Nibley: Footnote faker or not?

[_kairos]

If this plows old ground just give me a good reference about the topic and I will go away.

Years ago Kent Jackson , BYU ?, reviewed some of Nibley's writings and found inaccuracies and sloppiness in Nibley's sourcing and footnote work. As I understand it, checkers were assigned to pour over the 6 volume collected works of Brother Hugh and the "conclusions" were something like : sloppy yes in places, but 82 % or higher accuracy on citing sources and getting the footnote correct in each ofthe collected works, and with an amazing note " Nibley made mistakes mostly taking "too much" from a source to make his case but it does not matter because Hugh does not speak for the church."
I pulled Nibley's Approach to the Book of Mormon which is vol 6 in the collected works, and went to chapter 25 "Some Test Cases from the Book of Ether". There are 11 pages in the chapter and Nibley has 34 footnotes from 23 sources. There are 9 non- English sources cited. He cited 4 of his own books/papers 9 times. He cites the apochyra Book of Jubilees
3 times.
Here is where I think something "funny " could be going on: Nibley cites " Hrozny, Uber die alteste....Zivilisation, Monografis Archivu Orientalniho,Prague,Orientalisches Institut, 1939, no. 7, p 6".
That is one hellavu citation to attest early
Migrations of people from central Eurasia.
My questions are among others did Nibley have a copy of or access to the non-English sources and did he peruse all of the non-English translating it himself to get a good source to make his points. That would take a lot of time and 3 by 5 note cards and how would he have been pointed to the source in the first place, especially the non- English.
He was supposed to be a genius but the footnote/ sources in the Approach to the Book of Mormon volume seem fishy to me.
Comments and links anyone?
Thanx
k

[_sock puppet]

It's easy to come across as a genius when you're making crap up, and have no compunction about shoveling that crap. That was Niblets.

[_Dr. Shades]

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[_Chap]

Here is where I think something "funny " could be going on: Nibley cites " Hrozny, Uber die alteste....Zivilisation, Monografis Archivu Orientalniho,Prague,Orientalisches Institut, 1939, no. 7, p 6".
That is one hellavu citation to attest early
Migrations of people from central Eurasia.

Well, as a first shot, why not have a look at the BYU library catalog to see if the books and journals Nibley cites would have been available to him there:

https://lib.byu.edu/books/

Obviously he could have used his vacation time to travel to other university libraries, or got books and journals through inter-library loan. That Czech journal you mention, Monografis Archivu Orientalniho, does exist, by the way.

In my experience the principal vices of scholars in regard to references in footnotes are:

(a) Simply copying them from other people's work without actually reading the original material cited.
(b) Not looking at the cited material carefully or critically enough to check that it really does support the point it is intended to support.

Plain old 'making it up' is pretty rare.

[_Symmachus]

I second Chap. Nibley most certainly did not fake his footnotes, at least not in the way that "fake" implies, though he clearly indulged in the scholarly vices that Chap points to. I remember in his biography a letter quoted where Nibley claims that he purposefully douses his work with footnotes (it's been fourteen years since I read the book, but I remember a line in the letter was something like "I don't write x number of words without having x number of footnotes"). That was in a private letter to (I think) his non-Mormon friend Paul Springer in the 1940s or 50s, so it gives us some sense of how he thought of footnotes. The sense I got was not that he was attempting to deceive but rather doing what scholars of his generation were trained to do, especially Americans trained in the German tradition (and when Nibley got his PhD in the 30s, most dissertation committees in America would have consisted of scholars trained in Wilhelmine Germany). Piling up references proved 1) that you did your homework and 2) that you had the proper respect for your peers and elders in the scholarly community. Of course the side effect was to lend authority to the arguments, which is of course why you ask the question in the first place.

