Hugh Nibley - Scholarship

Scholarship

Nibley, along with B. H. Roberts, is one of the most influential apologists within Mormonism. He was praised by Evangelical scholars Mosser and Owen for his ability to draw upon historical sources to provide evidence for Latter-day Saint beliefs. Nibley's research ranges from Egyptian, to Hebrew and early Christian histories, and he often took his notes in a mix of Gregg shorthand, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Egyptian. Nibley "insisted on reading the relevant primary and secondary sources in the original and could read Arabic, Coptic, Dutch, Egyptian, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Old Norse, Russian and other languages at sight." In a perceptive critique, William J. Hamblin, a colleague of Nibley's at BYU, remarked that "Nibley's methodology consists more of comparative literature than history." Douglas F. Salmon has examined in depth Nibley's comparative method, focusing on the latter's work on Enoch.

Among other topics Nibley wrote about were LDS Temples, the historical Enoch, and similarities between Christian Gnostic and Latter-day Saint beliefs, and what he believed were anti-Mormon works. He wrote a brief and somewhat emotional response to Fawn M. Brodie's No Man Knows My History, which was titled No Ma'am, That's Not History. Nibley also published scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals on topics without direct reference to Mormonism. One such article that is still cited in works in the field of Roman Studies was on sparsiones. His Berkeley dissertation was on Roman Festival Games. He published in such journals as Classical Journal, Western Political Quarterly, Western Speech, Jewish Quarterly Review, Church History, Revue de Qumran, Vigililae Christianae, The Historian, The American Political Science Review, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica. His essay, "The Passing of the Church: Forty Variations on an Unpopular Theme," which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Church History, touched off a short but furious debate within the journal's pages in 1961.

He turned away from scholarly publications in favor of LDS publications in the mid-nineteen sixties. Significantly his Mormon publications often drew more attention than many of his peer-reviewed works; for example, a lengthy discussion in the pages of Catholic Biblical Quarterly that ran in 1950-51 about his Improvement Era article, "Baptism for the Dead in Ancient Times". Nibley has also received praise from prominent non-LDS scholars such as Aziz S. Atiya, David Riesman, Robert M. Grant, Jacob Neusner, James Charlesworth, Cyrus Gordon, Raphael Patai, Margaret Barker, Matthew Black, George MacRae, Joseph Fitzmyer, David F. Wright, and Jacob Milgrom.