Utah Lighthouse Ministry

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Hugh Nibley’s Footnotes

By Ronald V. Huggins
Th.D., Associate Professor of Theological & Historical Studies, Salt Lake Theological Seminary

Photo of Hugh Nibley examining part of the Joseph Smith papyri
Hugh W. Nibley examining part of the Joseph Smith papyri

In her book Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith (2005), Martha Beck describes an encounter she had with a scholarly looking person in a supermarket who accuses her famous father, the quintessential LDS apologist Hugh Winder Nibley, of being a liar. When Martha asks the man (she calls him Tweedy) for an explanation, he says he used to work as “one of the flunkies who checked his footnotes,” and that in the process had discovered that most of them (“conservatively, 90% of them”)1 were bogus:2

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.

This accusation pales in comparison with Beck’s much more devastating claim, namely that her father subjected her to ritual sexual abuse when she was a child. Not long after the appearance of Leaving the Saints, defensive voices began to be heard trying to exonerate Hugh Nibley of guilt in relation to that charge by pointing to what they imagined to be the easily provable absurdity of “Tweedy’s” claim about the footnotes. Thus we find BYU’s Robert L. Millet, for example, remarking in a review for the Evangelical magazine Books & Culture that the “problem for Beck, of course, is that the books are still in print, still available for examination. . . Further, I know personally many if not all of the source checkers; they are outstanding academics from such BYU departments as Ancient Scripture, Asian and Near Eastern Languages, Law, the Library, English, and Classics.”3 Yet if Tweedy was in any sense right about the footnotes the “problem” ceases to be Beck’s and becomes Millet’s and his learned source checkers.4 The question then becomes: Why did all those “outstanding academics” either fail to notice the problems, or (as Tweedy claims) give Nibley a pass on them?

Note that there is also regrettably a bit of what might be considered doublespeak in what Millet says. On the one hand Millet seems to be saying that Nibley’s footnotes are all good. He knows all the checkers and they are all “outstanding academics,” and yet he also says about the footnotes “If they weren’t properly checked . . . they can be checked today.” But what on earth does that mean? “If they weren’t properly checked” by all those “outstanding academics,” then were they really outstanding academics after all? Or perhaps we are to suppose that they have become outstanding in the mean time. Still the issue never had to do with the checking of the footnotes, but with their original production.

In his review of Leaving the Saints, Boyd Jay Petersen, Hugh Nibley’s son-in-law and biographer, and brother-in-law to Martha Beck, remarks that he has “contacted many of the note checkers and editors of the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley” and that “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.”5 Petersen is right in saying that Nibley does not make up sources. In his review Millet gives the wrong impression when he represents Tweedy as claiming that “a good 90 percent his footnotes are totally made up.”6 Tweedy never really claimed that. Although Beck does represent Tweedy as saying that Nibley “makes them all up,”7 when one reads further it becomes clear that Tweedy is not saying Nibley invented his sources, only that he regularly misrepresented them in various ways. And, in fact, that is certainly true.

Did Tweedy exist? Certain Mormon scholars appear very confident in asserting that he did not. Kent P. Jackson states flatly: “I don’t believe that the man in tweed ever existed,”8 and John Gee, in an email to me, states: “As I am sure you are aware, Ms. Beck’s account of Tweedy is entirely fictional.”9

Whatever Professor Gee may personally believe he is mistaken in attributing to me an awareness that Tweedy is “entirely fictional.” Certainly Tweedy might have been invented, but if so he was well invented. When he recounts how his “team leader” said that Hugh Nibley “could see anything on any page that needed to be there,” I thought that that put the situation rather well, at least as the exasperated overstatement by someone who was constantly having to deal with the kinds of things I describe below.10 Moreover if Tweedy did not exist, where did Martha Beck learn that there were serious problems with her father’s use of his sources? Still in one sense it really doesn’t matter whether Tweedy existed or not. What matters is whether what Martha Beck reports him saying is in any sense true, which is something that can be tested, as Kent P. Jackson so correctly points out: “Nibley’s books still exist, and thus the notes are available to be examined by anyone who wants to take the time.”11

In 1988 this same Kent P. Jackson pointedly criticized Nibley in a review of the latter’s Old Testament and Related Studies. In that review Jackson accused Nibley of “selectively including what suits his presuppositions and ignoring what does not,” and for seeing “things in the sources that simply don’t seem to be there.” Jackson further charged that “most puzzling assertions remain undocumented—or unconvincingly documented—even in those articles that are footnoted heavily,” and that Nibley “often uses his secondary sources the same way he uses his primary sources—taking phrases out of context to establish points with which those whom he quotes would likely not agree.”12 Although Jackson spoke as something of a lone voice at the time, his criticisms of Nibley were no less than just.

Nibley’s misuse of sources goes beyond seeing things in them that aren’t there. He regularly modifies his quotations to artificially render them more supportive of the arguments he is trying to make. He sometimes mistranslates them, as Petersen notes, or else translates them in very strange and unjustified ways. In defense of these he offers his readers howlingly inadequate justifications for them, when he offers anything at all. In one instance he replaces a line in his source with one he made up himself, and this in a place where his source stood against his argument and what he made up supported it (this, of course, is particularly heinous).13 He also regularly leaves out words with the result that passages having nothing to do with his point suddenly become supportive of it. None of my examples have to do with legitimate readings of sources that are more congenial to a Mormon worldview than to a traditional Christian worldview. Everyone will, or at least should be willing to admit that scholars of all stripes sometimes choose from a range of possible legitimate translations or interpretations of a given passage the one that is most congenial to their own point of view. But what I am talking about here goes well beyond that.

Often Nibley’s modifications are quite extensive and ingenious; too ingenious in fact for me to feel comfortable attributing them to mere sloppiness as Petersen does. This ingenuity will be evident I think in most of the examples of misquotation that follow. For brevity’s sake I use the term “misquote” to mean to misrepresent in any way, e.g., by adding to or taking away from a passage, asserting that it means something other than it does, reading things into it, or mistranslating it.

Before we proceed further it should be stressed that the present work deals with only one aspect of Nibley’s long career. It does not delve into other more positive aspects such as the generations of students inspired by his teaching, many of whom no doubt even went on to pursue post graduate work themselves in hopes of carrying on in his footsteps. In addition to this he was tremendously important in terms of arousing interest in the LDS academic community in the importance of the study of ancient texts and languages. These are entirely positive developments except where Nibley’s misuse of sources is emulated as well, as one sometimes finds being done in material produced by certain over-enthusiastic LDS apologists.14

Nibley was also a very gifted and inspiring communicator, who, when he was not put in the position of having to defend the indefensible, had a clear and vigorous writing style, a gift we see in evidence as well in more than one of his highly gifted children. By any measure Hugh Nibley stands as a giant in the unfolding story of Utah and Mormonism.

Finally, in his defense, Nibley did not write in a vacuum. All those years he wrote for an audience that must also bear some of the responsibility for the problems I will be discussing. Surely we all have a responsibility within the range of our abilities to test the claims of authors even when (perhaps even especially when) they are saying things we would like to believe, recognizing, of course, that in this particular case Nibley himself made it very difficult for common people to check out his sources by featuring obscure editions in other languages instead of the widely available, and often more up-to-date and authoritative, English ones.

In order to make my examination of Nibley’s misquotations easier to follow I will consistently place in bold the problematic words and phrases in the Nibley passages I discuss.

Nibley Misquotes Justin Martyr’s First Apology

Justin Martyr was a Christian writer and apologist who was active during the middle decades of the second century AD. In his essay “The Expanding Gospel,” Nibley quotes the tenth chapter of Justin’s First Apology as follows:

“We believe that God organized all things in the beginning out of unformed matter,” says Justin Martyr to the Jew Trypho, “. . . for the sake of the human race, that they, if they prove themselves by their works to be worthy of His plan, having been judged worthy to return to his presence (so we believe), shall reign with him, having been made immortal and incorruptible. At the creation they themselves made the choice . . . and so were deemed worthy to live with him in immortality.”15

The original form of this passage contained some things that resonate with current LDS teaching, the creation of everything out of unformed matter being an example.16 That was a view widely held in the ancient world, not least of all among the Platonists. Given what Justin says elsewhere, however, it is doubtful that he regarded this unformed matter to be in any sense self-existent or eternal.17

The one item in the above passage from Nibley that can be chalked up to sloppiness is the mention of Trypho the Jew, who appears in connection with another work by Justin (Dialogue with Trypho) but not this one. In this case Nibley probably just had a lapse of memory. The rest of his changes, however, are obviously intentional.

