Meditations on Vogel, Appendix G: Robert Ritner
A professor is only a professor when acting as such, just as a Prophet is only a Prophet when acting as such.
I don't mean that as an insult. I just mean that we all are human.
I recently returned to apologetics after a protracted absence due to anxiety and depression, along with other mental challenges. One of the first things I did after deciding to come back was pick up a used copy of Robert Ritner's book, The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri.
He sums up the tone of his book on page 94: "Except for those willfully blind, the case is closed."
I prefer the more measured tone of Ritner's esteemed colleague Emily Teeter, when she said: "What I learned in graduate school, 25-30 years ago, it's basically all wrong," speaking of everything she learned about the predynastic era, the earliest and longest Egyptian era - which is the era Joseph Smith focuses most heavily on in his Egyptian Alphabet, where he repeatedly refers to the creation and the first days of Egypt. Teeter's comment came during her presentation at the Oriental Institute's "Before the Pyramids" exhibit, and indeed Joseph Smith makes no mention of pyramids in his Egyptian Alphabet, despite the pyramids being the single most defining characteristic of Egypt. Interesting, that.
Don't get me wrong, I am grateful for Ritner's scholarship and he is at his best when he is simply presenting established Egyptological facts instead of attempting to analyze Joseph Smith. But one gets the impression that Ritner read Fawn Brodie and then felt he was qualified to lecture the world about Joseph Smith.
For instance, on the very first page of his introduction, Ritner cites Brodie in a footnote to support the false claim that Joseph Smith "noted in his journal that he 'translated a portion'" of the Kinderhook Plates. Contra Ritner, it was in fact William Clayton who said as much, in his own personal journal. Perhaps critics will look at this and think it makes no difference. But that attitude is precisely the problem. Facts do matter, and in this case the misunderstanding may have prevented Ritner from seeing that Joseph Smith was likely talking about the Hor Book of Breathings, which multiple sources tell us he translated a portion of, and not the Kinderhook Plates, as Clayton, in his exuberance, likely misunderstood - which I explain in my post regarding the subject.
Ritner begins the second page with another false claim, stating that Josiah Quincy's account of Joseph exhibiting the mummies and papyri to him is "representative" of the statements Joseph Smith made to other people concerning the mummies and papyri, which is blatantly false. Quincy has Smith identifying the male mummy as "Pharaoh Necho," speaking of him as a "little runt," and claiming the papyri contained the autograph of Moses and lines written by his brother, Aaron. The Quincy account is in fact very different from other accounts and is unreliable: it was published in 1883, after being reworked, and seems to be caricaturing the experience. For instance, he says Joseph Smith's mother purchased the papyri, which is not true, and that the price was 6,000 dollars, which is also not true. Here it looks like Quincy combined two separate ideas - that the papyri had been purchased and that Joseph's mother owned them – into a single claim. And, he did so without attention to the finer details. Moreover, Quincy's journal entry is less reliable because it was apparently rewritten to make it more suitable for publication. In his introduction, Quincy states:
"...a friend, who had read my journals with interest, offered me his most valuable aid in what may be called the literary responsibilities of the undertaking. My narratives have gained in grace of expression as they passed beneath the correcting pen of my obliging critic, and I am confident that a stern exercise of his right of curtailing reflections and omitting incidents has been no less for the reader's advantage."
With equally unmitigated certainty, Robert Ritner issued a direct response to the Church essay on the Book of Abraham, in which he said, “No amount of special pleading can change the female ‘Isis the great, the god’s mother’ (Facsimile 3, Fig. 2) into the male ‘King Pharaoh, whose name is given in the characters above his hand.’“
Ritner is incorrectly quoting Joseph, who said "head," not "hand." But since Ritner assumes Joseph is a fraud, he doesn't pay attention. Here’s what Joseph Smith actually said in his Facsimile 3, figure 2 explanation: “King Pharaoh, whose name is given in the characters above his head.” To the outsider, it might seem as though Ritner made a meaningless mistake. But in terms of serious scholarship, Joseph’s use of the word “head” in Figure 2 should stick out like a sore thumb in contrast to his use of the word “hand” in the other instances. In figures 4 and 5, Joseph refers to characters “above the hand” and “above his hand,” respectively. But in figure 2, he says “above his head,” not “above his hand.” If Joseph wanted to refer to the characters above figure 2's hand, he could have said “hand,” like he did in the other cases.
