John Dehlin and I conclude this historic three-part podcast interviewing Dr. Robert K. Ritner, world famous Egyptologist and former professor of Dr. John Gee of BYU. We cover a lot of ground in this 5 1/2 (!) hour episode, and before we are done, Dr. Ritner gets to finally give his version of the famous (and apparently apocryphal) story circulated by Dr. John Gee as to how Dr. Ritner was “removed” from Dr. Gee’s dissertation committee at Yale. Fasten your seat-belts; it’s going to be a bumpy night!
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I watched all three episodes RFM. Thank you for your participation in this. There are interviews and there are interviews; as regards this one: all I can say is “Wow!”. At the very least, I can imagine that there is (or will soon be) a serious circling of the wagons in the higher echelons of the LDS church to figure out how to respond. And though I doubt it will change the minds of people who are incorrigibly dishonest with themselves or others (after all, we all personally know people who lie even when they apparently have nothing to gain from it); nevertheless, I think an honest, reasonable person (and I believe that many Mormons are) will not be able to regard The BOA the same way as they did before this interview. T
Humpty Dumpty applied to the Book of Abraham.
The Book of Abraham sat on the wall (shelf)
The Book of Abraham had a great fall (Rosetta stone)
All the Church scholars and all the Brethren,
Couldn’t put the Book of Abraham back together again.
Left to their own devices, and supported by their 100 billion dollar war-chest, the Mormon church would co-opt Egyptology, US history, any academic discipline if it served their purposes.
I found this fine apologetic work while duckduckgo’ing this episode.
https://thelunchisfree.com/2019/04/06/astronomy-according-to-abraham/
Mormons are just crazy. SWK believed in Bigfoot along with early church members. Flat Earth is probably not far behind.
Frankly the show the Expanse has finally put the Mormon religion in proper context with them trying to escape birth control with the Nauvoo spaceship.
https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Mormons
Joseph Smith is just a prominent religious scifi writer building on the religious scifi writers that came before him.
Great series!
This particular episode was pretty hard on John Gee! John Gee is correct… fiction just doesn’t need to be reviewed like scholarly works.
Amazing series.
One of my big takeaways is that the $80 that I blew on Michael Rhodes “The Hor Book of Breathings – A Translation and Commentary” is worthless. Oh well, at least the binding looks nice.
Book of Abraham was my biggest shelf item, but I kept believing with the help of the apologists. About a year ago I decided to be more objective, and the work of Dr. Ritner made it all so clear. I really appreciate this collaboration, even though at first it was painful to listen to, like digging out shrapnel. By the end, it was more like looking at photos of the procedure, and realizing why I had to go through it.