From history to religion

Jacob Neusner

pp. 98-116

in: Jon R. Stone (ed), The craft of religious studies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

My work for the past four decades has pursued a single problem, which is, to explain how Judaism as we know that religion came into being. I have wanted to account for its success, when and where it succeeded in its social goals, and to explain the conditions of its failure, when it did not. While a field-theory of the history of Judaism has emerged, my principal interest, beginning to present, has been in the formative age, the first seven centuries ad. Then the books came to closure that together with Scripture ("the Old Testament") form the definitive canon of Judaism as we know it. The canon set forth in written form the Judaic way of life, worldview, and theory of the social entity that it called "Israel", this last a theological theory of the social order corresponding to Christianity's "mystical body of Christ". The work of description, analysis, and interpretation has carried me across four academic disciplines within the study of religion, in an overlapping sequence of approximately a decade each, history, literature, history of religions, and theology. I conceive religion to be accessible to this-worldly study when it is viewed as an account of the social order and the statement of a cultural system, and the problem of studying religion in my view is to explain the relationship between the religious ideas that people hold and the social world that they create for themselves.