his approach concludes that most of the works that were found atNag Hammadi are not Gnostic because they lack the Gnostic myth evenif some include certain of its characters or motifs in otherwise quite differ-ent stories.

Thispicture of Christian life may not match conditions of the middle of thesecond century, but instead may suit better the more developed Chris-tian churches of the third century, long after Irenaeus.

To this I would simply say that the burden of proof is ontheir side: we’ve been at this ‘study of religion’ thing for a while now, and still, we have nosingular definition of ‘Religion’ which the majority of scholars can agree on. If it is the case thatall of our various attempts to impose one abstract concept on disparate phenomena constantlycome up short, then isn’t it perhaps more likely that the abstract concept which we are trying toemploy is precisely not a derivation from the phenomena, but rather an imposition on them? Thehistorical perspective, on the other hand, shows that religion changes, and that this is because wechange with it.

that one can abstract ‘Religion’ from‘religions’ in some meaningful sense

If it were the casethat there is such a thing as capital-R ‘Religion’ (that is, religion sui generis), then it would seemto me that we would necessarily be able to find a plethora of various words throughout historywhich refer to this one self-same ‘thing’, ‘Religion’. That is, we would expect to find analoguesfor ‘Religion’ in a wide variety of disparate languages and historical settings, much like we coulddo for a word like ‘tree’ or ‘bowl’, etc. B

What is the Study of Religion?

points of commonality between the various religious traditions of the world

such a concrete thing as religion

but it didn’t have secularists—which is to say it didn’t havereligion either.

which we call modern subjectivity.

his is because religion is thetwin of modern science

ng, ‘religion’ (for example as opposed to secularism), highlights the very modern, very global,

any, perhaps even most or all,people who practice a religion today have some understanding of themselves as doing thisbroader, second order thing, ‘religion’, and this would seem perfectly natural to us

Even a distinctionsuch as that between Christianity and ‘Heathenism’, for example, could have been made withoutrecourse to the general category of religion

‘religion’

Religion, in other words, is the product of contingency, anaccident.

That ‘religion’ is a thoroughly modern phenomenon (perhaps even an epiphenomenon ofmodernity), one whose history is necessarily tied up with the study of religion. There wasno chemistry before there were chemists, and there was no religion before there werescholars of religion.

uncovered

hey nevertheless remainsdistinct regions of human experience.

we understandimplicitly

But is it not the case that in our average understanding religion and science are so oftenopposed, or if not outright opposed, then somehow at odds?

At this point, we might feel equally compelled to ask, “what isreligion?”

This raises the question as to whether interpretivereconstruction encourages cumulative scholarly development rather than interpretive pluralismas an end in itself.

proliferation of interpretations

clear criteria

Additionally, this construal may simply reflect my own temperamental preference andacademic training to date.

outside of practitioners’ understandings.

hey also emerge within specific social, political, andmaterial conditions that shape what can be thought, said, and done. An emphasis on intelligibilitymay therefore leave insufficient room for analyzing how religious forms are produced

I argue that an assumption of coherence is methodologically necessary forunderstanding how practitioners experience religious objects as meaningful, but that this must betreated as a heuristic tool rather than as a description of lived religious reality.

ow such judgments are to be disciplined,without abandoning the reconstructive task altogether, is a live methodological question.

what ispresented as a practitioner’s worldview reflects the scholar’s own assumptions or theoreticalinterests.

At every stage, interpretation involves judgment aboutwhat counts as relevant and what can be reasonably ascribed to adherents

If coherence is, at least in part, an achievementof interpretation rather than a given of religious life, then the study of religion must remainattentive to the heuristic character of its reconstructions.

The problem becomes even greater when disagreement among practitioners is taken intoaccount.

risks overstating the unity of lived religiousexperience

ithout some appeal to coherence, reconstructionrisks collapsing into mere aggregation, offering only description rather than understanding.

are in fact coherent enough to be reconstructed by the scholar in the first place

interpretive reconstruction

The academic study of religion is primarily concerned with understanding how religioustexts, material objects, and practices make sense to those who inhabit them.

: how religious texts, material objects,and practices (frequently referred to with the shorthand “religious objects” below

he rst half of Golitzin's explanation—that the author took on a sub‐apostolic pseudonym so as to “ght rewith re”—fails to explain why he took on the particular pseudonym he did

hese two scholars, then, set the terms for the subsequent study of the CD in the twentieth century. SinceDionysius was exposed as Pseudo‐Dionysius, scholars have consistently dismissed the pseudonym. They haveargued that it was a ploy on the author's part to win a wider readership in a time of anxious orthodoxies. Thepreponderance of scholars have worked in the wake of Koch, attempting to assess the nature and extent of theauthor's debt to late Neoplatonism. For most of these scholars, the debt to Plato precludes Paul. Müller nds“no trace” in the CD of the salvation by the blood of Christ, which he understands to be the essence of Paul'steaching. J.-M. Hornus insists that the CD “totally ignores...the central afrmation of Pauline faith,” againhere the atonement through the blood of Christ. For E.R. Dodds, the great scholar of later Greek philosophy,the CD is little better than a poor attempt at “dressing [Proclus'] philosophy in Christian draperies and passingit off as the work of a convert of St. Paul.” R.A. Arthur laments that while “[Dionysius'] main Christianinuence ought to be that of Paul...his much vaunted discipleship is simply not convincing.” While her overallassessment is that “his own theology owes very little indeed to Paul,” she notes one similarity: “both [Paul andDionysius] more or less ignore the human Jesus.” In short, the dominant scholarly stream has consistentlyneglected to examine the aims and purposes of the pseudonym and the inuence of Paul

some potentially troubling discrepancies (i.e. Clement and Ignatius) and goes to great lengths to explain awayothers.

I show how Dionysius' Christology,so often found wanting, derives from Paul's experience of the luminous Christ on the road to Damascus.

ancient use of the criterion of multiple attestation

Within this passage Origen gives as clear a statement as we could wish of theagonistic paradigm of interpretation: one needs to bring the scriptures aswitnesses, “For without witnesses our interpretations and exegeses are incred-ible” (1.7).

efineshermeneutics within an agonistic paradig

opueqeApior)sauaSounayyfasnpeonoeadapiyjosemwuayscspayydunssiy