Nibley: Footnote faker or not?

[_kairos]

Highly recommend clicking on link citing work by ron huggins above from california kid's post above which leads to a very lengthy analysis of the Nibster's miss use of footnotes and attempts to defend them by the FARMERs including DCP and the GEEman.

i would post the link if i knew how but it is just above in ck's post.

plan to sit for a while to take in this devastating analysis.

k

[_Markk]

By request of Noel, I posted in another thread some letters by Klaus Baer in which he comments on Nibley's research. As a bonus, here's an old blog post I wrote on Nibley's footnotes (no longer online anywhere else, so this is an MDB exclusive ).

A Footnote to the Debate Over Nibley's Footnotes

A while back, Ron Huggins wrote a fairly devastating critique of Hugh Nibley's use and abuse of his sources. More recently, Huggins's critique was critiqued by Shirley Ricks in the FARMS Review. My critique of the critique of the critique follows.

In her entire lengthy article, Ricks does not respond to any of the specific examples Huggins offered. She spends a considerable amount of time discussing issues with which Huggins was unconcerned-- specifically, incomplete or inaccurate citations. Huggins was more interested in cases where Nibley misused or misrepresented his sources. These issues are almost entirely glossed over in the FARMS response.

The FARMS response is also largely an argument from authority, mostly just citing the assessments of Mormon scholars who think Nibley was right more often than he was wrong. It also makes a pretty lame dig at Huggins when it assumes that the reason he compared Nibley's translations with the published translations of professional scholars was that he lacked confidence to do his own translations. (One suspects he would have been criticized for hubris had he used his own translations as the standard for comparison.)

Unlike Ricks, I tend to agree with Huggins's assessment of Nibley's footnotes. In Nibley's essay, "Meaning of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers," I found many of his statements about the KEP manuscripts to be false and misleading. Brent Metcalfe's reaction to the essay was similar. In a letter to Wesley P. Walters, Nibley's Egyptology teacher Klaus Baer characterized Nibley's apologetics in terms strongly reminiscent of Huggins's view: "Much of it seems to be obfuscatory in the extreme, tending to pick on asides, quotes out of context, and opinions emitted by the large penumbra of semi-scholarly types (and crackpots) that hang around the fringes of Egyptology -- and are, of course, much attracted by such things as the Book of the Dead." Baer identified five specific examples of misrepresentation from just a few pages of one of Nibley's works.

I think it's important to acknowledge that Nibley did a lot of good, was extremely knowledgeable, and had many talents and virtues. His work is very useful for suggesting future directions of study. But in my opinion, his work must also be used very critically and with careful attention to his sources. It cannot generally be taken for granted that he accurately represented what they say.

Hey CK

I went back and read some old post on HN also, and while you said he had some good things to offer, you also agreed he was a "crackpot" (along with Barker)

Whats also funny is Blixa is criticizing me for calling him a hack wrote...


Blixa Nov 8 2007 wrote

"I'm glad Nibley inspired you, though, Trevor. That's at least one good thing to his credit ; ) "

I am having fun reading through the old posts on Nbley and what is ironic...I am rather gentle in my criticism of HN, while others are extremely hostile.

I am up to about 2009 in my reading

More later.

[_Blixa]

Hey CK

I went back and read some old post on HN also, and while you said he had some good things to offer, you also agreed he was a "crackpot" (along with Barker)

Whats also funny is Blixa is criticizing me for calling him a hack wrote...


Blixa Nov 8 2007 wrote

"I'm glad Nibley inspired you, though, Trevor. That's at least one good thing to his credit ; ) "

I am having fun reading through the old posts on Nbley and what is ironic...I am rather gentle in my criticism of HN, while others are extremely hostile.

I am up to about 2009 in my reading

More later.

You continue to occupy the most black-and-white of positions, Markk.

In this thread, I've never defended Nibley in the uncomplicated way you apparently assume I have. I think his apologetic work is terrible and you can probably find old posts of mine that state that even more directly. Here in 2012, though, you can see that discussions with Kish as well as reading Martha Beck's book gave me a way to situate his work, to read it much more in context than the way I, and many others, had usually encountered it: viewtopic.php?p=621237#p621237

My original intervention in this thread was to try to help you understand how better to evaluate his career. The OP thread title is "footnote faker" which suggests making things up out of whole cloth: a charge that crops up in Martha Beck's book in a typically bizarre anecdote about an unnamed man sidling up to her at a Provo grocery store and whispering this in her ear. Whatever one makes of Nibley's use of source material in his apologetic work, I don't think this one holds water and I'd like to have seen Beck give some examples.

I continued to respond to your assertions because they also seemed to be rooted in an ignorance of academic and scholarly practices, something which is easy to clear up and would have even given you better grounds on which to criticize Nibley. That last part is important. If you want to criticize his work and career, doing so from a position which understands it is paramount unless you want your arguments to be dismissible as that of a crank.

