Chances are high that anyone reading this post has a detailed understanding of the origin of the Book of Mormon: We sang about it in Primary. We tell the story to investigators. It plays a heavy role in Seminary and Sunday School classes. We make models of the gold plates. We make pilgrimages to the sites of the plates’ discovery, their translation, and the publication of the Book of Mormon. There are movies, and paintings, and pageants. You know that a first edition – and you know the year of that first edition – is a costly item. The origin story of the Book of Mormon is so fundamental to our understanding of our religion that people have faith crises when they discover that the story is more complicated than they’d previously thought.

The Book of Abraham … not so much. You probably remember that there were Egyptian mummies involved. You may have a mental image of papyrus fragments, and of the mysterious drawings that are part of the published work. You may know that there has been controversy and discrepancies between Mormon belief and scholarly pronouncements. But do you know the year it was first published? and where? Can you tell with any depth of detail its origin story? Probably not, unless you have done reading of your own, in books that are not always reader friendly or easily found except in academic libraries or used book stores.

The latest volume of the Joseph Smith Papers – Revelations and Translations. Vol. 4: Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts – is teaching me more than I ever knew there was to know about the origin of the Book of Abraham. I’m never going to be an expert, and even learning enough to write this review has taken me weeks longer than others who have reviewed it, but it is proving to be an intellectually fascinating and religiously rewarding beginning.

As with several other volumes in the Papers, this is a facsimile edition – oversize, with full color images of the Book of Abraham in both manuscript and first printed form. The facsimiles include those “related manuscripts” mentioned in the title, with which I had very little prior familiarity. With transcriptions on facing pages, this arrangement lets you spend all the time and effort you want to with the “original” materials, looking at the details, feeling the foreignness, trying – if that’s your bent – to put yourself in the place of Joseph Smith and his associates (Oliver Cowdery, William W. Phelps, Warren Parrish, and a few others) as they examined these documents, trying to understand what ancient wisdom they contained … with all the advantages of also being able to read a printed transcription on facing pages

The text that accompanies and frames and summarizes those facsimiles, though, is what I find most valuable. The Introduction tells us what we know – not nearly as much as we’d like to know – about where the papyri came from, how they reached Joseph Smith, why he cared, why he and a small group of associates put such effort into translating them – and especially about what “translation” means in the context of these Egyptian records.

And that is where the “religiously rewarding” aspect of struggling with this book comes in, for me:

These are very familiar verses from Doctrine and Covenants, Section 9:

7 Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me.

8 But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.

9 But if it be not right you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong; therefore, you cannot write that which is sacred save it be given you from me.

This passage is directed specifically to Oliver Cowdery, and it refers specifically to Oliver’s desire to translate the Book of Mormon in 1829, but they seem to have a direct relevance to efforts to translate the Book of Abraham a few years later – and as an illustration of the application of scripture beyond its original context, the parallel reassures me that such personal application is in fact a valid use of scripture. In the case of the Book of Abraham, there was no use (or little use; sparse accounts are contradictory) of a seer stone, no “spectacles” to assist with translation. Instead, Joseph and his associates “studied it out in their minds,” examining the characters found on the papyri Joseph had acquired in connection with Egyptian mummies during the heyday of Europeans’ and Americans’ fascination with all things Egyptian, and deciding – we do not know how – what various symbols meant. Frustratingly, we have no record of how they arrived at their understanding. The first documents (beyond facsimiles of the few surviving bits of papyri) in this Papers volume, however, preserve the results of their attempts at comprehension: The men copied characters from the papyri – not expertly, by any means, but I recognize from my own scattered attempts to learn something of non-roman alphabets that becoming familiar with the shapes of other writing forms, learning to distinguish one symbol from another, is an important first step in tackling an unfamiliar writing system. There was also a formal manuscript, their Egyptian Alphabet, where symbols were copied in columns, accompanied by notes on the sounds and meanings of those characters in their five “degrees” of meaning – without, I stress, any record of how they decided what character corresponded with what sound – as well as a homemade notebook in which they copied entire passages from the papyri, with their translations of those passages – again, without any explanation of their process. These “translations” do not accord with modern scholarly understanding, in the slightest, and they do not appear to have played any role in the later translation of the Book of Abraham. They do, however, provide concrete evidence of Joseph’s belief that “other records have I, that I will give unto you power that you may assist to translate” (D&C 9:2), and that translation would require diligent effort and study, and that he was willing to make that effort. Skeptics, of course, will look at the same effort and see only evidence of failure, or delusion – but I am unashamedly not a skeptic. The tools Joseph used in trying to understand are the only tools – faith, and mental effort – I have to use in any facet of my own life, so I like to see him exercising those same tools.

The dates of these early efforts to understand are unclear. They took place sometime in the mid-1830s, during the tumultuous times in Ohio and Missouri and the flight to Nauvoo. Once in Nauvoo, with a relatively stable and secure period, Joseph turned again to his Egyptian materials. This time, from what limited clues we have, the translation process did not involve a committee of associates, all trying to puzzle meaning from ancient records. When he took up the task again, in 1842, Joseph seems to relied entirely on his prophet gifts, dictating his translation to scribes who wrote down his words, much as they had done during the translation of the Book of Mormon. And just as Joseph dictated that Book of Mormon translation without always consulting the physical plates themselves, Joseph seems to have dictated the Book of Abraham without necessarily referring to the physical papyri.

Joseph’s use of the word “translation” for his production of the Book of Mormon, the Book of Abraham, and his notes on and additions to the Bible is idiosyncratic. That is, he did not “translate” in the common modern understanding of that word, as does someone who reads two languages and converts a text from one of those languages to the other. Joseph Smith did not read Egyptian, or the ancient Nephite language, or Hebrew (although he studied Hebrew, he did not produce his version of the Bible through the study and conversion of written Hebrew, or Greek, texts). Without elaboration, Joseph claimed only to translate “through the gift and power of God.”

Yet we are left with these scriptural texts which, with time and a willingness to treat them as serious works, seem ever more unlikely to have come solely from the brain of Joseph Smith. Through him, yes, with the imprint of his language, but too elaborate, too consistent, to have originated with him. The more we know about the Book of Abraham, incomplete as the historical record is, the more we can compare and contrast Joseph’s work on this book of scripture with the far more widely known and better understood translation of the Book of Mormon and his revision of the Bible. This volume from the Joseph Smith Papers brings me closer than I have ever been before to an understanding and appreciation of Joseph’s work on the Book of Abraham.