From My Book, An Excerpt On Nibley and Baptism of Adam

[_Philo Sofee]

I'm making pretty decent progress in my book. I am in chapter 2 now, dealing with Hugh Nibley's apologetic and discovered something that fascinated me to no end. Here is a small excerpt with the appropriate footnotes for this section I researched and wrote tonight. Here ya go. Don't tell me I ain't never done no nuthin for you!

Here is the problem with Hugh Nibley’s apologetics. His conclusions just can’t be believed anymore. This unfortunate state of affairs has occurred because his own colleagues warned that the methodology Nibley was using is seriously faulty reasoning with zealous exaggeration of what parallels meant, and even of their significance, let alone whether they even exist.

One of the most beautiful parallels that Nibley distorted (deliberately for the sake of the parallel?) that caused me to lose an enormous amount of faith in his research and scholarship was pointed out by Douglas F. Salmon. Nibley used the Apocalypse of Adam to show that Adam was baptized.[18] This was simply spectacular, as no other Christian denomination ever taught (or even today teaches!) that Adam not only had the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but went through the ordinances pertaining to that Gospel. As Nibley put it “The valuable Apocalypse of Adam claims to be taken from a book handed down from Adam himself, containing an exposition of the Gospel of salvation but dwelling with particular emphasis on the baptism of Adam; this is particularly intriguing since the wonderfully condensed and powerful presentation of the gospel plan in the Joseph Smith book of Enoch devotes a whole page to the baptism of Adam (Moses 6:51-68).”[19] That, to put it straight, is delightful! That is a testimony strengthener, and I used it many times in conversation with a lot of people. But what is the actual reality? Dismal. Disappointing.

The parallel is from the Gnostic materials found at Nag Hammadi. Salmon stunningly pointed out what the text said – “This is the hidden knowledge of Adam which he gave to Seth, which is the holy baptism of those who know the eternal knowledge through those born of the word and the imperishable illuminators, who came from the holy seed.” Salmon comments – “It should be clear that the subject here is the apocalypse itself, the ‘revelations’ and the ‘knowledge’ contained therein – these are the baptism. The term ‘baptism’ is used metaphorically here – it does not refer to an actual physical baptism in water of a believer.”[20]

Looking a little deeper into this is quite enlightening. James Robinson’s text The Nag Hammadi Library in English, in his translation of the Apocalypse of Adam says the same thing as Salmon pointed out, contra Nibley.[21] Bentley Layton’s scholarly analysis and translation of the Apocalypse of Adam says of this passage, “True (‘holy’) baptism is acquaintance (gnosis).”[22] In a recent translation, Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer translate the text as “This is the hidden knowledge of Adam, which he gave to Seth, which is the holy baptism of those who know the eternal knowledge…”[23] This is reinforced by Hans-Joachim Klimkeit where he translates a text from the Manichaean Creation Texts as saying “After the creation of man, ‘Jesus the Splendor’ – an emanation of the Third Messenger, and as such a redeeming emissary from the Realm of Light – descended and brought Adam the saving knowledge (gnosis) of his origin and of the truth about himself.”[24] This demonstrated to me Nibley’s hasty superficial reading of the text. But it also showed me not to take Nibley’s emphasis in many other areas of parallels with unique LDS scriptures and concepts too seriously either. In a total of 8 pages of text in the Apocalypse of Adam, baptism is mentioned merely twice in two different sentences, with absolutely nothing about Adam being baptized.

