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 we slow down and examine the record itself, an uncomfortable fact emerges.
We do not actually know what record Joseph Smith had. In fact, we know very little.
Not the language.
Not the format.
Not the completeness.
Not the chain of custody.
Not even whether the surviving fragments represent the text he translated.
And yet your entire argument assumes we do.
The Assumption That Starts Everything
Your Book of Abraham critique begins with a quiet assumption: that the record of Abraham was physically present on the papyri Joseph Smith owned.
You state that assumption as if it were a fact.
But even Latter-day Saint scholars openly admit that we don’t know if the text of the Book of Abraham was on the papyri Joseph Smith acquired.
That single sentence destabilizes nearly every conclusion the CES Letter draws.
If the text was not on the surviving papyri, then arguments based on fragment comparison collapse immediately. Your proof is gone. The nail in the coffin is removed and the possibility that the Book of Abraham was inspired by God emerges.
Even if the text for the Book of Abraham was on the surviving papyri we have, we still face a far more complicated problem.
An Unknown Transmission History
Abraham lived around 2000 BC.
Joseph Smith produced the Book of Abraham nearly four thousand years later.
Between those two points lies a transmission gap larger than the entire bible.
How was Abraham’s record preserved?
How many times was it copied?
Who edited it?
Who transmitted it?
Which language was it preserved in?
Did it remain in Semitic script?
Was it ever rendered into Egyptian?
Was it embedded within other texts?
Was it excerpted?
Was it recopied alongside funerary material?
Every ancient text we possess went through layers of copying, redaction, and contextual adaptation.
Why would Abraham’s record be the only exception? Why wouldn’t it change, when virtually every other hand copied ancient document varies and is added with additional commentary over time?
How Did the Record Get to Egypt?
If Abraham’s record ever existed in written form, how did it arrive in Egypt? Wouldn’t the timing of this matter so that we could actually decipher what it meant in context?
Several historically plausible routes exist of when a record of Abraham would be relevent in Egypt.
- Abraham himself traveled to Egypt
- Jacob and his sons settled there
- Later Jewish refugees fled to Egypt arout 585 BC after Babylon destroyed Jerusalem
- Jewish mercenaries settled throughout Egypt
- Large Jewish populations and communities flourished in Thebes and Alexandria
Egypt was not religiously isolated.
It was a cosmopolitan center where Jewish, Egyptian, Greek, and Near Eastern traditions mingled for centuries.
We know Jewish texts circulated in Egypt.
We know Egyptian priests collected foreign religious material.
We know Abraham was not only a central figure in Jewish tradition but was also known beyond Israel as a patriarch associated with multiple nations.
The question is not whether Abraham traditions could reach Egypt.
The question is why the CES Letter treats that idea as implausible.
What Language Was the Record In?
Your argument repeatedly assumes that if Joseph Smith possessed a record of Abraham, it must have been written in Egyptian and must be directly readable by modern Egyptologists.
That assumption is nowhere supported by the historical evidence.
Ancient records were frequently:
- Translated into new scripts
- Copied into local writing systems
- Summarized
- Embedded within unrelated texts
- Recontextualized for new ritual purposes
Even the Book of Mormon explicitly describes a record written in one language and preserved in another.
Why would Abraham’s record be required to follow a different rule? Do you really think there was only one unvarried understanding of Egyptian over a 3000 year dynasty?
The Unknown Relationship to Hor
Much of the CES Letter’s confidence rests on a further assumption: that the Egyptian priest Hor was the author or owner of the Book of Abraham text.
But all we actually know is this:
Those papyri included funerary texts.
One of those texts included an image later used as Facsimile One.
That is the full extent of our certainty. There where originally 11 Mummies, 2 Scrolls a long and a short one, and additional fragments that Michael Chandler had. We can assume that they all came from the same place. But that’s a hefty assumption. Something we definetly do not know.
We do not know:
- Why Hor had the papyri
- Whether he copied them
- Whether he inherited them
- Whether multiple texts were combined
- Whether Abraham material existed adjacent to funerary material
Egyptian priests routinely collected foreign religious texts.
They routinely repurposed imagery.
They routinely blended traditions.
Assuming Hor’s papyri represent a single, closed-purpose document is historically naïve. It ignores looking at the full picture. It ignores trying to look at things in context.
The Problem of Surviving Evidence
Only a small portion of the papyri Joseph Smith owned still exists.
The two large papyrus rolls he worked with (described as having black and red ink) were sold, sent to Chicago, and destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
The fragments critics analyze today followed a completely different chain of custody.
They were mounted, framed, privately held, and eventually donated to a museum.
Conflating those fragments with the missing scrolls is not evidence.
It is assumption.
The Question You Never Ask
Your critique never seriously asks the most basic historical question.
What record did Joseph Smith actually have?
Instead, you quietly replace that unknown with a convenient certainty.
Once that substitution is made, everything else seems obvious.
But if we remove that substitution, the confidence evaporates.
What This Leaves Us With
We are left with a much narrower conclusion than the CES Letter claims.
Joseph Smith possessed ancient papyri.
He produced a text he said came from Abraham.
We do not know the physical relationship between the two.
We do not know the language of the original record.
We do not know how much material is missing.
We do not know the full transmission history.
And yet the Book of Abraham contains ancient material Joseph Smith could not have known.
Can you just answer these questions for me?