Nibley: Footnote faker or not?

[_Symmachus]

He simply wasn't interested in what the text actually said. He was interested in how useful it could be to his program. I don't know how this formula could possibly translate into good scholarship.

Totally agree. I wish I had put it so succinctly.

As for how interesting Mormonism could be, I am not fully persuaded that there aren't interesting elements and cultural interactions there. Of course, they are not at all the things Nibley claimed are there, but I do believe that there is enough influence from the Western esoteric tradition to make it inherently interesting.

It is also interesting, in my view, that the fall-back position on the Book of Abraham has become "Hellenistic pseudepigrapha," because the Hellenistic world is the fertile ground in which Western esotericism eventually sprouted up. I think one of the ways one can rescue Mormonism as a topic is to move away from the focus on the personality cult of Joseph Smith.

This is one of the reasons I've always found so many of your posts so interesting. The rhetoric of restoration that had been emphasized in the Church's history only intermittently until the mid twentieth century but is so prominent now is a big of the part of the problem. Mormonism does come out of some very interesting traditions, and I still enjoy learning about these relationships and contemplating occasionally about how Mormonism might look in practice if it were more conscious of them rather than repudiating everything as simply apostate. Even without getting into its hermetic inheritance, I am astonished at how little the Bible is emphasized and taught (and how poorly when it is taught), how centuries of Christian thought—which Mormonism is heir too—are tossed out the window and deemed worthless. All that talk about learning truth from whatever source is just talk. The Church discourages people even from looking into Mormonism's own backyard, let alone the neighbor's yards.

You are right to pick on the reliance on the truth of the "Gospel" (whatever that means) as a methodology, but I think there is also a measure of self-deprecation in Nibley's denigration of scholars and scholarship. Whether it represents genuine humility is something I can't judge. I have a feeling there was a pride that came from his decision to submit the intellect to the mantle of testimony.

It's possible. I didn't know him and can only go by what is observable at a distance; I'm sure also that my view is colored by my negative reaction to the Nibley cult that I ran into at BYU and the point of my emotional exit from the Church when that occurred. I know that others saw Nibley as a self-mocking paragon of humility who lived a modest lifestyle that was a token of his deep indifference to the applause of the world. The applause of his inductees is another matter, though, because, like the athletes of god in Late Antiquity, only an egomaniac could have such excessive modesty on constant and conspicuous display. After all, no one who deprecates himself as a sign of humility during an interview in a film documentary that is exclusively about himself and that is made and produced by his own family members is really all that self-deprecating. If you don't want the limelight, why would you step into it?

Oddly enough, Dumézil crossed my mind too in relation to what Nibley came up with. The difference, I suppose, is that Dumézil's schema was flawed by being too broad and truistic, whereas Nibley's has the opposite problem of being irredeemably idiosyncratic. I hadn't cottoned on to the fact that his meta-claim was that everything had diffused out from Adam and Eve in Missouri. Astonishing.

Martin Bernal was another name that came to mind à propos of Nibley's methodological indiscipline and (in particular) lack of philological rigour in pursuit of a ideological chimaera. The difference being, I suppose, that Bernal was at least trying to fight racism while Nibley was at least indirectly supporting it.

That second paragraph is devastating, Johannes. I hadn't thought of this issue, but it's interesting that Nibley has very little to say about this whole issue. Perhaps he dealt with it in his Abraham books, which I haven't read, but something tells me loyalty to the Church leaders would have prevented him from saying much before 1978 (and the Joseph Smith Papyri book was published in 1975, I think).

[_Kishkumen]

It is also interesting, in my view, that the fall-back position on the Book of Abraham has become "Hellenistic pseudepigrapha,"

This interests me.

Whose theory is this?

I know Gee has talked about it before. I don't know whether it is his theory. The JSP date to the second century BCE. Gee discovered a papyrus bit with a lion couch scene with the name Abraham used in a magic spell. I can't recall the date on that papyrus. There are also ideas about the use of Egyptian to convey a Hebrew text that seem moore consistent with Hellenistic or Roman Egypt--or some such; honestly it sounded pretty lame as an apologetic and I don't recall the details.

