Nibley: Footnote faker or not?

[_Kishkumen]

Here is the translation from google translator...

"As Adam stands and aufzuklren be investigated, the man, his assistant came. The high helpers came to him, who? Ck rich luster into carrying him in a Stu. He said to him: Draw thy robe ... The men who created your robe, you serve until you abscheidest '"

Here is Nibleys translation...a paraphrase according to Jeffrey M. Bradshaw

Nibley paraphrases a passage from the Mandaean Ginza: “… when Adam stood praying for light and knowledge a helper came to him, gave him a garment, and told him, Those men who gave you the garment will assist you throughout your life until you are ready to leave earth'”

NIbley's paraphrase isn't that far off, and it is certainly much closer than Google Translate.

[_Rosebud]

Fourth sentence is a misrepresentation.

Explain?

Fourth sentence said: "But please don't tell me that an ignorant take on his methods and motives is as good as an informed one."

I didn't ever claim that an ignorant take on his methods and motives is as good as an informed one. Instead of responding to what I really did say, you imply that I made a claim I didn't make. An informed take on his methods will always be better than an uniformed take on his methods if his methods is the topic of conversation. I am not talking about his methods, however. You are. I have no interest in his methods. You do. I will talk to you about them in the context of this conversation, but I am not going to waste time talking about them.

I think there was a lot going on in his mind and that dishonesty was part of it.

A statement that could apply equally well to just about anyone, including you.

No argument here. However, my statement was made within the context of our conversation. I If you would like to go back and copy/paste our back and forth so it's all in one string, I'd be happy to further explain. I do not want to do the chore myself just because you enjoy zinging me.

I am saying that I think Nibley was more intelligent than most believers. Thus my assumption about possible dishonesty.

Ah, so one is not likely to be intelligent and honestly believe. Gotcha.

Egads Kish. It is possible for Nibley to be more intelligent than most believers and for many believers to be intelligent. It is possible for unintelligent people to profess belief they don't have as well as for intelligent people to profess belief they don't have. In fact (and as you know -- especially in 2016), it is common for Mormons who don't believe to profess belief so that they won't be rejected by their families and communities.

And again, you leave out the rest of what I said to make your point.

I don't really go about trying to operate cynically. Or trying to be more or less perceptive based on any kind of attempt to operate in some way. Those are hostile assumptions about me.

It's not like you are an unknown quantity who is posting here for the first time. I think I have some sense of your biases and posting habits.

And I have acknowledge my biases in this thread. I don't mind having them. In fact, I think it is important to do my best to directly acknowledge them.

t is still hostile to assume that I am trying to be more or less perceptive based on an attempt to operate in some way. Actually, it's more patronizing than hostile.

This may be the major difference between us. As I said before, I am more likely to assume there was some truth to her words than are you.

Oh, I think there is some truth to her words. I believe she believes her words. I believe she was sexually assaulted by a neighbor boy as she claims she was. I believe BYU is a psychologically stressful environment, especially if you are gay. I believe almost anyone would have struggled as a child in that family. It is not as though I have no sympathy with her plight. I just don't find some of her claims very credible, particularly those memories she recovered through the process she describes.

Okay.

OhI am always happy to be educated on what I might be missing. If you have something to bring to the table here, by all means do. I am willing to accept the truth. I want the truth. Merely alluding to your expertise is not really all that helpful.

If we are going to have a decent conversation about these things, we are going to have to figure out how to copy/paste the entire context of the conversation. I have no desire to play a game of words defending things I did not mean. You brought up the false memory debate. I am not obligated to share my expertise just because you brought it up. That's a long and very ugly debate. I am fine explaining what I meant in past posts when I have the posts in front of me. I am not going to go play post fetching so I can explain myself to you.

As you like.

Yes, I prefer going with the evidence. I like that.

Again, patronizing.

Do you know what psychoanalysis is? Just kidding, but don't get after me about making statements that you say are ignorant about subjects you have more information about than I do while you make ignorant statements about subjects I know more about than you do. Mote and beam thing.

Using the term psychoanalysis in its popular sense is not "making ignorant statements about subjects you know more about than I do." Unless, of course, you are claiming great expertise on the subject of American slang.

If you used it as slang, you used it as an insult and you are attempting to win this debate by insulting me.

Carry on.

I don't know why you assume you know what he believed. Just because people say they believe things, it doesn't mean they do....

