FAIR is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing well-documented answers to criticisms of the doctrine, practice, and history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Difference between revisions of "Criticism of Mormonism/Books/Becoming Gods/Chapter 3"
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Revision as of 14:55, 11 December 2014
- REDIRECTTemplate:Test3
Contents
- 1 Response to claims made in "Chapter 3: Thus Saith Joseph"
- 1.1 84, 370n9-11
- 1.2 Claim The revelations in the Book of Commandments were modified because they were "showing their age," "contained outdated information," "included erroneous statements" and "abandoned doctrines." Some of the revelations "revealed too much information about LDS beliefs."
- 1.3 Claim Mormons view divine truth as "not absolute or fixed; it is changeable, flexible."
- 1.4 Claim Joseph received a "false revelation" through his seer stone to go to Toronto, Canada to sell the Book of Mormon copyright.
- 1.5 Claim Some of the modified revelations had their meanings "reversed."
- 1.6 Claim Joseph modified the revelation now found in D&C 5:4 to add additional gifts. After translating the Book of Mormon he was not supposed to become a prophet or organize a Church.
- 1.7 Claim Joseph modified what is now D&C 8:6-9 to hide Oliver Cowdery's use of a divining rod.
- 1.8 Claim Apostle William E. McLellin left the Church because he was "shaken by the changes made in the revelations."
- 1.9 Claim Mormons claim that Biblical writers modified revelations, but cannot provide data to support this. This is an "argument from silence."
- 1.10 Claim Joseph Smith turned the "Book of Breathings" into the "Book of Abraham." Joseph claimed that the "Book of the Dead" had been written by Joseph of Egypt.
- 1.11 Claim
The restoration of the missing portions of Facsimile 1 were "terribly wrong."
- 1.11.1 99 - LDS apologists' main purpose is to explain away "any and all criticisms that might damage the validity of Smith's writings"
- 1.11.2 The author(s) of Becoming Gods make(s) the following claim:
- 1.11.3 FAIR's Response
- 1.11.4 The author(s) of Becoming Gods make(s) the following claim:
- 1.11.5 FAIR's Response
- 1.12 Question: In the Kirtland Egyptian Papers, why is each Egyptian character matched to an entire paragraph of English text?
- 1.13
Response to claims made in "Chapter 3: Thus Saith Joseph"
| Chapter 2 | A FAIR Analysis of: Becoming Gods: A Closer Look at 21st-Century Mormonism A work by author: Richard Abanes
|
Chapter 4 |
84, 370n9-11
Claim
The revelations in the Book of Commandments were modified because they were "showing their age," "contained outdated information," "included erroneous statements" and "abandoned doctrines." Some of the revelations "revealed too much information about LDS beliefs."
Author's source(s)
- Karl F. Best, "Changes in the Revelations, 1833-1835," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (Spring 1992), vol. 25, no. 1, p. 90.
- H. Michael Marquardt, The Joseph Smith Revelations: Text & Commentary, p. 17.
Response
- Absurd claim: The revelations were "showing their age" between 1833 and 1835?
- Doctrine and Covenants/Textual changes
85, 371n14
Claim
Mormons view divine truth as "not absolute or fixed; it is changeable, flexible."
Author's source(s)
- Richard N. and Joan K. Ostling, Mormon America: The Power and the Promise, (New York:HarperCollins Publishers, 2000), 249. ( Index of claims )
Response
- The author's claim is false: Latter-day Saints realize that their understanding of divine truth may grow and be enhanced, but this does not mean that the truth is changeable or flexible.
- Quotes another author's opinion as if it were fact: once again, only a hostile author is cited; there are no quotes from LDS sources used to explore their supposed view.
- Church doctrine/Changing
87, 370n23
Claim
Joseph received a "false revelation" through his seer stone to go to Toronto, Canada to sell the Book of Mormon copyright.
Author's source(s)
- David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ.
Response
- History unclear or in error
- Book of Mormon/Attempt to sell copyright
87, 371n25
Claim
Some of the modified revelations had their meanings "reversed."
Author's source(s)
- D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (Signature Books, 1994), 5.
Response
89, 372n28
Claim
Joseph modified the revelation now found in D&C 5:4 to add additional gifts. After translating the Book of Mormon he was not supposed to become a prophet or organize a Church.
Author's source(s)
- Karl F. Best, "Changes in the Revelations, 1833-1835," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (Spring 1992), vol. 25, no.1, p. 98.
Response
89, 372n29-30
Claim
Joseph modified what is now D&C 8:6-9 to hide Oliver Cowdery's use of a divining rod.
Author's source(s)
- D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, revised and enlarged edition, (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998), 206 ( Index of claims )
- H. Michael Marquardt, The Joseph Smith Revelations: Text & Commentary, pp. 14-15.
Response
- Mind reading: author has no way of knowing this.
- Doctrine and Covenants/Oliver Cowdery and the "rod of nature"
90, 372n34, 375n35
Claim
Apostle William E. McLellin left the Church because he was "shaken by the changes made in the revelations."
Author's source(s)
- "The Early History of the Saints and Their Enemies," Sept. 28, 1875, Salt Lake Daily Tribune, Dec. 5, 1878
- William McLellin, Saint's Herald, vol. 17, pp. 556-557.