The most serious change occurs in Nibley’s “quotation” of Justin (the third bolded text) where he inserts a phrase that, in fact, was not Justin’s:

At the creation they themselves made the choice.

Not only does Nibley insert these words of his own, but he also withholds from his readers what Justin had actually said there, namely, “For as at the beginning He created us when we were not,”18 an idea that does not jibe with the LDS doctrine of preexistence. That Nibley knew what the Greek actually said here is clear from the fact that he translated this same passage from Justin more adequately at another place. Nibley’s rendering of Justin’s words there is: “For in the same way in which He created in the beginning those who were not.”19

Less radical but still problematic is Nibley’s translation of Justin’s Greek phrase tēs met’ autou anastrophēs as to return to his presence (the second bolded text), a translation that is reminiscent of the LDS idea of the post-mortal return to Heavenly Father, but that runs counter to Justin’s context. The noun anastrophē, which in the New Testament usually means something like way of life or behavior, has a number of other possible meanings, including a dwelling and a return. The fact that here in Justin the word is accompanied by the words met’ autou (which ought to be translated with him rather than to him) rules against Nibley’s translation and for the rendering to dwell with him, which coincides with both the reading of the Latin text accompanying the Greek text in the edition Nibley used20 as well as all the English translations I have encountered.21

When we combine Nibley’s rendition of tēs met’ autou anastrophēs (second bolded text) with the phrase he invented to replace one of Justin’s, what emerges is a retelling of a familiar Mormon story of choices made in the premortal period in relation to accepting or rejecting the plan of salvation proposed by Jesus and chosen by Heavenly Father in preference to the alternative one put forth by Lucifer (see Abraham 3 and Moses 4). Justin was aware of the idea of the preexistence of souls, but he nowhere endorses it, nor did he ever speculate on what preexistent human souls might have thought, done, or decided. And he clearly rules out the idea that they were either uncreated or unbegotten.22

Hugh Nibley’s Misuse of the Dead Sea Scrolls Book of Giants

One of the most remarkable examples of Nibley engaging in a complex sequence of carefully worded obfuscations in order to fundamentally misrepresent a text, while obscuring its real meaning, is his attempt to establish a relationship between the Pearl of Great Price Book of Moses 6-7 and the fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls Book of Giants on the basis of a supposed link between the Mahijah in Moses 6:40 and Mahujah in Moses 7:2 and the character Mahawai in the Book of Giants. In setting up the case here Nibley shows his usual facility at teasing one name out of another as he melds the two distinct Book of Moses and Book of Giants figures into one.23 Nibley places passages from Moses 6 and 7 in one column and various fragments from the Book of Giants next to them in another, pausing here and there to underscore alleged points of contact. In reality there are no significant points of contact between the stories related in the two works, and Nibley’s clarifications simply impose foreign meanings on texts that are contradicted by what the texts themselves actually say. This despite the fact that he begins by saying “Let me read you some parallel passages, following the translation of Professors Milik and Black, so that you won’t think I have been loading the dice to come out this way.”24

In order to understand how seriously Nibley misrepresents his sources here we need to provide a little background. The title of the Book of Giants is derived from its subject, the giants. But who are the giants? The story is based on Genesis 6:2: “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.” According to one very prominent ancient stream of interpretation (in whose current the Enoch literature, including the Book of Giants ran) the Sons of God in Genesis 6:2 were fallen ruling angels, called Watchers, and the daughters of men, human women. The giants in turn were the offspring of the illicit coupling of these two. According to this tradition the flood was sent to drown the giants, whose spirits then remained on the earth as the demons. At the same time their angelic fathers (the Watchers) were bound under the earth to await the judgment. The biblical reference in Jude 6, “angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains, under darkness, unto the judgment of the great day,” is probably to this story.25 Fragments of this same story are found in a multiplicity of ancient sources and it is well known to students of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In the section of the Book of Giants Nibley refers to, the giant Mahawai (Nibley calls him MHWY) is sent to Enoch to seek the interpretation of a frightening dream that one of the other giants had. Mahawai goes to Enoch, and in response Enoch sends a letter back to the giants and their fallen-angel fathers informing them that there is no escaping the judgment that is about to fall on them. Following then are examples of what the fragments of the Book of Giants actually say, followed by what Nibley made of them in the process of trying to “discover” parallels between them and Pearl of Great Price Moses.

(1) The Book of Giants tells us that Mahawai is a giant. Nibley describes him as a man.26 In this case he is literally half right: giants were half human.

(2) The Book of Giants tells us that the giants, frightened by a mysterious dream, send Mahawai to get the interpretation from Enoch, “on the pain of death.” Nibley attempts to inject an additional element into the story: “That MHWY was sent ‘under pain of death’ shows that not only the dreams but the presence of Enoch was a cause of dread.”27 He does this to create a parallel with the fear of Enoch referred to in Moses 6:39. In his Winter 1986 lectures on the Pearl of Great Price Nibley went even further with this purpose by falsely restoring a line in this Book of Giants passage making it read: “Thereupon all the giants and nephilim took fright [when they heard about Enoch].”28

(3) The Book of Giants tells us that Mahawai journeys to find Enoch.29 Nibley says that here Enoch’s journey as described in Moses 6:42, 7:2-3 “seems to be transferred to MHWY himself.”30 Actually there is no connection between the two journeys other than the bald fact that they were both journeys.

(4) The Book of Giants tells us that Enoch writes a letter in response to Mahawai’s question.31 Nibley says that “It is in reply to Mahijah-MHWY that Enoch refers the people to an ancient book which he bears with him,” thus trying to force a parallel with the reference to “a book of remembrance” in Moses 6:46. But there is no reference to an “ancient book” in the Book of Giants passage. Another problem here is Nibley’s description of the intended readers of Enoch’s epistle: “Enoch refers the people to an ancient book.” Enoch actually addresses the epistle not to “people” but to Shemihazah, a leader among the fallen angels (Watchers), and through him to the rest of the fallen Watchers and giants.

(5) The Book of Giants calls Mahawai’s father Baraq’el. Nibley remarks that: “The name Baraq’el is interesting in this context since Joseph Smith was designated in the Doctrine and Covenants both as Enoch and as Baurak Ale (e.g., D&C 78:9 [=1835 edition]; 103:21-22 [=1844 edition, 101:4-5]).” [Brackets in online version of this article for clarity; not in author’s original.] The unusual designation of Joseph as Enoch and Baurak Ale was dropped from the 1981 edition of the D&C [78:9, 103:21-22, respectively]. In his 1986 Pearl of Great Price course Nibley teased this out a bit further: “Baraq’el is interesting too because Baraq’el is supposed to have been the father of Enoch.”32 The father of Enoch in the Bible and the Book of Moses is Jared (Genesis 5:18 and Moses 6:21). Mahawai the giant is not Enoch, nor is Baraq’el, the father of Mahawai in the Book of Giants, by any stretch of the imagination, the father of Enoch. He is an evil figure, one of the chiefs of the fallen angels.33

(6) The Book of Giants tells us that the letter of Enoch describes the coupling of fallen angels and human women as “prostitution.”34 In an attempt to link that passage to the general reference to Adam’s children as being “conceived in sin” in Moses 6:55, Nibley gives this strange description of what is supposedly going on:35

Enoch tells how the Lord told Adam of the natural inclination to sin that came with the Fall. This is converted in the Aramaic version to a denunciation of the wicked people of Enoch’s day, who did indeed conceive their children in sin, since they were illegitimate offspring of a totally amoral society.

Notice the absence of any reference to fallen angels, their human wives, or their gigantic offspring. They are all together described as “people” and “illegitimate offspring of a totally amoral society.” Nibley seems to be trying to obscure the true nature of the story.

