From Deseret News archives:
FAIR Conference tidbits
"Rumors surrounding what is in the First Presidency's vault are vastly overblown. You hear about the Urim and Thummim, the sword of Laban and the lost 116 (manuscript) pages (of Joseph Smith's translation of the Book of Mormon)," he said to chuckles from the crowd.
"None of that is true, though there are some items of significance," he said, several of them "given specifically to the First Presidency." He didn't elaborate further but did say that the church's "single most important holding" within the archives is a portion of the manuscript of the Book of Mormon.
Will the public ever see copies of minutes from meetings of the church's First Presidency? someone asked. "I doubt it."
While some people are obsessed with original source materials for LDS scriptures, more than half of Latter-day Saints "don't care" that the church doesn't have copies of the Egyptian scrolls from which Joseph Smith said he translated the Book of Abraham.
John Gee, a professor of Egyptology at Brigham Young University and author of "A Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri," said he believes another third of Latter-day Saints believe the book was not translated from the papyrus scrolls first obtained by the church in 1838.
During his presentation, Gee said eyewitnesses during Smith's lifetime wrote of several different ancient manuscripts that came into his possession. Some of those subsequently ended up in a Chicago museum and were destroyed in the great Chicago Fire, while others eventually were turned over to the church's First Presidency by the Metropolitan Museum in 1967.
Whether the manuscripts now owned by the church were intact from the time Smith had them or parts of them had been removed in the ensuing years can't be known, he said.
What is known is that the documents the church owns don't contain writings from the Book of Abraham, which is a part of the church's official canon known as the Pearl of Great Price.
"You cannot prove the Joseph Smith Papyri contained the Book of Abraham, and you can't prove that they didn't," he said.