Nibley said “dwelling with particular emphasis on the baptism of Adam.” This is pure bunk. There is no emphasis on baptism, and interestingly enough little emphasis on Adam himself, this apocalypse has almost nothing to do with or is about Adam. Nibley also said “The valuable Apocalypse of Adam claims to be taken from a book handed down from Adam himself…” This is pure bunk. Barnstone and Meyer say “The Revelation (or Apocalypse) of Adam is a mythic narrative poem.”[25] James M. Robinson said “The Apocalypse of Adam is a revelation received by Adam…”[26]

Bentley Layton’s galumptious scholarly discussion of this gnostic work illustrates the careful and excellent care he uses in describing it as realistically as he knows how to. There is nothing about it saying it is a book from Adam handed down. The only possible literal water baptism possibly hinted at in the text is at the exposition of the “first Kingdom” where it says “And he was nourished in the heavens. He received its glory and power, and arrived at the lap of his mother. And it was thus that he arrived at the water.” Here Layton speculates “Possibly, Jesus’ arrival at the Jordan for baptism by John the Baptist.”[27] At the section Layton labeled as “Accusation of the damned by the guardians of baptism” we read in the text, as translated by Layton – “Next, a voice came to them – for Mikheus, Mikhar, and Mnesinous, who preside over holy baptism and living water.” Here Layton comments “Possible by an improper kind of baptism.”[28] There is nothing about Adam’s baptism.

Nibley was entirely wrong all around with his emphasis, shallow reading, and dubious parallel of Adam’s baptism. He left the impression that this is all about Adam. It isn’t. He left the impression that the majority of its time this text is discussing Adam’s baptism and it’s importance. It isn’t. He said it was a book written by Adam and handed down through his posterity (to make a parallel with Joseph Smith’s claims in the Pearl of Great Price). It isn’t. All of this is very important background knowledge for us as we tread into his massive parallels and emphasis on the claimed parallels with the Book of Abraham, which must be read with great care, and, I would add, sufficient and necessary skepticism. I find Dr. Nibley over and over again emphasizing the wrong things, completely misconstruing contexts from the ancient materials he imagines parallels to the Book of Abraham, and outright inventing situations supposedly from the ancient’s point of views that simply do not exist.


Endnotes

18. Douglas F. Salmon, “Parallelomania and the Study of Latter Day Scripture: Confirmation, Coincidence, or the Collective Unconscious?,” in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 33/2 (2000): 137.
19. Hugh Nibley, Enoch the Prophet, Deseret Book/FARMS, 1986: 144.
20. Salmon, “Parallelomania,” p. 137.
21. James M. Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library in English, Harper & Row, 1988: 286.
22. Bentley Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures, Doubleday & Company, 1987: 64.
23. Willis Barnstone, Marvin Meyer, The Gnostic Bible, New Seeds, 2006: 188.
24. Hans-Joachim Klimkeit, Gnosis on the Silk Road, Gnostic Texts from Central Asia, HarperSanFrancisco, 1993: 15.
25. Barnstone, Meyer, The Gnostic Bible, p. 178.
26. James M. Robinson, Nag Hammadi Library, p. 277.
27. Bentley Layton, Gnostic Scriptures, p. 60, note 78:a.
28. Bentley Layton, Gnostic Scriptures, p. 63, note 84:b.

[_Kishkumen]

Nibley remains something of a mystery to me. It is clear, as you say, that on the surface Nibley's characterization of the Apocalypse of Adam is incredibly misleading. As often happens with Fox News, Nibley's readers go away from his lesson knowing less, in a sense, than when they picked up his book. On the other hand, that person will know that there is such a gnostic book, and, should she or he pick it up later, will find it has little to do with what Nibley led everyone to believe about it.

That said, if one considers carefully Nibley's assumptions, it is easy to see how he gets to these idiosyncratic readings. Nibley seems to believe quite genuinely that, like the Bible, the Apocalypse of Adam was once in an unadulterated state, and in that state it contained something much more like the pure revelation received by Joseph Smith. Nibley sees the vestiges of that pure Book of Adam behind the gnostic version, a book passed down and altered, but one that really did go back to Adam. In it baptism is mentioned. Oh, sure, lots of oddball gnostic verbiage obscures the truth, but if we could clear off the barnacles of gnostic nonsense, we would see that the baptism of Adam is what this is about. Presto!

