us why chicago is a really important institution for egyptology just for those who don't know well the university of chicago is where egyptology began in the western hemisphere when the university was being assembled they actually hired james henry breasted and sent him to germany to learn egyptology which was really a european phenomenon only and so he came back and brought the field to chicago so every program in the united states is ultimately an offshoot of the chicago program you're either a student of a chicago professor or the student of a student of a chicago professor so when i was at yale for example i was a colleague of michael co i went there from teaching at chicago as a grad student went to yale and when my professor retired i was lured back and i was happy to come back because it's the premier institution yale is a good university but chicago for my field is better we have a higher concentration of egyptologists than anywhere else we have three egyptologists plus an egyptian archaeologist and no other no other university in the western hemisphere has that and that's why that's rare even in europe so we are the center and i know the the first ever chair in egyptology it was just created in september and i was the first awardee of it so that's a great honor because even rested did not have a chair in egyptology so it's a great yes and it's also probably worth noting is we will get to talking about john gee that that john john gee at one point was a student of yours true he was at yale yes okay and just out of curiosity what's what's the what's the elite or preeminent uh university you know in europe or elsewhere for the study of egyptology maybe even in egypt itself well there there are a number of choices in in europe uh the people associated with the british museum are major scholars oxford cambridge and by the way by the way uh professors currently at oxford and cambridge actually the oxford one just just retired but they're both our chicago students that's awesome one of my students is now at cambridge one of my colleague students who was ahead of me her student just retired from oxford so we've done well excellent but they're they're also the the echo partik in paris the lu the louvre the sorbonne in paris uh heidelberg in germany and etcetera there there are numerous constitutions it's far more widespread in europe than it is here okay it's a bullet field what's that say that again it's a boutique field there are very few people that can go into it they're relatively few jobs and it doesn't pay well so it's an academic career well let's get into that so let's talk a bit about your background growing up in houston and what got you ultimately interested in egyptology i had an outstanding second grade teacher and we would do modules in geographic locations and societies we had japanese tea parties we had hawaiian luau i tasted poi for the one and only time when i was in second grade uh and we did a section on egypt making pyramids uh cardboard pyramids and it was the pyramids that stuck most kids go through a stage of dinosaurs and then move on to something else often dinosaurs to mummies to something more mature and more lucrative and i got stuck at the mummy stage so by the time i was in junior high i had read every single book on egypt that was in the houston public library it wasn't a huge amount but it was maybe 50 books so i was fully prepared to ask deep and penetrating historical questions of my junior high school world history teacher and when i did she was flabbergasted had no clue what i was what i was asking about what was that question you you asked her i remember you mentioning this i was i desperately wanted to know whether the body and cave in kings valley 55 was the tomb of ahmadine whether he had identified him as ah or not we still don't know that by the way and she didn't know who on earth i was talking about it was it was an extreme disappointment because i just i just knew that this advanced teacher would have all the answers to uh the question so that that led me on what has become a lifetime of ask questions about things like who's buried and what to do so maybe a tad bit precocious as a as a junior high student i would repeat that robert if you dr rittner if you don't mind i said i was probably horribly obnoxious i would go on to be the head of the debate team in high school and then in acting in college in addition to my degrees so uh i have no trouble standing on a stage and being forceful and i don't get embarrassed i have to ask this i i grew up loving abbott and costello and dracula and frankenstein and werewolf uh do you remember watching the mummy movie or any of the mummy movies that came out uh the two of the major reasons why i'm in egyptology is uh boris karloff's the mummy and uh which i've actually published about by the way because it's if the the plot is actually drawn from the ancient interesting story uh and h writer haggard's cleopatra and i was like i was a child in 1963 when this liz taylor cleopatra came out i was not allowed to see that it was too racy um but i was i was absolutely overwhelmed by all the publicity and all things egyptian there was also a wonderful movie theater in houston the metropolitan movie theater downtown which was all in egyptian design with sphinxes and egyptian tile on the floor and wall paintings etc it was the most fantastic place so i think i was drawn initially to egypt by the exoticism but then once i began to read about the culture it's just so absolutely fascinating and so very different and insightful and although it's early it's not primitive and that's that's what i try to teach in my egyptian religion classes because religion is what i basically do that's what i was hired to do religion egyptian religion specifically uh so i publish religious texts which of course is why then i was asked specifically to look at the joseph smith the players because it's a religious text i have colleagues that work on legal texts and meta and other kinds of texts but i work on the religious text specifically and i teach classes on egyptian religion um you know 20 lectures explaining all the various nuances of whether the egyptians are polytheistic how they relate to the idea of deity uh what are the multiple creation myths what are the concepts of the various different gods how do you pray to them how do you sacrifice to them what are the burial rituals what are the requirements for burial what are the papyri that go with burial what are the other objects like the canopic jars what are the elements of embalming why would you have jars that are next to the bed what do they contain why would they even be there all i also work in ancient egyptian medicine so i can explain the embalming from a medical point of view um so that's what i do got it dr rittner can i break in here for a second if you're done with the background john you said you were asked to look at the joseph smith papyrus who asked you and what was what happened there rfm i'm totally sorry this is going to sound really rude i had one quick question about his background before we jump into that and i just don't want to be totally out of sequence is that okay yeah but that's a super important question i think robert i think it's important i alluded to this in our intro that you your life didn't wasn't necessarily setting you up to become an academic do you mind sharing with us how your life was being set up a bit about your parents and their occupation and and kind of what decisions you had to make in terms of career that may or may not have been maybe what your parents were shooting for yeah and what might have been financially advantageous for you well parents generally want their children to do something successful but my my father owned a major sheet metal company in houston that that put in all the ductwork for air conditioning and all the major high rises in what is now the major cities in the united states and i was the eldest son and i was fully expected to take over that company and i did not want to do that because i don't want i did not want to be an engineer and spend all of my time dealing with numbers i'm much more interested in humanistic issues which is why i went into i i already knew when i was in junior high devouring every book in the houston library that egyptology is quite what i wanted to be um and so i didn't even get a chance to pick out my own university i was told by my father i was going to rice because he went to rice and because that was where i would get the best engineering degree and so i'm sure i would became an immediate disappointment when i got there and took a psychology degree instead and i did that on purpose because psychology had the least number of required courses and you could do a psychological interpretation of almost anything so i took a whole series of medieval courses which i could then do a psychological interpretation of and union psychology which actually used egyptian ideas and made reference to egyptian texts so long story short i was able to uh shift my medial work to do coptic things and by the time i was a senior undergraduate i already had an article in print on the influence of coptic egyptian monks on medieval ireland and that allowed me to get into the university of chicago pretty much against my parent's will and go on to do egyptology i had to be self-supporting because they weren't going to pay for it and fortunately for me i had a younger brother and he took over the family business so that got me off the hook but my parents were not accepting of my profession until 1975 i think it was when we there was the large tudon common exhibit here and there were lines around the block at the field museum and i was able to walk them all the way ahead of the line and write in and give them a private tour and then it became okay that's awesome i love that story before we jump to rfm's question just one more quick question or um tell us about your training in the field of egyptology just a brief kind of overview like uh who'd you study with and and uh kind of what were the main things you did a thesis or dissertation on and anything that we should know about your training that could tie into mormonism later that will lead us to rfm's great question about how you first got introduced to uh became aware of the book of abraham i well egyptology at the university of chicago was it's changing now because the university is forcing us to push people out faster uh for economic reasons but when i was going through their program it was a four-year program because you walk in no one has hieroglyphs it's not like you you've learned hieroglyphs in high school that's not taught so you come in knowing absolutely nothing and it takes two full years to learn even the basic stages of middle egyption which is just one of the multiple language phases of egyptian that you need to know to be an egyptian you need to know old egyptian middle egyptian lady egyptian demotic and coptic all of those they have different grammar different vocabulary choices and in some cases there are multiple scripts so there is higher hieroglyphs which are like printing there is hierarchic which is like our long hand a cursive and there's demotic which is like shorthand my specialty is actually demotic that's from the ptolemaic period the time from alexander the great up until the roman conquest that's the time period in which by the way the joseph smith papyrus was written so tell us the years tell us the years of kind of you know uh egyptian kind of religious period you're talking about 332 to 30 bc so about did you say 300 bc 32 to 30 bc okay and the joseph smith is somewhere around 100 bc somewhere roughly in there we keep we keep arguing about exactly when it might be if you you originally people were basing the date on that papyrus on the shape of because handwriting changes handwriting's changed over time so you can judge a date by the way that people write their squiggles if you try to read your ants hand-written postcards you'll notice that older people have a different handwriting style than well modern people don't have any handwriting style at all because they don't know how to do long hand but uh that's used for dating however with this that set of documents there are also personal names and that are in the text and that from genealogies that we can reconstruct from other documents belonging to them uh michael koon couldn't was able to show what their proper date range is so we have a better date now it was originally thought it was roman date but we now know it's tolerant so you're saying the the approximate years a year of the of the papyri that joseph acquired yes okay excellent um okay so so so you get four years of classes that include multiple languages you also have to learn history art culture religion i mean i can tell you about what sandal styles are i can tell you about the food techniques of ancient egyptians um i can tell you all about their prayers i can tell you about their economics i've actually done mathematics in egyptian i had to learn how to do fractions the egyptians only use unit fractions except for two-thirds five-sixths so every time you make a fraction you have to break it down into unit fractions which is pretty cumbersome so it's really remarkable they were able to build pyramids with such accuracy because which they could do and we have their surviving mathematical homework exercises we have their school exercises we know how they taught language we have from egypt almost everything you could imagine so we have their literary tales and i've published those i've done translations of egyptian literature uh in a collection for yale university when i was there i've done translations of religious texts that are relevant to the bible in a series called context of scripture where we actually lined up items that were biblical passages with something that was comparable or relevant in all the ancient near eastern languages and i did a large chunk of the egyptian ones in three volumes tell us uh any big name you know pillars in the field that that were part of your training that you want to mention that are worth mentioning well my primary teacher was klaus bear i mean i and i actually became his replacement when klaus became ill he had a he had a stroke uh i was his hand-picked successor as a graduate student to take over his courses and he was that he was to have been the chief reader of my dissertation but he didn't survive and so ed wente who is uh was our specialist in egyptian religion and a logical person also to work on with me uh he was my chief reader for my dissertation and i'm guessing i know kloss bear will will come into the book of abraham's story later as we talk about it so well that's the answer to rfm's question it's because i had been the the student of and successor of klaus bear and worked in religious texts that's why i was someone reached out to me so rfm please jump in with any follow-up to the question you had for robert okay and actually because i've already heard the first part of his answer which dates to 2002 i think that in order to keep this chronological we should probably go back to perhaps mormonism's most famous people of yours dr rittner whose name is john gee he is known far and wide among many if not most mormons as the foremost egyptologist who writes and presents frequently in defense of the authenticity of the book of the mormon scripture called the book of abraham and i understand that he was a student of yours at yale is that correct well the latter statement is true he was a student of mine at yale i would not say he's the foremost person who comments on the book of abraham oh i was just trying to say with him from a mormon perspective well then i think kerry mullstein would have something to say and and we will talk in depth about guillermo stein later so what i want to jump to now is doing a a jump back into kind of early 19th century uh egyptian slash us history and and start talking kind of a bit about the chronology of the book of abraham which predates the book of abraham so dr rittner if we could begin tell us about the state of egyptology in let's just say the 1810s and 1820s i i've heard i've heard words like egyptology mania or egyptimania talk about like what was going on in the field of archaeology anthropology egyptology and what would have led to some mummies and some scrolls showing up in kirtland ohio in in 1835 okay well uh egyptology actually modern egyptology begins with the napoleonic conquest of egypt the invasion of egypt because napoleon brought not merely soldiers when he entered egypt but also a whole series of scholars usually referred to by the french term the savants and these scholars were brought in to [Music] take records and make drawings of everything they could find in egypt because it was an exotic country and napoleon was fully intent on making it a french colony and so these scholars recorded animal life plant life and for egyptology's sake they recorded every square inch of every major temple they could find some of those no longer exist so this will this was this then in resulted in a multi-volume uh set of books called the description of egypt which are absolutely critical for us even to this day because it records the state of monuments that are much more pristine than they are now so that didn't take a while that took a while for the book to actually appear but what did immediately start appearing were things that the army was finding uh antiquities which the french were loading up and bringing back to france but since they were at war at that point with england and wellington the major french ship was seized was it was destroyed off the coast of alexandria frank gaudio has found the wreckage of the french fleet just recently in the the waters there in the mediterranean but before it sank the british unloaded for themselves all the major fines that the french were taking back from egypt and they brought them back to britain that included a major stone that a french soldier had found reused in a fort and at the fort of rosetta that now exists in the british museum but before it had been spirited away copies were made it was inked and so impressions were made and some of those made it back to france and so you had british scholars times young and you had french scholar francois young uh studying these inscriptions and champagne was the one who in 1820s was able to make the first elements of decipherment of egyptian hierarchy so because napoleon was the conquest of egypt suddenly egyptian themed items became all the rage in paris so there was even an elaborate severa porcelain uh service that was created for the imperial court and everyone was making neo-egyptian ideas and egyptian elements were also being inspired from uh had been picked up during the french revolution as being something that was anti so they they went to the isis cult and there were fountains of isis that were built in paris with water spilling squirting out of the breasts of the goddess uh so there was there was the theme that egypt was the new revolutionary uh sort of society that would start a new beginning and that was true everywhere because of all the sudden influx of new egyptian antiquities coming out of egypt and now suddenly the first ability to begin to read it so everyone was fascinated by that but of course the knowledge of being able to read in the 1820s in in paris would not have been available to anyone in the united states and certainly not in the heart of the country so anyone discussing egyptian hieroglyphs in kirtland ohio or chicago or even new york would know nothing absolutely nothing about this got it how would someone like a michael chandler you know i know that he acquired the the mummies and the and the papyrus from from someone else well let me let me back up and give you the story you actually asked for so uh antonio lebolo was an agent for the french who he was an italian soldier but he was an agent for the french for finding these antiquities that were being brought back for the market in france and roughly somewhere around 1820 he was on an excavation in the vicinity of thieves we don't know exactly where it was either thieves or nearby thieves and he seems to have acquired 11 mummies which were then shipped back to italy he died in 1830 i believe and then his heirs in order to make money off of these mummies because mummies were now being traded as uh as objects for decoration they were being ground up for medicine there were so many cat mummies that were being brought up that they were used to fuel the trains in england in lieu of coal wow um and so they were they were then shipped off to new york to find a buyer and they ended up in the hands of a traveling salesman with uh michael chandler who then exhibited them and marketed them the mummies came also some of them would have papyri the book of the dead funerary papyri that were wrapped up with the mummy uh and these mummies were slowly dwindled down in number as he traveled from new york to philadelphia and new orleans and ultimately to kirtland uh and he's selling bits and pieces of them here and there so there were four left when he got to kirtland and he was advertising them by claiming that in order to sell them that these date from the time of the prophets these go all the way back to biblical times and here you can see the faces of egyptians who will have talked to joseph no this was his selling pitch because this ups the price you know and none of the mummies is ever going to be a you know a workman you know this is a pharaoh this is the princess this is because of course that also increases the value and so having told the assembled people of ohio as he had elsewhere you know here are people who talk to joseph then they look at him and