Nibley: Footnote faker or not?

[_Kishkumen]

All you have to do is attend a "Worldview Weekend" conference and it will all be made clear to you.

I was really fortunate to meet and spend some time talking with the author of a very excellent history of Hermeticism during a recent conference. Seriously, the book was groundbreaking. We had a great time chatting because I have at least a smidgen of knowledge regarding the topic of Western esotericism and the occult, and I loved his book.

His candor was very refreshing too. He confided to me that as a German Protestant, he was comfortable writing about these things but felt inhibited when it came to the idea of participating in them.

[_Maksutov]

All you have to do is attend a "Worldview Weekend" conference and it will all be made clear to you.

I was really fortunate to meet and spend some time talking with the author of a very excellent history of Hermeticism during a recent conference. Seriously, the book was groundbreaking. We had a great time chatting because I have at least a smidgen of knowledge regarding the topic of Western esotericism and the occult, and I loved his book.

His candor was very refreshing too. He confided to me that as a German Protestant, he was comfortable writing about these things but felt inhibited when it came to the idea of participating in them.

Okay, you got me hooked. Please share? This is an area of great interest to me.

[_kairos]

Ok back just a moment- Nibley was complex, idolized in BYU / church intellectual environs, wrote some really mystifying s#&t, could get just about anything he wrote published by DB or BYU, talked over the heads of mere mortal TBM's, got his ass kicked by non-lds Egyptologists in the Book of Abraham debacle , had a strange absent minded professor type personality but probably mostly put on- So why would Nibley get sloppy with footnotes? Not enough grad students to do the checking ?
Seems to me the Nibmeister decided to write on say the Jaredite voyages and boat building. So to accomplish the miracle he says to himself " to justify this boat building BS , I need to show that somewhere in the world there was a group who had expert boat building and sailing expertise ". So he finds something in some obscure writing and overstates their expertise or he simply makes up something that claims submarines were built by the people of the Indian Ocean island and develops the footnote no matter how scant the evidence is for their expertise. Thus he has come up with "reasonable " evidence to counter the claim that the jaredite story is pure myth.
Great so long as no one checks and he took that bet many times!
Was it worth it? Has his star been tarnished or does he still get an almost free pass ?

[_Kishkumen]

...had a strange absent minded professor type personality but probably mostly put on...

Seriously, what the hell? Why would you assume that his absentmindedness was an act?

- So why would Nibley get sloppy with footnotes? Not enough grad students to do the checking ?

The situation was more complicated than mere sloppiness. Nibley wasn't fond of spoon-feeding people who refused to do their own study. He fielded endless questions from people who did nothing more than pose them without any study or thought. One of his favorite phrases was, "It's in the books!" Or, to put it in other words, "If you really want to know about these things, spend time researching them."

Was it worth it? Has his star been tarnished or does he still get an almost free pass ?

Old scholarship doesn't always hold up. We don't spend a lot of time debating the virtues of Frazer's Golden Bough or Mircea Eliade's theory regarding shamanism and early religion. Subsequent work has shown that these scholars' ideas were seriously flawed. They made a contribution, but the discussion moved on. Only people who don't understand how scholarship works ridicule older work as though people in the past should or could have known that these ideas were silly.

The old scholarship had its place. It moved the conversation forward. Now it is time for new approaches.

[_Symmachus]

This thread has certainly taken a few unexpected turns. As in the conspicuous cases of Alan Dershowitz and Doris Kearns Goodwin, I think if Nibley were inventing sources or plagiarizing footnotes, somebody would have found an example by now. Perhaps someone will in the future. Until then, I see no evidence on which to base an assertion that he faked footnotes.

Whether he misread sources is another issue. Of course he misread sources. That's going to happen when you impose a predetermined answer of "yes" to the question of "is Mormonism the one true religion?" Also, that is just a scholarly hazard anyway, especially in reading ancient sources whose meaning is not always clear and almost never obvious. That is especially going to happen when you write as much as he did for an audience that was not scholarly; remember that almost everything he ever published was in the Improvement Era. Other than the anti-Brodie hack-work, his first stand-alone book project was not until The Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment in the mid 1970s, and that by Deseret Book. Neither that nor the Improvement Era were venues with exacting scholarly standards. So Nibley's only pressure to be precise and accurate was himself.

