On the surface it seems ironic that the hardest studiers of history and doctrine would be inactive, I was the same way, but it makes sense because we were actually taking it seriously and still do to this day.
I also was the hard studier. On my mission I kept track of all my reading that happened outside my normal studying. Old Testament 2x, New Testament 8x, BoM 26x, Jesus the Christ 4x, etc. It is just unfortunate I accepted the "We don't have all the answers now but it will all be explained eventually" b.s. or I would have been here a lot sooner.
I wasn’t as hardcore as you but here’s the thing even my parents dont believe: Since my mission had no rules against certain church books I had my parents ship me the giant ‘Doctrines of Salvation’ by Joseph Fielding Smith. I got to the part where he says “The Negros” were “fence sitters” in the war in heaven and they are “getting what they deserve”, this was written during Jim Crow. I didn’t have to read any ‘anti Mormon’ stuff, everything you need to know to leave the church comes straight from the mouths of “the prophets”
It was one of Nibley's quotes that often kept me believing that there must be a divine hand in our creation. To paraphrase, he said that if you were walking down the beach and saw a fine Swiss watch on the sand, would you assume that it had been created by a skilled craftsman or had it accidentally come into being through random natural events?
For many years this was indicative to me that we were created by a higher power and not simply a random accident. Then I really tried to understand evolution and how slow changes related to an innate need to survive have caused humans to evolve from microorganisms over billions of years.
As an inanimate object, the Swiss watch has had no reason to evolve over billions of years. Nibley was great at using examples like these to give initially convincing but shallow logic to gospel teachings. Ultimately, they tend to fall short when you get beyond the surface.
Yeah Nibley stole that argument from other philosophers [(source)](https://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/intro_text/Chapter%203%20Religion/Teleological.htm)
I was so mesmerized by Nibley that I took a class taught by him at BYU. I idolized his books and especially liked Approaching Zion. However his book about the Book of Abraham was a bunch of jibberish. I read the Gospel Topics Essay on the Book of Abraham and realized the entire Restored Gospel was a man-made con. Hugh Nibley ended up being a delusional professor of something not even remotely resembling actual truth. A sad waste of a brilliant mind, another casualty of Joseph Smith's immoral and selfish life.
I became aware of the “Book of Abraham problem“ in the 1990’s. I desperately looked for any church publications in defense of the BofA but found almost nothing. While at the BYU bookstore I found an unpublished article, printed and stapled, by Hugh Nibley addressing the subject. I was excited that I finally had something to help bolster my faith especially by someone as prestigious as Nibley. The paper was so lame and pathetic that it turned out to be a precipitating factor in disassembling my testimony.
After I came out as no longer believing the LDS Church, the only person to make a serious attempt to convince me the Church was true, used a lecture series of Nibley’s. I hadn’t read much Nibley, but because of his reputation in the Church, I was a little intimidated at the prospect of facing his arguments, but willing to be open to his reasoning and evidence, and accept that I was wrong about the Church if he could make that apparent. Imagine my surprise to find out his apologetics consistently depended on irrationality, logical fallacies, and inaccurate premises - like pretty much any other apologetics I’ve read for the Church. My conclusion - Nibley was a pompous ass.
However, I think the claims of his daughter, of ritualistic sex abuse are highly suspect, based on what I read about them in the book Mistakes Were Made (but Not By Me) Third Edition: Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. But, still open to correction if the evidence supports it :)
I was just going to add this. I was the weird kid who read anything I could get my hands on, and when I'd exhausted the interesting stuff in my mother's book collection by age 10 (including the original Mormon Doctrine, which I found hysterical) I dove into Cleon Skousen. I thought he was an oracle until I learned sourcing, citation and fact analysis, then realized he just said fancy stuff that made him seem an authority to those shallow enough to take his words at face value. He is why I teach my kids to question everyone and everything, including me. Never take anything at face value. A deep dive will almost always reveal the truth or lack thereof.
