Defending the Indefensible?
An Academic Examination of Latter-day Saint Apologist Arguments
Concerning the Book of Abraham, the Kirtland Egyptian Papers,
and the Long Scroll Theory

 
A Critical Academic Analysis
 
Abstract
 
This paper undertakes a systematic critical examination of the principal apologetic arguments advanced by Latter-day Saint scholars—most prominently John Gee (BYU Egyptologist) and Kerry Milstein (BYU Egyptologist and ancient Near East specialist)—in defense of the Book of Abraham as an authentic ancient text. Drawing on the documentary record of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers (KEP), including the Egyptian Alphabet documents and the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL), as well as the three surviving Book of Abraham translation manuscripts,[1] this analysis evaluates specific claims made by apologists regarding (1) the authorship and purpose of the GAEL; (2) the so-called “long scroll” or “missing scroll” theory; (3) the reverse translation hypothesis; (4) the proposed chronology of the Book of Abraham’s dictation; and (5) the evidential status of ancient parallels cited in support of the text’s antiquity. The paper concludes that the apologetic framework advanced by Gee, Milstein, and their associates does not withstand sustained scholarly scrutiny and that the documents themselves, read on their own terms, point toward a nineteenth-century composition rather than an ancient Egyptian original.
 
I. Introduction: The Stakes of the Debate
 
Few topics in the study of Latter-day Saint origins generate as much scholarly heat as the Book of Abraham. First published in the Times and Seasons in March and May 1842, the text purports to be “a translation of some ancient records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt,” specifically described as “the writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand upon papyrus.” Joseph Smith acquired the Egyptian papyri and mummies in July 1835 from a traveling exhibitor named Michael Chandler, and within days announced that one of the scrolls contained the writings of the patriarch Abraham and another the writings of the biblical Joseph. For over a century the matter rested largely unresolved, since the papyri were assumed to have been destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The unexpected recovery of substantial fragments from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967 and their transfer to the LDS Church reignited the debate with enormous force.

The fragments returned to the Church in 1967 included significant portions of two Egyptian funerary texts: the Book of Breathings Made by Isis (belonging to a priest named Hôr) and the Book of the Dead (belonging to a woman named Ta-shérit-min). University of Chicago Egyptologist Klaus Baer, working in 1968, confirmed what Egyptologists had long suspected from the published facsimiles: these were entirely ordinary Ptolemaic-era mortuary texts, bearing no relationship to the text of the Book of Abraham as published.[2] The characters in the margins of the surviving translation manuscripts—documents written by scribes William W. Phelps, Warren Parrish, and Frederick G. Williams—were found to correspond sequentially to the first four lines of Joseph Smith Papyrus XI, the vignette-flanking columns of Joseph Smith Papyrus I, and related fragments. The gap between the Egyptian source and the English “translation” was stark and apparently unbridgeable by any conventional Egyptological standard.

Into this uncomfortable documentary situation stepped a generation of Latter-day Saint apologists, chief among them Hugh Nibley (Brigham Young University, d. 2005),[3] and subsequently John Gee and Kerry Milstein, both BYU-affiliated Egyptologists. Their collective task has been to explain away what critics regard as plain evidence of fabrication—that Joseph Smith had produced an elaborate pseudo-Egyptian text from materials whose actual content was already known. The apologists have deployed several interlocking strategies: (1) asserting that the papyrus Joseph Smith translated is not among the surviving fragments; (2) arguing that the GAEL was produced from Smith’s translation and not the reverse; (3) proposing that the entire Book of Abraham was composed in Kirtland in 1835, before the production of the GAEL; and (4) marshaling ancient non-biblical parallels to the Book of Abraham narrative to support its claim to antiquity. Each of these strategies will be addressed in turn.
One additional scholar deserves mention in passing: Brian Hauglid (BYU), whose 2010 work A Textual History of the Book of Abraham shaped much subsequent apologetic and critical discussion alike, though his later conclusions moved closer to a critical reading of the evidence.[4] The volume edited by John Gee and Brian Hauglid for the Joseph Smith Papers Project, alongside the standalone publications by Gee and Milstein, form the primary apologetic corpus under examination here.[5]
 
II. The Authorship of the GAEL and the Egyptian Alphabet Documents: Phelps vs. Smith
 
One of the most persistent strategies in the apologetic literature has been to distance Joseph Smith from authorship of the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL) and the associated Egyptian Alphabet documents. The GAEL is a bound volume written primarily in the handwriting of W. W. Phelps, with some entries by Warren Parrish. The three Egyptian Alphabet documents are in the handwritings of Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, and Phelps respectively. If these documents are understood as Joseph Smith’s genuine attempt to translate Egyptian characters—a project that manifestly failed by any standard of Egyptological assessment[6]—the apologetic position becomes severely compromised. Hence the motivation to reassign authorship.

John Gee has been among the most assertive in attributing the GAEL to Phelps rather than Smith. In his 2017 publication An Introduction to the Book of Abraham, Gee states that the document “represents W. W. Phelps’s speculations on Egyptian grammar in his handwriting.”[7] Gee has supported this attribution by noting that (1) the GAEL is predominantly in Phelps’s hand; (2) that the five-degree system is supposedly Phelps’s misunderstanding of a locating system for characters on the papyri; and (3) that the document was allegedly in Phelps’s personal archive. He also claimed, in a 2015 essay, that the transliteration system used in the GAEL reflects the orthographic practices introduced by Hebrew teacher Joshua Seixas beginning in January 1836—a dating that would place the GAEL’s composition after the known 1835 period of Kirtland translation work, and therefore after Smith had largely moved on from the papyri.[8]

Each of these supporting arguments is problematic. The handwriting attribution proves nothing about intellectual authorship: Phelps served repeatedly as Smith’s scribe and amanuensis. More critically, Smith’s own Egyptian Alphabet document contains entries and definitions not found in Phelps’s or Cowdery’s versions, including the five-degree expansion of the name “Abroam” in all five degrees—written in Cowdery’s hand at the end of Smith’s alphabet. This independent material is precisely what one would not expect if Smith were merely copying Phelps’s work, as Gee contends. Furthermore, the heading of Phelps’s Egyptian Alphabet explicitly states it was produced under Smith’s instruction.

