Papyrus Amherst 63 = Reformed Egyptian = Book of Mormon is true.

[_boo]

Can I play too, Kish?

Let us start with 1 Nephi 1.2 (I have naturally taken the text from the 1830 Palmyra edition of the Book of Mormon):

....yea, I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.

Your argument is that the "language" of the Egyptians means just that - Ancient Egyptian - and that the learning of the Jews is the content that was expressed in that language.

I want to argue that there is no reason why Nephi would have taken it into his head to compose the Small Plates in Ancient Egyptian. It just makes no sense. And this is Nephi talking - Mormon did not abridge this part of the Nephite record, so we can have a high degree of confidence that we are reading the words of Nephi ben Lehi himself, written within a generation of 600 BC.

So why does Nephi bring up Egyptian? What did he mean by the term? Apostates and anti-Mormons would doubtless say that the text was written by Brother Joseph (as if he could do such a thing in 60 days!), and that Joseph was influenced by later Euro-American fantasies about Egypt as a land of mysteries. But such an explanation is obviously not open to faithful Latter-day Saint scholars. Nephi was not an Orientalist, and "Egypt" to a Judahite in 600 BC did not signify esoteric exoticism. It signified slavery and oppression. The early prophets (Hosea, Amos, Micah and Nephi's beloved Isaiah) repeatedly reference the narrative of Israel's liberation from Egypt in the exodus as a programmatic model for YHWH's dealings with his chosen people. Jeremiah, who we know was a contemporary of Nephi, incorporated the same theme into his preaching.

I suggest, then, that "Egypt" in the Book of Mormon text signifies oppressive, idolatrous enemies, from whom God's remnant people look to be delivered by his divine hand. It is plausible that the members of the Lehite colony used the terms "Egypt" and "Egyptians" to denote the native peoples of the Americas. So the "language of the Egyptians" that Nephi employed would have been the language of the Maya - a language which he and his family would have had to learn on arriving in the New WOrld, and which would no doubt have become more familiar to him over time than his native Hebrew.

It makes perfect sense . that was the language that the Brass Plates were written in Egyptain His very name was Egyptian . Think of educated Hindi in India today . They often speak and certainly write in English routinely . Paticularly if they are writting at lenght about an English text.

[_Symmachus]

In support of Johannes’ point, recall that Joseph Smith mistook a Greek psalter for Egyptian. Maybe the Book of Mormon was written in a kind of proto-Coptic?

I think you might be on to something here. Reformed Egyptian is often compared to Demotic Egyptian. Demotic Egyptian is, as I'm sure everyone knows, a descriptor for a script rather than a language per se. The language was Late Egyptian, and the next phase of that was Coptic. In fact, those who have "done their homework," as one geenius has, will no doubt have noticed that the language of Demotic basically is Coptic, and Coptic itself is but Late Egyptian written in the Greek script (or Reformed Greek, if you will, since it contains extra characters adapted from Demotic), and with a very substantial vocabulary of loanwords from Greek.

In short, Reformed Egyptian=Demotic= Coptic. That could very well describe the learned language of the Nephite scribes.

In suggesting these new possibilities, you and Johannes have inaugurated new approaches to the Book of Mormon.

[_SuperDell]

You take the characters Joseph Smith wrote and compare them to the characters on these texts.

Couldn't be more simple to make the comparison.