In 1835 the church purchased four mummies and accompanying papyri from a travelling exhibitor, and Joseph Smith announced that one roll contained writings of Abraham in his own hand. His translation appeared in 1842 with three woodcut facsimiles. The papyri were thought destroyed in the Chicago fire of 1871, but in 1967 eleven fragments surfaced at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and were returned to the church, allowing Egyptologists to read them directly.
The verdict of Egyptology, from the first examinations of the facsimiles in 1912 through study of the recovered fragments, has been consistent: the fragments are portions of common Egyptian funerary documents, a Book of Breathing prepared for a priest named Hor and pieces of a Book of the Dead, dating from centuries after any plausible Abraham, and the facsimile interpretations do not match their Egyptian content.
The church's own Gospel Topics essay acknowledges these findings. Responses within the tradition divide: some scholars argue the Abraham text came from portions of papyrus now lost, others that the papyri served as a catalyst for revelation rather than a source translated in the ordinary sense, and Community of Christ never canonised the book at all. The dispute is genuinely unresolved as a matter of faith commitments rather than of Egyptology, and it has become the standard case study in how the movement negotiates scholarship and scripture.