I have been reading up on the Book of Abraham lately especially after reading some of the amazing work done by both Shulem and Philo Sofee.
Anyway... one thing I came across is the 'updated' reply to a CES Letter from a former CES employee (Jim Bennett) and he rails on the use of Kevin Mathie's interpretations of the facsimiles.
Are there any other sources beyond Ritner that discuss what they say? Is there any solid reason to think that Mathie's interpretations (that are commonly found in the infographics online) are wrong?
Just wondering if the constant use of Mathie's background in this piece is to simply deflect by claiming (rightfully so) that Mathie is not an Egyptian scholar, or if Mathie's translations of the facsimiles have been found problematic. I'm open to being wrong here, but I've never seen anyone really claim that those interpretations are "wrong" in the consensus of Egyptian scholars.
This piece also claims that facsimile 1 is unique since the body appears alive unlike most where the body already looks dead and ready to move to the afterlife, and that there are no other surviving versions that are the same with a 'living' body. Anyone have examples there as well?
Book of Abraham facsimiles- Sources for what they really say
Re: Book of Abraham facsimiles- Sources for what they really
There are some uncertainties about the details in the papyri from which the facsimiles were drawn, but there is no doubt among non-LDS Egyptologists about what type of texts the original papyri were, and no doubt that Joseph Smith was wrong about pretty much everything in them. I don't know whether the work by Kevin Mathie that you're referring to is the one excerpted here, but that text does contain quotations from many past Egyptologists pointing out Smith's errors.
Among the sources Mathie quotes are an anti-Mormon pamphlet from 1912, by an Episcopalian bishop in Utah who sent copies of the facsimiles to several Egyptologists to see what they thought of Smith's accuracy and reproduced their comments in the pamphlet as evidence against Mormonism. A copy of the pamphlet is here; scroll down to Chapter VII to see the quotations from scholars. Note that Breasted, in particular, was in his day the best translator of the Egyptian language in the United States and one of the foremost Egyptologists in the world. Another of Mathie's sources is an article by Klaus Baer, who examined the surviving fragments of the original papyri shortly after they were rediscovered in 1967. You can see his article here, though it's pretty detailed and may not be what you want to read first.
The vignette with Anubis and the bier is different from the norm for that type of illustration, but no copy of an Egyptian funerary text is exactly like another, so some individual copies are going to look odd. A study from 2008 by Lanny Bell, here, discusses what the original illustration may have looked like and points out that every possible reconstruction of the image includes some unique element. According to Bell, the legs-apart position is not unique, although it is unusual. Although my knowledge of Egyptian iconography is much less extensive than Bell's presumably is, I've seen images from this period of Egyptian history in which the god Osiris is starting to get up from the bier, showing that he is being resurrected. I don't recall seeing images with his legs apart, or of the average dead guy doing the same thing as Osiris, but signs of life in the man on the bier are not the wild departure from precedent that church apologists would have you believe. Here's an example of Osiris getting up:
Finally, there's an article from 1995 by Stephen E. Thompson, an LDS Egyptologist who, unlike John Gee or Kerry Muhlestein, refuses to contort the evidence to defend his religion. You can read the whole thing here, but I'll quote this bit directly: "In the preceding I have argued that (1) Joseph Smith's interpretations of the facsimiles in the Book of Abraham are not in agreement with the meanings which these figures had in their original, funerary, context; (2) anachronisms in the text of the book make it impossible that it was translated from a text written by Abraham himself; and (3) what we know about the relationship between Egypt and Asia renders the account of the attempted sacrifice of Abraham extremely implausible."
Among the sources Mathie quotes are an anti-Mormon pamphlet from 1912, by an Episcopalian bishop in Utah who sent copies of the facsimiles to several Egyptologists to see what they thought of Smith's accuracy and reproduced their comments in the pamphlet as evidence against Mormonism. A copy of the pamphlet is here; scroll down to Chapter VII to see the quotations from scholars. Note that Breasted, in particular, was in his day the best translator of the Egyptian language in the United States and one of the foremost Egyptologists in the world. Another of Mathie's sources is an article by Klaus Baer, who examined the surviving fragments of the original papyri shortly after they were rediscovered in 1967. You can see his article here, though it's pretty detailed and may not be what you want to read first.
The vignette with Anubis and the bier is different from the norm for that type of illustration, but no copy of an Egyptian funerary text is exactly like another, so some individual copies are going to look odd. A study from 2008 by Lanny Bell, here, discusses what the original illustration may have looked like and points out that every possible reconstruction of the image includes some unique element. According to Bell, the legs-apart position is not unique, although it is unusual. Although my knowledge of Egyptian iconography is much less extensive than Bell's presumably is, I've seen images from this period of Egyptian history in which the god Osiris is starting to get up from the bier, showing that he is being resurrected. I don't recall seeing images with his legs apart, or of the average dead guy doing the same thing as Osiris, but signs of life in the man on the bier are not the wild departure from precedent that church apologists would have you believe. Here's an example of Osiris getting up:
Finally, there's an article from 1995 by Stephen E. Thompson, an LDS Egyptologist who, unlike John Gee or Kerry Muhlestein, refuses to contort the evidence to defend his religion. You can read the whole thing here, but I'll quote this bit directly: "In the preceding I have argued that (1) Joseph Smith's interpretations of the facsimiles in the Book of Abraham are not in agreement with the meanings which these figures had in their original, funerary, context; (2) anachronisms in the text of the book make it impossible that it was translated from a text written by Abraham himself; and (3) what we know about the relationship between Egypt and Asia renders the account of the attempted sacrifice of Abraham extremely implausible."