Welcome back to another episode of Mormon Discussion Podcast. I'm your host Bill Real, and I'm grateful for the chance to be with you today.

Today we're going to do a logical deconstruction takedown of the book of Abraham in the Egyptian papyri.

This is episode number two. The first one was on the 116 pages of the book of Lehigh.

Again, this is going to be a series of about 30 chapters,

30 episodes, all reflected in a book that was published on Amazon, which we'll talk about at the end.

So let's start off. In 1835, Joseph Smith acquired several ancient Egyptian papyri, along with

some mummies. Soon after, he announced that one of the papyriary

contained the writings of the biblical patriarch, Abraham, written by his own hand. Joseph Smith said

he could translate these characters by the gift and power of God, just as he had translated

the Book of Mormon. The result became the Book of Abraham, now part of LDS scripture,

in the Pearl of Great Price. Now Joseph didn't present this as speculation or inspiration.

He presented it as a literal translation of ancient Egyptian characters. He even published

copies of the original papyrus fragments,

alongside his translation, inviting readers to see the source material for themselves.

At the time, no one in Joseph's environment could even read Egyptian. The Rosetta Stone had

only recently been discovered and the field of Egyptology was still

developing. Joseph's claim could not be tested, and people either believed him or they didn't.

But then that changed. In 1967, fragments of the original papyri that Joseph owned were rediscovered in the archives of

the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. These fragments were examined by professional

Egyptologists, and unlike Joseph's contemporaries, modern scholars could actually read Egyptian. Their conclusion was clear and

consistent. The papyri do not contain the writings of Abraham. They are common Egyptian funerary

text, specifically portions of the Book of Breathings and the Book of the Dead. These were standard burial documents placed with the deceased to guide them in the afterlife.

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