I wonder why this is such an issue, though. I can't imagine a case where scholars critique another scholar largely by fretting about how well or how accurately s/he cited sources in footnotes. It could be part of a much wider engagement, but there is a certain tenacity to this charge in Nibley's case that I haven't seen paralleled. A detectable pattern of deliberate deception would be one thing, but while that could have slipped past the Improvement Era editors, it would be much harder to get past someone like Kish.

In the apologetic sphere, I don't see John Gee's work face this criticism, nor any of the illustrious contributors to the Interpreter. With Nibley, for some reason, I have seen these charges about his footnotes brought up many, many times over the years, never with any substance, but I have found it puzzling. I mean, if you look at his footnotes, you will see that he doesn't do much with them: they're mostly padding, either meant to map out his reading for the reader or as a display of erudition to intimidate his reader (although I'm sure that anonymous lady in Parowan who reads FARMS and FAIR stuff is also a zealous reader of Archiv für Orientforschung, nudge nudge wink wink). He does not, like many scholars, use them as a space to argue with other scholars or use them to lay the foundations for the arguments he's making in the text.

In fact, I don't think he really makes any arguments in the text either, and that's probably part of the reason why they are the source of anxiety. Nibley's method (which, despite frequent claims of admirers—and I count myself as one—is not really typical of his generation) is basically free association: x looks like y, so I'm going to mention x and y, oh, and both look like z, so let's throw that in, and all of them together look like ABC, so we'd better mention that. I would differ from Kish in that I don't really think Nibley is analogous to Frazer, or even a contemporary of Nibley's like Theodor Gaster. Those scholars had well-stated and narrowly-defined positions that they tried to support via comparative analysis using analytical models that helped to explain something. Those models are not accepted anymore, so their explanations don't hold up today, but they were doing a lot more than just saying "x looks like y." In some cases, they were extremely detailed and wildly learned (e.g. Jane Harrison and especially Gaster) in working through their explanations. Nibley is wildly learned but in his work he does not bother with details or with explanations. X looks like Y is about all he does.

It's really up to Nibley's reader to make connections and discern just what his point is when he discusses X and then discusses Y. Luckily for them, most of the time his point is always the same: the Book of Mormon (or Book of Abraham) is genuinely ancient (a very broad thesis, actually). Scholarship, on the other hand, tries to understand: to go from not-knowing to almost-knowing. But that's not what Nibley does. He doesn't attempt answers to questions. He doesn't even ask questions. He throws material at readers and, most of them being believers, he leaves it to them to make the connection between antiquity and whatever topic of Mormonism. If his footnotes are "faked" (his sources aren't real), then those connections aren't real, and therefore the connection with antiquity is not real. Conversely, if they are real, then perhaps those connections are real. Ergo, those footnotes better not be "faked" (whatever that means), if you're a believer, and if you aren't, then obviously they must be fake.

That is how I think most people read Nibley and how Nibley wanted to be read. One struggles in vain to find a clearly stated argument in most of his work (his earliest articles in non-Mormon venues are an exception). So his footnotes are the only thing to grapple with for most readers, because there is no there there.

I really think footnotes are not the best way to critique Nibley's work. Just look at the connections he expects you to make and ask yourself how well he actually establishes them. In the series of articles that comprise Lehi in the Desert, for instance, all of that bedouin material feels really intimidating (although, looking at the footnotes, he seems to cite the same few texts over and over, probably because he didn't have access to a lot of Arabic materials). But the bedouin material comes from Abbasid collections of poetry from 1500 years after Lehi's party supposedly went into the desert. Is there a connection between the culture described (and possibly invented) by those Abbasid scholars and any desert nomads in the sixth century BCE? Possibly, but not necessarily. Does he argue that connection and establish it through evidence-based reasoning? No. Does it make the connection more likely just because he reads the sources accurately and cites the material precisely in his footnotes? Not to my mind.

It's not just that he doesn't ask questions, then; it's that he avoids them. The lack of a real argument, let alone a solid one, is what renders it worthless for understanding and unpersuasive as a sign of the Mormon scripture's antiquity, even if Nibley's free-association bonanza is interesting and fun to read.

