Religious principles to be learned from stories and prophets

Seven scriptural accounts of the Creation arranged in parallel columns

Presentation to the American Historical Association.

An outline of time from Abraham to the birth of the United States written by W. J. Cameron and pedigree charts written by James H. Anderson showing the relationship of Mormonism to the past and the future of the covenant

Reprinted in The Ancient State, The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley 10. 303–10.

Adds some notes to Mr. Warren Blake’s study of the life and works of Joseph Justs Scaliger to correct some common misconceptions.

Includes questions and answers about Bible passages

Compiled in Compiegne, France (at the end of World War II) using J. G. Hava, Arabic-English Dictionary for the Use of Students (Beirut: Catholic University Press, 1921).

Reprinted in The Ancient State.

Considers the nature and importance of the sparsiones by looking at three points: (1) what was distributed by sparsio, (2) by whom and on what occasions, and (3) by what particular methods.

Commenting on the reception of Fawn Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith, Thomas G. Alexander claims that “perhaps no book in recent years has evinced more comment.” He then contrasted “the scholarly Marvin Hill’s” two reviews of Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith (Dialogue 7, no. 4 [1972]: 72–85; Church History 43, no. 1 [March 1974]: 78–96) with “the rather outrageous Hugh Nibley’s No Ma’am That’s Not History. . .’” See Thomas G. Alexander, “The Place of Joseph Smith in the Development of American Religion: A Historiographical Inquiry,” Journal of Mormon History 5 (1978): 3–17, at 10, no. 9. The bibliographer-historian Dale L. Morgan, who provided Fawn Brodie with considerable assistance with both the contents and style of her biography of Joseph Smith, described Nibley’s pamphlet as “something of a slapstick performance, and the irony of it is, Nibley . . . is much more intoxicated with his own language than you, the ‘glib English major’ are.” See Morgan’s letter to Fawn Brodie, dated 9 June 1946, in Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism: Correspondence & A New History, ed. John P. Walker (Salt Lake City: Signature Press, 1986), 125. Tertius Chandler, a dilettantish polymath and friend of Morgan, included a polemic against Nibley’s pamphlet in Chandler’s Half-Encyclopedia ([Dedham, MA]: privately printed, 1956), 662–79. (The entry is entitled “The Controversy over Joseph Smith” and is dated 14 July 1952; it was extended to include other LDS responses to Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith in “The Controversy over Joseph Smith—Part II,” dated 1 September 1952, 675–79). BYU Special Collections has a primitive typescript version of Chandler’s “The Controversy over Joseph Smith,” dated 1 September 1952, 22 pp.

This is a short, witty reply to Fawn M. Brodie’s No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet, 2nd ed., rev. and enlarged (New York: Knopf, 1945; 1971). Nibley’s response to Brodie signaled to the Saints that there was still room for a nonnaturalistic account of Joseph Smith’s prophetic claims and revelations. Cultural Mormons who celebrated a new enlightenment with the appearance of Brodie’s treatment of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon were often troubled by what they considered Nibley’s flippant response to Brodie. Opposition to his views has also been a common feature of the secular, revisionist element in the so-called New Mormon History, which has tended to see in Brodie’s account of Joseph Smith the beginning or basic outline of an acceptable naturalistic account of Mormon things.