As usual, I think our resident Mormons are forgetting (surely on purpose by this point, since it has been discussed ad nauseam) that for the entire time period which the BOM story claims to cover (c. 2500 BC to c. 400 AD, if
this chart published in
the Ensign and hosted on the official LDS website is to be taken seriously), we already know what forms of Egyptian were spoken and written. From Bard & Shubert (1999).
Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt. Routledge. p. 325, as cited at Wiki, we can distinguish six major periods of Egyptian language development:
- Archaic Egyptian (before 2600 BC), the reconstructed language of the Early Dynastic Period,
- Old Egyptian (c. 2600 – 2000 BC), the language of the Old Kingdom,
- Middle Egyptian (c. 2000 – 1350 BC), the language of the Middle Kingdom to early New Kingdom and continuing on as a literary language into the 4th century,
- Late Egyptian (c. 1350 – 700 BC), Amarna period to Third Intermediate Period,
- Demotic (c. 700 BC – AD 400), the vernacular of the Late Period, Ptolemaic and early Roman Egypt,
- Coptic (after c. 200 AD), the vernacular at the time of Christianisation, and liturgical language of Egyptian Christianity.
Notice how that covers from before 2600 BC (i.e., at least 100 years before the outer bound of the Mormon timeline) to well within the Christian era. There is some academic and popular debate as to when Coptic Egyptian stopped being a 'living' language (and out of respect for a popular opinion of the Coptic Orthodox people, I would never call it 'dead', exactly -- just heavily restricted, as we still use it in our liturgies; it is just no longer learned as a
first language by anyone, sadly...at least not right now, unless we want to believe some
unconfirmed and probably false or misleading reports from modern Egypt), but the newest original documents (i.e., not translations or transcriptions of scriptures or hymns) we have in the language are 13th century marriage documents from 1246 AD (963
Anno Martyrum, according to the Coptic calendar), which show indisputably that the latest form of the Egyptian language survived some eight centuries after the BOM story is said to have concluded. (These marriage documents are analyzed by Coptic scholar Leslie S.B. MacCoull in her article "The Strange Death of Coptic Culture",
Coptic Church Review 10, 1989 -- for anyone who wants an academic reference.)
So the Mormons would have to show the actual existence of this 'Reformed Egyptian', whatever it actually is (language, script, or something else), in the same way that each of the stages of
actual Egyptian is attested to in particular times and places. Until they can do that (which they cannot), they are not taken seriously by anyone working in any related field (linguistics, Coptology, archaeology, etc.), nor should they be. You have to
earn being taken seriously in the scientific world by producing actual evidence and data. It is not enough to simply claim things which no other researcher accepts because you have a supposedly holy book which tries to invent people, places, and things which never existed, and you are required by your religious belief to believe that book rather than what actually exists in the real world.
It is enough for most Christians that Jerusalem, Bethlehem, etc. exist, and we find the various traditions of Christianity tied to the lands and peoples that it has always claimed to be tied to (whether in the Mediterranean or East Africa or India or wherever), and it is likewise enough for most Christians to notice that no such relationship exists between Mormonism and basically anything. Even their "Hill Cumorah"
wasn't named that until 1829 (recall here that JS supposedly retrieved the golden plates in 1827), and by rights that's probably the most important place of pilgrimage for devout Mormons. It, like everything else that is actually testable about the Mormon story, fails even the most basic test of "Does this
actually exist in history as it is claimed to or does it not?"
Mormonism is by a wide margin the least historically-based belief system in the world. Even when basing his understanding of Christianity on apocryphal or heretical sources, at least the Islamic prophet Muhammad obviously drew from preexisting Christian and Jewish traditions (i.e., things that
actually existed in the world at the time and for some time before Muhammad's own era, whether they were right or not). Other than the Biblical text itself and perhaps
some names from various apocryphal texts which have a striking resemblance to BOM character names, what is there in Mormonism that we can say with confidence predates Joseph Smith?
Maybe some of the books that skeptics say JS relied on when writing the BOM, though of course Mormons reject that idea entirely, so really I don't know that there's anything at all.
How silly would it be to treat the claims of the people who have no evidence at all with the same seriousness with which we treat the claims of the academic Egyptologist, linguist, or even the churchman who is fluent in their own community's history? (e.g., historical sources like Sebeos of Armenia, Zacharias of Mytilene, the patriarch Michael the Syrian/Michael Rabbo, HG Bishop Severios Ibn al Muqaffa', etc.) I would never claim that we should take any of the claims of any of these people at face value (including claims that I make; that's why I try to include references for everything), but certainly it should be recognized that there is a marked difference between saying (as the Mormons must say) "I believe in this despite all the contradictory evidence, and
no supporting evidence", and what we as Christians at least
can say concerning our own faith -- namely, "I believe in this due to the consistent witness/through line of history as it exists across many different places over the past two millennia, despite the fact that the history is never cut and dry and so a fair bit of discernment must be used before accepting any particular source" (read: we don't just believe in anything or everything that is written somewhere,
but at least we have those sources to critically evaluate in the first place, as part of the process of coming to understand our histories).
