Traditional cult as a point of comparison with Christianity

Jonathan Z. Smith’s 1990 book Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity provided an important glimpse into the history of the study of ancient ‘‘paganism.’’ Smith showed above all that scholarly attempts to grasp the nature of religions of the Roman Empire besides Christianity were inevitably - and often explicitly - motivated by an anti-Catholic polemic, in which a pure, inspired Christian message became gradually ‘‘paganized’’ through the early centuries. Smith also observed that the categories by which scholars would label the principal features of the religions of the Roman Empire - ‘‘priest,’’ ‘‘sacrifice,’’ ‘‘god,’’ ‘‘sanctuary,’’ ‘‘theology’’ - were so loaded with Christian theological and liturgical meaning that they tended to obscure the data under examination: a Roman priest was not a man consecrated to God; few religions of the empire held communal ‘‘theologies’’; and ‘‘sacrifice’’ did not emphasize the violent, guilt-inducing blood-bath that scholars often placed as the backdrop to Christ’s ‘‘perfect sacrifice.’’

It is notable that many of the scholars most prone to accepting theologically-loaded terminology and repeating old Protestant biases have come not from religious studies but from disciplines like classics and history that claim a preference for ostensibly ‘‘native’’ terms (‘‘magic,’’ ‘‘baptism’’) over critically-informed ‘‘comparative’’ categories (‘‘ritual expertise,’’ ‘‘initiation drama’’). But any student of ancient religions must inevitably rely on comparative categories to make sense of primary materials, explain them in understandable ways, and assemble larger conclusions. Hence, to study the religions of the Roman Empire requires a willingness to abandon blatantly theological categories (e. g. ‘‘salvation’’), to rectify and define critically such inevitable categories as ‘‘priest’’ or ‘‘god,’’ and to develop new categories that more fittingly represent the religious worlds and experiences of people beyond a putative Christian fold. Ultimately, Christianity should emerge as one trend among many in the religious world of the Roman Empire. Indeed, it should be treated as a source of comparative data in its own right - for example, for new locations for shrine-centers or prevailing trends in the use of scripture for talismanic functions - rather than as the endpoint of ancient religious longing (see now Beard, North, and Price 1998).