Joseph Smith and the Book of Abraham Papyrus Roll in His Own Words

The guiding principle underlying all I write about the book of Abraham may be expressed as follows: 

Joseph Smith was a Prophet of God and he knew what he was doing. 

While he may not have fully grasped, at the moment, all the implications of the many revelations he received, as Elder Neal A. Maxwell suggested in his final public discourse, he surely understood his calling and the nature of prophecy and seership: "Though the grandness of this doctrine is beyond our comprehension, it is not beyond our attention and exploration. We are, in fact, in the position of having been given revelations that were then far beyond the Prophet Joseph Smith, bright as he was. Yet he was their enunciator and their declarer" ("Free to Choose," BYU devotional, 16 March 2004). And Joseph Smith was also the appointed keeper of the various sacred records that he both treasured and translated. How did he translate? In the words of associate W.W. Phelps: "He translated sacredly" (LDS Hymnal: "Now we sing with one accord")

It was for Joseph Smith, as it was with King Mosiah: "King Mosiah, had a gift from God, whereby he could interpret such engravings," as appeared on records "of ancient date," whether plates of ore, large stones, or papyrus rolls (Mosiah 21:28; Mosiah 8:11). And note how the "gift from God" precedes the instrumentality by which the gift is exercised; the "gift" is given, then "interpreters" provided "whereby he could interpret." For Brother Joseph, the gift to interpret ever remained, even when the instrumentality, or Urim and Thummim, "whereby he could interpret," varied from ancient interpreters to seer stones, then to the experienced seeric vision of spiritually endowed eyes. The gift also remained, whether he was to interpret engravings on plates of ore or hieratic on papyrus. Yet Latter-day Saints sometimes find it easier to exercise faith to see Brother Joseph visited by an angel and translating from plates hid from worldly eyes, rather than translating from papyri originating in "the catacombs of Egypt" and brought to him, as if by accident, by an ordinary man named Michael Chandler.

Yet documentary evidence abounds for the Prophet translating from a papyrus roll. Whether translation from papyri by the gift and power of God and an open flow of revelation combined to produce what we have of the book of Abraham is, naturally, an open question. As Hugh Nibley explains, the Prophet Joseph, in translating Scripture, would both translate and interpret ancient writings, while also allowing further revelation to cause his mind to "take flight" to skies of clarity and splendor (Hugh Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Abraham, 4). Like Abraham, Joseph Smith sought not only to be one "who possessed great knowledge" but "to possess a greater knowledge" (Abraham 1:1). We here recall the telling words of Elder Bruce R. McConkie who yearned for yet more knowledge about "the dispensation of the gospel of Abraham": "Would that the Prophet had gone on his translation or revelation, as the case may be" ("The Doctrinal Restoration," in The Joseph Smith Translation: The Restoration of Plain and Precious Truths, ed. M.S. Nyman, R.L. Millet, 1985, 1-22).

We speak of Lehi's dream of the Tree of Life, but he also calls it a vision. Interpretation, translation, insight, dream, or vision--all belong to seers and revelators. Scripture works to the salvation of the human family, which calls for nothing less than all the divine communication the Prophet is capable of receiving. We need not question, in any degree, the work of a seer because he is the one who has been set apart or consecrated to be the Gazelem, or spiritual interpreter, of this generation. Gazelem derives from Semitic g-z-r = Egyptian Dj-z-r, "set apart," "make sacred or consecrate," with -m as mimation, and occurs as a personal name in both Levantine and Egyptian sources.

Still, clear evidence that the Prophet Joseph interpreted from a papyrus roll comes from his own official record.

We would do well to start with the Prophet's final public discourse, his ultimate and far-reaching public testimony, delivered just eleven days before his martyrdom. On Sunday, June 16, 1844, Joseph Smith taught powerful doctrine about the nature of God and of eternal advancement from intelligence to intelligence. He took a portion of his text from Abraham Chapter 3, published two years earlier, and told his hearers that he had learned this powerful doctrine "while translating," which is a marvel. The act of translating papyri, by the gift of God, led to the receipt of revelation about the nature of God, one medium of gift and light flowing into the other! We recall the Lord's invitation to Oliver Cowdery a year before the publication of the Book of Mormon itself: "Ask that you may know the mysteries of God, and that you may translate and receive knowledge from all those ancient records which have been hid up, that are sacred" (Doctrine and Covenants 8:11). "Translate and receive knowledge": so runs the Divine invitation. The verse thus also succinctly describes Joseph Smith's learning the mysteries of God by translating a papyri, a "sacred record" once "hid up," and now "in [his] house." How did it all happen: Chandler and papyri and Abraham? Brother Joseph must have been asking in faith for more "ancient records" to come forth in his day. Such faith drew Abraham's record to Kirtland--and to a Prophet's home.