His methods were pretty consistent with his avowed beliefs. He was fairly open about his assumptions, and if you knew his work, you wouldn't need to rely on circular reasoning about high intelligence and dishonesty. His writings, methods, and avowed beliefs are all what one might expect of a person of his time, place, circumstances, and training. His assumptions and his methods are certainly open to criticism--they practically beg for criticism.

If the best you can do is to cast doubt on Nibley's honesty with general statements on the capacity of the intelligent to be successfully deceptive, then it's weak sauce.

All right Kish, but here's the rub... I don't think his methods are worth any time expenditure. If you do, then you are more than welcome to write long posts analyzing them. I will not read those posts because I will think you are wasting your time writing them and that it would be a waste of my time to read them. HIs methods were bogus. I lost my interest in him not too far into the first of his books I tried to read. He was explaining how it was that language didn't exist before Adam and Eve and how God taught them the pure Adamic language and that all the languages of the world evolved from there. It was nonsense Kish. I got a headache. I have a hard time believing he seriously had himself convinced of this stuff. Science had progressed far beyond that during his time period and he was not unintelligent or uneducated. If you want to believe he really did, your prerogative.

Maybe i can believe he was both exceptionally intelligent and mentally ill.... but that would support his daughter's perception. If you want to call my assessment "weak sauce" because I refuse to give whatever his silly methods were more of my time, that's also your prerogative. Maybe you have something really enlightening to share about them besides that he began with the premise that the Mormon narrative was accurate and then "aggressively massaged" sources to prove it. Still don't know how you know whether or not he believed what he said he believed, but it's your right to believe whatever you want to believe about what you can know about others' beliefs.

Why does it bother you so much that some people think Nibley might not have been the man he presented himself to be? Why accept some information and disregard other information? Tad bit of bias perhaps?

You are mistaking critical thinking for bias. Critical thought will result in trusting some information and doubting the veracity of other information. Yes, I doubt Martha Beck on certain topics. I don't dismiss everything she says out of hand, as anyone who went to the trouble of investigating all of my posts on the subject would know.

So you don't think you have bias? You don't acknowledge your own bias? You think that you are an unbiased critical thinker?

Here's the bias: It gets wearying to watch a lot of ignorant and cynical nonsense about Nibley regularly trotted out.

So your bias is not about the subject, but against the people who talk about the subject? I'm not sure that's bias as much as discrimination or a tendency to speak patronizingly to people who don't respect Nibley's methods enough to spend time studying them. (------> Rosebud <------)

A similar "bias" of mine is that the subject is bogus and people who spend time studying it are wasting their time on a strange obsession. But there's nothing wrong with hobbies, so... again... carry on. Study away.

You know, like, "smart people are good liars and don't really believe in religion, and we all know Nibley was smart, so he was probably a liar and didn't believe in his religion, not really."

Gag.

This is also patronizing. I can see why, thinking back, you would decide to make the argument that my argument was this simplistic, but that doesn't mean that it was. Let me spell it out for you:

1. It is human nature to publicly present oneself in the way one perceives will evoke positive reinforcement from others.

2. Intelligent people have a higher capacity to manage their self-presentation in a manner that will allow them to foster positive reinforcement. (Although really delving into this would require defining different types of "intelligence" and I do not have enough information about Nibley to know what kind of intelligent he really was. He very well could have been a savant who did not have the capacity to manage his self-presentation. Maybe I should find an old video of him and watch him for behaviors that would indicate that he was missing that kind of intelligence. That might be interesting... at least to me.)

3. Individuals with more capacity to manage their self-presentation in a manner that will allow them to foster positive reinforcement also have the capacity to develop intricate lies that bring them rewards. They are incentivized to use their intelligence in this manner and sometimes justify their actions to themselves with thoughts like, "but people want to believe me, so how are these lies doing any harm?"

4. Individuals publicly presenting intricate lies that bring them rewards are harming others for personal gain because their deceptions have harmful consequences in others' lives no matter how much energy the individual doing the deceiving puts into convincing him or herself that the deception isn't doing any harm.

You're the one drawing the patronizing conclusions about my perceptions of people's beliefs and intelligence. That's a common and trite connection. I am not going to go back and read my arguments, but thinking back on them and considering your acknowledged "bias" (although I'm not sure I'd use the word "bias" for what you acknowledged) I can see that you might have had a justified reason to jump to those conclusions. The fact that you might have been justified in jumping to your conclusions does not also mean your conclusions were accurate.

Lastly, I have enough experience with the type of person you think Nibley was to know the difference.

Well, good for you.

