In his excellent review of Dan Vogel’s Book of Abraham Apologetics: A Review and Critique (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2021), Stephen Smoot wrote the following in a footnote that I found to be “spot-on”:
Vogel makes a rather astonishing admission
here that might go unnoticed if the reader is not paying close attention. Vogel
states,
In July 1835, Smith started to dictate
the English text of the Book of Abraham from a copy of the Egyptian funerary
manual Book of Breathings once owned by an Egyptian [sic] priest named Hôr but
soon interrupted his dictation to compile an Alphabet and then a Grammar and
Alphabet of Egyptian, in which he gave ‘translations’ of random hieratic-looking
characters. (217)
If we follow Vogel’s logic here,
Joseph Smith was able to produce fanciful content for his pseudepigraphic Book
of Abraham on the fly in July 1835 after his initial encounter with the papyri,
but for some inexplicable reason decided to suddenly stop to first produce a
convoluted alphabet and grammar system to translate the text he was already
capable of simply making up in the first place. Vogel, it would seem, wants to
have it both ways—he both ways Joseph Smith to be dependent on the Grammar and Alphabet
but also able to materialize content out of thin air without the aid of the
Grammar and Alphabet. (Stephen O. Smoot, “Framing
the Book of Abraham: Presumptions and Paradigms,” Interpreter: A Journal
of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 47 [2021]: 325 n. 106; see also Jeff
Lindsay’s review in the same volume)
