LDS Joseph Smith's Claim of an Apostasy is a Lie

[dzheremi]

Okay, Peter...I don't know how to say this in a way that will be seen as neutral by the Mormon audience (here I am wearing my 'linguist hat', so to speak, not my 'Coptic Orthodox person who disagrees with Mormonism on religious grounds' hat), but if Reformed Egyptian is meant to be Egyptian, as in a form of the Egyptian language rather than a modification of supposedly Egyptian characters in order to write some other language (as some Mormons have tried to claim), then it is even more of a problem.

Joseph Smith produced a so-called "Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language" around December 1835, which is fully searchable thanks to the ever-valuable Joseph Smith Papers project (you can look at it yourself here), so we can tell what he thought Egyptian was, and especially considering that the period of time these people were supposed to have existed and written in Egyptian ('Reformed' or whatever kind) extends well into the Coptic period, it is relatively easy to compare the kinds of things found in Joseph's text with any reputable Coptic dictionary or grammar. When you do so, what you find is that Joseph Smith was not knowledgeable concerning any form of Egyptian language, and what he actually produced and touted as 'Egyptian' bears no resemblance to anything even remotely related to the language, leaving the disinterested investigator with no other option but to conclude that he made it up because he lived at a time before Champollion's works were available in the USA, so he was able to print these things and have his imaginings accepted by people who did not know any better. (He's far from the first to do so; the Jesuit writer Athanasius Kircher did essentially the same thing back in the 17th century, and was able to convince many in his day that he could actually read Hieroglyphs; the only difference is that he did not try to form a religion around his 'discoveries'.)

And it's not like "Oh, this form is like that form, only a bit changed, like you'd expect to find in a language that had evolved under its own conditions, such as after the Lamanites were in the Americas for a while" or what have you. When I write that it bears no resemblance to Egyptian, I mean that.

For example, on page 11 of his grammar, Joseph gives us this fantastic bit of information about one of his Egyptian characters:

"Toan low ee tahee takee toues: under the Sun: under heaven; downward; pointing downward going downward; stooping down going down in<to> another place,= any place: going down into the grave— going down into misery= even Hell; coming down in lineage by royal descent, in a line by onitas one of the royal families of the Kings the of Egypt."

Erm...no. "Toan low ee tahee takee toues" is gibberish. It's nothing Egyptian. Even the component parts of the varying definitions he gives for this don't correspond to anything. There are various ways of saying "downward" or "under" in Coptic, and none of them look anything like that, much less are they expressible by one character, as Joseph would have it. "Sun" in Coptic is ⲣⲏ (rī), which is not even a form that is found anywhere in that long string of pseudo-words. So "Under the sun" is out, even if he had magically gotten the rest correct. One way to say "downward" or "below" is ⲉϧⲣⲏⲓ (ekhrīi; cf. ϧⲣⲏⲓ khrīi 'lower part'), which is also not there. The Coptic for heaven is ⲫⲉ (fe; as we pray in the Lord's prayer: Je Peniot etkhen nifiowi... -- fiowi is the plural, 'heavens'), which is also absent from the above, and so on. (My source for all these Coptic words, by the way, is W.E. Crum's Coptic dictionary, which is the standard reference work for the language.)

Now...even granting that he could've been referring to some earlier stage of Egyptian, or maybe even one that is radically changed such as to account for 'Reformed Egyptian' being its own thing, how on earth are you going to get something like "Toan low ee tahee takee toues" for "under the sun" when the basic building blocks you're working with look nothing like that? That's not how even wildly divergent forms of language evolve, much less different forms of the same language like the different forms of Egyptian. If it's supposed to be some kind of Egyptian, it will still bear a resemblance to its parent language even if it is many centuries removed. Cypriot Maronite Arabic, probably the most divergent form of Arabic from the (admittedly artificial) standard in terms of its phonology (since its speakers have been separated from Arabic-speaking lands and stuck on Cyprus, surrounded by Greek since about the 9th-10th century) still looks like Arabic. It's not like Modern Standard Arabic has a word for something, and Cypriot Maronite Arabic has a long string of unrelated sounds for the same thing, as in the above example from Joseph Smith.

MSA shams 'sun' CMA shimps
MSA 'atiq 'old' CMA 'atik
MSA ard 'earth' CMA art

etc. etc.

No "tee ta too hee mah moe' or whatever. That's gibberish.

 

[Peter1000]

God has always used the known language of the prophets. God doesn't have His prophets write in non-existant languages.

You don't actually know that "God has always used the known language of the prophets."

You don't actually know that "God doesn't have His prophets write in non-existant languages."