[_Lemmie]

His writings, methods, and avowed beliefs are all what one might expect of a person of his time, place, circumstances, and training. His assumptions and his methods are certainly open to criticism--they practically beg for criticism.

Kish, I had always assumed that some of the issues with Nibley's methods, etc. were allowed, maybe even exacerbated by the lack of a more typical university, peer review-type environment and publishing process in his religious work. When you mention 'place [and] circumstances,' was that what you meant?

[_kairos]

I posed the question of this op to a "famous ", in my mind, Mormon historian and his response is below. I will not cite his name.
You all would know him if i did- and by the way he is not nor ever was a FARMER or part of the FAIR crowd.
" Hugh Nibley was perplexing. I went to all his classes, went to his Sunday School class every week. He had amazing breadth and brilliance. I liked when he was a close commentator on a text. However, when I edited his book in the Collected HN series, I started looking up every single footnote. And I found that his translations from the Greek weren't good. When he was trying to prove a parallel point from an ancient text, his translations were not carefully translated -- just when they needed to be most careful. I also studied his appendix on Cyril of Jerusalem in the papyrus book. And that was also not convincing at all. So I was very disillusioned with Nibley. I think he was a very brilliant man with some kind of serious flaw in his scholarship. In life and history, we discover that people are really complex--he certainly was. "

k

[_Rosebud]

Here are my last thoughts on this before I go back to doing something with my spare time besides paying attention to message boards.

What I liked about Nibley's daughter's book was her presentation of her perception of the Mormon tendency to pretty much worship Nibley's "genius" (saying this while intentionally not getting into the subject of the ins and outs of the 90s "false memory syndrome" and "courage to heal" craze) and how well her perceptions of what was going on in her family and the community in regards to the ubiquitous love of her father aligned with my personal experience with his books.

Here was my experience:

I read a bit. What I read didn't make sense. I could see that he was trying to take his readers down a logical path to the conclusion he wanted them to believe, but when I really tried to follow him down that path, I just felt confused. I looked around me. There were long shelves of his books, all with beautiful matching covers, at Deseret Book. People collected them for their own bookshelves because if they had Nibley's books on their shelves, it demonstrated to their neighbors that they were one of those "smart, scholarly" Mormons who read and understood Nibley. I would wonder to myself how they could actually get through his crap. It's not very enjoyable, at least to me, to read a bunch of stuff that is trying to sound smart and be brilliant but in reality just doesn't fit together. Maybe I felt that way because when I read, I read to try to actually comprehend and I had enough confidence in my own ability to actually understand what he was saying and that I believed that if he were saying something worth understanding, I would get it. But I didn't get it. And, maybe because I'm me and I happen to trust myself a bit, I didn't figure that just because I didn't understand it, Nibley was saying something brilliant and beyond me. I decided, instead, that he was writing nonsense instead of brilliance.

His daughter's thoughts on this subject were interesting to me (again setting aside the controversial parts of her book because that's a different discussion) because she described what I observed. For ease of communication, I'll call it "The Nibley Effect." Simply put (and being a bit repetitive here) Mormons want to show off how cool they are because they understand Nibley's "methods" or his books or his brilliance, or whatever. If someone could say (back in the days), "I love Nibley," they would garner deep respect. In other words, people love and respect Nibley for whatever reasons they say they love and respect him (some of that happens on this board today) in order to receive positive reinforcement from their envioronments. Normal human behavior. Nibley sought positive reinforcement and received it for writing nonsense. Other people jumped on the bandwagon and sought positive reinforcement for connecting themselves to Nibley's positive reinforcement.

But his daughter pretty much called out an "emperor's new clothes" phenomenon. Well, that's what I see too: the Nibley Effect. And the Nibley Effect, at least to me, is far more interesting than Nibley's bogus words or "methods." From my perspective, that's a lot if not most of what the Nibley craze was about. I agree with his daughter in that regard.

[_Chap]

Here are about 10 minutes of Nibley talking about horses in the Book of Mormon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwi0L-mwn4M

I'd be happy to link to a version without the captions - but if you just listen to the sound alone it's pretty bad. What is he saying?

I don't think he is saying anything very much; he's just standing there talking and being Nibley, which is all his audience expects of him.

[_Kishkumen]

I didn't ever claim that an ignorant take on his methods and motives is as good as an informed one. Instead of responding to what I really did say, you imply that I made a claim I didn't make. An informed take on his methods will always be better than an uniformed take on his methods if his methods is the topic of conversation. I am not talking about his methods, however. You are. I have no interest in his methods. You do. I will talk to you about them in the context of this conversation, but I am not going to waste time talking about them.

