(
The point? Those three little symbols he said represented all those words, including many multisyllabic foreign names including Elkanah, Korash, Shagreel, Libnah, Mahmackrah, Rahleenos, and Abraham, Ur, and Chaldea.
Photo courtesy of UTLM: http://www.utlm.org/newsletters/no111.htm )
Researcher Bruce MacArthur asks the following questions:
Joseph Smith supposedly spent the period between late 1827 and middle 1829 in “translating” from the fabled golden plates to the Book of Mormon.
Several years later, the “curiosities” were purchased from Chandler.
First, Smith did what you have called a “while-you-wait” translation of the papyrus, then he did something which seems to be much more ambitious in which the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar (EAG)- was phase-one and the Book of Abraham was phase-two.
Still later, the Kinderhook Plates surfaced, and Joseph Smith claimed to recognize several of the characters from his prior work with the golden plates and the Book of Mormon.
01 — Why was neither “alphabet” nor “grammar” needed for the golden plates and the Book of Mormon?
02 — Why WAS such needed for the papyrus and the Book of Abraham –especially (as you remarked) when he had already done the while-you-wait translation for Chandler?
03 — Why did Joseph Smith fail to consult his own EAG when the Kinderhook Plates were found — it “should” have made the full translation of these new plates to be almost “automatic”, and certainly a LOT faster than the actual process followed!
04 — Why do NONE of the EAG characters resemble any of the vaunted “Anthon Transcript” characters in a functional way?
05 — Why do NONE of the EAG characters resemble any of the Kinderhook Plate characters in a functional way — if they really WERE recognizable to Smith from his golden plate and Book of Mormon experience?
06 — Just what good did the EAG presumably DO for Joseph Smith if he really WAS able to “translate” Egyptian “live” (that is, as you and I can translate Spanish)?
07 — I have studied Chinese language which is written in non-alphabetic characters. Chinese characters are sequenced in a dictionary by “radical” (or “root”) — and the radicals-roots are, thenselves, sequenced by “stroke-count”! — and by the number of thenon-radical (or non-root) strokes. In dictionaries of the “simplified” Chinese characters, there are some (but very few) characters with more than 20 or 25 strokes (total); dictionaries of the “traditional” Chinese characters “might” have a very few characters of over 30 or 40 total strokes. Egyptian characters seem to be a LOT simpler than even most of the “simplified” Chinese characters — SO, just how can Mormons tolerate the notion that each stroke of an Egyptian character has its own meaning AND that a rather simple character can have the meaning that English needs some 25-100 words to express?
Being a Christian author means being a proxy - for the benefit of another and…
View Comments
I have no desire to defend Joseph Smith or his EAG, but some of MacArthur's questions are not really valid objections, and Mormons would not have trouble responding:
1. The BoM was translated with the magical Urim & Thummim, but JS didn't have that any more when he got the papyri.
2. He didn't NEED the EAG to translate the papyrus; he wrote it to benefit mankind, based on his ability to read the papyrus.
3. Nor did he need the EAG to understand the Kinderhook plates, for two reasons: he was able to read them already, and there was no reason to think that the K plates were in the same language as the papyri.
4. The Anthon Transcript was REFORMED Egyptian, the papyrus was pure Egyptian.
5. Same response as 3: they were not in the same language. D&C says that JS was a translator, not of any specific language alone, but apparently ANY ancient language.
6. See response to 2
7. That is a valid linguistic objection.
FWIW: My academic field was linguistics; I did several years of postgraduate studies in comparative and historical linguistics.
See my article "Linguistic Problems of Mormonism" at http://packham.n4m.org/linguist.htm
As always, Richard, your insights are valuable and helpful.
I'm wondering about the translation of the Book of Mormon -- part of that was done with a seer stone (perhaps the "chocolate-colored" one the size of an egg that apparently is still in the LDS church's possession?)-- and I've heard Mormons speculate that Smith used it to help translate the papyri. Have you ever read anything that connects the translation process of both the BofM and the PofGP via the seer stone?