This is an adaptation of a Twitter thread written by @LDSFootnotes, posted with their permission.
In a recent issue of the Mormon apologetics journal The Interpreter, John Gee once again goes on the offensive against The Joseph Smith Papers Project (JSPP) for daring to publish scholarship that contradicts his favorite pet theories regarding the production of the Book of Abraham. Gee is a BYU religion professor and church-employed Egyptologist who has built his career on promoting apologetic defenses of the Book of Abraham, which very often include polemic attacks on critics. To understand what is going on here, let me first introduce a bit of background to the problem and what John Gee finds so particularly offensive.
A Brief Introduction
The Book of Abraham is the product of a Joseph Smith’s efforts to “translate” a set of Egyptian papyri that the saints purchased in Kirtland, Ohio in 1835. The text we have today in the Pearl of Great Price was produced by Smith and his scribes between the time of their acquisition and its later serial publication in the Times and Seasons in 1842. Among the papers produced in association with the translation project are two scribal manuscripts of the Book of Abraham, written in the handwriting of Warren Parrish and Frederich G. Williams, and it is the nature of these manuscripts that is of primary concern. John Gee asserts that these documents were not a part of the translation effort, but were produced independently by Smith’s scribes in their efforts to reverse engineer the revelatory translation that Smith had already performed via his prophetic gift. Other scholars assert that these manuscripts were produced during the translation effort and provide insights into how the papyri we being translated by Smith. Importantly, in their recent publication, the JSPP favors the latter of these interpretations, and that has John Gee mad.
Why does it matter whether these scribal manuscripts were produced as part of the translation effort or afterwards by Smith’s scribes in an attempt to reverse engineer his efforts? In short, because the translation effort reflected by the scribal manuscripts is highly indicative of a “word for word” attempt at translating the characters on the papyri, and the translation is quite simply wrong. Therefore, if the scribal manuscripts are a reflection of Smith’s attempts to translate the Book of Abraham, it demonstrates that Smith believed he was literally translating the Egyptian characters on the papyri into English and that he had no idea what he was doing. Notably, this is supported by the fact that the surviving papyri that we have today have been retranslated by modern Egyptologists and shown to have absolutely nothing to do with the content of the Book of Abraham. This has led some apologists to suggest that Smith did not literally translate the characters of the papyri but was instead inspired by the papyri which served as a catalyst for him to receive the Book of Abraham through revelation.
For a thorough scholarly dive into theories behind the production of the Book of Abraham, I recommend these videos by Dan Vogel, and his forthcoming book, Book of Abraham Apologetics: A Review and Critique.
Observations on John Gee’s Objections
Given that brief background, we can now turn to John Gee’s objections and responses to the JSPP’s recent publication covering the Book of Abraham documents. Gee’s primary objection is that the JSPP promotes a “Simultaneous Dictation Theory” regarding the production of the Book of Abraham and the scribal manuscripts. That is, the two manuscripts of Smith’s scribes were produced in the course of the “translation” of the Book of Abraham as it was dictated by Joseph Smith. What follows are some pointed observations regarding Gee’s objections, the unprofessional and not entirely honest manner regarding how he presents his arguments.
Observation 1: Polemics
In what has become routine practice among LDS apologists raised through FARMS, and now FairMormon and the Interpreter Foundation, Gee’s responses to opinions he disagrees with are couched in insulting portrayals of the character or motivations of his opponents. What makes the present case particularly noteworthy is that his target is the Joseph Smith Papers Project that is supported by Church History Department and overseen by LDS General Authorities. Indeed, the book to which he is responding was almost certainly reviewed and approved by General Authorities before publication. It is incredible then that Gee characterizes their work as promoting “preconceived theories” on the “basis of no evidence” and “the same as making it up.” While risking returning to Gee his own polemic, anyone familiar with John Gee’s career of “scholarship” will recognize these accusations as obvious projection.
Observation 2: Selective Omission
Gee attempts to present the observation that the two manuscripts produced by scribes Warren Parrish and Frederick G. Williams are feature both paragraphing and punctuation and therefore do not appear to have been simultaneously produced during dictation. What he does not tell the reader is that the scribal manuscripts are paragraphed on the basis of characters written in the margins that correspond to those on the papyri, which strongly suggests that the paragraphs are intended to be interpretations of these characters. Furthermore, the lack of punctuation is not the hallmark of work produced from dictation so much as inconsistent punctuation—which is what we do find between the Parrish and Williams manuscripts.
Observation 3: Not the Evidence You are Looking For
A strong piece of evidence supporting the conclusion that Parrish and Williams simultaneously created their manuscripts from Smith’s dictation is that both include instances of the exact same textual corrections. Such corrections would be unlikely to occur if these documents were independently created by the two men in an effort to reverse engineer what had already been translated, but they would occur if they were simultaneously recording Smith’s own corrections at the time of dictation. Gee’s solution to these evidences contradicting his pet theory is to simply assert they are a nothing-burger.
