Before taking Hugh Nibley's word for it, best pump them brakes, kid!

Before I get to it, I'd like to let my LDS buds know right off the bat that I don't have a single negative thing to say about the Church in this post - not a one. And since I have known some (not many, but a few) Mormons to be sensitive to criticisms of anything LDS, let me preface all this with some advice from the fine folks at FAIR for perspective, "Nibley's articles and arguments are not gospel, and we do not always have to follow them or defend them."

I know I've burned some bridges in the past with my carrying on about the Church on Facebook, and I regret that. So, for those of you Mormons who continue to endure to the end in your friendship with me, let me assure you that the sun has risen on a kinder, gentler, respectfuller, cuddlier Butchy boy - and those who have seen me since I've started hitting the gym might even go so far to say a svelter and years-younger-looking Butchy boy, too. But enough about how kind and good looking I am. There'll be plenty of time for that in a bit.

I'm going to add to my promise that I won't have anything negative to say about the Church in this post and say that I don't have much negative to say about Hugh Nibley, that pioneering and inspiring LDS scholar and apologist, either. I will, however, be looking at what some of Nibley's fellow Mormons and peers in academia have had to say, and, truth be told, it ain't all positive.

But that in itself isn't necessarily a negative thing. Mormons do not ascribe absolute infallibility to their own canon of scriptures, ancient or modern, or to their Church leaders, local or global, so the statement that Hugh Nibley, or more specifically his academic and apologetic output, is not without error should not be a controversial declaration. But I'm going to go just a tad further and suggest that the errors found in Brother Nibley's work, especially with respect to his treatment of sources, are problematic enough that accepting as a general rule that his translations and/or interpretations of sources are always sound is perhaps unwarranted. Despite the volumes of sound scholarship he produced during his lifetime, I submit that the confidence with which some LDS approach Nibley's work should be replaced with a careful attention to his sources and a cautious pause before accepting the conclusions he draws from them. Of course, this is wise counsel when encountering any scholarly work, but due to some exchanges I have had with enthusiastic fans of his writing, I believe this point is worth emphasizing in Hugh Nibley's case.

A brief article in today's Mormon Times got me to thinking about Brother Nibley, and before I pile on him, let me do the obligatory he-was-brilliant-and-everyone-says-so thing: Hugh Nibley was brilliant. Everyone says so. And they're right. So with that out of the way, let me draw your attention to a critique of Hugh Nibley's footnotes written by Ron Huggins a couple years ago. If you can't be bothered to read it all (and I don't blame you, it's a Friday, after all), the long and short of it is:

• Hugh Nibley's daughter describes an encounter she had with a feller who used to work as "one of the flunkies who checked his [Nibley's] footnotes," and that while doing so discovered:
  

  "Sometimes what he [Nibley] said was exactly the opposite of what the author meant. Sometimes a quotation he'd footnote just wasn't there. My team leader told me your dad's gift was that he could see anything on any page that needed to be there."

• Some suspect Nibley's daughter of inventing this dude and fabricating her exchange with him - just like she's probably lying about her father molesting her when she was a child. 
• Well, forget all that, then - When we actually look at Nibley's footnotes, what do we find?
• What follows is a detailed and, frankly, devastating look at a handful of Nibley's footnotes that lead Huggins - and, in the interest of full disclosure, me - to conclude:
  

  

  "Quite often Nibley will multiply misrepresentations by piling them up one upon the other all in a very short space.... Nibley is a very untrustworthy guide for Mormons wanting to follow in his footsteps by becoming scholars. His information is simply too often inaccurate and his way of using it too often dubious to serve as any sort of credible model."

This is quite an assertion, I realize, and since I won't be sharing any specific instances of Nibley's misrepresentations (such as this) myself, I recommend a close read of the Huggins piece to those of you from Missouri (the "show me" state - get it? Hardy har).

Interestingly enough, a response to Ron Huggins's article and defense of Nibley's work recently appeared in the pages of the FARMS Review (available online here). What's remarkable about the FARMS response is that in its loyal defense of Hugh Nibley, it conspicuously neglects to counter a single example of misrepresentation offered by Huggins. This isn't the only problem with the FARMS article, but I will let it alone and direct the interested reader to a critique of it offered by Chris Smith in his "A Footnote to the Debate Over Nibley's Footnotes," and the conversation from MormonDiscussions.com that ostensibly inspired his entry, "Spirit of Nibley's Sloppiness lives on."

For all the good said about Hugh Nibley's scholarship in the FARMS piece, there are a few instances of candor that should give pause to those who would place too much confidence in his published work. For example:

• "[I]n some of Nibley's works, few or no references were given. Source checkers, if they were unable to find the quotations, would sometimes take off the quotation marks and supply a reference that seemed to cover the same territory. These manufactured notes may have been inadequate compared to what Nibley himself might have provided...."
• "Nibley did not feel bound by some of the rules that some translators use that often result in stilted translations." (offered as a plausible explanation for the flaws found in his translations)
• "[O]ccasionally he would read a source in an idiosyncratic way, but that's the scholar's prerogative."
• "You translate with the book closed. You decide exactly what the original writer had in mind. Unless you know, don't leave his text; stay with him until you decide you know what he means. Then close the book—never translate with it open—and put down in your own words what you think the author had in mind, what you have gotten from the text. No two people are going to get the same thing." (Hugh Nibley describing his own approach to translating)

In a jaw-droppingly stunning attempt to defend the, shall we say, creativity sometimes found in Nibley's translations, Shirley Ricks, the author of the FARMS article, takes the word translation as it is applied when referencing Joseph Smith's "translation" of the King James Bible (where Smith claimed divine inspiration, not the ability to translate in the scholarly sense the original biblical languages), and declares that, "it does not seem impossible or implausible that [Nibley] could have relied on the Spirit to aid in his 'translation' efforts." Is she serious? Is she serious?! Yes, apparently, she is. (I'd love to see a college student use that line in defending a term paper to an incredulous professor.)

In her FARMS paper, Ricks refers her readers to an article on the FAIR website addressing the issue of Hugh Nibley and his footnotes. The bulk of that article makes it a point to stress that Nibley did not make up his sources. However, the point of Ron Huggins's critique and, indeed, the concern of this blog entry is not that Nibley made up sources, but that he misrepresented them. This being said, the below excerpts from the FAIR article are telling in what they allow. Keep in mind these are Nibley's fellow Saints weighing in:

• "We never found anything that Nibley made up or intentionally misquoted. I would characterize his use of sources as sloppy but certainly not dishonest."
• "I have contacted many of the note checkers and editors of the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley...and they all confirm that, while Hugh has been sloppy—at times mistranslating a text or overstating his case—he does not make up his sources."
• "Among my critiques was that Nibley often generalized excessively, saw 'things in the sources that simply don't seem to be there,' let his 'predetermined conclusions set the agenda for the evidence,' and misinterpreted authors he cited. Others, including some of Nibley's greatest admirers, have found the same problems in his scholarship. But the academic transgressions committed by Nibley (hardly unique to him) were the products of carelessness and wishful thinking, not of fraud and deception."

Let me be clear: There is much one can gain from a study of Nibley's work. I do not believe his misrepresentations were intentional (err... not necessarily). He has made brilliant contributions to what has become quite a fascinating discussion, and, heck, in many important ways, he initiated the discussion. However, I must echo Chris Smith's sentiment that the writings of Hugh Nibley should "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."