Egyptologist Translates Book of Abraham - Dr. Robert Ritner Pt. 2 | Ep. 1340

The Book of Abraham Translation: An Egyptologist’s Final Verdict

When Joseph Smith published the Book of Abraham in 1842, he claimed it represented a literal translation of ancient Egyptian papyri he had acquired from a traveling exhibition. Nearly two centuries later, the gap between that claim and the actual content of those papyri remains one of Mormonism's most significant historical tensions. In a detailed interview on the Mormon Stories Podcast, University of Chicago Egyptologist Dr. Robert Ritner dismantled the remaining apologetic defenses of the Book of Abraham translation, offering a technical analysis that challenges the text's authenticity at its foundation. Ritner, currently facing kidney failure and in need of a living donor, brings urgency to what he describes as a necessary correction of the historical record.

Background: The Papyri in the Vault

The controversy centers on eleven papyrus fragments purchased by Joseph Smith in 1835. Smith asserted these contained the writings of Abraham himself, penned by the patriarch's own hand. After Smith's death, the fragments were presumed lost until 1967, when the LDS Church revealed they had been stored in a New York vault for decades, kept from public or scholarly view. The rediscovery allowed modern Egyptologists to examine the documents Smith claimed to translate.

What they found contradicted Smith's assertions entirely. The surviving fragments contain standard Egyptian funerary texts, specifically portions of the Book of the Dead and the Book of Breathing. Ritner emphasizes that these fragments date roughly 1,500 years after Abraham would have lived, a chronological impossibility if Smith's translation claims