Ex-Mormon Sues Over Joseph Smith’s Purported Translation of Egyptian Papyri

The study of Ancient Egyptian civilization of course intersects with modern doings – think of how it’s inspired architecture of our time, or how it’s informed any number of pop culture creations.

And yet, decorative use of hieroglyphs aside, it seems like it’s relatively uncommon for this aspect of reception history to involve the linguistic side of Egyptology.

That’s part of why an ongoing class action lawsuit against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is so interesting.

Legal stuff can be complicated to parse for the untrained, and this U.S. case seems both particularly quixotic and particularly unruly. That said, it’s basically a 2019 class action lawsuit started by ex-Mormon Laura Gaddy and attorney Kay Burningham that’s expanded and shifted a bit over time and even suffered dismissal, although they’re now appealing so that they can file a third amended complaint.

Nonetheless, amidst all of this thicket of procedural detail, one constant drumbeat is that deception around matters critical to faith led people to get tricked into donating money.

Some of those allegations of deception include stuff like glossing over Mormon prophet Joseph Smith’s practice of polygamy, but a surprisingly large part of the lawsuit hinges on his purported translation of some Egyptian papyri as the Book of Abraham.

As the second amended complaint details, preparation for a 2018 church activity led the plaintiff Gaddy to an internet rabbit hole and then disillusionment:

[S]he viewed websites that addressed Smith’s lies about his polygamy, which led her to sites where other historical issues were addressed, including the stone in the hat method of Book of Mormon creation, Book of Abraham anomalies, Smith’s 1826 fraud trial, and other misinformation. Over time, the conclusion was inevitable – Mormon history was radically different from what she had been taught…

She found that she could not reconcile what she had learned with continuing membership in the LDS Church. Ultimately, shortly after that rude awakening, she resigned from the Church…

She underwent months of counseling for the severe emotional distress that she has suffered upon learning that her trusted spiritual advisors have mispresented [sic] the historical facts, and concealed important stones, artifacts, original manuscripts, documents, and information, leading her to build her faith upon an incomplete and misleading premises. Her entire life had been based upon a lie.

As for those “anomalies” with the Book of Abraham, the second amended complaint repeatedly and rather vaguely references “Egyptologists” in its focus on how the underlying work comprises stuff like “a common Egyptian funerary document,” something persistently misrepresented by the church.

 

(papyrus image from second amended complaint)

 

As it discusses even further, too, this deception even includes a misleading traditional facsimile of a key papyrus portion, since the historic printing plate from 1840s Nauvoo (Illinois) clumsily mutilated Anubis’s countenance in order to pass off the animal-headed deity as a human.

 

(printing plate detail from second amended complaint)
 

Per the district court opinion, however, rendering any sort of judgment on the truth of Smith’s translation would start to adjudicate faith claims and trample on constitutionally-guaranteed religious freedom.

Thus, between Mormon history and such “big picture” legal issues, this fringe case that began as a rabbit hole for Gaddy opens up at least two big rabbit holes in turn for others.

At a minimum, though, even without descending into either one of those rabbit holes, Egyptologists should definitely be aware of this case.

It’s not every day that the correctness of translations from Egyptian end up in court, let alone in a lawsuit that’s drawing a bit of notice.

As Courthouse News Service reported when the case was initially dismissed, “The court cannot settle the question of whether the hieroglyphs were more accurately translated by academics or prophets.”

. . .

David Mihalyfy is an independent scholar with a B.A. in Linguistics (Harvard, ’02) and a Ph.D. in the History of Christianity (UChicago ’17).

In a not uncommon scholarly trajectory, he first became interested in Afroasiatic historical linguistics because he happened to study one language (Coptic, for Christian texts), and soon realized the relative underdevelopment of diachronic knowledge in comparison to Indo-European languages.

He has presented at several Egyptological Symposiums of the American Research Center in Egypt’s Missouri Chapter, as well as remotely at the Egyptological Conference in Copenhagen. Several short articles from a larger project on the survival and transformation of Afroasiatic N-stems in Egyptian were recently published in the Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities.

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