[_Kishkumen]

Very illuminating and well-written as usual, gracious consul. It is true that Nibley did not offer historical arguments so much as cherry-picked parallels from all over time and the known world in order to make Joseph Smith's religion and texts seem authentically ancient. Following the footnotes leads to the discovery that the parallels are not all Nibley cracks them up to be. Often he interpreted his sources in an idiosyncratic way in order to draw the connection. Upon closer examination, the parallel did not look so similar after all. Nibley's treatment of history reminds me of those amateur Freemasonic scholars who saw the Craft wherever they looked. In their view Freemasonry was ancient and spread throughout the world in a glorious diffusion of symbol and truth. So, if something among the Native American tribes or Afghanistan looked vaguely familiar, the antiquity and ubiquity of Freemasonry were the answer. All a Mason needed to see was the similarity in order to draw the obvious conclusion. At the same conference I alluded to above someone commented about her father the Freemason interpreting Egyptian iconography as obvious Freemasonic symbolism. I could sympathize.

[Guest]

Like others, I've found Nibley rather impenetrable when I've tried to read him (and I'm not unfamiliar with postgraduate-level work on the ancient world). I've never paid attention to his footnotes before, so I decided to try an experiment. I looked at the first chapter of Abraham in Egypt and pulled out the first 10 footnotes.

Here is the chapter: http://publications.mi.BYU.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1093&index=8

Here is my summary of the notes:

1 - W. F. Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), 64—65. A well known 20th century secondary source, quoted to support what seems to be an truism (viz. life in the ancient world was tough).

2 - Micha J. bin Gorion, Die Sagen der Juden, 5 vols. (Frankfurt: Rütten & Loening, 1913—27), 1:333, quoted to support what seems to be a Jewish legend which Nibley refers to for no very obvious reason. Presumably the book is a 20th century collection of older Jewish stories.

3 - One of Nibley's own previous articles.

4 - 20th century Jewish source from 2 again

5 - Secondary source from 1 again.

6 - A rabbinic midrash on Genesis.

7 - 20th century Jewish source from 2 again, quoted to support rabbinic tradition about Abraham.

8 - The meatiest one yet. Bernhard Beer, Leben Abraham’s nach Auffassung der jüdischen Sage (Leipzig: Leiner, 1859), 190—92 n. 819; Judah Goldin, trans., The Fathers according to Rabbi Nathan (New York: Schocken, 1955), 132; Böhl, Zeitalter Abrahams, 35—36; the older list is in Gerald Friedlander, Pirkê de Rabbi Eliezer (New York: Hermon, 1965), 187—230. All quoted to support Jewish traditions about the "Ten Trials of Abraham", including the (alleged) attempt to sacrifice him.

9 - Another Midrash, plus the 20th century Jewish source from 2 again.

10 - Günter Lanczkowski, “Parallelmotive zu einer altägyptische Erzählung,” Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft 105 (1955): 258, cited to support a parallel between Genesis and an Egyptian story.

This is a tiny sample, of course, but it illustrates a few things:
- Nibley used footnotes in different ways. Some of them contain apparently genuine attempts to support his parallels with the ancient world, while others seem strangely gratuitous.
- Nibley quoted a mixture of himself, other 20th century sources and genuine premodern texts.
- Nibley's footnoting conventions were just that, conventional. They look like standard scholarly footnotes.
- He cited the same source in several different footnotes. This isn't unusual, of course.
- His sources aren't that obscure. For example, the German source mentioned in 2, 4, 7 and 9 looks exotic, but Worldcat says that there are numerous copies in US libraries, including at BYU.

[_Johannes]

Kish - I've tried to send you a PM, but I've been defeated by the software. I'm interested to know - who was the German Hermetic scholar you met?

[_Johannes]

I thought I'd try the same experiment with another chapter from Nibley's oeuvre.

This time, I tried a chapter from The Ancient State:

http://publications.mi.BYU.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1115&index=5

It was apparently originally published in Western Political Quarterly 4/2 (1951): 226-53, so I assume it was peer-reviewed.

