Symmachus wrote:Thanks for your generous and thoughtful reply, Kish. I wasn't aware of some of that background, but it does contextualize things a bit. The Classics section was in flux when I started (one faculty member died, three were preparing for retirement—one of them not without fight—one faculty member moved over to religion, and one new faculty member had just arrived, all in the first semester, so there were basically two other people in the section). And Nibley was obviously not going to last long, the Petersen biography came out the year before, and there was a flurry of activity commemorating him. Then, of course Martha Beck's book was about to come out and was discussed even before it was published (I have read it by the way, and she reminds me a lot of her father: a brilliant writer with a mind that is more inventive than it is precise, more interested in story than truth). Maybe all of that contributed to the environment I perceived.
I recall when the one passed away. I had been that professor's teaching assistant at one point and had taken several courses from her. In fact, I still have a garlic press I bought through her from her daughter. We use it all the time! I was sad to hear the news. The three who were retiring were all former teachers. Ironically, my work involves a lot of the material the non-LDS professor worked in, and, although I respected his work very highly, I was not all that fond of him as a teacher. The one who went out with a fight knew quite a bit about several aspects of his field, but would say bizarre and utterly irresponsible things of a religious nature to the students on occasion. I will never forget the time the professor argued, based on a ludicrous misuse of linguistics, that a particular manifestation of Zeus proved the god was really Satan. Since the Greeks worshipped Satan, and were into the gay (an example of the sophistication of gender studies in Provo at the time), they were evil. Unbelievable nonsense.
Symmachus wrote:The Nibley-olatry must have been going on for some time, though, because I can't otherwise understand why FARMS decided in the early 1980s to publish every damn thing he had ever written, whether of any value or not. I understand that in the past few years they have even published some personal letters, and I know that in 2005 they published a series of lecture notes for a course he had given 50 years previously. Not a sustained argument in a book manuscript, just lectures he had prepared. Those were still worth reading in 2005, because they had some brilliant and relevant insight? Um, ok.
Oh, yes, the Nibleyolatry was longstanding. As you say, he was the academic Elvis of Mormonism. Well, Sterling McMurrin should have been, but Nibley was. All of that is quite understandable and predictable, but a real shame. What I was trying to get at was that there was a) some pushback; b) no post-mortal deification; c) little interest in Nibley evinced in Classics per se. But boy, the Nibley cult was already quite remarkable. I recalled that people would make pilgrimages to visit Nibley and present some bit of antiquity or idea to him to ask for his opinion.
One of the funniest examples was a pair of young men who drove up from California to show Nibley their photos of southwestern Native American rock carvings. Nibley motioned for some of us students to come over to take a look at the carvings and then he sneaked off. Considering how often that kind of crap was happening, I could understand why he resorted to such shenanigans. He was also asked about Adam-God countless times. My wife's grandmother even called him once to ask him about it.
I do think it's a little more stable in Classics now, as I'm sure you know, and their most recent faculty addition (a friend and classmate from the same period), as far as I know, has neither time nor interest for apologetics.
I didn't mean to paint too dreary a picture, though; I actually had a great time at BYU, and I found that many of the classics students were as disgusted by the pseudo-scholars in apologetics as I was, and most of them were extremely open-minded people, even the hardcore believers. A few of them even knew that I was an atheist who didn't go to Church, drank coffee with abandon, was creative with my ecclesiastical endorsements, and slept with my girlfriend (you can see why I had a great time at BYU) but they preferred open conversation, sincere friendship, and generous debate to petty moralizing, so we got a long just fine. And the Harvard Hellenist was very good to me and picked up a lot of the slack from the other faculty; I ended up in a very good PhD program, partially with his help, so I shouldn't complain.
But I know what you mean about the ANE dominance. The idea that someone would want to learn Greek to read Homer and without the intention to prove that the Odyssey preserves a coded template for the LDS temple ceremony was something that baffled those people.
Well, I am happy to hear that your experience had its bright side. My experience sounds a lot like yours. In my view, the big mistake was the increasing incorporation of New Testament studies in the Department. Now, anywhere else that would be a good thing, particularly if there is sufficient depth in Roman imperial studies. One can always talk about early Christianity in terms of non-elite society, resistance to imperialism, imperial religions, etc. Of course, there is the entire field of the study of Late Antiquity, to which New Testament may be somewhat more peripheral, but still within the realm. Also, one can sympathize with the desire to pursue a topic that made more sense economically at BYU. The money flows for apologetic BS. Classics is starved while ANE and Religion do much better because any Mormon can see the value of walking in the footsteps of Moses, Lehi, and Jesus, while few appreciate Socrates and Cicero, or know much more than their names. So, New Testament makes Classics more topical to the alumni with money, administrators, etc.
Unfortunately, any scholarship related to Mormonism has the potential to attract the zealous lunacy that confounds real learning with its hailstorm of dubious nonsense. And, when there is not the injection of "Zeus is Satan" garbage, there are the shackles of conforming to the boundaries of belief and the worry about offending the sensibilities of the faithful. These things are not conducive to academic inquiry. A little experience really opened my eyes to such boundaries. I ran into one of the Classics faculty at the SBL. Not the "Zeus is Satan" fellow, but another who had deep interests in the New Testament. Even though I was not really on this person's A-list, we got a long fairly well. I went through the AAR/SBL book sale with him and he talked about the importance of locating commentaries by "believers." I did a double take on that one. In that moment I could very clearly see what separated me from this smart, well-educated, fellow Classicist. I would have never bothered to worry about whether an New Testament commentary writer was a believer. I just demanded that it be well done, useful, and worth laying out the cash for it.
Well, I have gone on long enough. I wish I could do something for Classics at BYU. I am not saying that they are in a bad way. As you noted there have been really good recent hires. I think I know the friend of whom you speak and he is definitely a sharp and promising young scholar with zero interest in worshipping Nibley. So, they should be OK. BYU is what it is. I am happy that Classics is still there. It could have been a much better department, but the nature of the university and the LDS Church hampered its fortunes greatly. Limiting hires to temple-recommend-holding members is an incredibly boneheaded policy that does real damage to smaller disciplines like Classics. They have had numerous well-trained, highly intelligent non-members put in some time at BYU Classics. The Suetonius scholar was grandfathered in, but everyone who came after him was denied the opportunity for lasting employment based on religious discrimination. Some of these folks were marvelous. That really burns.