The Book of Abraham and the Papyri

Egyptologists say the surviving papyrus fragments are a common funerary text, not the story of Abraham. That is true — and it does far less damage to the Book of Abraham than critics assume.

The Question Stated Fairly

In 1835 Joseph Smith obtained several Egyptian mummies and rolls of papyrus and produced the Book of Abraham, published in 1842. For most of the next century the papyri were assumed lost. Then, in 1966, several fragments were rediscovered in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and turned over to the Church. Egyptologists — Latter-day Saint and non–Latter-day Saint alike — identified them as standard funerary documents, principally the “Book of Breathings” belonging to a Theban priest named Hor, dating to roughly the first century before Christ, long after Abraham lived.

The characters on those fragments, everyone agrees, do not translate into the text of the Book of Abraham. The critic’s conclusion follows quickly: Joseph Smith looked at a pagan burial scroll, imagined he was reading Abraham, and the whole book is therefore exposed as fraud.

It is a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a dodge. The answer has three parts: we do not have the papyrus Joseph actually used; “translation” in Joseph’s hands never meant what the critic assumes; and the Book of Abraham carries internal evidence of authenticity that no burial scroll could account for.

What Was Recovered — and What Wasn’t

The first fact usually left out of the objection is how little survived. The fragments returned in 1966 are exactly that — fragments, mounted on stiff paper. Eyewitnesses who saw Joseph’s collection in the 1830s described something far larger: “a long roll” of papyrus, and in some accounts more than one roll, with writing in red and black. Much of that material was scattered after Joseph’s death and a large portion is believed to have burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Egyptologists estimate that the surviving scroll of Hor was originally several feet longer than the piece we now possess. In other words, the fragment critics point to is a small, damaged remnant of what Joseph once held. The Church’s own scholars state the matter plainly: it is likely that much of the papyri Joseph had access to is simply not among the surviving fragments. One cannot declare that the source of the Book of Abraham has been examined and found wanting when the source may not be in the room at all.

This is not special pleading invented to escape a problem. It is the ordinary situation of ancient manuscripts, and it was noted by observers long before the fragments resurfaced. The honest statement is that we cannot compare the Book of Abraham against a source document we do not have.

What “Translation” Meant to Joseph Smith

The deeper answer is that the critic assumes Joseph worked the way a modern scholar works — parsing signs one by one with a grammar and lexicon. Joseph never claimed to do this. Every scripture he produced came by revelation, not by academic decipherment.

Consider the clearest parallel: the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible. Joseph “translated” large portions of the King James Bible — producing new material, including an entire book of Moses and a restored passage on Enoch — without possessing a single ancient manuscript. He had only an English Bible open in front of him. No one imagines he was rendering Hebrew or Greek characters. “Translation,” in his usage, meant receiving by revelation the truth that God wished to give, using the text before him as an occasion.

Doctrine and Covenants 7 (heading)

“A translated version of the record made on parchment by John and hidden up by himself.” — a text Joseph received by revelation, having no access to any physical parchment at all.

On this understanding — often called the catalyst model — the ancient papyri were the occasion for revelation rather than a code Joseph decrypted. God gave Joseph the record of Abraham, an account that had once been written by Abraham’s own hand and transmitted across the centuries, using the Egyptian artifacts before him as the prompt. The words of Abraham did not have to be inscribed on the surviving fragment for the revealed account to be genuine.

A second faithful possibility remains open as well: that the text of Abraham was written on a portion of the roll that has not survived. Latter-day Saints are not required to choose between these; both are consistent with the book being exactly what it claims to be. What neither model requires — and what the record never claimed — is that the funerary characters on a first-century fragment spell out the words of Abraham.

The Facsimiles

The three facsimiles printed with the Book of Abraham are Egyptian vignettes, and critics note that Joseph’s explanations of them do not line up with a standard Egyptologist’s reading of a funerary scene. Two things need to be said. First, in Egyptian practice a vignette and the text beside it were frequently unrelated, and images were routinely copied, reused, and reinterpreted centuries after they were first drawn — so a later Egyptian, an ancient Jew in Egypt, or a prophet restoring the record could all attach a meaning the original engraver never intended.