So, the core thing, the important thing, is that we have a book with Adam's name on it that mentions a baptism of some kind. Before the gnostics wrecked it, it looked more like stuff Joseph Smith received by revelation.

As a scholar, I am thunderously outraged by this irresponsible methodology. LDS people who buy into this are being led down the primrose path, at least from the perspective of a historian. And, I feel very strongly that the perspective of the historian is important for all people to understand, even if they want to construct alternate readings and meanings for their own edification. The latter is what I believe Nibley was doing, consciously or not. He reads these things through his version of the lens of Joseph Smith, and in the process leaves most of what is interesting lying on the cutting room floor.

But I also feel badly for people who take Nibley at his word and fail to look further. If one is careful, one will dig into the texts themselves, as you have here, in order to find just how problematic his method is. Most people will not. They don't have time. They trusted Dr. Nibley to enlighten them, and what he has done is to provide them a kind of alternate reality. A Joseph Smith-based reality. What they are missing, that I would hope that they not miss, and what I think Joseph Smith himself would not have failed to do, is to look for the meaning and truth that can be derived from the text on its own terms.

Of course, once again we are no longer operating in the bailiwick of the historian. We are looking for truth from the gnostics. Many people here will find such an exercise utterly futile. But for those who don't find such things futile, there is much more to be gained from trying to understand groups like the gnostics, and their texts, than there is to be gained by wresting their words to support one's own views. I think that, in his heart of hearts, Nibley was open to other perspectives, although he was very loyal and pursued his mission. I've heard too many stories about him lauding the truth of other traditions to think otherwise.

Unfortunately, what he gave us in his writings often does serious injury to those traditions, however much he may have gleaned from them personally. When I consider the historical significance of things past, there is yet a part of me that wants to find gems of meaning for my own life. I don't put them in my published writings because that is not what I do as an historian. That is not my job. But, my fledgling and ever evolving understanding of history provides me a rich storehouse of ideas that I can mine for my own edification.

When I look at the gnostics, as understood in the broad strokes, I see people who were grappling with their disappointment in a Roman imperial system that fell far short of its own propaganda. For those people who pursued philosophy and were in a certain class, the realization that the Roman way, so to speak, would never fulfill its promises, and would certainly not bring enlightenment, must have been deeply disillusioning. Where to go for the real dope? Revelation or philosophy? Revelation and philosophy? What role does ritual play in attaining the truth? How are we to understand our disillusionment with the Roman imperial system in mythic or theological terms?

Those are great questions to think about when we try to understand the gnostics. And there are many, many more, not a few based on quite different assumptions than mine. These questions are being pursued in great detail and depth by brilliant, committed scholars. Personally, I think there is much to be gained by reading what they have read. Some Nibley readers whose curiosity has been piqued will pick up those books. They may even get past the disappointment that comes with the realization that what they are reading has little to do with what Nibley said and try to understand solid scholarship on the gnostics. That is what I hope would happen, but I don't believe it happens as often as it should.

[_Symmachus]

A paradigmatic illustration of Nibley's modus operandi, Philo.

I think Kish's analogy with Fox News is funny, although I cannot in the end agree. In all of these discussions, I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding about the functions of modern scholarship, a confusion that Nibley himself and other apologists exploit and are exploited by.

The attitudes and assumptions of modern scholarship are a mixture of 19th century German Wissenschaft, corporatism, and 20th century Franco-American post-modernism, and at their core now resides a mind-grating paradox: scholarship is not concerned with finding truth, only with handling evidence. Nibley, on the other hand, was deeply and perhaps obsessively concerned with truth, and since he knew he had it, he didn't need to care much about evidence. Consequently, he is very shoddy with it.

