Hugh W. Nibley, 94

From the earliest age, I was taught to be respectful of the beliefs of others, tolerant of their traditions though they might differ from my own.

Then I met the Mormons.

I hate the Mormons. I hate that, like a McDonald's Fish Filet, they're the same everywhere. From Utah to Ukraine, I've seen them in their suits, with their Elder-nametags and fluoridated grins. I hate them for their quick American friendliness, a geniality without depth. Above all, I hate them because they pulled off what I've always wanted to do: They invented a religion, and made an assload of money in the process.

Two weeks ago in Provo, one of the prime architects and defenders of the modern Mormon conspiracy died at the age of 94. Hugh W. Nibley was the foremost, God-smacked party-line scholar of Mormon revelation in this Mormon century.

Nibley used his training as an historian to justify the 19th-century Mormon fraud, and may be the main reason that Mormonism is now taken seriously in theology departments and around dinner tables the world over. Without Nibley the Mormon Church would be pretty much indistinguishable from some goyim down in Texas calling themselves the Branch Davidians until the feds come knockin' with flamethrowers.

A professor emeritus of "ancient scripture" at Brigham Young University, Nibley was often called upon to justify dogma in light of rulings by the ruling Quorum of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His ancient texts of expertise were primary sources: the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price, writings that Joseph Smith-the founder of Mormonism after he'd failed as a town-to-town occultist in upstate New York-claimed that he was gifted by an angel who sought to communicate to white men of little intellectual honesty the narrative and teachings of Christ's sojourn in the Americas.

Smith's greatest discovery? A portion of the Pearl is known as the Book of Abraham: Smith's translation of an ancient Egyptian papyrus that he obtained for wampum in 1835, but which went missing after his death. In 1966, a professor found it in the Met's collection, right here in New York; subsequent studies of the document, based on definitive understandings of hieroglyphics only arrived at in the 20s and 30s, showed it to be nothing more than a common Egyptian funerary document.

Nibley spent much of his life touting this heap of reeds and hermetic symbology as the testament of the patriarch Abraham (you know, the one who almost shivved Isaac). He wrote reams of responses to Mormon officials, and generally sought any method at his disposal to support America's fastest-growing religion.

One thing about those Mormons, though: the boys make excellent CIA operatives, the blond girls are cute, and they run an excellent franchise of J.W. Marriott hotels.