Joseph Smith's Translation Skills

Mike Licona at Baptist Press has the second in his three-part series on Mormonism today.

In it, he tells of a time when he discussed Mormonism with a couple of Mormon missionaries and did some extensive research into the origins of Mormonism and their sacred documents, even talking to a couple of Book of Mormon archaeologists at Brigham Young University.

I won't reveal all that he found, but perhaps the most devastating thing Licona discovered during his research concerned a Mormon document called the Book of Abraham, which Mormonism founder Joseph Smith says was written in the same "Reformed Egyptian" language as the golden tablets of the Book of Mormon he said he found, but no one has ever seen.

Smith obtained the papyri in 1835 along with some mummies he bought and said he translated them, just as he did the golden tablets, with the Book of Abraham (supposedly written by the patriarch Abraham) as the outcome.

The papyri for the Book of Abraham were lost for 100 years or more, but turned up again in 1967. John Wilson and Klaus Baer, both professors of Egyptology at the University of Chicago, and Richard Parker, a professor of Egyptology at Brown University, were asked to provide a "fresh" translation of these documents.

Well, it turns out these documents were just a copy of documents commonly buried with the dead--and the practice of including these documents at burial didn't even start until 1000 years after Abraham's time. Even more devastating: their text wasn't even anything remotely like what Joseph Smith claimed.

Licona points out the obvious conclusion:

Therefore, at best, Joseph Smith was mistaken to believe that he had the ability to translate Reformed Egyptian and, therefore, we should render the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham as unreliable. At worst, he was a fraud, and the gold plates he said he found and translated into the Book of Mormon never existed in the first place.

In other words, if Joseph Smith really believed he was divinely given the gift to translate and that the Book of Mormon contains an historical account of real peoples, he was either self-deluded or deceived. The other option is that Joseph Smith knew his claims were false. If this was the case, he was a deceiver. Deceived or deceiver? Either way, it seems pretty clear that Joseph Smith was not a prophet of God. Accordingly, despite the fact that the Mormon church embraces a few beliefs in line with biblical Christianity it is demonstrably a false religion.