(7) The Book of Giants has the giant Ohyah describing (if Milik’s restoration is correct) his attack on “all flesh.” Nibley introduces the passage by referring to Ohyah as “the enemy of Enoch.”36 He does this to create a parallel between that passage and Moses 7:13. He summarizes what he sees going on in both passages by saying that: “the wicked move against Enoch and his people in force but are themselves forced to acknowledge the superior power supporting the patriarch.” However there is no indication whatever in the passage that Ohyah is acting as “an enemy of Enoch.” Nor is there, so far as Milik and Black reveal, any mention of Enoch at all in that particular fragment.37 Here Nibley uses ellipsis points to artificially endow the quotation with the desired meaning:

4QEnGiantsc4QEnGiantsc (as quoted by Nibley)
By the strength of my power, [I had attacked] all flesh and I have made war with them. But [I] not [. . . and] I do not find my support(?) to strengthen (me), for my accusers [. . .] they dwell in [heaven]s and they live in holy abodes, and [I will] not [win my cause(?)], for they are more powerful than I 38By the strength of my power, [I had attacked] all flesh and I have made war with them; . . .

they live in holy abodes, and . . .

they are more powerful than I (Nibley’s italics)

Nibley’s ellipsis points make it appear that Ohyah made war against those living in holy abodes (presumably he wants the reader to think of Enoch). That is not the case. Ohyah makes war against “all flesh” but his accusers represent another group, a group that lives in heavens and holy abodes. Notice as well that Nibley again calls the giants “people.” The theme of the giants turning bloodthirsty and attacking humanity, and even eating them, was a common one in ancient Jewish literature (cf. 1 Enoch 7:1-6; 9:10; Jubilees 7:21-24).

All the supposed parallels between the Book of Giants and the Book of Moses exist only in Nibley’s mind. And he carefully crafts his language throughout to conceal the true meaning of the Book of Giants fragments from his readers.

Nibley’s Misquotation of Eusebius’s Preparation for the Gospel

One of the more complex and interesting examples of Nibley’s misuse of his sources is found in his attempt to make Eusebius of Caesarea, a Christian writer active during the first half of the fourth century, support the identification of Enoch as a Son of Man figure. Writes Nibley:

Eusebius states the case thus: “The Son of Man and the Son of Adam are the same thing, so that Adam and Enosh are the same; carnal (sarkikon) through Adam, rational (logikon) through Enosh.” [[Preparation 11.6]] He also makes it perfectly clear that by Enosh he means Enoch: “The Hebrews say that Enosh not Adam was the first true man. . . . He ‘was not found’ [said only of Enoch] means that truly wise men are hard to find. He withdrew from the world of affairs and thereby became the Friend of God [cf. Abraham]. The Hebrews call him ‘The Friend,’ signifying thereby the favor (charin) of God.” [[Preparation 7.8]]. (double brackets mine)39

At the center of Nibley’s use of the two passages from Eusebius cited in the above quotation is the assertion that Enosh and Enoch are one and the same. Nibley states this explicitly when he says it is “perfectly clear that by Enosh he means Enoch.” His apparent reason for saying this is that he wants to transfer what is said about Enosh in Eusebius to Enoch. In order to accomplish this identification, Nibley must misquote the second passage. He does this by misusing ellipsis points to tie together what is said about Enosh in the first passage with what is said about the one “who was not found,” i.e., Enoch (see Gen. 5:24), in the second. Contrary to Nibley’s claim, however, Eusebius does not identify Enoch with his twice-great grandfather Enosh (Gen. 5). The material passed over by Nibley’s ellipsis points contains a clear transition from the discussion of Enosh to the discussion of Enoch in the words: “But now after him of whom we have spoken there was another.”40 Eusebius does link Enos and Adam, based on the fact that these names come from two different Hebrew words meaning man. Nibley significantly modifies the text and in doing so obscures what Eusebius was actually saying. This is perhaps best seen by quoting the passage in context with Nibley’s version in a parallel column:

Preparation 11.6 (Gifford)41Preparation 11.6 (Nibley)
It is written at least in a certain Prophet ‘What is man [Heb: enosh], that Thou art mindful of him? Or the son of man [Heb: adam], that Thou visitest him?’ [Ps. 8:4] For which the Hebrew, in the first naming of ‘man,’ contains the word ‘Enos’: as if he said more plainly, What is this forgetful one, that Thou, O God, rememberest him, forgetful though he is? And the other clause, ‘Or the son of man, that Thou visitest him?[’] is read among the Hebrews, ‘Or the son of Adam’:
so that the same man is both Adam and Enos; the fleshly nature being represented by Adam, and the rational by Enos.













The Son of Man and the Son of Adam are the same thing, so that Adam and Enosh are the same; carnal through Adam, rational through Enosh.

Nibley’s words “The Son of Man and the Son of Adam are the same thing,” although placed within quotation marks, do not appear in his source. Nibley has apparently made them up in service of his wanting to more clearly secure the identification of Enoch as a Son of Man figure.42

Nibley Misquotes Various Sources in his “The Passing of the Primitive Church”

Though his literary output was enormous, Hugh Nibley seldom published in scholarly journals outside Utah, and even less in ones dedicated to the study of ancient Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible. Naturally the question arises whether Nibley indulged his propensity for misquotation when writing for non-Mormon scholarly audiences as often and as blatantly as he did when writing for Mormons. The answer is that the same kind of problems are found in those articles as in things he wrote for Mormons.

“The Passing of the Primitive Church: Forty Variations on an Unpopular Theme,” was originally published in the prestigious journal Church History in 1961. In the communications section of that journal in the final issue of that same year, R. M. Grant, one of the most distinguished historians of early Christianity at the time, complained that Nibley had “not always taken into account the context of the Fathers’ statements or for that matter their use of homiletical rhetoric.”43 What Grant said was certainly true. But the problems with that article ran far deeper, as I shall now attempt to illustrate by way of two examples. What Nibley set out to prove in that article was that “the church founded by Jesus and the apostles did not survive nor was it expected to.”44 It is an argument for the great apostasy and the rise of the great and abominable church without using those terms. In order to carry it off Nibley had to marshal evidence showing that the actions of the earliest church indicated that they did not expect the church to continue, and that the idea of the triumph of the church arose only later. Unfortunately Nibley gets where he wants to go by tailoring the evidence.

1. Nibley Misquotes the Shepherd of Hermas

The Shepherd of Hermas is an important allegorical work dating from the second century AD. In the article we have been discussing Nibley refers to two passages from Hermas’s well-known book of Vision’s Tower Parable:

The original tower with its perfectly cut and well-fitted stones is soon to be taken from the earth, and in its place will remain only a second-class tower of defective stones which could not pass the test. [Visions III.3-7] In the Visions of the Pastor of Hermas the church is represented as an old and failing lady—“because your spirit is old and already fading away”—who is carried out of the world; only in the world beyond does she appear as a blooming and ageless maiden. [Visions III.11-13] (Brackets mine to include references given by Nibley in footnotes).45

If the Shepherd had actually said what Nibley credited it with saying about the replacement of the tower (which represents Christ’s church) with a “second-class tower of defective stones” it might have been legitimately cited as a possible prediction of the coming replacement of the true church of Christ with the great and abominable church described in 1 Nephi 13. But the Shepherd says nothing whatsoever about a second tower. It only mentions that certain stones (people) that delay repentance will not be included in the tower but will go to an inferior place. It does not say that the inferior place is a tower, nor that it replaces the tower that is spoken of:

I asked her yet another question, whether these stones that were tossed aside and not fit into the building of the tower could repent and have a place in the tower. “They can repent,” she said, “but they cannot be fit into this tower. They will be fit into a greatly inferior place—and then only after they have been tormented and have completed the days of their sins.” (Visions III.7.5-6)46

The reference Nibley quotes about the Church being represented as an “old and failing lady” who will only appear “as a blooming and ageless maiden” in the world beyond entirely misrepresents the meaning of Hermas’s vision. In reality the condition of the woman representing the church in the vision reflects Hermas’s own spiritual condition. In the course of his vision she appears to him in three different forms, each time with increasing vigor, as Hermas becomes more spiritually vigorous himself. None of this has anything to do with her state in this world as opposed to the world to come. Her three appearances are described in Visions III.10.2, and each as it relates to Hermas’ spiritual development in its own chapter in Visions III.11, 12, and 13. That the appearance of the woman relates to Hermas’s spiritual state and not to her (the church’s) condition in this age as opposed to the age to come can be seen very well when the second passage quoted by Nibley is given with its context:

In the first vision, why did she appear to you as an elderly woman, seated on a chair? Because your spirit is elderly and already fading away, having no vigor because you are feeble and of two minds. (Visions III.11.2)47

In short, Nibley boldly misrepresented the Shepherd of Hermas’s Vision’s Tower Parable.

