page_title: Book of Abraham
section_title: Controversy and criticism
hierarchical_section_title: Book of Abraham / Controversy and criticism
caption_attribution_description: English: Detail from Portrait of Charles Theodule Deveria
context_page_description: The Book of Abraham is a work produced between 1835 and 1842 by Joseph Smith based, he said, on Egyptian papyri purchased from a traveling mummy exhibition. According to Smith, the book was "a translation of some ancient records [...] purporting to be the writings of Abraham, while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus". Smith said the papyri described Abraham's early life, his travels to Canaan and Egypt, and his vision of the cosmos and its creation.
  The work was canonized in 1880 by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as part of its Pearl of Great Price. It thus forms a doctrinal foundation for the LDS Church and Mormon fundamentalist denominations of the Latter Day Saint movement. It is not considered a sacred text by the Community of Christ. Other groups in the Latter Day Saint movement have differing opinions regarding the Book of Abraham, some rejecting and some accepting the text as divinely inspired scripture.
context_section_description: Since its publication in 1842, the Book of Abraham has been a source of controversy. Non-Mormon Egyptologists, beginning in the late 19th century, have disagreed with Joseph Smith's explanations of the facsimiles. They have also asserted that damaged portions of the papyri have been reconstructed incorrectly. In 1912, a letter about the Book of Abraham was published by Arthur Cruttenden Mace, Assistant Curator in the Department of Egyptian Art in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. He wrote:
  I return herewith, under separate cover, the 'Pearl of Great Price.' The 'Book of Abraham,' it is hardly necessary to say, is a pure fabrication. Cuts 1 and 3 are inaccurate copies of well known scenes on funeral papyri, and cut 2 is a copy of one of the magical discs which in the late Egyptian period were placed under the heads of mummies. There were about forty of these latter known in museums and they are all very similar in character. Joseph Smith's interpretation of these cuts is a farrago of nonsense from beginning to end. Egyptian characters can now be read almost as easily as Greek, and five minutes' study in an Egyptian gallery of any museum should be enough to convince any educated man of the clumsiness of the imposture.
  The controversy intensified in the late 1960s when portions of the Joseph Smith Papyri were located. The translation of the papyri by both Mormon and non-Mormon Egyptologists does not match the text of the Book of Abraham as purportedly translated by Joseph Smith. Indeed, the transliterated text from the recovered papyri and facsimiles published in the Book of Abraham contain no direct references, either historical or textual, to Abraham, and Abraham's name does not appear anywhere in the papyri or the facsimiles. Edward Ashment notes, "The sign that Smith identified with Abraham [...] is nothing more than the hieratic version of [...] a 'w' in Egyptian. It has no phonetic or semantic relationship to [Smith's] 'Ah-broam.'" University of Chicago Egyptologist Robert K. Ritner concluded in 2014 that the source of the Book of Abraham "is the 'Breathing Permit of Hôr,' misunderstood and mistranslated by Joseph Smith", and that the other papyri are common Egyptian funerary documents like the Book of the Dead.
  Original manuscripts of the Book of Abraham, microfilmed in 1966 by Jerald Tanner, show portions of the Joseph Smith Papyri and their purported translations into the Book of Abraham. Ritner concludes, contrary to the LDS position, due to the microfilms being published prior to the rediscovery of the Joseph Smith Papyri, that "it is not true that 'no eyewitness account of the translation survives'", that the Book of Abraham is "confirmed as a perhaps well-meaning, but erroneous invention by Joseph Smith", and "despite its inauthenticity as a genuine historical narrative, the Book of Abraham remains a valuable witness to early American religious history and to the recourse to ancient texts as sources of modern religious faith and speculation".
caption: In the late 19th century, French Egyptologist Théodule Devéria was one of the first to offer a scholarly critique of Joseph Smith's translation.
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