Nibley defended Joseph Smith through scholarship, not testimony

[_Themis]

I think someone like Bushman can admire some bits of Brodie ... while at the same time entirely rejecting her conclusion. Or, one can admire the research (maybe even the writing, since Brodie was a gifted writer), while rejecting the conclusion.

We find plenty who do the same with a earth billions of years old.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ599TQUiug

[_Maksutov]

If you really want to know what Bushman thought of Nibley's scholarship just compare the number of times Bushman quotes Brodie or Quinn as opposed to Nibley in Rough Stone Rolling. Even Bushman himself has acknowledge Brodie's work as preeminent.

In 2005, LDS scholar Richard Bushman published a highly regarded biography of Smith entitled Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling which has frequently been compared to Brodie's work. In his book, Bushman noted that Brodie's "biography was acknowledged by non-Mormon scholars as the premier study of Joseph Smith"and called Brodie "the most eminent of Joseph Smith's unbelieving biographers." Bushman wrote in 2007 that Brodie had "shaped the view of the Prophet for half a century. Nothing we have written has challenged her domination. I had hoped my book would displace hers, but at best it will only be a contender in the ring, whereas before she reigned unchallenged."

Nibley, not so much.

When it comes to Nibley''s defense of the Book of Abraham, especially his ""gibberish" Egyptian translations he fares even worse. Ritner has observed:

In 1975 Hugh Nibley attempted both a transliteration and a literal, interlineal translation of only the unrestored portions of Fragments Xi & X. Designed strictly for an audience of believers, Nibley's volume was expressly composed to provide a Mormon rebuttal to the interpretive analysis of Egyptologist, including Baer, with whom he had studied briefly and informally. These word for word incomplete translations produced such results as ... were recognized by Nibley as "nonsense." While intended to highlight his quibbles over the nature of translations (to defend Joseph Smith's use of the term) Nibley's interlinear method of literal translation would necessarily produce gibberish from any language.

Tacitly acknowledging this source of embarrassment, John Gee and Michael Rhodes have attempted to justify Nibley's methods--while promptly dropping them--in their heavily "re-worked" edition of "The Message of the Joseph Smith Papryi".

Like most LDS I grew up idolizing Nibley as this really smart guy who believed and defended Mormonism. And like most Mormons any book I bought of his remained on the shelf, unread. Later on in life when I started examining what he actually said it was a huge let down. Instead of using scholarship to defend Mormonism, he was attacking scholarship he thought was critical Mormonism. The realty is that Nibley did not use scholarship to defend Mormonism, he used sophistry, parallelamania and rhetoric, most of which has not stood well the test of time. In Mormon circles he may still be much admired but in scholastic circles, especially non LDS ones, he is rarely referenced.

So go ahead and spend your time reading though a volume of books that are outdated and no longer relevant, even in modern LDS scholarship circles. But you should know that even within church circles much of what he has written has "not aged well." As LDS Historian David Whittaker noted:

Hugh Nibley's 1961 The Myth Makers went even further, suggesting that there never was an 1826 trial. In his 1991 foreword to Tinkling Cymbals and Sounding Brass, historian David Whittaker acknowledged that a number of Nibley's conclusions had not aged well. Noting that Nibley "made no claims to be an expert in American or Mormon history" and wrote "in part under assignment, and preferring that his time could be devoted to other projects," Whittaker wrote: "Readers thirty years later should not be surprised to discover that, with the subsequent professionalization of the Church library and archives, the study of Mormon history has progressed on a variety of details discussed in Nibley’s works. For example, recent work has been done on the now available accounts of Joseph Smith’s First Vision, as well as on money digging and his 1826 trial, and the earliest treatments of his religious claims. . . . Such new research has strengthened Nibley’s arguments in many cases; it has corrected him in others."

For whatever genius he may have had, the amount of sustained puff and bluff undermined his potential and his legacy.

[_Symmachus]

Sounds like a fun project, Kjones. As an undergraduate, I read all the Collected Works then published (up to 15 I think). I was already beyond belief when I first encountered Nibley, so I approached him from a rather unusual angle. I have never met another non-believer who took Nibley as seriously as I did, and anyone I know who took him seriously did so as a believer first, even if they later shed that belief. Anyway, I found Nibley to be a very poor scholar—potential untapped when not abused, though with some moments of sheer brilliance—but he is unquestionably the greatest writer Mormonism has ever had. For that reason, I always enjoy reading him and agree with you that his work has not been surpassed and won't be in the near future. Nibley was creative in the very literal meaning of the word: his picture of Mormonism was not simply the Received Version but rather one infused with particular colors from Nibley's own palette. It's a pity the brilliance of those colors are so rarely appreciated. I suspect Nibley's artistry is better appreciated and enjoyed by people who aren't reading him for validation as believers or hunting for holes and errors as non-believers.

