Bushman verses Nibley

[Rain]

I was reading reviews of "Rough Stone Rolling." 

One review had this, in part, to say:

"For Nibley is by far a superior and more recognized scholar, not only in LDS circles, but also one of the most respected scholar/author's in the world. He touches on similar subjects with clarity and both deep scholastic knowledge and his references are taken from his own research from original sources, not relying on the work of others as this book often does."

I'm in no way a scholar or historian.  Those who know more than I do, what do you have to say about what was said in the quote?

[The Nehor]

My prediction is Bushman wins by knockout in Round 5.

[Steve Thompson]

Replace "Nibley" with "Bushman" and it would be about right.

[Calm]

Bushman is the more organized writer in my experience. 

[Freedom]

21 hours ago, Rain said:

I was reading reviews of "Rough Stone Rolling." 

One review had this, in part, to say:

"For Nibley is by far a superior and more recognized scholar, not only in LDS circles, but also one of the most respected scholar/author's in the world. He touches on similar subjects with clarity and both deep scholastic knowledge and his references are taken from his own research from original sources, not relying on the work of others as this book often does."

I'm in no way a scholar or historian.  Those who know more than I do, what do you have to say about what was said in the quote?

Nibley was a different type of scholar, he was an NOT expert in American history, he researched ancient texts. If this critic claims Bushman, who was the chair of the joseph Smith papers project tasked with gathering and studying primary sources, did not use original sourced then he did not read the book or look at the foot notes. 

Edited August 2, 2021 by Freedom
add word 'not'

[sunstoned]

1 hour ago, Calm said:

Bushman is the more organized writer in my experience. 

Bushman also pays more attention to his citations.

[Kenngo1969]

Certainly, I'm no expert.  And I will admit, candidly, that I have read more of Bushman than I have of Nibley.  For whatever my opinion, considering those caveats, may be worth, I think any comparison between the two is not only an apples-to-oranges comparison, it's an apples-to-Buicks comparison.  Largely, Nibley's work attempts to situate Latter-day Saint holy writ in an ancient milieu, while Bushman's work attempts to contextualize the Restoration in an eighteenth-century milieu.  I don't think there is any need to pit one against the other, or that it makes much sense to do so.  It's as though one person says, "I like French Vanilla ice cream," while another, in response, says, "Buicks are the best cars made today."

[Kenngo1969]

2 hours ago, Calm said:

Bushman is the more organized writer in my experience. 

 

25 minutes ago, sunstoned said:

Bushman also pays more attention to his citations.

Ah, yes!  The mysterious Man in Tweed makes yet another mysterious appearance!   

 

Regarding Hugh Nibley's alleged misuse of, or carelessness with, sources, see here: 

https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Question:_Did_Mormon_scholar_Hugh_Nibley_fake_or_distort_most_of_his_footnotes%3F

I thought someone did a more extensive examination of Nibley's use of sources, but it might have been someone in connection with FARMS or one of its successor organizations, which means, alas!, that we may never find it.  

Edited August 2, 2021 by Kenngo1969

[Calm]

34 minutes ago, Freedom said:

he was an expert in American history,

Is there a “not” missing?

[SeekingUnderstanding]

1 hour ago, Kenngo1969 said:

 

Ah, yes!  The mysterious Man in Tweed makes yet another mysterious appearance!   

 

Regarding Hugh Nibley's alleged misuse of, or carelessness with, sources, see here: 

https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Question:_Did_Mormon_scholar_Hugh_Nibley_fake_or_distort_most_of_his_footnotes%3F

I thought someone did a more extensive examination of Nibley's use of sources, but it might have been someone in connection with FARMS or one of its successor organizations, which means, alas!, that we may never find it.  

From your source (this is what his friends are saying):

”I have contacted many of the note checkers and editors of the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley...and they all confirm that, while Hugh has been sloppy—at times mistranslating a text or overstating his case—he does not make up his sources”

”We never found anything that Nibley made up or intentionally misquoted. I would characterize his use of sources as sloppy but certainly not dishonest.”

 

Edited August 2, 2021 by SeekingUnderstanding

[Rain]

Thank you everyone.  

My impression was that most had a good impression of Bushman.  I knew that some would not like the book and think it "anti", but this comparison surprised me.

[Kevin Christensen]

For a detailed examination of Nibley's Footnotes and Sources, see Shirley Ricks, who was involved with source checking the Collected Works, and personally knew all the source checkers and what they found.

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1756&context=msr

Gossip ("a lot of people are saying" without ever saying who said what and what they could have known) is much easier than actually source checking.  I do know bit of what I am talking about because I have had to provide sources for my footnotes for dozens of articles published for various peer-reviewed publications.  Source checking is a pain.  Necessary, but a pain.  One way to avoid the pain is to not cite anyone.  But that would defeat the point of scholarship, and become simply partisan opining and sourceless propaganda.