(footnote: British scholars were much sparser in their use of footnotes until recently, and it's not unusual to come across a book from as late as 1970s where a scholar will say something like, "I'm sorry I'm not going to quote modern scholarship much and fill the foot of the pages with notes, but if you really know the scholarship on this, you'll be able to tell where it comes from, so there's no need for me to waste time on that")

Also, some of the other private letters quoted in that book show that Nibley did take trips back east and to California to look up references and do library research. BYU had a pathetic library when he started there in the 40s, and its largely through his efforts and contacts with bookdealers on the east coast that the library started to acquire a pretty substantial collection of material for doing ancient history. So, even if BYU didn't have something that Nibley references, it doesn't necessarily mean that he didn't read it.

Nietzsche, incidentally, had railed against this fetish of the footnote as a young professor and made many scholarly enemies among the Prussian professoriate, and I think more recent scholarship in ancient history is abandoning page-long footnotes and opting for more compact and succinct references. People skeptical of Nibley's work should likewise aim the attention where it belongs: not on his footnotes but on his arguments and his use of evidence. On the first, Nibley is obscenely sophistical (ironic given his expressed and vivid hatred of sophistry), and on the second he is sloppy enough that he is not reliable as a general rule (see, e.g. Robert Ritner's observations about Nibley throughout the footnotes—argh!—of his edition of the Joseph Smith papyri for plentiful evidence of Nibley's sloppiness on the Egyptian front).

[_richardMdBorn]

People skeptical of Nibley's work should likewise aim the attention where it belongs: not on his footnotes but on his arguments and his use of evidence. On the first, Nibley is obscenely sophistical (ironic given his expressed and vivid hatred of sophistry), and on the second he is sloppy enough that he is not reliable as a general rule (see, e.g. Robert Ritner's observations about Nibley throughout the footnotes—argh!—of his edition of the Joseph Smith papyri for plentiful evidence of Nibley's sloppiness on the Egyptian front).

I agree with you. I got through ILL Vol.4 of his collected works about fifteen years ago. I read the first third of the book and was not impressed with it.

Slightly off topic, I recently wrote an article for The Space Review criticizing two books. One of them was just named as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. This author badly misread her source for the history of GPS. None of the three judges for this Pulitzer, as far as I could tell, knows anything about the history of technology.

[_Markk]

If this plows old ground just give me a good reference about the topic and I will go away.

Years ago Kent Jackson , BYU ?, reviewed some of Nibley's writings and found inaccuracies and sloppiness in Nibley's sourcing and footnote work. As I understand it, checkers were assigned to pour over the 6 volume collected works of Brother Hugh and the "conclusions" were something like : sloppy yes in places, but 82 % or higher accuracy on citing sources and getting the footnote correct in each ofthe collected works, and with an amazing note " Nibley made mistakes mostly taking "too much" from a source to make his case but it does not matter because Hugh does not speak for the church."
I pulled Nibley's Approach to the Book of Mormon which is vol 6 in the collected works, and went to chapter 25 "Some Test Cases from the Book of Ether". There are 11 pages in the chapter and Nibley has 34 footnotes from 23 sources. There are 9 non- English sources cited. He cited 4 of his own books/papers 9 times. He cites the apochyra Book of Jubilees
3 times.
Here is where I think something "funny " could be going on: Nibley cites " Hrozny, Uber die alteste....Zivilisation, Monografis Archivu Orientalniho,Prague,Orientalisches Institut, 1939, no. 7, p 6".
That is one hellavu citation to attest early
Migrations of people from central Eurasia.
My questions are among others did Nibley have a copy of or access to the non-English sources and did he peruse all of the non-English translating it himself to get a good source to make his points. That would take a lot of time and 3 by 5 note cards and how would he have been pointed to the source in the first place, especially the non- English.
He was supposed to be a genius but the footnote/ sources in the Approach to the Book of Mormon volume seem fishy to me.
Comments and links anyone?
Thanx
k

Just today I posted this on another forum...a poster claimed a Nibley quote was a proof text for "garments" in ancient days. it took me a while to track down the end note...which in the end was BS.

Here is the quote from the book...