say oh okay they're linked to the patriarchs and that is an interesting segue so so i guess there's there's two these two things happening there's just this fascination with all things egyptian kind of like a pop culture almost phenomenon absolutely yes and then there's all these people that care about the bible and if anyone's read the old testament they would associate moses uh abraham and joseph meaning joseph of the technical dream code joseph you know one of the 12 sons of of jacob who became israel they would know those three names and they'd say whoa mommy's in egypt that's moses and joseph and you know and abraham right and that's all they would know yeah about about egypt so of course so all i could actually tell you about egypt is what you read in genesis and exodus right yeah really quickly i want to go just a tiny bit back to 1828 9 18 30. one of the things that was really important about joseph smith he starts out as a treasure digger with the seer stone telling people he could find buried treasure by i don't know 1828 let's just say that jig is up he's you know he's in front of the chorus yes yeah lots of lots of problems he he's run followed the law but but there's still a perception that he has these powers okay when he comes up with the story for the book of mormon and the plates and and moroni and nephi or whatever and the angels he he he names egyptian as the language that the golden plates uh were written on and he doesn't just call it egyptian he calls a reformed egyptian can you is there anything any observation you have about like why he would have picked egyptian as the language of the golden plates and if if anything like reform egyptian if that has any meaning to you or if you even have any theories about like why he would have picked egyptian as as what was written on the plates or what that would have meant or if that would have even been possible that israelis you know people living in jerusalem in 600 bc would be riding on golden plates in egyptian well there's a there's a long series of myths of egyptians moving to the west or other peoples moving to the west the jews moving to the west the lost tribes moving to the west uh my f in my first article on coptic influence on ireland i referred to a story that had been circulating in medieval europe that while the british were claiming in front of the papal court that they had priority on the british islands because they were descended from brutus and wandering trojans the scottish claimed that they were sorry my dog is barking in the background the problem we're keeping it real uh calm confinement uh the scottish position was that they were their nation was founded by traveling egyptians who had fled west and the princess scotia was the egyptian queen who founded the scottish throne and that is where you got the name scotland and the stone of scone so these wandering egyptians created scotland so the there was already in european notion the idea of people coming from turkey people coming from egypt and founding the civilizations farther to the west it's a it's a cultural link that gives them priority so egypt is a logical choice because if you're going to go back what is the earliest one you can get basically egypt is it and in answer to your question um there is no such thing as reformed egyptian it's not a stage of any of the egyptian languages and i i told you though we have multiple examples of them and that that is not one of them so the final stage is coptic which is written with the uh greek alphabet and some signs for sounds that greek doesn't have i have seen the characters that are supposed to contain reformed egyptian they were even sent to me when i was a just starting my being a professor at yale to see what my impression of them was i think it was checking me out to see whether a good professor down the line for someone who would be sent to me that is also foreshadowing i don't know that to be true but my response was well yes some of these things look vaguely egyptian they're they're none of them are actual egyptian but the problem is when you have more than 5 000 hieroglyphic signs more than 5 000 and you have cursive versions of that which are reduced to squiggly lines that look sort of like arabic or chicken scratches and you can further reduce those into other little squiggles for the demotic which is like shorthand it is almost impossible not to find a shape that can be said to look like some egyptian sign it's like finding images and clouds so i can throw sand on the floor and say yep that looks like the following word right right rfm i want to tap on your expertise here as well in all your studies and in your just kind of best best speculation any idea why joseph would have picked reformed egyptian as you know the claim for for you know the language in which the the book of mormon golden plates were written well there's a couple of things first off i'm coming from my background as having been an avid apologist for the book of mormon and also of course the book of abraham some time ago uh two things first off joseph smith through the book of mormon identifies the characters on the plates as reformed egyptian that originally they had written in egyptian and a thousand years later over the span of the book of mormon that had been changed among them to a state that they called reformed egyptian um not that it was generally known as reformed egyptian but that's what the nephites called it within the context of the book of mormon so in that way actually from an apologetic point of view i could see that as mirroring the development of the egyptian language among the actual egyptians from the hieroglyphs through excuse me the hierarch the demonic perhaps even the the coptic going from a much more uh complicated uh difficult to render type of um ideogram to things that are easier to draw take less time and are easier to do with the cursive uh first off what do you think about that dr rittner do you see any similarity between the way the book of mormon presents their changing of the script of egypt that they claim to have had with the way things really happened among the egyptians well the problem is the characters as i recall them include some shapes that look like a capital c that look like printing as well as more squiggled shapes which is to say it mingles two different styles for egyptian and the egyptians wouldn't have done that they would have kept them separate either either you're going to have printing or you're going to have long hand but you wouldn't use one letter one kind and another letter is another so as a writing system it is confused it's not what one would actually kind would probably use and none of those signs show a direct link from a development from what you would have before i mean it's like someone just reassociated and okay i'll just draw a series of squiggles starting from i think upper left it looks like a if i i think it's a c if i remember i haven't looked at this in more than five years so um but it's like okay i'll start with something that's very simple and i will devolve it from that and i could i could generate something like that too but you wouldn't want to write with it so i mean what this is something you could ask us a specialist who who works with lots of writing but i teach writing all the time and i i think it would be that wouldn't be a workable system very good the second part of my answer from john dolin is that even though uh i think that egyptology has certainly probably can i jump back in one more thing yeah i don't remember how many how many signs there were but there seems to have been quite a lot of them and the one thing that is happening in the egyptian language is it's simplifying its script so you go through these thousands in hieroglyphs and then by the time you reach coptic what they're doing is in order to write the bible they are they are now sin shifting to a purely phonetic writing so you only have 20 something signs so what they have done is simplifying and so if they were going to go any further all they would do is further simplify you wouldn't suddenly have more signs and that's what they've got i mean the english alphabet wouldn't suddenly add extra letters because what will we use them for so there is no reason why the script would actually be more complex after coptic after it had already shrunk down to this base number of limited signs and there are in coptic already sounds that were in the greek which they adopted which the egyptian didn't even have so there were some of these signs they didn't really use so if anything it would got it would have gotten smaller it certainly wouldn't gotten have gotten larger so that's the answer to your question it's that you absolutely wouldn't have been adopted because it's going in the wrong way so there's your there you go okay thank you and the second part of my answer to what john deland had asked is that i'm pretty sure that we're very clear that at least in joseph smith's mind and it may have been in the larger community as well at the time that it was believed that egyptian and hebrew were related languages and that they were similar in some way i think that today we understand they're very different kinds of languages with not really any connection between the two but backgrounds no they actually they are they are they are related yes yeah egyptian and uh hebrew are cousins egyptian is not semitic but it's called part of the hemito semitic or afro-asiatic languages so there are many many many words and grammatical features that are similar between egyptian and uh hebrew or arabic or eugeridic there are there are phoenician there are a number of these egyptians closest relative is berber which is the language that's spoken by some of the tribes in libya though it was actively suppressed by muammar gaddafi and was not allowed to be taught in schools and there are no good grammars of it and it's not well known and that's where we get our word barbarian from isn't it yes it is well let me ask you this wait rfm i just i just want to just really quick like for those who don't believe that joseph smith received golden plates by an angel then they they you know the only other thing to think about is he's sitting around thinking okay i'm going to tell people that i got plates from an angel but they're gonna ask me what what the place were written in hmm he's thinking about a jewish family in jerusalem you know the obvious answer would be i think hebrew you know so i'm just i guess i'm just trying to say why in the world would he pick egyptian and not hebrew do you have any you know any idea about that rfm or dr rittner well according to the book of mormon okay so going from its self-explanation they talk about the fact that they're hebrew so they do speak jewish but the book of mormon specifically states dr rittner that the reason they wrote in egyptian on the plates was because of the lack of space in other words they could convey much more information on the plates through writing in egyptian than they could in hebrew i'm wondering if dr rittner number one if that's true and number two if it's not true if that does play into the general idea of joseph smith's day that actually one glyph in egyptian could cover an entire paragraph or even paragraphs of meaning right well that is absolutely critical and i did not know that he had stated that in in the book of mormon because that answers actually everything so the and the simple answer to your question is yes there was such a belief that was the prevailing belief before champollion made his discovery restate it restated just for those who didn't get it or understand the belief was the belief was that this is a belief that goes all the way back to the roman period as egyptian hieroglyphs were being forgotten because the roman government did not accept any documents in egyptian language so if you did it if you did a legal document it had to be in greek or latin in egyptian the roman government wouldn't recognize it as being legally valid so that and and that and various other features the romans stopped supporting egyptian temples so they wouldn't pay for the hieroglyphic sculptors so then the the the nature of the egyptian language was lost over time by the byzantine period no one really knew it any longer so late speculators were trying to understand what these bizarre symbols were which they no longer knew and so what they thought they were were symbolic explanations and late s scholars byzantine scholars said that if you dr did the drawing of an eye that represented the all-seeing power of god who and then you could spill out an entire paragraph from one side and in the 1600s you had a scholar athenazius kierke who thought he could translate an obelisk that had been moved to rome and he produced pages of what this supposedly said on the basis of a handful of signs and we now know that all it says is the king's name but he managed to create all of this out of it because it was the assumption that each one of those little signs represented something like a paragraph and that is absolutely critical for our understanding of what joseph smith did as i was able to show in an article i produced online and we can talk about that later thank you dr thank you i did not know that if i had known that i would have certainly referenced it in my article and i'm happy to know that now because that basically is absolutely the smoking gun that shows what yeah yeah it's brilliant and that's rfm that's why i couldn't do this interview without you so thank you for helping me make sense of that um to tell you now that what's extremely important to understand is that that's that's wrong that the egyptian script is primarily phonetic the egyptians have signs for single it is generally assumed and stated that the phoenicians invented the alphabet they did not the egyptians already had an alphabet before anyone else the thing is the egyptians didn't think that was enough they didn't like just having an alphabet so they have signs that represent one sound a b a p then they have other signs that represent two consonants other signs that represent three consonants other signs that represent whole words which is closest to the idea of you know this is a whole concept but it's only a word not a whole paragraph and then they have other signs because that like all semitic languages egyptian doesn't write vowels hebrew doesn't write wells so if they would spell something like imagine if i were writing the word ball i would write b-l-l so how do you know if you're talking about bill the person bull the animal or ball the bouncy thing and the only way you do that is you put an extra sign that gives you something that we call a determinative that gives you the range of meaning so if it's bll and it means bill the personal name you put a seated man after it if it means bull the animal you draw a bull and if it me now these have no spoken value at all so these are just extra values that give you the mental range of what it is uh or ball you do a circle now that's important actually for the book of abraham because some of the signs that he read were actually determinatives not even words and so they actually had no spoken value at all got it but we'll get back to that at another time okay well that's what's actually going on so the whole idea that you read the whole paragraph absolutely wrong absolutely wrong got it so that's what champagne y'all knew and that's what no one in the u.s could have known brilliant um okay so uh so we know so we know that that joseph claims to have this power to translate uh special languages uh the book of mormon you know he claims he can translate egyptian and then in 1830 i think this is important um in in doctrine covenants what is now doctrine covenants section 21 in mormon scripture which i believe is a revelation given on april 6 1830 which all mormons uh you know should know uh is is the date that the church uh was actually founded what we have is is in doctrine doctrine covenants section 21 um sort of god telling joseph smith uh you know what his his special powers are or you know why he's called to kind of lead and what we find is it says in dnc 21 1 behold there shall be a record kept among you and in it thou shalt be called a seer a translator a prophet an apostle of jesus christ and elder of the church blah blah so it is super important to understand i think that the one of the ways that joseph smith was able to get followers to get a reputation uh to have people sort of be enthralled with with him as an individual was that he claimed special powers it used to be the seer stone and treasure digging but eventually it was hey god allows me to translate languages and it's there in in the founding revelation of of the church on april 6th 1830 joseph is a translator um and and his first you know major language or at least one of the major languages is egyptian so um i just think that's important so now now as we come forward a bit um about the about michael chandler let's go ahead and jump back to that part of the story uh michael chandler um shows up in kirtland now this is going to be a bit of a spoiler because we're going to be getting to the ways that joseph smith and those who helped him got it wrong what what do you want to tell us about michael chandler coming to kirtland and specifically what he brought and then i want you to talk about what he was actually what what the things were that he was actually bringing which again is a spoiler to this whole conversation but i think it's important to understand up front what what what were the items that that joseph brought and what was the content of the scrolls in particular just in general okay well the the mummies that you were bringing that he was bringing at least from the evidence we have from the surviving priory uh the mummies themselves are lost or potentially lost it's been argued that they were burned up in the chicago fire one of them may have gone to the niagara museum in which case it's at the emery museum now so it's a good candidate for being one of those i but these mummies are late mummies they are ptolemaic in date probably which means they could not be from the time of the patriarchs although chandler was advertising them that way because of course they would sell now you're not you're not going to get as much money for a mummy if you say it's from the time of ptolemy uergates the second because who is going to know who that is you know uh but if you say it's from the time of joseph you've you're you're you're going to get a better deal and joseph and michael chandler is a traveling salesman who is there to make money and he's been trying to sell these things he's charging for people to see them and then hopefully sells them off and the papyri that are with them do are books of the dead they are the normal things that are wrapped up with mummies which are their passports to eternity basically they are the documents that allow the deceased to get through the dangerous passageways in the underworld because in egyptian religion even if you've led a virtuous life after death you confront as you move through the underworld as your soul moves through the underworld you have to go through gateways that are guarded by demons that challenge you to identify them you have to know special names and powers and you have to be provided with food stuffs and if you're food offerings are required if you don't have the food offerings magical spells will provide the equivalent of them so the book of the dead includes spells to give you nourishment in case your descendants stop bringing offerings to the tomb it's your backup so everyone wanted these and they're extremely expensive you spend a lot of your life savings to make one of these documents they are this there's scribal societies that make they're ready made in advance and then they go in and insert people's names um so they're often a stock thing it's not something that you commissioned to do from beginning to end although some wealthy people might be able to do that but this the the egyptians knew they would be living most of their life they thought uh just like this earth but in heaven so you wanted everything you had in your egyptian religion to back up is life affirming paradise is primarily just this same life but without the illness disease or pain so what you want is to reproduce everything as much as possible and you can put that in book form and with with ritual spells to make that all happen and that's what these critical books of the dead are can i break in here for just a second their amulets is what they are right well uh i was struck dr rittner while you were talking about the purpose of the book of the dead because of course there's the book of the dead which we know now uh john g notwithstanding my apologies to him if he's listening that this is the scroll that was used the book of the dead in order to translate into the text of the book of abraham how much i've got right so far correct well um if you want to be really technical and this is super technical uh the the document that was used for the book of abraham as i see it and as the woodcuts would seem to establish is actually something called a book of breathing which is a different kind it's a different kind of document it's a derivative of the earlier books of the dead is that all sense books are book of dead is the second text all right but they're similar is that correct they are they're similar and they're precisely similar in purpose and the book of breathings is just a late development which is a replacement for the older book of the dead okay one develops into the other so it's part of the same series of ritual texts and funerary prayers that's derived from concepts in the book of the dead so as a if you take book of the dead as a