Mormons view the Old and New Testaments as divinely inspired and also have additional books in their scriptural canon, i.e., the Book of Mormon (where the term Mormon is derived), the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price. The vast majority of the content found in these additional books was dictated by Joseph Smith, Jr., and nearly all his teachings had some root in the King James Version of the Bible, or his interpretation of it.1
The historicity of the Book of Mormon has been widely disputed. The consensus among geneticists is that the Native American people descended primarily from north-east Asian stock. However, the Book of Mormon says that the Native American people descended from groups of Semitic people, including Israelites, who emigrated from the Old World by ship. The book also refers to things such as steel, horses, and elephants that are not known to have existed in the New World at the relevant time.
Another point of contention is Smith’s method of translation. Among other artifacts found with the plates, Smith wrote of interpreting devices called the Urim and Thummim. He described them as a pair of stones, fastened to a breastplate joined in a form similar to that of a large pair of spectacles. The Urim and Thummim, or “seer stones,” are what Joseph claims to have used to interpret the writings on the plates.2 Joseph’s first wife, Emma, was the first person to act as his scribe. She later recounted the following to her son Joseph Smith III: “In writing for your father I frequently wrote day after day, often sitting at the table close by him, he sitting with his face buried in his hat, with the stone in it, and dictating hour after hour with nothing between us.”3 David Whitmer, one of the Three Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, gave an address in 1887 in which he stated, “I will now give you a description of the manner in which the Book of Mormon was translated. Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine. A piece of something resembling parchment would appear, and on that appeared the writing. One character at a time would appear, and under it was the interpretation in English. Brother Joseph would read off the English to Oliver Cowdery, who was his principal scribe, and when it was written down and repeated to Brother Joseph to see if it was correct, then it would disappear, and another character with the interpretation would appear. Thus the Book of Mormon was translated by the gift and power of God, and not by any power of man.”4
Given these and other descriptions, it is easy to draw a correlation with Joseph’s early career as a “Glass Looker” who would be hired to locate buried treasure in exchange for fees in various areas of Western New York during the 1820s. To do this, he would place his “peep stone” into a hat and look into it to have the location of the treasure revealed to him. In 1826, he was arrested for this, under the charges of being “a disorderly person and an imposter.”5
In 1835, Smith purchased some Egyptian papyri containing hieroglyphics and four mummies from a traveling exhibition.6 He later translated the papyri in the same method he used with the Book of Mormon. He called it the Book of Abraham and in it recounted the story of Abraham’s early life and of a vision in which God revealed to Abraham much about astronomy, the creation of the world, and the creation of man. It was originally published in 1842 and is now an official book of the Pearl of Great Price.
Although the Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799, it had not yet been completely deciphered. Translations of the Egyptian language were not widely available until the 1850s, and by this time the original papyri were considered lost. However, in 1966, twenty-two fragments of it were discovered in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Both Mormon and non-Mormon Egyptologists confirmed their authenticity and that these documents were in Smith’s possession. This discovery raised some major issues. First, the papyri can reliably be dated to around A.D. 60, which is much too late for Abraham to have written it. Of course, it could be a copy, or a copy of a copy, but that brings us to the second issue. When the text of the book of Abraham is compared with the translations of the original papyri, they are clearly not the same. In fact, they were discovered to be funerary texts containing passages from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which were commonly buried with mummies.7
The LDS Church has given two possible explanations for these contradictions, neither of which are very satisfactory. One explanation given is that Smith might have been translating a different portion of the papyrus rolls, a portion that remains lost. The other explanation given is that we must take into consideration what Joseph meant by the word translation. Receiving revelation through the Urim and Thummin is a much different process than translating a text using the tools of scholarly research.8 I can only concur.
- Joseph Smith’s Wentworth Letter, 1842 [<]
- Joseph Smith-History, Pearl of Great Price [<]
- History of the RLDS Church, 8 vols., Independence, Missouri, 1951, “Last Testimony of Sister Emma” [<]
- David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ, Richmond, Missouri, 1887 [<]
- D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987) [<]
- History of the Church, Vol. 2, Ch. 17, p. 236 [<]
- Jay M. Todd, “Egyptian Papyri Rediscovered,” Improvement Era, January 1968: 12–13 [<]
- Michael D. Rhodes, “I Have a Question,” Ensign, July 1988, 51 [<]
-old fossil. We prepared our children with the expectation that Mom and Dad would be “taking a very long time” reviewing the entire exhibit. And we did. The exhibit is incredible.