Gee’s claim that the GAEL was in Phelps’s personal archive—rather than in institutional Church custody—has been examined by the editors of the Joseph Smith Papers, who observed that an 1846 inventory of records prepared before the exodus west lists documents matching the description of the Egyptian papers, suggesting continuous institutional custody rather than private ownership. Gee offers no documentary evidence to the contrary.[9]

The Seixas transliteration argument—that the GAEL must date to after January 1836 because it uses the Hebrew orthographic convention of terminal-h for long vowels—was subjected to scrutiny by Ronald V. Huggins, formerly a professor at Salt Lake Theological Seminary. Huggins reviewed Seixas’s 1834 Hebrew grammar[10] and found no evidence that Seixas introduced such a rule systematically. Huggins’s assessment was direct: “Seixas’s system of transliteration does not introduce the innovation Gee attributes to him.” If the very linguistic datum on which Gee’s dating argument rests is nonexistent, the entire chronological argument collapses. Gee’s effort to reassign authorship of the GAEL to Phelps and to post-date its composition rests on demonstrably weak foundations.

The question of authorship is, moreover, partly settled by Joseph Smith’s own official history. The entry for the latter part of July 1835, written by Willard Richards in September 1843 with the likely assistance of W. W. Phelps himself, reads: “the remainder of this month I was continually engaged in translating an alphabet to the Book of Abraham and arranging a grammar of the Egyptian language as practiced by the ancients.” That Phelps—who helped write this very entry—assigned authorship to Smith rather than to himself is a significant datum that Gee’s framework cannot accommodate.

Warren Parrish’s handwriting appears at the end of the GAEL’s definitions for Kolob and the adjacent characters. Parrish was not hired as Smith’s scribe until October 29, 1835. His presence in the GAEL indicates that the document was still being produced in late October or early November 1835—consistent with the 1835 timeline established in Smith’s history and inconsistent with Gee’s post-1836 dating.[11]
 
III. The Reverse Translation Hypothesis: Phelps’s Alleged Reverse Engineering
 
The “reverse translation” hypothesis—first fully articulated by Hugh Nibley in 1975[12]—holds that the Egyptian Alphabet and GAEL were not genuine attempts to translate Egyptian characters but rather post-hoc efforts by Smith’s associates to systematize or “reverse engineer” his already-completed translation of the Book of Abraham into an artificial grammar. In Nibley’s formulation, Phelps and others, perhaps competitive with Smith’s superior knowledge, tried to match the finished Book of Abraham text back to characters on the papyri but “never got beyond the second line of characters.” Nibley was frank that this was speculative: “Of course, there is not a shred of evidence that such an event took place.”[13] Yet the hypothesis was adopted and elaborated by subsequent apologists including Gee and Milstein.

Gee’s version of the theory, articulated in his 2000 A Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri, suggests that “the Kirtland Egyptian papers… appear to be a later attempt to match up the translation of the Book of Abraham with some of the Egyptian characters.”[14] In his 2017 Introduction, Gee frames this in terms of scholarly precedent: “A decipherer comes up with a translation first, recording insights along the way; later scholars systematize them into a grammar book.”[15] Kerry Milstein has similarly espoused the reverse translation position, arguing in his FAIR presentations that the GAEL was produced from the Book of Abraham rather than the other way around.[16]

Milstein, in his 2020 FAIR presentation titled “Egyptian Papers and the Translation of the Book of Abraham,”[17] subjected the reverse-translation hypothesis to what he presented as an empirical test—comparing characters in the GAEL with those in the margins of the Book of Abraham manuscripts. His own statistical summary was revealing: approximately 96–98 percent of the characters did not match between the two sets of documents, whether by character form or textual content. Of the rare instances where textual parallels could be identified, the characters themselves did not correspond. Milstein concluded that this shows the GAEL was not used to translate the Book of Abraham in any conventional sense—which is, of course, uncontested. Yet he failed to appreciate that his analysis also destroys the reverse-translation theory. If the scribes were “reverse engineering” the Book of Abraham text into the GAEL, one would expect far greater character-to-content correspondence than 2–4 percent.

The internal content of the Egyptian Alphabet and GAEL also argues powerfully against the reverse-translation hypothesis. The first section of the alphabets (Part 1 of the first degree) deals with Princess Katumin, the royal lineage of Kitumin, and the founding of Egypt by a woman who discovered the land while it was still underwater—subjects that have no direct counterpart in any published verse of the Book of Abraham. The second section incorporates the “pure language,” Adamic terminology that predates the arrival of the papyri by at least two months (as established by Phelps’s letter to his wife of May 26, 1835). Characters 4 through 9 in Part 2 are identical to characters in the pure language specimen—a document predating the Egyptian acquisition. These can hardly be products of reverse engineering a text that did not yet exist.[18]

The apologetic reverse-translation thesis also encounters a fatal chronological problem. The surviving translation manuscripts demonstrate, through shared scribal errors and simultaneous emendations, that Frederick G. Williams and Warren Parrish wrote simultaneously from Joseph Smith’s dictation—rather than either scribe copying from the other or from a previously existing document.[19] The same emendation (the cancellation of “unto” and replacement with “unto” in a different position) appears in both the Williams and Parrish documents in a form that could only arise from simultaneous oral dictation. The same is true of the correction from “their hearts are turned” to “they have turned their hearts”—Parrish stopped mid-word before the correction was issued, a phenomenon inexplicable in a copying scenario but entirely consistent with live dictation. Parrish was not engaged as Smith’s scribe until October 29, 1835. The Williams-Parrish documents therefore date to after that date, meaning they constitute the original dictated record—not copies of a missing earlier text—and they postdate the alphabets and GAEL by several months.

The logical conclusion is the reverse of what Gee and Milstein propose: the GAEL was produced first, in July through October 1835, and the dictation of the bulk of the Book of Abraham text followed, in November 1835. Gee and Milstein’s reverse-translation hypothesis is not only unsupported by evidence; it is directly contradicted by the documentary record.
 