general broad category the answer is yes so earlier scholars would have lumped that in with the book of the dead in the book of british we now take it as a separate book but it's still part of that same concept of sequence is that also called the senson manuscript yep and it says breathing egyptian word for breathing right so it's a shot incense in which means the book of breathing so when we call it the book of breathing it's because that's what the egyptian title is that's on those examples that actually have a label that's the label okay so having said that much it's basically a book of the dead but more specifically a book of breathing so you've already described the purpose of that and the book of abraham is linked to the book of the dead the book of abraham text at least facts emily 2 is linked to the temple because a number of those figures are not actually translated but that's just said uh the meaning of this will be revealed in the temple you remember those explanations right dr rittner well facsimile too is something completely different it is from it is from a different manuscript though correct and yeah it's not actually even a manuscript it's a different object and we'll be digging into it we'll be digging into the facsimiles in detail in a bit i'm so sorry because here's what i'm leading toward in my clumsy way dr rittner is brigham young who is of course joseph smith's successor in a famous speech he gave a definition of the temple ritual the mormon temple ritual which we call the endowment and this is what he said the purpose of the endowment was and anybody who's been through the temple to receive their endowment will recognize that this is an accurate description of what goes on there but the reason that struck me is because it sounded so similar to what you were saying is inscribed on the book of the dead here it is ready one paragraph your endowment this is brigham young speaking your endowment is to receive all those ordinances in the house of the lord which are necessary for you after you have departed this life to enable you to walk back to the presence of the father now here's the here's the interesting part walk back to the presence of the father passing the angels who stand as sentinels being enabled to give them the key words the signs and tokens pertaining to the holy priesthood and gain your eternal exaltation in spite of earth and hell period end of quote from brigham young does that sound at all like what's on the book of the dead because it kind of sounded similar to me what's your take on that dr rittner well you're you're asking me to speculate uh on things that are outside my specific area of competence but having said that yes if you if you simply look at now this is papyrus number the number two the tasha men text the where you have there is a series of vignettes and vignette is just a fancy french word for picture uh pictures that that illustrate many of these spells which show the gateways and show the demon forces including the snake walking on human legs which was of interest to the scribes of smith because they copied it in the curtain paper several times in this manuscript and it's it's referred to elsewhere uh that's about that's another story but but the there there are guardian figures in there which are and gates which are immediately recognizable even to the modern eye as a gate and an angelic slash demonic guardian next to it and the standing figure of the the tomb owner talking to the person so you know i can look at that picture and and you know i can hand that to a third year you know a third grader and say what's going on there and they can say it's a person having a conversation with some weird spirit at a gateway this would be immediately recognizable to anyone of any intelligence level whether modern or ancient you wouldn't need to read the text or even know anything about the manuscript to know that much does that well it opens it up to me the way what i told you about the book of mormon opened it up to you because if i'm understanding you correctly uh the endowment ceremony itself at least this part about which is the important part is the the pinnacle moment in the endowment ceremony where you have to give keywords and tokens and passwords to an angel who's standing as a sentinel for you to enter into a representation of heaven in the temple the celestial room um but if i'm understanding you correctly then maybe that actually could have been derived just from the iconography or the pictures on the papyrus that joseph smith had in his possession is that what you're saying well obviously i have no idea what was going on in brigham young's mind but yes i think i think that's entirely possible and viewers and listeners will be able to get a better sense of this uh when we actually talk about the vaccinations we can actually look at these images and uh and um and then people will have a visual sense of what we're talking about as well if i thought this was a foundational document and that it represented insights into heaven which is what the egyptians intended to be anyway and i had it in my possession or i had looked at it and i was told that this is this is where revelation would come from then those observations are exactly what i would pull from it that would be a reasonable prophetic use of this document well the reason i'm excited about this i'm going to duck into the background here in a second john don't worry about it but i think that actually we are making some we're doing some groundbreaking stuff here and getting new and additional insights into maybe how it was that the temple endowment was created by joseph smith with with a lot of help from the masons of course but uh but uh anyway i'll duck out and yeah i was gonna i was my thought when you were asking on rfm was and i don't want you to duck out um i just want to make sure we don't cover things twice um but but uh my my wondering was that if if in some way the there was egyptian influence in the masonic ceremony that then would have then filtered into the mormon temple ceremony and i i'm just totally speculating there's a great deal of masonic influence in terms of iconography because the masons picked up on the gypto mania of the napoleonic era and um masonic temples to this day are wonderful repositories of egyptian ideas and here i should make a personal remark my ancestor was governor of pennsylvania on the anti-masonic party which is no longer with us but governor joseph rittner before this just before the civil war um was i i i don't even know what his religious beliefs were i assume he's catholic because they were the anti-masonic people but i have toured the uh masonic uh lodge in philadelphia which is one of the most wonderful recreations of ancient egyptian temple space i've ever seen and i highly recommend it to anyone who wants to see what egyptian designs look like um i'm not anti-masonic i'm not a mason but uh i noticed when i was there there when they had a card file on masons and i'm flipping through and it said joseph rittner not a mason in bold letters so i was visiting under a different name apparently they haven't forgotten my ancestors so i'm sorry so there is there is certainly a masonic possibility excellent so yeah if if egyptian apparently we just don't do well with other religions since uh i've come from a family of debunkers right well there's you know everything everything's remix you know we just have multi-generational influences and it's certainly very possible that egypt egyptian you know uh relics or writings or or fables or stories influenced the masonic ceremony which then influences well it's questionable but but it's again it's a good foundational myth the rosicrucians want to be ancient egyptians as well so there are multiple societies that claim to have a basis in surviving ancient egyptian rituals and motifs and that's also true of the mummy movies because of course the mummy is being kept alive by the secret group of ancient egyptian priests who are still with us supposedly well you'd be hard-pressed to find one i'd like to meet one excellent the great point rfm thanks for bringing that up um it it so you you've established that these you know these scrolls are are books or artifacts that are commonly in this time period buried with mummies because they're going to be used in some way uh in their afterlife is that an okay summation it is a primary gift for them for their afterlife okay so um so i think it bears mentioning something really important and that's the dates so dr rittner if we had to estimate an approximate year or era when abraham would have lived and i have to even state that even you know even jewish scholars will admit that there's a big question mark as to whether you know characters adam and eve and abraham and moses even really existed and we talked about this in our david macavoy interview so one problem you have with the book of abraham is abraham may not have ever existed but then a second really big problem about the book of abraham is the dates so dr ritter what's your understanding of when abraham might have lived if he had ever lived well since we have no historical records outside of the bible for his existence that becomes a problem and so then the question is where do you where do you locate the time period that would be likely for people moving from canaan into egypt and there have been a couple of different suggestions uh i personally favor the the explanation that was provided by the egyptians themselves which is the egyptian historian minitho who was writing in the ptolemaic period in other words roughly the same time as these papyri were being made and he explained the biblical stories because he knew them he was a historian writing for the library of alexandria he was writing the history of egypt and so he had to deal with the exodus and he claimed that these exodus stories were linked to in the invasion of egypt by the hixos which was in what we now call the second intermediate period and we're talking roughly around 1700 bc okay so the number i had and that rfm just texted me was 2000 bce you're putting it around 1700. so a couple millennia and i i think we've already established that you date these papyri to around 100 bce is that right yes so it's pretty it's pretty hard to even make the claim that that that abraham that these papyri were written by the very hand of abraham when when they were actually written somewhere between 1600 and 19 when they date to 16 to 1900 years after abraham would have lived if abraham had ever lived well that is so certainly true that even the apologists recognize that and that's why they've had to say well okay the original was written but this is a this is a copy okay but there is no there is not a chance whatsoever that that text could that lang that script it's written in did not even exist at the time of the hexas they didn't even have those shapes of squiggles so we can be 100 percent that it could not under any circumstances have been written at the time of whenever you want to make abraham assuming you want to make an abraham at all because the language the language hadn't evolved yet to where it had evolved by the language or the script yeah exactly or this manuscript it which didn't exist till much later because as i said it's a late derivation of the book of the dead all these things say late late late late i mean there is no wiggle room zero none not any not even a tiny a tiny iota impossible uh and even if you play with uh abraham and say no he was instead under the beginning of the new kingdom which is where he's also been put uh then you're only moving it to 1300 bc which you're still two you're a thousand years away more than a thousand years away so under any scenario no matter how weird you want to make it and no matter how desperate and i use that word with intent you you you make your argumentations it can never be anything more than absolutely ridiculous i hope i made that clip yes so you're saying there's a chance yeah right or if you are hallucinating and absolutely mentally insane i'll try not to take that personally but just that uh this is actually not a challenge to what you're saying but just to clarify what it is you're already talking about is that in the history of the church it talks about the book of abraham and this language is in the heading at the beginning of the book of abraham in the lds scriptures where it describes it as the writings of abraham while he was in egypt called the book of abraham written by his own hand upon papyrus that's how it's described that it's written by his own hand and that's the difficulty that apologists have to try and work their way around with that particular issue and i'm showing that introduction uh of the 18 of the 1981 edition of the book of abraham um and uh and yeah we'll come back to this as well but that's that's a super that's a super important point um well there's also a point in the slide you just quickly showed because there's a change from the what the book of abraham actually said to what the 2013 description says did you notice it's gone from a translation to an inspired translation and that is a very big difference right yeah and we'll totally come back to that and the uh the apologetic arguments uh around this theory as i remember looking at the manuscript the word inspired is not there yeah just while we're on the while we're on the topic of timeline rfm if you'll just jump in on this question as i understand some of the some of the content in the actual book of abraham and again we'll come back to this but abraham's talking about things clearly from genesis and even genesis hadn't hadn't been written uh you know back in 2000 bce is that right rfm no that's an interesting point if you're going to go with the historical figure with the question mark next to it of abraham living at 1800 to 2000 bc and writing in chapter two and i think uh four and five of abraham about genesis material i think typically david bakavoy would back me up that scholars generally agree that that was probably written maybe around 600 bce so yeah that would have been a long time after abraham lived for him to be writing the book of genesis which had not been written yet and probably wouldn't be for another thousand years it's kind of like writing harry potter fan fiction before jk rowling releases harry potter yes but of course you've got to understand that according to the basic fundamentalist worldview that joseph smith had it was moses who wrote genesis and therefore abraham coming after moses would be able to reference it chronologically it's only when studies have developed to the point that they have now that we can see that that doesn't really make sense on a regular timeline yeah well the same argument is applicable to the book of exodus and for phrases and terms that are in the book of abraham specifically the the name potiphar which comes out of the book of exodus and is in the joseph story you have in the book of abraham a reference to the so-called hill of butterfly potiphar is an egyptian name that is only occurring in the later period post new kingdom what year is that post new kingdom 800's six hundreds somewhere in there seven hundreds what i'm telling you now is that scholars have to date the book of exodus it had to have been composed no earlier than 700 bc because it has anachronisms in there that couldn't have existed no egyptian would have been named potiphar before the what we call the libyan period in egypt which is one of my periods of specialization the berber period in egyptian uh potiphar is padi pa ra the one whom parade has given and that has a grammatical construction that wasn't possible and wasn't used as a personal name until around 700 bc and so it's a distinctly egyptian name it's in a distinctly egyptian place and it's grammatically only possible at this time period like the script which means there is not a chance same level of absolutely wrong that the book of exodus can date from a patriarch who lived at the time it claims just to put a fine point on this doctor right there you're right you're saying i'm just i've just said fundamentalism as possible right and i just want to make sure it's clear to the audience that you're referencing abraham chapter 1 verse 20 where it says behold potiphar's hill was in the land of ur of chaldea and if i'm understanding that's also absurd because for another reason and that's uh there's no if potiphar is out of time anachronistically putting an egyptian name in or of is absurd geographically because there is no way there would have been such a thing wherever you put or of the chaldees and my colleague who is now my director of my institute a senior sumerian scholar did a chapter in my volume because i asked him to to discuss ur of the chaldees there are two ores that are possible uh one is in mesopotamia and the other is near haram but neither place would an egyptian place name be there and under no circumstances i want to emphasize that with as many exclamation points as i could possibly do never would you have an egyptian priest functioning theirs doing sacrificial rights in or wherever you put war never would happen and the egyptians didn't do human sacrifice anyway and the picture isn't of a sacrifice so everything about that as we will eventually get to is just a fantasy built on a fantasy built on a misunderstanding built on ignorance built on not understanding anything whatsoever nothing built on a misunderstood and wrongly reconstructed drawing on a torn papyrus which they didn't understand how to restore so the drawing is ultimately a fabrication and everything spun off of it is a lie on a i hope that was clear it was can i pursue this just just a little bit further john since we're here on this issue of ur um it's my understanding having been involved in the book of abraham apologetics for some time reading a lot of stuff that was written including by hunible as well as john gee two proposals for ur and there's one that's way south and then there's one that's much further north the one that you mentioned as being near on and it seems to me that john g and other mormon apologists are really trying hard to favor the northernmost or specifically because at or around the time of abraham when egyptian the egyptian empire had its widest influence it actually extended up and east toward that area so they can try and justify the book of abraham talking about there being this egyptian presence an egyptian priest ian or of the chaldeas going with the northern or at that specific time period is that your understanding of their argument and do they have a good argument there it is my understanding of their argument and it's ridiculous uh at the height of egyptian political control under the native pharaohs egypt never controlled beyond the orontes river which is to say you are basically south of modern ontakia ancient antioch which was in syria but it's now politically in turkey uh haran is higher up way north of that and out of that territory they they never got there okay so even even under the ptolemaic army where egyptian control was a little broader it never had iran so at no time at no time did the egyptian state control iran so no matter where you put or either north or south then according to yeah the book of abraham would be incorrect about talking about cleveland [Laughter] so the book of abraham would be wrong about the likelihood of an egyptian priest conducting a ritual in iran is the same as an egyptian priest conducting it in cleveland so um so for those who are listening uh and you know we've we basically said you know the problems some of the core problems the book of abraham abraham may not existed if he existed he existed oh you know over 1700 to 1900 years before this would have been written i even wonder whether was he a sheepherder like i don't know what his occupation was but could he have traveled to egypt and learned egyptian and then written it in the short period of time he was in egypt like what's the chances of that happening dr rittner well the hixos period that i mentioned there were large canaanite populations who had moved into egypt and we now know from studies of dentition and the dna that we're actually getting from bodies in the delta which is to say the northeastern section of egypt that there was a large-scale migration in this period of people out of canaan into egypt they settled there they brought with them their canaanite ways so yes there were populations that were moving into egypt during periods of famine and they were settling there and to a certain extent they were egyptianizing and they would have learned how to speak egyptian whether i think it's highly doubtful they would have learned how to write egyptian because even the egyptians rarely wrote egyptian reading and writing required intensive schooling in an egyptian temple 99 of the population as we currently guess couldn't read and write we currently assume only one percent of the population could read or not and certainly not abraham showing up in egypt from a foreign country fast no shepherd is gonna write uh at all that's not possible uh unless you are a member of an elite ranking family upper middle class at the minimum you couldn't write and you had to be trained in a priestly school which means you had to be apprenticed into the temple right shepherds aren't apprenticed into the temple and if and if this evidence evidence isn't enough for you to to start to wonder about the book of abraham dear listeners and viewers if i'm reading from the church's own book of abraham essay which we're going to go to in depth later i'm reading directly from it quote these fragments date between the third century bce in the first century bce long after abraham lived that's the church's own uh acknowledgement now