Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

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slavereeno
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Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

Post by slavereeno » Sat May 18, 2019 1:58 am

Our stake did a fireside with Bruce Porter who is an LDS Apologist and student of Hugh Nibley.

Bruce Porter claims:

1. The Three Facsimiles represent an endowment. The lion couch represents "The Death of God", the circle one represents the resurrection and Ascension, and the Throne one represent enthronement. These facsimiles represent the endowment process.
2. Joseph Smith never used the word "Translation" about the papyrus, he only said he was telling us the meaning of them, not translating them.
3. Joseph Smith filled in the writings around the outside edge of circle one without having the original source, which was miraculous.
4. He then stammers through a translation which speaks, allegedly of exaltation and temples.
5. Osiris means "The Redeemed"
6. Abraham is telling us that God is locatable
7. Abraham names a bunch of planets including Kolob, but says God doesn't actually live on Kolob, just near it.
8. All religions diffuse from one original religion, but are changed through apostasy
9. He quotes EA Wallis Budge - curator of the Egyptian museum as saying "There was never a people more ready to accept Christianity than the Egyptians" Porter suggests this is because they were originally part of the Adamic religion before theirs branched off after the tower of Babel.
10. He says "Osiris is Christ" "Horus is Peter" "Patah(sp?) is the father God"
11. The brass plates were written in Egyptian.
12. Laman and Lemuel are Phoenician names, Nephi and Sam are Egyptian Names
13. Joseph Smith received the book of Joseph at the same time as the Book of Abraham
14. Egyptian for Pharaoh means Great House Abraham 1:20 says "Pharaoh signifies royal blood" great house = royal blood, JS could not gotten this by accident.
15. Min is Ham, Hathor is Egyptus so the BoA is correct here too Min is the only one depicted with dark skin in the Egyptian glyphs
16. Egypt was a Matrilineal Patriarchy just like Abraham was.
17. Egyptian religion imitated the Melchizedek priesthood, just like it says in the book of Abraham
18. The pyramids were just attempts to imitate temples and do work for the dead.
19. The Shabaka Stone was the first written document and was basically the endowment
20. Christ gives the keys to sealings to peter
21. He shows several stone reliefs are a depiction of the "ritual embrace" that are basically the veil ceremony, including hands on shoulders etc.
22. The things in the Book of Joseph are so sacred they cannot be published
23. The book of Joseph led to the restoration of the endowment at Nauvoo, he then shows some example from the papyrus and explains the veil ceremony by "translating" the Egyptian on the spot.
24. There is no way Joseph Smith could know these things, and no way he could make them up
25. Bruce Porter considers himself a "Scholar"
26. He mentions some text that was "found" in 1979 that says Abraham was on the lion couch and that proves Joseph Smith was right.

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slavereeno
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Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

Post by slavereeno » Sat May 18, 2019 1:59 am

If you are interested in a more direct look at this stuff, PM me.

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Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

Post by jfro18 » Sat May 18, 2019 6:31 am

slavereeno wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 1:58 am
Our stake did a fireside with Bruce Porter who is an LDS Apologist and student of Hugh Nibley.

Bruce Porter claims:

1. The Three Facsimiles represent an endowment. The lion couch represents "The Death of God", the circle one represents the resurrection and Ascension, and the Throne one represent enthronement. These facsimiles represent the endowment process.
Except we know they don't. We know what they mean... this ain't it.
slavereeno wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 1:58 am
2. Joseph Smith never used the word "Translation" about the papyrus, he only said he was telling us the meaning of them, not translating them.
The Kirtland Egyptian Papers disagree: "Translation of the Book of Abraham written by his own hand upon papyrus and found in the catacombs of Egypt."
slavereeno wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 1:58 am
3. Joseph Smith filled in the writings around the outside edge of circle one without having the original source, which was miraculous.
I'm not sure which one circle one is, but where he filled in the facsimiles he was... wrong. Filling out something incorrectly isn't miraculous - it's just wrong.
slavereeno wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 1:58 am
11. The brass plates were written in Egyptian.
There were no brass plates, and there's no such thing as reformed Egyptian. That's a really bold assumption that shows the lack of integrity here.
slavereeno wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 1:58 am
13. Joseph Smith received the book of Joseph at the same time as the Book of Abraham
And yet no one has bothered to translate it. I wonder why?
slavereeno wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 1:58 am
14. Egyptian for Pharaoh means Great House Abraham 1:20 says "Pharaoh signifies royal blood" great house = royal blood, JS could not gotten this by accident.
Really? Joseph couldn't guess that a title like Pharoah meant royal blood? That's news to anyone who knows how Joseph worked.
slavereeno wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 1:58 am
15. Min is Ham, Hathor is Egyptus so the BoA is correct here too Min is the only one depicted with dark skin in the Egyptian glyphs
He called Anubis a slave because the skin was darkened on the facsimile and chiseled the woodblock to remove the snout when printing it.
slavereeno wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 1:58 am
18. The pyramids were just attempts to imitate temples and do work for the dead.
LOL
slavereeno wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 1:58 am
22. The things in the Book of Joseph are so sacred they cannot be published
LOL LOL LOL LOL - How in the hell would he know that?! That's dishonest at best in order to make people think there's nothing wrong in Zion.
slavereeno wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 1:58 am
23. The book of Joseph led to the restoration of the endowment at Nauvoo, he then shows some example from the papyrus and explains the veil ceremony by "translating" the Egyptian on the spot.
So the Book of Joseph contained the Masonic ceremony?
slavereeno wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 1:58 am
24. There is no way Joseph Smith could know these things, and no way he could make them up
Besides being initiated as a Mason weeks before using it for the ceremony?
slavereeno wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 1:58 am
25. Bruce Porter considers himself a "Scholar"
You've laid out quite a nice groundwork to show why he's not. :lol:
slavereeno wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 1:58 am
26. He mentions some text that was "found" in 1979 that says Abraham was on the lion couch and that proves Joseph Smith was right.
There's 1 or 2 other of those drawings that shows Abraham in the same position, which doesn't prove the Book of Abraham any more than it shows that the drawings were done differently. It still has a ton of translation issues as do Facs 2 and 3 along with the BoA itself.

Thanks for the recap... I kind of wish I could go to something like this just to be 'that guy' that asks the questions that he's trying to avoid.

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Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

Post by moksha » Sat May 18, 2019 8:58 am

Slavereeno, just for fun why don't you post this over at Mormon Discussions. I would be interested in what Grindael, Shulem, and a few others had to say about Brother Porter's claims.

http://www.mormondiscussions.com/phpBB3 ... um.php?f=1
Good faith does not require evidence, but it also does not turn a blind eye to that evidence. Otherwise, it becomes misplaced faith.
-- Moksha

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Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

Post by Palerider » Sat May 18, 2019 10:31 am

All I can say is, there's nothing more dangerous than a salesman who is mis-informed or believes his own crap.
"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily."

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Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

Post by Hagoth » Sat May 18, 2019 9:08 pm

It sounds like it was raining crap. I hope you took an umbrella.

For one thing, the 1979 Abraham papyrus he's talking about is called P. Leiden I 384. The figure on the couch in this papyrus is not the struggling Abraham, but is the very dead mummy of Osiris. The associated text is actually a pagan love spell designed to “inflame” a woman’s “female body” so that she will surrender herself to the lustful desires of the owner of the scroll. Yes, the papyrus does have a picture of a lion couch, which is standard in embalming scenes and is NOT a sacrificial altar by any stretch of the imagination. It also has a variation of Abraham’s name, “abraam”, along with those of Isaac, Jacob, Michael, Gabriel, Zeus, and other prophets, angels, and gods whose names eventually came to be used as purely magical words in spells created by Egyptian magicians millennia after Abraham’s time. These names do exist on the papyrus but they make no reference to the image. The figure standing over the mummy is not the priest of Elkenah, as Joseph claimed in the BoA facsimile, it is Anubis as he would have appeared in the undoctored Facsimile 1 drawing if that portion hadn’t been missing.