Nibley does not offend me in my capacity as a scholar (to the extent I get offended at all) because writing for the Improvement Era and such illustrious presses as Deseret Book and Bookcraft was nothing like what I do. Although he certainly could do evidence-based scholarship, 99 % of what he wrote were exercises in the contemplation of Mormon esoterica. He is much more like Robert Graves than Ronald Syme, and if you study his work closely you'll see the kinds of people he cites frequently were not taken seriously by scholars either, even if some of them held academic positions: Graves, for one, but also John Allegro, Giorgio de Santilllana, Cyrus Gordon, Lord Raglan, and so on. The signs of his fringe-status are there, and he doesn't hide it. Was Nibley supposed to tell his less erudite audiences that he was a fringe-scholar? Maybe, but the trouble with people on the fringe is that they tend to think that they are in the center and everyone else on the fringe (the Lord's chosen people have always been insignificant, after all). Bitching about Nibley as an historian is about as productive as bitching about Graves as a Celticist. Once you have claimed to talk to the Moon Goddess, you've moved into something else and I'm not gonna judge you by the same standards of rationality (and sanity) as I otherwise would. You go on and talk to that Moon Goddess, and I'm going to do my thing. I'm here for you, but you please stay over there for me.

Nibley doesn't seem to have taken any of the accoutrements of scholarly credentials very seriously either or to have used them to advance his apologetics, although I do think he fostered his own personality cult. The later FARMSians are a little more suspect to me because they obviously deployed all the forms of academia to claim authority for their apologetic projects. THAT is much more like Fox News to my mind. It's one thing to write for a small readership in the intermountain west while teaching at what was then a nowhere-school, especially if you're writing to people who also think they talk to the Moon Goddess, but it's quite another to broadcast your Yale degree while hitting up donors and cultivate students as if what you are doing is just advancing a typical research agenda at a major university.

Nibley was a professor of ancient scripture, not a professor of history; an interpreter of Mormonism, not antiquity. Anyone who took him otherwise wanted to be taken in by him. If someone were genuinely interested in what modern historical scholarship had to say about Mormon scripture and weren't looking to build up their Mormon testimony, it wasn't hard to find that material. Pretty much any book not written by Mormons would be a good place to start. I suspect readers of Nibley went to Nibley for confirmation, not information.

When I look at the gnostics, as understood in the broad strokes, I see people who were grappling with their disappointment in a Roman imperial system that fell far short of its own propaganda. For those people who pursued philosophy and were in a certain class, the realization that the Roman way, so to speak, would never fulfill its promises, and would certainly not bring enlightenment, must have been deeply disillusioning. Where to go for the real dope? Revelation or philosophy? Revelation and philosophy? What role does ritual play in attaining the truth? How are we to understand our disillusionment with the Roman imperial system in mythic or theological terms?

Hmmm. Don't you think it's odd then that they don't talk about the Roman imperial system at all in any gnostic texts? It seems to me that that is sort of like saying Nibley's estoteric Mormonism was a response to the failures of post-war American propaganda. It could be true, but if so it is very strange that he doesn't seem aware of it in his voluminous writings. And I would also add that disillusionment with government systems and institutions is very much a recent, post-Vietnam preoccupation. Perhaps there is a certain presentism here.

For my part, I find Synesius's letter 148 revealing about how distant most people were from the Roman imperial system (although I am skeptical of how applicable the word "system" is):

No doubt men know well that there is always an emperor living, for we are reminded of this every year by those who collect taxes; but who he is, is not very clear. There are people amongst us who suppose that Agamemnon, the son of Atreus, is still king, the great king who went against Troy.

I suspect that only two groups of people in history have taken Roman imperial propaganda all that seriously: Roman imperial propagandists, and modern Roman historians. Perhaps those pre-modern gnostics, like Nibley, were more disturbed by the immediate reality of death they saw all around them, even if they were well off, than abstract conceptions like ideology. You were much more likely to find an emaciated beggar in an ancient city than an imperial image. The ubiquity of death is often overlooked by historians who are used to living in a society where the processes around natural death are cordoned off, rigorously sanitized, and highly controlled. Overcoming death and the unpleasantness of materiality is the most pervasive preoccupation in gnostic texts, but politics is invisible. Maybe we're the ones with the political obsessions and disillusionment in the wake of failed imperial propaganda.