Second, a number of Joseph’s specific claims have aged remarkably well — identifications that looked like guesses in 1842 but that later Egyptology has, in several cases, vindicated. That case is made in detail in our companion article, “The Facsimiles — Inverted Priestly Imagery.” For the present question it is enough to note that the facsimiles are a matter of interpretation, not a knockout: an Egyptologist reading them one way does not settle what an ancient Abrahamic tradition, or a modern revelation, made of the same figures.

What the Book Itself Contains

Set the papyrus aside and read the book. If it were the daydream of a frontier farmer projecting a story onto a pagan scroll, it should be full of nineteenth-century mistakes. Instead it reflects ancient traditions about Abraham that were either unavailable to Joseph or survive, in the forms closest to his account, only in sources recovered and translated long after his death. A full bibliography for each of the parallels below appears in the appendix.

Ancient Abraham Traditions the Book Reflects

  • Abraham nearly sacrificed — The book opens with priests attempting to offer Abraham himself on an altar (Abraham 1:7–15). This episode is absent from the Bible but is one of the most widely attested traditions in extra-biblical Abrahamic literature — Jewish, Christian, and Islamic. Most of those sources were untranslated in Joseph Smith’s day, and the versions closest to the Book of Abraham’s account — a sacrificial altar and an officiating priest, rather than the more familiar legend of Nimrod’s fiery furnace — were unavailable in any European language until the twentieth century.
  • Abraham as astronomer and teacher — The book presents Abraham reasoning on astronomy in Pharaoh’s court and declaring what he had learned to the Egyptians (Abraham 3:15; Facsimile 3). This is not in Genesis, but it is one of the oldest and best-attested traditions about Abraham outside the Bible. Pseudo-Eupolemus (2nd c. BC) has Abraham teaching astronomy to the priests at Heliopolis; Artapanus and Josephus report the same; later Greco-Roman astrologers cite “books of Abraham” on the subject. Josephus was in fact widely available in English in Joseph’s day, though there is no evidence he used it and the accounts diverge at points; Eusebius, who preserves the earliest and closest version, was not translated into English until 1903.
  • A specific and unexpected cultic setting — Abraham 1 places the near-sacrifice at the hand of a priest of Pharaoh, on an altar in “Ur, of Chaldea,” near “the plain of Olishem” (Abraham 1:10, 20), with worship directed to gods named Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, and Korash. Several details have gained support since 1842. Olishem plausibly corresponds to Ulisum, a place named in an inscription of Naram-Sin (ca. 2250 BC) in what is now northern Syria or southern Turkey — a region under real Egyptian influence in the Middle Kingdom, unlike southern Iraq. Elkenah reads naturally as the Canaanite El. And Egyptologists have documented sanctioned ritual killing in Middle Kingdom Egypt, even beyond its borders, though most prefer “ritual slaying” to “human sacrifice” as the label. None of these identifications is beyond dispute — John Gee rates the Olishem site “promising but not proven” — but together they fit the ancient world far better than a lucky guess would.
  • A pre-mortal council and the ordering of the heavens — Abraham 3:22–28 describes intelligences organized before the world, a council of divine beings, and a chosen Mediator. Biblical scholarship now recognizes the divine council as a genuine ancient Near Eastern pattern underlying Psalm 82, 1 Kings 22:19–22, Job 1–2, and Isaiah 6 — but that recognition rests on the Ugaritic tablets discovered in 1929 and on manuscript readings (Deuteronomy 32:8, “sons of God”) recovered from the Dead Sea Scrolls, neither available to Joseph Smith. The King James text he used obscures the pattern rather than displaying it. Related traditions of pre-existent souls shown to Abraham appear in the Apocalypse of Abraham, untranslated into English until 1918.

A forger copying a burial scroll does not accidentally land on the specific, ancient forms of these Abraham traditions — forms that in several cases surfaced only after his death. Where a parallel was in fact available in Joseph’s world, the honest course is to say so, as we have; what remains is a pattern of fit with the ancient Near East that a lucky nineteenth-century guess does not explain. The content of the Book of Abraham points toward an ancient source, not away from one.