Observation 4: Distorting the Facts
Gee misrepresents the facts by pretending that observations of evidence that contradict his position occur half as frequently as in reality. I’m no mathematician, but six occurrences of identical corrections is not equivalent to “no evidence.” Gee’s assertion is that Parrish merely copied Williams’s work—including the textual mistakes with their corrections. Gee provides no rationale for why Parrish would purposefully copy William’s errors and corrections, which seems like a particularly odd thing to do. It is interesting that Gee accuses the JSPP editors of presenting arguments “on the basis of no evidence” and “making things up” given his reluctance to provide evidentiary support of this particular assertion.
Observation 5: Hear the Words of My Mouth
A challenge for Gee’s assertion that Parrish simply copied Williams’s manuscript is that Parrish consistently writes the spelling “Elkkener” whereas Williams varies between spellings of “Elkkener” and Elkeenah” but ultimately favors the latter. Again, if Parrish were merely copying Williams’s manuscript, why would he systematically deviate from Williams when copying this proper name? Rather, these observations are evidence that both men wrote these names from Smith’s dictation and reflect his non-rhotic New England accent, and that they heard it differently.
Observation 6: Grasping at Empty Straws
Desperate for anything that will confirm his assertion that Williams and Parrish did not simultaneously record Smith’s dictation of the Book of Abraham, Gee tries his hardest to claim that lack of a specific piece of evidence is actually contradicting evidence. That is, Gee asserts that because these men did not specifically record the presence of both Parrish and Williams in their journals, they could not have possibly been both present to transcribe Smith’s dictation. Well, except that instance in which it is recorded that they were together and “spent the day in translating the Egyptian records.” However, because there is a degree of ambiguity in that this entry does not explicitly say that Smith worked on the translation together with both Williams and Parrish, Gee asserts that this could mean anything else. Apparently, in Gee’s world view, unless each man recorded an entry in their journals for each day of the translation project, that they sat together and took dictation simultaneously from Smith’s lips, it couldn’t possibly have happened—despite any other evidence suggesting that this is exactly what they did.
Observation 7: Creating Fake Problems
Gee claims that in Williams’s manuscript there are two insertions that do not appear in Parrish’s version. That is, somewhere in the transcription process Williams went back and inserted lines between what had already been recorded, but Parrish did not do the same in his manuscript. Specifically, at the bottom of the first page of Williams’s manuscript, the words “I will refer you to the representation that is at the commencement of this record” are crammed in smaller script before the start of the next paragraph, which continues “It was made after, the form of a bedsted…” In Parrish’s manuscript, these paragraphs are broken between pages, with the first ending at exactly the bottom of the page and the next beginning at the top of the following page. Notably, these are marked as insertions by the JSPP editors. Gee asserts that this proves that both men couldn’t have possibly been simultaneously recording Smith’s dictation or else both would have made the same insertions.
Here I want to provide two possible explanations for this first passage marked by the JSPP editors as an insertion. First, as LDS Footnotes points out, it is possible that Williams may have first heard the statement “I will refer you to the representation that is at the commencement of this record” as an aside from Smith that was not s part of the translation, and consequently left it out. Only after he realized his mistake did he go back and insert it above. Parrish however simply did not make this same mistake. Seems entirely plausible.
Alternatively, in my view, Williams realized he was running out of space in the current paragraph before the upcoming paragraph marked by the next Egyptian character. Dan Vogel describes that the scribes wrote the characters in the margins before writing the translation, and sometimes they misjudged the space they needed for the corresponding text. This appears to be one of those cases, and Williams realized this as he was taking dictation. To compensate, he wrote the last phrase in smaller script and crammed it in before the start of the next paragraph. That is, JSPP is simply in error by marking these words as an insertion; they are merely Williams trying to make due with the space he provided himself before the next paragraph. In encourage the reader to inspect both the Williams and Parrish manuscripts and form their own conclusions.
The passage marked as an insertion in Williams’s manuscript is also likely an error. It is very clearly just the continuation of the paragraph from the preceding page, and it is not clear at all why JSPP determined this was an insertion. Perhaps because it is slightly smaller script in the top margin, but that again can be explained by Williams having potentially misjudged how much space he needed before the paragraph indicated by the next character. In any case, Williams made similar use of the top margin on the first page of his manuscript, so it’s not exactly clear why JSPP concludes this is an insertion. On Gee’s part, however, he is happy to accept that it is an insertion because he wants to use it to assert that it disproves the simultaneous dictation theory, but he doesn’t want to elaborate on why. Without any elaboration, Gee simply claims: “The other addition, inserted into the upper margin of the manuscript in Williams’s hand, but included in the text, is harder to explain.” Perhaps he also recognizes that it is not an insertion, as indicated by his detailed discussion involving margin measurements explaining why Parrish’s corresponding section is not an insertion.
Observation 8: “He Didn’t Mean That”
Most telling of all is Gee’s dismissal of Parrish’s own statement that “I have set by [Joseph Smith’s] side and penned down the translation of the Egyptian Hieroglyphicks has he claimed to receive it by direct inspiration from Heaven.” This seems to be a pretty unambiguous statement that Parrish wrote the direct translation of the characters on the papyri straight from Joseph Smith’s lips. That is obviously a problem for Gee’s portrayal of Parrish’s manuscript as merely a copy of Williams’s work. Gee’s solution is to simply claim that Parrish didn’t mean what he very plainly said.