 

[mmksparbud]

It is not us that say things will be done this way---It is God Himself. And when He says it, then that is it. If He wants it changed, then He makes it known. It is not done in secret, it is not done and "lost", God makes sure it is known that it has been changed, No such thing happened with the U and T and again--it was used for Yes and No answers--not 500 page translations. God allowed close family relations to marry at the beginning--then He said No--clearly-- through Moses. The U and T were used for a time and then they disappeared. These stones were not held in a secret box somewhere--they were on the Priest, in plain site for all to see. God does nothing in secret. Bottom line--only the High Priest can use them and you have no right to have a High Priest, there is ONLY one of those and Jesus Christ is it. Read Hebrews!!! I thought you guys just had priests, now you say you have high priests also!!!---that is totally unbiblical and antichrist!!! There can be no earthly high priest since Jesus became the High Priest!!! Worse than sacrilege.
The Holy Spirit rested on the Gentiles, it was seen and obvious and then it was understood what the dream of the clean and unclean meant---The gentiles were now to be a part of His family. The Spirit fell on them openly as proof of the meaning of the dream. Dreams, visions, direct speech----As with Moses, if it was speed God wanted, He would have just told JS the story, Why make Him translate the plates and then remove them? Just tell him the story, what's the difference, either way --no plates. God didn't remove the tablets the commandments were written on right away. They were viewed by ALL the Israelites before being put in the ark. God saw fit to hide the ark---before that---it was even written down how to make it right in the bible and was seen by all the Israelites many times.

 

[withwonderingawe]

I'm joining this part of the conversation without reading what all has been posted, I hope I'm not repeating anything.

Dr. Dan Peterson had an interesting article this week where he talked about how language change. He speaks Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, German and I guess several other languages.

He explains;
English manifests similar historical changes. Thus, taking just the first 20 lines of the 1603 printing of “Hamlet,” we find such spellings as “magicall,” “historie,” “meete,” “leegemen” (“liegemen,” itself obsolete), “souldier,” “releeved,” “peece,” “seene,” “wil,” “beliefe” and “fantasie.”

And, in Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400), we find words such as “contree,” “armee,” “koude” (“could”), “ooth” (“oath”), “condicioun” (“condition”) and “seyd” (“said”). Chaucer doesn’t write “eyes,” “toes” or “foes,” but “eyen,” “toon” and “foon.” His infinitive verb “to ride” seems almost German: “riden” or, sometimes, “ryden.” And his past participles often have a “y” prefix, so that “fallen” becomes “yfallen” (like German “gefallen”).

Furthermore, such spelling variations represent changes in pronunciation. “Forehead” was once pronounced “forid.” “Bone,” “home” and “oak” were spelled “boon,” “hoom” and “ook” 600 years ago — and “ban,” “ham" and “ac” around A.D. 1000.

... George Bernard Shaw is attributed with the quip that Britain and America are “two countries divided by a common language.”

I think that would describe what Moroni was trying to explain when he said; "but the Hebrew hath been altered by us also...and also that none other people knoweth our language;" Mor 9

Peterson also says; "If we were transported four centuries back to Shakespeare’s day, or six centuries to Chaucer’s, we would find the language virtually incomprehensible. If we traveled back a thousand years, English would seem as foreign to us as German, French or Latin."

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865658006/The-Book-of-Mormon-and-linguistic-evolution.html?pg=2

 

[tickingclocker]

First of all, I do not go around deceiving and distorting. I am trying to be a disciple of Christ, and as a disciple, I would be under condemnation for deceiving and distorting.

It is not within Mormonism that I would mention an evangelical class, but in the world of religion in JS time. . Apparently I did not say that clear enough, so let me say it again. The BOM was brought forth by Jesus as a second witness that He was the Christ. It also allowed Jesus to jettison JS to the top of the religious scene at that time. IOW it separated him from all the other competing evangelicals in other religions at that time.

What other evangelical in the other Christian religions had brought forth a book like the BOM, that read like the bible, because it taught people about Jesus Christ and his dealing with a people that had not even been discovered yet. It was sensational, and thousands of people thronged to hear a prophet of God in our time.

The words that comes close to the word "evangelical" are "preaching" and "missionary". The Mormon church, I believe, does more evangelical/missionary work than most churches. It is steeped in preaching and missionary work. So just because we don't have a lot of flame throwing, pulpit thumping, evangelicals in our church, we do believe in preaching and doing missionary work.

JS was never an evangelical. Obviously you don't understand the concept of "evangelicalism", or, you are being deliberately deceptive. Because I think you are more aware of what "evangelical" implies here.

The BoM reads like the bible because a large portion of it was copied from the bible. Sometimes word for word, and grammatical error for error. You cannot prove otherwise.