I know you are moving on to more profitable uses of your time, but I will nevertheless respond. If you do not understand his methods, then you are poorly equipped to judge his intentions and character as expressed through his writings. What appears confusing or dishonest to you may actually spring from his assumptions and methodological choices. Now, I happen to reject his assumptions and methodological choices, but that is different from ignorantly inveighing against his work as an attack on his character while denying the utility of understanding the very things one is using to attack his character.

No argument here. However, my statement was made within the context of our conversation. I If you would like to go back and copy/paste our back and forth so it's all in one string, I'd be happy to further explain. I do not want to do the chore myself just because you enjoy zinging me.

Yeah, I get it. I call you on your BS, and then you eloquently refuse to defend it. Instead, you accuse me of zinging you because most everyone here knows that I am fond of zinging people. It is an effective dodge, I'll grant you that.

Egads Kish. It is possible for Nibley to be more intelligent than most believers and for many believers to be intelligent. It is possible for unintelligent people to profess belief they don't have as well as for intelligent people to profess belief they don't have. In fact (and as you know -- especially in 2016), it is common for Mormons who don't believe to profess belief so that they won't be rejected by their families and communities.

Good. I am glad we all agree that many things are possible. Whether they apply to Nibley or not is something that remains to be shown. You are welcome to show them instead of calling upon some undisclosed personal experience as your evidence against Nibley's character, or Martha Beck's imaginative memoir of her psychological transformations from Mormon rube and victim of Geraldo Rivera to the triumphantly enlightened Harvard hero and Oprah darling.

It is still hostile to assume that I am trying to be more or less perceptive based on an attempt to operate in some way. Actually, it's more patronizing than hostile.

OK, put up or shut up. If it is the case that your personal response to Martha Beck's memoir is the centerpiece of your case against Hugh Nibley, then so be it. It's not exactly persuasive, but I can understand the desire to sympathize with the victims of Mormon patriarchy who target their fathers as the personal face of the problem. If you have some other experience that you have yet to share, beyond an inability to understand or care very much about Nibley's writings, then I am all ears.

If we are going to have a decent conversation about these things, we are going to have to figure out how to copy/paste the entire context of the conversation. I have no desire to play a game of words defending things I did not mean. You brought up the false memory debate. I am not obligated to share my expertise just because you brought it up. That's a long and very ugly debate. I am fine explaining what I meant in past posts when I have the posts in front of me. I am not going to go play post fetching so I can explain myself to you.

Fine. But you can't have it both ways. You can't base your case on this stuff and then expect me not to ask you to defend your position. You bring up Martha Beck's account as evidence against Nibley's character, and I respond with a reasonable concern regarding her credibility. You choose not to defend the credibility you have asserted on her behalf. I suppose we can discount what Beck has said unless we are just generally inclined to believe her.

Because your basic position in this conversation is that whatever experience each of us brings to the discussion is an unassailable personal truth. I have my experience, and you have yours. But, I reject your assumption. I think we can get beyond the aporia of solipsism and examine our views together.

If you used it as slang, you used it as an insult and you are attempting to win this debate by insulting me.

If you were to offer some genuine psychological analysis, then I would respectfully listen. If you want to take every reference to psychology as a swipe at you, then you should develop a thicker skin. I did not make those comments based on whatever training you have. I basically am familiar with your posts about John Dehlin's lack of character. I do not have your personal profile including your name and your profession in front of me.

All right Kish, but here's the rub... I don't think his methods are worth any time expenditure. If you do, then you are more than welcome to write long posts analyzing them. I will not read those posts because I will think you are wasting your time writing them and that it would be a waste of my time to read them. HIs methods were bogus. I lost my interest in him not too far into the first of his books I tried to read. He was explaining how it was that language didn't exist before Adam and Eve and how God taught them the pure Adamic language and that all the languages of the world evolved from there. It was nonsense Kish. I got a headache. I have a hard time believing he seriously had himself convinced of this stuff. Science had progressed far beyond that during his time period and he was not unintelligent or uneducated. If you want to believe he really did, your prerogative.

Maybe i can believe he was both exceptionally intelligent and mentally ill.... but that would support his daughter's perception. If you want to call my assessment "weak sauce" because I refuse to give whatever his silly methods were more of my time, that's also your prerogative. Maybe you have something really enlightening to share about them besides that he began with the premise that the Mormon narrative was accurate and then "aggressively massaged" sources to prove it. Still don't know how you know whether or not he believed what he said he believed, but it's your right to believe whatever you want to believe about what you can know about others' beliefs.

