Most LDS scholars don't take his work very seriously today, and his work is largely unknown outside the church. His methodology is outdated at best, and intellectually dishonest at worst. I think BYU professor / FARMS contributor Kent P. Jackson best summed up Nibley's work in his BYU Studies review of Collected Works of Hugh Nibley. He points out that: 1. "In most of the articles Nibley shows a 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. By selectively including what suits his presuppositions and ignoring what does not, he is able to manufacture an ancient system of religion that is remarkably similar in many ways to our own--precisely what he sets out to demonstrate in the first place." 2. "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." 3. "Several of the articles lack sufficient documentation and some lack it altogether". 4. "Nibley's wit has made him one of the most sought-after speakers in the Church. But I am dismayed to find in this collection several passages in which his satire tends toward sarcasm and name-calling, which have no place in serious scholarship". Hugh Nibley reviewed by a BYU religious professor * Mormonismus(Mormonen)-Online Douglas F. Salmon in Dialogue seems to agree: "The number of parallels that Nibley has been able to uncover from amazingly disparate and arcane sources is truly staggering. Unfortunately, there seems to be a neglect of any methodological reflection or articulation in this endeavor". Hugh Nibley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia I think Hugh Nibley's popularity in the church is best summed up in BYU:A House of Faith, by Bergera and Priddis, pg 362: "As a former BYU history professor observered in 1984, '[Nibley] has been a security blanket for Latter-day Saints to whom dissonance is intolerable....His contribution to dissonance management is not so much what he has written, but that he has written. After knowing Hugh Nibley for forty years, I am of the opinion that he has been playing games with his readers all along....Relatively few Latter-day Saints read the Nibley books that they give one another, or the copiously annotated articles that he has contributed to church publications. It is enough for most of us that they are there.'" Hugh Nibley duped a lot of people in his day. The First Presidency was obviously no exception. ?? One would think that would've been pretty well established well before Hinckley's time. Not really. Also Truman G. Madsen and Hugh Nibley were contemporaries, both from the old-school methodology of finding parallels where they didn't exist to prove a point. I like Truman G. Madsen, but that doesn't mean that I'm impressed by Nibley's questionable, less-than-vigorous approach to LDS scholarship. The only thing that impresses me (and not necessarily in a positive way) is the extent to which he went to "prove" parallels where there were none. Well Nibley sometimes criticized Mormon culture as "kitschy", and as a Democrat was critical of Republican policies, but he was never critical of the church itself. In fact he was one of its foremost apologists. His entire body of work is devoted to "proving" the church is true. I don't know how Hinckley could honestly call him "the greatest critic of the church" when virtually everything he wrote was in defense / support of it. If anyone doesn't "like" him, it is probably due to his flawed methodology and intellectually dishonest approach. He was an apologist first and foremost, not a scholar. Which might be fine for some people, but I prefer my church scholarship a little more rigorous.
