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Qualified for What? 3 Qualified for What? “But surely,” we hear again and again, “such great schol- ars should be able to decide on this particular case with- out any trouble.” Should they? Being a great scholar, while it gives people the impression that one is an authority on many things, is possible only because one is an authority on a few things. It is precisely the great authority, C. S. Lewis reminds us, that we should mistrust: “It sounds a strange charge to bring against men who have been steeped in those books all their lives,” he writes of the leading New Testament scholars, “but that might be just the trouble. A man who has spent his youth and manhood in the minute study of New Testament texts and of other people’s studies of them . is, I should think, very likely to miss the obvious things about them.” 1 Lewis then proceeds to cite examples in the field of This chapter consists of the remainder of parts 3 and 4 of “A New Look at the Pearl of Great Price” that were not reprinted in Abraham in Egypt, CWHN 14. “Part 3: Empaneling the Panel” originally appeared in the series “A New Look at the Pearl of Great Price” in IE 71 (July 1968): 48–55; most of part 3 appeared in Abraham in Egypt, CWHN 14: 127–44. “Part 4: Second String” originally appeared in the series “A New Look at the Pearl of Great Price” in IE 71 (August 1968): 53–64; the first section of part 4 appeared in Abraham in Egypt, CWHN 14: 144–56. 1. C. S. Lewis, “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” in Chris- tian Reflections (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967) , 154. 95 96 AN APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM biblical scholarship, but the best examples of all must surely be furnished by the Egyptologists. Every Egyptologist is by necessity a specialist, if only because Egyptian is written in three totally different scripts, and as the outpouring of specialized studies has steadily increased in volume, especially since World War II, the spe- cialists have become even more specialized. Jean Leclant noted in 1966 that the last of the real “all-round” Egyptolo- gists are fast dying off.2 Shortly before his death, Sir Alan Gardiner, who was certainly one of those great ones, com- plained that it was “impossible for any student to keep abreast of all that is written save at the cost of abandoning all hope of personal contributions.” 3 And those contribu- tions become ever more personal, according to Jean Capart, things having reached the point where “the authors some- times confine themselves to reading nothing but their own works while systematically turning their backs on those of their colleagues.” 4 Many years ago Capart cited Heinrich Schäfer’s complaint that the study of Egyptian religion had made little or no progress through the years because the experts, like the blind wise men examining the elephant, were each content to study and report on one limited department only; all their lives, Capart notes, Gaston Mas- pero and Alfred Wiedemann had protested against that sort of thing—but in vain.5 In 1947 an attempt to organize an international society of Egyptologists (a thing that any sensible person would think to be totally inevitable in such an ancient and peculiar brotherhood) fell through completely—for specialists are a 2. Jean Leclant, “Pierre Lacau,” AfO 21 (1966): 272. 3. Alan H. Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961) , 16. 4. Jean Capart, “Le Cheval et le dieu Seth,” in Mélanges Maspero 1 (Cairo: IFAO, 1935) , 227. 5. Jean Capart, Bulletin critique des religions de l’Égypte, Revue de l’histoire des religions, 1904 (Brussels: Misch et Thron, 1905) , 6–7. QUALIFIED FOR WHAT? 97 jealous lot.6 Adriaan de Buck even charged Egyptologists with discouraging others from studying Egyptian; 7 and Günther Roeder reports that his translations of religious texts had to buck the “current of opinion and the sovereign personalities in the field,” who opposed his ideas “with much head-shaking and rude condemnation” before they finally began to give way.8 The very nature of Egyptian studies, in which the unknown so completely overshad- ows the known, has always encouraged specialization, for as FranÇois-Joseph Chabas noted a hundred years ago, it is possible for each student to find in Egypt “whatever sus- tains his particular views.” 9 Today even the specialist, according to Siegfried Morenz, “is in constant danger of losing his grasp even of a special area, such as Egyptian religion.” 10 How specialized Egyptian studies have always been may be inferred from the report of Georges Goyon in 1963 that the problems of the Great Pyra- mid, which have had enormous popular appeal for more than a century, remain unsolved because “the scholars who have really studied it on the scene can be counted on the fingers of one hand.”11 6. [The attempt apparently was eventually successful as the Inter- national Association of Egyptologists dates its founding to 1947. Nib- ley may not have known about this because the American Egyptolo- gists have generally had very little participation with the international association—eds.] 7. Adriaan de Buck, “Défense et illustration de la langue égypti- enne,” CdE 23 (1947): 23. 