[2][3] Bibfeldt made his first appearance as the author of an invented footnote in a term paper of a Concordia Seminary student, Robert Howard Clausen.
When the ruse was uncovered, Marty's fellowship to study overseas was revoked, and he instead enrolled in the University of Chicago, where he spent the rest of his academic career.
Targets of Bibfeldt-related content include conservative theologians who maintain the historical consistency of their causes, neo-orthodoxes, those who pander to donors or cultural whims, compromisers lacking moral backbone, and American evangelicals.
Bibfeldt's bibliography includes his doctoral thesis, "The Problem of the Year Zero"; his response to Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or, titled Both/And, as well as the subsequent reconsideration Either/Or and/or Both/And; and his argument for the Mesopotamian origins of baseball, The Boys of Sumer.
A Swedish parallel is the fictitious theologian Elof Sundin [sv] at Uppsala University since the early 1960s.