Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity
Jonathan Z. Z. Smith, 1990
In this major theoretical and methodological statement on the history of religions, Jonathan Z. Smith shows how convert apologetic agendas can dictate the course of comparative religious studies. As his example, Smith reviews four centuries of scholarship comparing early Christianities with religions of late Antiquity (especially the so-called mystery cults) and shows how this scholarship has been based upon an underlying Protestant-Catholic polemic. The result is a devastating critique of traditional New Testament scholarship, a redescription of early Christianities as religious traditions amenable to comparison, and a milestone in Smith’s controversial approach to comparative religious studies.
(Text by the author)
Contents:
On the origin of origins
On comparison
On comparing words
On compating stories
On comparing settings
Index