Response
- This explanation (as shown by the dates of the material cited) came long after the fact. The author does not tell us that McLellin said at his excommunication hearing that:
- he said he had no confidence in the presidency of the Church; consequently, he had quit praying and keeping the commandments of the Lord, and indulged himself in his sinful lusts. It was from what he had heard that he believed the presidency had got out of the way, and not from anything that he had seen himself.[1]
- McLellin had previously been excommunicated for spending time with "a certain harlot" while on a mission.[2] He had also been out of fellowship for "writing a letter which "cast…censure upon the [first] presidency."[1]
- McLellin: Examining the Witness
- Doctrine_and_Covenants/Textual_changes
90
Claim
Mormons claim that Biblical writers modified revelations, but cannot provide data to support this. This is an "argument from silence."
Author's source(s)
- Stephen W. Gibson, One-Minute Answers to Anti-Mormon Question, p. 82
Response
94
Claim
Joseph Smith turned the "Book of Breathings" into the "Book of Abraham." Joseph claimed that the "Book of the Dead" had been written by Joseph of Egypt.
Author's source(s)
- No source provided.
Response
- Book of Abraham/Joseph Smith Papyri/Church disclosure of "Book of the Dead"
- Book of Abraham/Joseph Smith Papyri
94-98
Claim
The restoration of the missing portions of Facsimile 1 were "terribly wrong."
Author's source(s)
- Charles M. Larson, By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus: A New Look at the Joseph Smith Papyri, 2nd ed., (Grand Rapids, MI: Institute for Religious Research, 1992), .
Response
99 - LDS apologists' main purpose is to explain away "any and all criticisms that might damage the validity of Smith's writings"
The author(s) of Becoming Gods make(s) the following claim:
LDS apologists' main purpose is to explain away "any and all criticisms that might damage the validity of Smith's writings."Author's sources: Author's opinion.
FAIR's Response
100 - One or two words in Egyptian were expanded to entire paragraphs in English
The author(s) of Becoming Gods make(s) the following claim:
Documents show how the hieroglyphs from the papyri were matched to the Book of Abraham text. One or two words in Egyptian were expanded to entire paragraphs in English.Author's sources: Richard L. Bushman, "Joseph Smith as Translator, in Waterman, p. 81.
FAIR's Response
Question: In the Kirtland Egyptian Papers, why is each Egyptian character matched to an entire paragraph of English text?
The KEP may have been an attempt to "reverse engineer" the Book of Abraham translation against the Egyptian papyri
Once the Book of Abraham translation was complete, a unique opportunity existed to use the completed translation in an attempt to match it against the Egyptian characters on the papyri and produce a correlation between English and Egyptian. The Church addresses this possibility on LDS.org:
Some evidence suggests that Joseph studied the characters on the Egyptian papyri and attempted to learn the Egyptian language. His history reports that, in July 1835, he was “continually engaged in translating an alphabet to the Book of Abraham, and arrangeing a grammar of the Egyptian language as practiced by the ancients.” This “grammar,” as it was called, consisted of columns of hieroglyphic characters followed by English translations recorded in a large notebook by Joseph’s scribe, William W. Phelps. Another manuscript, written by Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, has Egyptian characters followed by explanations.[3]
The reverse engineering hypothesis gains traction once we see that the translation of the Book of Abraham (as some have supposed are demonstrated by the characters in the margins of the translation manuscripts) and the characters in the GAEL:
Yet some have supposed that the Egyptian Alphabet was the tool used to create the translation. In order to assess whether this could be the case or not, I conducted research to test the assumption. First, I located all of the phrases in the Egyptian Alphabet that also appear in the Book of Abraham. I then compared the Egyptian characters next to those phrases to the Egyptian characters adjacent to the matching lines in the early Book of Abraham manuscripts. Of the twenty-one times I found text in the Egyptian Alphabet that matched text in the Book of Abraham, I found only one time that the corresponding Egyptian characters matched, four times when part of the characters matched, and sixteen times in which there was no match whatsoever. Clearly the Egyptian alphabet was not used to translate the papyri, nor is there any demonstrable relationship between the characters on the papyri and the text of the Book of Abraham. This is not surprising since the characters come from fragments of papyri that eyewitnesses noted were not the source of the Book of Abraham.[4]
Even further evidence of this is the presence of Hebrew in the GAEL. This is further explicated by Jeff Lindsay[5]
Notes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "History of William E. McLellin," Millennial Star 26 (1864), 808.; see also Joseph Smith, History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 7 volumes, edited by Brigham H. Roberts, (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1957), 3:31. Volume 3 link
- ↑ D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (Signature Books, 1994), 44.
- ↑ "Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham," Gospel Topics (8 July 2014).
- ↑ Kerry Muhelstein, '"The Explanation Defying Book of Abraham" in A Reason For Faith: Navigating LDS Doctrine and Church History (ed.) Laura Harris Hales (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2016) 85.
- ↑ Jeff Lindsay, “A Precious Resource With Some Gaps” Interpreter: a Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 33-2 (2019) pp. 35-58 off-site