2. Nibley Misquotes Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History

We have already dealt with Nibley’s complex misquotation of Eusebius’s Preparation for the Gospel. The Ecclesiastical History, written in stages during the first quarter of the fourth century, is Eusebius’s best known work. As part of his argument that the earliest church did not expect to survive, Nibley wants to show that there was a significant shift in attitudes toward martyrdom in the earliest and later Christian Church. He appeals, in defense of this idea, to a letter by Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria (d. c. 265) preserved by Eusebius. Here is what Nibley says:

This concept of martyrdom [the one Nibley had been describing as the one held by the early Church] is the opposite of that which later prevailed, as Dionysius of Alexandria points out in a letter to Novatus, noting that whereas the early martyr was concerned “for his own soul alone . . . today the martyr thinks in terms of the whole Church.”48

In context, however, the letter has nothing to do with contrasting earlier and later attitudes toward martyrdom. This is clearly seen when some of the original context of the letter is given along with the words Nibley quotes. In his letter Dionysius says to Novatus:

You ought to have been ready to suffer anything whatever rather than split the Church of God, and martyrdom to avoid schism would have brought you as much honour as martyrdom to escape idolatry—I should say, more. For in the latter case a man is martyred to save his own single soul, in the former to save the whole Church.49

Nibley creates the temporal/historic element he needs out of thin air by adding a word that is not in the original at all: today.50

Nibley Misquotes Two Early Sources in Support of Baptism for the Dead.

1. Nibley Misquotes Matthew 16:18

In his article “Baptism for the Dead in Ancient Times,” Nibley offers a case for an alternative reading of Matthew 16:18, “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” that is built upon a combination of mistranslation, misquotation, and the misidentification of sources. Nibley insists that Matthew’s famous passage refers to the practice of baptism for the dead:

It is the proper function of a gate to shut creatures in or out of a place; when a gate “prevails,” it succeeds in this purpose; when it does not “prevail,” someone succeeds in getting past it . . . the thing which is held back [by the gates of hell], is not the church, for the object is not in the accusative but in the partitive genitive: it is “hers,” part of her, that which belongs to her, that the gates will not be able to contain. Since all have fallen, all are confined in death which it is the Savior’s mission to overcome; their release is to be accomplished through the work of the church, to which the Lord promises that at some future time he will give the apostles the keys.51

According to Nibley, then, the it in prevail against it refers not to the Church but to a portion of the number of the souls who were at one point in hell, but who will later escape from there through proxy baptism. In other words the passage should have been translated something like: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against some of the dead it is holding back getting out finally through baptism for the dead.”

Nibley defends this strange rendering by arguing that the object of prevail against here “is not in the accusative but in the partitive genitive: it is ‘hers,’ part of her, that which belongs to her, that the gates will not be able to contain.”52 One need go no further in response to Nibley’s argument than to point out the fact that the Greek verb translated prevail against in Matthew 16:18 (katischyo) almost always takes a genitive object when used to mean prevail against or over!53 This being the case there is no reason whatever to suppose that the passage has any other object than the Church. The mere fact that the object of the verb is not an accusative, in no way implies that we must read it as a partitive genitive. What is more there are no other contextual clues which would suggest a partitive genitive with the meaning Nibley gives it here either.

2. Nibley Misquotes Ignatius of Antioch’s Philadelphians

A remarkable example of Nibley’s finding things in the ancient sources that simply aren’t there is where he argues that the combination of the words “rock” “key,” and “gate” is to be understood as a reference to baptism for the dead. And so he writes concerning the ninth chapter of Ignatius of Antioch’s letter to the Philadelphians (early 2nd cent.):

The same idea is even more obviously expressed by Ignatius in what is perhaps the earliest extant mention of the rock after New Testament times, making it equivalent to

the high priest . . . to whom alone the secrets of God have been confided. . . . This is the Way which leads to the Father, the Rock . . . the Key . . . the Gate of Knowledge, through which have entered Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, Moses and all the host of prophets.

From which it is clear that Matthew 16:17-19, with its combination of gates, keys, and rock, definitely hinges on the subject of salvation for the dead, and the work by which they are admitted to the presence of the Father.54

The passage in the form Nibley quotes it, is by no means as explicit as he makes it. As we begin to deconstruct Nibley’s argument it will be helpful to restore the words Nibley left out between have been confided and This is the way:

. . . have been confided. The ministering powers of God are good. The Comforter is holy and the Word is holy, the Son of the Father, by whom He made all things, and exercises a providence over them all. This is the way . . .55

It appears that Nibley removed these in-between words in order to make the words This is the way refer back to secrets of God. But even if this connection were as clear as Nibley wants to make it, it would still not be clear that we are to find baptism for the dead implied in the words secrets of God, and hence Nibley would still not be justified in arguing that the combination of rock, key, and gate should be taken to refer to baptism of the dead.

But in pointing out these problems we have yet only scratched the surface. The even more basic problem is that the text Nibley quotes comes from a version of Ignatius’s letter that was expanded by someone writing several centuries after Ignatius. None of the crucial words, rock, key, and gate, in Nibley’s quotation are found in Ignatius’s original letter.56 They were all added later (perhaps in the fourth century) by an unknown writer who tampered with the text. Nibley is remiss in not telling us that he has used the later, longer version of Ignatius’s letter and for not providing us with any justification for his having done so. What is more, his claim that the passage contains what “is perhaps the earliest extant mention of the rock after New Testament times” is completely false.57 Nibley seems to assume that the words originated with Ignatius, in which case that might have been correct. As it is, however, the fact that he assumes rock is original to Ignatius raises doubts as to how well he actually knows the Ignatian material. The fact that there is more than one recension of Ignatius’s letters and that the longer version, the one appealed to by Nibley, is not the original one is scarcely something known only to experts.

Nibley’s quoting material from the late recension of Ignatius’s letters but treating it as coming from the time of Ignatius is a problem we find elsewhere in his works as well. In another work he quotes material from the late versions of Ignatius’s Trallians 4 and Smyrneans 6 as examples of the sort of thing that is being said “Already, at the end of the first century.”58 Not only did the material Nibley quotes in that case come from centuries later, but he was also imprecise in his dating of Ignatius’s original letters, which date from the early second and not the late first century.

Nibley’s argument about the rock, key and gate, collapses completely when we look at the passage as Ignatius originally wrote it in the early second century. In the passage as Nibley quoted it the bolded word This was taken to refer to the secrets of God, into which Nibley read baptism for the dead. But Ignatius originally wrote not this (houtos) but he (autos) referring back not to the secrets of God but to the high priest (possibly Jesus or the bishop representing him) mentioned just before, i.e. to a person not a practice or teaching. To this both the standard English translations and the critical Greek editions uniformly testify.59 In the end Nibley’s argument is grounded on arguments and appeals to ancient texts that had absolutely nothing whatever to do with baptism for the dead.