The Church Has Never Hidden This

A common charge is that the Church suppressed the papyri problem. The opposite is true. The Church published photographs of the fragments in its own magazine shortly after they were recovered, has printed scholarly analyses through its universities for decades, and has issued a detailed public essay, Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham, that states the Egyptological facts openly — including the concession that the surviving characters do not correspond to the book’s text.

An institution hiding a fraud does not hand its critics the photographs and lay out the hard data in a document any member can read. It does what the Church has in fact done: tell the truth about the evidence and explain why the book still stands.

The Verdict

The objection rests on an assumption the record never made — that Joseph Smith claimed to be decoding, sign by sign, the exact fragment we now possess. He did not. We do not have the full roll he worked from; “translation” for him always meant revelation, as the Bible translation and the record of John both show; and the book he produced contains authentic ancient material he had no natural way to obtain.

What the critic has established is narrow: a first-century funerary fragment does not, by itself, spell out the words of Abraham. What the critic needs to establish is far larger: that an unlettered young man, with no access to the ancient legends the book reflects, invented a doctrinally profound and historically resonant account of Abraham out of a pagan scroll. That is the claim that cannot be sustained.

The Book of Abraham is not judged by the ashes of a burned scroll. It is judged, like all scripture, by what it teaches and by the witness of the Spirit to the one who reads it with real intent (Moroni 10:4–5). Read that way, it declares Abraham — and it declares the God who called him.

Appendix — Sources on the Ancient Abraham Parallels

The claims above are drawn from a substantial body of primary texts and scholarship. On the availability question — which sources Joseph Smith could or could not have read — the English-publication date matters more than the composition date, so both are given where relevant. The standard reference work catalogs more than a hundred ancient and medieval Abraham texts by motif and should be consulted first.

The Standard Collection

  • John A. Tvedtnes, Brian M. Hauglid & John Gee, eds., Traditions About the Early Life of Abraham (Provo: FARMS, 2001) — catalogs 100+ ancient and medieval Abraham texts by motif; borrowable at the Internet Archive.
  • Hugh Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Abraham (Collected Works vol. 18), 375–468; and Abraham in Egypt.
  • John Gee, An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (Religious Studies Center / Deseret Book, 2017).
  • Smoot, Gee, Muhlestein & Thompson, “A Guide to the Book of Abraham,” BYU Studies Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2022).

The Near-Sacrifice of Abraham

  • Primary texts — Pseudo-Philo, Biblical Antiquities 6 (1st c. AD; Eng. M. R. James, 1917); Apocalypse of Abraham 8 (1st–2nd c. AD; Eng. G. H. Box, 1918); Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, Gen. 11:28; Bereshit (Genesis) Rabbah 38:13 / 44:13 (Eng. Soncino, 1939); B. Talmud, Pesahim 118a (Eng. Soncino, 1935–48); Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer 26 (Eng. Friedlander, 1916); and the Islamic qiṣaṣ — al-Ṭabarī, al-Tha‘labī, al-Kisā’ī, Ibn Kathīr — plus Coptic and Ethiopic (Falasha) versions.
  • On availability — The Book of Jasher (Moses Samuel’s English translation, New York, 1840) contains the Nimrod-furnace episode at Jasher 12, and predates the 1842 publication of the Book of Abraham. The altar-and-priest configuration specific to Abraham 1, however, is found only in sources not rendered into any European language until the twentieth century.
  • Studies — Bradley J. Cook, “The Book of Abraham and the Islamic Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyā’,” Dialogue 33, no. 4 (2000); Pearl of Great Price Central, “Abrahamic Legends and Lore.”

Abraham the Astronomer

The Cultic Setting, Sacrifice & Geography

The Divine Council & Pre-Mortal Life

These parallels vary in strength. The near-sacrifice and the divine-council material are strong on the availability axis, because the forms closest to the Book of Abraham surfaced in English only in the twentieth century. The astronomer tradition is the weakest on that axis, since the motif was widely diffused; it is better deployed as evidence that the text fits its ancient milieu than as evidence Joseph could not have encountered it. In every case the responsible claim is the modest one — that the Book of Abraham sits comfortably in an ancient world it should have known nothing about.