Drudgery divine

Jonathan Z. Smith takes aim at a problem he sees in how scholars have studied religion. He argues that writers with a stake in defending a faith can steer the comparison of religious traditions toward their own conclusions. To make the case, he surveys four hundred years of work that set the earliest Christian communities beside the religions of late antiquity, including the so-called mystery cults. He contends that much of this work rests on a hidden quarrel between Protestants and Catholics.

The book is largely a critique of how New Testament scholarship has been done, but it also offers a new way of describing early Christian movements so that they can be compared with other traditions on fair terms. It is a methodological work and a theoretical statement, and it reflects the approach to comparison that Smith is known for across his career at the University of Chicago.