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Nibley, Hugh (19160134): Difference between revisions
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Nibley | Hugh Winder Nibley (March 27, 1910 – February 24, 2005) was an American scholar and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) who was a professor at Brigham Young University (BYU) for nearly 50 years. He was a prolific author, and wrote apologetic works supporting the archaeological, linguistic, and historical claims of Joseph Smith. He was a member of the LDS Church, and wrote and lectured on LDS scripture and doctrinal topics, publishing many articles in the LDS Church magazines. | ||
</div> | </div> | ||
== Biography == | == Biography == | ||
After his mission, he attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he graduated in 1934. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) in 1938. He taught various subjects at Claremont Colleges until he enlisted in the United States Army in 1942, where he was trained as an intelligence officer as one of the Ritchie Boys. | Hugh Winder Nibley (March 27, 1910 – February 24, 2005) was an American scholar and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) who was a professor at Brigham Young University (BYU) for nearly 50 years. He was a prolific author, and wrote apologetic works supporting the archaeological, linguistic, and historical claims of Joseph Smith. He was a member of the LDS Church, and wrote and lectured on LDS scripture and doctrinal topics, publishing many articles in the LDS Church magazines. | ||
Nibley was born in Portland, Oregon, and his family moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1921, where Nibley attended middle school and high school. Nibley served an LDS mission in Germany, where he learned German. After his mission, he attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he graduated in 1934. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) in 1938. He taught various subjects at Claremont Colleges until he enlisted in the United States Army in 1942, where he was trained as an intelligence officer as one of the Ritchie Boys. | |||
Nibley became a professor at Brigham Young University (BYU) in 1946, where he taught foreign languages and Christian church history. He continued to study Egyptian and Coptic, and became the figurehead of the Institute for Ancient Studies at BYU in 1973. During his professorship, Nibley wrote articles for scholarly publications and for official LDS Church publications. Nibley published multiple series of articles in the Improvement Era as well as An Approach to the Book of Mormon, which was the lesson manual for Melchizedek priesthood lessons in 1957. Nibley also published a response to the Joseph Smith Papyri as well as other articles on the Pearl of Great Price. In addition to Nibley's church publications, he also published social commentary, often aimed at LDS culture. Nibley's work is controversial. Kent P. Jackson and Douglas F. Salmon have argued that the parallels Nibley finds between ancient culture and LDS works are selective or imprecise. Nibley's defenders like Louis C. Midgley and Shirley S. Ricks argue that his parallels are meaningful. | |||
Hugh Nibley's son Alex organized a documentary on Hugh entitled Faith of an Observer. Hugh Nibley's complete works were published jointly by the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) and Deseret Book. Around the time of Nibley's death in 2005, his daughter Martha Beck published a memoir where she claimed to have recovered repressed memories of Nibley sexually abusing her. Immediate family members and some book reviewers of Beck's memoirs considered her claims to be false. | |||
Hugh Nibley was born in Portland, Oregon, son of Alexander ("El") Nibley and Agnes Sloan. Among their other sons were Sloan Nibley, Richard Nibley, and Reid N. Nibley. Their father, Alexander, was the son of Charles W. Nibley, Presiding Bishop of the church. Alexander's mother, wife of Charles, was Rebecca Neibaur. Rebecca was the daughter of Alexander Neibaur, one of the first Jewish people to convert to Mormonism. Alexander Nibley served as mission president of the Liège Conference. | |||
In 1917, Nibley's family moved to Medford, Oregon, where his father started to manage his father's sugar beet company. The next year at age eight, Nibley was baptized into the LDS Church. The family returned to Portland after the sugar beet factory failed in 1919. In 1920, the principal at Nibley's elementary school gave all of his students an IQ test. After seeing Nibley's high scores, the principal decided to privately tutor Nibley. Nibley's parents employed a music tutor and a French tutor for their children as well. | |||
Nibley's family moved to Los Angeles in 1921, where Nibley's father participated in the burgeoning real-estate market and was part of Los Angeles's high society. Nibley attended Alta Loma Middle School from 1921 until 1923. He graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1927, where he was friends with John Cage. Nibley was particularly interested in astronomy, art, and English. In order to see through his telescope unimpeded, he cut off his eyelashes. His interest in literature led him to study Old and Middle English, German, Latin, and Greek. He spent the summer of 1925 working in a lumber mill. In 1926, Nibley's poems appeared in the Improvement Era and The Lyric West. That same year, his family moved to a mansion. Nibley spent six weeks alone in the wilderness near Crater Lake, excited to experience solitude and to "get back to nature" like the transcendentalists. Nibley took part and excelled in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC). According to Nibley, he participated in ROTC at his mother's urging, and she hoped that if there was another world war he would be an officer. The summer he was 17, he attended Brigham Young Academy's Aspen Grove summer school. | |||