IV. The Long Scroll Theory and the Missing Papyrus Argument
 
The most prominent single claim in contemporary Latter-day Saint apologetics regarding the Book of Abraham is the “long scroll theory”—the assertion that Joseph Smith’s source papyrus for the Book of Abraham is not among the fragments returned from the Metropolitan Museum in 1967, but rather was a much longer scroll that was destroyed in the Chicago Fire of 1871. This argument was developed at length by John Gee and Kerry Milstein, with Milstein providing what he presented as eyewitness testimony in a 2016 essay.[20][21]

The theory rests on two interlocking claims: (1) that the surviving Hôr papyrus fragments are far shorter than the original scroll must have been; and (2) that eyewitness accounts from visitors who saw the papyri before 1871 attest to a lengthy scroll containing the writings of Abraham—a scroll that is not among the surviving fragments. Gee has at various times estimated the original scroll at up to 41 feet in length, though experts such as Egyptologist Robert Ritner have estimated the typical length of a Book of Breathings scroll at approximately five feet, consistent with the quantity of surviving material.[22][23]

Gee cites the work of early nineteenth-century Egyptologist Gustavus Seyffarth,[24] who examined the St. Louis Museum’s Egyptian collection in 1856 (where the papyri were then on display) and described what he found. Gee has argued that Seyffarth’s description implies the existence of a second text on the scroll, following the Book of Breathings—the opening words of which Gee reconstructs as “beginning of the book of.” This reconstruction, however, has no documentary basis. Seyffarth described what he examined as “an invocation to the deity Osiris in which occurs the name of the person Horus and a picture of the attendant spirits introducing the dead to the judge Osiris”—a description that matches the Book of Breathings exactly and provides no indication of any subsequent text. The phrase “beginning of the book of” was never written by Seyffarth; it is Gee’s speculative reconstruction derived from comparing Seyffarth’s terminology with his translation of a different Book of Breathings document. This reconstruction has been sharply criticized by Egyptologists and dismissed as unsupported speculation.[25]
The eyewitness testimony marshaled by Milstein in support of the long scroll theory also fails under scrutiny.

The witnesses he cites—including W. W. Phelps’s letter of July 1835, Oliver Cowdery’s December 1835 article, Charlotte Haven’s 1843 letter, Henry Caswall, Charles Francis Adams, and others—do indeed mention “scrolls” and “rolls” of papyrus. But none of them makes the claim that the Book of Abraham’s source was specifically the intact end-portion of the Hôr scroll rather than the mounted fragments. Charlotte Haven’s account of Lucy Smith opening “a long roll of manuscript” referring to the writings of Abraham and Isaac written in Hebrew and Sanskrit is a description of demonstrable confusion about the papyri’s nature (they are neither Hebrew nor Sanskrit, and the identification of the other scroll with ancient Joseph is no longer defended). It does not establish that the Book of Abraham came from a scroll separate from the surviving fragments.

The most direct refutation of the long scroll theory comes from the translation manuscripts themselves. The characters in the margins of the three surviving translation documents—written by Phelps, Williams, and Parrish—can be traced sequentially to Joseph Smith Papyrus XI: the very fragment recovered from the Metropolitan Museum in 1967.[26] Cook and Smith’s 2010 analysis of the diminishing damage patterns along the top edge of the surviving Hôr scroll fragments estimated that the missing interior section was approximately 56 centimeters (about 22 inches) in length—consistent with a standard Book of Breathings scroll of roughly five feet total, not anything approaching 41 feet.[27] No credible Egyptological analysis supports Gee’s estimated scroll length.

Gee and Milstein have constructed an interpretive framework in which the crucial evidence—a massive, lost scroll containing the Book of Abraham—conveniently cannot be examined. This approach is methodologically problematic. The hypothesis is structured so as to be unfalsifiable: any absence of evidence for the scroll’s contents can be attributed to its having been destroyed. Simultaneously, any surviving evidence (the mounted fragments, the translation manuscripts, the sequential character-copying) can be attributed to a “different” papyrus. This is precisely the kind of ad hoc reasoning that is incompatible with rigorous scholarly inquiry. As Ritner observed in his critical assessment, the identification of the Hôr papyrus as the source of the Book of Abraham is supported by the text itself—which twice refers the reader to “Facsimile No. 1” at the commencement of the record—and by the sequential character evidence.[28] The long scroll theory requires the invention of an unseen, unverifiable document to circumvent this evidence.
 
V. The Question of Chronology: When Was the Book of Abraham Translated?
 
Central to the apologists’ framework is the claim that Joseph Smith translated the entirety of the Book of Abraham—and possibly more—by the end of July 1835, prior to the creation of the GAEL. This chronological claim is essential because, if the GAEL predates the translation, the reverse-translation theory becomes untenable; but if the translation preceded the GAEL, then the apologists can argue the GAEL was derived from the translation rather than vice versa.
Gee has stated this position explicitly: “The current published text of the Book of Abraham and probably more seems to have been translated by the end of July 1835.”[29] Kerry Milstein and Megan Hansen, in their 2016 article on the chronology of the Book of Abraham, similarly assert that “it seems likely Joseph Smith translated all the texts of the Book of Abraham we now have and perhaps even more by 1835,” though they acknowledge the theory is “problematic” and “simultaneously incomplete.” BYU professor Brian Hauglid, in his earlier 2010 Textual History of the Book of Abraham, treated the possibility of a 1835 completion as plausible, though his later views moved toward revision.[30]

The primary evidence offered for an early 1835 translation of the full text includes: (1) the use of “Shinehah” as a code name in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, which appears in Abraham 3:13; (2) Wilford Woodruff’s references to “Kolob” in 1837 and 1838; (3) Joseph Smith’s references to Abraham’s “writings upon the planetary system” in a May 1838 journal entry; and (4) similarities between conceptual material in the GAEL and the text of Abraham chapters 3–5.[31]

Each of these evidential pillars is weaker than it appears. The name “Shinehah” almost certainly predates the papyri entirely: the code names in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants were being inserted into revelations during the spring of 1835, before the Chandler papyri arrived in Kirtland in July of that year. “Shinehah” also appears in an 1838 revelation as an Adamic name for a plain near the Valley of Adam-Ondi-Ahman—a connection that predates any Abraham chapter 3 context. The borrowing in 1842 of “Shinehah” from the Adamic lexicon for use in Abraham 3:13 is more parsimonious than the reverse. Woodruff’s 1837–1838 references to Kolob can be fully accounted for by the GAEL’s definition of Kolob in Warren Parrish’s handwriting—written in late October or November 1835, well before those references. The 1838 journal entry about Abraham’s astronomical writings is best understood as referring to the GAEL’s astronomical system, not to a completed chapter 3 of the Book of Abraham.