8. Günther Roeder, Volksglaube im Pharaonenreich (Stuttgart: Spe- mann, 1952) , 7. 9. François-Joseph Chabas, “Sur l’étude de la langue égyptienne,” Verslagen en Mededeelingen (1865): 195; reprinted in Oeuvres diverses, BE 11 (Paris: Leroux, 1903) , 47. 10. Siegfried Morenz, review of Reallexikon der ägyptischen Religions- geschichte, by Hans Bonnet, Orientalische Literaturzeitung 48 (1953): 342. 11. Georges Goyon, “Le méchanisme de fermeture a la pyramide de Chéops,” Revue archéologique 2 (1963): 1. 98 AN APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM The Book of the Dead12 The largest part of the Joseph Smith Papyri in the posses- sion of the Church consists of fragments from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the fragments having been translated and discussed by no less a scholar than Professor John A. Wilson of the Oriental Institute.13 “Scholars had barely begun the study of the Book of the Dead,” Edouard Naville recalled, “when they saw that the text swarms with difficulties. The prevailing mysticism, the abundance of images, the oddity of the pictures, the impossibility of knowing how the Egyptians expressed even the simplest abstract ideas—all offer formidable obstacles with which the translator is con- tinually colliding.” 14 These points can be illustrated by the most easily recog- nized section of the Joseph Smith Papyri, namely the frag- ment with the picture of a swallow (fig. 8) , chapter 86 of the Book of the Dead. It is, according to the rubric (the title in red ink) , “A Spell for Becoming a Swallow.” But what do we find? To this day Egyptologists cannot agree on just what is meant by “spell” —is it a recitation? an ordinance? an act of medita- tion? an incantation? merely a chapter? Neither does anyone know for sure in what sense the “transformation” is to be understood—whether it is a change of form, a transmigration, a passage from one world to another, a mystic identification, a ritual dramatization, or whatnot. And what about this busi- ness of becoming a swallow? In the same breath the speaker announces that he is a scorpion, and after the title there is nothing in the text that even remotely suggests anything hav- ing to do with a swallow—literal, typological, allegorical, or mystical. Certainly what the subject does is most unswallow- like and unscorpion-like as he advances on his two legs and 12. Part 4 of “A New Look at the Pearl of Great Price” began here. 13. John A. Wilson, “The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: Translations and Interpretations: A Summary Report,” Dialogue 3/2 (1968): 67–85. 14. Edouard H. Naville, Das ägyptische Todtenbuch der XVIII. bis XX. Dynastie (Berlin: Asher, 1886) , 2. QUALIFIED FOR WHAT? 99 Figure 8. The swallow vignette of JSP VI shows that this is Book of the Dead 86. Courtesy of the Church Archives, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. stretches forth his two arms in the accepted human fashion.15 Strangely, the titles are often easier to understand than the sections that go with them, as if, T. George Allen points out, the two were of different origin and history.16 Such confusion may in part be explained by the alarm- ing fact that the ancient scribes who produced these docu- ments were often unable to read what they were writing. By the Twenty-first Dynasty, Naville noted, the “ignorance of the scribes” reached the point (toward which it had long been steadily tending) of complete miscomprehension of their own texts, betrayed by the “common habit of copying entire sec- tions backwards.” 17 “Even in their original state,” however, 15. Wilson, “Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri,” 79–80. 16. T. George Allen, The Egyptian Book of the Dead: Documents in the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) , 3. 17. Naville, Das ägyptische Todtenbuch, 41; cf. E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyp- tian Ideas of the Future Life: Egyptian Religion (New York: University Books, 1959) , 45. 100 AN APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM Professor Allen assures us, “the sanctity of the spells proper was furthered by intentional obscurities,” 18 so that no matter how far back we go we will always be in trouble. At all times, Wilhelm Czermak observes, “the concrete wording of the Book of the Dead” is illogical and “fantas- tic,” but its religious sense, he insists, is not; if we confine our researches, therefore, to the examination of the text, as almost all students do, we are bound to get nowhere.19 This is not a paradox: the divine words don’t need to make sense in order to be taken seriously.
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