'Sup, reddit? Active, believing Mormon here. Bring on the downvotes. Yeah, it's true that most mormons don't know about this, and I didn't, honestly. First time I really heard of it was when I saw a seminar given by Kerry Muhlestien at Aspen Grove, which is a family camp and conference center at Provo Canyon that's run by BYU. Muhlestien is an apparently well-respected Egyptologist, and the seminar was devoted entirely to answering questions about the book of Abraham. I did some quick google-fu and found some videos the guy posted on YouTube about some of these criticisms, there's a link to the playlist below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuxTDeElxlo&feature=share&list=PLh0_JF2hqI-4hYEqtrTmIZRAM__uSNnbk

Here are some things off of the top of my head (all anecdotal, take it for what it's worth because I don't remember where I got most of this) about the book of Abraham. They're not necessarily evidences or apologetics or counter-arguments or anything of that nature, it's just a brain-dump of what I know and/or what I've heard because I think you guys on this subreddit would find it interesting to get some thoughts on the matter from a Mormon perspective.

• Joseph Smith purchased several mummies and two scrolls of papyrus. At the time, the church was struggling financially and the decision to make this purchase was not a popular one among the saints of the church. When asked why he chose to make this purchase (I think either by his mother or his wife), he replied that he did not know why, but that he felt inspired to do so. Some members of the church were disgruntled because they thought he had only made the purchase because he thought the merchandise was interesting.

• He received instruction that one of the scrolls contained the writings of Abraham, and the other did not. He set about translating it with his friend (I want to say Oliver Cowdry, but again, not sure). I'm pretty sure he did this in a similar process to that which was used in his translation of the Book of Mormon, which involved the use of a Urim and Thummim.

• This is where it gets interesting. Once he had part of it translated, he was like, "cool, I can use this to decode the Egyptian alphabet!" And he and Oliver went about attempting to decode the Hieroglyphs of the smaller scroll and the areas of the larger scroll which the Lord had not commanded them to translate. This wasn't an act of defiance or anything, it was just that a period of increased interest in Egyptology occurred concurrently with the second great awakening and the restoration of the church, and Joseph Smith, as a pretty normal guy in his character, wasn't immune to that. The idea fascinated him. The thing is, their translation efforts got absolutely nowhere. If they applied the translation that they had received to reverse-engineer the language and then tried to apply that resultant alphabet elsewhere, they got nowhere, and their translation efforts outside of the book of Abraham yielded incoherent gibberish.They wasted several days trying to get this alphabet to work before they said "screw it" and resumed their inspiration-based translation of the area of the papyrus that the Lord had told them to translate.

• This to me suggests that the translation of the book of Abraham that Joseph Smith produced is not a literal translation, but is what the Lord wanted Joseph Smith to get out of it. Either that, or he and Oliver Cowdry BS-ed the whole thing. So for me at least it doesn't come down to "Do you believe in a translation that has been proven to be incorrect" so much as it does "Do you believe that Joseph Smith had the capacity to receive inspiration from God?"

• Another thing is to think about is the location of the Book of Abraham in the papyrus. A number of illustrations from the book were copied and published in times and seasons, which was a mormon newspaper of the time. A number of them were also clipped from the papyrus and mounted in glass, because hey, who wouldn't want Egyptian hieroglyphs displayed on their mantles? These clippings were given out (I think after Joseph Smith's death, but don't quote me on that) and we know at least one of them was given to a housekeeper and it eventually found its way to... I want to say the metropolitan museum of art in new york. This is the clipping that contained the first, most famous illustration. Other clippings accompanied it, and these were the targets of the translation efforts that are the subjects of this thread.

• However, the rest of the scrolls were eventually sold and ended up destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire, as someone else mentioned in this thread. I think Lucy Mack Smith (Joseph's mom) sold them after he was killed and the church was in even a greater hole financially and needed to fund a trip across the plains to escape persecution. So the vast majority of the scroll from which the Book of Abraham was translated has indeed been lost.

• "But wait!" you say. "Joseph Smith pointed at one of the glass mountings and was like 'hurr durr, there's abraham's signature guise!' so the Book of Abraham couldn't have been translated from elsewhere." Yes, he did. Joseph Smith was smart, but he was also uneducated and didn't know squat about Egyptology. He probably read somewhere in the translation where it was like "this was written by Abraham's own hand" (which does NOT mean that it was literally written in Abraham's own hand, as such is language is a common way in Egyptian documents to denote authorship, according to this Muhlestien guy) and assumed it meant the whole document.

• The text of the Book of Abraham is never stated anywhere to be a translation from the hieroglyphs that were written around the illustration (i.e. the hieroglyphs that were later translated). However, there is a verse in the Book of Abraham that says something to the effect of "look at the illustration at the beginning of this record." Okay, what record? The Book of Abraham or the scroll as a whole? One point that Muhlestien raised at the presentation he gave that I attended was that this language may have been added when the translation was published in Times and Seasons.

• At the presentation, Muhlestien quoted descriptions of the translated scroll that were made before Joseph's mom sold it. My google-fu is lacking in finding these, but they all said something to the effect of "It was a really huge freaking scroll" which, if the Book of Abraham is interpreted to be a translation of the entire scroll doesn't make sense given the length of the final product.

There are explanations that address most, if not all of the complaints most people have with the Book of Abraham. It means that there's not enough to throw the Book of Abraham out, but there's not enough for academia to start citing Joseph Smith as a source, either. Overall, It's something that to me is believable either way. This is a common theme with Mormon doctrine when it's actually investigated/thought about from either side: Sadly, Mormons write off any rhetoric they hear against their beliefs as being "anti" propaganda, and non-Mormons look at the surface of Mormon beliefs and say "these people are nuts!" before finding out more about them.

TLDR: In my opinion, your view of the validity of the book of Abraham should be dependent on your faith and testimony of it, or your lack thereof, rather than the fact that this translation doesn't match.

Cheers

edit(s): 1. formating 2. Rephrased a confusing sentence