1. Martin P. Nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen Religion, 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1941), 1:778-79, a well known secondary source.

2. Two fairly mainstream 20th century secondary sources, cited to support what were once mainstream theories about ancient kingship rituals.

3. One of the great man's own works!

4. Three 20th century sources on Icelandic customs.

5. Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum (History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremem) IV, 26-27; Paul Herrmann, Nordische Mythologie (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1903), 300, 501; and Paul B. Du Chaillu, The Viking Age, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1890), 1:296, cited (again) in reference to Scandinavian customs. The secondary sources seem a bit dated.

6. Four more dated secondary sources, then Tacitus, Annals X, 51; Thietmar Merseburg, Chronicon I, 17, in Robert Holtzmann, ed., Die Chronik des Bischofs Thietmar von Merseburg und ihre Korveier Überarbeitung, vol. 6, part 9, of Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Berlin: Weidmann, 1955) [the Monumenta is a standard collection of historical texts]; and numerous references in the sagas, especially Finnur Jónsson, Egils Saga Skalgrímssonar (Halle: Niemeyer, 1924). Plus another couple of dated secondary sources.

7. Several sources on Celtic customs, mostly somewhat dated secondary sources (including Hastings' standard Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics).

8. Five more sources on Celtic customs, again with a leaning towards dated secondary sources (including the Mythology of All Races).

9. Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum No. 4039K, cited in Allcroft, Circle and the Cross, 1:299 [I'm surprised he didn't consult the CIL directly]; cf. Strabo, Geography XII, 5, 1.

10. British assemblies described in a letter from Gregorius Magnus (Gregory the Great), Epistolae (Epistles) XI, 77, in PL 77:1215-16; at the Council of Cloveshove, A.D. 747, in Joannes D. Mansi, Sacrorum Concilorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, 31 vols. (Graz: Akademische, 1901), 12:400; by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae III, 5; see especially the Welsh version, tr. Acton Griscom (London: Longmans, Green, 1929), IX, 1; III, 3. The year-drama is described by Rhys, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 155-58, 160-65, 562; cf. Mary Williams, “An Early Ritual Poem in Welsh,” Speculum 13 (1938): 43-51; and Raymond W. Muncey, Our Old English Fairs (London: Sheldon, 1935), 46, 103, 116, 145-47, 156, 162-63, 166. A further mixture of premodern sources and relatively dated secondary scholarship.

Make of all that what you will.....


ETA: I guess the takeaway point is, again, the diversity. There are genuine premodern primary sources, next to secondary sources which seem curiously dated (even by reference to 1951, when the article was written, let alone 1981, when it was published in The Ancient State). Some of his sources look exotic, but others are surprisingly vanilla.

[_kairos]

This thread has certainly taken a few unexpected turns. As in the conspicuous cases of Alan Dershowitz and Doris Kearns Goodwin, I think if Nibley were inventing sources or plagiarizing footnotes, somebody would have found an example by now. Perhaps someone will in the future. Until then, I see no evidence on which to base an assertion that he faked footnotes.

Whether he misread sources is another issue. Of course he misread sources. That's going to happen when you impose a predetermined answer of "yes" to the question of "is Mormonism the one true religion?" Also, that is just a scholarly hazard anyway, especially in reading ancient sources whose meaning is not always clear and almost never obvious. That is especially going to happen when you write as much as he did for an audience that was not scholarly; remember that almost everything he ever published was in the Improvement Era. Other than the anti-Brodie hack-work, his first stand-alone book project was not until The Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment in the mid 1970s, and that by Deseret Book. Neither that nor the Improvement Era were venues with exacting scholarly standards. So Nibley's only pressure to be precise and accurate was himself.

I wonder why this is such an issue, though. I can't imagine a case where scholars critique another scholar largely by fretting about how well or how accurately s/he cited sources in footnotes. It could be part of a much wider engagement, but there is a certain tenacity to this charge in Nibley's case that I haven't seen paralleled. A detectable pattern of deliberate deception would be one thing, but while that could have slipped past the Improvement Era editors, it would be much harder to get past someone like Kish.

