Section 13: Doctrine and Covenants — The Living Archive

Doctrine and Covenants (D&C) is a collection of 138 "sections" plus two Official Declarations. The sections are primarily revelations received by Joseph Smith from 1823 to 1844, with additions from later prophets. This is the LDS book that contains the most theologically distinctive doctrines — the ones that make LDS theology categorically different from historic Christianity.

D&C 130:22 states that the Father has "a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's." D&C 132 contains the revelation on plural marriage and the doctrine of eternal marriage. D&C 76 contains the vision of the three degrees of glory. D&C 138 (added in 1918) presents the vision of the redemption of the dead, providing doctrinal grounding for baptism for the dead.

Official Declaration 1 (1890) ends polygamy. Official Declaration 2 (1978) extends priesthood to Black members. Both are presented as revelations from the living prophet. Both represent substantive reversals of previously "revealed" positions.

ERROR IDENTIFIED: D&C 130:22 — God has a body of flesh and bones — contradicts John 4:24 ("God is spirit") and Colossians 1:15 (Christ is "the image of the invisible God" — God is invisible because he has no body to see). D&C 132's polygamy revelation contradicts Matthew 19:4–6 and the consistent apostolic teaching on marriage. The reversals of Official Declarations 1 and 2 demonstrate that the living prophet's revelations are institutionally conditioned, not eternally fixed. A canon that can be revised by the living prophet is not a canon. It is an archive of institutional history.

Section 14: The Pearl of Great Price — The Abraham Papyri Disaster

The Pearl of Great Price is the fourth Standard Work. It includes the Book of Moses (a Smithian revision of Genesis), the Book of Abraham, Joseph Smith—Matthew (a revision of Matthew 24), Joseph Smith—History (Smith's autobiographical account including the First Vision), and the Articles of Faith.

The Book of Abraham is the most theologically consequential and the most empirically falsified section of the entire LDS canon. In 1835, Smith purchased Egyptian papyri from a traveling exhibition. He claimed to translate them, producing the Book of Abraham — which contains some of LDS theology's most distinctive doctrines, including the pre-mortal existence of souls, the council of the gods, and the identification of the star Kolob as nearest the throne of God. The facsimiles Smith produced — drawings of the papyri with his explanatory notes — appeared in the published text.

In 1966, eleven fragments of the original papyri were discovered in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were examined by multiple professional Egyptologists, none of them LDS, using standard Egyptological methodology. The conclusion was unanimous: the papyri are standard Egyptian funerary documents, specifically the Book of Breathings Made by Isis. They contain no narrative about Abraham. Smith's explanations of the facsimiles — which identified Egyptian gods as specific biblical figures — are without Egyptological basis. The facsimile characters Smith identified as "God sitting upon his throne" are identified by Egyptologists as Osiris.

The LDS church's Gospel Topics Essay on the Book of Abraham acknowledges that Smith's translation does not correspond to the papyri content, and proposes several explanations: that Smith may have been inspired by the papyri rather than translating them, or that the original text was on missing portions of the scroll. Neither explanation was Smith's own — he presented himself as translating the actual documents.

ERROR IDENTIFIED: This is not a translation disagreement. A translation disagreement involves scholars reading the same text differently. What happened here is that the text Smith claimed to translate has been found, read by professionals, and determined to say something entirely different from what Smith claimed it said. If Smith could not translate Egyptian papyri — producing a "translation" that bears no relationship to what the documents actually contain — then his claim to have translated the Book of Mormon by the same power cannot rest on that authority. The crack runs to the foundation. This is the Book of Abraham's diagnostic function: it is the most directly testable translation claim Smith ever made, the test has been conducted, and the claim has failed.