I'm not aware that 'mormonism' rose to the "top" of the new religious outlook... swamp... during the Great Awakening in the 1800's. JW's and SDA's are still with us. They all had something new within their belief systems. One was closer to being biblical than the other two, with Saturday as the Sabbath, which it historically is in Judaism. The other two brought out completely foreign, unbiblical concepts to to the public (Jesus as Michael the archangel, and the BoM). It remains entrenched as a "second witness"--to Mormons alone. Nobody else, so how it could have allowed JS to "rise to the top of the evangelical world" is one darn colossal far-fetched statement. But you must have your outlook and everyone else has the same.

ALL churches believe in missionary work and preaching. Your statement means absolutely nothing here. The connotation of "evangelical" means a lot more than simply "preaching and teaching". Well, now. You really are stretching far beyond your reach there! To prove the impossible? Go right ahead and try, but don't whine when you get knocked to the undoubtedly real ground. Like I said, "believe" anything you want about your church being "greater than anybody else's church is". I expect nothing less out of you by now. You must know by now that doing so turns people right off when seeing Mormons having to brag about their church to promote it as legitimate. It smacks of desperation. They won't tell you that, but that is what they are thinking. I tried to warn you nicely and even sternly, but you are the one who keeps insisting on having your feelings offended by being told the truth, Peter.

I've never seen "flame throwing" in any church. Have you? What does it look like? Does it burn the parishioners hats off, or just singe the carpets a bit? Pulpit thumping? Now that I have seen. When I was much younger the children in the church just would not settle down, the choir leader stormed to the pulpit, slammed his hands down, and yelled for the parents to control their children if you please! (It was very hot, and long before AC in those days. Everyone was more short-tempered than usual.)

 

[tickingclocker]

You need to see the fruit produced by Lord through JS. For by their fruit ye shall know them.

It all started with a visitation from Jesus Christ.

The BOM was translated for the very purpose of teaching people about Jesus. To witness that He is the Christ.

Jesus Christ restored his true church to the earth again so that all the principles and ordinances required for salvation would be available again, so that Jesus Christ can save us.

There are millions and millions of people that have been converted to Jesus Christ.

Everything centers around Jesus Christ. Everything.

If by their fruits ye may know them, JS has clearly shown the way to Jesus Christ, not Satan.

What fruit? Wax? That's not fruit.

It all started by a visit by an ANGEL of false light. Can you be a bit more honest here? JS claimed it was an ANGEL who called himself Moroni, not by Jesus Christ. That's the official line of the LDS, too. They even have a statue of Moroni on top of their main temple in Utah. Not Jesus Christ, not even JS. Moroni the false ANGEL of light.

The BoM was never translated. It's known worldwide as a fake, except to Mormons. You wish to believe it, go ahead. Nobody else does.

The Church was never taken away so how could it have ever been "restored"? You cannot restore something when it has never left. The only thing one needs for salvation is to cry out to Jesus Christ for it in repentence, He gives the faith to you to believe in Him, and like He said, "It is finished." Nothing more is needed for salvation. He even produces the fruit of the Spirit within the believer by His power! All we can do is let Him work through us, the New Man, as our Lord. What's to "restore" about that? It's always been the Gospel since His resurrection. Still is.

Yes, there have been. Millions are now born-again Christian believers, in every nation, kindred, tongue, and people. Everything does center IN God. Yes. Not the LDS. So... why do you allow your life to be centered in your church then?

JS shows the way to works. Not to salvation. Only the divine Holy Spirit can show the way to salvation. Nobody else. If I didn't know better I'd say you sound like you are trying to convince... yourself here. Only you can answer that--before God.

 

[withwonderingawe]

Joseph Smith produced a so-called "Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian language" around December 1835, which is fully searchable thanks to the ever-valuable Joseph Smith Papers project (you can look at it yourself here), so we can tell what he thought Egyptian was, and especially considering that the period of time these people were supposed to have existed and written in Egyptian ('Reformed' or whatever kind) extends well into the Coptic period,

Are you trying to say that Joseph claimed that the Book of Abraham was written in reformed Egyptian? He never said that at all.

The Grammar and Alphabet papers were put together after the Book of Abraham was pretty much finished. So it appears to be an attempt to "reverse engineer". They had the papyri from which the Book of Abraham was taken and then all these others. They tried to match up the translation from one to the others and make an alphabet out of it. They probably didn't know Egyptian reads backwards, right to left. There is another important point, there is only one section with Joseph Smith handwriting on it dated Oct 1835. If he was using this as his means of translating then his handwriting would would been all over it.

 

[dzheremi]

I am saying that if Reformed Egyptian is meant to be a form of the actual Egyptian language a la Demotic or Coptic, and Smith wrote what he knew as 'Egyptian' in his grammar and alphabet of 1835, then it is clear that what he was working with based on what he actually produced as 'translation' of the language was not actually a form of Egyptian or any other extant language, but something unique to him and unrelated to the language he actually claimed it to be. It's not Egyptian of any era. As far as I can tell, it's not anything. Smith may have been able to pass it off as Egyptian to a public who did not know any better, but in our day, that is not possible, and even the most basic comparison between an actually attested form of Egyptian and what Smith produced shows them to be completely unrelated. You can look at Crum's Coptic dictionary yourself, look up any common words in it, and see how transparently unrelated Joseph's imagining of Egyptian is to the actual language.