Nibley's parents were worried about his social development and felt that an LDS mission would help him have more contact with people. In November 1927, Nibley received his temple endowment, and studied at the Salt Lake Mission Home to serve an LDS mission in Germany until 1929. He spent his first three weeks in Germany learning German in Cologne with other missionaries. After his mission, he received special permission to visit Greece for six weeks to contact other members of the LDS Church there. | |||
Nibley | After his mission, Nibley majored in history at UCLA. He also studied Latin, Greek, and Spanish and graduated summa cum laude in 1934. Nibley's grandfather, Charles, and his brother, Philip, died in 1931 and 1932, respectively. In June 1933, Nibley used his knowledge of shorthand and typing when he served a short-term mission in the northwestern states as the mission stenographer. He returned in time to start his PhD at UC Berkeley in September 1934. In the 1936–1937 school year, he received a fellowship that would have covered his tuition and housing. Nibley's father asked him to loan the money to him and did not repay it. He found a job translating Latin, but because his funds were severely limited, he moved from the expensive International House to a cheap apartment, where his neighbors spoke Arabic. His dissertation, "The Roman Games as a Survival of an Archaic Year Cult", was accepted, and he graduated in 1938. | ||
Nibley | Nibley volunteered to teach at Claremont Colleges, and he taught without pay for the 1939–1940 school year, living frugally. The next year he worked as an instructor, and taught history, social philosophy, modern European history, humanities, U.S. history, history of education, Greek, and German. He taught alongside scholars fleeing from Germany, including Thomas Mann, and once co-taught a class with retired professor Everett Dean Martin. He acted as a secretary when prominent intellectuals spoke at the Committee on War Objectives and Peace Aims. He studied more languages, including Irish, Akkadian, Russian, Italian, and Spanish. He sought out native speakers to converse with when possible. In a letter to his friend from UC Berkeley, Paul Springer, Nibley wrote that two of his friends at Scripps College were discovered to be Nazi agents. He resigned from Claremont in June 1942, and then enlisted as a private in the United States Army for World War II. | ||
Nibley | In the army, Nibley completed weather observation school in March 1943 after he finished basic training. His commanding officer recommended him for officer training, and he attended military intelligence training in the United States Army Intelligence Center at Camp Ritchie in western Maryland. He completed intelligence training on June 2. In August he started attending the second Order of Battle course. Before leaving for Europe, he courted and proposed marriage to Anahid Iskian, but she refused. Nibley became a Master Sergeant along with his fellow Order of Battle graduates. After an OB training in Hyde Park Corner, he was assigned to help compile information on German officers for the June 1944 Order of Battle Book. He instructed officers and other men in the 101st Airborne Division about the German Order of Battle. He was part of the Utah Beach division during the D-Day invasion, and landed by glider at Eindhoven as part of Operation Market Garden. Nibley gathered intelligence on German war movements from civilians, documents, and POWs. He was the only survivor of OB team #5. He visited Dachau concentration camp a few days after its liberation. After being discharged from the army in November 1945, he went camping near Hurricane, Utah. | ||
Nibley's work | Improvement Era hired Nibley as a managing editor in 1946. On his own time, Nibley wrote a detailed response to Fawn M. Brodie's significant biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History. The response, entitled No, Ma'am, That's Not History, identified flaws in Brodie's work, including the way she read the sources, but it did so using "dismissive and patronizing language". According to Ronald Helfrich, author of Mormon Studies: A Critical History, No, Ma'am was "a turning point in the history of Mormon apologetics and polemics" because it used academic language in its arguments. Nibley's patronizing language, Helfrich posited, could be a reflection of Nibley's own "patriarchalism and paternalism". Dale Morgan, a historian who helped Brodie while she wrote the biography, found Nibley "intoxicated with his own language". Richard Bushman, famed for his own biography of Joseph Smith, after hearing the criticisms of No, Ma'am, was surprised by how "on the mark" it was. Nibley's rhetorical style became popular with defenders of the church, and in 1979, Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) was founded and published "Nibley-style apologetics and polemics". | ||
While living in Salt Lake City, Nibley improved his Russian by insisting that he and his Ukrainian roommate only speak Russian. Nibley promised to pay his roommate one cent for every mistake he made in Russian and two cents for every English word he spoke. | |||
