The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol. 4: Mormonism and Early Christianity \( PDFDrive.com \).mobi by Hugh Nibley & Stephen D. Ricks & Todd M. Compton

Author:Hugh Nibley & Stephen D. Ricks & Todd M. Compton
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: The Maxwell Institute, BYU, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Publisher: Deseret Book Company
Published: 2010-11-11T07:00:00+00:00

The business of selecting, restoring, and translating pertinent texts is one that calls for the constant exercise of judgment and the constant making of choices. To enable the scholar to choose between two or more equally authentic but conflicting passages, between equally plausible but conflicting readings of the passage chosen, and between equally

grammatical

but

conflicting

translations of the text thus selected and restored, he invariably adopts some rule or policy in the light of which one interpretation will always enjoy a clear priority, thus obviating the necessity of giving serious consideration to the others. Let us consider the well-established principles upon which the experts operate.

All for the Party

In George Orwell's much cited and

disturbing novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the tyrannical super-state of the future is operated by its masters on the proposition that "who controls the past controls the present, and who controls the present

controls the future." That is the secret of power: If you can control people's ideas of the past, you control their ideas of the present and hence the future. The unhappy hero of the story works in a public relations office where the past is controlled. His task is to check all back newspapers kept in the official files of the state for any piece of news, no matter how old, that might

embarrass the government if brought to light–

old promises and prophecies that have

failed, glorious deeds of men now out of favor with the rulers, friendly alliances with governments now odious to the state, and so forth.

When he comes upon such an item, our

hero immediately cuts it out and burns it, substituting in its place a revamped version of the same story of exactly the same length but so rewritten as to make it seem that the present government has always been right, infallibly vindicated in the unfolding of events. It is a careful, deliberate controlling of the past, a rewriting of history in retrospect to suit the present interests and support the present policies of the Party, whose authority is thus confirmed by the verdict of history.

All this seems to us very cynical and sordid, and yet, appalling as it seems, Mr.

Orwell has given a very fair description of what has been going on for thousands of years in the learned world! Except in its cold-blooded mechanics, wherein does the operation described differ from that of the learned Hebrew Meturgeman? In his business of rendering ancient Hebrew into

contemporary Aramaic, "the most difficult passages were simplified, or explained, the incidents of the past conformed to the ideas of the present . . . and, finally, the laws expanded in accordance with the practice and teaching of later times . . . the Meturgeman did not scruple to transform the text before him in the boldest fashion. "17

His motive in this, we are told, was "to gloss over or to modify everything which seemed inconsistent with the accepted view of the history of the nation, to magnify and expound everything which redounded to the credit of the heroes of the past . .

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