[_Chap]

The attitudes and assumptions of modern scholarship are a mixture of 19th century German Wissenschaft, corporatism, and 20th century Franco-American post-modernism, and at their core now resides a mind-grating paradox: scholarship is not concerned with finding truth, only with handling evidence.

My emphasis.

Now they tell me??

Damn, damn, damn!

I shall write zeroes over my entire hard disk and end it all.

[_Res Ipsa]

The attitudes and assumptions of modern scholarship are a mixture of 19th century German Wissenschaft, corporatism, and 20th century Franco-American post-modernism, and at their core now resides a mind-grating paradox: scholarship is not concerned with finding truth, only with handling evidence.

My emphasis.

Now they tell me??

Damn, damn, damn!

I shall write zeroes over my entire hard disk and end it all.

When I read that, my first reaction was to plug my ears and yell "La La La! I can't hear you!"

Totally ineffective with printed text.

[_Symmachus]

Now they tell me??

Damn, damn, damn!

I shall write zeroes over my entire hard disk and end it all.

I can't say I really get what you're trying to say.

[_Chap]

Now they tell me??

Damn, damn, damn!

I shall write zeroes over my entire hard disk and end it all.

I can't say I really get what you're trying to say.

As I hope my use of emphasis made clear, I was reacting to this bit of your post:

scholarship is not concerned with finding truth, only with handling evidence.

[_Kishkumen]

Greetings, dear consul:

I think Kish's analogy with Fox News is funny, although I cannot in the end agree.

I am not sure what you make of my analogy with Fox News, so I don't know how to respond to this criticism. It was a very limited criticism that dealt only with the question of how informed someone would be regarding the subject under discussion after reading the content. In this case, the Apocalypse of Adam. I doubt Nibley's readers walked away from this piece knowing more accurate information about the Apocalypse than before they found his article. Instead, they imbibed a lot of pseudo-information about it.

The attitudes and assumptions of modern scholarship are a mixture of 19th century German Wissenschaft, corporatism, and 20th century Franco-American post-modernism, and at their core now resides a mind-grating paradox: scholarship is not concerned with finding truth, only with handling evidence. Nibley, on the other hand, was deeply and perhaps obsessively concerned with truth, and since he knew he had it, he didn't need to care much about evidence. Consequently, he is very shoddy with it.

Very well put.

Although he certainly could do evidence-based scholarship, 99 % of what he wrote were exercises in the contemplation of Mormon esoterica. He is much more like Robert Graves than Ronald Syme, and if you study his work closely you'll see the kinds of people he cites frequently were not taken seriously by scholars either, even if some of them held academic positions: Graves, for one, but also John Allegro, Giorgio de Santilllana, Cyrus Gordon, Lord Raglan, and so on. The signs of his fringe-status are there, and he doesn't hide it. Was Nibley supposed to tell his less erudite audiences that he was a fringe-scholar? Maybe, but the trouble with people on the fringe is that they tend to think that they are in the center and everyone else on the fringe (the Lord's chosen people have always been insignificant, after all). Bitching about Nibley as an historian is about as productive as bitching about Graves as a Celticist. Once you have claimed to talk to the Moon Goddess, you've moved into something else and I'm not gonna judge you by the same standards of rationality (and sanity) as I otherwise would. You go on and talk to that Moon Goddess, and I'm going to do my thing. I'm here for you, but you please stay over there for me.

On the one hand, I embrace your comparison of Nibley with Graves because I think a lot of what Nibley actually did is quite comparable to Graves. On the other hand, the comparison fails when you consider how he presented himself to others. Nibley played the role of ancient historian and scholar, without any explicit qualifications, unless you consider his denigration of mainstream scholarship as a bizarre kind of inverted qualification. I do have a problem with that. I either know or know of a number of people who went out to pursue the Nibley path only to make the jarring discovery that what he was doing only misleadingly resembled what they were expected to do in their graduate education.

