So now, the post...
Dr. Streuss over on the discussion board which officially represents the views of FAIR has a post about Nibley and he writes:
Often on other boards (and sometimes here) I read claims about Hugh Nibley’s incompetence and pseudo-scholarship. There is even a recent trend for these claims to come from LDS posters. So, my question is: Is this true? Were Paul Own and Carl Mosser mistaken when they agreed with Truman Madsen that “To those who know him best, and least, Hugh with. Nibley is a prodigy, an enigma, and a symbol.”
This is sort of a false dilemma. It's not a choice between pseudoscholarship and genius. I think Nibley was clearly a genius and had some rare gifts in language abilities and memory. But I also think he was, all things considered, a pseudoscholar. An IQ of 449 (which is average for an apologist as they self-report) doesn't guarantee credible research. And what I've tried to get from Nibley fans in the past is some kind of gauge for his true accomplishments. It's clear that he had a number of articles published in real scholarly journals, but that's par for the course for any associate professor trying to keep a job. That hardly makes him an "Enigma". Which articles or projects that he worked on are milestones for Arabic studies or antiquities in general? Which textbooks note Hugh Nibley as the quintessential thinker of anything? What work of Nibley even puts him on the scholarly radar let alone sets him well above other scholars in his field? Perhaps there's an answer to this, but I'm still waiting on it.
Nibley's work reminds me a lot of Immanuel Velikovsky's. Velikovsky was also a genius and had a knack for synthesizing volumes upon volumes of ancient lore into the most outrageous hypotheses imaginable. Nibley was an Enigma because he had these rare abilities whereby he could commit half the protologia, or rather half the BYU library to memory. He's not an Enigma because of his actual contributions to the scholarly world.