“Wie Adam dasteht und sich aufzuklren sucht, kam der Mann, sein Helfer. Der hohe Helfer kam zu ihm, der ihn in ein Stu?Celestial Kingdom reichen Glanzes hineintrug. Er sprach zu ihm: Ziehe dein Gewand an… Die Mnner, die dein Gewand geschaffen, dienen dir, bis du abscheidest’”

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? Celestial Kingdom 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'”

[_Symmachus]

Slightly off topic, I recently wrote an article for The Space Review criticizing two books. One of them was just named as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. This author badly misread her source for the history of GPS. None of the three judges for this Pulitzer, as far as I could tell, knows anything about the history of technology.

I think they have different criteria than you, e.g. a Pulitzer-worthy book* should be readily translatable into one or more of the following terms from Blurbese:

1. tender
2. spellbinding**
3. riveting***
4. dazzling
5. searching
6. revealing
7. magical
8. sweeping

* Or in, Blurbese: "exploration" or "meditation" or "portrait"

** consult a physician if you are bound by spell for more than four hours after reading

*** hard hat required for reading

[_richardMdBorn]

Slightly off topic, I recently wrote an article for The Space Review criticizing two books. One of them was just named as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. This author badly misread her source for the history of GPS. None of the three judges for this Pulitzer, as far as I could tell, knows anything about the history of technology.

I think they have different criteria than you, e.g. a Pulitzer-worthy book* should be readily translatable into one or more of the following terms from Blurbese:

1. tender
2. spellbinding**
3. riveting***
4. dazzling
5. searching
6. revealing
7. magical
8. sweeping

* Or in, Blurbese: "exploration" or "meditation" or "portrait"

** consult a physician if you are bound by spell for more than four hours after reading

*** hard hat required for reading

How silly of me to expect that the author to be accurate in her research. The Pulitzer Committee stated that the book was

A brilliantly researched account of a small but powerful secret government agency whose military research profoundly affects world affairs.

She got almost everything wrong in the three pages that dealt with the subject of my book, If her research is that bad on one subject, it's likely to also be sloppy elsewhere. Circa 1992, I was in a bookstore in SF. There was a new biography about C.S. Lewis by A.N. Wilson. I opened it up at random and found a significant error on the first page I reviewed. I closed the book and decided not to was my money on it.

[_Rosebud]

Here is where I think something "funny " could be going on: Nibley cites " Hrozny, Uber die alteste....Zivilisation, Monografis Archivu Orientalniho,Prague,Orientalisches Institut, 1939, no. 7, p 6".
That is one hellavu citation to attest early
Migrations of people from central Eurasia.

Well, as a first shot, why not have a look at the BYU library catalog to see if the books and journals Nibley cites would have been available to him there:

https://lib.BYU.edu/books/

Obviously he could have used his vacation time to travel to other university libraries, or got books and journals through inter-library loan. That Czech journal you mention, Monografis Archivu Orientalniho, does exist, by the way.

In my experience the principal vices of scholars in regard to references in footnotes are:

(a) Simply copying them from other people's work without actually reading the original material cited.
(b) Not looking at the cited material carefully or critically enough to check that it really does support the point it is intended to support.

Plain old 'making it up' is pretty rare.

Idk..... If Nibley really was a genius (and it seems he probably was), he would have known how ridiculous his own arguments are. But he went ahead and made them anyway. I don't see any reason why someone who was knowingly making ridiculous arguments and was therefore knowingly fooling people into believing them (based almost primarily on the merit of his "genius" and the veracity of the Mormon version of the gospel) wouldn't have just made up footnotes too.

Some smart people find enjoyment in the ease with which they fool the masses. He could very well have gotten a lot of personal entertainment out of the joke and how simple it was for him to b.s., garner prestige, and get people to believe he honestly believed all that stuff.

It's kind of an a$$hole joke, but he could have had his incentives. Smart people can sometimes feel irredeemably bored.