But, despite my attempts, you've never shown that you've taken the time to read, let alone comprehend, my comments--or that of others also trying to give you a better way to situate an understanding of Nibley's contradictions. An example of your lack of care would be your response to Mak where you misread his sarcastic suggestion that people here were actually defending Nibley as itself a defense of Nibley!

I don't know what to make of this. You seem to have a big chip on your shoulder about education, about academia, about intellectual work itself. God knows that isn't unusual in this country. But really, I doubt anyone here would endorse the idea that only years in graduate school or terminal academic degrees are necessary for thoughtful discussion of Mormon history or even brilliant contributions to its study. What is necessary, though, is reading. Reading widely and reading carefully: even on a message board.

[_Morley]

What is necessary, though, is reading. Reading widely and reading carefully.

This applies to so much.

[_Kishkumen]

A while back, Ron Huggins wrote a fairly devastating critique of Hugh Nibley's use and abuse of his sources.

Wow, yes, that is devastating. LOL. I had read the bit about Enoch before, but not the other stuff. Yikes. It almost seems as though Nibley was providing his own JST of his sources before he went looking for parallels. The similarity with Gee is hard to escape. Well, I am glad you linked this. I don't know how I missed it. I had never read Ron's critique of Nibley's peer-reviewed articles, and it is true that he seems to have done some of the very same slipshod and misleading nonsense in these articles as he did in his apologetic stuff.

Well, I really owe Ron Huggins a great deal. He and I have talked about the misleading nature of LDS apologetics before, and I agreed with him. At the time, however, I had no idea exactly how bad it was.

What pains me most, however, is not Nibley, but the sloppiness and failure of the peer-review of the journal articles. One shouldn't be able to slip these kinds of errors by a good peer reviewer. In my own experience, however, there are lazy and ineffectual peer reviewers. Some of the least valuable reviews I have received, and the most suspicious, in my opinion, were those that said, "Looks great; publish it." I say suspicious, because: 1) very few people are so good that they do everything right; and 2) scholars who are qualified to review an argument usually have their own, different opinions about it.

It is good to see that the system worked, albeit tardily, when other scholars responded in their own works to Nibley's misrepresentations.

Thanks again to CaliforniaKid for bringing this to my attention. And, I must tell Markk that, yes, it appears that Nibley was more dishonest that I had realized. I can almost forgive Nibley's JST of antiquity in Mormon-boosting materials outside of academic discourse, but I can't forgive the misrepresentation of ancient sources in peer-reviewed articles. I only wish the initial reviewers had caught such things and rejected his pieces.

This does make me quite angry about the perpetuation of dubious and unethical practices in LDS scholarship and apologetics, as well as the disservice it does to all LDS scholars who, unlike Nibley, are ethical in their work. Their reputations stood to suffer because of the inferior methodology of Nibley. So much damage is caused by the unethical behavior of an influential figure.

I think Ron and Chris have both been very generous in seeing the positive that Nibley did in inspiring others to learn about antiquity. Yes, that's great. But, what is the result of their further education after they have been inspired? In the case of Gee, one sees big questions about his own reliability when it comes to his representation of the ancient sources on Mormon topics. Most, however, have left Mormonism or Nibley behind.

I know of one particularly sad case in which a troubled LDS academic who had done respectable and even fine work in the past went over the deep end and started a Nibleyesque cult. The damage that caused was, for the few who felt pressured or were misled to go along, devastating.

[_Mayan Elephant]

Here are my last thoughts on this before I go back to doing something with my spare time besides paying attention to message boards.

What I liked about Nibley's daughter's book was her presentation of her perception of the Mormon tendency to pretty much worship Nibley's "genius" (saying this while intentionally not getting into the subject of the ins and outs of the 90s "false memory syndrome" and "courage to heal" craze) and how well her perceptions of what was going on in her family and the community in regards to the ubiquitous love of her father aligned with my personal experience with his books.

Here was my experience:

I read a bit. What I read didn't make sense. I could see that he was trying to take his readers down a logical path to the conclusion he wanted them to believe, but when I really tried to follow him down that path, I just felt confused. I looked around me. There were long shelves of his books, all with beautiful matching covers, at Deseret Book. People collected them for their own bookshelves because if they had Nibley's books on their shelves, it demonstrated to their neighbors that they were one of those "smart, scholarly" Mormons who read and understood Nibley. I would wonder to myself how they could actually get through his crap. It's not very enjoyable, at least to me, to read a bunch of stuff that is trying to sound smart and be brilliant but in reality just doesn't fit together. Maybe I felt that way because when I read, I read to try to actually comprehend and I had enough confidence in my own ability to actually understand what he was saying and that I believed that if he were saying something worth understanding, I would get it. But I didn't get it. And, maybe because I'm me and I happen to trust myself a bit, I didn't figure that just because I didn't understand it, Nibley was saying something brilliant and beyond me. I decided, instead, that he was writing nonsense instead of brilliance.