Nibley Misquotes Eight Sources at One Stroke

One of the most common ways Hugh Nibley misquotes his sources is to make some assertion and then offer a footnote containing several references to ancient texts, some of which might mention the topic he is discussing, but few if any of which provide direct support for the point he is trying to prove. It is impossible to estimate how many of these kind of footnotes exist, but there are so many that it is not difficult to suppose that it is in consideration of these that Tweedy came up with his exaggerated 90% number. A classic case in point is a footnote Nibley offered while trying to prove “the total neglect of education in the early church.”60 Nibley declared: “Actually the Apostolic Fathers were greatly concerned about education, warning their people against the bad education of the world, and chiding them for their neglect of the only education that counted—that which prepared the young for the next life.” In ostensible support of this statement Nibley directs his readers to a footnote which in turn refers them to no less than eight different ancient passages, none of which reflect a negative attitude toward formal education as such, and only six of which come from the group of writers known as the Apostolic Fathers.61 Prominent Church historian Hans J. Hillerbrand pointed to Nibley’s “comment about the absence of educational concern in the early church,” as a prime example of things he considered “highly debatable” in Nibley’s article.62

Nibley’s Defenders

Having said all of this, it should be noted that there have been attempts to vindicate Nibley on the question of his footnotes. In a talk titled “Autobiographical Notes on My Testimony,” Daniel C. Peterson tells the following anecdote about his own expert encounter with Nibley’s footnotes:

You may remember, some of you, that Hugh Nibley wrote an article and published it in Revue de Qumran a number of years ago called “Qumran and the Companions of the Cave.” And I thought, well, okay, Islamic studies and Arabic was just a sideline for Nibley. I’ve heard for a long time (and so have you probably) that Nibley’s work really isn’t that good. That if you checked the footnotes it doesn’t hold up, you know. He wasn’t that good a scholar, he’s sloppy, and he’s careless, and you can’t trust him, and he’s just a dishonest Mormon apologist. So I thought (you know, which now I am) (Laughter). So, anyway. . .

But it seemed to me a good opportunity to look at that passage. There’s a passage in one of the Surahs of the Qur’an [sic!], one of the chapters, that talks about the Companions of the Cave and Nibley argued that this was a garbled recollection of the Dead Sea Scrolls community and he had cited a number of Arabic sources. I thought it would be child’s play for an Arabist to check out Nibley’s footnotes and then expand beyond them to see if his argument really held up. Well, what really struck me about it was, when I started getting into the article, how many Arabic sources he had looked at; how much work he had done and how precisely right it was.63

All this is well and good. If Peterson found that a single article by Nibley was impressive then, of course, that is fine. Still how strict an examination did he actually undertake of it? He gives us some sense of this right after what he says above: “Now I can only say that it was right to a certain extent,” he continues, “because I didn’t get through it all.” Not exactly a systematic analysis then, I gather. Even so Peterson goes on to say that he came away feeling that in that article anyway, Nibley’s footnotes were “meticulously accurate, that he had really gotten the Arabic sources down, which really impressed me. And so now when people say, ‘Yeah, well he just misrepresents his sources.’ I suggest they go have a look at the (Inaudible) or something like that if they want to check it. They usually don’t.”

I cannot be certain what word or words stood where “Inaudible” now appears in the quote above. Still one could easily imagine that Peterson had said there: “Revue de Qumran.” If not, it is still worth asking whether Nibley was in fact “meticulously accurate” in his use of sources there? And the answer is no, he is not. On page 136 of that article Nibley says: “The story of Joseph’s winning of Mary is told in the Epistle of I Clement, c. 43.”64 No, actually it is not. A story similar to the one Nibley describes is told in the Protevangelium of James 8-9, a story that echoes the story of Aaron’s budding rod in the Old Testament book of Numbers, chapter 17. In fact it is this latter story, the story of Aaron’s budding rod, that is told in the Epistle of I Clement, c. 43.

In his review of Martha Beck’s book Boyd Petersen says the following:

John Gee recently completed a statistical analysis of one of Hugh’s articles chosen at random to establish the accuracy of the footnotes. In looking at Hugh’s essay, “Victoriosa Loquacitas: The Rise of Rhetoric and the Decline of Everything Else” as it appeared in its original form in Western Speech 20 (1956): 57-82 (reprinted in The Ancient State [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company and FARMS, 1991]: 243-286). Gee discovered that “87% of the footnotes were completely correct, 8% of the footnotes contained typographical errors, 5% were wrong in some other way (e.g. frequently right author, right page, wrong title). In no case could I determine that any of the errors in the footnotes was intentional or that any of the footnotes were fabrications” (personal e-mail, John Gee to Boyd Petersen, 13 January 2005).

In a later study Gee analyzed the footnotes in one of Hugh’s Egyptian works, Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1975). Selecting a chapter from the book at random (Chapter 3, the second-longest chapter in the book), Gee found that “94% of the citations were correct, 4% were typographical errors, and 2% were wrong.” It was Gee’s determination that “the results seem to show that Nibley was more accurate when dealing with a Mormon topic, that his Egyptian work was more accurate than his classics work, and that his work on Message was better than normal, not worse.” Further, Gee stated that “I have never seen any case where Hugh Nibley ever fabricated or made up a source. After looking up thousands of citations, I have seen him make just about every mistake I think one could make, but I have never seen him make up anything” (personal e-mail, John Gee to Boyd Petersen, 14 March 2005).65

Gee makes allusion to the analysis of the chapter from Nibley’s Message of the Joseph Smith Papyrus in his introduction to the new second edition, of which he was one of the editors: “Analysis of a random chapter showed that of its almost seven hundred citations, Nibley was completely accurate 94 percent of the time, and in more than half of these remaining forty cases, one could explain the problem as a typographical error” (p. xx). Petersen cannot be correct in saying that Gee used chapter 3 in his analysis, since that chapter is clearly not the “second-longest chapter in the book,” nor does it contain “almost seven hundred citations.” In fact it contains only 60 footnotes, 48 in the original edition. Gee must have based his analysis not on chapter 3, but on Part III. Part III with 616 footnotes in the new edition comes closest to Gee’s “almost seven hundred citations,” of all the sections in the book. The only section with more footnotes is Part II, with 774 footnotes.

For Gee to merely cite the statistics of his study of course means nothing unless we can actually see what he meant when he says he checked Nibley’s footnotes. How rigorous was his checking? The summary statement he makes regarding it, which we have just quoted, does not instill a high level of confidence. (By what measure I wonder do 616 citations count for “almost seven hundred citations”?) Nor does his remarking that “Since Nibley made his own translations from all foreign languages except where noted, we have given him wide latitude in rendering his translations.”

Still there is a way to test the rigor of Gee’s analysis, given the fact that Part III served as the basis of Gee’s analysis, and therefore that the depth and carefulness of his analysis ought to become evident, to some degree at least, in the kinds of changes he makes in relation to the footnotes for that section in the new edition.

If one were looking for evidence that Gee’s analysis dealt primarily with superficial things one would find it in an instance where Nibley very conspicuously misrepresented his source, and where Gee made some minor corrections but overlooked entirely the bigger problem. Such an example conveniently presents itself in a quotation from a book by Yigael Yadin that appears on page 131 in the 1975 edition and page 212 in the 2005 edition.

In the 1975 edition Nibley says that “a fundamental religious activity of the ancient Hebrews was going up to the Temple ‘to read the Story of the Creation’ (Y. Yadin, War of the Sons of Light and Darkness, pp. 202f).” In the second edition the editors have made a few minor changes. Yadin had not capitalized Story, and so the new edition changes the quote to read “story of the Creation.” It also, for example, changes Nibley’s “202f” to “202-203”. No notice is taken however of the conspicuous fact that Yadin does not say that it was those going up to the temple that read the story of Creation but those who did not go up. The words “To read the story of [the] Creation,” by the way, occur on page 203 twice. I quote the passage so as to include both of them. The first part begins in the midst of a quotation from the Mishnah:

“When the time was come for a course to go up, the priests and the levites thereof went up to Jerusalem, and the Israelites that were of the selfsame course came together unto their own cities to read the story of the Creation, and the men of the ma‘ ãmad , etc.”

The Tosephta, in the corresponding passage (ib. iv, 3) reads: “When the time was come for a course, the priests and levites went up to Jerusalem, and the Israelites that were of the self same course and were not able to go up to Jerusalem came together into their own cities to read the story of Creation.” [Yadin’s italics]66

The above is an example of a very straightforward misquotation. Yadin said it was those who did not go up to Jerusalem that read the story of Creation, Nibley quoted him as saying it was those who did go up to Jerusalem. This indicates that Gee in making his corrections for this passage for the new edition was not attending to the question of whether Nibley was accurately representing his sources, even on a relatively basic level, but was attending only to superficial matters of spelling, capitalization, and so on.

If then Gee missed so straightforward an example of Nibley’s misuse of his sources as this, how can we expect that he would not also have missed ones that were less straightforward and harder to detect? In addition, when Gee says he gave Nibley, “wide latitude in rendering his translations,” does that mean that he did not check his translations or simply decided to accept without question whatever Nibley chose to do in them? And are all of Gee’s statistics as inexact as his using “almost seven hundred” as just another way of saying “616”? Such considerations cast a certain shadow of doubt over Gee’s statistics. It will be interesting to see whether he will be able to do anything to make the shadow go away.