There is no correspondence between what Joseph wrote about as 'Egyptian' and any kind of actual Egyptian, except perhaps by random chance, in the same way that anyone typing out random strings of characters into Google Translate and then trying to see if they mean anything in other languages might get lucky every once in a while. It doesn't mean they're actually showing any knowledge of any particular language.

 

[tickingclocker]

"Peter1000, post: 69899211, member: 382212"]I have already told you that you and I had similar experiences with how JS translated the BOM. I accepted the truth when received, you did not. The question is why did you not accept this information?
---You can "say" we have had the same experiences, but that doesn't mean I agree with your "buddy-buddy" assessment. I only believe the truth. Not lies for my convenience. When you make a commitment before God to deal in honesty, unlike what I was taught, that should answer your question. However, as the suns sets in the west and comes up in the east, you won't like that answer, and I'm sure you will find fault with it. Just don't whine about it to me.

I hold the office of "High Priest" in the Melchisedec priesthood, in the LDS church. So LDS certainly have "High Priests". Curious that you would not know that, having been a Mormon.
---No you don't. You hold an imaginary priesthood title bestowed upon you by mere men in a group that calls itself a church. Not by God Himself. Prove otherwise. Instead, you play act, right along with the rest of them. I don't consider that a "High Priest". Because there is only ONE genuine "High Priest" in this universe. Jesus Christ. You cannot prove otherwise. However, HE CAN! Without any doubt whatsoever to anyone.

There is no other record of anyone but the High Preist using them....... The problem is that the record is incomplete. Only 1/1,000th of what the Lord did for his people are recorded by his people. So there could have been other times the U and T were used by any number of prophets in the long line of prophets from Moses to Malachi. Since it is not recorded does not mean it was not done.
--The problem is, you are trying to insist the bible 'could' say something it does not. Because it fits your human agenda. If it didn't, you wouldn't be trying to make it say what it never has. Not even in YOUR books does it say anyone else used the Urim & Thumim besides the High Priest. Since it was "not recorded" as you put it doesn't mean it WAS done either. Are you willing to take the chance to defend your lie of convenience? That is all it amounts to. Nothing more than a lie of convenience. And you know it, deep deep down.

Even if the High Priest was the only one recorded to have used them, it doesn't mean that the Lord could not use any person He wanted to use them. See Acts 10:10-16 and ask Peter, if the Lord says something is clean, even though our traditions say it is filthy, it is clean, sayeth the Lord, if I say it is clean. The same thing applys to your illogical assumption that the Lord could not let anyone but the Aaronic priesthood High Priest use the U and T. Again you restrict the Lord from doing what He wants done. The Lord gave JS the U and T to translate, who are you to tell the Lord he cannot do that because our tradition says only Aaronic priesthood High Priests are the only ones that can use them.
--Your church always says what follows on earth follows in heaven. Well? Therefore what follows in the Word of God follows at all times thereafter, then. God is pretty specific in His dealings and determinations when it comes to the holy. Obviously your church deals in cherry picking what it wants to "follow in heaven and earth". And you follow their lead. Not God's established truths. Imagine if the High Priest of the first Temple didn't like the curtains God Himself had chosen for it, and decided he was going to change them from linen to a mixture of camel and goat's wool? Do you think God would have simply looked the other way? The Lord struck someone dead for so much as touching the Ark of the Covenant to keep it from falling over! He said don't ever touch it and HE MEANT IT. You cannot argue against God's decrees. You cannot win this argument. Not when its HIS temple and holiness you are trying to manipulate. It's NOT YOURS. Beware.

I haven't done a lot of research lately on how we got the information about how JS translated the BOM. I believe there are 2 different statements from Oliver Cowdery, (the scribe used the most by JS) in which he said in one statement that JS used the U and T. He also said in another statement that JS also used a stone in a hat.
---Which are you going to believe? JS, who claimed outright that he used his peepstone in a hat? Which was the leader of YOUR church here? Because its not convenient for you to believe your leader's silly antics, you will shunt yourself off to a secondary person's recollection in order to keep believing your leader didn't say what he did? Your own church fully admits JOSEPH SMITH USED HIS PEEPSTONE IN A HAT. I never heard it either when I was a kid. It was always the Urim & Thumim. Now they claim precisely what non-Mormons have been trying to tell Mormons for years. THAT is the part you don't like. Not that the world now knows JS stuck his face in a silly hat with a ridiculous stone in it. Isn't that the real sticking point here, Peter? Especially when they openly display JOSEPH SMITH'S PEEPSTONE to the world, while the world looks on, asking the same question of them still......but what about the Urim & Thumim?? Didn't they work like they were supposed to IF JS was telling the truth?