Gordon Thomasson (who had been a Nibley assistant) reported that one critic who complained about one of Nibley's translations was actually only demonstrating his unfamiliarity with the particular source Nibley was using.

Bushman has the utmost respect for Nibley, and reported that Nibley's work came at an important time for his testimony, and that his essay on Joseph Smith and the American Revolution amounted to a "Thank you" and Tribute to Nibley.

https://rsc.byu.edu/book-mormon-authorship/book-mormon-american-revolution

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

[Robert F. Smith]

14 hours ago, Rain said:

I was reading reviews of "Rough Stone Rolling." 

One review had this, in part, to say:

"For Nibley is by far a superior and more recognized scholar, not only in LDS circles, but also one of the most respected scholar/author's in the world. He touches on similar subjects with clarity and both deep scholastic knowledge and his references are taken from his own research from original sources, not relying on the work of others as this book often does."

I'm in no way a scholar or historian.  Those who know more than I do, what do you have to say about what was said in the quote?

Utterly silly comparison, which is what Nibley himself would have said.  Both are world class scholars covering very different areas of research (though sometimes overlapping).  They also come from different generations.  Rough Stone Rolling is indeed a group effort, since no one person could examine and evaluate all the sources, but it is a wonderful bio.

[Robert F. Smith]

1 hour ago, Rain said:

Thank you everyone.  

My impression was that most had a good impression of Bushman.  I knew that some would not like the book and think it "anti", but this comparison surprised me.

High quality scholarship is often misjudged as anti, but that tells us more about the accuser than about the scholarship.

[Robert F. Smith]

12 hours ago, sunstoned said:

Bushman also pays more attention to his citations.

Actually, Bushman had a crew of professional historians working on his project.  Nibley did not.

[CA Steve]

17 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Utterly silly comparison, which is what Nibley himself would have said.  Both are world class scholars covering very different areas of research (though sometimes overlapping).  They also come from different generations.  Rough Stone Rolling is indeed a group effort, since no one person could examine and evaluate all the sources, but it is a wonderful bio.

I love books. When I have the chance, I will peruse the library of members when I visit them. I have noticed two things in those libraries. Members tend to have more books by Nibley but the ones by Bushman are more likely to have been read.   And I too am guilty of that.

[Kenngo1969]

@Kevin Christensen

Thanks for posting the Shirley Ricks piece.  I think that's what I was looking for.  Footnote 36 is my new all-time favorite footnote to anything, anywhere.  

Quote

Nibley’s piece ‘A Strange Thing in the Land,’ ran across reference to the book of 1 Jeu and changed it to 1 Jew. The other one is a typist who accidentally changed a word that she was unfamiliar with. Nibley stated that ‘there is no eschatology without protology,’ which was changed by the typist to ‘there is no eschatology without proctology’; this was amusingly corrupted further as ‘there is no scatology without proctology.’” Gee, personal communication, 3 October 2008.

       

[Kenngo1969]

@SeekingUnderstanding

If you're interested in the topic, still, you really should read the Shirley Ricks piece linked by Kevin Christensen earlier.  I think it's interesting how many people with such free and wide access to computers and databases (not to mention the Internet!   ) feel themselves so absolutely free to criticize Hugh Nibley, who did his research with actual books, and shoeboxes full of 3x5 cards, and a pencil.  She talks about how people were able to retrace Professor Nibley's research (and how librarians, if they had known, would have been mortified) by finding the actual books where he had penciled in his notations.

Edited August 2, 2021 by Kenngo1969

[SeekingUnderstanding]

35 minutes ago, Kenngo1969 said:

@SeekingUnderstanding

If you're interested in the topic, still, you really should read the Shirley Ricks piece linked by Kevin Christensen earlier.  I think it's interesting how many people with such free and wide access to computers and databases (not to mention the Internet!   ) feel themselves so absolutely free to criticize Hugh Nibley, who did his research with actual books, and shoeboxes full of 3x5 cards, and a pencil.  She talks about how people were able to retrace Professor Nibley's research (and how librarians, if they had known, would have been mortified) by finding the actual books where he had penciled in his notations.

All of which is immaterial to the fact that he is “sloppy” with his foot notes. 

[bOObOO]

17 hours ago, Rain said:

I was reading reviews of "Rough Stone Rolling." 

One review had this, in part, to say:

"For Nibley is by far a superior and more recognized scholar, not only in LDS circles, but also one of the most respected scholar/author's in the world. He touches on similar subjects with clarity and both deep scholastic knowledge and his references are taken from his own research from original sources, not relying on the work of others as this book often does."

I'm in no way a scholar or historian.  Those who know more than I do, what do you have to say about what was said in the quote?

I am in some way a scholar or historian but I don't know if I know more than you do on this issue.  I'd just say that people have different views about what original sources are.  Everything any of us mortals have learned was known by God before any of us.