Summing Up

I have offered here only a few examples of what I believe to represent a common phenomenon in the works of Hugh Nibley. I could have easily multiplied the number of examples dealt with, but I feel the ones I have chosen illustrate the situation well enough. Quite often Nibley will multiply misrepresentations by piling them up one upon the other all in a very short space as for example when he claims on page 248 of Old Testament and Related Studies that scholars are “generally agreed,” that the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed “for the first time” such things as “. . . the exact date of Easter . . . the nature and origin of the organization of the Primitive Church . . . the origin of Gnosticism.”67 The Dead Sea Scrolls are Jewish texts. They include no Christian texts at all. In addition their perspective is quite different from that of Gnosticism. To put it quite simply they do not reveal “for the first time” nor for any time the things Nibley claims they do. And since Nibley’s statements weren’t true, scholars obviously weren’t/aren’t “generally agreed” in supporting them. 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.68

Footnotes:

  1. Martha Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith (New York: Crown, 2005) 165. ↩︎
  2. Ibid., p. 166 ↩︎
  3. Robert L. Millet, “‘They Leave It, But They Can’t Leave It Alone’ The Memoir of a Disaffected Mormon,” Books & Culture 11.4 (July/Aug. 2005) 33. The fact that Robert L. Millet was asked to review Martha Beck’s book for the Evangelical publication Books & Culture was extremely unfortunate. The fact that Martha Beck’s chronicle might be true, I say might be true, makes it entirely inappropriate for Evangelicals to publish a review by a Mormon apologist who, because of who he is, can only try to discredit Beck’s story, even if it happens to be true. ↩︎
  4. Although it is doubtful a case could be made for Nibley’s source checkers being responsible for fixing his footnotes. ↩︎
  5. “Response to Leaving the Saints,” http://www.fairlds.org/Reviews/Rvw200504.html. ↩︎
  6. Millet, “‘They Leave It, But They Can’t Leave It Alone,’” p. 33. ↩︎
  7. Beck, Leaving the Saints, p. 165. ↩︎
  8. Email from Kent P. Jackson (6 July 2006). ↩︎
  9. Email John Gee (12 July 2006). ↩︎
  10. Martha Beck, Leaving the Saints, p. 166. ↩︎
  11. Kent P. Jackson, “Leaving the Facts and the Faith,” FARMS Review of Books 17.1 (2005) 119. ↩︎
  12. Kent P. Jackson, “Review of Hugh Nibley, Old Testament and Related Studies (The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley 1; ed. by John W. Welch, Gary P. Gillum, and Don E. Norton; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book // Foundation for Ancient Research & Mormon Studies, 1986),” BYU Studies 28.4 (1988) 115-17 (Infobase edition). ↩︎
  13. See footnote 18 for full example. ↩︎
  14. See, for example, John Gee’s very forced and special-pleading translation of the phrase tas systaseis tas archontikas in Ignatius of Antioch’s Trallians 5 as “the principle revelations” (John Gee, “The Corruption of Scripture in Early Christianity” in Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Great Apostasy [ed. by Noel B. Reynolds; Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research & Mormon Studies and Brigham Young University Press, 2005] 167), rather than something more like Bart D. Ehrman’s “hierarchies of the cosmic rulers” (The Apostolic Fathers [Loeb Classical Library 24-25; 2 vols.; Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2003] 1:261). I would invite Gee to produce an example of a single non-Mormon scholar or in any language that supports his translation here (including the two scholars he cites for support in a footnote). Perhaps I can help him get started by presenting how several different editions of Ignatius’s Trallians, that happen to be readily available to me, translate these words—Wake: “the several companies of them, under their respective princes,” Kirsopp Lake: “gatherings of principalities,“ Richardson: “the array of principalities,” Roberts-Donaldson: “their gatherings under their respective princes,” Kleist: “the hierarchy of principalities,” Goodspeed, “the relations of their rulers,” Lightfoot: “the assemblages, musterings, of heavenly rulers,” Lightfoot/Harmer: “the hierarchy of principalities,” Schoedel: “the archontic formations,” Staniforth: “dispositions of the heavenly powers.” A popular Spanish translation has “los ordenes de los
    principados,” a popular German one, “die Rangordnung der Herrschaften,” and a popular French one, “les armées des principautés.” A Greek Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (BDAG 3rd) agrees with all of these by translating systasis in Ignatius, Trallians 5, “a group with common interests, gathering, union, associations,” and archontikos “assemblages of the (celestial) commanders,” as does G. W. H. Lampe’s A Patristic Greek Lexicon, which translates systasis for the passage, “congregation, company of angelic beings,” and archontikas, “pertaining to the rulers i.e. angelic hierarchy.”
     
    Whether or not Gee was directly inspired in his studies by Hugh Nibley, his strange rendering nevertheless reminds us of what Nibley himself did with that same passage. Nibley translated Ignatius’s tas systaseis tas archontikas with the very Mormon sounding “councils of the Heavens (lit. assemblies or natures of the Rulers archontikas),” which, it must be said, is closer to correct than what Gee has. But Nibley also tried to make the subject of Ignatius’s discussion the secret ordinances of Christians by translating ta epourania as high things, rather than the more correct heavenly things (Hugh W. Nibley, The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment [Collected Works of Hugh Nibley 16; 2nd ed.; ed. by John Gee & Michael Rhodes, Illustrations directed by Michael P. Lyon; Provo, Utah: Deseret Book // Foundation for Ancient Research & Mormon Studies and Brigham Young University Press, 2005] 522. (The same material appeared on p. 283 in the original 1975 edition of this work). Gee translates ta epourania as celestial matters, which is acceptable so long as he does not attempt to exploit any imagined distinction between the words heavenly things and celestial matters as a way of artificially smuggling in a reference to current LDS teaching. Both Gee and Nibley did what they did in an attempt at finding in Ignatius a reference to the early existence of some sort of disciplina arcana, secret ordinances passed only to those who were worthy, in this case taken to parallel the teachings and rites of the modern LDS Church. Both unfortunately were willing to produce an eccentric, less than adequate translation of their original source in order to make it happen. ↩︎
  15. Hugh W. Nibley, “The Expanding Gospel,” in Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, 1978) 37. In this context Nibley does not name the Greek text he is relying on. The same quotation appears, however, in Hugh W. Nibley, Temple and Cosmos (ed. by Don E. Norton; Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret // Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research & Mormon Studies, 1992) 198-99 (Infobase Plus Edition). There the source is given as PG (Patrologia Graeca) 6:340-41. ↩︎
  16. See also Justin, 1 Apology 59. Another place where Justin’s original passage resonated with LDS teaching is in its emphasis on worthiness. ↩︎
  17. Probably Justin believed God created matter first and then shaped it later. (Could this be the implication, for example, of Justin’s words in 2 Apology 6, when he says that the Father, through Jesus, “created and ordered [ektise kai ekosmese] all things”?). Such a view at least would seem to flow from (1) Justin’s insistence that God the Father alone is unbegotten (1 Apology 14 & Trypho 126), (2) his pre-conversion disagreement with Platonists who said “that the world is also unbegotten,” (Trypho 5) and (3) his seeming affirmation of the statement “that which is unbegotten is similar to equal to, and the same with that which is unbegotten” (Trypho 5). See also his remark in Trypho 1, where he alludes to those who say “that the soul, in consequence of its immortality, needs nothing from God.” In Trypho 5, Justin affirms that souls are not in fact immortal. (ET: Ante-Nicene Fathers 1). ↩︎
  18. ET: Ante-Nicene Fathers 1: “On tropon gar tēn archēn ouk ontos epoiēse” (PG 6:341). Compare below Nibley’s translation with a popular English translation of the passage:

    Nibley, Justin 1 Apology 10
    At the creation they themselves made the choice . . . and so were deemed worthy to live with him in immortality.
     
    Justin 1 Apology 10 (Ante-Nicene Fathers) 
    For as in the beginning He created us when we were not, so do we consider that, in like manner, those who choose what is pleasing to Him are, on account of their choice, deemed worthy of incorruption and of fellowship with Him.