So I believe JS used both methods to translate. It is possible that the stone was a much faster way to receive info directly from the Lord, rather than have to study the characters on the plates, then translate.
---There are none so blind... as those who seek to justify their own blindness. Keep your hands over those eyes, Pete. That way nobody can see you for what you are, huh?

Study what Mormons say, not what....
---Not what.... they do, instead? They show JS's peepstone to the world, proving so many of those dismissed "antis" had been telling the truth right along. What the LDS did was calculate how many offended members they would lose before they ever decided to show that peepstone to the world. It's a gamble. We know they only retain those who already knew how to lie to themselves. Those numbers become rather irrelevant once you realize that your own church is systematically whittling itself down to a small group of the "truly blind".

 

[withwonderingawe]

I am saying that if Reformed Egyptian is meant to be a form of the actual Egyptian language a la Demotic or Coptic, and Smith wrote what he knew as 'Egyptian' in his grammar and alphabet of 1835, then it is clear that what he was working with based on what he actually produced as 'translation' of the language was not actually a form of Egyptian or any other extant language, but something unique to him and unrelated to the language he actually claimed it to be. It's not Egyptian of any era. As far as I can tell, it's not anything. Smith may have been able to pass it off as Egyptian to a public who did not know any better, but in our day, that is not possible, and even the most basic comparison between an actually attested form of Egyptian and what Smith produced shows them to be completely unrelated. You can look at Crum's Coptic dictionary yourself, look up any common words in it, and see how transparently unrelated Joseph's imagining of Egyptian is to the actual language.

There is no correspondence between what Joseph wrote about as 'Egyptian' and any kind of actual Egyptian, except perhaps by random chance, in the same way that anyone typing out random strings of characters into Google Translate and then trying to see if they mean anything in other languages might get lucky every once in a while. It doesn't mean they're actually showing any knowledge of any particular language.

You're losing me here, are you saying the scrolls were not written in Egyptian? or that the Book of Abraham is unrelated to the writings on the scraps of the scrolls which we do have?

Are you really interested in the truth??

There are eyewitness who say there were three to four scrolls and they saw them rolled out across the floor as Joseph studied them. It is felt that the scraps we have are not the ones Joseph translated into the Book of Abraham. We only have about 13 percent of the original papyri that Joseph Smith possessed.

Again the Egyptian alphabet is really unrelated to the Book of Moses except that they were trying to match what they saw in that scroll to another with no inspiration from God, it was purely out of curiosity. One of the papers they have is a partial translation of the Book of Abraham with Egyptian characters written in the left-hand side, one might jump to the conclusion that this was Joseph translating, but it wasn't.

"... the Egyptian characters were added after the entire English text was written (as evidenced by the use of different inks, Egyptian characters that do not always line up with the English text, and Egyptian characters that sometimes overrun the English text). Thus it was not a matter of writing the character and then writing the translation but of someone (not Joseph) later adding the characters in the margin at the beginning of paragraphs of text without explicitly stating the reason for doing so." Gee
http://publications.mi.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1125&index=5

 

[dzheremi]

I don't know how much clearer I can be. Let me try again: If what Mormons refer to as 'Reformed Egyptian' is supposed to represent an actual stage, dialect, or form of the Egyptian language, then Joseph's efforts in trying to decipher or translate it show absolutely no knowledge of what he was looking at, if we are to judge his aptitude based on what he published as an 'Egyptian grammar and alphabet'. What is contained in his Egyptian grammar is very obviously not what he claims it to be (it's not any kind of Egyptian), so it does not really matter what the 13 witnesses or whoever added the supposed characters said. Joseph proved himself to be ignorant of Egyptian by writing a book which he claimed was about the language that is transparently unrelated to any known form of it, whether in writing system (the individual characters), phonology (his transliterations or whatever this "ho la lish moo mah pah" stuff is supposed to be), or in any other respect.

It is akin to me claiming that I discovered Martian Arabic on an old scroll on which was written U(H)E$QGQIGJ$Y)GI)#EHJIA. You would obviously want to know why I was calling it Martian Arabic and claiming that such a thing exists, right? After all, as far as we know Arabs never lived on Mars, and what's more Arabic doesn't even look like random English-input keyboard smashing -- it looks like this: هذه هي الحروف العربية

And if I claimed that U(H)E$QGQIGJ$Y)GI)#EHJIA means "house", and you had an Arabic dictionary lying around and could look up my claim and see that "house" in Arabic is "bayt" (بيت), not a bunch of random gibberish, what reason could you possibly have for trusting my claim in the face of indisputable evidence to the contrary?

