1   In FAIR’s review (http://www.fairlds.org/pubs/LBOA.pdf), Ben McGuire, levels a serious charge “This film, while trying to maintain a scholarly facade, loses much of its credibility because of this fact—it fails to acknowledge current scholarship.”  In reality, McGuire’s creates a facade by failing to answer and account for current scholarship on Egyptology that refutes the Book of Abraham.  In his effort to rescue Joseph Smith’s sinking credibility as a prophet and translator of ancient texts, McGuire blinds himself to anything presented by bone fide Egyptologists and settles for two plans of attack, one on papyri age and the other on defining “translation.”  Neither attack has any weight since he merely raises additional questions, but raising questions does nothing to refute the film’s data.  In the end he settles for the invisible, subjective (and flimsy) Mormon “testimony” that the book is true.  Clearly, McGuire and FAIR can’t answer the hard-hitting facts present in the film with a Sunday testimony. 

                If McGuire wishes to refute the film’s assessment of the papyri’s age (the Egyptian papayri actually dates thousands of years later from the time of Abraham), he should use more than subjective analysis (e.g., “I read into Joseph’s remarks….”).  Reading between the lines does nothing to solve the problem since the opposing argument can easily be “read into” it with equal validity.  McGuire reads that Smith is speaking of papyri “in general,” but this is refuted the first published Book of Abraham “translation,” in the Times and Seasons, where Smith specifically states it is Abraham’s writing, “by his own hand.”  McGuire completely ignored this “specific” reading and trades for his subjective “general” reading.  Smith refutes McGuire.

The papyri text, according to McGuire, contains two things: 1.) the Book of Abraham and 2.) the Book of the Dead or Book of Breathings with other Egyptian spells.  Still, McGuire can’t specifically point to anything from the Book of Abraham in the text.  Understand this:  The Book of Abraham is nowhere and the Egyptian mythology is everywhere.  He hypothesizes that perhaps the papyri were altered, which claim he bases solely upon one “hostile witness,” named Henry Caswell, who viewed the papyri.  To him, that is sufficient proof that Smith’s sketches (a hand-drawn knife) was in the original because the hostile witness “failed to mention it.”  Arguments from silence are self-refuting and go nowhere.

                McGuire adapts Dr. John Gee’s theory about Smith’s Egyptian alphabet translation pages, viz., that the Egyptian alphabetic-parallel hieroglyphs were added to the pages after the English, because the hieroglyphs “run over the margins ... and sometimes the English text.... This indicates that the Egyptian characters were added after the English text was written.”  This theory is suspect since Gee refutes himself during an online exchange with Seymour Bloom by stating, “I never intended the term ‘overrun’ to mean ‘overwrite’ since they are not synonyms”  (See http://www.lds-mormon.com/gee_abraham.shtml.)  McGuire, however, understood Gee that way and used it as his argument. 

McGuire then dodges the problem of Smith simply creating text by granting him liberty for inspired parenthetical commentary between Abrahamic phrases.  McGuire’s argument tells me that this is not Abraham’s book if one can’t distinguish Abraham’s sentences from Smith’s additions and alterations.    The best McGuire can offer is that Smith produced “The Book of Abraham Obscured,” since nobody can definitively point to a single clause and guarantee that it is Abraham unadulterated.  His argument only supports his opponents that the Book of Abraham is merely a collection of Smith’s ramblings that is passed off as scripture to the unaware Mormon.  This argument, by the way, is a rehashing of Hugh Nibley’s invention that there are two ways for Smith to translate, literally (mechanical) and spiritually (inspired).  The conclusion for all faithful Mormons is that Smith’s Book of Abraham is a “spiritual translation” and therefore bears no expected resemblance to the papyri’s literalness.  If it is admitted that the papyri is necessarily different from the translation due to “inspired” translation, then we must ask why Smith needed the papyri at all if he is simply creating the “inspired translation” without reliance upon the Egyptian?  This mystery dissipates by suggesting that Smith used his famous Urim and Thummim stones in the translation process.  These strange stones were also used by Smith for translating the Book of Mormon, so this argument for the Book of Abraham may not be in the Mormon’s best interest, if it is apparent that the “spiritual translation” has nothing to do with the actual text.  Smith allegedly looked into the stones and correctly read the English translation that mysteriously appeared under each hieroglyph.  As amazing as this sounds, it is more amazing to think that this in any way refutes the Egyptologists and hard evidence to the contrary.  The movie produces the two mutually exclusive propositions.  Either Smith’s production is sound and refutes the entire scholarly field of Egyptology, meaning that the entire world of Egyptologists are “know-nothings,” or the world of Egyptology refutes and exposes Smith as a fraud.