His daughter's thoughts on this subject were interesting to me (again setting aside the controversial parts of her book because that's a different discussion) because she described what I observed. For ease of communication, I'll call it "The Nibley Effect." Simply put (and being a bit repetitive here) Mormons want to show off how cool they are because they understand Nibley's "methods" or his books or his brilliance, or whatever. If someone could say (back in the days), "I love Nibley," they would garner deep respect. In other words, people love and respect Nibley for whatever reasons they say they love and respect him (some of that happens on this board today) in order to receive positive reinforcement from their envioronments. Normal human behavior. Nibley sought positive reinforcement and received it for writing nonsense. Other people jumped on the bandwagon and sought positive reinforcement for connecting themselves to Nibley's positive reinforcement.

But his daughter pretty much called out an "emperor's new clothes" phenomenon. Well, that's what I see too: the Nibley Effect. And the Nibley Effect, at least to me, is far more interesting than Nibley's bogus words or "methods." From my perspective, that's a lot if not most of what the Nibley craze was about. I agree with his daughter in that regard.

yep. indeed.

nibley was a god-awful lunatic. he was filthy. his clothes were filthy. his house was filthy. his classroom was an unorganized disaster. he was unprepared for crap all the time. he was lazy as hell. but he sure had a lot of smoke blown up his ass. students would sit in his classroom and take notes like it mattered. as if they could ever return to their notes and make one goddamn bit of sense of a sequence of more than 5 words from anything nibley said.

the rows and rows of books on Mormon shelves with the matching covers in pastel colors on vanilla white. all about the same size. they looked like a collection of important crap. nobody read that stuff and took it seriously, because it was not serious. it was a status thing. and it was meant to be on the shelf, just in case one needed a note or reference for one of those talks or lessons.

martha beck has her own issues. her book had issues. but the sentiment was right on track with regards to nibley's professional work - it was a commissioned crock of crap. and it was on track about his presence - filthy ass lunatic. and about the abuse, who can judge. only her. i cannot. but i know this, when someone is pedastaled like nibley was, bad crap gonna happen. you can bet on that.

[_kairos]

Nibley as a "filthy ass lunatic" from Mayan Elephant's point of view.

The list of characterizations of the Nibster has grown considerably through the understanding and analysis of those participating in this thread.

Now will the "real Hugh Nibley please stand up?

just askin

k

[_Lemmie]

Mayan Elephant, just to clarify, is this your first person assessment? You have had classes with Nibley and you've been in his home and office?

[_Mayan Elephant]

Mayan Elephant, just to clarify, is this your first person assessment? You have had classes with Nibley and you've been in his home and office?

yes, yes and yes.

and the strangest thing from this goofy dude was seeing him walking in provo canyon with his one-piece garments unzipped about half way down his chest. damn that dude was strange.

[_Symmachus]

Although I can't really see any correlation between hygiene and scholarship, Mayan's posts do make me think of the word that best describes for me the quality of Nibley's work as an academic enterprise: crap.

The Huggins link doesn't change my view and is an example of what I've been saying. Nibley is not the kind of sham-scholar who makes things up whole cloth or plagiarizes. Those are easy to spot, and their aims are usually some kind of personal advancement. He is a different kind of sham-scholar, one that is harder to categorize because the aims of his project are so different from those of genuine imposters (bud-ump ching).

I continue to give him credit for actually producing something, unlike any of his self-appointed successors and fawning imitators. He does have a view of Mormonism that has many attractive features, that is vigorously argued, beautifully constructed (as long as you don't look beneath the hood), and frankly better than anything the Church has an offer. This view of Mormonism is really what Nibley is promoting in his writings. Nibley is an apologist in the classical sense because he is creative rather than destructive: he builds an edifice of a Mormonism (the cosmic play that he is always going on). Read Justin Martyr or Clement of Alexandria to get a sense of what I'm talking about and to see how interesting apologetics can be. These guys were not simply attacking critics or reviewing them (a few did that sporadically: Origen on Celsus, for instance) but actually trying to show how their Christianity was an intellectual system and a view of reality that could actually complete with other systems and views. I totally reject the end but I enjoy observing the means. I put Nibley in the category, and probably also B.H. Roberts and now T. Givens. I would definitely reserve the word "hack" for people like Daniel Peterson and Kerry Muehlestein: these people have absolutely nothing original to say. Never mind that I don't agree with them—I prefer reading and engaging with people I disagree with rather than people who the same views as me—but there is no "there" there with them.