In general, though, I think the intuitive appeal has everything to do with the funkiness of Egypt in that period. So many odd things were happening. Ezekiel the Tragedian (probably Alexandrian Jewish) wrote a Greek "tragedy" about Moses and the Exodus in the same century the papyri were produced. So the polyglot cultural stew of late Hellenistic Egypt seems to some apologists like a decent candidate for the environment that produced the Book of Abraham.

Of course, 19th century America is a much better fit.

[Guest]

Hmm.... Ok, let's see what old Hughie had to say on the difficult LDS issue of race.

From Abraham in Egypt:

[url]http://publications.mi.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1093&index=15
[/url]
He starts off by saying that the curse of Ham was a curse on a land, not a race:

....[T]o follow the Book of Abraham, “Thus, from Ham, sprang that race which preserved the curse in the land” (Abraham 1:24). Which was cursed, the land or the people? “It can only be the land that it meant,” Richter concludes,136 for as F. M. Theodor Böhl maintains, classification of people by race is “a concept utterly foreign to the ancient Orient”—the curse of Ham belongs to whoever oppresses Israel, whether Babylonians, Assyrians, Philistines, Phoenicians, or Canaanites, each of which in their time has been assigned by ancient and modern writers to the line of Ham.137

He then fights shy of coming out and saying explicitly that the curse of the Lamanites included a dark skin:

When Cain was cursed because of his sin he went to the land of Nod (Genesis 4:16)—meaning nomadism or wandering.... The parallel with the Lamanites at once springs to mind. Lamanite darkness was ethnic in the broadest sense, being both hereditary and cultural, shifting between “white and delightsome” and “dark and loathsome,” along with manners and customs as well as intermarriage (Alma 3:4—10). But inseparable from the cultural heritage of ancient tribes were the markings that members of the society put on themselves, without which they would be considered outcasts. People who marked their foreheads with red after the Lamanite custom “knew not that they were fulfilling the words of God when they began to mark themselves in their foreheads,” thus showing that the Lamanite curse had fallen on them (Alma 3:18).

At this point, he goes off into what I can only assume is vintage Nibley. I think his point is that the mark of Cain isn't a black skin but rather the tattoos of wandering metalworkers. The free-associative nature of what he says speaks volumes about the way the man's mind worked:

It was the same with the descendants of Cain. Since time immemorial they have been identified throughout the East with those wandering tribes of metalworkers whose father was Tubal Cain.... As the sign of their mystery and their tribe, the wandering smiths or tinkers have always blackened their faces with soot.... The name by which they were known was Qenites171 (cf. Aramaic qēnā = smith). The ancient people of Tubal were also connected with Nukhashshe, a name that designated those parts of Asia Minor and Syria where mining and metallurgy are believed to have originated;172 the same word is the common Semitic root for copper and its alloys, and it is the Egyptian name for the Ethiopians, usually translated as “the Blacks,” nḥsy. According to their own report and universal folklore, these traveling menders of pots and pans must keep traveling because they are under a curse. “They are the Gypsies,” says a very old Judaeo-Christian writing, “who carry loads, and they march on the roads with their backs and necks breaking under their loads....”173 They beguile their outcast condition with wild music and dancing, and they are the Cainites of old who enticed the righteous Sethians, called “the Children of God,” to join in their revels and so fall from grace in the days of Jared.174 Their special mark is not the blackened face and hands, however, but a tattoo on the hand or arm, a Tau-sign or a circle and cross.... According to a midrash, God placed a letter of the alphabet on Cain’s hand as a mark, so that no one would slay him,176 and some of the Jewish doctors maintained that “the ‘Sign of Cain’ was the mark on David’s brow.”177 Certain it is that “the mark of Cain” goes along with a cursing, a wandering way of life, and a distinctive mark on the body.

He goes on to emphasise that the lineages of Cain may be Semitic rather than black:

Recent studies of the genealogy of Cain by Johannes Gabriel189 and Robert North190 emphasize the claims of such desert tribes as the Kenites and the families of Kenaz and Caleb to belong to the family.... Linguistic evidence intertwines Hamites and Semites the further back in time one goes....