In point of fact, the characters above the hand do not even represent Isis. To be clear, Ritner is not getting the name Isis from the characters on the facsimile. Instead, he assumes the characters which are there do not belong there. Then he tells us the name Isis should be there instead (even though it's not there). After which, he tries to use that as evidence that Joseph got the name wrong.
Out of the columns in Facsimile 3, the man who taught Ritner Egyptian, Klaus Baer, only felt comfortable translating the text for figure 5, and Joseph Smith got it right, as I discuss here.
The problem with Ritner's approach to translating in this case is that Ritner assumes the scribe's intent and imposes that assumption onto the translation, then uses that translation to declare what the scribe's intent supposedly was. So he claims he's refuting the idea that the scribe was adapting these figures for other purposes, but he starts with the assumption that the scribe was not. However, if we start with the assumption that the scribe was adapting the figures, then proceed to beg the facsimile to prove us wrong, it is unable to do so.
He knows, for instance, that early Christians used images of Isis to represent the Virgin Mary - with no alterations made to the image. If one didn't know those images were adapted, it would of course be reasonable to simply identify them as Isis - however, if one were trying to refute the idea that they were adapted, it would be completely unreasonable to start with the assumption that they are not adapted. It would be wrong-headed to say that "no amount of special pleading can turn Isis into Mary."
Ritner is a great Egyptologist and brings with him some good information when he focuses on facts. But he's no Seer, and he should have viewed Joseph through a different lens.
I don't mean that as an insult. I just mean that we all are human.
I recently returned to apologetics after a protracted absence due to anxiety and depression, along with other mental challenges. One of the first things I did after deciding to come back was pick up a used copy of Robert Ritner's book, The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri.
He sums up the tone of his book on page 94: "Except for those willfully blind, the case is closed."
I prefer the more measured tone of Ritner's esteemed colleague Emily Teeter, when she said: "What I learned in graduate school, 25-30 years ago, it's basically all wrong," speaking of everything she learned about the predynastic era, the earliest and longest Egyptian era - which is the era Joseph Smith focuses most heavily on in his Egyptian Alphabet, where he repeatedly refers to the creation and the first days of Egypt. Teeter's comment came during her presentation at the Oriental Institute's "Before the Pyramids" exhibit, and indeed Joseph Smith makes no mention of pyramids in his Egyptian Alphabet, despite the pyramids being the single most defining characteristic of Egypt. Interesting, that.
Don't get me wrong, I am grateful for Ritner's scholarship and he is at his best when he is simply presenting established Egyptological facts instead of attempting to analyze Joseph Smith. But one gets the impression that Ritner read Fawn Brodie and then felt he was qualified to lecture the world about Joseph Smith.
For instance, on the very first page of his introduction, Ritner cites Brodie in a footnote to support the false claim that Joseph Smith "noted in his journal that he 'translated a portion'" of the Kinderhook Plates. Contra Ritner, it was in fact William Clayton who said as much, in his own personal journal. Perhaps critics will look at this and think it makes no difference. But that attitude is precisely the problem. Facts do matter, and in this case the misunderstanding may have prevented Ritner from seeing that Joseph Smith was likely talking about the Hor Book of Breathings, which multiple sources tell us he translated a portion of, and not the Kinderhook Plates, as Clayton, in his exuberance, likely misunderstood - which I explain in my post regarding the subject.