and even a more devastating blow and dr ritter i want you to confirm this uh this might you know be one of the most devastating blows of all the church's own book of abraham essay says none of the characters on the papyrus fragments mentioned abraham's name or any of the events recorded in the book of abraham mormon and non-mormon egyptologists agree that the characters on the fragments do not match the translation given in the book of abraham so i mean if if you wanted sort of like the most obvious hit you over the head acknowledgement the church itself is basically saying that the content the substance of these papyra um never mentioned the word abraham anywhere and don't have anything to do with abraham or anything written that joseph claimed to have translated into the book of abraham dr rittner do you confirm that absolutely this was something that was recognized already in the 60s as soon as the papyri were rediscovered uh and placed in front of aziz astia at the metropolitan uh and then given over to the church uh immediately hugh nibley began to recognize that renee from his work that he did then subsequently with klaus bear he knew that what this text actually said and that it did not say anything of the sort which led to a variety of explanations as to why not uh you know where was the text was this the text is translation the right word splitting hairs over the word translation trying to explain where the missing manuscript was try to account for why it says the illustration is right next to the text except there was supposed to be a missing manuscript that would then be in between but it can't possibly be there so that doesn't make any sense either but we'll try this explanation that explanation some other explanation and all of it is grappling with the simple fact that we have the text which is precisely the same as the illustration the text the text translations by smith references that illustration as being the document we now have the document we can read which he which no one could at the time he owned it uh we can now read every single jot and squiggle on there every single word and abraham is nowhere there uh and in fact there is nothing on there that you know the only thing that might dovetail with that text is the word v [Laughter] i can find the word the oh it's so beautiful uh it's just funny um thank you well this has been fantastic so far dr rittner and rfm i think it's been really interesting to sort of set the context for uh you know our our deeper discussion the book of abraham and to be honest it seems like what we've already shown which which concludes with the church admitting that the papyrus has nothing whatever to do with abraham at all uh probably should be the end of the story should be the end of the discussion it's like none of this happened the book of abraham was made up and end of story but interestingly that's not how mormon history went instead we have this incredible history of the church trying to explain away well we we have the issue of these documents being destroyed we have the issue of or or allegedly destroyed and then refound you have the issue of egyptologists over many time periods debunking the book of abraham and then we have the resurgence of of some of these documents in the 1960s and then just decades of apologetic acrobatics trying to save the book of abraham uh from being something that sort of torpedoes joseph smith and with it the entire restoration and so even though logic says case closed already uh it's it's super important that we go a lot deeper and really talk about in depth the problems with the book of abraham and most importantly the problems with the church's uh apologetics and i think that's something dr rittner that you feel very passionately about because uh while i don't think you care what people believe in terms of religious beliefs i think you have a lot of respect for people's religious beliefs i think you really take issue with shawnee scholarship or dishonest scholarship or unethical or misleading scholarship is that fair to say dr rittner uh yes exactly i i it's not my business to [Music] debunk people's religion that's not why i was involved with this i was asked to read a papyrus and i read a papyrus my concern is that if you're going to discuss this document you discuss the document accurately and that's where i feel i have a role to play is that i can tell you what it says and when there are contortions that are made to try to make it say something else then my scholarly sense is offended i love it and because we're kind of starting and maybe a bit of a new section of this interview i'm just going to mention as as we want to in every section and this will come out of left field for someone just joining us it is really important that we note that dr rittner aside from his love for egyptology and truthful scholarship we are taking advantage of this historic moment of him coming on mormon stories and radio free mormon to also provide our listeners with the opportunity to do something very historic and uh altruistic which is that dr rittner is facing kidney failure he is in need of a living donor to secure his life and continued research and we're inviting annie and all of our listeners to spread the word if you can help please contact dr dana mclean northwestern medicine transplant coordinator at 312-695-0828 living donors save lives i'm just going to mention that multiple times during this episode thanks to anyone who heeds this call or spreads the word so that we can uh help save dr rittner's life and prolong it so that he can do as much research as possible so i just have to throw that in okay so with that what i want to do now so we we in our chronology dr rittner michael chandler comes to kirtland in 1835 he's saying he's he's already tying you know the old testament and and moses and abraham and joseph to these papyra joseph says let's buy them i think he buys two two mummies and two scrolls is that right dr rittner uh i think so i have to go back and refresh my rfm is that right two two mummies and two scrolls i think two mummies four scrolls but you got some mummies and some squirrels okay so mommy you have certainly so yes okay and so joseph gets those and doesn't he immediately pronounce what they are rfm is that right uh i don't know if it's immediately but i think it's soon after if not immediately that indeed the writings on these scrolls are writings of abraham and also with joseph yeah he basically says as i remember my my studies it's a scroll of abraham and the scroll of joseph does that sound right yes but he only to our knowledge got at least part way through his translation which is what he called it uh of the book of abraham and nobody knows seems to know that if he ever got anywhere with the book of joseph right my assumption is that the book of joseph is the story of katumin that never was finished and we can look at that in a minute that'll be great and and we also should note uh referencing our a recent interview on the joseph smith translation that he had already started the book of moses right write rfm with his uh attempt to re-translate a more inspired version of the holy bible is that right right yes he started that in june of 1830. so he couldn't you know he couldn't very well name one of the scrolls moses because he had already moses had already been taken in a previous translation exercise well that's true because you're you're dealing with a limited number of patriarchs and bible personalities who already have a pre-established connection with egypt and therefore who logically at least in joseph smith's mind would have writings represented on scrolls found in egypt with egyptian mummies right okay so he gets these scrolls and he begins a translation uh process i don't uh we want to come back to this um because you know at the time the church members were you know dealing with this stuff uh they didn't know anything about the details and we kind of want to reveal this chronologically as the public was made aware so uh without digging into the curling egyptian papers and and all those things dr rittner rfm is there anything we want to do to set the listeners up for just understanding what was produced when it was produced i know that it was important to at least brian hogley to note that part of the book of abraham was sort of translated in 1835 and then part of it was translated later in the navau time period is that right rfm right 1835 which is up through abraham chapter 2 verse 18 and the balance being translated in the early 1842 in nauvoo and then it was printed in the church newspaper starting i think in march of 1842 and then eventually it gets incorporated into mormon scripture right right i think that was around 1860 or so yeah so a couple decades later it's it's actually brought into the canon along with the book of mormon and the doctrine and covenants uh et cetera right right okay so let's actually begin with facsimile one because i think that's a really uh reasonable and fun place uh to begin now i know that most of my uh the consumers of our podcasts uh you know only only consume this in audio form but having said that in rfm i know your podcast isn't yet on youtube or facebook but but we are providing visuals because we think it's going to help hopefully those of you who are tuning in via audio will still be able to understand this conversation but if you really want to get the most from it you'll want to switch to youtube or facebook where we're actually providing a video and so with that what i'm going to put on the screen is facsimile one which is what you know one of the first things that was produced and uh dr rittner take it away as you want to take us through what was produced but then go back and talk to about what the origin texts actually were and what they said well what you're looking at as as copied shows you a well let's see let's where to start the prominent feature is a bed i think i can all recognize it's a bed it's in the shape of a lion you can see a lion's head on the right hand side it has lion's feet and a lion's tail coming out on the far left hand side there is a body lying on that with his legs up in the air and he's shown with two hands held up in front of his face and the reason why they are presumably there is because there is a dark figure standing above him the body is dark though weirdly the head is white not it doesn't match uh and the that figure has one arm holding a knife so that the body on the bed would appear to be warding off the blow of an attack above the body's head is a floating bird flying bird below the bed there are four jugs with different heads a human head a that should be a baboon head a jackal head and a hawk head those are correctly done and at the head end of the bed there is an altar with flowers and wine jugs next to it below the line of all of that as a baseline there's a zigzag of water with a crocodile shown and at the base of all of that is a series of what would look to modernize like just a series of rectangles with little rectangles inside of them which is known as the niched bricking motif as a standard feature of egyptian design that goes all the way back to the most archaic period and is from interconnections between egypt egypt and sumer as a part of bric architecture which is just used as a baseline design in egyptian art and if it hasn't already occurred to the listeners feel free to if you don't have the youtube video available feel free to pull out your own standard works and and turn to the book of abraham and the facsimiles that are there rfm if you want to tell them where to go i think they probably know right i assume that they do but i will let them know that that's not going to really do the whole trick because starting with the next slide you're going to see things you're not going to find in your scriptures and you would never know about if you only went by the scriptures in rfm tell us just that like you know one sentence what what is basically joseph smith claiming that that this is this image is well what this image is is the according to joseph according right it's the crisis point of the entirety of chapter one of the book of abraham when abraham is being sacrificed by the priest of el kenna who is uh gonna sacrifice him and abraham cries to the lord for deliverance and the angel of the lord represented in figure 1 comes down and delivers him at this moment and smites the altar smites the priest and abraham is able to make a getaway and continue his journeys on so that's abraham on the bed about to be sacrificed right in those four canopic jars below him he identifies as four idolatrous gods he identifies the crocodile as the god of pharaoh and then that's about everything that i probably should say here and the bird the bird that's the angel of the lord coming down to save and when he cries for help okay all right so back to you dr rittner let's let's go back to the source text shall we all right so for those of you who can see the the image here is what actually survives this is the real papyrus this is the papyrus that joseph smith owned which then passed from his family ultimately to a household servant and al and then on to the metropolitan museum in new york and it we know this is the original papyrus because it is glued onto a backing has plot numbers for mormon home allotments from i think it's kirtland that's on the back side um and you can see for those again who can that the body is in fact damaged when smith bought it it was not there the papyrus was already damaged and so someone has drawn in the connecting pencil lines to make the cor the the vein body and most importantly both of those hands the the arms connecting to what he what look like two hands there that are survive on the fragment of papyrus basically the head of the guy with the knife and the knife right the knife and the head of the dark figure is drawn the guy standing up that's drawn in and then on on supposedly abraham lying down what's drawn in so what's important to notice is there is no knife that is preserved in this so we don't actually know from the survival you cannot say that this figure originally held in life there is no proof for that oh i thought it looked like in his right hand he had a dagger or something but i i see what you're saying yeah uh and we don't know what his head actually looked like from this if we only had this papyrus because there is no head there and there was no head there for joseph smith because it's torn and we see him drawing it back to complete the image and they have drawn it in a different way than they would ultimately put it in the wood cut so they couldn't make up their mind initially how they wanted it because if you can see the picture you see the man's face is full face looking at you the one with the dark body but eventually they made it profile like the figure on the bed so again proof that there was no actual one that they could copy from they were having to make up what was broken and this is the best they could do the problem is what they inserted is wrong there was never a knife there there was never a human head there and there is a reason why the skin of the figure on the left is dark and it's not because he's a dark egyptian or anubian it's because he's a jackal because he's the egyptian god anubis who has a dog head and is a furry dog and the black represents the color of his hair and we'll we'll jump to that photo in a sec but and it's also important to note that there's two arms that are drawn in right and there are double arms and that there actually is probably only one arm right and that that's of abraham laying down for the people to be able to explain that with parallels the problem for understanding this in the way that joseph smith interpret it is this is a fairly common scene this is not this scene of anubis to give the name to the god on the left with the jackal body with the god osiris on the bed which always has the form of a lion this is the funerary bed it is never never never an altar you do not sacrifice anything on it this is where the dead rest in peace and receive blessings not sacrifice you would never kill anyone on such a thing and the pots underneath the bed hold the internal organs that are used in mummification because when you dry out the body to mummify and preserve it you remove the lungs liver stomach and intestines because these rot quickly and so they are removed from the body the heart by the way is left inside everything else is those other arguments are taken out they are embalmed separately and they are put in the canopic jars this is so well known that if you look at the brendan fraser mummy movie of recent date they talk about the canopic jars there and in that movie strangely enough they make five of them but they're only four they're always only four they're always four in the papyri and joseph smith's artists got it right because we have because they copied the papyrus which had it right so if we go to the next image now tell us what we're seeing in this image this is a reconstruction of what it would actually have looked like so on the left is the original is the facsimile one as we've already shown and as was released in the book of abraham right yes and on the right hand side there is a proper reconstruction where we can actually see anubis's head it's a jackal naughty human you will notice his arm is extended it does not have a knife and you will notice that what is above him is actually a bird's wing that is extended off to the right hand side above his one hand raised not two his other hand is attached to his penis he's holding an erect penis because what you are actually seeing is an x-rated scene of osiris rising from the dead and impregnating his wife the goddess isis who has taken the form of a a kite a bird and she is thus engendering her son the god horus who will avenge his father who kill who was slain by the god seth this is all a critical moment in egyptian mythology in egyptian mythology every person who dies wants to be revived like osiris was revived by the god anubis the god of embalming and so the figure of osiris on the embalming bed who is receiving blessing and embalming from anubis protecting him not killing him protecting him uh this is enabling not only osiris but you after death become a form of osiris and so you too will revive and be alive in the underworld just like osiris was which is why the surrounding hieroglyphic text has nothing to do with abraham it is entirely about a man by the name of [ __ ] a priest whose funerary papyrus this was and it belonged to his mummy which was one of those mummies and this contains funerary blessings for him asking that he be revived like osiris in the picture and that it contains an invocation to the gods of the north south east and west that they induct horus like osiris into the underworld safely as shown in the picture with anubis embalming osiris who equals horus and this is the moment where this is not what you typically find in most of the book of the dead papyri this is a much more specialized arcane ritual scene in which osiris is shown impregnating his his wife which you otherwise find on temple walls which i'll be able to show you in a moment we get scenes just like this and for funerary scenes typical scenes of anubis if we go to the next slide i can show you a parallel example well i just and just and just to reiterate something you probably already said where you can you can notice that where where joseph smith describes would have drawn the right hand of i guess it's abraham lying down what what what it's more likely is that that was the left wing of the bird not the right hand of abraham is that correct correct yeah absolutely correct okay so they got that second arm wrong and of course they got them and we have also as we shall see when we get to the other some real egyptian examples uh there are typically falcons representing the goddesses isis and nephthis that are at the head and foot end of the lion bed and the head and bird nephes is what is interpreted by joseph smith as the spirit of the lord okay so now going to the second image that we got from mormon sorry about that perfect so so now turning to this wonderful graphic presented by mormoninfographics.com what we have is facsimile one with with all the different items in infection only one numbered and then we've got on the left hand side on the right hand side a modern egyptological interpretation and on the left-hand side what joseph smith's uh interpretation was and i don't even know this you were the original source of these interpretations but i think it would be interesting to just kind of go through i don't know the first five or six or ten or even all of them and i'll tell you what what joseph said it was and then again you tell us what it really is is that okay happy to do so so starting with number one it's the it's the bird in the top right joseph smith calls that the angel of the lord did he get that right well as i just said a moment ago that is probably the goddess nephes at the head of the lion or a bed okay the guy this is the sister this is actually the sister of osiris who together with the goddess isis mourned the dead osiris and like mary magdalene at the resurrection of jesus she is present at the resurrection of osiris so she is regularly figured as being there that's who that goddess is and she and isis both take bird form okay so she's number number one now it says in the modern egyptological interpretation the spirit of ba or [ __ ] uh that could be another interpretation okay it might be his his the egyptians have multiple spirits including the kaa the ba et cetera the ba is a bird-headed spirit and that is another possibility okay um i'm going to show you a picture where it might well be the uh the goddess