Why Does the CES Letter Hide How Unsettled Facsimile 3 Translation Really Is? The CES Letter wants Facsimile 3 to feel simple. Egyptologists translated it. Joseph Smith got it wrong. End of story. But that is not the full story. The actual scholarship around Facsimile 3 is far less settled than the CES Letter presentation…
Why Does the CES Letter Ignore the Altar-to-Throne Pattern in Facsimile 3? The criticism the CES letter makes against facsimile is totally predictable: “Facsimile 3 is a funerary text, therefore Joseph Smith was wrong.” That sounds persuasive only if the image is isolated from the rest of the Book of Abraham and stripped of its…
If the writings beside Facsimile 1 identify Abraham, Chaldea, and the opening movement of Abraham’s story, why does the CES Letter treat the papyri as if only the surface funerary text matters? The CES Letter says the Book of Abraham fails because Egyptologists can read the surface text. But that’s just the surface layer. Ptolemaic…
If Facsimile 2 is “just random Egyptian nonsense,” why did Joseph Smith keep landing on themes modern scholars say a hypocephalus was designed to teach? Dear CES Letter, You treat Facsimile 2 like an easy win. A weird circular Egyptian disk equals “Joseph guessed,” “Joseph invented,” “Joseph failed.” But when I slow down and see…
If Facsimile 1 is “just a common funerary scene,” why does its closest known parallel point to ritual violence, and why did Joseph Smith get multiple low-probability details right? Dear CES Letter, You lean hard on Facsimile 1 because it feels simple. You frame it like this: modern Egyptologists can read the picture, the picture…
Why should we trust a damaged fragment over multiple eyewitness descriptions? But how can we be more confident now, with less of the image, than those who saw it closer to intact? Dear CES Letter, You present Facsimile One as if it is the easiest issue in the entire Book of Abraham. As if it…
The CES Letter claims Joseph Smith was a false prophet because of how the Book of Abraham was “translated.”But why did you assume the Grammar and Alphabet project was a translation attempt at all? Dear CES Letter, Your argument about the Book of Abraham leans heavily on one document set: the so-called Grammar and Alphabet…
The CES Letter argues Joseph Smith was a false prophet because the Book of Abraham does not match the surviving papyri. But why do you assume the surviving papyri are what he translated in the first place? Dear CES Letter, Your argument against the Book of Abraham depends on a single assumption. That the fragments…
The CES Letter claims the validity of the Book of Abraham is settled.But what record did Joseph Smith actually have? Dear CES Letter, Your letter acts as if we know exactly what Joseph Smith had in his hands, what text he was working from, and how that text relates to what survives today. But when…
Dear CES Letter, Your treatment of the Book of Abraham assumes that when the Book of Abraham differs from the King James Version of Genesis, that difference must mean corruption, invention, or theological drift. But I keep running into a problem. What if some of those differences are not distortions at all? I mean, there…