He concludes:

These few observations, kept to a minimum, should be enough to make it clear that there is no exclusive equation between Ham and Pharaoh, or between Ham and the Egyptians, or between the Egyptians and the blacks, or between any of the above and any particular curse.

There is a distinct air throughout this of "move along, nothing to see here". He is reacting to a rival interpretation that he doesn't even want to lay out clearly.

[_Johannes]

I know Gee has talked about it before. I don't know whether it is his theory. The JSP date to the second century BCE. Gee discovered a papyrus bit with a lion couch scene with the name Abraham used in a magic spell. I can't recall the date on that papyrus. There are also ideas about the use of Egyptian to convey a Hebrew text that seem moore consistent with Hellenistic or Roman Egypt--or some such; honestly it sounded pretty lame as an apologetic and I don't recall the details.

In general, though, I think the intuitive appeal has everything to do with the funkiness of Egypt in that period. So many odd things were happening. Ezekiel the Tragedian (probably Alexandrian Jewish) wrote a Greek "tragedy" about Moses and the Exodus in the same century the papyri were produced. So the polyglot cultural stew of late Hellenistic Egypt seems to some apologists like a decent candidate for the environment that produced the Book of Abraham.

So it really is being suggested by Mormon scholars that the Book of Abraham is a Hellenistic pseudepigraphon?

Well, that's Nibley under the bus, for a start. From Abraham in Egypt, which I have just been reading:

“I, Abraham . . .” These words in the opening verse of Joseph Smith’s Book of Abraham ring out like a trumpet blast challenging all comers to a fair field. They state the argument and set up the target. Is this an authentic autobiography of Abraham the Patriarch, or is it not? Let us not evade the issue by dismissing the proposition as too absurd to be taken seriously; if it is as impossible as it seems to modern scholars, let them please take a few minutes off to disabuse the public mind and explain it to the world.

[_Kishkumen]

Yes, a Hellenistic pseudepigraphon. Nibley, like most everything else, is expendable.

[_Symmachus]

Johannes, the material you post from Abraham in Egypt is interesting to me because it shows both Nibley's shoddy scholarship and his ability to make Mormon tradition look better than it is.

He uses late antique and early medieval midrash to explicate a passage supposedly written by the patriarch Abraham while he was in Middle Kingdom Egypt?! Yes, but if we just accept it, then it's not that Mormon scripture contains canonized racism but rather that revelation has given Mormons access to this very ancient tradition of wandering Semites whose day-job and lack of access to adequate hygiene facilities renders their faces black. It's all just a sad mix-up, which awareness of Mormonism's deep antiquity fixes.

[_CaliforniaKid]

Now get that dissertation done! (Done well, because it is another topic I am deeply interested in.)

Workin' on it. It won't be the ambitious, comprehensive treatment I wanted to write, though. Mostly it will cover 1847-1854.

[_Blixa]

Now get that dissertation done! (Done well, because it is another topic I am deeply interested in.)

Workin' on it. It won't be the ambitious, comprehensive treatment I wanted to write, though. Mostly it will cover 1847-1854.

I assume this will all be on the postcard you're sending me?

[_Blixa]

Yes, a Hellenistic pseudepigraphon. Nibley, like most everything else, is expendable.

If I had any Mormon theological ambition, which I doubt I have to assure anyone I have not, I would not want to out-Joseph-Joseph, but project myself back to "the polyglot cultural stew of late Hellenistic Egypt" and rescue the esoteric "tradition," 19thC America be damned.

Good thing I only aspire to creating a Mormon hermetic Tarot. Maybe.

[_Kishkumen]

Yes, a Hellenistic pseudepigraphon. Nibley, like most everything else, is expendable.

If I had any Mormon theological ambition, which I doubt I have to assure anyone I have not, I would not want to out-Joseph-Joseph, but project myself back to "the polyglot cultural stew of late Hellenistic Egypt" and rescue the esoteric "tradition," 19thC America be damned.

Good thing I only aspire to creating a Mormon hermetic Tarot. Maybe.

I'll be more than happy with the Tarot! (But will always dream of the theology.)