Why Mormons Leave

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The Book of Abraham

Joseph Smith published a translation of Egyptian papyri. The papyri survived, Egyptologists can read them, and they are ordinary funerary texts from centuries after Abraham.

Abraham Facsimile 1 · Abraham, Joseph Smith · Public domain

What members were taught

Joseph Smith translated a record written by Abraham's own hand on papyrus. The facsimiles in the Pearl of Great Price show Abraham on an altar, and the translation proves that Joseph could read ancient languages by revelation.

What the record shows

Joseph Smith published a translation of Egyptian papyri. The papyri survived, Egyptologists can read them, and they are ordinary funerary texts from centuries after Abraham.

The Book of Abraham is the one founding claim where the physical evidence is on the table. In 1835 Joseph Smith bought several Egyptian papyri from a traveling exhibitor and announced that one of them was written by Abraham "by his own hand upon papyrus." He published his translation, with three illustrations and his explanations of them, and the Church canonized it in 1880.

Egyptian could not yet be read in America in 1835. It can be read now. Fragments of the same papyri turned up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967 and were returned to the Church. Every Egyptologist who has examined them, inside the Church and out, reads them as standard funerary texts prepared for an Egyptian priest named Hor, roughly fifteen hundred years after Abraham would have lived.

The 2011 survey placed the Book of Abraham in a tie with polygamy as the single most damaging historical issue, and several respondents used the same phrase for it: the nail in the coffin. It was particularly important to men and to older respondents. What they describe is not a loss of faith in Abraham, but a loss of faith in the translator. If the one translation that can be checked turns out to be wrong, the ones that cannot be checked lose their standing too.

The Church's 2014 essay on the subject accepts that the papyri do not contain the Book of Abraham and offers the alternative that they prompted a revelation rather than being translated. Many respondents read the essay and found that it confirmed the problem rather than answering it.

What people actually name

From the crowd-sourced 2014 comprehensive list, lightly edited.

  • The surviving papyri, rediscovered in 1967, are a Book of Breathings and other common funerary documents dated to roughly the first or second century BC.
  • The facsimiles printed in the Pearl of Great Price are identifiable Egyptian vignettes, and Joseph Smith's explanations of the figures do not match what Egyptologists read in them.
  • Joseph Smith's own "Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language" shows him assigning whole paragraphs of English to single characters.
  • The text carries nineteenth-century ideas about astronomy and about lineage that were used for a century to justify the priesthood and temple ban.

What the Church has said

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