    Were he here to defend himself, Nibley might say that he was simply distilling what he understood to be the sense of the passage. There are two problems with this: (1) even if that were the case, Nibley would not in fact be accurately distilling Justin’s thoughts, and (2) Nibley presents it as straightforward translation. Nibley was fully aware of the proper form used for quotations as opposed to paraphrases, as is made clear by a note in his The World and the Prophets (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book // Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research & Mormon Studies, 1987) 301, n. 21, which reads: “Tertullian, De Spectaculis, 2, in PL 1:705, paraphrased.” ↩︎
  19. Nibley, The World and the Prophets, p. 226. ↩︎
  20. See PG (Patrologia Graeca) 6:341-42: ut cum eo degant “that they might live with him.” The specific edition is not mentioned in the book I am using, but it is given in the reprint of the same article in Temple and Cosmos, pp. 198-99 and note. ↩︎
  21. E.g., Thomas B. Falls translates “to make their abode with Him” (Saint Justin Martyr [The Fathers of the Church 6; Washington D. C.: Catholic University Press of America, 1948]), Edward Rochie Hardy translates “dwelling with him,” (Early Christian Fathers [The Library of Christian Classics 1; ed. by Cyril C. Richardson; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953), Leslie William Bernard does not translate it (St. Justin Martyr: The First and Second Apologies [Ancient Christian Writers 56; New York/Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 1997]). ↩︎
  22. See Justin, Dialogue with Trypho 5 and 1 Apology 10. ↩︎
  23. Hugh W. Nibley, “Churches in the Wilderness,” in The Prophetic Book of Mormon (The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley 8; Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book // Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research & Mormon Studies, 1989) 289-90. ↩︎
  24. Ibid., p. 291. Nibley is referring to The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4 (ed. by J. T. Milik with the collaboration of Matthew Black; Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1976). A less elaborate version of this same presentation appears in Hugh W. Nibley, “A Strange thing in the Land,” in Enoch the Prophet (The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley 2; ed. by Stephen D. Ricks; Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book // Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research & Mormon Studies, 1986) 277-81. There Nibley remarks similarly: “The following translation is from Milik and Black, lest the writer be charged with forcing the text” (p. 278). ↩︎
  25. For more on this story in relation to the Book of Giants and other early texts see my “Noah and the Giants: A Response to John C. Reeves,” Journal of Biblical Literature 114.1 (Spring 1995) 103-19. ↩︎
  26. Nibley, “Churches in the Wilderness,” in The Prophetic Book of Mormon, p. 291. ↩︎
  27. Ibid. ↩︎
  28. Hugh W. Nibley, Teachings of the Pearl of Great Price: Transcripts of lectures presented to an Honors Pearl of Great Price Class at Brigham Young University, Winter Semester 1986 (Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research & Mormon Studies [FARMS], n.d.) 21:12. In the lecture Nibley refers to the passage as coming from 4QEnoch. The correct reference is 4QEnGiantsb 1.20. It should be kept in mind that this statement was made in the casual context of a lecture rather than the more controlled setting of a piece of published writing. It is very easy when one is casually talking to have something come out in a way that is not exactly how one intended to say it. ↩︎
  29. Milik & Black, Books of Enoch, pp. 305-306. ↩︎
  30. Nibley, “Churches in the Wilderness,” in The Prophetic Book of Mormon, p. 292. ↩︎
  31. Milik & Black, Books of Enoch, pp. 314-16. ↩︎
  32. Nibley, Teachings of the Pearl of Great Price, 21:12. ↩︎
  33. Milik & Black, Books of Enoch, pp. 153, 311. ↩︎
  34. Ibid., p. 315. ↩︎
  35. Nibley, “Churches in the Wilderness,” in The Prophetic Book of Mormon, pp. 292-93. ↩︎
  36. Ibid., p. 294. ↩︎
  37. Milik & Black, Books of Enoch, pp. 307-308. ↩︎
  38. Ibid., p. 308. ↩︎
  39. Hugh W. Nibley, “The Enoch Figure,” in Enoch the Prophet, pp. 35-6. ↩︎
  40. ET: Edwin Hamilton Gifford, Preparation for the Gospel (2 vols; Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1903) 1:331. PG 21.522: Alla gar meta ton eiremenon altos. ↩︎
  41. Gifford, Preparation for the Gospel, 2:554. ↩︎
  42. See earlier statements in Nibley “The Enoch Figure,” in Enoch the Prophet, p. 35. Nibley appeals to these same two passages from Eusebius’s Preparation for the Gospel (7.8 and 11.6) in support of a similar claim about Enoch in his article “A Strange Thing in the Land.” He does so in a passage that also contains a rendering of the Hebrew verb bara that is highly problematic as well:
     
    “It is implied in Genesis 5:1-2 that the human race was fully launched when the book of the generations of Adam was inaugurated, since Adam and Eve were set apart (barâ), and given a name and a blessing. A very old tradition equates true humanity with Enoch the record keeper, a more complete man than Adam himself.” (“A Strange Thing in the Land,” in Enoch the Prophet, p. 138).
     
    In yet another place Nibley, in the process of “translating” Genesis 5:1-3, renders bara the same way again:
     
    “It begins, ‘In the day the Gods set apart [bara—we are being very literal here] Adam in the likeness of the Gods [bi-dmuth elohim] he made him. Male and female he set them apart, and gave them a blessing, and gave them their names as Adam, in the day he set them apart.’ (See Genesis 5:1-3).” (“Before Adam,” in Old Testament and Related Studies, p. 78).
     
    Nibley’s rendering of this passage is highly problematic. In the first place if one wants to be “very literal” in translating bara one translates it create not set apart. Set apart is not listed as a possible translation of bara in standard reference works on Biblical Hebrew such as Brown, Driver, Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament and the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT). Secondly, elohim should be translated here not as a plural (Gods), as Nibley has done, but as a singular (God). This is made clear in the Hebrew by the use of third person singular verbs. Hence when Nibley puts the Gods set apart Adam he is doubly mistranslating bara. Not only does the Hebrew verb not mean set apart but it is also cast in third person singular in the original (he set apart Adam). In order for Nibley’s translation to be legitimate in terms of the grammar of the passage, bara would have had to have been cast in the third person plural. Finally, if Nibley insists on treating elohim as plural and is willing to confound the singular verb bara by treating it as if it were a third person plural form with elohim (Gods) as its plural subject, why does he then fail to confound all of the other singular verbs in the sentence, which also have elohim as their subject? Why didn’t he confound them to read as third person plurals as follows?:
     
    — in the likeness of the Gods they [the Gods] made him

    — Male and female they [the Gods] set them apart and gave them a blessing, and gave them their names, as Adam

    — in the day they [the Gods] set them apart.
     