The part about Joseph filling in the missing characters on Facsimile 2 without a source is hilarious. We know the source. He simply copied them from the one of the other scrolls he had, the Hor Book of Breathings. And they were the wrong form of Egyptian. And he randomly copied them without rhyme or reason, even copying some of them upside down without realizing it.
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Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

Post by slavereeno » Sat May 18, 2019 10:51 pm

I think this is a dangerous game to play for our stake, the believer that will take this at face value I suppose, but anybody who looks any further into this will start to smell the rot pretty quickly.

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Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

Post by slavereeno » Sat May 18, 2019 10:56 pm

moksha wrote:
Sat May 18, 2019 8:58 am
Slavereeno, just for fun why don't you post this over at Mormon Discussions. I would be interested in what Grindael, Shulem, and a few others had to say about Brother Porter's claims.

http://www.mormondiscussions.com/phpBB3 ... um.php?f=1
I requested an account, not sure how long that process will take.

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Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

Post by Red Ryder » Sun May 19, 2019 1:02 am

    slavereeno wrote:
    Sat May 18, 2019 10:56 pm
    moksha wrote:
    Sat May 18, 2019 8:58 am
    Slavereeno, just for fun why don't you post this over at Mormon Discussions. I would be interested in what Grindael, Shulem, and a few others had to say about Brother Porter's claims.

    http://www.mormondiscussions.com/phpBB3 ... um.php?f=1
    I requested an account, not sure how long that process will take.
    Welcome to level 8 of disaffection. There’s no turning back now.

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    Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

    Post by græy » Mon May 20, 2019 8:11 am

    moksha wrote:
    Sat May 18, 2019 8:58 am
    Slavereeno, just for fun why don't you post this over at Mormon Discussions. I would be interested in what Grindael, Shulem, and a few others had to say about Brother Porter's claims.

    http://www.mormondiscussions.com/phpBB3 ... um.php?f=1
    Oh man, I stumbled on mormondiscussions.com a couple years ago but had forgotten about it since then. There are some good discussions to wade through over there.
    slavereeno wrote:
    Sat May 18, 2019 1:58 am
    Our stake did a fireside with Bruce Porter who is an LDS Apologist and student of Hugh Nibley.
    Wow. I just don't know where to go with those. On one hand, I hate it when they blatantly lie or make sh*t up and pass it off as verifiable research or the word of god. On the other hand, I'd love to have a reason to engage DW on some of those points.

    edit: Apologists like this may in fact be diluted enough to genuinely believe this stuff, so maybe they aren't actually lying?
    jfro18 wrote:
    Sat May 18, 2019 6:31 am
    Thanks for the recap... I kind of wish I could go to something like this just to be 'that guy' that asks the questions that he's trying to avoid.
    I'd buy a ticket to that show. :D
    Well, I'm better than dirt! Ah, well... most kinds of dirt; not that fancy store-bought dirt; that stuff is loaded with nutrients. I can't compete with that stuff. -Moe Sizlack

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    Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

    Post by slavereeno » Mon May 20, 2019 10:31 am

    græy wrote:
    Mon May 20, 2019 8:11 am
    Oh man, I stumbled on mormondiscussions.com a couple years ago but had forgotten about it since then. There are some good discussions to wade through over there.
    Yes, I have browsed it a little, but I keep feeling like the last thing I want to do is spend MORE time on Mormonism.
    græy wrote:
    Mon May 20, 2019 8:11 am
    Wow. I just don't know where to go with those. On one hand, I hate it when they blatantly lie or make sh*t up and pass it off as verifiable research or the word of god. On the other hand, I'd love to have a reason to engage DW on some of those points.
    Yeah, there were times when he would make like he was "translating" the Egyptian on the spot and throw in words and phrases from the endowment to make it sound like the Egyptians had literally written our modern endowment in the facsimiles. It was some next level bullsh*t.

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    Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

    Post by slavereeno » Mon May 20, 2019 10:37 am

    As I was thinking about this, I realized I had heard of Bruce Porter over a decade ago. There was a guy that I worked with who was a huge fan of Nibley and Porter, and he would go to Porter firesides as a YSA and then come back to work on Monday and tell us all the theories and stuff.

