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 suggests. Most Egyptologists who commented on Facsimile 3 did not provide a full translation of the text above the figures. They mainly identified the figures by comparing the scene to other Egyptian images. That is a major difference.
Looking at a throne scene and saying, “This looks like Osiris, Isis, Ma’at, Hor, and Anubis,” is not the same thing as reading every damaged caption and proving the issue is closed.
Quinten Barney’s research makes this problem much harder for critics. He notes that many earlier Egyptologists relied on iconography because the characters were difficult, poorly rendered, or illegible. Only Ritner and Rhodes offered full translations of Facsimile 3, and even those translations contain disagreements and uncertainty.
That alone should slow the triumphalism.
If the CES Letter is going to present Facsimile 3 as a settled case against Joseph Smith, why does it not explain that only two scholars have published full translations of the whole facsimile text?
Why does it not explain that Ritner and Rhodes do not always agree?
Why does it not explain that some readings depend on comparison with other Books of Breathings rather than a clean reading of the actual characters in Facsimile 3?
Why does it not explain that some glyphs are ambiguous at best and unreadable at worst?
For example, Ritner and Rhodes differ in important places. Ritner reads part of the text as “Lord of Abydos(?), the great god forever(?)” while Rhodes reads it as Hor abiding at the side of the throne. Ritner’s question marks show uncertainty. Rhodes gives a different reading. They also differ on whether Ma’at is “mistress of the gods” or “lady of the West.” In the Anubis columns, both rely on difficult readings, and both acknowledge uncertainty in what follows. Barney concludes that the disagreements and cautions show the text cannot be handled without “deducing and assuming.”
That is not the same thing as a clean, devastating refutation of Joseph Smith.
It is a difficult nineteenth-century engraving of an ancient Egyptian scene, copied from a papyrus we no longer have, involving captions that even trained scholars handle with caution.
The CES Letter also ignores another major issue: Ptolemaic Egyptian religious texts were not flat, single-layer captions. Egyptian religious imagery could carry multiple meanings. Hugh Nibley emphasized that Egyptian representations should not be forced into one interpretation only, and cited Egyptologists who recognized that Egyptian symbols often carried multiple significance. Critics fall into the same mistake over and over: “This represents B, therefore it cannot represent A.”
That is the entire weakness of the Facsimile 3 attack.
The critic assumes a surface funerary reading exhausts the image. But Facsimile 3 belongs to a Ptolemaic world of layered symbols, reused imagery, temple meanings, divine identity, throne theology, judgment imagery, astronomy, and sacred adaptation.
So yes, a late Egyptian funerary layer may exist.
That does not erase an Abrahamic layer.
That does not erase the star canopy.
That does not erase the throne pattern.
That does not erase Abraham teaching astronomy.
That does not erase the altar-to-throne structure across the facsimiles.
That does not erase Jewish and Egyptian overlap in the ancient world.
That does not erase the possibility that Joseph Smith was revealing a higher meaning rather than giving a modern Egyptology classroom translation.
The CES Letter needs the reader to think the issue is simple. It needs “Egyptologists say” to function like a magic phrase that ends the discussion. But when the actual translation history is examined, the case becomes much more complicated.
Most identifications were based on comparison, not full translation.
The two full translations differ.
The readings contain uncertainty.
The scene is not a standard judgment scene.
The iconography is unusual.
The papyrus original is gone.
The Ptolemaic religious setting allows layered meanings.
And Joseph Smith’s interpretation fits the broader Book of Abraham structure: Abraham moves from altar, to heavens, to throne.
That is why this issue is so damaging to the CES Letter’s framing. The criticism does not merely leave out a small footnote. It leaves out the very complexity that keeps Facsimile 3 from being the easy “gotcha” critics want it to be.
So if the case against Facsimile 3 depends on two uncertain modern translations, figure identifications based heavily on parallel scenes, and a refusal to consider Ptolemaic layered meaning, why does the CES Letter present it as though the matter has already been settled?