Grant Palmer

Christmas, honestly, was difficult. I'd just finished questioning my belief in God the Father and concluded that I still had deep faith in Him. The love I've felt from Him my whole life may be explained away by an atheist as an evolutionary good feeling designed to give us peace, but there was too much feeling on my part to believe that.

As further evidence, and because I've had siblings die that I've been sealed to in the temple (which was not something I could validate any longer), I started reading about near-death experiences. There are several doctors who have done serious studies on the matter, and some pretty indisputable experiences by the experiencers, witnessing things out of their body they couldn't have seen otherwise, learning things in the next sphere they had never known here on earth but were verified later. As sensational as looking to those experiences may seem, they brought me great comfort, and were certainly no more sensational than looking into a 14-year old boy having visions.


One thing I noticed in many lengthy NDE's was that the patient was met by family who had already died. This made sense, of course, that they would be with their loved ones in the next life. With or without a temple ceremony.


As far as our research goes, the next step we took was to borrow a copy of Grant Palmer's book, An Insider's Guide to Mormon Origins, from the library. He was the initiator of the speculative "Golden Pot" theory, and I wanted to check his sources on some things, which I knew could be found in his book. Palmer also seemed very anxious to continue going to church, having a lot of respect and love for its teachings. That sounded like me.


The first chapter in his book, which was in no way ever inflammatory but calmly written and very carefully documented, explained how the papyri Joseph Smith used to translate the Book of Abraham, part of the Pearl of Great Price, had been found in nearly its entirety and translated by modern Egyptologists in 1968. The translation can in no way be matched to Joseph Smith's translation. It is completely different, and the papyri are, in fact, funeral texts for Hor or Horus, who was presumably the mummy the papyri were originally discovered with. Apologists have little to offer as possible explanations, especially as Joseph Smith was so specific about labeling the three facsimiles, and also because Joseph Smith stated that the papyri were the written by the hand of Abraham. The papyri were determined (within and without the LDS church) to have come from a time period 1500-2000 years after the time of Abraham.


While the rest of the book is excellent reading, especially all of Palmer's well-researched ideas on how the Book of Mormon was written, the first chapter was the complete deal-breaker for me. I'd had questions to that point, serious doubts that probably would have been enough, but this was fact. I'm a logical being. Faith is important, but it doesn't contradict science, which is what would have been required here. (At least my faith doesn't, but I don't require God to have created the earth in 144 hours in order to believe in Him.) In essence, my testimony of Joseph Smith as a prophet, and any possibility of it ever returning, was gone for good.


By the way, this book is easy to find at a lot of libraries, Amazon, my house, and (for the first two years of its published life) Deseret Book.