nephes but we do have images where it's the boss spirit hovering over the corpse okay number two is the figure lying down on on what joseph would call the altar let me just say one let me just introduce one thing if it's actually the ba it should have a human head so that's wrong you're saying this this the fact that it has a fully bird head suggests to me it's more likely the goddess necklace okay so that was some other egyptologists that would have made that interpretation so the figure i would mention here i'm sorry just jumping it might even have been me because i might have thought it was the ball at an earlier age i'm just thinking off the top of my head okay i see but as it is a bird's head it's more likely to be after this and the parallel that i'll show you in a moment has a bird so okay harvey's jumping in the place where the bird head is the exact head is missing and there's a lacuna there in the original and so that has been drawn in as well as the the hands and the head okay well then we don't know got it thank you rfm okay the second figure is abraham fastened upon the altar according to joseph smith so that's the figure lying down on the altar that's abraham about to be killed what is that actually from an egyptologist's perspective it's actually the god osiris and it equals who is also equivalent to the priest horus or but it's it's the dead osiris reviving okay it's osiris but it's intense reviving which is which is demonstrated by his raising of his one hand to his face that is the signal in egyptian of of waking up and and scratching your face so that is a gesture of just waking up and i'll be able to show you that in parallels as well but it's osiris his other hand isn't there because as i will show you in parallel his other hand would be on his erect penis okay and and it's osiris but it's also symbolizing the person the mummy who's in short you know in two years who is which is poor yes horror okay so that's not that wrong this papyrus that's the man whose name is actually on it right okay so that's all for over two the third uh the third figure is the is the dark figure uh with the knife uh stabbing uh you know the about to stab the person on on the altar joseph smith says that's uh the idolatrous priest of elkanah well it's the god anubis whose head has incorrectly drawn as a human head it's also as you can see the wrong color because he's a jackal and so his entire body is covered with black hair not just the body so they didn't understand that it's an animal god so it's not a it's not a priest it's a it's a god and the god is has an animal head and the head would be dark and he would never have a knife because what anubis does is to minister spells and unquench and ointments onto the body and he certainly wouldn't be holding a knife to attack it okay so it's restored incorrectly in the hand the head the color of the head the the nature of the creature he and what he is doing so in other words there is nothing correct about that statement okay on all points okay um over three for the altar uh that that uh according to joseph abraham's lying down on uh he calls that altar the altar for sacrifice by the idolatrous priests standing before the gods elkanah libna qurash and pharaoh what what do you say that altar is that altar is a lion bed which is attested in egyptian surviving uh monumental sculpture and even wooden sculpture from dynasty 3 from the time of king jose the step pyramid at saqqara we even have an example of this from king tudonk almonds burial with a lion bed this is one of the funerary beds which is used to elevate the symbolically the corpse into the sky the egyptians believed the the horizon god was the god aka who had two lion heads the bedstead head there would be actually one on each side two lions so that when you put the corpse in on the bed you are actually putting him on the body of the lion goddess two double-headed lion goddess who represents the sky so this is part of the procedure in the mummification where you are symbolically raising the dead body into heaven by putting him on a representation of the horizon sky goddess or god rather here goku and so this is not a thing of evil or death in a negative way this is actually exaltation in the most literal sense of where you put the body to symbolically cause it to ascend into heaven not the angel of the lord doing it it's the bed that's doing it the bed is the equivalent of the angel of the lord so if there was an angel of the lord here it would actually be the lion bed and not the bird got it okay and of course the names that you mentioned those are all gibberish and don't exist and have nothing to do with anything egyptian whatsoever and never did okay so that's f that's five six seven and eight which which are the canopic jars according to you uh dr rittner according to me and everyone else and so joseph names them got idolatrous gods elkanah libna makhmara and korosh really quickly rfm do we have any idea where those names come from do they appear like a town next door to joseph or you know some apocrypha writing that he read do you know of any attempt to sort of figure out where he got those names this has been a long-standing hobby of mormon apologists to try and come up with some connection to either a place name a person name or pretty much any name you could come up with in any language whether it's egyptian or mesopotamian or hittite or hebrew and to come up with something in some other language at some other time that sort of sounds like one of these names and then to proclaim it as a bullseye and well i guess then it depends upon your own perspective john gee has recently published a paper on the four sons of horus uh which are pictured there is five six seven and eight in which he engages in that exercise he published it at the interpreter journal the online journal with the editor daniel c peterson and this is in the past two weeks that this came out and he is so taken by the connections that he has managed to draw with hidite and mesopotamian names that he has proclaimed in the conclusion that the odds of joseph smith guessing these four names correctly are astronomical and as he puts it they are equivalent to winning the powerball lottery three weeks in a row uh wow dr rittner i guess i guess a checkmate uh on you by by jungkook you know i'm just i'm being silly do you have a response to john gee's assertions there uh you already use or gibberish um uh my honest reaction that's just pathetic oh no tell us why um these are extremely well known figures the names are extremely well known they're we have surviving three-dimensional examples of these almost every museum and mine has multiple copies the metropolitan has multiple copies every regional muse any museum that has egyptian objects probably has some of these most of these have the name and hieroglyphs written right on them i don't have to make it up it's right there um john gee knows that he's he has had training even though he goes out of his way to ignore it and pervert it at every opportunity uh in no case were these jars ever ever associated with the hittites or mesopotamia and if you can weasel out some and the operative word is weasel some kind of a connection to some far-flung place that's meaningless because these jars never had anything to do with it it doesn't make any difference if if you can find an el cana coming out of kentucky that doesn't make it connected to a jar that has a known name and a known function and was never connected with that name in any context in the real world where i live but john g does not you know now that you mentioned it kentucky does sound kind of like elkanah [Laughter] no seriously that's the kind of connections he draws and by the way uh doctor in his paper that did come out this is john gee's paper in which he has no less than 119 footnotes he somehow followed me in that i i i've always recommended lots of footnotes well even with all those footnotes and in the body of his paper he somehow manages to avoid actually ever once mentioning the real egyptian names of these four sons of horus let's do that shall we would you what are those names sure can we bring up the picture again so that i can walk people through them i'm going to show i have a slide coming up for that in a moment maybe i don't know if you want to hold that do you want to jump to that and come back before we do let's kill off the last two images or three images that we've got so that we can move to the next okay so now we're over eight um we've got uh nine which is the idolatrous god uh of pharaoh so that's the alligator the crocodile and joseph smith is uh is basically saying the crocodile is the adulterer scott of pharaoh uh we have our first hit i think yes well in so far as the crocodile is an egyptian god and therefore would be a god who would be worshipped by pharaoh that would be correct it is not a god who is however of kingship or pharaoh-ness so it is not a god specifically linked to an exclusive to pharaoh and the other problem that is clear from the book of abraham is that joseph smith thought pharaoh was a personal name so what he's saying here is it's the god who belongs to the man pharaoh as opposed to the title pharaoh and so he's still off even to the extent that this one is sort of a cloak all he's really saying in that remark is that this is an egyptian god and that doesn't take a whole lot of insight can i ask you something dr ritter are there any animals native to egypt that are not in some way represented by egyptian gods no no but the crocodile was particularly infamous as being the symbol of ancient egypt so much so that when uh augustus caesar conquered egypt he issued coinage and the main coin that was that was labeled igupta copta egypt captured the symbol for egypt was a crocodile so he issued a coin with a crocodile and the words egypt captured on it so the crocodile has been the symbol of egypt throughout the mediterranean world because egypt uniquely had them the only other thing that was comparable was the hippopotamus right can i bring up one other point just in favor of the book of abraham because i want to give it its do this says this isn't necessarily a hit but whereas the description of facsimile one does have the bedstead the lion couch label as an altar i do have to mention that in chapter 1 verse 13 it does say about the altar it says it was made after the form of a bedstead so it does apparently recognize that it looks like a bedstead but then it may goof it up by going on to say such as was had among the chaldeans yes well it's it's easy enough to describe it as a bed because he's lying on it i think that's that's inferential you can figure that out without much insight but after the matter of the chaldeans wherever you want to put the chaldeans who are mesopotamians know this egyptian bed was never ever found there that's ridiculous should have stopped after the bed's dead part yes just to be clear do you do you consider nine the the the crocodile you know interpret it as the adulterous god of pharaoh do you consider that a hit dr rittner only vaguely okay i think him i said in my book well he got one right okay but but only in the sense that it's a god whom pharaoh would have worshipped got it okay overnight uh oh so who is the crocodile what is the crocodile what's that sobeck okay so in this image it says the god horus uh i don't think joseph smith ever did horus you may be looking off the actually i think i think you must be looking on the right hand side yeah yeah i'm saying that's it's saying the modern egyptological interpretation i don't i don't know i don't know who who did that there there is a form of horus linked to to sobac uh because egyptians there's egyptian syncretism where gods merge into others but if it's going to be horus merged with sobek typically it is a crocodile body with a falcon face and those exist so i i'm not responsible for the the statement that it's horus so i can't explain that yeah yeah this is just something i pulled out the internet that helps frame this discussion but i mean because of the complexity in egyptian religion yes horus can take on a form who's linked to sobek and in that myth sobek helps to ferry the body of the wounded osiris across water and so that could be a reason why he's depicted here got it okay um the next one is 10 which um which joseph's tell us tell us what 10 is referring to you told us before just what it looks like to you well what it actually is is an altar that's your altar stand on which that's an egyptian altar uh with uh floral offerings on top and there are wine jugs that are put on the left and right underneath it and so with the wine jugs have a very distinctive shape with a little wide opening mouth there that's for either wine or it could be water jugs and joseph calls that abraham in egypt which i have no idea how he got that i don't have a clue what that's supposed to mean i mean i know there was the weed in famine you know like seven years of bumper crops i'm thinking of joseph in the technical dream code here that's my extent of uh egyptian knowledge biblical knowledge so so so what i'm telling you we still haven't gotten to the bottom but what i'm telling you is that there is actually something that represents an interaction of an agent who elevates into the sky and protects but that's the bed which he misidentified as an altar and there actually is an altar but it's not for the sacrifice of humans but for the offerings of plants and and foodstuffs and that he misidentifies as abraham what in egypt whatever on earth that's supposed to mean dr rittner i i've read hunibly extensively and i recollected his argument for the accuracy of that was that that stand contained i think a lotus or some other kind of plant life that represented the egypt itself and therefore it designated that what was occurring in the picture was occurring in egypt abraham being in the picture it could therefore represent abraham in egypt what do you think of that explanation well try selling that in court i i think in a legal court that no one would take that seriously and that's that that what i'm trying to say is that's unbelievably contorted okay so the um is it a um a plan on it is it a oh absolutely it is certainly a plant is it ever used to designate the location of what's happening in the uh the vignette as occurring in a certain location no these are just standard these are just standard offering scenes okay the the water lily or egyptian lotus is a symbol of rebirth because it opens at sunrise and so it's it's it's a symbol of coming into being like the sun comes into being each morning so it is something that is offered to the dead to symbolize rebirth and it is something that people carry at parties to celebrate festivities just as we would give flowers now so in the same way you'd give flowers at a funeral now that's what the egyptians did so what i'm understanding then and what i'm sort of starting to see is that perhaps what's going on is that hugh nibbly and perhaps other apologists take a correct identification of one item at least if they get that far and then there's a speculation that leaps off of that correct identification in order to make sense out of joseph smith's interpretations but that speculation falls flat as far as you're concerned yes well i don't think it requires any in particular uh deep understanding to recognize that that's a a water lily there because there are more than thousands of examples of this shown on altar any any papyrus wall scenes will show you exactly the same scene with the plant very clearly distinguished as to what it is so anyone with even a minimal knowledge of an egyptian scene could pick that out and know what that is so saying it's a lotus is not an insight knowing it's a stand for an all thing can be seen from literally thousands of examples picking out the the kind of vessels that are assigned beside it these aren't really very well drawn by the artist the artist who did the joseph smith papyrus here was not a great artist this is you know it's it's it's his primary role was to do the text the picture is sort of schematic but we have these from so many other case examples where you have fine artists doing it we can be unbelievably precise about what these are so there there is no question about what they mean and unless they mean abraham in egypt on every wall scene in egypt because since this is something that's not found uniquely here it's found everywhere over and over and over again is it going to have a different meaning in all the nine other million places and only that meaning here that's the kind of logic that mr nibbly was trying to put forward it's like saying the letter a that we see in every letter that you in every inscription in english has a special meaning in this one letter right here in this piece of paper the the letter a has this nuance but on the wall over there and on my newspaper and everywhere else it doesn't mean that that is nibbly's argument and it's ridiculous can i say one other thing that is a little bit off topic i don't want you to go crazy with this because i know you could go on for a long time i just want to say i'm struck by the fact that the correct understanding of facsimile one is osiris being raised to life and it is supposed to also represent [ __ ] or the owner of this this papyrus and through this he becomes raised to life and it sounds an awful lot like the christian doctrine of all believers in jesus being resurrected through the resurrection of jesus christ you noticed that did you well at first it sounded very strange how you were describing it and then i thought wait a second this isn't strange at all this is christianity are you are you referring rfm that maybe egyptology influence christianity is that what you're basically asking right now i'm just saying i'm just noting that it's a very strange idea but then it's perfectly mirrored in christian doctrine yes well i don't know how far you want to go off on the side that's what i said the official theology of the egyptian king is that the on the night of his beginning the god ammon takes the form of the father and comes in looking like the father visits the wood the future mother he gives the sign of life to her nose and she becomes pregnant and she produces a child who is sorry 50 human and 50 divine who is the savior of his people and he is the intercessor between the world of the gods and the world of humans he was born of a virgin birth perhaps you've heard that before so so it's possible dr rittner what i think i hear you saying is that egyptian myth possibly influenced christian myth this is what i show to my students who are shocked appalled and amazed all the time and just to be clear for me are we saying that the jesus figure in egyptian religion is osiris or someone else well osiris is like a jesus figure insofar as he is the resurrection for egyptians but the the story of the the birth of uh of a saving figure is also pharaoh because he is the he's he's a god on earth for ancient egyptians and is he does play the role in many respects that jesus did because he is officially the only priest in all of egypt so all priests who function in egypt are his delegates who are acting in his guise so in theory only the king offers to the gods and all the priests are acting as imitators of the priests of the of the king so so if i i don't know how far you want to get into that but obvi but there are many many many many connections between egyptian religion and judaism and egyptian connections and christianity and of course jesus spent time in egypt and the theologians who made christianity largely did so in the city of alexandria in a f in a philosophical school that had been a pagan philosophical school before it became a christian one and in late antiquity the last major philosoph philosophers who were there teaching in the alexandrian school before it christianized these people were also egyptian priests of the goddess isis and osiris great questions rfm i'm so glad you're you're with us and dr rittner thank you so much this is stuff i didn't expect to be learning and i'm just i'm blown away and loving it so thank you to you both uh just really quickly to clear this slide um and i know we've got some other things so i think we're we're now over 10 11 quickly joseph says it's these door-looking things at the bottom he says they're designed to represent the pillars of heaven as understood by the egyptians dr rittner what what's your interpretation of of those doors at the bottom or door-like figures it's all it's a wall design as represented by the egyptians it's the niche-breaking facade that you can find even on it's it's something that's common between egypt and mesopotamia and it was probably the result of uh in egypt from back and forth trade in the earliest periods because you find it on ziggurats so it's a it's a it's a design of bricking that's then used as a wall motif in egypt it doesn't represent the heavens it represents a baseline just the opposite got it and then 12 this looks kind of intense joseph says 12 which i think ends up being i don't want to spoil her but it's right next to the crocodile and all along kind of the the strata that the crocodile is operating in joseph and describes say rauki yang signifying expanse or the firmament over our heads but in this case in relation to this subject the egyptians meant to signify xiaomao to be or the heavens high okay or the heavens answering to the hebrew word shamayin so dr rittner is that correct no no part of that uh it is water that is correct but it represents not the firmament but but again the nile or a portion of the nile and so it's ground not water yes the egyptians did have a concept of a heavenly river on which the sun god rode in a boat but there's no sun god