The presence of Hebrew vocabulary and syntax in Abraham chapters 3–5 provides the strongest case against a 1835 translation date. Joseph Smith’s Hebrew lessons with Joshua Seixas began in January 1836.[32] Matthew Gray (BYU), in a 2020 essay, demonstrated that Smith’s use of Hebrew in the Book of Abraham reflects the specific transliteration conventions[33] and lexical entries of Seixas’s textbook and the Hebrew-English lexicons available to Smith in 1836—particularly entries in Gesenius’s lexicon translated by Josiah W. Gibbs. Terms such as “no-el-mah” (for eternity), “Kokob” (star), “Kokaubeam” (stars), “Rauvkeeyang” (expanse/firmament), and the use of plural “Gods” (Elohim) throughout chapters 4–5 all reflect Hebrew study. The wholesale replacement of the King James “without form and void” with “empty and desolate” matches precisely Seixas’s translation of the Hebrew term on page 78 of his grammar.[34] Milstein and Hansen attempt to explain these Hebrew elements as “glosses” added in 1842 to a pre-existing 1835 text, but this explanation is methodologically incoherent: the Hebrew influences are not superficial additions but are structurally interwoven into the text’s narrative and theological substance.[35]

The journal entry for March 8, 1842, is unambiguous: “Commenced translating from the Book of Abraham for the 10th number of the Times and Seasons.” The “10th number” was the March 15, 1842 issue, which published Abraham chapter 2:19 through chapter 5:21—precisely the material that Gee and Milstein want to attribute to 1835. The journal says Smith commenced translating for that issue on March 8. Milstein’s attempt to reinterpret “translating” as “editing a pre-existing translation” is an example of the special pleading that characterizes much of the apologetic literature on this question.[36]
 
VI. Ancient Parallels and the “Traditions About the Early Life of Abraham” Argument
 
In 2001, BYU’s Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) published a 553-page compilation titled Traditions About the Early Life of Abraham, edited by John Tvedtnes, Brian Hauglid, and John Gee.[37] This volume assembled Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sources—many of them late, ranging from the first through fourteenth centuries CE—that share thematic overlap with the Book of Abraham’s narrative. The editorial thesis, as stated in the volume’s introduction, is that “because the Book of Abraham parallels so many non-biblical stories about Abraham, it is clearly of the same tradition,” and that “the majority of these non-biblical traditions were not available to the Prophet Joseph Smith during his lifetime.”[38]

This argument has been deployed repeatedly in popular apologetic contexts by Gee, Milstein, and others, and it merits careful examination both on its own terms and in terms of its methodological assumptions. Several categories of claimed parallels deserve attention.
The most frequently cited parallel is the claim that Abraham was nearly sacrificed by an Egyptian or Chaldean priest—a narrative central to Abraham chapter 1. Apologists cite dozens of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sources in which Abraham is thrown into a furnace by Nimrod for refusing to worship idols. Kerry Milstein has argued that this parallel, alongside the iconography of Facsimile 1, establishes the antiquity of the Book of Abraham’s sacrificial narrative.[39]

Several serious problems undermine this argument. First, the apologists’ sources largely describe Abraham being thrown into a fire by Nimrod—not stabbed on an altar by Egyptian priests. These are fundamentally different narratives. Milstein himself acknowledged, in a 2011 essay, that the non-canonical tradition “held that Abraham was to be burned while the Book of Abraham spoke of an altar”—and then attempted to synthesize these by suggesting that Egyptian sacrificial victims were typically stabbed and then burned. But none of the non-canonical sources has Abraham stabbed before being thrown into fire. Second, many of these sources were available in Joseph Smith’s cultural milieu. Adam Clarke’s well-known Bible Commentary, which circulated widely in early nineteenth-century America, explicitly mentions the tradition of Abraham being thrown into a furnace by idolatrous Chaldeans. A 1760 English dictionary entry under “Abraham” recounts the same legend. Matthew Henry’s commentary references it as well. The FARMS claim that “the majority of these non-biblical traditions were not available to the Prophet Joseph Smith during his lifetime” is simply false for the sacrificial narrative.[40]

The parallel regarding Abraham’s father Terah as an idol-worshiper, advanced by the apologists as a “unique element” supporting the Book of Abraham’s antiquity, is equally readily explained by reference to sources in Joseph Smith’s environment. Joshua 24:2 directly states that Terah “served other gods.” Adam Clarke’s commentary on Genesis notes the probability that Abraham himself was initially an idolater before his divine call. The anti-Masonic Convention proceedings of 1829, published in Massachusetts, directly discuss Nahor, Terah, and possibly Sarug as idolaters. This tradition was not obscure.

Regarding the place name “Olishem,” cited by Milstein as a remarkable confirmation of the Book of Abraham’s historical authenticity—Milstein stated that “the chances that Joseph Smith would make up a fictional outlandish place that turned out to be accurate in name, time, and location are too astronomical even to be considered”—the assessment of specialists is far more restrained. Christopher Woods (University of Chicago), a specialist in ancient Near Eastern languages, observed in 2011[41] that any convincing identification would require “much more substantial evidence” than phonetic similarity, and that “everything we know about the region during the period in question… speaks strongly against it.” The apologists’ own 2022 Guide to the Book of Abraham concedes that Olishem remains a “plausible and promising, though not yet definitive” identification.[42] Milstein’s unqualified declaration of a “hit” far outstrips the actual evidential situation.