"I learned it by translating the papyrus now in my house." What a definitive statement! And it is very important to note the name of the Prophet's personal secretary who took down his last sermon: it was the gifted Englishman Thomas Bullock, the most accurate secretary the Prophet ever had.

As Joseph Smith delivered his powerful sermon, did he know what he was saying? did he know what he had been doing? or was the latter-day Gazelem, one who brings hidden things from darkness into light, himself in the dark? Some students now say that Joseph Smith only thought he was translating from papyrus, that in his ordinariness and weakness he might not always have been able to distinguish between an act of translation from a document and a revelation prompted because of a document. (Of course, seeric translation is revelatory at essence--and Orson Pratt insisted on combining these words to describe how seers translate.) These students insist that Latter-day Saints must today fashion new narratives about the book of Abraham because the old ones have failed, failed, they say, because Joseph Smith could not have divinely translated from an Egyptian papyrus, and this despite his work with the Egyptian engravings on the gold plates. 

Yet would anyone say the same of King Mosiah and the large stone "filled with engravings" brought to him for interpretation, itself a sort of historical accident reminiscent of Chandler's papyri? Did Mosiah translate the stone by the "gift and power of God" or was the stone only a heavy prompt? Amaleki says "he did interpret the engravings by the gift and power of God," but what did Amaleki know? Or, would Ammon perchance have suggested to King Limhi that while Mosiah's grandson, now king himself, could interpret languages, that even so, owing to weakness and simplicity, he might not know exactly what was going on when he translated, even with the engravings in front of him? Did "direct" revelation, then, though unrecognized as such by the weak king, hold him steady as he faltered in his noble and seeric but doomed efforts to interpret?

Consider the pattern the Books of Omni and Mosiah, and Doctrine and Covenants Section 9, give us for seeric translation. 

Amaleki knew; Mosiah knew; Benjamin knew; the second King Mosiah knew; Aminadi knew: Joseph knew. These were all seers of God and they knew what they were doing. The question is not one of frailty and weakness in a prophet or king or seer, but whether each and every one was a moron. So let's not ask questions about Joseph Smith, that we couldn't also in good faith ask of Aminadi, Gazelem, or of either Mosiah. "Limhi was again filled with joy on learning from the mouth of Ammon that king Mosiah had a gift from God, whereby he could interpret such engravings; yea, and Ammon also did rejoice" (Mosiah 21:28).

What is our response?

Do we rejoice? Or do we, at times, let our reasoning "interrupt [our] rejoicings?"

Oliver, in the revelation received through Joseph, was further invited to "ask in faith, with an honest heart, believing that you shall receive a knowledge concerning the engravings of old records, which are ancient, which contain those parts of my scripture of which has been spoken" (8:2). This special promise somehow seems to embrace all the "old records," and the consequent code-cracking, which have emerged in Egypt, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Asia, and the Americas since 1829--and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon leads them all.

One record alone joins the Book of Mormon in the lead, as earnest of that which is yet to come, "the revelation" of "a translated version of the record [of portions of the last chapter of the Gospel of John] made on parchment by John and hidden up by himself" (Doctrine and Covenants 7). As Hugh Nibley noted in 1975, there seems to be no limit as to the manner in which the "old records" come to light: some are penned on parchment, others engraved on metal or stone, some are perceived and translated by vision, others with the old record preserved and present. "The engravings of old records, which are ancient," certainly has the ring of metal to it, but may also include such things as the records of Enoch and Noah recovered through the inspired translation of the Holy Bible.

Needless to say, the brethren, in light of this revelation, expected to recover more engraved plates in the fashion of the gold plates of Mormon, or the like, and that's why the papyri, once identified as purporting to be Abraham's writings, had to purchased and kept safe at home. Joseph Smith would not have raised $2400 to purchase papyri unless he had already read on one of the rolls that it purported to be "the writings of Abraham." Just because someone, somewhere, says that the Prophet subsequently only thought that he was translating from a specific roll of papyrus, when he was really receiving the book of Abraham by revelation, without need of papyri, doesn't make it so. Not to fuss--evidence will point the way.

