The Book of Abraham Facsimiles — Why Joseph Smith’s “Translation” Makes Sense

Egyptologists say Joseph Smith’s explanations of the facsimiles don’t match their reading. There is an explanation — and it doesn’t require Joseph Smith to be wrong.

The Critic’s Argument

Egyptological analysis of the facsimiles shows that the figures Joseph Smith identifies — for example, “God sitting upon his throne” (Facsimile 1) or the various figures in Facsimile 2 — have different meanings in standard Egyptian funerary contexts. The figure Joseph identifies as God is more typically identified by Egyptologists as Osiris or the deceased. The scene is typically read as the mummification scene from the Book of Breathings.

The critic’s conclusion: Joseph Smith’s “translation” does not match what trained Egyptologists read from the same documents. Therefore Joseph Smith was a fraud, and the Book of Abraham is a fabrication.

The Problem with This Argument

The argument assumes that the facsimiles were designed to carry exactly and only the meaning they carry in a standard Egyptian funerary context. But this assumption is not established — it is assumed. And there is documented evidence that Egyptian religious imagery was regularly re-interpreted and re-deployed across different cultural and theological contexts, including by Semitic peoples living and worshipping in Egypt.

The same visual elements could carry different meanings depending on the interpretive tradition of the reader. This was not unusual in the ancient world — it was standard practice in syncretistic religious environments where multiple cultures shared iconographic vocabulary while assigning different meanings to shared images.

Michael Rhodes and Hugh Nibley

Both Michael D. Rhodes and Hugh Nibley — LDS scholars with serious Egyptological credentials — have worked extensively on this question. Nibley’s Abraham in Egypt is the most comprehensive treatment, documenting the rich and complex relationship between Abraham’s world and Egyptian priestly culture.

Nibley’s argument — developed over decades — is that Joseph Smith’s explanations can be read as the meaning assigned to these images in an Abrahamic or Semitic priestly interpretive tradition, not in the standard late-period Egyptian funerary tradition. The same iconographic elements that mean one thing in a Book of Breathings context could mean something different when deployed in a Semitic theological context that reused Egyptian visual vocabulary for its own purposes.

This is not special pleading. Scholars of ancient religion routinely document how religious imagery travels across cultural contexts with altered meanings. The question is whether a Semitic patriarch in Egypt — specifically Abraham, according to the text — could have been given, produced, or deployed Egyptian-style imagery carrying Abrahamic meanings. The answer from the historical record is: yes, this is exactly the kind of thing that happened in ancient syncretistic contexts.

The Abrahamic Context

Abraham 1:12–14

“And it came to pass that the priests laid violence upon me, that they might slay me also, as they did those who were before me; and as they lifted up their hands upon me, that they might offer me up and take away my life, behold, I lifted up my voice unto the Lord my God, and the Lord hearkened and heard.”

Abraham 1 specifically describes Abraham encountering Egyptian priestly iconography in a context where that iconography was being used for something he found theologically abhorrent — human sacrifice on the altar of a false god. He was nearly the victim. The facsimiles may represent Abraham’s own theological response — a re-appropriation of Egyptian imagery for Abrahamic purposes, using the visual language of the culture but inverting or reinterpreting it for a very different theological audience.

This is not speculation about what ancient people did. This is exactly what Abraham’s text says he was doing — operating in an Egyptian priestly environment and producing a theological record using materials from that environment. That the imagery looks Egyptian is expected. That the theological content differs from standard Egyptian funerary usage is also expected.

What Egyptology Cannot Determine

Egyptology is a legitimate discipline with real expertise. It can tell us what the standard funerary meaning of these images was in standard Egyptian funerary contexts. It can date the papyri. It can identify the genre of document the papyri belong to. What it cannot do is tell us what meaning Abraham — a Semitic patriarch operating in an Egyptian priestly context, as the text explicitly says — assigned to images he deployed for his own theological purposes.

The “fraud” argument requires certainty about which interpretive tradition was intended by the author. Egyptology can establish what the standard tradition says. It cannot establish what a non-standard, deliberately Abrahamic deployment of the same imagery meant. That is outside the discipline’s competence — not because Egyptologists are incompetent, but because the question is about the intent of a specific ancient author, not the standard meaning of a genre.

Verdict

The facsimiles are not straightforward translations of standard Egyptian funerary documents — and Joseph Smith never claimed they were. In the form we now possess them they are late Egyptian copies; what Joseph restored was not the draftsman’s original funerary intent but the Abrahamic meaning the record attaches to them — Abrahamic theological content carried in Egyptian visual vocabulary.

