History of religions discourse

Definition of history of religions discourse.

Jonathan Z. Smith is an historian of religions who has worked closely both with New Testament scholars and with the texts of early Christianity. Let us look briefly at the ideological texture of some of his commentary. A "gospel" is a narrative of a son of god who appears among men as a riddle inviting misunderstanding. I would want to claim the title "gospel" for the Vitae attributed to Mark and John as well as for those by Philostratus [about Apollonius of Tyana] and Iamblichus [about Pythagoras].... I am not describing a shift from myth (i.e. "aretalogy") to kerygma or a process of existential demythologization. I would want to insist, as an historian of religions, that what I have attempted to describe is thoroughly consistent with a proper understanding of myth.... I would propose that there is no such category as "pristine" myth but only application and that this application derives from the character of myth as a self-conscious category mistake.... My understanding of the nature of application has been much influenced by recent anthropological studies of divination.... Myth as narrative ... is an analogue to the limited number of objects manipulated by the diviner. Myth as application represents the complex interaction between diviner, client and "situation." There is delight and there is play in both the "fit" and the incrongruity of the "fit," between an element in the myth and this or that segment of the world that one has encountered (Smith 1978: 204-206).

For Smith, Matera's theological-historical commentary makes an intellectual mistake that no commentator should make as they interpret the Gospel of Mark--namely, Markan discourse is myth as narrative. The social-scientific commentary of Malina and Rohrbaugh, on the other hand, basically bypasses the nature of Mark as religious text to explicate it as a social and cultural text. The inner nature of the discourse, for Smith, is to intertwine a belief in God who has the final say over humans with the life of a person who engaged in radical enough activity to get himself killed in Jerusalem--a major ritual, political, and economic center of Jewish life during the first century. The challenge Smith envisions is to figure out the manner in which the "two stories" (myth and "life of") play with one another to create the incongruous story the text itself calls "gospel." For Smith, the issue is not the relation between story and discourse as literary critics often suggest. For a historian of religion, a primary issue is the application of myth to the "life of" a particular person (a Vitae).

From V. K. Robbins, Exploring the Texture of Texts, (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996), p. 108.

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