However, the question becomes whether that view of Mormonism has any basis in reality, which brings us back to crap. Unlike Kish, I would say that Nibley is absolutely a bullshitter: unlike the liar and unlike the truth-teller, he has absolutely no concern whatsoever with any correspondence between what comes out of his mouth or from his pen and what exists out there in the world. He says merely what people want to hear—including himself. In that, he is also like classical apologists. This is also why I say he is a sophist.

I think this is the case with almost everything he ever wrote. I actually read his dissertation. When I was at BYU and the personality cult that he helped foster was running strong, I was told by his fans (some of whom were professors) about how he'd written it in six weeks. Ok, well, I thought to myself, let's see how good it is. So I ordered the microfilm through interlibrary loan. How good it is: not at all. Yes, he is influenced by a strain of scholarship that still held sway when he wrote with some scholars working on religion and culture in various ancient societies (although Nibley would repeat over the next fifty years that this was some kind of established fact rather than a temporary fad that had pretty much faded by the time Nibley actually started publishing in the 40s). But he has absolutely no concern whatsoever for accuracy. I still remember, more than ten years after reading this thing, how he references the Rig Veda (probably composed in the mid second millennium BCE) on the same page as Adam of Bremen (11th century CE) to support his point about some aspect of an assumed (but never established) pre-historic new year rite. One is an ancient polytheistic text from India, the other the work of a learned Christian in medieval Germany. They are 2,500 to 3,000 years apart and both brought in as evidence for a thesis about...Rome! Nibley might as well have quoted Abraham Lincoln as evidence for a pre-historic new year rite on the Tiber. The simplest facts about the context of his sources don't matter to him, but if something like context doesn't matter, what does?

This was typical rather than unusual in the dissertation and in fact in almost everything he wrote that I've read,* and it is the work of a mind that is clearly indifferent to whether or not something is true (unlike a liar, who is deliberate and conscious of the truth). Nibley simply doesn't care. The fact that so much of his apologetic energy was spent exaggerating and then whining about "the schoolmen" (a favorite phrase of his) and the limits of scholarship says a lot: someone who believes scholarship is just a social exercise for people with low self-esteem is a person who doesn't believe scholarship has much to do with truth. Maybe he was confirmed in this prejudice by the fact that he was able to get his slip-shod dissertation accepted as a scholarly contribution. His contempt for "the school" (another favorite phrase to describe and minimize academia) and its methods is telling: since he deploys those methods as his primary mode of exposition, and since he doesn't have much faith in their ability to capture truth, anyone reading Nibley should not believe that truth has any concern for him. The Huggins discussion of Nibley's use (misuse, I mean) of Justin Martyr confirms that for me: Nibley thinks that Justin Martyr is Justin Mormon, so obviously he makes him say whatever sounds Mormon-ish, blithely indifferent to whether or not that is really the case.

I wouldn't trust the medical advice of a doctor who spends much of our appointment telling me that doctors' medical advice is largely self-serving and worthless. Either he's wrong, in which case he's not trustworthy, or he's right, in which case his own advice is largely self-serving and worthless. In neither case is his medical opinion helpful to me if I'm looking for a sound medical opinion. Other aspects of that doctor might be really interesting to me, but his medical advice given in his capacity as a doctor would not be trustworthy.

If you're interested in accuracy, the only accurate thing you can learn from Dr. Nibley is Hugh Nibley's views of Mormonism. Those are intellectually interesting and I can appreciate them as far as they go, but in his capacity as a scholar of antiquity—someone for whom accuracy should be a minimum bar—he is simply not to be trusted. Because he's a bullshitter.

*(I've read I think most of what he wrote. I admit that the one area I have not spent time on his Nibley's work with the Book of Abraham; I plowed through the Collected Works in order up to "Temple and Cosmos (v. 12 or 13), and I think most of the Abraham stuff was after that, although some of the volumes I know were stuff like lecture notes and sunday school lessons. Why they would publish those or Nibley would consent to that is beyond me; if it was such great scholarship it should have been published long ago, but I think it has more to do with reverence for Nibley than for scholarship. Anyway, I'd had enough of Nibley by "Temple and Cosmos," so maybe everything is different in Book of Abraham stuff. I also couldn't read any more because I had come to detest his personality cult—and I maintain again as I have elsewhere in this forum that he nurtured and participated in this cult. Also, the Book of Abraham is so obviously not ancient that I didn't see the point of wasting my time. I'm pretty sure I can predict what Nibley says: 1) non-Mormon scholars are prejudiced and 2) it doesn't matter what the text actually says if we can make it fit an ancient context, and I'll bet he then spends a few volumes trying to show how detail X and Y in the (English) Book of Abraham have some parallel X-1 and Y-1 in some part of the ancient world remotely connected to Egypt. To those of you who have read Nibley's stuff on this: is that prediction accurate?)