Nibley was a Mormon folk legend during his lifetime, and frequently members of the LDS Church told fantastic stories about him. A Sunstone magazine article documenting several common folk stories (some of questionable veracity) reported that Latter-day Saints would talk of Nibley, for example, shouting quotes from the Illiad while a parachutist in World War II in an attempt to convince Greeks he was friendly, or absent-mindedly recommending German readings to a student without considering the student's inability to read the language. In her thesis on Nibley folklore, Jane Brady found that Nibley stories could be organized into five categories based on the role Nibley played in them: hero, iconoclast, eccentric, spiritual guide, and defender of the faith. Brady put Nibley stories into the context of folklore stories, stating that they illustrated ways that the people who told the stories within BYU's community felt about their own roles as LDS scholars. | |||
Nibley's 1963 speech "Three Shrines: Mantic, Sophic, and Sophistic" distinguished between the sophic and mantic, or a classical tradition of distinguishing between the natural and supernatural. H. Curtis Wright, a professor in BYU's library science program, described Nibley's work with sophic and mantic as "the most insightful thing [Nibley] has ever done" describing the idea as "far more basic than the epistemological disjunction of reason and the senses". | |||
Revision as of 13:04, 24 August 2026
| Hugh Nibley | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Personal details | |
| Birth name | Hugh Winder Nibley |
| Born | 27 March 1910 Portland, Oregon, U.S. |
| Died | 24 February 2005 Provo, Utah, U.S. |
| Nativity | United States |
| Religion | Latter-day Saints |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance |  United States |
| Branch |  United States Army |
| ASN | 19160134 |
| Rank | Private |
| Camp Ritchie | Class 7 (15 April – 12 June 1943) |
| Section | 6 |
| Enlisted | Los Angeles, California |
{{Needs source}}, or explain disagreements on talk. Baseline import notes: About the data.
Hugh Winder Nibley (March 27, 1910 – February 24, 2005) was an American scholar and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) who was a professor at Brigham Young University (BYU) for nearly 50 years. He was a prolific author, and wrote apologetic works supporting the archaeological, linguistic, and historical claims of Joseph Smith. He was a member of the LDS Church, and wrote and lectured on LDS scripture and doctrinal topics, publishing many articles in the LDS Church magazines.
Biography
Hugh Winder Nibley (March 27, 1910 – February 24, 2005) was an American scholar and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) who was a professor at Brigham Young University (BYU) for nearly 50 years. He was a prolific author, and wrote apologetic works supporting the archaeological, linguistic, and historical claims of Joseph Smith. He was a member of the LDS Church, and wrote and lectured on LDS scripture and doctrinal topics, publishing many articles in the LDS Church magazines.
Nibley was born in Portland, Oregon, and his family moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1921, where Nibley attended middle school and high school. Nibley served an LDS mission in Germany, where he learned German. After his mission, he attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he graduated in 1934. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) in 1938. He taught various subjects at Claremont Colleges until he enlisted in the United States Army in 1942, where he was trained as an intelligence officer as one of the Ritchie Boys.
Nibley became a professor at Brigham Young University (BYU) in 1946, where he taught foreign languages and Christian church history. He continued to study Egyptian and Coptic, and became the figurehead of the Institute for Ancient Studies at BYU in 1973. During his professorship, Nibley wrote articles for scholarly publications and for official LDS Church publications. Nibley published multiple series of articles in the Improvement Era as well as An Approach to the Book of Mormon, which was the lesson manual for Melchizedek priesthood lessons in 1957. Nibley also published a response to the Joseph Smith Papyri as well as other articles on the Pearl of Great Price. In addition to Nibley's church publications, he also published social commentary, often aimed at LDS culture. Nibley's work is controversial. Kent P. Jackson and Douglas F. Salmon have argued that the parallels Nibley finds between ancient culture and LDS works are selective or imprecise. Nibley's defenders like Louis C. Midgley and Shirley S. Ricks argue that his parallels are meaningful.
Hugh Nibley's son Alex organized a documentary on Hugh entitled Faith of an Observer. Hugh Nibley's complete works were published jointly by the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) and Deseret Book. Around the time of Nibley's death in 2005, his daughter Martha Beck published a memoir where she claimed to have recovered repressed memories of Nibley sexually abusing her. Immediate family members and some book reviewers of Beck's memoirs considered her claims to be false.
Hugh Nibley was born in Portland, Oregon, son of Alexander ("El") Nibley and Agnes Sloan. Among their other sons were Sloan Nibley, Richard Nibley, and Reid N. Nibley. Their father, Alexander, was the son of Charles W. Nibley, Presiding Bishop of the church. Alexander's mother, wife of Charles, was Rebecca Neibaur. Rebecca was the daughter of Alexander Neibaur, one of the first Jewish people to convert to Mormonism. Alexander Nibley served as mission president of the Liège Conference.