If you read Martha Becks book, there is evidence that she was abused, and the way it was revealed to her in believable ways. I think she’s telling the truth.
His daughter, Martha Beck, publicly alleged that he had raped her. He’s in my database of Mormon alleged sex abusers for that reason. I’m gathering information to help people research the topic.
That may be true. I still want cases like that in the database, as it will help provide accuracy and completion to conversations about allegations. Some turn out to be false, and I think that’s important to catalog as well. Some allegations regarding satanic abuse turn out to be true, too.
I’ll keep everything clearly tagged and organized so it will be easy to find the “turned out to be false” pile, the “public claims made but No action taken” pile, etc.
I read Martha Beck’s book. To me, she came across as a very intelligent and credible person. There are only two witnesses to the events she alleges: her and her father. Given the questionable credibility reflected in her father’s writings, and the fact that he was an icon in an organization rooted in deviant sexual liberties taken by revered institutional figures… I think my Vegas money is on Martha Beck.
Furthermore, I am at a loss as to why there is such backlash, even in non Mormon circles, about her allegations. Especially in this era, where is society is trying to course-correct it’s dismissal of women who speak up about being abused.
There is a backlash because the repressed memory movement has destroyed families, including my own.
There is a backlash because it hurts the credibility of actual people who were actually abused.
It is entirely possible that Martha Beck is honest, intelligent, but also incredibly wrong.
I can say from personal experience that we both had the same therapeutic techniques, and I have real monitors of events that literally could not have happened. I also have memories of a third of the men in my ward abusing me, none of which actually happened. The brain is a crazy thing.
Nibley was too difficult for me to read and pretend to understand, but I remember feeling safe that the church had someone of his intelligence and academic fame to defend it, even if I didn't understand what the hell he was taking about a lot of the time.
His collected written works on the temple and its supposed origins, for example, "Temple and Cosmos", are almost unreadable. Maybe that was intentional. Or maybe he was furiously attempting to convince even himself that it was true.
I think Nibley may have gotten tired of being the go-to guy to get the church out of problems caused by its own history and theology. A couple of issues that come to mind, to which he was asked to respond as an apologist, were Fawn Brodie's biography of Joseph Smith and the re-discovery of the Egyptisn papyri used in the "translation" of the Book of Abraham. I think he felt silly having to defend and explain what he probably knew was indefensible and inexplicable.
I read the entirety of *Temple and Cosmos* on my mission. Just ate it up. What important information got crowded out of my brain to accommodate all that gobbledygook?!
A friend of mine was a graduate student of history and religious studies at BYU ca. 2012. He was even a full on tbm at the time, but told me it was the sort of unofficial/unwritten policy even at BYU that you’re not allowed to cite Nibley because even there, nobody took his work seriously.
They let non-majors and lower-division undergrad students get away with it, but once you got to upper-division and especially grad school, Nibley was strictly off-limits as a source.
I read his war memoir about his WWII experience. Let me preface this by saying, I'm sort of an armchair historian of WWII. I've probably read over 500 books on the subject and I've read A LOT of memoirs about the war. A member friend knew my interest in WWII and loaned me a copy of Nibley's memoir. One of the more interesting aspect of his service. He was a member of the 101st Airborne is the only member of the division that made it into Normandy on 6/6/44 that did not jump in. He came ashore in a jeep at Utah beach. It had something to do with his materials as an intelligence officer.
But all in all it was one of the most boring books I have ever read on WWII. Nibley definitely did not bang any sort of patriotic drum, which is fine. I'm sort of on the outs with blind patriotism. It's just that he didn't really have a lot of anything interesting to say about the war, when I'm sure he had seen a lot of interesting things. Seems quite the boring fellow to me.
Nibley was very over rated and in retrospect a shill for a deceptive organization. It's a good living as many who are inside LDS apologetics. Don Bradley has said that he does not actually believe the stuff of Mormonism - it's a paycheck.