[Kenngo1969]

1 hour ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

All of which is immaterial to the fact that he is “sloppy” with his foot notes. 

Okay.  I was unaware that you were such an expert in research.  I stand corrected!  

[Nevo]

14 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

”We never found anything that Nibley made up or intentionally misquoted.”

The only Nibley claim I have ever checked turned out to be made up. 

It wasn't just sloppiness. Sloppy was spelling Richard Reitzenstein's name wrong. Nibley completely misrepresented the scholarship he was citing.

Edited August 2, 2021 by Nevo

[SeekingUnderstanding]

20 minutes ago, Kenngo1969 said:

I stand corrected!  

By the very link you shared on this page no less. 

[Nevo]

[Sorry, was trying to edit. Forgot how the new board software works!]

Edited August 2, 2021 by Nevo

[Kevin Christensen]

The story of The Blind Men and the Elephant is a cautionary story about the dangers of over-generalization from inadequate sampling.  We establish our paradigms from what we take to be "standard examples of scientific work" sufficent to allow us to order and interpret all of our experiences within that frame.  (See Kuhn and Barbour on this).  So, it matters a great deal not only whether a particular sample is accurate, or inaccurate, but whether such sampling is sufficent to support broad generalizations, to support a paradigm and general outlook. For instance, one of several Nibley footnote checkers that Shirley Ricks quotes in the article I cited says this:

Quote

 Tredway relates:
As far as the thousands upon thousands of footnotes that
we checked, I remember no glaring errors. . . .
. . . I was amazed at the accuracy of his transcriptions as
we checked the sources against them. . . . I can’t imagine how
he read so widely because there were Nibley tracks (notations)
in so many books in the Harold B. Lee Library that it seemed
no one could have read that much, and that was only one
library. When I went to Berkeley to find some of his sources,
I found Nibley tracks scattered all over there too. It had been
rumored that he started on the first floor and went through
every book of interest to him all the way to the top floor of
the library, which was many floors (maybe as many as nine).41
And we got books through Interlibrary Loan from Harvard,
Princeton, Stanford, and a bunch of other universities with
those same tracks. To think that he typed each quote by hand
on a card with that old manual typewriter and indexed them
without any computer was mind boggling.42

I've long noticed that the thing about insisting on perfection is that it inevitably and naturally focuses one's attention on imperfection because by definition only imperfection is decisive.  And I've often quoted Betty Edwards in "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" as pointing out that our brains actually making the things that seem important and carry large amounts of information as larger than they actually are.  We are not objective truth machines, but biological interpreters operating under limitations and finite information and narrow perspective.

So perspective matters.  It matters to me intimately because every now and then, my lovely spouse of 43 years goes into a mode where I become reduced in her eyes as the sum total of only my worst actions, only my imperfections.   It is not a pleasant place to be, and the only honorable way out for me is to gently, patiently, acknowledge her pain, and the truth of what she says, but to also encourage her to consider a broader perspective, to count the blessings, rather that just fixate on the negative.  "Pure knowledge greatly enlarges the greatly soul." (D&C 121:42).  It follows that impure knowledge contracts the soul, which means that anytime we feel our souls contracting towards another person, or community, or culture, we ought to take a moment to reflect on what kind of knowledge is operating on us to generation that contraction?  For instance, when Othello is suffocating Desdemona, when is soul is contracted so far that he feels justified in murder, what kind of knowledge has he been operating on?  Has he followed the facts as he sees them, prodded by his friend, Honest Iago, to the appropriate conclusion?  Are his sincerity and honest conviction in that moment, sufficient to the case and action?  Do specific accurate facts always bring perspective in their wake? Or might a fan, a spear, a wall, a tree, a snake, and a rope might be subject to profound reinterpretation, given a broader perspective on the same observations?  Might a handkerchief, even if present, not mean what Iago suggests?

Early on on our marriage, my wife once stated, "I put up with your inconsistencies because your consistancies are important to me."  That is, she usually sees me with a pure knowledge that keeps my inconsistencies in perspective, and that in pure knowledge turn encourages me to keep working on those inconsistencies.  I have changed a lot over the years.  And I've read 19 volumes of Nibley, and more.  It takes more than one footnote to take his measure properly.  

And work goes on.  See Jeff Bradshaw here on Faith, Hope and Charity

Quote

Instead, as part of the ‘guarded tradition the Apostle’ [Paul] that is transmitted to readers in 1 Corinthians and elsewhere in scripture, these terms have been used to describe a distinct progression of ‘stages in a Christian’s earthly experience.’ The three stages that correlate to faith, hope, and charity were described by Joseph Smith as the ‘three principal rounds’ of a ladder of heavenly ascent. Each round marks a chief juncture in priesthood ordinances and on the pathway to eternal life.”

https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/faith-hope-and-charity-the-three-principal-rounds-of-the-ladder-of-heavenly-ascent/

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA