Does this sound reasonable?
A guy who used a seer stone to help people hunt for treasure, but never found any treasure, used that same seer stone to translate a set of ancient golden plates by the power of God, but an angel took the plates so we can't see them now.
That same guy got some Egyptian scrolls and translated them before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Now that we can translate those scrolls (the portions we have, anyway), and Joseph's translations are inaccurate, we can conclude that his translation was more like a revelation, and the actual contents of the scrolls don't matter.
So we have a guy with a seer stone that never found treasure, using the same seer stone to translate ancient golden plates that were left on earth for over 1,000 years but then were taken away by an angel so we can't study them, and then translating an untranslatable document that, now that we can translate it, turns out to be about something else entirely.
God works in mysterious ways.
Here's a clip I really appreciated. Especially the first seven minutes. But John's commentary is important, too. He mentions how the actual, truthful history of the church used to be considered anti-Mormon material. But in the age of the internet, the church has had to admit and discuss these things.
This is one lady's experience deciding, in spite of the pain it caused, that the above doesn't make sense, and the most reasonable conclusion is that Joseph Smith made it up.
I have a lot of thoughts on this one, though they don't really make sense. I'll try and get it out though. I've thought a about the scrolls before and it doesn't make sense. I'm not sure what they're actually supposed to say either. But there is a chance that modern translation is unable to understand what was written if it was meant to be sacred. Things like mapping out Kolob might not translate well. I'd have to do more research on that one. There's also the story of how the translation of the plates was certified by a translator before he realized what the translation was. But even if neither translations was correct I'm not sure it matters to me. Maybe there never was a man named Shiz or an army of stripling warriors. The promise was that the gospel was found in the BoM. Even if it is just a story, maybe it's only the truths behind the story that we needed. It also reminds me of D&C 91 where it says the apocrypha isn't translated entirely correctly but the spirit will manifest what is truth to us. Honestly if the commandment was to read the TV Guide every day then I'm sure there would have been a way for us to get revelation from that. Not sure where that leaves me. I guess I'm not really sure either on the translation.
ReplyDeleteI would definitely recommend more research on the topic. To cut right to the heart of the matter, there are only two defenses of the Book of Abraham that make any sense at all:
Delete1) The papyrus acted as a catalyst for Joseph to seek revelation. He may have thought he was translating the contents of the papyrus, but it really was just a tool to get him to inquire of God.
2) The portions of papyrus that Joseph translated have been lost.
I don't buy #2 at all, because we have the facsimiles. Even if all the rest of the Book of Abraham really was written on papyrus, we can see from the facsimiles that Joseph was not translating - he was either making stuff up or receiving revelation unrelated to the contents of the papyri.
That leaves us with #1. Joseph didn't translate - it was just pure revelation. This is a viable defense for someone who wants to keep their faith. It requires recognizing that Joseph was dead wrong about what he thought he was doing (i.e. translating) but it also allows for the Book of Abraham to be completely "wrong" in terms of a translation from the papyrus, and still be inspired of God.