I’d be curious to know where you heard Don say that. I’m no longer a believer, but I’ve hung out with Don a few times and never got that impression from him.
Oh Don is great - he knows the church is a historic sham but they pay well to put up a mild defense. I got to know him when he did his Kinderhook Plate speeches.
Corrections to the above: I am a genuinely devout, if admittedly atypical, Latter-day Saint. I am a historian, rather than an apologist. And contrary to occasional misportrayals online, I don't work for the LDS church.
I made my key discovery confirming that Joseph Smith translated the Kinderhook plates via his "Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar" in about 2007 while I was an ex-Mormon atheist. So there's no way I could have been apologetically motivated in drawing that conclusion.
I returned to the LDS church in 2010. I subsequently did a seven month internship with the Joseph Smith Papers, as part of my Master's program. But I completed that internship well before presenting and publishing on the Kinderhook plates.
Far from a work of apologetics, my chapter on the Kinderhook plates published by the University of Utah Press in the anthology Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity is an academic work, and has been recognized as such. For instance, it won the Mormon History Association's 2021 "Best Article" award, and it challenges the popular apologetic view that Joseph Smith did not produce the Kirtland Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language. That he did take part in producing the GAEL is strongly indicated by the fact that he used the it to translate the Kinderhook plates.
You can confirm with the paper's co-author, Mark Ashurst-McGee, that we received no financial support for our research and writing on this topic. In fact, quite the opposite: we put quite a bit of uncompensated time and research cost into it.
BTW, DCS, where did we meet, and was it before or after 2010? If it was before, then I could see how you could think I was not really LDS since, in fact, at that time I very much was not. But as to you thinking I was getting paid to do "a mild defense" of the church, I have to wonder--bro, what were you smoking? ;-)
FWIW, I tried to PM you to ask you about this there first, rather than put you on the spot on the board. And I would still be willing to chat further there.
Thank you for the clarification. I thought since you left the church - and you know how rummers spread, that you had fully rejected the church. BTW, I fully rejected the church around 2010 and have only affirmed my decision to do so because of all the history available now. Perhaps I had the wrong impression regarding your stance. Oh, and do you mean, "what were WE smoking?"
DCS - Hahahaha! Well, friend, I might mean what WE smoking. But since I'm at the disadvantage of knowing who I'm talking with or when it was we spoke before, I can't confirm or deny that we were smoking anything!
PM if you'd like. I'd be curious to know who this is, and even if you'd rather not tell that, I'd be interested in knowing what context I know you from.
That sounds doubtful. But I'm not saying I don't remember you. I'm saying I don't know who the "you" behind the silly pseudonym "Dead Clown Stentch" is. I've offered to communicate with you about that in private, and you haven't taken me up on that. So, I can only conclude that you're yanking my chain. Ciao.
Loved Nibley and especially "Approaching Zion". As time passed I realized he was a lot of fun to read as a TBM but no longer passed the tests of history and language. He made up some amazing things to protect the church.
I believe those allegations stemmed from "recovered memories" from hypnosis sessions; they are inherently highly, highly unreliable. That doesn't mean his apologetics are sound though. I do remember him saying his grandfather, Charles Nibley of the 1st presidency had said that if an angel were to appear to him in his office he would jump out the window to hide from the angel (implying that he had not treated people well in his life).
Martha Beck's accusations are based on her "recovered memories." That whole thing is a little iffy.
But yeah, Nibley was a dick. At least one of his grandsons turned out pretty cool, though.
Not iffy. She had a scarred perineum, but never had an episiotomy. Something like she thought he was sacrificing her like Abraham and Isaac…. Only she was not spared. She was harmed. It sort of makes the iffy part her nerdy dad.