here and the crocodile is in it which means it's underneath it and it probably refers to the lake of kansu which is described in the actual text so that's not a sky place it's a portion of the embalming zone which is what you're actually seeing here because you're seeing the embalming taking place so in summary if you had if you were grading this paper and you had to grade it out of 12. so 12 out of 12 being perfect what grade are you giving joseph smith and his scribes for the interpretation effect simile one f f even with the god of pharaoh in there can't we just can we get a maybe an f plus or a d minus or something no out of 12 like point five out of 12. you wanted a numerical grade yeah give a numerical grade out of out of 12 we'll give him one okay it's one ah yes that's a partial one for the uh god of pharaoh we're taking it [Laughter] so rafim's happy with that i'm declaring victory and leaving the field all right rfm's going back to church as soon as they let us okay a little more seriously dr rittner and john can i just tell you having studied all this egyptian mormon apologetic stuff i'm frankly disappointed in this because although i could not give you the exact reference it was probably nibbly or someone like him could you put that back up there for just a second there john the one you just had up absolutely and i just want to say that i remember reading and being very excited to read and find out and then even teach in firesides that 11 that basically this entire thing was correct that 11 really did represent the pillars of heaven that there was a basis for that in egyptology that 12 really was the waters of heaven because the heaven was seen as the waters you've got the the uh the um i'm sorry the alligator the crocodile the crocodile in the waters of heaven but that's okay because he is a god and that's where gods would be is in the waters of heaven and that all of these things were correctly translated and i read this in mormon apologetic material and i even taught it to other members of the church so i'm on being honest with you when i say i'm frankly disappointed that this is so wrong that i was actually so misled by hunibly and john gee and others and mormon apologists in in being told that this was correct and backed up by legitimate egyptology well if i could intrude for just a moment both of those individuals actually knew better uh one thing i didn't comment on but should specifically is the phrase rauki yang is not egyptian it sounds chinese or indonesian to me but it's i'm sure it's not it's made up or perhaps it's a bizarre derivation from hebrew i don't know because i i don't know hebrew so i can't comment on the hebrew word but what i can tell you is that that's not not not an egyptian word an rfm i love that personalization of the of the point and i'll even take it one step further if we had to estimate how many man hours how much tithing money how much cost and investment how many how much cost in in research in publication in conferences in scholars attending conferences you know how many millions of dollars have widows basically and others donate latin americans donated to the church people all over the world donating the church and then the church redirects those millions of tithing dollars so that they can pay the salary of nibbly and gee and mulsteen and and support fair mormon in the background and and the maxwell institute and and jack welch should just all the armies and armies of apologists first decades who have been spending millions of dollars of contribution sacred tithing funds from the church to make these super specious and irresponsible and i guess according to dr written are almost laughable assurances or interpretations of this in the name of scholarship so that the members of of the church can't understand what really went on but instead you know rely on the credibility of humility's lore or his phd from ucla wherever he got it or john lee's john john gee's degree from yale like it's a super waste of resources and a really monolithic lithic act of deception and we're just on facsimile one now now tell me rfm if i've misspoken or overspoken or overstated in the dr rittner i want to hear if you have anything out as well no i would just say that not only have they taken advantage of john gee and hugh nibbley's credibility they unfortunately have also taken advantage of my credulity because you you were a purveyor of these teachings well right i didn't know any better i'm not a student of egyptology i didn't go to yale i didn't go to the oriental institute in chicago i'm relying on people who have credentials who have studied and who are representing to me that they are passing along correctly what they have studied and that the egyptology that they have studied does support the book of abraham and the translation of the facsimiles and doctor you're saying all of these men should have known better yes well i i what i'm actually saying is they did know better yeah that you know for whatever reason they chose not to express that and to look for ways to argue against what's obvious when i worked on the book of abraham the reaction by my colleagues was that stuff is ridiculous why bother no one would take that seriously none of my colleagues i mean it's dismissable immediately which is why all the way back to the spaulding book which we'll eventually talk about i'm sure this has been dismissed out of hand by everyone and when i was first considering publishing the book and the idea was sent to a colleague to see whether the institute would publish it the response back was why waste your time with something like this it's ridiculous i mean this is this is coming out of germany there were marquis it's just why bother i mean it's so it's so completely absurd that no one would give it even five seconds of time so no egyptologist real egyptologist would spend three seconds reading john gee's article on alkena they wouldn't bother i've only looked at it because i've been drawn in this and therefore uh because i was publishing the egyptian manuscript but if but if i had not been asked to read the actual papyrus i wouldn't have spent a second on anything john gee ever wrote i think that's pretty clear it is and we're gonna thank you dr rittner this is so valuable and i'm going to refer back to a quote that came out of my wonderful interview with shannon uh caldwell montez she she quotes elder donald h oaks in 2002 who spoke at a dinner with a bunch of apologists um and you know he basically makes this point and here's a quote though argument does not create conviction the lack of it destroys belief what seems to be proved may not be embraced but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned rational argument does not create belief but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish and so there we have you know downhill jokes basically saying hey apologists we hire you for a very specific reason we're not hiring you necessarily to create good answers because i think the church knows there aren't good answers we're hiring you to create answers and i would add answers backed up by uh prestigious phd's so that members of the church can just go oh well joggie went to yale he's smarter than me hugh nibbly has a phd he's smarter than me he knows egypt right he knows egyptian so i don't have to worry about this problem it's not a problem and we have it all the way to the top um of the church leaders basically saying that that they pay apologists to come up with whatever answers they can so that members uh won't ever question or doubt others lose their faith both ways he tells his audiences that no one can critique or understand this document unless they have a degree in egyptologists like him but he won't discuss it with me because i have a degree in egyptology like him you know which is it john um you're going to respond to me or you're not going to respond to me if you don't want to respond to me because you don't have the facts then don't tell people or pretend to people that you do because quite honestly john you don't thank you for your directness rfm thanks for your feedback as well oh by the way about about elder um what was that quote from elder uh jokes elder oaks i just parenthetically elder oaks has never been that articulate or eloquent in his entire life what he's doing is quoting another person who i believe was austin ferrar yeah in the footnotes i i think you're right yeah thank you boom baby thank you for the christmas i've been here all week that's awesome try the face um yeah and what we're gonna get to is that the church has known since at least 1912 the serious problems of the book of abraham and they've intentionally chose chosen to cover up and obfuscate the problems and we'll get to that we're coming to it but we have to finish um the facsimiles we also have more images actually facsimile one we have to finish facsimile one uh and so in the next image so dr rittner has basically provided us with a few more images to give some important background on facsimile one we've covered a lot of territory but dr rittner let's talk through these images uh to close out this this segment well that's what we're seeing here those of you can see this let me describe it we have an image on which the papyrus design was based so you were seeing a scene that is carved in a special highly restricted super sacred uh osiris chapel that is on the roof of the temple of dendura in the middle of egypt this is one of the most sacred special sites that was used for the special festivals of the month of kodiak which is in egyptian time when osiris was revived and this shows the precise moment when the corpse of osiris the dead god killed by his brother who lust who who sought his kingdom so he killed osiris osiris is dead his body has been pieced together by his son anubis anubis is shown here with his hands extended over the god osiris lying on the lion bed not altar anubis has a jackal head he has his hands extended out in prayer over those two hands extended praying for the benefit of osiris osiris has his one hand to his face in the act of coming to life scratching his face waking up and his penis is erect and it is inserted into a bird flying autopit who is his wife the goddess isis who is receiving his semen to produce his son horus who will be the next pharaoh in his avenger and this is exactly what you've got in the uh drawing much more schematically done on the papyrus this is what joseph described should have drawn in for facsimile one for the missing parts if we go to the next slide there's a line drawing of this same thing and if you look on the far right hand side at the head of the bed there is a goddess with her hand to her mouth or head and that is the goddess who sometimes appears as a bird in that same position over the head of of the bed and that's what i would suggest might be the if if you restore the head as a bird head it's the goddess nephes got it interestingly enough what used the figure behind anubis there is the god horus who is not yet born but who is watching his own birth kind of like in the pre-existence rfm that's what i was saying he's in the pre-mortal existence this is a mormon this is a mormon document here there's a mormon carving he nobody would be ecstatic okay tell us what this next image is uh dr rittner here we have an example of the same scene now without anubis but again the lion bed we have the body of osiris this this is a line drawing that was done early on by mariette in the 1800s the 1900s and the penis has been hacked out probably by christians ouch that's got to hurt they savagely attacked images of penises all the way through egyptian temples there are many gods who have erections that's a it's normal i spend a lot of my time discussing images of erections i'm sure my parents were so happy about that but you can see not only the goddess isis being impregnated but you see at the head and foot of the bed here we have that bird form that i was talking about okay um and if we go to the next one here is a standard example now from a royal tomb of the same scene of anubis with his hands extended over a body on as you can see a lion bed and underneath it you can see the four jars and those are the canopic jars with the distinctive human baboon jackal and falcon heads which are the four canopic jars for the lungs liver stomach and intestines and you'll notice the anubis does not have a knife but he's in the same posture you'll notice he has a jackal head you'll notice the bed has a lion head you'll notice there's no knife involved at all and here it's the wrapped mummy rather than an erect mummy and this is for this is the more normal scene so the joseph smith papyrus is really very exceptional in having a scene of the impregnation of isis which is a very specialized and especially sacred scene that most people wouldn't have seen or had so this is something that comes from that particular scene that's in this special chapel in them this major temple and by the way that temple is ptolemaic in date from the time of cleopatra the great and it's roughly the same time period as the actual papyrus of horus the papyrus of [ __ ] that is the joseph smith papyrus facsimile one by the way if i keep saying [ __ ] or horus it's the same name the the name in egyptian is [ __ ] but the greek version of that is horus and so the god horus and the man who's the priest named [ __ ] have actually the same name got it we tend to say the god horus because it's come down to us through greek herodotus and other records can answer a quick quick question dr rittner i apologize this is probably a dumb question but as the chinese say there are no dumb questions only dumb people so anyway no um in the papyrus that joseph smith had in his possession uh it's broken off and i know that those are called lacunae and that those happen with regularity in papyri however it it occurs to me that the place where it is broken off the center piece of that seems to be the same place that was hacked off in this sculpture which is right around the place where that erection would have been with the bird above it and i was wondering if prior to joseph smith getting it perhaps even thousands of you not thousands but 8 000 or 2 000 years ago perhaps that was broken off at some point even intentionally by people who were offended by the depiction of the erect penis uh is it probably just a coincidence or might be something to that coincidence because it's um these things are rolled and they break on the folds and there was a crease there that goes right down through the middle and it just it probably snapped off of where it was rolled and the problem is that when chandler was bringing these around he was partly unrolling them uh and so every time you do that with fragile documents pieces are going to break off and we know that happened actually once smith bought them because he ended up gluing pieces from different manuscripts in the wrong places and in my book i had to put back these little patches and try to figure out where they originally went and it was like a major jigsaw puzzle uh because so many things had broken off and been glued back upside down sideways and in the wrong place and even in the wrong document so as they unrolled them which we know he did because that's described in the stories that when visitors paid their whatever it was to come in and see them he would roll them across the floor and and that would certainly cause damage so it's just it's probably just a natural thing and after all these papyri like the mummies had been shipped all the way from egypt where they could have already been damaged by boat to italy and then from italy by boat to new york and then on a wagon bumping from new york down to philadelphia to new orleans and to ohio so uh they had an opportunity to suffer a lot okay well i thought i'd give it a stab i just want you to know i'm still gonna go with that premise for my dissertation [Laughter] next okay so to close out uh the slides for facts yes if i think the next thing is going to be on the um the four horse so here we can actually see who the four sons of horus are and so you can see them there drawn this is from just pulled from wikipedia page so this is so commonly known that anyone can check this you don't have to take my and it's this is not my personal interpretation uh it is well known egyptians texts survive which describe it specifically and there are the gods and there are their actual names that you can read in seti which is the human-headed one dua moutef who is the jackal-headed one poppy who is the baboon-headed one and quebec who is the uh how a falcon-headed one so there's not el kinna etc etc we have these names we absolutely have these names anyone who wants to can look up four sons of horus right now on the internet and read everything you'd want and see example after example after example you don't need to take my word for it and any attempt to make them be something connected to the hittites is bizarre just bizarre if you go to the next slide this is book of the dead 151 which is a major spell that is designed now this would have been in a papyrus that would have been almost certainly in one of the papyri that joseph smith bought whether it was it survived i did not survive in the copy that we still have but it would have been as one of those the papyrus number two would have or the tasharian men would have had it and so we get statements to be said by quebec so this is what the so-called idolatrous god actually is this is the one with the falcon head i am your son oh osiris so and so here would be [ __ ] i have come to be your magical protection i unite for you your bones and assemble for you your members i have brought to you your heart i have put it for you as a seat in your body i have preserved your house after you for you are alive forever to be said by the baboon one i am happy oh fill in the blank here i have come that i may be your magical protection i have attached for you your head and your limbs i have smitten for you your enemies beneath you while you are alive forever to be said by duamutef who is the jackal-headed one i o cyrus i am your son horus your beloved i have come that i may save my father osiris from him who did him harm that is the god set i put him beneath your feet forever if you trample something down that means you have control over it and here you're invoking osiris which means you're at the same time invoking the dead man who is now merged with and a form of osiris to be said by amseti that's the human-headed one i am your son oh fill in the blank here i have come that i may be your magical protection i preserve your house abiding abiding as pata has commanded that's the craftsman god at memphis as ray the sun god himself has commanded then we have directions lo one shall use this only when he is pure and spotless without eating goats or fish or going near women in other words you had to be ritually pure after bread and burnt incense have been offered no human sacrifice here food offerings and incense that's normal that's what egyptians offer not humans for thee to these gods ever as for every blessed one for whom this is used he shall be a sacred god who is in the god's domain and he shall not be kept away from any gate of the west the egyptians believed the underworld was in the west because that's where the sun set he shall be a follower of osiris wherever he goes a truly excellent spell proved millions of times so that's what's going on in that scene that's sort of a just a description or a narration almost or a description of the ritual right if hugh nibley had been honest he would have reproduced book of the dead 151 and said this is what this scene is about i have to admit rfm doesn't that kind of sound a little bit like proxy work for the dead when you hear him read that like what you would hear right before a mormon temple you know baptism for the dead or or even an endowment ceremony sort of this there's a little bit of ritualistic language that reminds me of the temple ceremony do you feel the same way far femme well i do but i also have to caution myself that when my knowledge of ritual is limited pretty much to what i've experienced in the lds temple it is very common for me as it is probably for most people to interpret any other kind of ritual histic ideas from egypt or anywhere else in terms of what it is that i already understand so i'm trying to avoid that but i did have a similar feeling to you um can i say something here about these four sons of horse because i need to get another another um point in here for joseph smith in addition to the one semi point for the god of pharaoh is it correct because in facsimile two the four sons of horror show up again in the hypocephalus there under figure six and there joseph smith translates that as representing this earth in its four quarters is it true that one of the interpretations or understandings about the four sons of horse is that they could represent the four cardinal directions in the so far as they are the number four then yes any any time you use the number four you can always say that that kind of that has a connotation of the four directions as far as hugh nibley is concerned and i learned at their knees john gee's concerned carrie muellstein's concerned etc the four sons of horus being identified by joseph smith as representing the earth in its four quarters is presented as being the direct hit absolute bullseye that joseph smith got right in his interpretation of facsimile two and i'm really really disappointed to hear that you're telling me that's not necessarily the case i'm telling you he got it right that they are the number four [Laughter] the symbolism of four for the four corners is universal okay i'm taking that as a hit then yeah so this is one