Then really, why do more than navel gaze? If studying the thoughts and cultural assumptions of people other than ourselves is so odious and boring, we should just do away with all of the various humanistic, historical, and social disciplines that concern such things because others' ideas and beliefs are nonsense. I get you aren't into it, and that you think it is a real bore, but thousands of people find a sympathetic study of other people's perspectives--something at the core of humanism--is not just pissing in the wind. There is a point to studying history and intellectual history, even if the benefit is reduced to something as simple as treating others, including kooky old Mormon scholars, with some measure of kindness, sympathy, and understanding.

So you don't think you have bias? You don't acknowledge your own bias? You think that you are an unbiased critical thinker?

Try exegesis instead of eisigesis.

So your bias is not about the subject, but against the people who talk about the subject? I'm not sure that's bias as much as discrimination or a tendency to speak patronizingly to people who don't respect Nibley's methods enough to spend time studying them. (------> Rosebud <------)

Again, exegesis not eisigesis. If you presume to criticize what you haven't a clue about, expect push back.

A similar "bias" of mine is that the subject is bogus and people who spend time studying it are wasting their time on a strange obsession. But there's nothing wrong with hobbies, so... again... carry on. Study away.

I got used to your hobbies. I quit commenting on them altogether. I was not aware they included attacking things you haven't the foggiest clue about and then defending your ignorance as unimpeachable personal preference, but now I know better.

1. It is human nature to publicly present oneself in the way one perceives will evoke positive reinforcement from others.

Banal observation.

2. Intelligent people have a higher capacity to manage their self-presentation in a manner that will allow them to foster positive reinforcement. (Although really delving into this would require defining different types of "intelligence" and I do not have enough information about Nibley to know what kind of intelligent he really was. He very well could have been a savant who did not have the capacity to manage his self-presentation. Maybe I should find an old video of him and watch him for behaviors that would indicate that he was missing that kind of intelligence. That might be interesting... at least to me.)

When you actually do turn your attention to the man you have been happily slagging from a position of confessed ignorance, let me know. I would find your informed take interesting.

3. Individuals with more capacity to manage their self-presentation in a manner that will allow them to foster positive reinforcement also have the capacity to develop intricate lies that bring them rewards. They are incentivized to use their intelligence in this manner and sometimes justify their actions to themselves with thoughts like, "but people want to believe me, so how are these lies doing any harm?"

Yes. I think most of us are aware of this. Now tell me how it is you have come to include Nibley in this category of people.

4. Individuals publicly presenting intricate lies that bring them rewards are harming others for personal gain because their deceptions have harmful consequences in others' lives no matter how much energy the individual doing the deceiving puts into convincing him or herself that the deception isn't doing any harm.

So, basically, what most people do as a matter of course a few people manage to turn into a sinister Ponzi scheme of social/financial capital with dire consequences for others. I am not sure what the dire consequences are imagined to be in Nibley's case. Since the guy lived in an unassuming little house, didn't really financially benefit from his "Ponzi scheme", and is really not all that well known outside of Mormonism's geek set, I am not seeing all of the dire consequences to which you refer. His family may have resented the way he "wasted" his life (or you resent it on their behalf). Certainly we can say that Martha presents herself as someone who felt deeply wounded and aggrieved by her father. She paints quite a colorful portrait of him as a pathetic Cagliostro-lite. Or perhaps you are talking about someone other than Nibley.

Well, good for you.

Certainly no one could accuse you of being patronizing.

[_kairos]

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Shadow person i am really trying but forgetful-please do not send me to outer darkness-seriously! i do apologize to the board.

k

[_Kishkumen]

I posed the question of this op to a "famous ", in my mind, Mormon historian and his response is below. I will not cite his name.
You all would know him if i did- and by the way he is not nor ever was a FARMER or part of the FAIR crowd.
" Hugh Nibley was perplexing. I went to all his classes, went to his Sunday School class every week. He had amazing breadth and brilliance. I liked when he was a close commentator on a text. However, when I edited his book in the Collected HN series, I started looking up every single footnote. And I found that his translations from the Greek weren't good. When he was trying to prove a parallel point from an ancient text, his translations were not carefully translated -- just when they needed to be most careful. I also studied his appendix on Cyril of Jerusalem in the papyrus book. And that was also not convincing at all. So I was very disillusioned with Nibley. I think he was a very brilliant man with some kind of serious flaw in his scholarship. In life and history, we discover that people are really complex--he certainly was. "