Ritner begins the second page with another false claim, stating that Josiah Quincy's account of Joseph exhibiting the mummies and papyri to him is "representative" of the statements Joseph Smith made to other people concerning the mummies and papyri, which is blatantly false. Quincy has Smith identifying the male mummy as "Pharaoh Necho," speaking of him as a "little runt," and claiming the papyri contained the autograph of Moses and lines written by his brother, Aaron. The Quincy account is in fact very different from other accounts and is unreliable: it was published in 1883, after being reworked, and seems to be caricaturing the experience. For instance, he says Joseph Smith's mother purchased the papyri, which is not true, and that the price was 6,000 dollars, which is also not true. Here it looks like Quincy combined two separate ideas - that the papyri had been purchased and that Joseph's mother owned them – into a single claim. And, he did so without attention to the finer details. Moreover, Quincy's journal entry is less reliable because it was apparently rewritten to make it more suitable for publication. In his introduction, Quincy states:
"...a friend, who had read my journals with interest, offered me his most valuable aid in what may be called the literary responsibilities of the undertaking. My narratives have gained in grace of expression as they passed beneath the correcting pen of my obliging critic, and I am confident that a stern exercise of his right of curtailing reflections and omitting incidents has been no less for the reader's advantage."
We might reasonably suppose that any of Joseph Smith's detailed, clarifying remarks, which Quincy may conceivably have originally written down, would have been edited out as part of that "stern exercise of his right of curtailing reflections and omitting incidents..."
In further support of this view is the statement from Quincy's account: "This is the autograph of Moses, and these lines were written by his brother Aaron. Here we have the earliest account of the creation, from which Moses composed the first book of Genesis." Since this was May of 1844, Joseph had long since already translated both the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham. But Quincy and his friend appear not to realize that the Book of Moses had in fact come from a translation of the Bible, not from a translation of the papyri, so in print it ended up in a narrative of the papyri - and this is perhaps the type of liberty which Quincy calls the “grace of expression” in the introductory excerpt to his book, cited above.
Continuing on in Ritner's introduction, he closes that paragraph by falsely indicating that Joseph came up with "Su-e-eh-ni" in 1844, when in fact the word Ritner refers to is from Joseph's Egyptian Alphabet and had been there since 1835-1836. Moreover, the commentary Joseph provides in his Egyptian Alphabet for Su-e-eh-ni, "What other person is that or who" fits well with the adaptation of the vignettes, which Joseph would have likely been trying to figure out when initially making sense of the papyri - but Ritner seems uninterested in what Joseph may have been up to and offers no explanation.
In the next paragraph, Ritner mentions the Book of Abraham being canonized in 1880, contrasting this with the Community of Christ view of it as "mere speculative writing" - however, Ritner fails to note that the Reorganized Church (since renamed Community of Christ) used the Book of Abraham as a legitimate source for some time even though they didn't canonize it.
And it continues on like this throughout Ritner's commentary in the book. Ritner explicitly assumes Joseph is a fraud and feels safe proceeding with that bias at every corner.
But even when it comes to his area of expertise, he wasn't doing due diligence.
In further support of this view is the statement from Quincy's account: "This is the autograph of Moses, and these lines were written by his brother Aaron. Here we have the earliest account of the creation, from which Moses composed the first book of Genesis." Since this was May of 1844, Joseph had long since already translated both the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham. But Quincy and his friend appear not to realize that the Book of Moses had in fact come from a translation of the Bible, not from a translation of the papyri, so in print it ended up in a narrative of the papyri - and this is perhaps the type of liberty which Quincy calls the “grace of expression” in the introductory excerpt to his book, cited above.