The broader methodological problem with the ancient parallels argument is what critics have called “cherry-picking”: selecting thematic similarities while ignoring thematic divergences, and establishing no standard for what level of overlap would actually confirm dependence on a common tradition versus coincidental similarity. Cuneiform sources attest thousands of ancient place names; any text will share some phonetic resemblance with some of them. The apologetic tradition has not established a falsifiability criterion: what evidence, in principle, would lead the apologists to conclude that the parallels are not evidence of antiquity? Without such a criterion, the parallels argument is not a scholarly argument but a rhetorical one.
 
VII. The Cosmological Framework and the GAEL’s Astronomical System
 
One arena where the apologetic argument has been particularly creative is in the Book of Abraham’s cosmological system—its depiction of a hierarchy of stars and planets organized around the governing star Kolob, nearest to the throne of God. Gee, Milstein, and William Hamblin (in a 2005 essay co-authored with Daniel Peterson) have argued that this cosmological framework reflects an ancient geocentric worldview rather than Joseph Smith’s nineteenth-century heliocentric context, thereby supporting the text’s antiquity.[43][44]
The cosmological system of the Book of Abraham did not spring into being fully formed in 1842.

The GAEL contains elaborate astronomical definitions written in late October–November 1835 (in Warren Parrish’s hand for the Kolob entry), describing a hierarchy of fifteen “fixed stars,” three “grand central” governing stars, and fifteen “moving planets” organized in a manner closely parallel to the organizational structure of Smith’s church hierarchy—including three presiding authorities governing twelve high councilors. The GAEL’s astronomical system closely mirrors the cosmological speculations of nineteenth-century natural theologians, particularly Thomas Dick (A Philosophy of a Future State, first published in Philadelphia in 1825), whose discussions of inhabited planets, a grand central body at the throne of God, and systems of systems moving around a common center were explicitly familiar to early Latter-day Saints. Oliver Cowdery quoted extensively from Dick’s book in the Messenger and Advocate in December 1836.[45]

Gee, Hamblin, and Peterson’s attempt to read the Book of Abraham cosmology as geocentric has been sharply criticized even within the LDS scholarly community. The text describes the Sun (“Floss-Isis”) as a “central moving planet”—both central and moving—a formulation that fits precisely with Dick’s model of the solar system revolving around a grander central body near God’s throne, but that does not fit any standard geocentric model. The description of the earth’s “annual revolutions” in the GAEL explicitly precludes a stationary-earth geocentric model. Gee’s response—that the higher celestial bodies revolve around the earth in successively larger orbits—is not stated in the text and is imposed on it. The astronomical framework of the Book of Abraham, read carefully alongside the GAEL, is best understood as a nineteenth-century synthesis of natural theology and religious cosmology, not as the recovery of a genuine ancient astronomical tradition.[46][47]
 
VIII. Methodological Critiques of the Apologetic Program
 
Beyond the specific arguments examined above, the apologetic literature surrounding the Book of Abraham exhibits several recurring methodological problems that merit explicit identification.
The first is the systematic invention of missing documents. The long scroll theory posits a large, lost papyrus.[48] Gee’s argument for an 1835 composition of the entire Book of Abraham posits a now-missing original dictation manuscript from which the surviving Williams and Parrish documents are supposed to be copies.[49] Milstein posits that Abraham chapters 3–5 may be a re-translated or revised version of an 1835 original.[50] Each missing document is structurally positioned so as to be immune from examination. The proliferation of such hypothetical documents is a methodological red flag: it suggests a framework organized around the need to protect a conclusion rather than around the evidence.

The second is confirmation bias in the handling of eyewitness testimony. The eyewitness accounts of individuals who viewed the papyri before their destruction in Chicago are selectively quoted to support the long scroll theory, while the accounts of those same witnesses that imply the mounted fragments contained the Book of Abraham are explained away. The 1840 account of an anonymous visitor who reported that Smith “pointed to a particular character” on the mounted fragments as “the signature of the patriarch Abraham” is directly contrary to the long scroll theory, yet receives no sustained treatment in the apologetic literature. Charlotte Haven’s description of a “long roll” is cited as evidence for the scroll theory, while her evident confusion about the papyri’s language (she described it as Hebrew and Sanskrit) is not taken as evidence that her testimony should be treated cautiously.

The third is the inconsistent deployment of methodological principles. Gee, in particular, has been observed to apply different evidential standards when the evidence cuts against his preferred conclusions. He relies on Joseph Smith’s official history to establish the July 1835 date for the beginning of translation, but ignores the same history when it attributes the GAEL to Smith rather than Phelps. He argues that Warren Parrish’s description of “translating” the Egyptian records cannot refer to the GAEL because Parrish said nothing about a grammar—yet is willing to treat the same journal entry as evidence for his preferred interpretation when convenient. Brian Hauglid, in his later career, publicly described this pattern as deeply troubling and acknowledged that his earlier work had been too influenced by apologetic assumptions.[51]

The fourth is the employment of the genetic fallacy in reverse. Gee and Milstein frequently argue that critics who doubt the Book of Abraham are operating from a “secularist” or “anti-Mormon” bias, and that this bias invalidates their conclusions. In his 2020 FAIR presentation, Milstein stated that people make “a religious choice” to believe or disbelieve in Joseph Smith’s translation ability, and that secularists are not more “objective” than believers.[52] This is a legitimate epistemological point in principle, but it is deployed selectively: the apologists do not apply the same critique to their own apologetic motivation, which is at least as clearly driven by prior commitment as the critical position. Identifying the source of a conclusion does not address whether the conclusion is supported by evidence.

The fifth is the routine dismissal of Egyptological expertise when its conclusions are inconvenient. The apologists invoke their own Egyptological credentials extensively, yet have characterized the assessments of outside Egyptologists—including Baer,[53] Ritner, and others—as biased or insufficiently attentive to apologetic considerations.[54][55] Robert Ritner (University of Chicago), one of the foremost Egyptologists of his generation, provided a detailed technical commentary on the Book of Abraham facsimiles in 2003 and 2014, concluding that “Smith had absolutely no abilities to read or translate Egyptian” and that the facsimile identifications are “indisputably wrong.”[56] The apologetic response has been to question Ritner’s motives and to suggest that Egyptological consensus is not authoritative in matters where revelation may be involved. This is not a scholarly response; it is an appeal to a domain of claims that by definition cannot be tested by evidence.
 