In 1917, Nibley's family moved to Medford, Oregon, where his father started to manage his father's sugar beet company. The next year at age eight, Nibley was baptized into the LDS Church. The family returned to Portland after the sugar beet factory failed in 1919. In 1920, the principal at Nibley's elementary school gave all of his students an IQ test. After seeing Nibley's high scores, the principal decided to privately tutor Nibley. Nibley's parents employed a music tutor and a French tutor for their children as well.
Nibley's family moved to Los Angeles in 1921, where Nibley's father participated in the burgeoning real-estate market and was part of Los Angeles's high society. Nibley attended Alta Loma Middle School from 1921 until 1923. He graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1927, where he was friends with John Cage. Nibley was particularly interested in astronomy, art, and English. In order to see through his telescope unimpeded, he cut off his eyelashes. His interest in literature led him to study Old and Middle English, German, Latin, and Greek. He spent the summer of 1925 working in a lumber mill. In 1926, Nibley's poems appeared in the Improvement Era and The Lyric West. That same year, his family moved to a mansion. Nibley spent six weeks alone in the wilderness near Crater Lake, excited to experience solitude and to "get back to nature" like the transcendentalists. Nibley took part and excelled in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC). According to Nibley, he participated in ROTC at his mother's urging, and she hoped that if there was another world war he would be an officer. The summer he was 17, he attended Brigham Young Academy's Aspen Grove summer school.
Nibley's parents were worried about his social development and felt that an LDS mission would help him have more contact with people. In November 1927, Nibley received his temple endowment, and studied at the Salt Lake Mission Home to serve an LDS mission in Germany until 1929. He spent his first three weeks in Germany learning German in Cologne with other missionaries. After his mission, he received special permission to visit Greece for six weeks to contact other members of the LDS Church there.
After his mission, Nibley majored in history at UCLA. He also studied Latin, Greek, and Spanish and graduated summa cum laude in 1934. Nibley's grandfather, Charles, and his brother, Philip, died in 1931 and 1932, respectively. In June 1933, Nibley used his knowledge of shorthand and typing when he served a short-term mission in the northwestern states as the mission stenographer. He returned in time to start his PhD at UC Berkeley in September 1934. In the 1936–1937 school year, he received a fellowship that would have covered his tuition and housing. Nibley's father asked him to loan the money to him and did not repay it. He found a job translating Latin, but because his funds were severely limited, he moved from the expensive International House to a cheap apartment, where his neighbors spoke Arabic. His dissertation, "The Roman Games as a Survival of an Archaic Year Cult", was accepted, and he graduated in 1938.
Nibley volunteered to teach at Claremont Colleges, and he taught without pay for the 1939–1940 school year, living frugally. The next year he worked as an instructor, and taught history, social philosophy, modern European history, humanities, U.S. history, history of education, Greek, and German. He taught alongside scholars fleeing from Germany, including Thomas Mann, and once co-taught a class with retired professor Everett Dean Martin. He acted as a secretary when prominent intellectuals spoke at the Committee on War Objectives and Peace Aims. He studied more languages, including Irish, Akkadian, Russian, Italian, and Spanish. He sought out native speakers to converse with when possible. In a letter to his friend from UC Berkeley, Paul Springer, Nibley wrote that two of his friends at Scripps College were discovered to be Nazi agents. He resigned from Claremont in June 1942, and then enlisted as a private in the United States Army for World War II.
In the army, Nibley completed weather observation school in March 1943 after he finished basic training. His commanding officer recommended him for officer training, and he attended military intelligence training in the United States Army Intelligence Center at Camp Ritchie in western Maryland. He completed intelligence training on June 2. In August he started attending the second Order of Battle course. Before leaving for Europe, he courted and proposed marriage to Anahid Iskian, but she refused. Nibley became a Master Sergeant along with his fellow Order of Battle graduates. After an OB training in Hyde Park Corner, he was assigned to help compile information on German officers for the June 1944 Order of Battle Book. He instructed officers and other men in the 101st Airborne Division about the German Order of Battle. He was part of the Utah Beach division during the D-Day invasion, and landed by glider at Eindhoven as part of Operation Market Garden. Nibley gathered intelligence on German war movements from civilians, documents, and POWs. He was the only survivor of OB team #5. He visited Dachau concentration camp a few days after its liberation. After being discharged from the army in November 1945, he went camping near Hurricane, Utah.