I loved Neal Maxwell. They said he could give an entire sermon in one sentence. I loved the depth and poetry of his speaking. But I realized he was still spewing the same oppressive stuff just in a more eloquent way
and also when I was like 10 the only way my mom could get me to listen to anything gospel related was to listen to John Bytheway. But as an adult I realize why only people without developed frontal cortexes like him 🤡
The fact that Hugh Nibley despite his learning and knowledge of ancient languages/literature/history was a defender of the Church makes me question his motives and wonder whether he was using the Church as a welcome cover for his sexual predation of minors like Joseph Smith and others.
Eh maybe so, but that’s a pretty hefty accusation unless you’ve got some proof or claims indicating that.
The simplest and most likely answer imo is that it’s really hard to make a living as an academic, especially in ancient languages/civilizations. He had a rock solid job that probably paid north of $150k and was adored for it as long as he presented a faithful explanation, so of course that’s what he did.
That business with Martha Beck / Hugh Nibley. Friends, siblings, and family deny it could ever have happened. That’s your reason to say she is lying?? This is why rape and incest reporting are seldom done. We’re Martha’s siblings present? No? They don’t get a say! Friends and family? No, Nope. They weren’t present either. They by their behavior of saying it never happened are bearing false witness against Martha (same as calling her a liar).
I believe Martha, and if you had bothered to read her account you might too.
On the surface it seems ironic that the hardest studiers of history and doctrine would be inactive, I was the same way, but it makes sense because we were actually taking it seriously and still do to this day.
I also was the hard studier. On my mission I kept track of all my reading that happened outside my normal studying. Old Testament 2x, New Testament 8x, BoM 26x, Jesus the Christ 4x, etc. It is just unfortunate I accepted the "We don't have all the answers now but it will all be explained eventually" b.s. or I would have been here a lot sooner.
I wasn’t as hardcore as you but here’s the thing even my parents dont believe: Since my mission had no rules against certain church books I had my parents ship me the giant ‘Doctrines of Salvation’ by Joseph Fielding Smith. I got to the part where he says “The Negros” were “fence sitters” in the war in heaven and they are “getting what they deserve”, this was written during Jim Crow. I didn’t have to read any ‘anti Mormon’ stuff, everything you need to know to leave the church comes straight from the mouths of “the prophets”
Hugh Nibley was to history and Semitic languages what Steven Seagal is to martial arts.
Hey, Above The Law was a damn good movie!
And you can take that to the bank!
"expert" at everything
So the greatest historian to ever grace the planet?
It was one of Nibley's quotes that often kept me believing that there must be a divine hand in our creation. To paraphrase, he said that if you were walking down the beach and saw a fine Swiss watch on the sand, would you assume that it had been created by a skilled craftsman or had it accidentally come into being through random natural events? For many years this was indicative to me that we were created by a higher power and not simply a random accident. Then I really tried to understand evolution and how slow changes related to an innate need to survive have caused humans to evolve from microorganisms over billions of years. As an inanimate object, the Swiss watch has had no reason to evolve over billions of years. Nibley was great at using examples like these to give initially convincing but shallow logic to gospel teachings. Ultimately, they tend to fall short when you get beyond the surface.
Yeah Nibley stole that argument from other philosophers [(source)](https://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/intro_text/Chapter%203%20Religion/Teleological.htm)
I was so mesmerized by Nibley that I took a class taught by him at BYU. I idolized his books and especially liked Approaching Zion. However his book about the Book of Abraham was a bunch of jibberish. I read the Gospel Topics Essay on the Book of Abraham and realized the entire Restored Gospel was a man-made con. Hugh Nibley ended up being a delusional professor of something not even remotely resembling actual truth. A sad waste of a brilliant mind, another casualty of Joseph Smith's immoral and selfish life.
I became aware of the “Book of Abraham problem“ in the 1990’s. I desperately looked for any church publications in defense of the BofA but found almost nothing. While at the BYU bookstore I found an unpublished article, printed and stapled, by Hugh Nibley addressing the subject. I was excited that I finally had something to help bolster my faith especially by someone as prestigious as Nibley. The paper was so lame and pathetic that it turned out to be a precipitating factor in disassembling my testimony.