IX. The Facsimiles and Interpretive Failure
 
The three facsimiles published with the Book of Abraham—labeled Facsimiles 1, 2, and 3—represent Joseph Smith’s interpretations of Egyptian vignettes. These interpretations have been extensively analyzed by Egyptologists and represent one of the most concrete tests of Smith’s claimed translational ability, since the vignettes are accompanied by Egyptian text that can be read and compared with Smith’s explanations.[57]

Facsimile 1 depicts what Egyptologists universally identify as a scene from the Hôr Book of Breathings: the god Anubis (identified by his jackal head, remnants of which remain visible) attending to the body of the deceased priest Hôr, who is recumbent on a lion-headed embalming couch.[58] Beneath the couch are four canopic jars with the lids of the four sons of Horus. A human-headed bird (the Ba, or soul) perches nearby. Smith identified the figure on the couch as Abraham, the attendant as a priest of Pharaoh attempting human sacrifice, and the canopic jars as “the idolatrous gods of Elkenah, Libnah, Mahmackrah, Korash, and Pharaoh.” He identified the Ba-bird as “the angel of the Lord.”

Kerry Milstein has attempted to defend Smith’s reconstruction on multiple grounds.[59] His primary argument has been that facsimile 1 is anomalous within the tradition of such scenes—that the figure on the couch is neither mummified nor naked as Osiris typically appears, and that the figure’s two raised arms suggest a “defensive mode” indicating struggle, compatible with a sacrificial scene. Milstein also argued, in a widely-cited apologetic claim, that a papyrus had been discovered depicting a figure on a lion couch “labeled as Abraham” by the Egyptians—an argument he subsequently retracted, acknowledging he had “misstated” that the text identified the figure as Abraham. Robert Ritner’s 2014 analysis clarified that the text in question is a love compulsion spell in which Abraham’s name appears in a string of magical names, with no intent to associate Abraham with the lion couch scene.[60][61]

Facsimile 3 is perhaps the most decisive test case. The hypocephalus vignette depicts a throne scene identified by Egyptologists as depicting Osiris in his divine role as judge of the dead, with various divine figures in attendance. Egyptian texts on the facsimile itself identify the figures. The second figure from the right is identified by the Egyptian text above his hand as “the Osiris Hor, justified forever”—not, as Smith stated, as “Shulem, one of the king’s principal waiters.” Ritner stated flatly that this evidence alone “provides indisputable evidence that Smith had absolutely no abilities to read or translate Egyptian.”[62] The apologetic responses to this identification—suggesting that Egyptian “labels” do not function as straightforward identifiers, or that Smith’s identification might reflect a separate tradtion—have been generally considered inadequate even within Egyptological circles sympathetic to the LDS tradition.[63]
 
X. Conclusion
The apologetic program surrounding the Book of Abraham, as advanced primarily by John Gee and Kerry Milstein, represents a sustained, creative, and substantially motivated response to a body of documentary and Egyptological evidence that poses genuine challenges to the text’s claimed ancient origin. The scholars involved bring genuine expertise in Egyptology to their work, and some of their contributions—particularly in cataloguing ancient sources[64] and analyzing the manuscript tradition of the text—have value independent of their apologetic conclusions.[65]

Nevertheless, the specific arguments examined in this paper are largely unsuccessful on scholarly terms. The attribution of the GAEL to Phelps rather than Smith lacks documentary support and contradicts the most authoritative contemporary account.[66] The reverse translation hypothesis—that the Egyptian Alphabet and GAEL were produced by scribes attempting to systematize Smith’s completed translation—is contradicted by the internal content of those documents, which is largely not about Abraham,[67] and by Milstein’s own statistical analysis, which found 96–98 percent non-correspondence between the characters and content of the GAEL and the translation manuscripts.[68] The long scroll theory rests on a speculative reconstruction of Seyffarth’s description, a mishandling of eyewitness testimony, and an estimation of scroll length that contradicts the analysis of independent researchers.[69]

The chronological claim that the entire Book of Abraham was composed by July 1835 is incompatible with the Hebrew lexical evidence in chapters 3–5,[70] with the simultaneous-dictation evidence from the Williams and Parrish manuscripts,[71] and with the plain statement of Smith’s 1842 journal. The ancient parallels argument, while providing material for future research into the intellectual environment of early Mormonism, fails to establish that the traditions cited were unavailable to Smith’s contemporaries, and fails to establish any methodological standard by which the parallels could count as disconfirming evidence.[72]

What the evidence does support, when read without the burden of prior commitment to the text’s authenticity, is a picture of Joseph Smith engaging in an elaborate creative project with the Egyptian papyri: developing characters, names, and definitions through the Egyptian Alphabet and GAEL documents in July through October 1835, drawing on the Katumin papyrus, the Adamic “pure language” tradition, the columns of the Hôr papyrus, Josephus, Adam Clarke’s Bible commentary, the natural theology of Thomas Dick, and his own developing theological concerns about the patriarchal priesthood—and then dictating the Book of Abraham narrative in November 1835 and March 1842. The characters in the translation documents’ margins were copied sequentially from Joseph Smith Papyrus XI, with invented characters inserted where the papyrus was damaged, to create the appearance of a translational relationship between Egyptian source and English text.[73][74]

This is not a comfortable conclusion for members of the Latter-day Saint tradition for whom the Book of Abraham is canonical scripture. But scholarly integrity requires that we follow the evidence where it leads, even when it leads to discomforting destinations. The apologetic framework examined here has not succeeded in leading the evidence elsewhere. The arguments of Gee and Milstein, taken on their merits, fail to provide a persuasive alternative to the critical account—and in several instances, the apologists’ own analyses inadvertently provide additional support for the conclusion they seek to rebut. Future scholarship on the Book of Abraham would be better served by engaging directly with the documents as they are, rather than through the distorting lens of a predetermined apologetic outcome.
 
References and Select Bibliography
 
Baer, Klaus. “The Breathing Permit of Hôr: A Translation of the Apparent Source of the Book of Abraham.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3, no. 3 (1968): 109–134.

