Nibley rakes Fawn Brodie over the coals

[_DarkHelmet]

Is this the same Hugh Nibley who didn't believe Brodie's claim that Joseph Smith was charged with glass looking in 1826, and said if such a claim was true it would be devastating to Joseph Smith's credibility?

[_quark]

As an experiment, Nibley should have removed borrowed material like published Christian works from LDS "gospel" to see what Joseph created from scratch. Now that would be delicious!

[_Sethbag]

http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/publications/transcripts/?id=47

The gospel as the Mormons know it sprang full-grown from the words of Joseph Smith... And lo and behold, everything fell into line of its own accord; all the haphazard elements in the bewildering heap fitted together perfectly to form a doctrine so commanding that not even a hint of rhetorical paradox is needed to support it, and no "Gregorian compromise" with a pleasure-loving world has been necessary to assure its vigorous growth.

Yes, no rhetorical paradox is needed to support it. Oh wait, how did God come into being? Answer: by going through mortality in a universe ruled by his God. And how did his God come into being? Answer: by going through mortality in a universe ruled by his God. Ok, so where did his God come from? Answer: it's turtles all the way down my friend.

The merciless logic of the Mormon doctrine made its strictly amateur missionaries from the outset the bane of the learned cloth throughout the world. What a piece of luck for Joseph!

This is the same merciless logic that lead Joseph Smith to conclude that infant gods would sit upon thrones in the Celestial Kingdom, looking just like they did the day they died as babes here on Earth, only resurrected. Merciless logic.

How her chuckle-headed, pipe-dreaming, glory-mongering hero ever produced a doctrine more wholly logical than anything done by a St. Thomas or a Calvin and at the same time as vivid and intimate as the faith of the Primitive Church is one of the more important issues our Sibyl has avoided.

I don't think she avoided it at all. Brodie said that Joseph had paid attention to the religious controversies that were current in his region at the time, and came up with answers to these disputed things. Also note that the doctrine of the church wasn't the same on April 6, 1830 as it was by 1844 when he died. A lot of stuff was added over that time, and Joseph certainly spent a lot of time reading, and discussing with others, matters of theology during that time. A Joseph Smith counseling with Sidney Rigdon, Oliver Cowdery, Hyrum Smith, WW Phelps, and all those others he associated with so closely over that decade and a half, and not only the books Joseph read in that time, but the books that his associates read and discussed with him, is a far different thing than the caricature Nibley makes Brodie's Joseph Smith out to be.

Did Brodie depict the Joseph Smith of 1844 as a chuckle-head? He was certainly glory-mongering, I'll grant that.

Certainly her Joseph is not up to the task, and until a more likely candidate than the Brodie mannequin turns up, we will just have to accept Joseph Smith's own story of what happened.

But the Joseph Smith who read, and thought, and borrowed from existing currents of thought, both from what he read, and from what he himself thought, and from what his associates over a multi-decade period of time thought and read, was not up to the task? Maybe, maybe not, but Nibley certainly doesn't establish his point by turning Brodie into a straw man and then knocking it down.

[_sock puppet]

Is this the same Hugh Nibley who didn't believe Brodie's claim that Joseph Smith was charged with glass looking in 1826, and said if such a claim was true it would be devastating to Joseph Smith's credibility?

Thanks DarkHelmet for reminding me that there actually was something I could agree with Nibley on, that part about devastating to JSJr's credibility. Why just as recent as a year ago, new BYU freshman have been trying to prove old Nibley wrong on that one, with little results to date.