Hi Prestor John :
1) Firstly : I was, honestly, not trying to embarrass Watchmen, but merely to point out the compete absurdity of his silly premise and it's position.
Watchmen offered multiple interpretations in his O.P. which conflict with Joseph Smiths explanation. I used his #1 example. Watchmens' interpretation of the Bird in the facsimile is “The spirit or “ba” of Hor (The deceased fellow)”
However, his own interpretations are, according to multiple Egyptologists (who he himself sites) incorrect.
Deveria says the bird is “the soul of Osiris under the form of a hawk,..., Spaulding also accepts Deverias authority. Petrie says the bird “is the hawk Horus”. Breasted says the bird represents “Isis” in the hawk form. Sayce, mace, and Mercer were either unable or unwilling to commit to a meaning of anything in the facsimile. Neither does Budge use this symbol for a persons “ba” in almost 700 pages of his interpretation of an entire Book of the Dead. So while watchmen claims : "My interpretation is correct because it comes from modern Egyptologists..", he then has to tell us why his egyptologist is correct against all of the above majority egyptologists who say he is incorrect.
For example, If a reader simply googles the symbol for the egyptian "ba" as a hieroglyph (i.e. not as a three dimensional necklass or talisman), then it is easily seen that Watchmens claim looks nothing like the egyptian "ba" (though the internet IS the source of watchmens' qualification to interpret egyptian according to him).
My point was that when watchmen offered readers erroneous and bad data and then pointed out that smith disagrees with that bad and erroneous data, it doesn’t show Smith was wrong at all. It simply shows a willingness to use bad data to influence others. This doesn’t tell anything important about Smith. It tells us something important about Watchmen.
2) Secondly : the test Watchmen wants to subject the Facsimile to, cannot prove what he seems to want to prove to himself. For example :
The depiction is not a standard Egyptian hypostele :
The early egyptologists, (set up by Spaulding) said that the scene was : ““ a well-known scene, (mercer) “merely the usual scene,” (Lithgoe) “figures...well known to Egyptologists and ...easy of interpretation,” (Mercer) “depicted...unnumbered thousands of times.”. If this is a typical, common scene, then one might suppose that the experts could come to some agreement on what this simple and obvious scene should mean. However, all of them disagreed on each of the items in the facsimile and none agreed on everything. It was a "keystone cops" attempt to translate a basic "Dick and Jane" difficultly level that resulted in much embarrassment to the egyptologists involved.
The Egyptologist James Breasted even claimed the facsimile was part of an incredibly common series of documents saying :
“a whole nation of people who employed them in every human burial, which they prepared”.
“publications of fac-similes of this resurrection scene....could be furnish in indefinite numbers.”
“the three facsimiles...will be and has been found in unnumbered thousands in egyptian graves....they were in universal use among the pagan egyptians.”
“to sum up,...these three facsimiles...depict the most common objects in the mortuary religion of Egypt..”
Meyer, Petrie, Lythgoe, Sayce and Breasted all made similar silly statements.
However, no duplicate of this facsimile has ever been found. Not a single one. This one is different than the “unnumbered thousands in Egyptian graves” Breasted described.
Joseph Smith claimed it was different as well.
The discovery that this facsimile had no duplicate among the "unnumbered thousands" means it is different and must be examined differently.
3) Thirdly, If the facsimile is different because is it a hebrew redaction, then to prove it either true or false, one must look at it as a redaction and see if it fits or not.
Watchmens attempt to prove that the object cannot be taken at face value must show that it cannot be taken at face value. While Watchmen (who claims his internet research is his qualification to “translate” Egyptian) and other egyptian “historians” show us wonderful examples of how none of them agree on even the first and simple symbol of the bird, they are all trying to assign different and conflicting values to an egyptian story. This cannot tell them if it is a hebrew redaction or not, nor what the symbols meant inside a hebrew redaction of Egyptian symbols.
None of them are considering the basic fact that the claim is that this record is different because it is NOT telling an egyptian story. It is a redacted hebrew story, attempting to be told in egyptian symbology. AND, the redactor is attempting to use “stock” egyptian symbols to represent foreign concepts and/or he must modify the standard symbols to have new meaning.
Mixing of stock and standard symbols
I already gave a simple example of mixing of symbols, showing that I use german words, written in greek letters that appears below my name “Clear” in all of my posts (there is one at the bottom of this post as well). However examples of the effect of this mixing of symbols is happening all around us.
Americans can say “you are welcome” whereas in proper spanish, one cannot literally say the same thing and mean the same thing. The “Por nada” (for nothing) they offer literally means “for nothing” instead of “you’re welcome”. The transliteration “you-are-well-come” is simply “gibberish” in Spanish (and transliteration IS what the egyptian “translators” are attempting). It is NOT the same as either translation OR interpretation. The mix of words and concepts are merely approximations, yet it is the mixture that causes problems.
How does a hebrew redactor transmit an ancient hebrew story, using stock and unyielding egyptian symbology?
Can he do it any more accurately and literally than the mexican is able to translate “you are welcome” in his language?
Are we it correct to expect that this could be done?
How does a hebrew redactor, for example, tell the story of the hebrew God, who is different than the egyptian Gods? (And he must tell a story about Abraham and the Hebrew God, but must use stock Egyptian symbols having a meaning that is foreign to the hebrew symbol set......). For example, one could try to tell the story of Jesus and the crucifixion and the atonement using stock symbology of the Norse and their Gods. Does one use Odin in the place of the Hebrew God? How does one then accurately tell a hebrew/Christian story using Norse symbology?
This is one difference that I see between the two arguments. One side is forcing the symbols into a pre-conceived and artificial mold that they can never fit, and then simply pointing out that it does not fit. The LDS respond “well duh!”, that is what we claimed in the first place! It isn't a stock Egyptian story...
The correct approach is evaluating the symbols using the claims the story makes for itself and seeing if it fits into the external historical world it claims for itself. And, as I've demonstrated, the doctrines within the Book of Abraham seems to fit into that ancient doctrinal world and it’s world views with impossibly correct preciseness.
This is another reason the arguments have gone on for almost 200 years without any conclusion at all regarding the facsimile. Obviously, the historical fact is that Joseph Smith restored much of early Judeo-Christian theology. The question is, how could he have done this without revelation. It is the question watchmen could not, and did not attempt to answer.
Clear
σιτωδρω