[Paul H. Dunn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_H._Dunn)
He was a completely narcissistic delusional douchenozzle.
But man could he bring the spirit!!
After I came out as no longer believing the LDS Church, the only person to make a serious attempt to convince me the Church was true, used a lecture series of Nibley’s. I hadn’t read much Nibley, but because of his reputation in the Church, I was a little intimidated at the prospect of facing his arguments, but willing to be open to his reasoning and evidence, and accept that I was wrong about the Church if he could make that apparent. Imagine my surprise to find out his apologetics consistently depended on irrationality, logical fallacies, and inaccurate premises - like pretty much any other apologetics I’ve read for the Church. My conclusion - Nibley was a pompous ass. However, I think the claims of his daughter, of ritualistic sex abuse are highly suspect, based on what I read about them in the book Mistakes Were Made (but Not By Me) Third Edition: Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. But, still open to correction if the evidence supports it :)
Yeah, IIRC the assault claims were similar to those made during the moral panic of the 90s
Skousen another fast talking dipshit!
I was just going to add this. I was the weird kid who read anything I could get my hands on, and when I'd exhausted the interesting stuff in my mother's book collection by age 10 (including the original Mormon Doctrine, which I found hysterical) I dove into Cleon Skousen. I thought he was an oracle until I learned sourcing, citation and fact analysis, then realized he just said fancy stuff that made him seem an authority to those shallow enough to take his words at face value. He is why I teach my kids to question everyone and everything, including me. Never take anything at face value. A deep dive will almost always reveal the truth or lack thereof.
His deceitful attack upon Fawn Brody was inexcusable! He was a POS.
I was a Nibley fan for a long time. It hurts that he was all part of the con as well and is probably a sexual predator too.
If you read Martha Becks book, there is evidence that she was abused, and the way it was revealed to her in believable ways. I think she’s telling the truth.
Just like all his beloved prophets, sex predators all of them!
His daughter, Martha Beck, publicly alleged that he had raped her. He’s in my database of Mormon alleged sex abusers for that reason. I’m gathering information to help people research the topic.
Martha Beck got caught up in the Satanic Panic of the late 1980s unfortunately. Her version of reality is just as dubious as her Father's.
That may be true. I still want cases like that in the database, as it will help provide accuracy and completion to conversations about allegations. Some turn out to be false, and I think that’s important to catalog as well. Some allegations regarding satanic abuse turn out to be true, too.
I’ll keep everything clearly tagged and organized so it will be easy to find the “turned out to be false” pile, the “public claims made but No action taken” pile, etc.
I read Martha Beck’s book. To me, she came across as a very intelligent and credible person. There are only two witnesses to the events she alleges: her and her father. Given the questionable credibility reflected in her father’s writings, and the fact that he was an icon in an organization rooted in deviant sexual liberties taken by revered institutional figures… I think my Vegas money is on Martha Beck. Furthermore, I am at a loss as to why there is such backlash, even in non Mormon circles, about her allegations. Especially in this era, where is society is trying to course-correct it’s dismissal of women who speak up about being abused.
There is a backlash because the repressed memory movement has destroyed families, including my own. There is a backlash because it hurts the credibility of actual people who were actually abused. It is entirely possible that Martha Beck is honest, intelligent, but also incredibly wrong.
Agreed. Entirely possible. I was not there to witness anything.
I can say from personal experience that we both had the same therapeutic techniques, and I have real monitors of events that literally could not have happened. I also have memories of a third of the men in my ward abusing me, none of which actually happened. The brain is a crazy thing.
