Review
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Title: Let’s Talk About the Book of Abraham
Author: Kerry Muhlestein
Publisher: Deseret Book
Genre: Religious Non-Fiction
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 144
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 9781629729749
Price: $11.99
Reviewed by Cheryl L. Bruno for the Association for Mormon Letters
Into the arena of recent Book of Abraham studies comes this tiny contender: Kerry Muhlstein’s Let’s Talk About the Book of Abraham is a 4.25″ x 7″ palm-sized paperback that packs its own unique punch. It comes on the heels of the Joseph Smith Translation Project’s Producing Ancient Scripture (2020) and Dan Vogel’s Book of Abraham Apologetics: A Review and Critique (2021) and addresses some of the issues that have been raised in these works.
The “Let’s Talk About” series is billed as a set of “small, approachable books on important Latter-day Saint topics, written by trusted, faithful scholars who can thoroughly explain crucial issues in a digestible way.”[1] Muhlstein was an excellent choice to write on this topic. As a BYU professor, his curriculum vitae is available on their online directory of faculty and is packed with qualifications and expertise in Egyptology and Near Eastern studies.[2]
The book is an outstanding introduction to a Latter-day Saint study of the Book of Abraham. I have already recommended it to several members of the church who have not been aware of or who are just beginning to take a deeper look at the controversies swirling about this field of study. In a succinct style, Muhlstein identifies and addresses a few of the important questions that investigators and scholars have encountered in studying Joseph Smith’s most provocative production.
Muhlstein devotes about a third of his limited space to exploring the history and background of the Book of Abraham, a work considered by Latter-day Saints and several Restoration groups as a book of scripture recovered by founding prophet Joseph Smith. For those who aren’t familiar with the events and personalities involved, this will be an interesting jaunt into Mormon history. The story behind the Book of Abraham has barely an equal in all of religious history throughout the ages.
Next, the author employs an entire chapter of his book to discuss the issue of bias and to set the tone of how he will approach scholarly issues regarding the Book of Abraham. He asks the reader to consider their preconceived notions and to remain open to new ideas. He presents four “categories of knowing:” intuitive, authoritative, logical, and empirical knowledge. He then compares the academic process of learning versus the revelatory method and states, “frankly, the method of receiving knowledge through revelation is more trustworthy and valid than the process of academic learning” (45). After making his own bias abundantly clear, he cautions his readers that when reading the works of scholars and researchers, it is important to understand the lens by which they view the subject—their “worldviews and beliefs about God” (47). Muhlstein thus establishes a foundation for how he will approach controversial topics in Book of Abraham studies. I am sure that this will feel comforting to certain readers and cautionary to others.
The last half of this book identifies four of the many questions that often arise for investigators of the Book of Abraham. I will cover two of these. First, in Chapter 8, Muhlstein considers, “how did Joseph Smith translate the Book of Mormon?” This issue arises from a discrepancy between the text the Mormon prophet produced and published and modern translations of the fragments of papyrus remaining from what Joseph Smith possessed in the 1830s and 40s. Joseph Smith’s translation is a first-person memoir purporting to be written by the hand of the biblical Abraham. The fragments, untranslatable in the early nineteenth century, are now identified by Egyptian scholars as funerary documents common to the second and third century BCE.
Unfortunately, Muhlstein begins his explanation with a “straw man” argument.[3] He explains that the reader is forced to make a choice as to whether or not Joseph had the ability to translate the papyri by revelation. “If we choose to believe that translation via divine assistance is not possible and that the only possible method of translation is the conventional academic model,” Muhlstein explains, “then the discussion is over.” On the other hand, “if we believe that God could bestow upon Joseph Smith an ability to translate outside of the conventional method, then the fact that he did not know Egyptian is irrelevant” (53). The central point at issue, however, is not whether Joseph translated by revelation. It is that if he translated by divine assistance, as he said, why did he get a different result than what linguists can now read on the papyri?
Forcing the reader to make this choice early in his discussion of issues seems to cut off many serious investigators, including those whom Muhlstein has asked to approach the Book of Abraham with an open mind (41). It also simplifies his potential solutions. These now come down to the “missing papyrus theory,”[4] the “catalyst theory,”[5] and a conglomeration of the two that I have named the “mistaken assumption theory.” In this, Muhlstein offers the possibility that the papyri served as a catalyst for Joseph’s translation but that he mistakenly understood his translation to be from an actual record written by Abraham.[6]
In his very brief Chapter 10, Muhlstein writes about the fascinating Book of Abraham “facsimiles—” annotated drawings of images found on the papyri. This is perhaps the most speculative treatment the author asks us to consider. Here, he suggests that the Egyptian priest Hor, who owned the papyri, “was just the type of individual who would have been involved in collecting foreign religious ideas and adapting them into Egyptian religious practice” (76). Thus, the vignettes were ancient Jewish representations of Abraham that were adapted into a funerary ritual by Hor. Alternately, they could have been Egyptian drawings that were appropriated by or reinterpreted by ancient Jews to represent their own religious tradition. Or, Muhlstein proposes, regardless of what they might have represented in the ancient world, perhaps Joseph Smith was providing a “spiritual interpretation,” a “homily, or sermon” that was directed toward modern readers (78).
The “Questions” section of the book is likely to stretch the credibility of even many faithful Latter-day Saints, although it is an admirable attempt to explain very difficult issues that are surfacing more and more frequently as the internet collides with our daily life and spiritual practice. Muhlstein asks us to “assume,” “presume,” and “imagine” (7-8) too many things about Abraham and his record, even as his love for his subject shines vibrantly through his prose. The strength of this issue of the “Let’s Talk About” series is the author’s passionate assertion that questions about the transmission of the Book of Abraham into the LDS scriptural record should not “stand in the way of gaining spiritual insight from Joseph Smith’s interpretations” (80).
[1] Book description at Deseret Book website, https://deseretbook.com/p/lets-talk-about-the-book-of-abraham-ppr?variant_id=196208-paperback.
[2] BYU Directory, Religious Education, https://religion.byu.edu/directory/kerry-muhlestein.
[3] A “straw man” fallacy replaces the real issue of an argument with a false one, or “straw man.” It then concentrates on refuting the straw man and discounts the more pertinent issue.
[4] This theory argues that Joseph was “translating from a part of the papyri we no longer have” (55).
[5] This theory postulates that Abraham’s record was not tangibly present on the papyri that Joseph Smith owned but that it “served as a catalyst to an independent revelation that came as a gift from God” (56).
[6] For a critical response to the missing papyrus and catalyst theories, see Dan Vogel, Book of Abraham Apologetics: A Review and Critique (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2021). When I reviewed Vogel’s book last year, I noted that the catalyst theory appealed to me, except for the major difficulty that Joseph Smith represented his translation as being literal. I am pleased Muhlstein addressed this difficulty in his treatment.