Abstract: In a response to my review of their Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts volume, the series editors of the Joseph Smith Papers provided feedback and commentary on two important items. There are other, unaddressed issues this rejoinder examines.


I am grateful to the editors of the Joseph Smith Papers for their thoughtful response to my review1 and to the editors of Interpreter for allowing me to write this rejoinder. The American historian Peter Novick noted when he was invited to respond to reviews of his work, “There is nothing more tedious than the spectacle of disgruntled authors complaining that they have been misrepresented or, even worse, whimpering that they have been ‘misunderstood.’ Academic authors, above all others, should be immunized from such concerns, after years of seeing the versions of our lectures we get back in blue books at the end of the term.”2 I hope I do not fall into that trap.
The series editors of the Joseph Smith Papers are good men. I have enjoyed working with them in the past and hope to do so in the future. They are intelligent, conscientious, sincere, faithful, skilled, and generally thoughtful and competent. Overwhelmingly, the Joseph Smith Papers Project is a testament to the skills of the respective authors and editorial teams. Having said that, JSP-R43 has academic failings. Due to the limited space accorded me in this rejoinder, I cannot further detail them [Page 114]here. However, a more comprehensive response to these shortcomings will appear in future publications. In this rejoinder, I will take stock, generally, of where discussions of these issues stand at the moment.
Unaddressed Issues
While I appreciate the time and care the series editors took to craft their response, they addressed only a subset of the concerns raised in the reviews by Jeff Lindsay4 and me. In addition to the lack of response to some of the technical errors in JSP-R4 that I pointed out in my review, several problematic editorial decisions remained unaddressed in the response:

* Placement and Grouping Issues. The response notes that an upside-down image in JSP-R4 (p. 47) was caught immediately after publication and corrected in the online errata. This is commendable, but the response glosses over my comments regarding the placement and grouping of the papyri in the printed volume. It is the entire purpose of a book review to make readers aware of such issues in the book being reviewed.5
* Dating Issues. In my review, I claimed that the volume “editors date the copying of Egyptian characters...