“Written by His Own Hand”

Abstract

In 1835, Joseph Smith acquired four mummies and a trove of papyri from an antiquities dealer. He claimed that the papyri included a narrative of the patriarch Abraham, and over the following years he translated the Book of Abraham. It describes a creation presided over by “gods” and details a premortal council in which human “intelligences” are present and a Savior is chosen. Controversy over Smith’s “translation” erupted almost immediately and reignited in 1967 when some of the original papyri were made public. Egyptologists identify those fragments as Egyptian funerary documents, unrelated to Smith’s Book of Abraham chronologically or thematically. Some Latter-day Saint apologists disagree, finding the Egypticity of Smith’s narrative credible. Other apologists agree that his work fails as translation in the conventional sense but succeeds as genuinely inspired scripture.