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Eyewitness, Hearsay, and Physical Evidence of the Joseph Smith Papyri

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Eyewitness, Hearsay, and Physical Evidence of the Joseph Smith Papyri Eyewitness, Hearsay, and Physical Evidence of the Joseph Smith Papyri John Gee Richard Lloyd Anderson is truly a scholar and a gentleman. I have had the opportunity to witness his kindness on many occasions and have never known him to do anything mean, petty, or unchristian. Nor has this remarkable man been noted for boasting of his achievements; thus few members of the church remember, as does my father, when the missionary discussions were known as the Anderson Plan. I appreciate his graciousness to me not only while I was his student but afterward. While I was his student, he introduced me to many facets of New Testament study that I have since had opportunity to work on at greater length.1 Here, however, I would like to pick up a thread from his Latter-day Saint historical work and apply it to a eld that sorely needs it. In his seminal work, Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses, Anderson discusses the need for a “safeguard” in historical work to protect against character assassination: Be sure that all statements come from the witness himself. Courts formalize this policy by various rules against hearsay, for one of the main questions about evidence is its directness, whether it is rsthand. In short, accurate evidence from a Book of Mormon witness must come from the witness not from garbled reports through intermediaries. Almost all of the rst generation of anti-Mormon writers ignored this basic rule, and now even educated authors may do no better. Although we are discussing specic objections to Book of Mormon witnesses, the methods of response should be helpful in similar claims not discussed for lack of space.2 Like the Book of Mormon witnesses, the Joseph Smith Papyri need careful treatment since discussions of the situation have generally been plagued by reliance on hearsay evidence or unwarranted assumptions. This has been true even of the omnium-gatherum approach in which all available evidence is assembled, eyewitness testimony and hearsay being given equal weight.3 I will review the eyewitness testimony to provide two types of reconstructions: the extent of the Joseph Smith Papyri and, to the degree possible, Joseph Smith’s understanding of the papyri. Obviously much more can still be done, but this might lay the groundwork for further research.4 Historical witnesses of the papyri often mingle eyewitness testimony with hearsay. Care thus needs to be taken to separate the eyewitness portions from the hearsay portions of any given witness’s testimony. For example, consider the following statement about the Joseph Smith Papyri: “Then she [Lucy Smith] turned to a long table, set her candle-stick down, and opened a long roll of manuscript, saying it was ‘the writing of Abraham and Isaac, written in Hebrew and Sanscrit,’ and she read several minutes from it as if it were English. Then in the same way she interpreted to us hieroglyphics from another roll.”5 Charlotte Haven, in the same statement, is an eyewitness to some things but a hearsay witness to others. She is an eyewitness that in Nauvoo, there was “a long roll of manuscript” and “another roll”; but when she reports that the manuscript was “written in Hebrew and Sanscrit” she is not in a position to conrm that from rsthand knowledge. Instead she gets her information from Mother Smith who “said she read it through the inspiration of her son Joseph.”6 Thus Haven’s report of the language of the papyri is garbled thirdhand hearsay. Failure to observe what is eyewitness and what is hearsay has caused much confusion over these reports.7 As Anderson has noted, “Hearsay situations raise the question of whether secondhand evidence started with observation.”8 In this case part did and part did not. The Joseph Smith Papyri As is well-known, the Joseph Smith Papyri (JSP) were found at Thebes by Antonio Lebolo with a cache of mummies.9 Lebolo commissioned Albano Oblasser to take the mummies to America and sell them. After buying the mummies in New York, Michael Chandler toured the eastern United States with them, selling them piecemeal as he went to pay debts. At Kirtland, Ohio, he sold the remaining four of the mummies to Joseph Smith and others in July 1835 for the price of $2,400. The mummies and papyri traveled to Missouri and Nauvoo. After Joseph’s death, Emma Smith’s second husband, Lewis Bidamon, sold the mummies to Abel Combs, who took them on another traveling show. While keeping some of the papyri, he sold the mummies to the Saint Louis Museum, after which they were sold to the Wood Museum in Chicago, where they were destroyed in the great re of 1871. The papyri kept by Combs eventually went to