Cook, Andrew W. and Christopher C. Smith. “The Original Length of the Scroll of Hôr.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 43, no. 4 (2010): 1–44.

Gee, John. A Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri. Provo, UT: FARMS, 2000.

Gee, John. An Introduction to the Book of Abraham. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and Religious Studies Center, BYU, 2017.

Gray, Matthew J. “Approaching Egyptian Papyri Language: Joseph Smith’s Use of Hebrew in His Translation of the Book of Abraham.” In Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity, edited by Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020.

Hauglid, Brian M. A Textual History of the Book of Abraham: Manuscripts and Editions. Studies in the Book of Abraham, vol. 5. Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2010.

Jensen, Robin Scott and Brian M. Hauglid, eds. Revelations and Translations, Volume 4: Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts. Joseph Smith Papers. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2018.

Milstein, Kerry. “Violence in the Service of Order: The Religious Framework for Sanctioned Killing in Ancient Egypt.” PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2003.

Milstein, Kerry. “Egyptian Papers and the Translation of the Book of Abraham: What Careful Application of the Evidence Can and Cannot Tell Us.” Presentation at the FAIR Mormon Conference, 2020.

Nibley, Hugh. “The Meaning of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers.” BYU Studies 11, no. 4 (1971): 350–399.

Nibley, Hugh. The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1975.

Ritner, Robert K. “The ‘Breathing Permit of Hôr’ Thirty-Four Years Later.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 33, no. 4 (2000): 97–119.

Ritner, Robert K. The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011.

Seixas, Joshua. A Manual Hebrew and English Lexicon. Andover, MA: Codman Press, 1834.

Smoot, Steven O., John Gee, Kerry Milstein, and John S. Thompson, eds. A Guide to the Book of Abraham. Provo: Religious Studies Center, BYU, 2022.

Thompson, Stephen E. “Egyptology and the Book of Abraham.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 28, no. 1 (1995): 143–160.

Tvedtnes, John A., Brian M. Hauglid, and John Gee, eds. Traditions About the Early Life of Abraham. Provo, UT: FARMS, 2001.

Woods, Christopher. “Examining the Book of Abraham.” Proceedings of the Oriental Institute Seminar, 2011.


