Apostles and Bishops in Early Christianity

The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley #15

by Hugh Nibley, John F. Hall (Editor), John W. Welch (Editor)

Apostles and Bishops in Early Christianity

Genres: Religion, Lds, History, Nonfiction

254 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2004

About the author

Hugh Winder Nibley was one of Mormonism's most celebrated scholars. Nibley is notable for his extensive research and publication on ancient languages and culture, his vigorous defense of doctrines of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and for frankly discussing what he saw as the shortcomings of the LDS people and culture.

A prolific author and professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University, he was fluent in over ten languages, including Classical Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, Coptic, Arabic, German, French, English, and Spanish languages. He also studied Dutch and Russian during World War II.

In addition to his efforts as a scholar, Nibley was well known for writings and lectures on LDS scripture and doctrinal topics, many of which were published in LDS Church magazines. His book “An Approach to the Book of Mormon” was used as a lesson manual for the LDS Church in 1957.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is my least favorite of Hugh Nibley's books that I have read so far. It is a collection of his lecture notes from class he taught on the subject at BYU. As you may be able to imagine, a collection of a professor's sparsely edited lecture notes is going to make for difficult reading. The editors and their assistants seem to have chiefly spent their time finding the sources for (almost) all of Nibley's references to authorities, and they did an impressive job, including references and quotations from Greek, French, German, and other sources in the footnotes. Dr. Nibley was a brilliant student of ancient scripture and history, but as a teacher in classes he had a tendency to assume a lot of knowledge on the part of his students, to ramble into many topics in a disorganized fashion, and to repeat a lot of material. In this book, one learns a lot about the establishment of the Roman Catholic Church after the deaths of the apostles and apostolic fathers (those who knew the apostles), and how the church came to have bishops as authorities and Rome as the center of the church. Nibley is most interested in establishing that there was no apostolic authority conferred by Peter and other apostles, who were general authorities, on local bishops, and that no one considered Rome to have any central authority in the church until the fourth century and perhaps later. I wish that Nibley had talked more about the fact that the apostles and early church leaders did not expect that the church would live on through the ages, but had been taught by Jesus Christ that there would be a great apostasy and the authority of the church would be taken from the earth until its restoration. He mentions that two or three times but does not explain it, and so the background for his research and reasoning is missing. The editors' afterword, which explains where Nibley's more developed thinking on the early church has been published, seems to indicate that those sources would be more valuable to the reader than this book, which does not compare in quality to the other volumes in this series.

I have read another book that is a compilation of Nibley's lectures on the Pearl of Great Price (Teachings of the Pearl of Great Price) and it presents some of the same information and a lot of additional, valuable information, although it is also redundant and sometimes rambling. At least it gives a good summary of the material. It is not a volume in this series but a less expensive, paperback edition by the same or a related publisher, a format that perhaps would have been more appropriate for this even more problematic collection of class lecture notes.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Apostles and Bishops in Early Christianity, Hugh Nibley explores the roles and responsibilities of various leaders in the early church, as well as problems of succession leading to the Great Apostasy. Although it is highly interesting, the book may be too polemical to be of much interest to non-Mormons. The editors readily admit that two possible drawbacks to the book are 1) that the book consists of lectures delivered in 1954 (hence, not the most recent scholarship available), and 2) that it is from a time that was substantially less ecumenical than the present. Despite these drawbacks, the book is well worth reading.

[Javier Fuentes Mora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super good book

[Jeanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a compilation of lectures from the 1950s. It highly-documented the dissipation of the early Christian church, which suffered from no leadership after the death of the apostles. This book followed the early Christian writings, which confirmed a general church apostasy as foretold in the New Testament.
If you want an abundance of documentation to show how the apostasy occurred, this is it.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book and much easier read than most of Nibley's works. Having said that, it is much like taking half a dozen sentences from Talmage's The Great Apostacy and writing an entire book on them.

[Ryan Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

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