Gnosticism and the History of Religions. By David G. Robertson

Abstract

A recent issue of this journal (Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89:4) presented a roundtable on “Theosophy and the Study of Religion” that shed light on the extensive intermingling of scholarship with Theosophy as the study of religion coalesced into an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such archaeological work is essential to the functioning of our field as a self-reflexive, critical discipline, because it provides opportunities to reassess too-long-settled consensus, change theoretical boilerplates that have outlived their utility, and—most urgently—expose the hidden complicity of our field in projects of (ideological and physical) domination of subjugated peoples and cultures. David G. Robertson’s Gnosticism and the History of Religions joins in on this disciplinary digging, focusing upon the travels of the concepts of gnosis and Gnosticism. Robertson seeks to present a narrative history of religious studies that connects the category critiques of Michael...