[1] Jensen, Robin Scott and Brian M. Hauglid, eds. Revelations and Translations, Volume 4: Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts. Joseph Smith Papers. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2018.
[2] Baer, Klaus. “The Breathing Permit of Hôr: A Translation of the Apparent Source of the Book of Abraham.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3, no. 3 (1968): 109–134.
[3] Nibley, Hugh. “The Meaning of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers.” BYU Studies 11, no. 4 (1971): 350–399.
[4] Hauglid, Brian M. A Textual History of the Book of Abraham: Manuscripts and Editions. Studies in the Book of Abraham, vol. 5. Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2010.
[5] Jensen, Robin Scott and Brian M. Hauglid, eds. Revelations and Translations, Volume 4: Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts. Joseph Smith Papers. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2018.
[6] Thompson, Stephen E. “Egyptology and the Book of Abraham.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 28, no. 1 (1995): 143–160.
[7] Gee, John. An Introduction to the Book of Abraham. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and Religious Studies Center, BYU, 2017.
[8] Seixas, Joshua. A Manual Hebrew and English Lexicon. Andover, MA: Codman Press, 1834.
[9] Jensen, Robin Scott and Brian M. Hauglid, eds. Revelations and Translations, Volume 4: Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts. Joseph Smith Papers. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2018.
[10] Seixas, Joshua. A Manual Hebrew and English Lexicon. Andover, MA: Codman Press, 1834.
[11] Hauglid, Brian M. A Textual History of the Book of Abraham: Manuscripts and Editions. Studies in the Book of Abraham, vol. 5. Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2010.
[12] Nibley, Hugh. The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1975.
[13] Nibley, Hugh. The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1975.
[14] Gee, John. A Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri. Provo, UT: FARMS, 2000.
[15] Gee, John. An Introduction to the Book of Abraham. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and Religious Studies Center, BYU, 2017.
[16] Milstein, Kerry. “Egyptian Papers and the Translation of the Book of Abraham: What Careful Application of the Evidence Can and Cannot Tell Us.” Presentation at the FAIR Mormon Conference, 2020.
[17] Milstein, Kerry. “Egyptian Papers and the Translation of the Book of Abraham: What Careful Application of the Evidence Can and Cannot Tell Us.” Presentation at the FAIR Mormon Conference, 2020.
[18] Nibley, Hugh. “The Meaning of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers.” BYU Studies 11, no. 4 (1971): 350–399.
[19] Hauglid, Brian M. A Textual History of the Book of Abraham: Manuscripts and Editions. Studies in the Book of Abraham, vol. 5. Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2010.
[20] Gee, John. A Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri. Provo, UT: FARMS, 2000.
[21] Milstein, Kerry. “Egyptian Papers and the Translation of the Book of Abraham: What Careful Application of the Evidence Can and Cannot Tell Us.” Presentation at the FAIR Mormon Conference, 2020.
[22] Ritner, Robert K. “The ‘Breathing Permit of Hôr’ Thirty-Four Years Later.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 33, no. 4 (2000): 97–119.
[23] Ritner, Robert K. The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011.
[24] Gee, John. A Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri. Provo, UT: FARMS, 2000.
[25] Ritner, Robert K. “The ‘Breathing Permit of Hôr’ Thirty-Four Years Later.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 33, no. 4 (2000): 97–119.
[26] Jensen, Robin Scott and Brian M. Hauglid, eds. Revelations and Translations, Volume 4: Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts. Joseph Smith Papers. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2018.
[27] Cook, Andrew W. and Christopher C. Smith. “The Original Length of the Scroll of Hôr.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 43, no. 4 (2010): 1–44.
[28] Ritner, Robert K. The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011.
[29] Gee, John. An Introduction to the Book of Abraham. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and Religious Studies Center, BYU, 2017.
[30] Hauglid, Brian M. A Textual History of the Book of Abraham: Manuscripts and Editions. Studies in the Book of Abraham, vol. 5. Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2010.
[31] Gee, John. A Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri. Provo, UT: FARMS, 2000.
[32] Seixas, Joshua. A Manual Hebrew and English Lexicon. Andover, MA: Codman Press, 1834.
[33] Gray, Matthew J. “Approaching Egyptian Papyri Language: Joseph Smith’s Use of Hebrew in His Translation of the Book of Abraham.” In Producing Ancient Scripture, edited by MacKay, Ashurst-McGee, and Hauglid. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020.
[34] Seixas, Joshua. A Manual Hebrew and English Lexicon. Andover, MA: Codman Press, 1834.
[35] Milstein, Kerry. “Egyptian Papers and the Translation of the Book of Abraham: What Careful Application of the Evidence Can and Cannot Tell Us.” Presentation at the FAIR Mormon Conference, 2020.
[36] Milstein, Kerry. “Egyptian Papers and the Translation of the Book of Abraham: What Careful Application of the Evidence Can and Cannot Tell Us.” Presentation at the FAIR Mormon Conference, 2020.
[37] Tvedtnes, John A., Brian M. Hauglid, and John Gee, eds. Traditions About the Early Life of Abraham. Provo, UT: FARMS, 2001.
[38] Tvedtnes, John A., Brian M. Hauglid, and John Gee, eds. Traditions About the Early Life of Abraham. Provo, UT: FARMS, 2001.
[39] Milstein, Kerry. “Violence in the Service of Order: The Religious Framework for Sanctioned Killing in Ancient Egypt.” PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2003.
[40] Tvedtnes, John A., Brian M. Hauglid, and John Gee, eds. Traditions About the Early Life of Abraham. Provo, UT: FARMS, 2001.
[41] Woods, Christopher. “Examining the Book of Abraham.” Proceedings of the Oriental Institute Seminar, 2011.
[42] Smoot, Steven O., John Gee, Kerry Milstein, and John S. Thompson, eds. A Guide to the Book of Abraham. Provo: Religious Studies Center, BYU, 2022.
[43] Gee, John. An Introduction to the Book of Abraham. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and Religious Studies Center, BYU, 2017.
[44] Gee, John. A Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri. Provo, UT: FARMS, 2000.
[45] Nibley, Hugh. “The Meaning of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers.” BYU Studies 11, no. 4 (1971): 350–399.
[46] Gee, John. An Introduction to the Book of Abraham. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and Religious Studies Center, BYU, 2017.
[47] Gee, John. A Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri. Provo, UT: FARMS, 2000.
[48] Gee, John. A Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri. Provo, UT: FARMS, 2000.
[49] Gee, John. An Introduction to the Book of Abraham. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and Religious Studies Center, BYU, 2017.
[50] Milstein, Kerry. “Egyptian Papers and the Translation of the Book of Abraham: What Careful Application of the Evidence Can and Cannot Tell Us.” Presentation at the FAIR Mormon Conference, 2020.
[51] Hauglid, Brian M. A Textual History of the Book of Abraham: Manuscripts and Editions. Studies in the Book of Abraham, vol. 5. Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2010.
[52] Milstein, Kerry. “Egyptian Papers and the Translation of the Book of Abraham: What Careful Application of the Evidence Can and Cannot Tell Us.” Presentation at the FAIR Mormon Conference, 2020.
[53] Baer, Klaus. “The Breathing Permit of Hôr: A Translation of the Apparent Source of the Book of Abraham.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3, no. 3 (1968): 109–134.
[54] Ritner, Robert K. “The ‘Breathing Permit of Hôr’ Thirty-Four Years Later.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 33, no. 4 (2000): 97–119.
[55] Ritner, Robert K. The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011.
[56] Ritner, Robert K. The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011.
[57] Ritner, Robert K. The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011.
[58] Baer, Klaus. “The Breathing Permit of Hôr: A Translation of the Apparent Source of the Book of Abraham.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 3, no. 3 (1968): 109–134.
[59] Milstein, Kerry. “Violence in the Service of Order: The Religious Framework for Sanctioned Killing in Ancient Egypt.” PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2003.
[60] Ritner, Robert K. “The ‘Breathing Permit of Hôr’ Thirty-Four Years Later.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 33, no. 4 (2000): 97–119.
[61] Ritner, Robert K. The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011.
[62] Ritner, Robert K. The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011.
[63] Thompson, Stephen E. “Egyptology and the Book of Abraham.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 28, no. 1 (1995): 143–160.
[64] Tvedtnes, John A., Brian M. Hauglid, and John Gee, eds. Traditions About the Early Life of Abraham. Provo, UT: FARMS, 2001.
[65] Hauglid, Brian M. A Textual History of the Book of Abraham: Manuscripts and Editions. Studies in the Book of Abraham, vol. 5. Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2010.
[66] Gee, John. An Introduction to the Book of Abraham. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and Religious Studies Center, BYU, 2017.
[67] Nibley, Hugh. The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1975.
[68] Milstein, Kerry. “Egyptian Papers and the Translation of the Book of Abraham: What Careful Application of the Evidence Can and Cannot Tell Us.” Presentation at the FAIR Mormon Conference, 2020.
[69] Cook, Andrew W. and Christopher C. Smith. “The Original Length of the Scroll of Hôr.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 43, no. 4 (2010): 1–44.
[70] Gray, Matthew J. “Approaching Egyptian Papyri Language: Joseph Smith’s Use of Hebrew in His Translation of the Book of Abraham.” In Producing Ancient Scripture, edited by MacKay, Ashurst-McGee, and Hauglid. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020.
[71] Hauglid, Brian M. A Textual History of the Book of Abraham: Manuscripts and Editions. Studies in the Book of Abraham, vol. 5. Provo, UT: Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2010.
[72] Tvedtnes, John A., Brian M. Hauglid, and John Gee, eds. Traditions About the Early Life of Abraham. Provo, UT: FARMS, 2001.
[73] Jensen, Robin Scott and Brian M. Hauglid, eds. Revelations and Translations, Volume 4: Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts. Joseph Smith Papers. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2018.
[74] Cook, Andrew W. and Christopher C. Smith. “The Original Length of the Scroll of Hôr.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 43, no. 4 (2010): 1–44.