    Instead he translates them using the third person singular pronoun he as their subject. There would, of course, be no virtue in Nibley’s carrying through his illegitimate translation in this manner, but it would have at least made his distortion of the passage consistent all the way through. ↩︎
  43. R. M. Grant, “The Passing of the Church: Comments on Two Comments on a Strange Theme,” Church History 30.4 (Dec. 1961) 482. ↩︎
  44. Hugh W. Nibley, “The Passing of the Primitive Church: Forty Variations on an Unpopular Theme,” in Mormonism and Early Christianity (The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley 4; ed. by Todd M. Compton and Stephen D. Ricks; Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book // Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1986) 169. ↩︎
  45. Ibid., p. 174. ↩︎
  46. ET: Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers (Loeb Classical Library 24-25; 2 vols.; Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2003) 2.213. ↩︎
  47. Ibid., 2:223. ↩︎
  48. Nibley, “Passing of the Primitive Church,” in Mormonism and Early Christianity, p. 179. ↩︎
  49. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.45; ET: G. A. Williamson, Eusebius: The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine (Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg Publishing House, 1965). ↩︎
  50. The contrast between martyrdom for self and for the whole church is stated using men and de in two nicely balanced statements:
    Ekei men gar hyper mias tis tēs heautou psychēs, entautha de hyper holes tēs Ekklēsias martyrei (PG 20:633) ↩︎
  51. Hugh W. Nibley, “Baptism for the Dead in Ancient Times,” in Mormonism and Early Christianity, p. 106. ↩︎
  52. Ibid. ↩︎
  53. I had originally written here “the Greek verb translated prevail against in Matthew 16:18 (katischyo) always takes a genitive object when used to mean prevail against or over.” An early reviewer pointed out that I had missed an example given in the big Liddell & Scott Classical Greek Lexicon (i.e., the Greek Septuagint at 2 Chronicles 8:3), where the verb had this same basic meaning but with an accusative rather than a genitive object. In this instance the reviewer was correct and so I replaced the always with almost always. ↩︎
  54. Hugh W. Nibley, “Baptism for the Dead in Ancient Times,” in Mormonism and Early Christianity, p. 107. ↩︎
  55. Ignatius, Philadelphians 9, Long Version (ET: Ante-Nicene Fathers 1) ↩︎
  56. See the original form of this letter, for example, in ET: Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers (Loeb Classical Library 24-25; 2 vols.; Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2003) ↩︎
  57. See, for example, Ignatius, Polycarp 1:1; Epistle of Barnabas 5:13; 6:3; 11:3, 5; Shepherd of Hermas, Parables (Similitudes) 9.2.1-2; 9.3.1; 9.4.2; 9.5.3; 9.9.7; 9.12.1; 9.13.5; 9.14.4. ↩︎
  58. Nibley, The World and the Prophets, pp. 54-55. ↩︎
  59. See Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers 1.292-93. Ehrman’s edition replaces the older 1912-1913 Loeb Classical Library edition of Kirsopp Lake. Both editions agree that Ignatius wrote autos not houtos (neither offering houtos as a variant reading) and both translate the word he not this. Edgar J. Goodspeed’s Index Patristicus (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, n.d.) also identifies autos and not houtos as the reading here (pp. 31 and 178). Although there is really no doubt as to the correct translation I have, by way of illustrating Nibley’s difficulty, checked the translations of Wake, Lightfoot, Roberts-Donaldson (Ante-Nicene Fathers 1), Stawley, Hoole, Richardson, Lake, Goodspeed, and Staniforth as well. All of them have he referring to the high priest. Finally, the reading in the edition of Ignatius’s authentic letters in Jacques-Paul Migne’s Patrologiae cursus completus, which is likely the edition Nibley himself used, is, again, autos not houtos in Philadelphians 9 (PG 5:704-05). ↩︎
  60. The twentieth “variation” in “The Passing of the Primitive Church: Forty Variations on an Unpopular Theme,” in Mormonism and Early Christianity, p. 177. ↩︎
  61. Ibid., p. 200, footnote 70. The closest we come to anything like what Nibley is talking about comes from the two writers cited who are not Apostolic Fathers. First, the fourth-century writer Eusebius’s repudiation of the followers of Theodotus the Shoemaker who “corrupt the word of God [which they freely emended],” and “Instead of asking what Holy Scripture says, they strain every nerve to find a syllogistic figure to bolster up their godlessness.” Some of them, Eusebius says, “give all their energies to the study of Euclidian geometry, and treat Aristotle and Theophrastus with reverential awe; to some of them Galen is almost an object of worship” (Eusebius Ecclesiastical History 5.28). But even there Eusebius is only speaking of putting worldly education above the word of God. Second the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions 1:1-5 (falsely attributed to one of the Apostolic Fathers), which describes the inability of the study of philosophy to provide satisfactory answers to the great issues of life such as whether or not there is life after death.
     
    As an interesting aside, Nibley misrepresents the above Eusebius passage again in his book The World and the Prophets (pp. 38-39) by (1) attributing it directly to Eusebius rather than to the source Eusebius was citing, and, (2) more seriously, treating it as generally descriptive of the Christian Church as such during a particular period of history, rather than as what it is: a description of the views and attitudes of a particular heretical sect. ↩︎
  62. Hans J. Hillerbrand, “The Passing of the Church: Two Comments on a Strange Theme,” Church History 30.4 (Dec. 1961) 481. ↩︎
  63. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference/august-2004/autobiographical-notes-on-my-testimony
    (Original URL accessed 28 February 2006; updated, 5 May 2025.)
     ↩︎
  64. Hugh W. Nibley, “Qumran and the Companions of the Cave,” Revue de Qumran 5 (April, 1965) 186. ↩︎
  65. http://www.fairlds.org/Reviews/Rvw200504.html ↩︎
  66. Yigael Yadin, The Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness; ET: Batya and Chaim Rabin (n.p.: Oxford University Press, 1962) 203. ↩︎
  67. Nibley, “The Dead Sea Scrolls: Some Questions and Answers,” in Old Testament and Related Studies, p. 248 ↩︎
  68. Should anyone wish to pursue this matter a bit further they might begin by seeking answers to the following questions: Was Nibley correct when he claimed that:
     
    1) The texts found at the site of ancient Chenoboskia near the modern Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1954 had originally been “buried by a little Christian church before the apostasy hit it, before Gnosticism hit it. They represent the earliest level, the earliest teachings of the church, a totally different picture from what anybody had imagined it would be like. And the extent of these things is remarkable,” (Nibley, “Apocryphal Writings and the Teachings of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in Temple and Cosmos, pp. 198-99.)
     
    (2) “The Epistle to Diognetus 10 tells us not to marvel at this—man must become the heir of divinity in the fullest sense,” (Nibley, “Treasures in the Heavens,” in Old Testament and Related Studies, p. 206, nt. 89.)
     
    (3) It was Christians being referred to when he writes: “‘O miserable Aristotle!’ cried Tertullian shortly after, ‘who taught them (the Christians) dialectic, the art of proving and disproving, the cunning turns of sentences, forced conjectures, tough arguments, contrary even to itself.’” (Nibley, The World and the Prophets, p. 39.)
     
    (4) The Gospel of Philip “is strictly orthodox, and very strongly anti-gnostic, although some people try to explain it away by saying it is gnostic.” (Nibley, “Rediscovery of the Apocrypha and the Book of Mormon,” in Temple and Cosmos, p. 225, Infobase edition.)
     
    (5) Justin Martyr “knows of no certain norm for distinguishing true Christians from false, and Irenaeus struggles manfully but vainly to discover one.” (Nibley, “Passing of the Primitive Church,” in Mormonism and Early Christianity, p. 182.)
     
    (6) Concerning the community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, that “their book of doctrine and covenants (now called the Manual of Discipline) is surprisingly like our own, as are their ideas of priesthood, prophecy, heaven and earth, marriage and eternal progeny, and so on.” (Nibley, “More Voices from the Dust,” in Old Testament and Related Studies, p. 240.)
     
    (7) Jesus is presented as performing baptisms for the dead, and the spirits are described as joining “his church exactly like their mortal descendants, and by the same ordinances” in chapter 42 of the 1st or 2nd century work, the Odes of Solomon. (Nibley, “Baptism for the Dead in Ancient Times,” in Mormonism and Early Christianity, p. 119.)
     
    (8) Concerning the baptism performed by the Apostles upon the dead in Shepherd of Hermas, Similitudes (Parables) IX.16.2, “That it was an earthly baptism which could only be performed with water is emphatically stated.” (Ibid., p. 122.)
     
    (9) The Shepherd of Hermas is “one of the most trustworthy guides to the established beliefs of the early church.” (Ibid., p. 121.)
     
    (10) Origen (d. c. 251) “can report no clear official teaching in his day not only regarding minor matters, but on the very first principles of the gospel.” (Nibley “Passing of the Primitive Church,” in Mormonism and Early Christianity, p. 175. Nibley’s misquotation of Origen’s First Principles in this case is a good example of what Tweedy described when he says: “Sometimes what he [Nibley] said was exactly the opposite of what the author meant” [Beck, Leaving the Saints, p. 16].)
     
    (11) “The Confessions [of Augustine] is the story of a man who sought for revelation in the church, failed to find it, and so with great reluctance turned to philosophy as a poor second best.” (Hugh Nibley, “Baptism for the Dead in Ancient Times, Part II,” Improvement Era (Jan. 1949) 60 nt. 60.) ↩︎

Originally appeared in:

Ronald V. Huggins, “Hugh Nibley’s Footnotes,” Salt Lake City Messenger, no. 110, May 2008, 9-21.

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