Matthew Black and Mircea Eliade Meet Hugh Nibley - a podcast by PDF feed of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship

Abstract: As a graduate student, Gordon Thomasson had the opportunity to introduce two internationally renowned scholars to the publications and scholarship of Hugh Nibley: Matthew Black, an eminent scholar of ancient Enoch writings; and Mircea Eliade, famed chair of the History of Religions program at the University of Chicago. Upon hearing of Nibley’s Enoch discoveries, Black made an immediate, impromptu visit to BYU to meet him. Upon reading one of Nibley’s studies, Eliade proposed hiring him on the spot, exclaiming, “He knows my field better than I do, and his translations are elegant!”





[Editor’s Note: Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article is reprinted here as a service to the Latter-day Saint community. Original pagination and page numbers have necessarily changed, otherwise the reprint has the same content as the original.

See Gordon C. Thomasson, “Matthew Black and Mircea Eliade Meet Hugh Nibley,” in Hugh Nibley Observed, ed. Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Shirley S. Ricks, and Stephen T. Whitlock” (Orem, UT: The Interpreter Foundation; Salt Lake City: Eborn Books, 2021), 423–432. Further information at https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/hugh-nibley-observed/.]

Matthew Black1

I left BYU in 1968 after suffering, as a passenger, in six months’ time what normally would have been two fatal automobile accidents. Already having been admitted to University of California, Santa Barbara, [Page 72]Professor Nibley told me that if I came back to complete advanced degrees in religion at BYU he would never speak to me again, because I “would have nothing to say” (Hugh then made an explicitly pointed critique of academic inbreeding in BYU religion at the time). During the rest of my graduate studies elsewhere, I stayed in contact with him through various means, primarily because I still sporadically worked on Brigham Young materials we had researched together. My other responsibilities to him [Page 73]at BYU had included my subsequently continuing study and critiques of both Latter-day Saint apologetics for the Book of Mormon (a never-completed thesis) and of temple-related ritual texts across cultures and through world history. I also continued to follow his other research.

Among other projects, Hugh continued to publish serially on aspects of the Pearl of Great Price, first focusing on Abraham and then on Enoch. The Enoch research appeared in the Ensign magazine as “A Strange Thing in the Land: The Return of the Book of Enoch” (1976–1977). Some of these and others of his writings on Enoch later appeared with slightly altered content in Enoch the Prophet.2 Latter-day Saint interest in the study of these texts continues.3

After I left BYU, Terrell M. Butler, a fellow graduate student at Cornell, invited me to join him in attending a guest lecture there that was to be given by Matthew Black. [Professor Black had collaborated with Józef Milik in the first translation of the Aramaic fragments of the Book of Giants into Englis...

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