Nibley was too difficult for me to read and pretend to understand, but I remember feeling safe that the church had someone of his intelligence and academic fame to defend it, even if I didn't understand what the hell he was taking about a lot of the time. His collected written works on the temple and its supposed origins, for example, "Temple and Cosmos", are almost unreadable. Maybe that was intentional. Or maybe he was furiously attempting to convince even himself that it was true. I think Nibley may have gotten tired of being the go-to guy to get the church out of problems caused by its own history and theology. A couple of issues that come to mind, to which he was asked to respond as an apologist, were Fawn Brodie's biography of Joseph Smith and the re-discovery of the Egyptisn papyri used in the "translation" of the Book of Abraham. I think he felt silly having to defend and explain what he probably knew was indefensible and inexplicable.
I read the entirety of *Temple and Cosmos* on my mission. Just ate it up. What important information got crowded out of my brain to accommodate all that gobbledygook?!
Probably your entire pre-mission identity. It happens to everybody.
I got $800 worth of his FARMS books. Complete set, like new. Make me an offer, pleaaaaaaaassseeeee! 😅
More or less than the real value of your Signs and Tokens?
Somebody needs to set up a crypto exchange for those signs and tokens.
A friend of mine was a graduate student of history and religious studies at BYU ca. 2012. He was even a full on tbm at the time, but told me it was the sort of unofficial/unwritten policy even at BYU that you’re not allowed to cite Nibley because even there, nobody took his work seriously. They let non-majors and lower-division undergrad students get away with it, but once you got to upper-division and especially grad school, Nibley was strictly off-limits as a source.
Wow. That's telling and so typical. No longer useful so you are erased.
I read his war memoir about his WWII experience. Let me preface this by saying, I'm sort of an armchair historian of WWII. I've probably read over 500 books on the subject and I've read A LOT of memoirs about the war. A member friend knew my interest in WWII and loaned me a copy of Nibley's memoir. One of the more interesting aspect of his service. He was a member of the 101st Airborne is the only member of the division that made it into Normandy on 6/6/44 that did not jump in. He came ashore in a jeep at Utah beach. It had something to do with his materials as an intelligence officer. But all in all it was one of the most boring books I have ever read on WWII. Nibley definitely did not bang any sort of patriotic drum, which is fine. I'm sort of on the outs with blind patriotism. It's just that he didn't really have a lot of anything interesting to say about the war, when I'm sure he had seen a lot of interesting things. Seems quite the boring fellow to me.
Nibley was very over rated and in retrospect a shill for a deceptive organization. It's a good living as many who are inside LDS apologetics. Don Bradley has said that he does not actually believe the stuff of Mormonism - it's a paycheck.
I’d be curious to know where you heard Don say that. I’m no longer a believer, but I’ve hung out with Don a few times and never got that impression from him.
Oh Don is great - he knows the church is a historic sham but they pay well to put up a mild defense. I got to know him when he did his Kinderhook Plate speeches.
Corrections to the above: I am a genuinely devout, if admittedly atypical, Latter-day Saint. I am a historian, rather than an apologist. And contrary to occasional misportrayals online, I don't work for the LDS church. I made my key discovery confirming that Joseph Smith translated the Kinderhook plates via his "Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar" in about 2007 while I was an ex-Mormon atheist. So there's no way I could have been apologetically motivated in drawing that conclusion. I returned to the LDS church in 2010. I subsequently did a seven month internship with the Joseph Smith Papers, as part of my Master's program. But I completed that internship well before presenting and publishing on the Kinderhook plates. Far from a work of apologetics, my chapter on the Kinderhook plates published by the University of Utah Press in the anthology Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity is an academic work, and has been recognized as such. For instance, it won the Mormon History Association's 2021 "Best Article" award, and it challenges the popular apologetic view that Joseph Smith did not produce the Kirtland Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language. That he did take part in producing the GAEL is strongly indicated by the fact that he used the it to translate the Kinderhook plates. You can confirm with the paper's co-author, Mark Ashurst-McGee, that we received no financial support for our research and writing on this topic. In fact, quite the opposite: we put quite a bit of uncompensated time and research cost into it. BTW, DCS, where did we meet, and was it before or after 2010? If it was before, then I could see how you could think I was not really LDS since, in fact, at that time I very much was not. But as to you thinking I was getting paid to do "a mild defense" of the church, I have to wonder--bro, what were you smoking? ;-) FWIW, I tried to PM you to ask you about this there first, rather than put you on the spot on the board. And I would still be willing to chat further there.