On his social commentary, I admit its value to a point, but it is extremely ill-thought out and amounts to little more than sophomoric grumbling, however eloquently expressed. It is the easiest thing in the world to point out that someone is not leaving up to their stated ideal; the nature and function of ideals is that they define shortcomings, make them intelligible and clear. Nibley was good at pointing out where Mormons were not meeting their ideals, then, but the question is: how to meet them? What do you think he proposed for that? I've argued in this forum that his social criticism reveals Nibley to be as much of a literalist (fundamentalist?) as his scriptural scholarship, for his only his answers to social problems or political problems was to apply the scriptures literally—as if it were that easy to know what they say half the time!—and especially to follow what the Church leaders say. Of course, that kind of obsequiousness is part of the reason why Mormons don't meet up with their ideals—resulting more space for people like Nibley to come in and expose their inadequacy. I just don't see his critiques as having more depth than emotional gesturing—though learned and eloquent in its expression—but perhaps you can persuade me otherwise.

In any case, I hope your reading of Nibley will stimulate some interesting discussion.

[_Gadianton]

I read probably half of his collected works as a teenager. In contrast to Symm, I was an avid believer when I read them but I had no knowledge of apologetics and I was barely aware of what anti-lit was. I was never a reader, but a friend got me into sci-fi, and then he got me into pseudoscience and church books such as Crowther's works and Skousen's. While my friend persisted in his childish delusions and is to this day a right-wing conspiracy nut (he isn't stupid by any means and has a very good mind for science, he's just childish), I read Since Cumorah, without any context as to what I was getting into, and I underwent a paradigm shift of sorts. It's not that I quit believing in conspiracies as such, but Nibley offered a new perspective I'd never encountered in the way he put his arguments together. Quite honestly, I'm not sure up to that point in my life I'd ever encountered an argument for anything. My exposure to science was entirely through Sci Fi and conspiracy writings, and I think I imagined science as an enterprise of armchair speculation and anecdotes (kind of like how the comment section at Sic et Non sees science as grown adults). Church books I read did perform analysis, but it was more about quoting past leaders and then painting whatever picture they wished to paint. So here's Nibley going off on the "Septuagint" and Dead Sea Isaiah and I'd never heard of any of this stuff, and then he's actually making evidence-based arguments. That must have made all kinds of sense to me so I went out and bought Gaster's Dead Sea Scrolls translation etc. My fascination with the other stuff just sort of drifted -- here was something you could really sink your teeth into with Nibley. And even better, Nibley had all kinds of accolades -- the way I read it, the entire scholarly world lived in fear of Hugh Nibley and admitted his was smarter than they were, knew more, and feared discussing scholarship with him. What I wonder about nowadays with Nibley, is the extend to which Nibley understood how the Chapel Mormon blindly followed his over-confident cynicism. Did he know? Was he okay with it? Well, that was a huge setup for failure. Unrelated to Nibley, I found myself in a library one day reading The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible and within about 20 minutes the paradigm shifted again and I never read another Nibley book.

As a bonus, as I've mentioned all of the above before but not sure about this one: Nibley's satire resonated with me than his scholarly stuff. My favorite Sci-fi series at that time was L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth, and Nibley's work reminded me quite a lot of that.

[_Kishkumen]

I have a couple of thoughts here. First, Nibley was obviously not playing the same game as most academics. From one perspective it would appear that he must have been deeply cynical or delusional. Both charges more or less fit. I think we have to appreciate the world Nibley came out of. It was one that still felt intense pain and a sense of alienation due to persecution. The “world” rejected Smith, and the US government very nearly destroyed the LDS Church over polygamy. Nibley was much closer, generationally speaking, to these wounds. He also saw the hypocrisy that occurred when Zion embraced Babylon to make money, hence his penitential reverence for Brother Brigham.

So, what did he care about placing a literal reading of Smith’s revelations at the center of his methodology? If he got one over on the wicked, vain Gentiles, then all the better for Mormonism, eh? If he strongly rejected money and academic achievement for his mission of defending the kingdom and making antiquity harmonize with Joseph Smith’s ideas, then he could exorcize the demons of the past weighing upon him.

Secondly, Nibley represents those early followers of Smith who surpassed Smith’s learning by a country mile but lacked his charisma and imagination. They helped make Mormonism, lending it a patina of respectability and sophistication, not to mention some of its more intensely strange content. Having invested in the system in this way, they would not abandon it. Investment came from belief and it intensified belief in turn. Nibley continued the work of Cowdery, Phelps, and Seixas. This had almost nothing to do with being a scholar in the modern sense.

[_Fence Sitter]

Nibley continued the work of Cowdery, Phelps, and Seixas

I can see the reference with both Cowdery and Phelps, and also the Pratt's might be here as well as Hyde, but why did you include Seixas? Was he a believer? I thought he was just the Hebrew teacher in Kirtland for a very brief time.

[_Kishkumen]

Nibley continued the work of Cowdery, Phelps, and Seixas

I can see the reference with both Cowdery and Phelps, and also the Pratt's might be here as well as Hyde, but why did you include Seixas? Was he a believer? I thought he was just the Hebrew teacher in Kirtland for a very brief time.

Oops! My brain slip. I meant Neibaur, Nibley’s ancestor.