this is one maybe it's a half of one along with half of one for pharaoh and the the crocodile god sobek i'm gonna add those together i'm gonna give me a big one right there okay one out of 12. good job good job junkie well actually actually it's one out of a lot more than that because we had to go into facsimile too which has a lot more uh figures in it than just figure one or family one believe it or not that's coming up everybody uh dr rittner you have one more slide you wanted to share with us and i'm guessing that there's gonna be some backstory for us to understand why this particular slide is is relevant at this point in the discussion well in the various articles done by john gee attempting to justify the legitimacy of smith's interpretation of facsimile 1. he states that there is an egyptian papyrus that links the name abraham to this scene and that is even cited in the church's statement the official online statement to which i responded a number of years ago and that is a papyrus from leiden which is a magical papyrus it's third century uh i believe a d so it is much much later than the book of abraham supposedly is said to be it is much later than the actual papyrus that we've got for the book of abraham so if it is a if it is connected it would be after the book of abraham not before it but the problem is let's actually look at it and see what it is it has nothing whatsoever to do with this tale of abraham and when one looks at the translation and i've lost it off my screen now can we pull it up yeah yeah so this this is a picture of what tell our listeners this is a picture of the uh leiden papyrus another wise known as the uh papiri grekie magikai the greek magical papyrus number twelve 474 to 79 it also has a number as you can see there pdm for for papiri de mataki magikai because this is a manuscript that is written both in egyptian and greek it's written by egyptian scribes who are fluent in both the greek script and the egyptian script and what this is is a sex spell this is a love spell to force a woman to have sex with you and this is part of a manual that would be like a cookbook you know a book of magical spells if you wanted to to have a woman come to you you'd you'd go fluid flip you go through the papyrus and find this and it's very fragmentary it's largely broken away but the parts of it that survive say you bring a seal something of copper and a lion and a mummy and anubis while they seek something with a scarab and then you recite magical words these are abracadabra words that don't mean anything even in egyptian adios etc etc and and uh and the whole soul for her fill in that her name whom then fill in the name of her mother the female and unfortunately your picture of my picture uh your picture is blocking my screen here the female body of her fill in her name who so-and-so bore i conjure by a god whose name is broken to inflame her her name again here her mother's name there write these words together with this picture on a new papyrus and you get the scene of the lion bed with the mummy of osiris and anubis who had been described as what you write so there you have in the text an actual mention although it's broken of the lion bed the mummy uh and the reason for this is this is that moment in which osiris comes to life and impregnates isis and that's what you want to happen to this woman that she will be inflamed in the same way by invoking this image and you'll notice abraham is in there but he is not obviously part of a story unless there's some interesting really exciting part that joseph smith left out and i'd like to read that part but instead here it's invoked just because it's a magical name the egyptians made use of every god imaginable the egyptians vote mesopotamian names greek names they even invoke exodus and invoke yahweh one of the most popular gods to mention in this papyrus is yao which is a form of yahweh because the egyptians accept all gods they never persecuted any god they accepted every god including the ones who persecuted egyptians so what they did is every wise man they would also put their name because they thought they had power so it is here egyptians invoking the name of abraham as a wise man but this is done in the roman period because they not because of their personal experience with abraham but because now they're aware of the bible so they're pulling this information out of the bible and actually citing the bible abraham is there's a magical name it's like saying conjuring by the by solomon who controls demons and dr renner just just because i i'm not familiar with this and i want to make sure i understand tell us how to tie this back to the book of abraham in mormon apologetics this has the word abraham it is so it is here in a spell that shows the lion bed but it's the lion bed that's used like the lion bed is used all over the place it has nothing to do with the book of abraham it's simply fortuitous that is a coincidence that it has it happens to be the same scene that's on the joseph smith papyrus because nothing about this papyrus relates to the story of abraham in egypt but as an apologist as a mormon apologist abraham is here simply because he's a magical name and it's no more significant than the [Music] as abracadabra and yes it's been mentioned specifically by john g repeatedly as a connection showing that abraham and the lion bed are related the the abracadabra here isn't is not invoking the lion bed it's merely a magical power to make the woman come and jump on your body by the way uh if i can just intrude here and answer your question john this is something yes that i i first saw about 20 years ago now it was in an insights which was the name of the like monthly newsletter from the foundation for ancient research in mormon studies in which this was proclaimed as being a huge support for the book of abraham because the book of abraham of course has facsimile 1 which has a lion couch scene and it represents it as being abraham on the lion couch or on the altar and here we have a legitimate ancient um piece of papyrus this leiden manuscript which has a lion couch scene just like in facts emily one and i think it's actually below it written in greek in the actual um document even though here the transliteration is above it there is the name abraham so there is this connection now in the light manuscript between abraham and the lion couch scene and facsimile one so now it is not out of the question that abraham would have something to do with a lion couch scene as it is represented in the book of abraham and this was rather trumpeted with some vindication at the time and where you'll find this in the essay john is it's just one sentence there is a section here toward the end which is called the book of abraham in the ancient world and this is where they try and trot out their connections to this and by the way they do have the connection about the um the four sons of horus and the four quarters they say joseph smith represented the four figures in figure six in fact similarly two as this earth and its four quarters and they say a similar interpretation has been argued by scholars who study identical figures in other ancient egyptian texts they give a footnote there i won't go there right now but they go on later on and they say when this one line here it is a third century papyrus this is the light and papyrus they don't mention it by name but it says a third century papyrus from an egyptian temple library connects abraham with an illustration similar to facsimile one in the book of abraham and there they give footnote 44 and they link that to oh an article by twittness howglid and gee but it's excerpts from p papyrus lyden and so yeah this is something where they're referring to this very drawing thank you rfm that's so valuable context and i've heard you and bill reel talk about that in your wonderful three-part series on the book of abraham and let me just ask you this dr rittner like okay you know maybe you don't share a mormon set of beliefs maybe rfm and i don't much these days either let's just say you're john gee or hugh nibbly or carrie milstein or whoever and you know you do have a phd in egyptology you do understand you know egyptian and you do come across this manuscript is there any world where it's reasonable to then put this in front of a mormon audience a believing mormon audience a questioning mormon audience and try and make the case that it somehow substantiates of you know the authenticity of the book of abraham translation as we have through joseph smith you know trying to trying to realize that these men are likely sincere believers they likely really believe the church is true they know that the book of abraham is on the ropes they're they really want to find reasons for people to still believe they're probably not intentionally trying to deceive so let's just say they come upon this uh you know i'm thinking wow cool the word abraham is is with anubis and and the blind bed like wow that's significant is it respon is it is it reasonable in any stretch for them to have sort of tried to to use this to bolster the book of abraham yes or no and if yes or no why or why not well i think i understand why they did it and uh it's an interesting [Music] conjunction however if the lion belt were a unique or rare phenomenon then the conjunction would be really striking but because i can walk into any egyptian museum and turn around and find a lion bed within five minutes on many many things on papyri on drawn on coffins actual lion beds in some cases uh on wall reliefs i it is a very very very very ubiquitous motif it is not at all unusual or exciting uh so you if the it abraham is only used a few times in the magical papyri but you also get other figures that are used in the magical aquarium uh so if you talk about abraham you have to look at where abraham is used and in no case i mean the couple of cases in the whole the whole all of the magical texts never is he used in relation to this to the book of abraham's story he's merely being used as a prophet of early times and these are late late late texts by which time they're drawing it not from any personal memories these are not ancient texts these are not early texts these are ones that are themselves derivative of the bible because in some cases they quote it so that mean that's why abraham is taken so if abraha so what you're telling me is if it's legitimate it means the book of abraham influenced this a.d papyrus so where's the intervening evidence to show it was around and influencing things so the the dates don't work uh the context doesn't work you can't say oh this is special because the look the uh the lion bed is there well yeah because the lion bed is on everything uh so the lion bed is not a big deal that's not particularly surprising and why is the lion bed there for the reason that i explained because it's a reference to osiris's power to engender sex and uh this is a sex spell that that isn't actually what i saw in the book of abraham i mean maybe there are more chapters that he didn't get to but it's it's not you know in the story we have so if you're saying that this is a connection what you're saying is that smith left out the good part well dr rittner i have to remind you that that god bless abraham that his seed would be as numerous as the sands of the desert or as the stars of the sky maybe that's maybe that's what we're seeing happening okay and before we leave that before we leave that i have to bring up the fact that i was disappointed in carrie muellstein who's one of the two preeminent egyptologist apologists for mormonism in the book of abraham and he is on record in a video and you probably know which one i'm talking about it may have been a response to your video that you did initially in 2002 or so but or 2012. but he is on record as saying referring to the light and manuscript that it contains the name abraham and that actually translated the words are abraham is upon the lion couch have you heard him actually say that because i have no i have not we have to get the audio [Applause] especially intriguing is a lion couch scene roughly contemporary to the joseph smith papyri that mentions abraham the leiden demonic papyrus 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 portion 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 couch by the way in the three-part piece that bill reel and i did in a separate podcast it's about a year and a half ago we do play the audio there so it is of record and he did say that um but i wanted to get your take on that on record now as saying something i don't like having to do but i will i kerry mulsanne was trained at ucla uh i know from the professors who taught him there that he was not taught late egyptian hieratic nor was he taught demonic so he can't he has not been tame trained in the script in which the book of abraham quote unquote or the uh breathing permit of horror was written so where he made an attempt to critique and evaluate my transcription and understanding of that document as opposed to michael rhodes he doesn't actually have the background to make that decision he might know middle egyptian hieratic it's very very different michael rhodes couldn't read uh ptolemaic hieratic if his life depended upon it i mean that he's not been trained and our listeners don't know who michael rhodes is i'm guessing many of them don't he produced a book in competition with mine i was denied access to seeing the papyrus actually that i petitioned to see the church before i ever started working on the papyri i was told i could not and i got michael rhodes to do a book instead and michael rhodes basically recycled the translation of hugh nibley from many years before but more to the point to answer the question rfm that you just asked me demotic is a highly specialized field within egyptology it is a sub sub specialty most of my colleagues eighty percent cannot read a word of demotic kerry was never trained in demonic so demo so he cannot read the script that he has said that you're telling me he is describing demotic is tough that is my specialty and when i got my phd you have to at chicago site read a text that is suddenly handed to you out of nowhere and the text i was handed happened to be this papyrus it's extremely complicated and this isn't this is not merely complicated demotic it's roman period demonic and there are three kinds of demonic because it changes over time radically so most people who read demonic don't read roman period demonic either but that's my fault that's my strong point so i was handed the very thing we are now talking about thrust in front of me and said keep going until i tell you to stop and i transliterated it and read it aloud in front of a group of who with individuals who would be my peers and i got honors because i read it flawlessly so that i can do did you get to the part where it says abraham upon the lion couch um yes unfortunately that section is broken the word lion is there who is there but they're not even in the same sense does that answer your question i think if i'm understanding you correctly um carrie mulesing was engaged in a little bit of um maybe wishful misrepresentation of what the actual translation is that is correct and and i guess i want to ask the same question we asked earlier whether it's ghee or mulstein or whoever was involved in discussing this putting this forward as some type of proof in your view dr rittner did they know better do they know better they should yes i'm sure they do yeah okay well i think you've been super i mean i'm just over the moon ecstatic at your generosity dr rittner today we're you know we're only i don't know a third of the way done with uh without this presentation we have a lot yet to go i i i'm guessing you're feeling ready to call it call it a day today right dr rittner uh i've probably irritated enough people at this point at rfm i know you got i know rfmu changed some plans to be able to be with us today but uh wow what an amazing first several hours with with you dr robert rittner with you rfm rfm anything you want to say in closing no just that it's been wonderful to talk with dr rittner somebody who is a really highly regarded egyptologist and by the way i don't know that um he would toot his own horn enough but i think that he's doubtless within the top five or ten egyptologists in the world today and would i be far off in saying that dr rittner uh i i wouldn't i wouldn't want to make that claim are you denying it i i i would say that i have been given a unique chair in egyptology in the united states and so that kind of speaks for itself and i'll i'll let that let that right my cv is available online one thing before we we go for the end of the session if i might please and that's to speak to your audience um over the years i have had an array of letters and emails coming in uh some of them have been extremely negative but a large number of them have been extremely kind and i have been able to answer some of them i haven't been able to answer all of them but i want to thank those of you who have written me kind letters i'm also interested in uh amused by those who've written me very negative ones but there was a time i was getting extremely negative ones and um then suddenly i got so many that there was even a website that was posted with i think 59 responses thanking me for my work uh i really appreciated that i have put a link to that on my personal website for the oriental institute i had to fight by the way with my administration to do that they didn't want to have anything to do with mormon issues for fear of losing donations to my institution so anyway thank all of you for your interest i hope i haven't annoyed you more than necessary today and um again thanks so much no you've been brilliant dr rittner um i can't thank you enough our people thank you i promised dr rittner he he'd talked to me about some of the disturbing letters or emails that he's received from uh kind of danite like modern cyber uh apologists who were angry that he would share with us his scholarship in any way that might uh challenge orthodox mormon faith and it's been really sad to see that anyone would mistreat a gentleman and a scholar like dr rittner just for sharing his expertise um with no real axe to grind so i want my listeners to make me proud and uh in email dr rittner uh it's r dashrittner at uchicago.edu and tell him how much you love him tell him how much you appreciate him tell him how much his work is meant to you how much this episode and future episodes mean to you so we can flood his inbox with thankful gr grateful positive emails because basically what we're doing is allowing people to base their lives on reality and not on distortions and misperceptions and untruths because people's time and money and lives and reputations deserve to be based on truth so that's what we're doing here and that's why we need to show dr rittner our thanks and i'll close as i began uh you know dr rittner is facing kidney failure and is in need of a living donor to secure his life and continued research if you can help or if you know anyone who can help please contact dana mclean northwestern medicine transplant coordinator 312-695 uh living donors save lives so let's get dr rittner a kidney and let's allow him to continue his wonderful research and just let him allow him to continue being an amazing human on this planet because we need uh as much dr rittner on this planet for as long as we can um i hope we're not embarrassing you with our with our praise and gratitude dr rittner yes actually you are but but thank you that's very it's extremely tired so uh so dear listeners uh rfm and i will be back in a couple days we're going to come back with dr rittner we're going to talk about facsimile 2 facts 73 we're going to talk about the currently in egyptian papers uh what are they called the joseph smith papers is that right rfm abraham egyptian papers is the current nomenclature i understand by the way before i sign off i just want to say something to all of my listeners as well if that if any of you are predisposed to write anything negative to dr rittner in regards to his position on the book of abraham i just want you to stop for a second and think to yourself what would osiris do i want to know what anubis would do i think that's the question i want to know what set would do would anubis take his arm with the knife and strike dr rittner or would anubis put out his arms in a blessing and protect and bless dr rittner that's i think that's the question is it rfm well i think set would cut him into 72 pieces excellent okay and we'll be talking about mormon apologetics in the book of abraham and uh different different attempts over the years to try and attack and or rescue the book of abraham so there's a lot more to come but today has been brilliant again thanks dr rittner thanks the brilliant rfm and thanks to all you listeners who support radio free mormon donate to radio free mormon donate to bill reel and mormon discussions and please donate to mormon stories podcast mormon stories dot org so that we can continue providing you with this type of programming rfm you want to tell people how to find your podcast yes radiofreemorman.org very easy to remember john can we get that phone number once again for the kidney donation just because i think that's the most important thing here dana mclean and i 312-695-0828 make sure and share this number and the name on the the show notes for the mormon stories.org podcast post and i'm sure you'll do that too on on the the simultaneous post on rfm absolutely brilliant all right um thanks everybody thanks dr rittner thanks rfm we'll see you guys soon on another episode of mormon storage podcast and radio free mormon take care everybody bye-bye

