In an
attempt to disparage the Book of Abraham, Christina Darlington wrote:
Nor could there possibility [sic] be any
additional text of these fragments found that would have connected these
funerary texts to Abraham as the Bible condemns all participation in the pagan,
occult ritual of communication with the dead (see Deuteronomy 18:10-12). (Christina
R. Darlington, Misguided by Mormonism But
Redeemed by God’s Grace: Leaving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints for Biblical Christianity [2d ed.; 2019], 59)
The problem
for Darlington is that the biblical authors used “pagan” (e.g., Canaanite and
Egyptian) sources in their inspired writings. For a discussion, see, for e.g.:
Kevin L.
Barney, The
Facsimiles and Semitic Adaptation of Existing Sources
Chapter 4:
Yahweh's Appropriation of Baal Imagery in John Day, Yahweh
and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan
As one
example, take Luke’s appropriation of the Egyptian narrative of Si-Osiris. As
Barney in his aforementioned essay writes:
Osiris-Abraham
Another example of Egyptian material being refracted through a
Semitic lens is provided by the story of the rich man and Lazarus, which is
recounted in Luke 16:19—31:
There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and
fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day: And there was a certain beggar
named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores, And desiring to be
fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs
came and licked his sores. And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was
carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was
buried; And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham
afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have
mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water,
and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. But Abraham said, Son,
remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise
Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. And
beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they
which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that
would come from thence. Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou
wouldest send him to my father’s house: For I have five brethren; that he may
testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment. Abraham
saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. And he
said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will
repent. And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither
will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.
In
his important study of this passage, Hugo Gressmann44 suggested that Luke’s account was based on a
popular Jewish version, perhaps written in Hebrew, of an Egyptian story.
Neither the Egyptian original nor the Jewish version of that original has survived;
nevertheless, their existence can be inferred from other documents that do
exist. The popular Jewish version can be deduced from seven late rabbinic
splinters; these texts almost certainly do not derive
directly from the Gospel of Luke. The Egyptian original is hypothesized based
on the Demotic story of Setna, described below.45 To analogize the relationship among these
texts in genealogical terms, the Egyptian original is like a grandfather, and
the popular Jewish version a father, to the account in Luke. The story of Setna
is a kind of uncle to the Lucan account, and the seven rabbinic splinters are
nieces and nephews of sorts.
The
Demotic story of Setna is known from a single papyrus manuscript in the British
Museum (Pap. DCIV).46 It was
written on the back of two Greek business documents, one of which was dated in
the seventh year of Claudius (A.D. 46—47). We can therefore suggest that the
Demotic story was written sometime during the next half century, or roughly
A.D. 50—100. According to the story, the magicians of Egypt were challenged by
an Ethiopian sorcerer, but no Egyptian was able to best the challenger. So an
Egyptian in Amnte, the abode of the dead, prayed in the presence of Osiris, the
ruler of Amnte, to return to the land of the living. Osiris commanded that he
should, and so the man, though dead for centuries, was reincarnated as the
miraculous offspring of a childless couple and given the name Si-Osiris (“Son
of Osiris”). Eventually, when the boy turned twelve, he dealt with the foreign sorcerer
and then vanished from Earth.
The part of the story that is relevant to Luke 16
takes place while the boy is growing up. One day the boy and his father see two
funerals: first, that of a rich man, shrouded in fine linen, loudly lamented
and abundantly honored; then, that of a poor man, wrapped in a straw mat,
unaccompanied and unmourned. The father says that he would rather have the lot
of the rich man than that of the pauper. Little Si-Osiris, however,
impertinently contradicts his father’s wish with an opposite one: “May it be
done to you in Amnte as it is done in Amnte to this pauper and not as it is
done to this rich man in Amnte!” In order to justify himself, the boy takes his
earthly father on a tour of Amnte.
Si-Osiris leads his father through the seven
classified halls of Amnte. The dead are assigned to one of the halls depending
on the merits and demerits of their mortal lives. In the fifth hall they see a
man in torment, the pivot of the door being fixed in his right eye socket,
because of which he grievously laments. In the seventh they see Osiris
enthroned, the ruler of Amnte, and near him a man clothed in fine linen and
evidently of very high rank. Si-Osiris identifies the finely clad man as the
miserably buried pauper and the tormented one as the sumptuously buried rich
man. The reason for this disparate treatment is that, at the judgment, the good
deeds of the pauper outweighed the bad, but with the rich man the opposite was
true. Now the father is able to understand the filial wish of Si-Osiris.
Once
again we are able to see how the Egyptian story has been transformed in Semitic
dress. The angels of the Lucan account appear to be an instrumentality
substituted for Horus (or the falcon of Horus).47The “bosom of Abraham” represents Amnte, the
Egyptian abode of the dead. And, most remarkably, Abraham is a Jewish
substitute for the pagan god Osiris—just as is the case in Facsimiles 1 and 3.
These relationships are summarized in a chart following the article.
Notes for the Above:
44.
Hugo Gressmann, Vom reichen Mann und armen Lazarus: Eine
literargeschichtliche Studie (Berlin: Königliche Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 1918); K. Grobel, “‘. . . Whose Name Was Neves,'” New Testament Studies 10 (1963—1964): 373—82. LDS
scholars have begun to cite Grobel, as in H. Donl Peterson, “Book of Abraham:
Origin of the Book of Abraham,” in Encyclopedia of Mormonism,
1:134. We should note that the first LDS scholar to recognize the significance
of Gressmann’s and Grobel’s work to the Book of Abraham was Blake T. Ostler,
“Abraham: An Egyptian Connection” (FARMS paper, 1981). For the original text
see Francis Llewellyn Griffith, Stories of the High Priests of
Memphis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), 142—207, and plates.
45. See Grobel’s chart,
which is also reproduced in Ostler, “An Egyptian Connection,” 18.
46. My description of the
text closely follows that of Grobel, “Neves.”
47. Grobel, “Neves,” 378.
If
Darlington is correct, she will, if she were to be consistent, reject the Bible as inspired scripture and condemn
authors such as Luke as violating Deut 18:10-12.