On Sunday, December 20, 1835, Brother Joseph wrote in his journal, in his own hand: "I showed them [guests] the sacred record." Here we find unequivocal evidence that the Prophet himself, not solely his scribes and associates, considered at least some part of the papyri in his possession to be Scripture, or "Sacred Record." So was Joseph Smith nine years in confusion about translating from a concrete sacred record, while "really" receiving inspiration that had nothing to do with what lay before his eyes or what he was exhibiting to visitors?

To say that the hieroglyphs have nothing to do with the translated book of Abraham, and that any previous claim to the contrary was in error, because Joseph wrote the book of Abraham by "inspiration" or by "pure inspiration," is not only to neglect the evidence found in the historical record, it is to promote the concoction of history by mind-reading. (And that's the very method Fawn Brodie evoked in her biography of Joseph Smith.) The claim can also be challenged on the grounds of logic.

If someone tells me that Joseph Smith "translated," or wrote, by inspiration, without hieroglyphs, couldn't I query whether the same inspiration would not work so well to translate papyri with hieroglyphic or hieratic script? If he was a seer working by inspiration, then what did he see in this case? Or what if I choose to bring up those Egyptian hieroglyphs on the gold plates? I could say: "Does not the 14-page book of Abraham translation undeniably follow the pattern previously stated to have been used to translate 421 pages?" Were the following response forthcoming: "Joseph Smith also translated those 421 pages by inspiration!?" "Well," I'd say, "didn't the plates sit beside him? didn't he see hieroglyphs appear before him? Or weren't there hieroglyphs and the translation thereof? Can the English translation of the Book of Mormon stand apart from a hieroglyphic original? And what were you telling me about the book of Abraham again? Is not Inspiration a word often veering from the concrete, one reflecting hesitation over using stronger words like revelation, vision, Spirit, words more befitting the dispensation of the fulness of times? Why not say instead 'He translated sacredly?'"

We sing of "an angel" that "Brought the Priesthood back again": "Even Joseph he inspired/Yea, his heart he truly fired/With the light that he desired/For the work of righteousness." Shall we, then, simply say it was all by "inspiration?" We could so say--and yet be doctrinal--but we'd then be leaving out so very, very much of the significance of seers and so very much of the realities of the Restoration. Inspired Joseph saw Elijah; inspired, he felt his hands on his head; under inspiration he "sacredly" pondered and expounded Elijah's expansive doctrines; and worked, fired in mind and heart, to build the Holy Temple. Did Joseph Smith build the Temple by "pure inspiration," then? He did. Nevertheless, as Brigham Young would be at pains to remind us, the Seer and the Saints used stone and mortar and brass all the same. And he used papyri and hieroglyphs all the same. The visionary mind of the Seer read iconography on the three facsimiles of the book of Abraham, iconography that must also be termed "hieroglyphic." So how is it that a Seer could not read words penned in hieroglyphic script? or words engraved on plates in a reformed hieroglyphic script?

Again in 1835, the Prophet appended a few words about the Egyptian artifacts, again written in his own hand, to a letter sent by W.W. Phelps to his wife Sally Phelps. In what he wrote, the Prophet, with his astonishing knowledge of Scripture ever likening verses, phrases, and prophecies, unto his own circumstances, tied the purchase and ownership of the papyri, or parts thereof, to the ancient prophecies of Moses--the papyri, arriving by seeming accident, nevertheless also came as prophecy fulfilled. The Prophet thus wrote to Sally of "hidden things of old time" and of "treasures hid in the sand" ("treasures": Deuteronomy 33:19). If the "treasures hid in the sand," in the very case of which Brother Joseph was then speaking, were mere prompts to revelation, then how could these rolls take on the substance and character of treasures? 

We move to an even more specific point of evidence.

"A TRANSLATION of some ancient records that have fallen into our hands, from the Catacombs of Egypt, purporting to be the writings of Abraham, while he was in Egypt, called the BOOK OF ABRAHAM, written by his own hand, upon papyrus." There next follows the shortened title, "The Book of Abraham". Times and Seasons, March 1, 1842. The lines introducing the book of Abraham, at the time of its publication in 1842, also convey the same line of evidence.

