Your Book Review: The Book Of Abraham

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Shelf Tester · Jul 8, 2026 · 15 min read

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Part 1.

The Book of Abraham opens with this paragraph:

“A Translation of some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt. The writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus.”

As you can read, The Book of Abraham was written by grand patriarch Abraham upon papyrus while he was in Egypt. Someone managed to get their hands on these papyri and then subsequently translated them into English. This is of profound historical importance if true, because otherwise there is no direct evidence that Abraham existed as a specific historical individual.

Who got their hands on these writings? The Mormons. More specifically their founding prophet Joseph Smith who a few years previously translated some other Egyptian writings into the Book of Mormon. The Book of Abraham is not that well-known in comparison, but it’s considered canonical scripture in the Mormon church.

The Abraham papyri were obtained by the Mormons in 1835 from a traveling antiques exhibitor, five years after the formal establishment of the Mormon church. A time at which it was experiencing a surge of new converts, with the membership doubling from 1834 to 1835.

During these times there was an enormous fascination with the ancient world in the US and Europe, particularly ancient Egypt. After Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign in 1801, Mummies were exported by the thousands into Europe and the US, making them surprisingly cheap and common. People would pay good money to see mummies or ancient artifacts being toured around.

It even became fashionable among the wealthy to host “mummy unwrapping parties” where they would buy a mummy, then invite all their friends to a party where the main entertainment would be watching a showman slowly remove bandages from the mummy while loudly dramatizing the whole affair. Hoping to uncover some cool trinkets or artifacts that would make the guests gawk.

Which sounds deranged today, but isn’t really: status signals are somewhat arbitrary. Remember MTV’s “My Super Sweet 16,” where the birthday girl has a meltdown because her Porsche arrived in the wrong color? If modern Sally is allowed a freakout, so is Victorian Sally:

Among other brave endeavors, they would ground the mummies into a fine powder and consume it as medicine even though cannibalism was generally considered to be gravely sinful. Mummy powder was also used as an aphrodisiac. Reading all this, I couldn’t help but reflect a bit on that famous Percy Shelley poem:

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Interlude 1.

Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine. A piece of something resembling parchment would appear, and on that appeared the writing. One character at a time would appear, and under it was the interpretation in English.

The preceding paragraph is a quote from one of Joseph Smith’s scribes describing the translation process that produced The Book of Mormon (not The Book of Abraham).

Part 2.

Returning to The Book of Abraham, Joseph Smith published his translation in the church newspaper in 1842, seven years after discovering the papyri. Alongside the text, he included three illustrations copied directly from the original papyrus scrolls, famously known today as the three facsimiles:

These are known respectively as Facsimile Nos. 1, 2, and 3. As you can see, Joseph added small Arabic numerals to each Facsimile, linking parts of them to a commentary he put below where he explained what each part depicts. More on that later.

Interlude 2.

Around 1819, a teenage Joseph Smith walked three miles from his family’s farm to meet a girl named Sally Chase. Sally was, at the time, the most famous seer in Palmyra, New York.

Treasure-digging was a real industry in rural upstate New York. The Spanish, supposedly, had buried gold and silver caches across the region during forgotten colonial expeditions, and any farm boy with a shovel and the right spiritual gift might be the one to find them. The right spiritual gift usually involved a “seer stone” (also called a “peep stone”) a small smooth rock that, when consulted correctly, would reveal the location of the treasure to the seer’s spiritual eye. Hundreds, possibly thousands of Americans worked in the trade.

Part 5.

Let’s take stock. At this point in the story we have, on the table:

An ancient Egyptian text written by Abraham on papyrus, translated by a prophet

The original Abraham papyri destroyed in a fire in 1871

Three facsimiles, copied before the fire, that every Egyptologist who has looked at them since calls a standard funerary scene.

Three draft manuscripts of the translation with Egyptian characters in the left margin at a ratio that no real human language has with English

A “grammar” of the Egyptian language Joseph said he was writing, which bears no resemblance to actual Egyptian grammar

A prior career of treasure-digging via seer stones in hats

A subsequent incident, post-Abraham, of confidently translating known forged plates.

Victorian-Crypto Pump-and-Dump Anti-Banking scheme.

All of these have explanations. The grammar? A side project. The margin characters? Scribal exercises. The Egyptologists? Possibly biased, possibly pattern-matching. Abraham’s hired artist? Sloppy. Kinderhook? Joseph hastily uses a private lookup table, not actual revelation. The anti-bank? Conditional revelation, saints insufficiently righteous.

What we actually need to settle this is the source. The actual papyrus. Then either Joseph’s English matches what’s on it, or it doesn’t, and the matter is done. Unfortunately the papyri burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871…