    This was all before my shelf brok, but I remember thinking the stuff sounding far fetched and writing it off as BS back then and kind of ribbing this guy at work. A third co-worker who was also in the conversations was teasing this guy about being a member of the Nibly-ite church. Haha!

    Porter says in the fireside that the church is asking and encouraging (paying?) him to do this stuff, but I am sure they would never endorse it publicly.

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    Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

    Post by jfro18 » Mon May 20, 2019 10:51 am

    slavereeno wrote:
    Mon May 20, 2019 10:37 am
    Porter says in the fireside that the church is asking and encouraging (paying?) him to do this stuff, but I am sure they would never endorse it publicly.
    That's basically the mission statement of apologetics.

    The church can encourage them and direct members to apologists, but they keep enough distance to throw them directly under the bus if they need to.

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    Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

    Post by moksha » Tue May 21, 2019 8:10 am

    Apologists would best serve the Church by being completely honest.
    Good faith does not require evidence, but it also does not turn a blind eye to that evidence. Otherwise, it becomes misplaced faith.
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    Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

    Post by achilles » Sat May 25, 2019 8:57 pm

    slavereeno wrote:
    Sat May 18, 2019 10:51 pm
    I think this is a dangerous game to play for our stake, the believer that will take this at face value I suppose, but anybody who looks any further into this will start to smell the rot pretty quickly.
    How many people actually look into this stuff? I think that most people are bored by the effort to do so. However, I have to say that anyone reading Nibley's Egyptian stuff is asking for trouble. He is very intelligent/well-read, but a sloppy academic. Nowadays, there is just too much information out there that comes from legitimate academic sources. (this is one reason why BYU's Muhlestein is just so ridiculous to me...how does he say the crap he says with a straight face...as an academic???)

    I bought the Oxford History of Ancient Egypt about seven or eight years ago (near the beginnings of my disaffection), and started reading. It's very well done--each chapter is written by a different scholar. The history begins with the neolithic cultures along the Nile and moves historically up through the end of the Hellenistic era. It's dense academic reading, but fantastic. I found that the more detailed my knowledge became, the more uncomfortable I felt about The Book of Abraham. I finally had to admit to myself that the BofA is just...19th century pseudepigrapha (the most charitable interpretation). Once I lost the Book of Abraham, it opened up a Pandora's Box of problematic crap. And I was church broke and fully onboard at the time with the Church...
    “For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”

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    Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

    Post by Corsair » Sun May 26, 2019 10:45 am

    achilles wrote:
    Sat May 25, 2019 8:57 pm
    How many people actually look into this stuff? I think that most people are bored by the effort to do so. However, I have to say that anyone reading Nibley's Egyptian stuff is asking for trouble. He is very intelligent/well-read, but a sloppy academic. Nowadays, there is just too much information out there that comes from legitimate academic sources. (this is one reason why BYU's Muhlestein is just so ridiculous to me...how does he say the crap he says with a straight face...as an academic???)
    My in-laws are fans of Bruce Porter. They urged me to watch a video from Brother Porter presenting on a rumored Nibley interpretation of a fragment of "The Book of Joseph" that was in church archives. Supposedly this was another fragment that was somehow connected with the Book of Abraham scrolls. I do not recall its exact origin and it felt a bit like a conspiracy theory.

    These hieroglyphics were apparently the original endowment and thus was so profoundly sacred that the church and the high level apologists don't bring it up. My mother-in-law excitedly showed it to me. I think I disappointed her when I asked if any non-church Egyptologists had examined it and provided an interpretation.

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    Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

    Post by jfro18 » Sun May 26, 2019 11:57 am

    Corsair wrote:
    Sun May 26, 2019 10:45 am

    My in-laws are fans of Bruce Porter. They urged me to watch a video from Brother Porter presenting on a rumored Nibley interpretation of a fragment of "The Book of Joseph" that was in church archives. Supposedly this was another fragment that was somehow connected with the Book of Abraham scrolls. I do not recall its exact origin and it felt a bit like a conspiracy theory.