These records, says Joseph knowingly--and with wonder--"have fallen into our hands." Here is a frank acknowledgment of the accidental, or the seeming accidental, the utter strangeness of the event. The whole circumstance of Chandler's visit to Kirtland and the subsequent purchase of the papyri all unfolded as surprise, a double accident. The word accident, we recall, comes from ad cadere to fall to, into; the records "have fallen (cadere) into our hands" by accident or coincidence, etc. "Fallen into our hands" tells us much about the attitude of Joseph Smith toward the papyri. "Have Fallen into our hands. . . purporting to be": Brother Joseph is speaking to an audience and telling them that the recovery of Abraham's writings apparently was not effected through supernatural means, but by accident and surprise. Yet the Lord had commanded Joseph and Oliver quite specifically to ask for more "old records" to come to light.

By small and simple means, Alma tells his son, Helaman, are the writings of the ancients preserved (Alma 37).

Why were the several papyrus rolls valued and purchased? (And why were the mummies purchased under some duress and not valued at all?) Because one of the sheets of papyri "purported" (pro-portare, carry forth, bear forth) that it held a treasure from the sands of Egypt. What treasure and how? Clearly the papyrus itself carried a message. Who says so? Joseph Smith. And why did he say so? Because he claimed to have "a gift from God to interpret such engravings or ancient scripts. There can be no doubt as to the implications of the peculiar wording of the introduction to the book of Abraham. Joseph Smith is saying he examined the papyri and that on one roll he saw words conveying, or purporting to say: Here are the "writings of Abraham while in Egypt." And what were the specific words he first read? Would it not logically be the title, a purporting statement indeed, which in its full and typically Egyptian form reads (as Hugh Nibley noted half-a-century ago): "The Book of Abraham Written by His Own Hand upon Papyrus" (Hugh Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Abraham, 7-8)? There is no other way to read the introduction--and to wriggle out of it by writing "Joseph Smith, or perhaps one of his associates, wrote the introduction" misses the point (see the extremely hard-to-follow Gospel Topics Essay, "Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham." Joseph Smith tells us the plain truth as he saw it: The papyrus purported to bear the title Book of Abraham. Only Joseph Smith, among the brethren, claimed to have the gift of God to "translate all records that are of ancient date" (Mosiah 8:11).

We go now to Spring 1844. On May 15, two easterners, Josiah Quincy and Charles Francis Adams, visited Joseph Smith and spent the day with him. On the next day, Josiah Quincy wrote to his wife and stated the following:

"He preached for us, prophesied for us, and interpreted hieroglyphics for us."

According to Adams's own diary, the Prophet took papyrus up in his hand and read the English translation directly from it. Whether a portion of the book of Abraham or no, we see the Seer in act of translation by the gift and power of God. He preached by the gift of the Holy Ghost, prophesied by that gift, and even interpreted hieroglyphics by that gift. Here was not the man Joseph Smith, but the Prophet with the prophetic mantle--and the Seer with the papyrus in hand.

Again, we recall the words spoken before thousands on 16 June 1844: "I learned it [the mysteries of God] by translating the papyrus now in my house."

Not all the evidence for Brother Joseph translating directly and knowingly from papyrus comes from his own mouth and record. Some comes from our own ability to "interpret hieroglyphics." Indeed, abundant evidence linking Brother Joseph, the book of Abraham, and the papyri and vignettes, comes directly from Facsimile 2 of the book of Abraham, the Egyptian hypocephalus. Words and phrases on this particular hypocephalus parallel most remarkably themes and episodes in each of the first three chapters of the book of Abraham.

The "noble" and "great" god described on the hypocephalus matches the "noble and great ones" spoken of in Abraham Chapter 3. This "noble" and "great" god is described on the hypocephalus (as noted by Nibley, and as the recently restored hieroglyphs confirm) as "descending" to help and to rescue one who calls upon him for rescue--just as in Abraham 1--and just as God comes down in the beginning to instruct the great and noble spirits in Abraham 3. The great god of the hypocephalus, after all, dwells in "the beginning," or zp tpy, as everyone has noted. Yet more parallels could be drawn between the hieroglyphs found on the hypocephalus and the book of Abraham, but the question is How did Joseph Smith know? Joseph Smith is a Prophet of God and he knew what he was doing.

I would ask the question of Abraham: "Is anything too hard for the Lord?" By seership, says Ammon, man can "work mighty miracles." Is it too great a "mighty miracle," to imagine the book of Abraham in hieratic on an actual sheet or roll of papyrus? We shrink from that while accepting a Book of Mormon written on plates of gold.

Yet nearly all the recovered literature of antiquity and certainly all the code-cracking strikes me as wonderful. Consider the story of the cracking of the Maya script, as recounted by Michael Coe. Or consider George Smith.