The “fraud” argument fails because it assumes a single correct interpretation (the standard Egyptological reading) and treats any deviation from that reading as error. But the text of the Book of Abraham tells us exactly why the images look like standard Egyptian funerary material: Abraham was there, in that context, using those materials. The interpretive frame he brought to them was not the Egyptian funerary tradition — it was the Abrahamic covenant tradition.

Egyptology alone cannot resolve the question of authorial intent. What it can do is confirm that the images are authentically ancient, that the kind of re-interpretation Joseph Smith’s explanations represent was culturally possible in the ancient world, and that the broader content of the Book of Abraham reflects genuine knowledge of the ancient Near Eastern world that was simply not available to a farm boy in upstate New York in 1842. For the companion question — why the surviving papyrus text itself does not match the book — see The Book of Abraham and the Papyri.

Appendix — Sources

The scholarship on the facsimiles is extensive and genuinely two-sided. What follows is a working source apparatus, not a reading list. The primary documents sit upstream of both interpretive camps; the Egyptological editions and the Latter-day Saint studies represent the main lines of interpretation; and the critical treatments are listed alongside the responses to them. A reader who wants a single exhaustive bibliography should begin with the one published in BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022).

1. Primary Documents

2. Egyptological Editions & Translations

3. Latter-day Saint Scholarship

  • Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, “A Guide to the Book of Abraham,” BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022) — the current state-of-the-question survey, with figure-by-figure treatments of Facsimiles 1–3 (including “A Semitic View of the Facsimiles,” “Abraham and Osiris,” and “Facsimile 1 as a Sacrifice Scene”).
  • ———, “Appendix: Book of Abraham Bibliography,” BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022).
  • John Gee, “A Method for Studying the Facsimiles,” FARMS Review 19, no. 1 (2007): 347–353.
  • John Gee, “Facsimile 3 and Book of the Dead 125,” in Astronomy, Papyrus, and Covenant, ed. John Gee and Brian M. Hauglid (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2005), 95–105.
  • Kevin L. Barney, “The Facsimiles and Semitic Adaptation of Existing Sources,” in Astronomy, Papyrus, and Covenant, ed. John Gee and Brian M. Hauglid (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2005), 107–130 — the “Semitic Adaptation” theory (Egyptian vignettes adapted by an Egyptian-Jewish redactor rather than drawn by Abraham); presented as valuable and attractive but not definitive.
  • Quinten Z. Barney, “The Neglected Facsimile: An Examination and Comparative Study of Facsimile No. 3 of the Book of Abraham” (MA thesis, Brigham Young University, 2019) — the most extensive single study of Facsimile 3 as of 2021.
  • Kerry Muhlestein, “The Religious and Cultural Background of Joseph Smith Papyrus I,” Journal of the Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture 22, no. 1 (2013): 20–33.
  • Kerry Muhlestein, “Assessing the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Introduction to the Historiography of Their Acquisitions, Translations, and Interpretations,” Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 22 (2016): 17–49.
  • Kerry Muhlestein, “Egyptian Papyri and the Book of Abraham: A Faithful, Egyptological Point of View,” in No Weapon Shall Prosper: New Light on Sensitive Issues, ed. Robert L. Millet (2011).
  • John Gee, An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2017).
  • Kerry Muhlestein, Let’s Talk about the Book of Abraham (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2022).
  • Brian M. Hauglid, ed., A Textual History of the Book of Abraham: Manuscripts and Editions (Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2010).
  • John Gee, The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment (Provo, UT: FARMS).
  • Stephen O. Smoot, “‘From the Catacombs of Egypt’: Latter-day Saint Engagement with Ancient Egypt and the Contest of Religious Identity,” Journal of Mormon History 46, no. 4 (October 2020).

4. Critical Treatments & Responses

  • Robert K. Ritner, “‘Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham’ — A Response” (self-published PDF, University of Chicago) — a direct, non–peer-reviewed reply to the Gospel Topics essay.
  • Brian M. Hauglid (co-editor of JSP vol. 4), comment on a Dan Vogel Facebook post, 8 November 2018 — stating he had come to reject the missing-manuscript theory and no longer shared the interpretive position of Gee and Muhlestein.
  • Charles M. Larson, By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus: A New Look at the Joseph Smith Papyri (Grand Rapids: Institute for Religious Research, rev. ed. 1992; orig. 1985) — the most widely circulated popular critical treatment; John Gee has published a response.
  • Dan Vogel, Book of Abraham video series (YouTube) — listed for context, as the material Hauglid’s comment answered.