Chronicling nearly two thousand years of history, this panoramic saga follows the destiny of Abraham, a Jewish scribe, and his descendants from the burning of Jerusalem under the Romans to the 1943 battle of the Warsaw ghetto.

When the Book of Abraham was first published to the world in 1842, it was published as "a translation of some ancient records that have fallen into [Joseph Smith's] hands from the catacombs of Egypt, purporting to be the writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called 'The Book of Abraham, Written by his Own Hand, upon Papyrus.'" The resultant record was thus connected with the papyri once owned by Joseph Smith, though which papyrus of the four or five in his possession was never specified. Those papyri would likely interest only a few specialists--were the papyri not bound up in a religious controversy. This controversy covers a number of interrelated issues, and an even greater number of theories have been put forward about these issues. Given the amount of information available, the various theories, and the variety of fields of study the subject requires, misunderstandings and misinformation often prevail. The goal with the Introduction to the Book of Abraham is to make reliable information about the Book of Abraham accessible to the general reader.

Written by an L. A. County homicide detective and former atheist, Cold-Case Christianity examines the claims of the New Testament using the skills and strategies of a hard-to-convince criminal investigator. Christianity could be defined as a “cold case”: it makes a claim about an event from the distant past for which there is little forensic evidence. In Cold-Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace uses his nationally recognized skills as a homicide detective to look at the evidence and eyewitnesses behind Christian beliefs. Including gripping stories from his career and the visual techniques he developed in the courtroom, Wallace uses illustration to examine the powerful evidence that validates the claims of Christianity. A unique apologetic that speaks to readers’ intense interest in detective stories, Cold-Case Christianity inspires readers to have confidence in Christ as it prepares them to articulate the case for Christianity.

In July 1835 at Kirtland Ohio, a traveling antiquities dealer brought to Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet, four Egyptian mummies and several rolls of papyri. Upon inspection Smith determined that one of the rolls contained a lost record of the patriarch Abraham. After purchasing these artifacts for $2400 Smith generated through translation five chapters that appeared during March 1842 in Nauvoo, Illinois in the Times and Seasons, a Mormon periodical, under the title "The Book of Abraham". This book has since become a canonized text of scripture for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A Textual History of the Book of Abraham: Manuscripts and Editions serves as a source book for interested researchers and scholars. It includes a brief introduction to the Book of Abraham and a detailed record of textual variants from the time it first appeared in the Times and Seasons until its latest edition (1981). This volume also produces for the first time typographic transcriptions with facing grayscale images of the surviving handwritten manuscripts of the Book of Abraham. Several appendices offer additional helpful resources such as contemporary accounts related to the translation of the Book of Abraham and a full set of color high-res images of the surviving Abraham manuscripts. This book will be a valuable reference tool for scholars interested in researching the textual history of the Book of Abraham

Said to have been dictated by Joseph Smith as a translation of an ancient Egyptian scroll purchased in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1835, the Book of Abraham may be Mormonism's most controversial scripture. Decades of impassioned discussion began when about a dozen fragments of Smith's Egyptian papyri, including a facsimile from the Book of Abraham, were found in the New York Metropolitan Museum in 1966. The discovery solved a mystery about the origin of the Egyptian characters that appear in the various manuscript copies of the Book of Abraham from 1835, reproduced from one of the fragments. Some LDS scholars devised arguments to explain what seemed to be clear evidence of Smith's inability to translate Egyptian. In this book, Dan Vogel not only highlights the problems with these apologetic arguments but explains the underlying source documents in revealing detail and clarity.

In Volume Five: INTERVIEWS WITH BOOK OF MORMON WITNESS DAVID WHITMER, CONDUCTED BY: Joseph F. Smith & Orson Pratt William H. Kelley & George A. Blakeslee George Q. Cannon Edmund C. Briggs & Rudolph Etzenhouser Joseph Smith III Zenas H. Gurley James Henry Moyle Thomas W. Smith Nathan Tanner, Jr. Edward Stevenson and the Chicago Times, Kansas City Journal, Omaha Herald, and St. Louis Republican, among others. STATEMENTS, TESTIMONIES, LETTERS, AND REMINISCENCES BY: Hiram Page John Whitmer William E. McClellin Elizabeth Ann Whitmer Cowdery Diedrich Willers Lucius Fenn Ezra Booth Parley P. Pratt Sidney Rigdon J. L. Traughber and minutes of meetings, ordination certificates, maps, and a chronology of the Joseph Smith family, 1771-1831.

Traditions about the Early Life of Abraham represents the first in a series of books in the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) collection at Brigham Young University. Here the authors have assembled and translated more than 100 ancient and medieval stories from their original Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Persian, Coptic, and Egyptian sources, all in an effort to piece together the early life of Abraham. This unprecedented compilation sheds new light on the Book of Abraham as an authentic ancient text and will be a welcome resource for biblical and religious studies scholars.

This volume--the work of a lifetime--brings together all the Joseph Smith Translation manuscript in a remarkable and useful way. Now, for the first time, readers can take a careful look at the complete text, along with photos of several actual manuscript pages. The book contains a typographic transcription of all the original manuscripts, unedited and preserved exactly as dictated by the Prophet Joseph and recorded by his scribes. In addition, this volume features essays on the background, doctrinal contributions, and editorial procedures involved in the Joseph Smith Translation, as well as the history of the manuscripts since Joseph Smith's day.

Many readers of the Pearl of Great Price give the facsimiles in the book of Abraham only a cursory glance before turning to something more familiar and understandable. That's because the facsimiles are Egyptian in nature and do not seem relevant in our modern world of gospel enlightenment. So what is their worth? It is self-evident that we have received no useless and unneeded revelations, said Elder Bruce R. McConkie. All that the Lord does has a purpose and serves a need. A Study Guide to the Facsimiles of the Book of Abraham shows the meaning of every character in the facsimiles and helps readers comprehend their great value. As translated by the Prophet Joseph Smith, they bear witness of the gospel as had by Adam, Noah, and other ancient patriarchs. Appealing to translation, inspiration, and likening, author Allen J. Fletcher brings to light the more mysterious components of the facsimiles, helping us make sense of them in our day and apply their timeless teachings in our lives.

Astronomy, Papyrus, and Covenant is the third volume in the FARMS series and includes papers from a recent conference on the subject. Rather than focus on biblical interpretations of Abraham, each chapter instead explores a lesser-known aspect of Abrahamic studies: his startling visions of the heavens, comparisons between the Book of Abraham and other ancient texts, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and an investigation into shifting interpretations of Abraham throughout nineteenth-century America. The compilation is an excellent introduction to recent scholarship on the subject and will prove to be fascinating reading.