Continuing on in Ritner's introduction, he closes that paragraph by falsely indicating that Joseph came up with "Su-e-eh-ni" in 1844, when in fact the word Ritner refers to is from Joseph's Egyptian Alphabet and had been there since 1835-1836. Moreover, the commentary Joseph provides in his Egyptian Alphabet for Su-e-eh-ni, "What other person is that or who" fits well with the adaptation of the vignettes, which Joseph would have likely been trying to figure out when initially making sense of the papyri - but Ritner seems uninterested in what Joseph may have been up to and offers no explanation.
In the next paragraph, Ritner mentions the Book of Abraham being canonized in 1880, contrasting this with the Community of Christ view of it as "mere speculative writing" - however, Ritner fails to note that the Reorganized Church (since renamed Community of Christ) used the Book of Abraham as a legitimate source for some time even though they didn't canonize it.
And it continues on like this throughout Ritner's commentary in the book. Ritner explicitly assumes Joseph is a fraud and feels safe proceeding with that bias at every corner.
But even when it comes to his area of expertise, he wasn't doing due diligence.
At one point, Ritner said Facsimile 1, figure 1 should be a "human-headed bird that represents the soul of the deceased individual," and claimed it was "wrongly restored with a bird's head" instead of a human head (see Ritner's footnote 28, here). However, Ritner would later identify the figure as the goddess Nephthys, with a fully bird head, which contradicted his earlier claim that it had been wrongly restored by having a bird's head. John Dehlin asked him about that, because it didn't match the reference Dehlin had ready in advance as being the correct Egyptological interpretation. So, Ritner said it might be the ba spirit of Hor, the papyrus owner, instead. However, Ritner incorrectly said that the ba is a bird-headed spirit, which he corrected soon after. But he seemed to forget that the head of the bird had needed to be partially restored, which had been the basis of his initial criticism years earlier (when he said it was incorrectly restored as a bird's head... only to later agree that it should be a bird's head).
This is instructive for a couple of reasons. First, Ritner seemed to have only dabbled in the specifics related to Joseph Smith. And, second, Ritner didn't take all Egyptological facts into account before criticizing Joseph Smith.
In another example, on page 93 of his book he identified the crocodile (Facsimile 1, Figure 9) as "Horus-Sobek," but when asked by John Dehlin to explain the figure, Ritner only would say the figure was Sobek and when Dehlin pointed out that his fact sheet identified the figure as Horus, Ritner was reluctant to admit an association with Horus, and he said he was "not responsible for the statement that it's Horus," despite having directly associated the figure with Horus at an earlier date.
And Ritner evidently forgot that his own mentor, Klaus Baer, identified the figure as Horus, explaining that Isis "was helped by Horus in the shape of a crocodile, who is represented in the water (the zigzags) below the vignette" (p. 118). In part III of the interview, Ritner does say that he went back and looked at his earlier writings and saw that he had in fact associated the figure with Horus, and that Baer had, so he said that was probably correct.
At one point, Ritner, further distancing the Pharaoh/Horus connection, even claimed that Joseph thought Pharaoh was a personal name for purposes of the facsimile explanation, which shows again Ritner's poor modus operandi in relation to Joseph Smith. The Book of Abraham was a translation, where Joseph was adapting words for his modern-day audience, as I explain in this post, so Ritner didn't understand the complexity of the issue but jumped in with an irrelevant claim which would make Joseph look bad while having nothing to do with an objective assessment of the adaptation theory or anything else relevant to Joseph's explanation.
We can't know what Ritner was thinking, but he seems oblivious to perspectives that could help us understand where Joseph Smith was coming from, and jumps the gun whenever it could hurt Joseph.
Similarly, Ritner dismisses the right hand of the figure on the lion-couch in facsimile 1 as the dappled tip of a wing, yet it can now be demonstrated, as Fairmormon has done, that those are not dapple marks at all but are remains of straight lines after ink has flaked off. Now, it may or may not be a wing, but calling them dapple marks contradicts the idea of them being fingers, which leads the reader to falsely believe that Joseph has been proven wrong, and proven wrong by "the real Egyptological facts." Why did Ritner not consider the ink flaking off, which turned out to be true, and instead insisted on getting the facts wrong by going straight to the least favorable possibility for Joseph?
