Hugh Nibley

He taught various subjects at Claremont Colleges until he enlisted in the United States Army in 1942, where he was trained as an intelligence officer as part of the Ritchie Boys.Kent P. Jackson and Douglas F. Salmon have argued that the parallels Nibley finds between ancient culture and LDS works are selective or imprecise.Hugh Nibley's complete works were published jointly by the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) and Deseret Book.He found a job translating Latin, but because his funds were severely limited, he moved from the expensive International House to a cheap apartment, where his neighbors spoke Arabic.[25] He taught alongside scholars fleeing from Germany, including Thomas Mann, and once co-taught a class with retired professor Everett Dean Martin.[34] After an OB training in Hyde Park Corner, he was assigned to help compile information on German officers for the June 1944 Order of Battle Book.On his own time, Nibley wrote a detailed response to Fawn M. Brodie's significant biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History.The response, entitled No, Ma'am, That's Not History, identified flaws in Brodie's work, including the way she read the sources, but it did so using "dismissive and patronizing language".[45] Nibley's rhetorical style became popular with defenders of the church, and in 1979, Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) was founded and published "Nibley-style apologetics and polemics".[50] In 1954, Nibley was on the advisory board for a student club focused on "the integration of sundry areas of scientific and spiritual truth" called "Alpha and Omega".The debate disillusioned Nibley, and when asked to give a prayer at the June 1960 graduation exercise, he started it by saying, "We have met here today clothed in the black robes of a false priesthood.Hans J. Hillerbrand published a response in the same journal, stating that characterizing the early Christians as having an institutional "church" was "theologically dangerous".[60] In his article in Vigiliae Christianae, he proposed the idea that Jesus taught his disciples additional rites after his resurrection, drawing on early Christian sources on Gnosticism.He maintained a small office in the Harold B. Lee Library, working on his magnum opus, titled One Eternal Round, focusing on the hypocephalus ("Facsimile 2") in the Book of Abraham.In his 1975 speech, "Zeal Without Knowledge", he worried that students were overly focused on suffering through church meetings than being genuinely spiritually exercised.[81] In reviewing the third edition, published in 1988, William J. Hamblin stated that while Nibley's explanation of ancient Near Eastern culture was accurate, he drew anachronistic parallels that weakened his other, stronger arguments.[53] Nibley continued to write about evidences of the Book of Mormon's ancient origins in a series of articles published in the Improvement Era between 1964 and 1967.In BYU Studies, Alexander T. Stecker found Since Cumorah a "stimulating" introduction to "many problems", but one that overburdened its readers with "irrelevant facts" and lacked a bibliography.[87] In an essay in Historians and the Far West, Thomas G. Alexander stated that Sounding Brass sarcastically points out obvious flaws in a form of "intellectual overkill".[93] In a 1982 review published in Dialogue, Eric Jay Olsen stated that Nibley's eclectic approach in Abraham in Egypt was overwhelming in its citations of obscure sources.[98] Nibley himself, in a 1951 letter to Francis Kirkham, wrote that he was not "a Book of Mormon scholar" and defined his studies as "popular works" that "should not come within the scope of a university press".[101] In response, Louis Midgley defended Nibley's methodology, and wrote that Jackson denied the possibility of comparative studies, since all historical scholarship "involves selection among alternatives".England praised Nibley's clear prose and witty satire, identifying the absence of the speech "Leaders to Managers: The Fatal Shift" as a major flaw in the volumes.Salmon noted that some of the parallels Nibley found between the Pearl of Great Price and ancient texts were extremely selective, and others were imprecise, inconsequential, or misrepresented sources: "parallelomania".[103] In response, Hamblin stated in The FARMS Review of Books that even though Nibley had made a few errors, that was not cause to dismiss his entire argument about the Pearl of Great Price's parallels with ancient texts about Enoch.[104] In Jerald and Sandra Tanner's Salt Lake City Messenger, Ronald V. Huggins wrote in 2008 that Nibley "modifies his quotations to artificially render them more supportive", and provided several examples.2" are not convenient selections but major theological themes in both Egyptian and LDS religion, thus providing support for the authenticity of Joseph Smith's revelations.[120][121] A Sunstone magazine article documenting several common folk stories (some of questionable veracity) reported that Latter-day Saints would talk of Nibley, for example, shouting quotes from the Illiad while a parachutist in World War II in an attempt to convince Greeks he was friendly, or absent-mindedly recommending German readings to a student without considering the student's inability to read the language.[128] Nibley's daughter Martha Beck published Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith in 2005, describing her departure from the LDS Church, and claiming in 1990 she had recovered repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse by her father.[135] In a review of Leaving the Saints for Sunstone magazine, Tania Rands Lyon noted many "internal inconsistencies" in Beck's narrative that argued against the abuse claims and was put off by the relentlessly negative view of Mormonism.