 

[ToBeLoved]

You don't actually know that "God has always used the known language of the prophets."

You don't actually know that "God doesn't have His prophets write in non-existant languages."

Clearly your biased. But that is to be expected when one cannot view something clearly and objectively.

 

[withwonderingawe]

I don't know how much clearer I can be. Let me try again: If what Mormons refer to as 'Reformed Egyptian' is supposed to represent an actual stage, dialect, or form of the Egyptian language, then Joseph's efforts in trying to decipher or translate it show absolutely no knowledge of what he was looking at

Okay, no!

The reformed Egyptian of the Book of Mormon was nothing like the Egyptian the scribes for Joseph were trying to decipher as they looked at the scrolls which the Book of Abraham was taken from.

1, The date of the scrolls were written maybe around 200 bc, Some of our "scholars propose that the original Book of Abraham "text" was written by Abraham and then "passed down through his descendants (the Jews), some of whom took a copy to Egypt where it was copied (after being translated) onto a later manuscript" . Jews did write their scriptures in other languages. And, there is a tradition that Abraham wrote scripture. In the Book of the Jubilees xxxix it reads " But he did not surrender his soul, and he remembered the Lord and the words which Jacob, his father, used to read from amongst the words of Abraham".

2, It is felt that Lehi was in the export import business; he had a home in Jerusalem, he had a home out in the country, he had a great deal of wealth, he had the camels and tents ready to go. His wife's name Sariah comes from Egypt, it has been found in some Aramaic papyri found in Elephantine, EGYPT. The name Nephi also seems to be Egyptian, (but for me to give you the quote we would both have to read German). It is felt that Lehi traveled back and forth from Jerusalem to Elephantine because there was a colony of Jews there along with a small temple which had been established around 650 bc. As a trader Lehi would have had to learn every day Egyptian in order to communicate.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Was-there-a-Jewish-temple-in-ancient-Egypt-318363

3, Lehi left Jerusalem around 600bc, the Egyptian written 400 years later when the scrolls which contained the Book of Abraham were put together would have gone through some major changes as all langues do. Then Moroni says they no longer speak a pure Hebrew and they had reformed the Egyptian in order to make it easier to write, kind of a shorthand.

So to try and compare Book of Mormon Egyptian to the Egyptian of the Book of Abraham just would not be the same at all.

Now no one ever said Joseph could read Egyptian. As I understand the process it would be like using a translating app on my cell phone. He placed either the seer stone or the Urim and Thummim over the a passage and the words would appear and he would read them to Oliver. Imagine that, 136 years ago Joseph was describing an app that I can now down load for $10.

 

[Peter1000]

It is not us that say things will be done this way---It is God Himself. And when He says it, then that is it. If He wants it changed, then He makes it known. It is not done in secret, it is not done and "lost", God makes sure it is known that it has been changed, No such thing happened with the U and T and again--it was used for Yes and No answers--not 500 page translations. God allowed close family relations to marry at the beginning--then He said No--clearly-- through Moses. The U and T were used for a time and then they disappeared. These stones were not held in a secret box somewhere--they were on the Priest, in plain site for all to see. God does nothing in secret. Bottom line--only the High Priest can use them and you have no right to have a High Priest, there is ONLY one of those and Jesus Christ is it. Read Hebrews!!! I thought you guys just had priests, now you say you have high priests also!!!---that is totally unbiblical and antichrist!!! There can be no earthly high priest since Jesus became the High Priest!!! Worse than sacrilege.
The Holy Spirit rested on the Gentiles, it was seen and obvious and then it was understood what the dream of the clean and unclean meant---The gentiles were now to be a part of His family. The Spirit fell on them openly as proof of the meaning of the dream. Dreams, visions, direct speech----As with Moses, if it was speed God wanted, He would have just told JS the story, Why make Him translate the plates and then remove them? Just tell him the story, what's the difference, either way --no plates. God didn't remove the tablets the commandments were written on right away. They were viewed by ALL the Israelites before being put in the ark. God saw fit to hide the ark---before that---it was even written down how to make it right in the bible and was seen by all the Israelites many times.

You can not restrict God to stick to something that happened 4000 years ago that was written in a book. Thousands of things were not written in the book. God will not be restricted by you either. If he wants HP in this last dispensation, He will have them, regardless of what the bible or bible scholars say. They are just guessing 99% of the time about God and his dealings with man.

Remember, what God says is clean, is clean. It is clean because God said. It is clean regardless of your traditions. It is also filthy if God says, regardless of your traditions. God will not be restricted because something is written in a book.

Many people saw the plates, they are real:
Read the testimony of the 3 witnesses: https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/three?lang=eng

Read the testimony of the 8 witnesses:https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/eight?lang=eng

There are others too.