In the apologetic sphere, I don't see John Gee's work face this criticism, nor any of the illustrious contributors to the Interpreter. With Nibley, for some reason, I have seen these charges about his footnotes brought up many, many times over the years, never with any substance, but I have found it puzzling. I mean, if you look at his footnotes, you will see that he doesn't do much with them: they're mostly padding, either meant to map out his reading for the reader or as a display of erudition to intimidate his reader (although I'm sure that anonymous lady in Parowan who reads FARMS and FAIR stuff is also a zealous reader of Archiv für Orientforschung, nudge nudge wink wink). He does not, like many scholars, use them as a space to argue with other scholars or use them to lay the foundations for the arguments he's making in the text.

In fact, I don't think he really makes any arguments in the text either, and that's probably part of the reason why they are the source of anxiety. Nibley's method (which, despite frequent claims of admirers—and I count myself as one—is not really typical of his generation) is basically free association: x looks like y, so I'm going to mention x and y, oh, and both look like z, so let's throw that in, and all of them together look like ABC, so we'd better mention that. I would differ from Kish in that I don't really think Nibley is analogous to Frazer, or even a contemporary of Nibley's like Theodor Gaster. Those scholars had well-stated and narrowly-defined positions that they tried to support via comparative analysis using analytical models that helped to explain something. Those models are not accepted anymore, so their explanations don't hold up today, but they were doing a lot more than just saying "x looks like y." In some cases, they were extremely detailed and wildly learned (e.g. Jane Harrison and especially Gaster) in working through their explanations. Nibley is wildly learned but in his work he does not bother with details or with explanations. X looks like Y is about all he does.

It's really up to Nibley's reader to make connections and discern just what his point is when he discusses X and then discusses Y. Luckily for them, most of the time his point is always the same: the Book of Mormon (or Book of Abraham) is genuinely ancient (a very broad thesis, actually). Scholarship, on the other hand, tries to understand: to go from not-knowing to almost-knowing. But that's not what Nibley does. He doesn't attempt answers to questions. He doesn't even ask questions. He throws material at readers and, most of them being believers, he leaves it to them to make the connection between antiquity and whatever topic of Mormonism. If his footnotes are "faked" (his sources aren't real), then those connections aren't real, and therefore the connection with antiquity is not real. Conversely, if they are real, then perhaps those connections are real. Ergo, those footnotes better not be "faked" (whatever that means), if you're a believer, and if you aren't, then obviously they must be fake.

That is how I think most people read Nibley and how Nibley wanted to be read. One struggles in vain to find a clearly stated argument in most of his work (his earliest articles in non-Mormon venues are an exception). So his footnotes are the only thing to grapple with for most readers, because there is no there there.

I really think footnotes are not the best way to critique Nibley's work. Just look at the connections he expects you to make and ask yourself how well he actually establishes them. In the series of articles that comprise Lehi in the Desert, for instance, all of that bedouin material feels really intimidating (although, looking at the footnotes, he seems to cite the same few texts over and over, probably because he didn't have access to a lot of Arabic materials). But the bedouin material comes from Abbasid collections of poetry from 1500 years after Lehi's party supposedly went into the desert. Is there a connection between the culture described (and possibly invented) by those Abbasid scholars and any desert nomads in the sixth century BCE? Possibly, but not necessarily. Does he argue that connection and establish it through evidence-based reasoning? No. Does it make the connection more likely just because he reads the sources accurately and cites the material precisely in his footnotes? Not to my mind.

It's not just that he doesn't ask questions, then; it's that he avoids them. The lack of a real argument, let alone a solid one, is what renders it worthless for understanding and unpersuasive as a sign of the Mormon scripture's antiquity, even if Nibley's free-association bonanza is interesting and fun to read.

This from Todd Compton:
" 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. "

I also think that "absent minded professor" in Nibley' s really meant or equals "sly old fox". Genius characteristics can exhibit a mindset that says there is too much going on in my mind to worry about whether I have a red and a blue sock on my feet or that I walked to work so why I am I looking for my car in the parking lot.


Finally a serous effort in house at BYU dug into the source/ footnote issue but I have not the detailed results- does anyone? Apparently Compton edited a volume of Nibley's work with the results posted above in general.

k