k

OK, now this is something we can sink our teeth into. Putting aside the fact that we here have the witness of an anonymous Mormon scholar whose skills with Greek are an unknown, I would say, based on my own experience, that this is a fair assessment and criticism of Nibley's methods. The serious flaw in Nibley's scholarship was, in my view, nothing less than a conscious decision to make Joseph Smith's narrative the lens through which he viewed everything else. If there was something in Greek (vel sim.) that looked vaguely familiar to his Mormon eyes, he would translate the language in such a way that it looked like a dead-on parallel. I have seen John Gee do exactly the same thing. Obviously, I reject this way of treating the ancient evidence. If one's point is to understand the past on its own terms instead of calling upon the past to bolster a predetermined end, then this is irresponsible scholarly practice.

What I think we have seen from our interactions with a few LDS scholar-apologists, however, is that they view this as unexceptionable. They point to the fact that we all have biases and contemporary theoretical fashions through which we examine the evidence; they slot Joseph Smith in where you slot in neo-marxism, post-colonialism, or what have you. Yeah, I don't buy this argument, but they are very open about it. And it fatally compromises the applicability of their views to the larger discussions on those topics. John Gee's translation of an early second century Greek text written by a Christian author is something that I have every reason to be suspicious of. But anyone who really knows these guys knows what they are doing and why.

[_Kishkumen]

Here are my last thoughts on this before I go back to doing something with my spare time besides paying attention to message boards.

What I liked about Nibley's daughter's book was her presentation of her perception of the Mormon tendency to pretty much worship Nibley's "genius" (saying this while intentionally not getting into the subject of the ins and outs of the 90s "false memory syndrome" and "courage to heal" craze) and how well her perceptions of what was going on in her family and the community in regards to the ubiquitous love of her father aligned with my personal experience with his books.

I can sympathize with the anger and sense of inferiority that results in the betrayal of one's family and community as one converts away from a minority community like the Mormons. Friends and family become unwitting victims and dupes. Former leaders are the manipulative villains who personally benefited from their crimes against the rest of the community. What makes this especially appealing in this case is how Joseph Smith's methods and misbehavior fit many of our narratives about cults and conspiracies so well. Anyone who persists in upholding Joseph Smith's take on things is liable to be seen as a conscious collaborator or a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. Nibley is a dangerous deceiver because he is implicated in it all.

Yes, it is true that people lionized Nibley without really understanding what he was saying. It is also true that much of what he was saying did not stand up to scrutiny. Unfortunately, what gets thrown out along with Nibley's dubious scholarship is the way he appealed to many curious people in a rather historically amnesiac community to go out and become interested in the many subjects he raised in his flights of scholarly fancy. It is no mean feat to drag a provincial farming society into an exploration of the vast and variegated landscape of literatures, histories, languages, and cultures.

Not everyone was going to do the work he kept asking people to do. Not everyone was going to listen to the many salutary criticisms of Mormon culture and leadership that he offered as a member of the community. But I think he deserves a great deal of credit for venturing to do these things, because they were much more important than his method of translating Syriac and Middle Egyptian. Among the number of us who took up his invitation are a growing group of people who realized that his methods were fatally compromised. We ultimately abandoned many of his views. But by Jove we had our minds opened a tiny sliver and we pried it to a larger crack because he went there first. He put people's provincial views in conversation with the wider world. Then we discovered that the relationship between these things was much more complicated than he had initially led us to believe.

One of the things that I admire about Robert M. Price, Don Bradley, and others like them is that they are open to learning from people whose ideologies and/or methods are so different from their own. An intelligent and perceptive reader will offer valuable readings of the text that almost anyone can benefit from. Joseph Smith was many things we may abhor, but he was a very creative and perceptive reader. Nibley did, sometimes inadvertently, stumble upon interesting and valuable things. He did publish some pieces in normal scholarly venues, and those things were deemed useful by his non-LDS peers.

My opinion is that through Nibley we will be able to place Joseph Smith in the larger context of spiritual and cultural trends in the West that date back to the Hellenistic period. The key difference between those who explicate this and Nibley is that they will step back from the discourse that Nibley was steeped in and participated in, in order to describe what Nibley and Smith were doing in their cultural appropriations and misprisions. Smith and Nibley might be viewed as a poor man's Plutarch, at least in regards to how Plutarch used his Middle Platonic eyes to reinterpret Greco-Egyptian religion. If one substitutes Smith's Freemasonry, folk magic, and frontier Protestant heresies for Plutarch's Platonism, the analogy works fairly well.