 

[mmksparbud]

ummm----you quote from a nonexistent book to prove that it exists???

 

[ArmenianJohn]

You can not restrict God to stick to something that happened 4000 years ago that was written in a book. Thousands of things were not written in the book. God will not be restricted by you either. If he wants HP in this last dispensation, He will have them, regardless of what the bible or bible scholars say. They are just guessing 99% of the time about God and his dealings with man.

Remember, what God says is clean, is clean. It is clean because God said. It is clean regardless of your traditions. It is also filthy if God says, regardless of your traditions. God will not be restricted because something is written in a book.

Many people saw the plates, they are real:
Read the testimony of the 3 witnesses: https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/three?lang=eng

Read the testimony of the 8 witnesses:https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/eight?lang=eng

There are others too.

If God is all-powerful, can he create a rock so large and heavy that he can't lift it?

 

[mmksparbud]

You can not restrict God to stick to something that happened 4000 years ago that was written in a book. Thousands of things were not written in the book. God will not be restricted by you either. If he wants HP in this last dispensation, He will have them, regardless of what the bible or bible scholars say. They are just guessing 99% of the time about God and his dealings with man.

Remember, what God says is clean, is clean. It is clean because God said. It is clean regardless of your traditions. It is also filthy if God says, regardless of your traditions. God will not be restricted because something is written in a book.

Many people saw the plates, they are real:
Read the testimony of the 3 witnesses: https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/three?lang=eng

Read the testimony of the 8 witnesses:https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/eight?lang=eng

There are others too.

All cronies???!!!!-----not one witness not related nor a buddie?---We follow the bible precisely because it is the word of God. We follow it to not end up believing in the imaginations of those who would demolish His word and replace it with their own. God gave us His word to keep us from going off into paths not of His making. A whole throng people--reportedly 1-2 million -- saw the tablets of stone and the U and T--The U and T were worn publicly. Even the most sacred of articles--0the Ark itself-- was at times taken out in public and viewed by all--as in war, it went before them. And it was captured and then returned--0seen even by the enemy. No one has seen those plates, not even your witnesses for they plainly state they saw them with their "spiritual eyes"-not physically, where they could touch them.
There is no High Priest save Jesus Christ. Not even the Catholic church makes such a claim--they have priests, with their Pope--but even he has never been referred to as a High Priest---the vicar of Christ is what they call him---and they have first dib's on what to call a priest, they started long before your church did. Read Hebrews, prayerfully, asking fir the Holy Spirit--- You can come to no other conclusion-- not if you love God as you say you do.

 

[dzheremi]

Withwonderingawe,

Joseph seemed to claim that he could read Egyptian when producing the book I mentioned earlier containing his description and translation of the 'Reformed Egyptian' characters. The very nature of that book means that either he was knowingly lying/perpetrating fraud, or he really did believe that this is how Egyptian is. I'd prefer to advance the latter theory, for the sake of being charitable to your religious beliefs, but that still means that he is wrong.

Just answer this question: Is Reformed Egyptian an actual variety of the Egyptian language or not? That's all I want to know. I don't care what LDS scholars have to say about anything in Egypt or possibly in Egypt or where they think the name Nephi came from (from how I've heard it pronounced, it seems like it would be curious if it were Egyptian...the word "Fai" in Coptic means "this", and "Ni" or "Ne" could be a determiner, verbal prefix, or a copula, depending on context, so....something like "the this"? "To be this"?) or any of this other stuff. My entire point is that if Reformed Egyptian is supposed to be an actual form of the Egyptian language, and Joseph Smith's 'Egyptian' grammar and alphabet displays what he knew of it, then there can be literally no doubt that this fundamental claim of the Mormon origin story is false. What Joseph wrote and presented as being Egyptian is not that, no matter how much the language would have changed.

Also, I don't know what you're trying to say by pointing out what is written in Aramaic papyri found in Egypt. Aramaic is a Semitic language, but Egyptian is not, so the part in your sentence where you say "it has been found in Aramaic papyri in Egypt" and follow that by saying "Nephi is also felt to be Egyptian" makes no sense, since Egyptian and Aramaic are two different languages. They are both Afro-Asiatic, but they belong to different branches of the family, so any relationship between them is very distant and doesn't tell us much. For comparative purposes, English and Armenian could be a similar pair for Indo-European languages (Armenian belongs to its own branch of IE, while English is part of the much larger Germanic family of languages that includes the Scandinavian languages, German, Dutch, Frisian, etc.), but saying "This name was found in ARMENIA; it was also felt to be English" would make absolutely no sense. Armenian and English are not close enough relatives for that to mean anything. They're different languages, just like Egyptian and Aramaic are different languages. It seems like in this part of your reply you are equating the two languages just because they are both found in Egypt. They're not the same.