Improvement Era hired Nibley as a managing editor in 1946. On his own time, Nibley wrote a detailed response to Fawn M. Brodie's significant biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History. The response, entitled No, Ma'am, That's Not History, identified flaws in Brodie's work, including the way she read the sources, but it did so using "dismissive and patronizing language". According to Ronald Helfrich, author of Mormon Studies: A Critical History, No, Ma'am was "a turning point in the history of Mormon apologetics and polemics" because it used academic language in its arguments. Nibley's patronizing language, Helfrich posited, could be a reflection of Nibley's own "patriarchalism and paternalism". Dale Morgan, a historian who helped Brodie while she wrote the biography, found Nibley "intoxicated with his own language". Richard Bushman, famed for his own biography of Joseph Smith, after hearing the criticisms of No, Ma'am, was surprised by how "on the mark" it was. Nibley's rhetorical style became popular with defenders of the church, and in 1979, Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) was founded and published "Nibley-style apologetics and polemics".
While living in Salt Lake City, Nibley improved his Russian by insisting that he and his Ukrainian roommate only speak Russian. Nibley promised to pay his roommate one cent for every mistake he made in Russian and two cents for every English word he spoke.
Nibley was a Mormon folk legend during his lifetime, and frequently members of the LDS Church told fantastic stories about him. A Sunstone magazine article documenting several common folk stories (some of questionable veracity) reported that Latter-day Saints would talk of Nibley, for example, shouting quotes from the Illiad while a parachutist in World War II in an attempt to convince Greeks he was friendly, or absent-mindedly recommending German readings to a student without considering the student's inability to read the language. In her thesis on Nibley folklore, Jane Brady found that Nibley stories could be organized into five categories based on the role Nibley played in them: hero, iconoclast, eccentric, spiritual guide, and defender of the faith. Brady put Nibley stories into the context of folklore stories, stating that they illustrated ways that the people who told the stories within BYU's community felt about their own roles as LDS scholars.
Nibley's 1963 speech "Three Shrines: Mantic, Sophic, and Sophistic" distinguished between the sophic and mantic, or a classical tradition of distinguishing between the natural and supernatural. H. Curtis Wright, a professor in BYU's library science program, described Nibley's work with sophic and mantic as "the most insightful thing [Nibley] has ever done" describing the idea as "far more basic than the epistemological disjunction of reason and the senses".
Research notes
- Also PG Class 6 GerOB
- OB 5;81
Gallery
After you are autoconfirmed, upload a photo and add [[File:Example.jpg|thumb|caption]] here, or set |photo=Example.jpg in the infobox.
Technical record
| Field | Imported value |
|---|---|
| Approx Age at Death | 95 |
| Nara ASN | 19160134 |
| Nara Name | NIBLEY HUGH |
| Nara State | 91 |
| Nara County | 37 |
| Nara POE | 9141 |
| Nara DOE | 280942 |
| Nara Grade Alpha | PVT |
| Nara Grade Code | 8 |
| Nara Branch Alpha | BI |
| Nara Branch Code | 0 |
| Branch | Branch Immaterial - Warrant Officers, USA |
| Nara Term or Enlistment | 5 |
| Term of enlistment | Enlistment for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law |
| Defer. Date | 0 |
| Nara Source | 0 |
| Nara Nativity | 95 |
| Nativity.1 | OREGON |
| Nara Year of Birth | 10 |
| Nara Race | 1 |
| Nara Race Description | White citizen |
| Nara Education | 8 |
| Nara Civilian Occupation | 31 |
| Nara Marital Status | 6 |
| Nara Height (inches) | 67 |
| Nara Weight (lbs) | 139 |
| Class_ASN | 19160134 |
| Class_Name | NIBLEY, Hugh |
| match_method | asn_exact_name_exact |
| row_source | both |
| Census_HISTID | 9E422AF9-5836-4237-82F1-7412712A06C8 |
| Census_State | CALIFORNIA |
| Census_Relate | Other non-relatives |
| Census_Sex | Male |
| Census_Age | 30 |
| Census_BirthYear | 1910 |
| Census_Marital | Never married/single |
| Census_Race | White |
| Census_BPL | OREGON |
| Census_MBPL | 0 |
| Census_FBPL | 0 |
| Census_Educ | 5+ years of college |
| Census_OCC | 6 |
Sources
- Wikipedia: Hugh Nibley
- Camp Ritchie class roster (classes 1–31), merged research file
- NARA World War II Army enlistment records (where a NARA ASN is present)
- 1940 U.S. Census (where a census match is present)