At the same time, with a wave of his own hand, Ritner casually dismisses the vignette's other hand as being identical to depictions in which the hand of Osiris is held to the face. This, despite the fact that the hand in the vignette is depicted at an upper angle, away from the face, which is the opposite of the other depictions. Ritner cannot offer even one other example in a similar scene where the arm is at an upper angle, so he simply does not address it.
Ritner just as casually mentions that the lion couch vignette and the instructions for the text are supposed to be at the end of the roll but that the scribe inverted them. Does Ritner know of any potential reasons for why the scribe did this? He doesn't say. But it adds to a list of anomalies which make this vignette unique. Anomalies support an adaptation theory, because they indicate the scribe was doing something different than would otherwise be expected. In the case of the scribe surprisingly inverting the lion couch vignette, that fits well with my theory that the scribe, who would have probably been acting under direction of the papyrus owner, was trying to compensate for the destroyed vignette on the very ancient papyrus containing the Book of Abraham, trying to reconstruct the scene based on the description in the book itself, but working with Ptolemaic-era figures which the scribe knew how to draw (adapting them for the other purpose).
Dr. Ritner claims with absolute, unmitigated certainty that Joseph Smith represented the text of the Hor roll as being the text of the Book of Abraham. But Joseph actually said the text was a record of the mummy, and never said the text of the Hor roll or text of any of the funerary papyri was about Abraham, and, on the Hor roll, only that the vignettes were part of the Book of Abraham, which makes sense in the context of my Book of Abraham theory. Critics rely on characters from the Book of Breathings copied into margins in early manuscripts of the Book of Abraham, and I explain in my theory why their argument is weak.
No amount of special pleading can change the words on the bill of sale signed by Emma: "from translations by Mr. Smith of the Records these Mummies were found to be the family of Pharo King of Egypt," into Joseph claiming the text of the funerary documents was the text of the Book of Abraham. In fact, Emma never claimed the text of the Book of Abraham was among the papyri being sold - a glaring omission if Joseph had actually claimed the funerary papyri contained the Abraham text.
And, of course, the funerary papyri indeed declares that the mummies are King Osiris (Ritner himself said, "Hor is repeatedly and explicitly stated to be deified, a member of the company of the gods, and a form of Osiris" see footnote 51), whom Egyptians believed to be the first Pharaoh, so Joseph was evidently right, although anyone Joseph mentioned this to in 1835 on the American frontier would not have understood the Egyptian theology (and thus only gotten the idea that they were royal), and we don't have the exact quotes from Joseph on this, to trace the natural extrapolation.
At the same time, with a wave of his own hand, Ritner casually dismisses the vignette's other hand as being identical to depictions in which the hand of Osiris is held to the face. This, despite the fact that the hand in the vignette is depicted at an upper angle, away from the face, which is the opposite of the other depictions. Ritner cannot offer even one other example in a similar scene where the arm is at an upper angle, so he simply does not address it.
Ritner just as casually mentions that the lion couch vignette and the instructions for the text are supposed to be at the end of the roll but that the scribe inverted them. Does Ritner know of any potential reasons for why the scribe did this? He doesn't say. But it adds to a list of anomalies which make this vignette unique. Anomalies support an adaptation theory, because they indicate the scribe was doing something different than would otherwise be expected. In the case of the scribe surprisingly inverting the lion couch vignette, that fits well with my theory that the scribe, who would have probably been acting under direction of the papyrus owner, was trying to compensate for the destroyed vignette on the very ancient papyrus containing the Book of Abraham, trying to reconstruct the scene based on the description in the book itself, but working with Ptolemaic-era figures which the scribe knew how to draw (adapting them for the other purpose).