I can think of at least one quite prominent victim of Nibley's scholarly malfeasance: John Gee. Anyone who looks closely at what Gee is trying to do will quickly see the telltale signs of Nibley's mishandling of evidence and creative behavior in the art of translation. Gee's record in his graduate work and his treatment of the Book of Abraham constitutes a real mixed bag, and one might go so far as to argue that he has done real harm. On the professor's side of the equation I have known more than one scholar who found the task of dealing with Nibley's acolytes onerous and frustrating. What to do with a student who does not seem to understand the difference between mainstream scholarship and Nibley's method, and seems to exhibit a smug condescension toward the former?

Hence:

Nibley doesn't seem to have taken any of the accoutrements of scholarly credentials very seriously either or to have used them to advance his apologetics, although I do think he fostered his own personality cult. The later FARMSians are a little more suspect to me because they obviously deployed all the forms of academia to claim authority for their apologetic projects. THAT is much more like Fox News to my mind. It's one thing to write for a small readership in the intermountain west while teaching at what was then a nowhere-school, especially if you're writing to people who also think they talk to the Moon Goddess, but it's quite another to broadcast your Yale degree while hitting up donors and cultivate students as if what you are doing is just advancing a typical research agenda at a major university.

The problem is that we don't arrive at FARMS without the groundwork Nibley laid. How did they not get the message after so many years watching Nibley in action? Did they not understand that they should be writing White Goddess Pt. III instead of No Ma'am That's Not History? Did Nibley not see it as part of his responsibility to clue everyone else in? I have a difficult time tolerating that kind of not-so-benign neglect.

Nibley was a professor of ancient scripture, not a professor of history; an interpreter of Mormonism, not antiquity. Anyone who took him otherwise wanted to be taken in by him. If someone were genuinely interested in what modern historical scholarship had to say about Mormon scripture and weren't looking to build up their Mormon testimony, it wasn't hard to find that material. Pretty much any book not written by Mormons would be a good place to start. I suspect readers of Nibley went to Nibley for confirmation, not information.

I am not sure most dimly educated Mormons at BYU or in the LDS Church at large really understand the difference there. I also think you overestimate, probably based on your own stellar intellect, how easy it is for the average person to find out what they do not know, when they don't even suspect there is a reason to look. Look at John Hall, for goodness sakes: did he truly understand the boundaries between Nibley's craft and ancient history? I don't think we can treat the scholars who followed Nibley as being completely different from the other Mormons who chose to trust him. The impact of such thorough cultural conditioning and misinformation is devastating.

Hmmm. Don't you think it's odd then that they don't talk about the Roman imperial system at all in any gnostic texts? It seems to me that that is sort of like saying Nibley's estoteric Mormonism was a response to the failures of post-war American propaganda. It could be true, but if so it is very strange that he doesn't seem aware of it in his voluminous writings. And I would also add that disillusionment with government systems and institutions is very much a recent, post-Vietnam preoccupation. Perhaps there is a certain presentism here.

Yeah, I don't think this statement or the comparison with Nibley withstand careful scrutiny. First of all, resistance rhetoric does not need to take the form of "Rome sucks." Secondly, your comparison with Nibley is practically a refutation of the rebuttal you are attempting. If Nibley's vision of a socialist Zion is not a response to the Mormon embrace of Americanism on some level, then I don't know what you would take it to be. As someone who sat through his classes, has read his works, and knows something of what the contrast of Zion and Babylon meant in Nibley's treatment of it, I am really taken aback that you would say this. So, I disagree with just about everything you have said here. But back to the actual topic. Religious resistance against Rome was a thing, and it permeates the prophecy and other sacred writings of the eastern half of the Roman world from the Hellenistic period through the Roman Empire. It is baffling to me that you would suggest that this is some kind of post-Vietnam thing. That is utter nonsense.

