The Church itself openly acknowledges the central Egyptological fact: both Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologists agree that the surviving papyrus fragments are ordinary Egyptian funerary texts and that their characters do not correspond to the English Book of Abraham text. So an LDS response should not pretend otherwise.
But there are at least two importantly different claims being conflated:
1. The extant fragments are not a conventional Egyptian-language manuscript of Abraham. Agreed.
2. Therefore Joseph could not have received an authentic revelation concerning Abraham. That does not follow.
Joseph's use of “translation” was demonstrably broader than modern academic translation. His revision of the Bible, for example, sometimes produced revelatory expansions without access to an underlying ancient manuscript. The Book of Abraham could therefore have arisen through what is commonly called a catalyst model: the Egyptian artifacts occasioned a revelatory process rather than supplying, character-for-character, the English text. The Church explicitly recognizes that as a possible model while declining to canonize one particular theory of the process.
There is also a genuine evidentiary limitation critics sometimes glide past: most of the papyri Joseph possessed no longer survive. Contemporary descriptions speak of longer rolls and multiple pieces, while today's fragments constitute only part of the collection. That does not prove a lost Abraham manuscript existed, but neither can someone legitimately argue from the surviving fragments alone that nothing Joseph possessed could have had any relationship to his production of the text.
More fundamentally, from an Ostler-style LDS perspective, revelation is not divine dictation through a perfectly transparent human instrument. God communicates through historically situated, fallible persons whose concepts, vocabulary, assumptions, and interpretive activity participate in revelation. Joseph could misunderstand aspects of Egyptian, speculate incorrectly about particular symbols, and still genuinely receive revelatory insight. Prophetic inspiration does not entail prophetic omniscience.
So “Mark and avoid” assumes the very theological premise that needs defending: that a true prophet must produce an academically correct Egyptological translation whenever he calls something a “translation.” That criterion is neither established by the biblical prophetic tradition nor required by a Latter-day Saint model of revelation.
A stronger critical argument would be: Joseph appears to have associated Egyptian material with Abraham in ways modern Egyptology does not sustain. That's fair evidence that an LDS believer has to explain.
But the leap from there to “therefore Joseph Smith was a false prophet” requires additional premises - and those premises are exactly where the debate really lies.
Joseph Smith was a false prophet.
The Book of Abraham had nothing to do with the writings of Abraham or the patriarch himself.
Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism? Mark and avoid.
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