Channel: Mormon Stories Podcast

Views: 66,520

Rating: 4.6807365 out of 5

Keywords: lds, mormon, egypt, egyptology, joseph smith, book of abraham, church of jesus christ, evidences, evidence and the book of abraham, book of abraham evidences, church of jesus christ of latter day saints, mormonism, problems with book of abraham, book of mormon central, saints unscripted, fair mormon, John Gee

Id: ORNYUyHg3pY

Length: 211min 21sec (12681 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/North_Utahn]

NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!! So sad, I had a brief email exchange with him after he was on with John and RFM, thanking him for lending his expertise on such a ridiculous, debunked subject. I was surprised that he responded to me. He was a funny and brilliant guy, a hero to exmos and truth seekers. I predict that, now that he is dead, Gee and Muhlstein will come out guns blazing to respond to the interview. I wonder if that is why they have delayed a response, waiting for him to die so he could not retort and put those mental infants back in their places.

[u/therealsweetjames]

Thank you Mr. Ritner for making sense of a fucked up religion I unfortunately believed in. You gave me the knowledge and strength to leave a cult. I will honor your name and work forever.

[u/dunfordtx]

Dr Ritners Mormon Stories podcast with John Dehlin and RFM blessed my life. God bless Robert Ritner.

[u/Imalreadygone21]

We loved him and his work. He will never be forgotten by our family! RIP

[u/BalanceMaestro]

Thank you for all that you have accomplished, Dr. Ritner. You will be sorely missed both here among us cult victims and among the whole world's people. You knew your stuff, and you never lost a fight. Well lived.

If only we had met under better circumstances. If only we were all academics with a passion for learning and history. But your contributions will be remembered, and they'll always be useful. This kind of devotion and insight doesn't lose to time.

[u/RyDiddy5]

John Gee wrote something on his passing, the opening paragraphs have the amount of integrity and class you would expect from Gee: http://fornspollfira.blogspot.com/2021/07/robert-kreich-ritner-jr-1953-2021.html?m=1

[u/yngbld_]

I remember John announced his need for a kidney... I'm assuming that's what ended up taking his life?

[u/RyDiddy5]

He’s in a place now that’s even better than the celestial kingdom. RIP Dr. Ritner