For my part, I find Synesius's letter 148 revealing about how distant most people were from the Roman imperial system (although I am skeptical of how applicable the word "system" is):

No doubt men know well that there is always an emperor living, for we are reminded of this every year by those who collect taxes; but who he is, is not very clear. There are people amongst us who suppose that Agamemnon, the son of Atreus, is still king, the great king who went against Troy.

Strange, strange reading of the evidence. I am surprised that you take this at face value and try to compare this to quite literate "Gnostics" in Egypt in the Late Roman Empire who knew enough to engage Neoplatonists and Hermetists. That they would think about Roman power in the sort of oblivious way you see Synesius impressionistically portraying is a very odd conclusion to draw, in my opinion.

I suspect that only two groups of people in history have taken Roman imperial propaganda all that seriously: Roman imperial propagandists, and modern Roman historians.

Ludicrous. Please tell me how Menander Rhetor fits into your assessment of the complete irrelevance of Roman propaganda to most educated people living in the Roman Empire. If propaganda were so irrelevant, then there would be no point in having propagandists.

I have a very difficult time taking any of these facile dismissals seriously.

[_Philo Sofee]

Love the conversation guys! I have a sincere question for you Kish. Was Lord Raglan fringe? I honestly don't know a lot about him but have read his material on heroes. It actually rings true about you putting Nibley with Graves, he used him enormously in his "background" evidence for the Book of Abraham. I suspect it was one of the things that some of his colleagues were critiquing him about grabbing something from one culture and then something else from another culture and far removed time and creating an artificial synthesis in antiquity that isn't really there. Kent Jackson bopped him good on that....

[_Gadianton]

Some great stuff on this thread.

But I also feel badly for people who take Nibley at his word and fail to look further. If one is careful, one will dig into the texts themselves, as you have here, in order to find just how problematic his method is. Most people will not. They don't have time. They trusted Dr. Nibley to enlighten them, and what he has done is to provide them a kind of alternate reality.

As a TBM student of Nibley without any relevant background, where to even begin? Deseret Book sold tiny pieces of his source material, which was extensive and mostly in other languages. As you pointed out he was a contrarian, and so if you think the academic world is full of crap then how to represent yourself to your audience fairly? As a student, you just figure if someone that smart believes it with such confidence then good enough (and he was a Jedi Master at poisoning the well). Well, as a student of Nibley, I don't think I was sure what we as a virtual student body were trying to figure out -- how everything in the ancient world is really Mormonism? As you put it, it's really an alternate reality -- a really disjointed one where you're mostly an observer because you aren't sure how you're supposed to participate let alone be critical of what you're taking in. Go out and learn 10 languages and then where next?

I never read anything he wrote critically in the least. I wouldn't have known how to. In fact, his stuff is awesome compared to Skousen and other church authors I'd read (and why read anything not by a LDS author?). A moment of skepticism when at a SLC library, I was kind of doing the math unconsciously while following up on books he so highly recommended. Not sure exactly what I was thinking, because THOSE books wouldn't have a reason for citing Nibley necessarily, but I was disappointed that he didn't seem to factor into the worlds of the few scholars he praised. Well, I think I just had that feeling that I could keep looking and I wasn't going to find references to Nibley -- he wasn't a pillar of the academy as I'd assumed (I imagined he must be churning out non-LDS stuff inspiring the less gifted academic community in their terrestrial sphere).

The fatal blow had nothing to do with Nibley. I was in a Bible bash on mission, went to a university library to find the proof for my position, and about ten minutes into an article from The Interpreter's Bible, and it was all over. Nothing to do with anything Nibley had ever discussed, but as Nibley was to Skousen, this stuff was to Nibley. I never read another article from Nibley after that. It was the realization that Nibley occupied an "alternate reality" barely related to scholarship. It wasn't a matter of refutation but dismissal. In fact, from that one article, I could do the math and see how there wouldn't be much point to LDS scholarship period, and the whole idea of finding Mormonism in the ancient world pretty much off the table nor even desirable. It was slowly downhill from that day on.