Religion and Bible

Abstract

When we last convened our annual meeting Boston, nine years ago, I was invited present plenary lecture the Society. I chose, then, as my topic, Bible and Religion.1 Among other matters, I chided, fairly gentle manner, biblical scholars, especially students of the literatures of early Christianities, for resisting the social category 'religion their work, and for markedly preferring the personal and experiential term 'faith.' In so doing, I was mindful of the compound compo- sition of my audience, and so began by acknowledging the significant number of scholars then gathered Boston who held joint membership the Society of Biblical Literature [SBL] and the American Academy of Religion [AAR]. I went on recognize smaller, but no less significant segment of my audience, by reminding those present that in the past decade, the North American Association for the Study of Religion [NAASR], an organization that regularly met concurrently with the SBL/ AAR, had devoted four full sessions at its annual meetings to theoretical questions the study of religion raised by New Testament research. These sorts of affinal relations, I suggested, constitute a massive syncretism, uncommon outside of North America, which holds out hope for the development of different practices, and for experiments reconceptualizations of both religious and biblical studies. Rehearsing these remarks before you, nine years later, gives rise no little sense of irony. (A prophet, I clearly am not!) Since then we have experienced our own version of the Millerite 'Great Disappointment,' rupture more recently eased, although surely not healed, by signs and portents of 'New' [post-2011] 'Dispensation.' Indeed, had we met together with the AAR Chicago this year, I would have begun by referring not one of my own past appearances before this Society but rather the 1936 publication, the Journal of Biblical Literature, of brief article, The Interpretation of Sacred Books, by the intellectual founder of the History of Religions field at the University of Chicago, Joachim Wach, order stress the deep interrelations of the two enterprises, the study of religion and biblical studies.2 It is, no doubt, reflection of our recent 'time of troubles' that I find it, now, necessary state at the outset that nothing that lecture- or this one, for that matter - was (or is) intended imply that the sorts of biblical scholarship represented by the SBL were alien the sorts of study of religion represented by the AAR. Taken together, the separate and shared scholarly interests of both associations reflect and inform elements of our 'normal science' of religion. This is no new synergy. To pick only one strand out of complex weave of intellectual, academic histories: pre-Ugarit days, Arabic was the chief cognate language of Biblical Hebrew and therefore was competence of many OT scholars. Towering figures such as Julius Wellhausen and Johannes Pedersen used their skills comparative Semitic philology make important contributions both biblical studies and the study of Islam, thereby becoming immediately involved the wider Continental discussions and debates characteristic of the formative period of Comparative Religions as an academic field. By way of an aside, I would call attention, as well, Pedersen's remarkable 1914 comparisons of the Book of Mormon the Quran, project that remains the focus of series of learned conferences sponsored by Brigham Young University. Other scholars - William Robertson Smith is, perhaps, the most familiar example- used the same philological learning write classic theoretical works that are still influential on contemporary students of religion. While other European scholars readily come mind, the same pattern was equally characteristic of North America. Here, the most influential example remains Morris Jastrow, Jr. …