Dr. Ritner claims with absolute, unmitigated certainty that Joseph Smith represented the text of the Hor roll as being the text of the Book of Abraham. But Joseph actually said the text was a record of the mummy, and never said the text of the Hor roll or text of any of the funerary papyri was about Abraham, and, on the Hor roll, only that the vignettes were part of the Book of Abraham, which makes sense in the context of my Book of Abraham theory. Critics rely on characters from the Book of Breathings copied into margins in early manuscripts of the Book of Abraham, and I explain in my theory why their argument is weak.
No amount of special pleading can change the words on the bill of sale signed by Emma: "from translations by Mr. Smith of the Records these Mummies were found to be the family of Pharo King of Egypt," into Joseph claiming the text of the funerary documents was the text of the Book of Abraham. In fact, Emma never claimed the text of the Book of Abraham was among the papyri being sold - a glaring omission if Joseph had actually claimed the funerary papyri contained the Abraham text.
And, of course, the funerary papyri indeed declares that the mummies are King Osiris (Ritner himself said, "Hor is repeatedly and explicitly stated to be deified, a member of the company of the gods, and a form of Osiris" see footnote 51), whom Egyptians believed to be the first Pharaoh, so Joseph was evidently right, although anyone Joseph mentioned this to in 1835 on the American frontier would not have understood the Egyptian theology (and thus only gotten the idea that they were royal), and we don't have the exact quotes from Joseph on this, to trace the natural extrapolation.
With equally unmitigated certainty, Robert Ritner issued a direct response to the Church essay on the Book of Abraham, in which he said, “No amount of special pleading can change the female ‘Isis the great, the god’s mother’ (Facsimile 3, Fig. 2) into the male ‘King Pharaoh, whose name is given in the characters above his hand.’“
Ritner is incorrectly quoting Joseph, who said "head," not "hand." But since Ritner assumes Joseph is a fraud, he doesn't pay attention. Here’s what Joseph Smith actually said in his Facsimile 3, figure 2 explanation: “King Pharaoh, whose name is given in the characters above his head.” To the outsider, it might seem as though Ritner made a meaningless mistake. But in terms of serious scholarship, Joseph’s use of the word “head” in Figure 2 should stick out like a sore thumb in contrast to his use of the word “hand” in the other instances. In figures 4 and 5, Joseph refers to characters “above the hand” and “above his hand,” respectively. But in figure 2, he says “above his head,” not “above his hand.” If Joseph wanted to refer to the characters above figure 2's hand, he could have said “hand,” like he did in the other cases.
In point of fact, the characters above the hand do not even represent Isis. To be clear, Ritner is not getting the name Isis from the characters on the facsimile. Instead, he assumes the characters which are there do not belong there. Then he tells us the name Isis should be there instead (even though it's not there). After which, he tries to use that as evidence that Joseph got the name wrong.
Out of the columns in Facsimile 3, the man who taught Ritner Egyptian, Klaus Baer, only felt comfortable translating the text for figure 5, and Joseph Smith got it right, as I discuss here.
The problem with Ritner's approach to translating in this case is that Ritner assumes the scribe's intent and imposes that assumption onto the translation, then uses that translation to declare what the scribe's intent supposedly was. So he claims he's refuting the idea that the scribe was adapting these figures for other purposes, but he starts with the assumption that the scribe was not. However, if we start with the assumption that the scribe was adapting the figures, then proceed to beg the facsimile to prove us wrong, it is unable to do so.
He knows, for instance, that early Christians used images of Isis to represent the Virgin Mary - with no alterations made to the image. If one didn't know those images were adapted, it would of course be reasonable to simply identify them as Isis - however, if one were trying to refute the idea that they were adapted, it would be completely unreasonable to start with the assumption that they are not adapted. It would be wrong-headed to say that "no amount of special pleading can turn Isis into Mary."
Ritner is a great Egyptologist and brings with him some good information when he focuses on facts. But he's no Seer, and he should have viewed Joseph through a different lens.
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