Also (again), I already provided an example in the form of Cypriot Maronite Arabic of how much one language has changed over a much longer time span than the 400 years that you are saying separate Lehi's time in Jerusalem from the Egyptian papyri containing the Book of Abraham. While the ideal comparison would've been between Levantine Arabic as spoken in Lebanon/Syria and CMA (a comparison which I can't do because I don't have enough resources in Lebanese Arabic to do so), even a comparison between CMA and Modern Standard Arabic shows that CMA is still clearly Arabic, even as it has undergone a great many phonological changes, acquired a new writing system (it is written in Greek script, rather than in Arabic), etc. It's still Arabic. Again, it didn't go from "Bayt" to "Moh mah moo mee" or whatever, and that's despite some eleven to twelve centuries of isolation from the parent language in the lands which it came from -- three times longer than the period you're talking about that supposedly made 'Reformed Egyptian' so different from it assumed parent language. Linguistic evolution does not work that way. Either 'Reformed Egyptian' as presented by Joseph Smith in his own writings is a kind of Egyptian or it isn't, and it very clearly isn't. From what I have personally read of Joseph's 'Egyptian' alphabet and grammar, it's nothing. It's no known language belonging to any recognized present or historical ethnocultural group.

And if it is just a writing system meant to write another language (Moroni said Hebrew, so let's go with that), then as I wrote in an early post, we are stuck because it doesn't correspond to what we know of language use in the time it supposedly existed. It's not any form of Hebrew or Aramaic, either (again, based on what Joseph Smith himself furnished as evidence of it). Scripts/writing systems have to correspond to some actual form of language that is used by real people in the world, or else they are just ornamental symbols (not really writing systems at all, but pure ceremonial decoration or a kind of non-linguistic symbolic storytelling, as people once believed about Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Mayan writing, etc. before we knew that they represent actual languages). And y'know..."I found a bunch of drawings and made up a story about what I imagine them to mean" would be fine if Joseph Smith/the LDS hadn't claimed to actually be translating a language (with divine assistance, no less! Surely God would know what He's doing even if Joseph didn't, right?).

 

[Peter1000]

Okay, no!

The reformed Egyptian of the Book of Mormon was nothing like the Egyptian the scribes for Joseph were trying to decipher as they looked at the scrolls which the Book of Abraham was taken from.

1, The date of the scrolls were written maybe around 200 bc, Some of our "scholars propose that the original Book of Abraham "text" was written by Abraham and then "passed down through his descendants (the Jews), some of whom took a copy to Egypt where it was copied (after being translated) onto a later manuscript" . Jews did write their scriptures in other languages. And, there is a tradition that Abraham wrote scripture. In the Book of the Jubilees xxxix it reads " But he did not surrender his soul, and he remembered the Lord and the words which Jacob, his father, used to read from amongst the words of Abraham".

2, It is felt that Lehi was in the export import business; he had a home in Jerusalem, he had a home out in the country, he had a great deal of wealth, he had the camels and tents ready to go. His wife's name Sariah comes from Egypt, it has been found in some Aramaic papyri found in Elephantine, EGYPT. The name Nephi also seems to be Egyptian, (but for me to give you the quote we would both have to read German). It is felt that Lehi traveled back and forth from Jerusalem to Elephantine because there was a colony of Jews there along with a small temple which had been established around 650 bc. As a trader Lehi would have had to learn every day Egyptian in order to communicate.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Was-there-a-Jewish-temple-in-ancient-Egypt-318363

3, Lehi left Jerusalem around 600bc, the Egyptian written 400 years later when the scrolls which contained the Book of Abraham were put together would have gone through some major changes as all langues do. Then Moroni says they no longer speak a pure Hebrew and they had reformed the Egyptian in order to make it easier to write, kind of a shorthand.

So to try and compare Book of Mormon Egyptian to the Egyptian of the Book of Abraham just would not be the same at all.

Now no one ever said Joseph could read Egyptian. As I understand the process it would be like using a translating app on my cell phone. He placed either the seer stone or the Urim and Thummim over the a passage and the words would appear and he would read them to Oliver. Imagine that, 136 years ago Joseph was describing an app that I can now down load for $10.

I have now printed this explanation, thank you, it is much better than mine. You are good.

 

[dzheremi]

Peter1000, I would advise you as a linguist and not as a churchman: Please, please do not use that post as any kind of explanation of Reformed Egyptian. It's not going to work with anyone who is not already predisposed to believe the Mormon origin story despite the massive amount of linguistic evidence that negates that story. I admire Withwonderingawe's zeal to defend her faith from detractors (and yours, for that matter), but that doesn't make basic linguistic facts change to fit the Mormon narrative. If there is evidence for Reformed Egyptian, it is not in that post.