Combs’s housekeeper, whose daughter’s widower sold them in 1947 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who in turn gave them to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on 27 November 1967. What the Metropolitan Museum of Art obtained and in turn gave to the church were ten fragments of papyri that had once comprised three separate manuscripts, originally belonging to a man named Hor (JSP I, X–XI) and women named Tsemminis10 (JSP II, IV–IX) and Neferirtnoub (JSP IIIa–b). Our concern here is not so much to trace the various places in which the papyri were located and in whose house they were at any given time, but rather to use eyewitness testimony to reconstruct the extent and physical condition of the papyri at the time Joseph Smith owned them and to determine, if possible, what happened to the various rolls. We will examine the eyewitnesses in chronological order. The Eyewitnesses 1835–1837 The rst known mention of the Joseph Smith Papyri is by A. Gardner11 in a letter in the 27 March 1835 Painesville Telegraph.12 On one of the female mummies exhibited by Michael Chandler, termed “No. 1,” “was found with this person a roll or book, having a little resemblance to birch bark; language unknown. Some linguists however say they can decipher 1336, in what they term an epitaph; ink black and red; many female gures.”13 Another female mummy, termed “No. 2,” was “found with a roll as No. 1, lled with hieroglyphics, rudely executed.”14 A male mummy, termed “No. 3,” “had a roll of writing as No. 1 & 2.”15 These can plausibly be linked with the following remaining fragments of the Joseph Smith Papyri: No. 1, with the red and black ink and the many female gures, is the roll of Tsemminis. The cipher 1336 would probably be an attempt to make out the hieratic of dd mdw à n “words said by” in the rubric (called here an “epitaph”). No. 2, from a female and with the rudely executed hieroglyphs, is likely the roll of Neferirtnub, and No. 3, from a male, would be the roll of Hor. Within a month of the purchase of the papyri, William W. Phelps who at that time, among other assignments, served as scribe to Joseph Smith wrote to his wife in Missouri: “The last of June four Egyptian mummies were brought here; there were two papyrus rolls, besides some other ancient Egyptian writings with them.”16 Thus, at that time there were two rolls and more than one piece of other scattered papyri. In December 1835, Oliver Cowdery, who like Phelps was Joseph’s scribe and so had worked closely with the papyri, described them as “two rolls of papyrus” lled with “characters . such as you nd upon the cofns of mummies, hieroglyphics, &c. with many characters or letters exactly like the present, (though probably not quite so square,) form of the Hebrew without points” forming a “record . beautifully written on papyrus with black, and a small part, red ink or paint, in perfect preservation.”17 To this he added “that two or three other small pieces of papyrus, with astronomical calculations, epitaphs, &c. were found with others of the Mummies.”18 Cowdery thus indicated that there were several other miscellaneous pieces of papyri besides the two large rolls. The prolix Cowdery19 also described the vignettes on the papyri: The representation of the god-head three, yet in one, is curiously drawn. The serpent, represented as walking, or formed in a manner to be able to walk, standing in front of, and near a female gure, is to me, one of the greatest representations I have ever seen upon paper, or a writing substance. Enoch’s Pillar, as mentioned by Josephus, is upon the same roll. The inner end of the same roll . presents a representation of the judgment: At one view you behold the Savior seated upon his throne, crowned, and holding the sceptres of righteousness and power, before whom also, are assembled the twelve tribes of Israel, the nations, languages and tongues of the earth, the kingdoms of the world over which satan is represented as reigning, Michael the archangel, holding the key of the bottomless pit, and at the same time the devil as being chained and shut up in the bottomless pit. But upon this last scene, I am able only to give you a shadow, to the real picture.20 Jay Todd, years ago, seems to have accurately connected these descriptions with the present papyri fragments.21 The “god-head” representation seems to be from JSP IV; the walking serpent and pillar seem to be from JSP V, thus all from the Tsemminis roll. The description of the judgment scene (which Cowdery got right)22 would match JSP IIIa–b, except Cowdery describes it as being on “the inner end of the same roll,” which leads one to conclude that this was a vignette from Book of the Dead 125 on the Tsemminis roll, and this would seem to be conrmed by a fragment of the text of Book of the Dead 125 included in JSP IX.
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