Hugh Nibley in Context
Personal e-mail, Todd Compton to Boyd Petersen, 8 January 2005; Glen Cooper to Boyd Petersen, 25 December 2004; William Hamblin to Boyd Petersen, 24 December 2004; Stephen Ricks to Boyd Petersen, 9 January 2005; John Gee to Boyd Petersen, 27 December 2004.
Likely the most damning review of Hugh's scholarly work has been Kent P. Jackson's review of Old Testament and Related Studies, Volume 1 of the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, which appeared in BYU Studies 28.4 (1988): 114-118. In that review, Jackson critiques Nibley's "tendency to gather sources from a variety of cultures all over the ancient world, lump them all together, and then pick and choose the bits and pieces he wants" and to read into these sources things that "simply don't seem to be there" (115). He says Hugh takes phrases out of context, didn't provide sufficient documentation for some sources, provides documentation "overkill" on others, and doesn't give sufficient evidence for some of his assertions. Additionally, Jackson took Nibley to task for his sarcasm and name-calling, "which have no place in serious scholarship" (116). But in all of this, Jackson never hints that Nibley simply "made up" his sources.
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).
Todd Compton wrote me that he "was very disillusioned with Nibley's scholarship when I checked his footnotes carefully. However, I believe he was misinterpreting, not making things up. Furthermore, I believe that saying that 90% of his footnotes were wrong is a wild overstatement, based on my experience editing Mormonism and Early Christianity.
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