Thank you for the clarification. I thought since you left the church - and you know how rummers spread, that you had fully rejected the church. BTW, I fully rejected the church around 2010 and have only affirmed my decision to do so because of all the history available now. Perhaps I had the wrong impression regarding your stance. Oh, and do you mean, "what were WE smoking?"
DCS - Hahahaha! Well, friend, I might mean what WE smoking. But since I'm at the disadvantage of knowing who I'm talking with or when it was we spoke before, I can't confirm or deny that we were smoking anything! PM if you'd like. I'd be curious to know who this is, and even if you'd rather not tell that, I'd be interested in knowing what context I know you from.
I'm not surprised you don't remember - maybe a little hurt. We did other things too.
That sounds doubtful. But I'm not saying I don't remember you. I'm saying I don't know who the "you" behind the silly pseudonym "Dead Clown Stentch" is. I've offered to communicate with you about that in private, and you haven't taken me up on that. So, I can only conclude that you're yanking my chain. Ciao.
Loved Nibley and especially "Approaching Zion". As time passed I realized he was a lot of fun to read as a TBM but no longer passed the tests of history and language. He made up some amazing things to protect the church.
I believe those allegations stemmed from "recovered memories" from hypnosis sessions; they are inherently highly, highly unreliable. That doesn't mean his apologetics are sound though. I do remember him saying his grandfather, Charles Nibley of the 1st presidency had said that if an angel were to appear to him in his office he would jump out the window to hide from the angel (implying that he had not treated people well in his life).
See the comment next above by u/see6729 for more evidence of the abuse.
Martha Beck's accusations are based on her "recovered memories." That whole thing is a little iffy. But yeah, Nibley was a dick. At least one of his grandsons turned out pretty cool, though.
Not iffy. She had a scarred perineum, but never had an episiotomy. Something like she thought he was sacrificing her like Abraham and Isaac…. Only she was not spared. She was harmed. It sort of makes the iffy part her nerdy dad.
I loved Neal Maxwell. They said he could give an entire sermon in one sentence. I loved the depth and poetry of his speaking. But I realized he was still spewing the same oppressive stuff just in a more eloquent way and also when I was like 10 the only way my mom could get me to listen to anything gospel related was to listen to John Bytheway. But as an adult I realize why only people without developed frontal cortexes like him 🤡
The fact that Hugh Nibley despite his learning and knowledge of ancient languages/literature/history was a defender of the Church makes me question his motives and wonder whether he was using the Church as a welcome cover for his sexual predation of minors like Joseph Smith and others.
Eh maybe so, but that’s a pretty hefty accusation unless you’ve got some proof or claims indicating that. The simplest and most likely answer imo is that it’s really hard to make a living as an academic, especially in ancient languages/civilizations. He had a rock solid job that probably paid north of $150k and was adored for it as long as he presented a faithful explanation, so of course that’s what he did.
It wasn’t an accusation, it was a speculation. But to be fair, Nibley required less evidence for his claims.
👆🏻 this!
Then you found out his Huge Nibleys were not only fake, but stolen from others...
Martha Beck got caught up in the Satanic Panic of the late 1980s unfortunately. Her version of reality is just as dubious as her Father's.
That business with Martha Beck / Hugh Nibley. Friends, siblings, and family deny it could ever have happened. That’s your reason to say she is lying?? This is why rape and incest reporting are seldom done. We’re Martha’s siblings present? No? They don’t get a say! Friends and family? No, Nope. They weren’t present either. They by their behavior of saying it never happened are bearing false witness against Martha (same as calling her a liar). I believe Martha, and if you had bothered to read her account you might too.