The Trouble with Abraham

In the year 1835, the well known swindler and horse thief, and founder of the Mormon Cult, Joseph Smith, produced the fraudulent “Book of Abraham”. In and of itself, this is nothing either new or particularly interesting. The Cult leader had knocked up other fictions for his cult before, but unlike the other tomes, the “Book of Abraham” was written from some actual Egyptian scrolls, Smith purchased from a travelling Mummy Show.

The Scrolls are real, and they have been seen by other people, unlike the sources of the other Mormon canons, and therein lies the interesting thing. You see the scrolls that Smith translated; have since been translated by real scholars, who understand Egyptian thanks to the Rosetta stone.