George Smith was the 19th century student that first identified tablets from Iraq, tablets hidden away in the basement of the British Museum for twenty years, as the ancient Babylonian Flood Narrative: Utnapishtum and all that. He started to translate the text, filled with wonder. But a part of the text was missing, lost in millennia. What did George Smith do? He led a projected six-month expedition to Nineveh to recover the missing section of text--an unlikely outcome that took one week. Was anything too hard for these men?

"Now it must be understood that he was looking for some dirty bits of clay almost indistinguishable from thousands and thousands of other bits scattered across the ruins, which measured eight miles in circumference. Smith might just as well as shuffled through the woods in autumn looking for half-a-dozen specific leaves, yet he picked up the pieces in a week. Considering the amount of rubble, how did he do it? Nobody knows. You couldn't get away with this in a novel or a movie because the odds against such a thing happening are outrageous." "On the 14th of May," Smith writes, "I sat down to examine the store of fragments of cuneiform inscriptions from the day's digging. . .On cleaning one of them, I found to my surprise and gratification that it contained the greater portion of seventeen lines, . .fitting into the only place where there was a serious blank in the story,'" Evan S. Connell, The White Lantern, 158-9.

We further read in the Smithsonian Magazine of the "rather slender hope that he might be able to find a missing piece of the Flood tablet, some three inches on a side, which he felt should still be lurking among the tons of accumulated rubble at the site. Yet he had to know that this would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. The clay fragment would be almost indistinguishable from the debris around it, assuming it hadn't been pulverized in antiquity or tossed out by Rassam's men during their excavations 22 years earlier" (David Damrosch, "Epic Hero, Smithsonian Magazine, May 2007). Yet not only was the missing piece promptly found, but a mere three days into the dig Smith had also found the Epic of Atrahasis! (Vybarr Cregan-Reid, "The Sad Tale of George Smith and Gilgamesh," The Telegraph, 21 September 2013.he Telegraph, 21 September 2013).

But the story gets even chancier: "As it happened, the fragment Smith so rapidly found was not from Gilgamesh at all but was from what scholars now know to be the opening of an even older version of the Flood story, dating from perhaps 1800 b.c. [Abraham's dispensation]," (Smithsonian Magazine).

Here was "a self-taught laborer who had never been to high school, much less college" who was working not with "a window of opportunity, but a mousehole of opportunity" "chancing upon the flood story," and then happening upon an even older record, of ancient date, within a week of starting a dig in Nineveh. Accident, luck, serendipity? Let's move on and actually study these gifts, gifts undreamed of before 1829, before 1830 and Cumorah and the Book of Mormon (Smithsonian Magazine).

And consider the following gift of God to a humble George Smith, whereby he, too, could read such engravings: "His accomplishment is all the more impressive given that he built some of his interpretations on guesses about words that no one had ever deciphered, in lines that often were only fragments of their full selves. Smith's writings are full of discoveries that have stood the test of time, often involving intuitive leaps beyond literal surfaces" (Smithsonian Magazine).


We need to accept the role of accident and coincidence and of "falling into our hands," of surprise and irony as "mighty miracles". We accept angels; let's be open to surprises of every sort. Joseph Smith was the first to acknowledge the accidental element, the surprise in all this sudden appearance of papyri. Yet he quickly raised 2400 dollars for the purchase. That's a lot of money for a chimera, for someone who doesn't really know whether he was translating actual text in front of him by the "gift and power of God" or not. The mighty miracle of preservation and copying stands at equal weight with the mighty miracle of ship and wagon on to little Kirtland. Why was it so? Who knows. The Book of Mormon explains it all: the large stone, the twenty-four plates, in each case these object are brought to the kingly seer--though epochs and hundreds, if not thousands of miles, separate seer from record.

Abraham, another possessor of the Urim and Thummim, likewise explains with some wonder how certain ancient records of the fathers about Creation, Astronomy, and Priesthood, "came into my hands" preserved "until the present day." That's a hint for us, and he tells us all about it--how it happens. That should reassure us and build our faith. Abraham, says Doctrine and Covenants Section 132, "hath entered into his exaltation and sitteth upon his throne"--following his resurrection in 33 BC. He can, under the direction of the God of the Living and not the dead, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, oversee the destiny of his record, this sign, this earnest of the resurrection of the dead. We may have to adjust our thinking about what the Lord can do when He says I am able to do mine own work. 

We might ponder again the question put to Abraham and Sarah: Is anything too hard for the Lord?

Joseph Smith was and is a prophet, and he knew what he was saying and what he was doing.