    These hieroglyphics were apparently the original endowment and thus was so profoundly sacred that the church and the high level apologists don't bring it up. My mother-in-law excitedly showed it to me. I think I disappointed her when I asked if any non-church Egyptologists had examined it and provided an interpretation.
    There's an Infants on Thrones podcast (it's their Book of Abraham smackdown one i think) where they talk about how so many TBMs will reference Nibley as being this 'prolific' (word my wife used) scholar on all things Mormon yet no one has actually read him or actually validated his arguments.

    Since I heard that comment I have noticed that more and more - Nibley's stuff is tossed into a discussion by a TBM as fact and then they run from it... few actually read Nibley and almost no one actually goes through the work to validate what Nibley is saying.

    And reading this thread makes it pretty clear why that is.

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    Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

    Post by Corsair » Sun May 26, 2019 9:26 pm

    jfro18 wrote:
    Sun May 26, 2019 11:57 am
    Since I heard that comment I have noticed that more and more - Nibley's stuff is tossed into a discussion by a TBM as fact and then they run from it... few actually read Nibley and almost no one actually goes through the work to validate what Nibley is saying.

    And reading this thread makes it pretty clear why that is.
    For a brief time before my belief collapsed, I did try reading Nibley seriously. A close family member has most of Nibley's books and I borrowed them thinking that the scholarly foundations of LDS belief would be revealed. It was not to be. Nibley needed and editor to keep him on track and no one had the gravitas to function as that editor. He had a lot of interesting things to say, but his arguments were mainly constructed with the belief that surely he knows what he is talking about. He saw parallels to LDS doctrine in every ancient manuscript he ever looked at.

    Nibley would drop hints about things then head off on some other subject involving drama between 19th or 20th century scholars that had no interest for me. I certainly liked a lot of Nibley's ideas and found that he spoke against the Pharisees at BYU and LDS leadership with delicious regularity. No one in the LDS church could call him out because we don't produce scholars like him. Anyone who had the background to call him out had no interest in doing so because they had better things to do than argue with some apologist at an LDS university.

    Lot's of people still like Nibley. Guys like Bruce Porter and Daniel Peterson consider Nibley to be some kind of patron saint of LDS apologists. But Nibley lost all persuasive power once I lost any testimony of Joseph Smith or the Book of Mormon. Very little of Nibley's apologetics holds up very well after the foundation of Mormonism crumbles.

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    Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

    Post by slavereeno » Tue May 28, 2019 9:57 am

    Corsair wrote:
    Sun May 26, 2019 9:26 pm
    Nibley would drop hints about things then head off on some other subject involving drama between 19th or 20th century scholars that had no interest for me. I certainly liked a lot of Nibley's ideas and found that he spoke against the Pharisees at BYU and LDS leadership with delicious regularity. No one in the LDS church could call him out because we don't produce scholars like him. Anyone who had the background to call him out had no interest in doing so because they had better things to do than argue with some apologist at an LDS university.
    This is well stated. Sometimes I loose the forest for the trees with this stuff, because its still so close to me. Real physicists don't spend a lot of time on the flat earthers because they just really have better things to do.

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    Re: Bruce Porter, Apologist Fireside

    Post by Red Ryder » Tue May 28, 2019 11:12 am

    slavereeno wrote:
    Tue May 28, 2019 9:57 am
    Corsair wrote:
    Sun May 26, 2019 9:26 pm
    Nibley would drop hints about things then head off on some other subject involving drama between 19th or 20th century scholars that had no interest for me. I certainly liked a lot of Nibley's ideas and found that he spoke against the Pharisees at BYU and LDS leadership with delicious regularity. No one in the LDS church could call him out because we don't produce scholars like him. Anyone who had the background to call him out had no interest in doing so because they had better things to do than argue with some apologist at an LDS university.
    This is well stated. Sometimes I loose the forest for the trees with this stuff, because its still so close to me. Real physicists don't spend a lot of time on the flat earthers because they just really have better things to do.
    This is the secret to moving on from Mormonism, NOMism, and Ex-Mormonism.

    “they just really have better things to do.”

    It’s that simple.
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