{"id":45870,"date":"2023-11-06T04:21:51","date_gmt":"2023-11-06T11:21:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=45870"},"modified":"2023-11-04T20:24:50","modified_gmt":"2023-11-05T02:24:50","slug":"five-things-to-know-about-mackay-and-belnaps-pure-language-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2023\/11\/five-things-to-know-about-mackay-and-belnaps-pure-language-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Five things to know about MacKay and Belnap\u2019s \u201cPure Language Project\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

First and foremost: \u201cThe Pure Language Project\u201d in the current volume<\/a> of the Journal of Mormon History is the best explanation to date of the significance of the documents relating to the Egyptian papyri (referred to collectively as the \u201cEgyptian Language Documents,\u201d or ELD for short) for the development of Church doctrine and Joseph Smith\u2019s understanding of the cosmos. Michael MacKay and Daniel Belnap show that these documents were deeply connected to an effort to develop a language capable of expressing the \u201ccosmic scope of the newly restored gospel\u201d (2) as it related to \u201contology, priesthood, cosmic spatiality, and the economy of God\u201d (24). The authors argue that the \u201cpure language project\u201d was specifically an attempt to escape from the dilemma, stated at the end of Doctrine and Covenants Section 76<\/a>, that it was impossible for mortals to speak, write or convey the \u201cmysteries of God,\u201d with additional connections to the doctrinally momentous Section 88<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The ELD bear on core doctrine, not trivia, and are an essential part of what makes us distinct as Christians. It is neither desirable nor possible to brush them away as ‘Mormonism’s Voynich manuscript.’<\/p>\n

Second: MacKay and Belnap\u2019s article builds on and then extends beyond a strong body of recent research on Joseph Smith\u2019s encounter with the Egyptian papyri and his search for a \u201cpure language.\u201d They make a number of important observations. Critically, for Joseph Smith, finding the \u201cpure language\u201d was not an attempt to recover the lost language of Eden, but to create in the present an \u201centirely new system of communication, one that was to be used to explain the economy of God\u201d (13), and which could include words from English or other languages. This undertaking preceded the encounter with the papyri by several years, and MacKay and Belnap identify continuities reaching as far back as 1827 and the \u201cCaractors\u201d document preserving engravings from the gold plates<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The continuity between the \u201cCaractors\u201d document, the \u201cpure language\u201d fragments and the ELD is one of several places where MacKay and Belnap\u2019s article agrees with observations I\u2019ve made in prior posts. Their insights are entirely independent, of course \u2013 it\u2019s clear that this article has been in the works for some time. Looking at previous and recent publications, it\u2019s clear that this body of research has been leading up to something big, and I\u2019m excited to learn that it can be expected in print next year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Third: The authors make a compelling argument that the Egyptian alphabets, the Grammar and Alphabet, and the 1835 Book of Abraham manuscripts were not translation documents. They reject the common interpretation that the ELD reflect an attempt to provide character-by-character renderings of an Egyptian hieratic text into English. The authors state: \u201cWhen it comes to translation as an academic practice of finding equivalencies between languages, there is no translation in the Abrahamic manuscripts\u201d (41-42). The marginal characters keyed to English text in the Abraham manuscripts include characters taken both from the papyri and from prior documented specimens of \u201cpure language,\u201d while the Egyptian alphabets primarily gloss non-Egyptian characters. They make a strong case that the ELD instead incorporated Egyptian characters into an already existing \u201cpure language project\u201d (22, 43).<\/p>\n

Fourth: The translation of the Book of Abraham is turning into a conundrum, including for MacKay and Belnap. If the ELD are not translation documents, that leaves the translation of Abraham without any documentary basis, although there are numerous journal entries and other historical records of translation work taking place in 1835 and later. That\u2019s not to say that there\u2019s no textual relationship between the ELD and the English text of Abraham \u2013 on this point, MacKay and Belnap\u2019s article adds a couple more important pieces to the puzzle. But the ELD don\u2019t look like working papers produced while creating the English equivalent of Egyptian characters from the papyri. MacKay and Belnap advance the possibility of a non-extant Book of Abraham text that preceded acquisition of the papyri (17, 34). But combined with the prevailing view that Joseph Smith didn\u2019t use the characters on the gold plates in his translation, the elimination of the ELD as translation documents leaves us in the awkward situation of seeing Joseph Smith and his associates as intensely focused on ancient characters on one hand, and not using them in translation on the other. (My suggestion is that the characters were in fact used in translating both the Book of Mormon<\/a> and the Book of Abraham<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Fifth: I don\u2019t know what the answer to the problem of scholarly publishing is, but we\u2019ve got to find something better than walling off the products of research from public view. I trumpeted the idea that the Grammar and Alphabet reflects a post-Champollion<\/a> understanding of Egyptian<\/a> earlier this year, and only now see that MacKay anticipated that in an article published in Dialogue in 2021<\/a>. Part of the answer is for scholars to meet the public where they are, as MacKay and Belnap have done over at From the Desk<\/a>. It\u2019s important to read the article, too \u2013 but even with access to JSTOR at a state flagship university, I don\u2019t have access to the most recent three years of the Journal of Mormon History.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First and foremost: \u201cThe Pure Language Project\u201d in the current volume of the Journal of Mormon History is the best explanation to date of the significance of the documents relating to the Egyptian papyri (referred to collectively as the \u201cEgyptian Language Documents,\u201d or ELD for short) for the development of Church doctrine and Joseph Smith\u2019s understanding of the cosmos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45870"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45897,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45870\/revisions\/45897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}