Still, speculation passes the time pleasurably.

Perfectly correct, but it also correct that the possibility of someone having lived is not evidence that they actually did live. People very like me might be found in New York Times obituaries, but that would only prove that they lived, not that I did… or to take a better example, Ignatius J. Reilly or Sherlock Holmes could have been real people, and future historians might argue the question if they don’t have much written evidence from our day to go on. There was such a city as London and there were detectives in it; there was such a city as New Orleans and there were unemployed people with master’s degrees who lived with their mothers there. But we know those people to have been invented through other evidence that we have. Appealing to “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” goes both ways, you see.

the Latter-day Saints do believe Abraham left written records, that Joseph Smith found some writings by him copied on papyri that he purchased from an antiquities dealer; and the contents of those writings were revealed to him by God.

Your link also admits

None of the characters on the papyrus fragments mentioned Abraham’s name or any of the events recorded in the book of Abraham. Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologists agree that the characters on the fragments do not match the translation given in the book of Abraham, though there is not unanimity, even among non-Latter-day Saint scholars, about the proper interpretation of the vignettes on these fragments. Scholars have identified the papyrus fragments as parts of standard funerary texts that were deposited with mummified bodies. These fragments date to between the third century B.C.E. and the first century C.E., long after Abraham lived.

Of course, the fragments do not have to be as old as Abraham for the book of Abraham and its illustrations to be authentic. Ancient records are often transmitted as copies or as copies of copies. The record of Abraham could have been edited or redacted by later writers much as the Book of Mormon prophet-historians Mormon and Moroni revised the writings of earlier peoples….

People who study Egypt for a living can read these, and what they say on their face is obvious and not anything unusual: whatever was revealed to Joseph Smith was purely spiritual in nature and can’t be seen by non-spiritual eyes. That’s something that really needs to be brought to the forefront when claiming documents as evidence, that only a prophet can know what they really say and that what others see is not what the prophet saw. And that’s a very different sort of claim than the impression given by “we’ve found a papyrus written by Abraham and Joseph Smith translated it.”

More nik-picking?

I need a cite that “met” in those days disallowed convergence.

Implied in the sense of the word “met” that they were going away from St Ives and the narrator was coming toward it. We use the word more loosely nowadays, the older usage was based on coming together, like when we say “roads meet”, convergence. Had they all been going the same direction the narrator would have “passed” them.

Yeah, good riddle, but does this ever happen? And how does one know the man, wives, sacks, cats and kits aren’t going to St. Ives too?

These things bothered me as a kid. 🙂

https://youtu.be/nWYTf47NWrc?is=WE5wArlk58gm4ish

Dems have a horrid group for pres candidate in 2028 – compared to the GOP’s deep bench, IMHO.

According to the data, Ocasio-Cortez leads the pack with 22% support while Buttigieg closely follows with 21%. Harris only scored 5% support, while California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) and Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) trailed with less than 10% each.