Wesleyan University

Historical Method in the Study of Religion

Author(s): Morton Smith
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 8, Beiheft 8: On Method in the History of Religions
(1968), pp. 8-16
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2504525
Accessed: 21-08-2017 17:35 UTC

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 HISTORICAL METHOD IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION

MORTON SMITH

Historical thought, as applied to the study of religion, has often concen

attention on two questions which history is incapable of answering - those
of the origin and nature of religion. The only thing history can tell us about
the origin of religion is that it occurred in prehistoric times. As for the nature
of religion, I should agree, of course, that the definition of the term is an
historical question. Nothing is more wearisome than to have some philosopher
invent his own meaning for the word religion and then go through history,
either distinguishing "true religion," which fits his definition, from "religion
falsely so called," which does not, or, even worse, trying to force all religion
whatever into his own mold. By contrast with this philosophical procedure,
the normal philological - and that is, historical - way of finding out what
a word means is to determine what it has been used to mean and then describe
the range and distribution of its uses. This method is used constantly, for
instance, in determining the meanings of words in hitherto unknown or im-
perfectly known languages. One collects all the passages in which the word
occurs and then looks for a meaning or group of meanings which will make
sense in all of them. Theoretically, therefore, I agree that the determination
of the meaning of the English word religion is an historical question. But
practically I doubt very much that it is a soluble question. The variety of
ordinary usage is so wide, the number of terms which the word has been used
to translate in learned literature is so enormous, the special meanings which
have been given it by individual thinkers are so many and so various, that
the historical method is unusable because of the complexity of the problem.
Even if a great staff of scholars were to produce a full account of the variety
of the usages, that account because of its complexity could never be fully
present at one time in any human mind. Those who have memorized the
Babylonian Talmud can never know it all at once - they can only recall it
part by part. Therefore I think the best we can do, with questions of this sort,
is to content ourselves with the customary generalities produced by the super-
ficial, historical methods of lexicography, and proceed to discuss the role of
historical method in the study of religion without knowing exactly what we are
talking about.

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 HISTORICAL METHOD IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION 9

This role is of course enormous, especially if one takes historical investiga-

tion, as I should, to include any sort of investigation intended to determine
just what did happen at some time in the past. In this sense, scientific investi-
gation, when it tries to determine what happened in a test tube, and criminal
or legal investigation, when it tries to determine what happened at a cross-
roads, and a vast number of other specialized sorts of investigation, are all
"historical." Any amount of stuff has, I know, been written about scientific
method and historical method and so on, but as far as they are concerned to
determine what happened in some past event, I think them the same: you
start with certain pieces of present evidence, meter readings or manuscript
text or whatever, you suppose that the present evidence was produced by the
sort of cause-and-effect sequences which you have learned from one or another
body of experience, and you try, accordingly, to imagine a set of causes which
would have produced the effects, that is, the evidence, to be accounted for. If
you can imagine two or more sets of causes which might have produced the
same evidence, you judge between them on the basis of probability (which is
another complicated set of generalizations from past experience) and your
result, "history," is accordingly, by your standard, the most probable account
of what happened. (It is not necessarily the true one. Indeed, it must some-
times be false, because improbable things sometimes happen and, when they
do, they produce results of which the most probable explanations will be the
wrong ones. But we can never recover the actual past event; therefore we have
to accept, faute de mieux, the most probable explanation as the historical one.
So truth is by definition stranger than history.) The search for, discovery, and
acceptance of these most probable explanations shape almost all our thought
about religion, as about almost everything else. From the immense range of its
relevance in the study of religion I want to pick out two spheres I think of
special importance.

The first is the obvious one: historical method enables us to produce the
individual histories of the individual religions which have arisen, flourished,
and declined among the civilized peoples of the world. These individual
histories are not, of course, the history of religion. That, I suppose, if we use
the terms strictly, would be an enormous, unknowable thing, an account of all
religious activities all over the world, from year to year, throughout the whole
course of history. This, thank Heaven, has never been attempted, and the
term "history of religion" is usually misused for what should be called "the
science of religion," that is, the attempt to classify religions by types, to de-
scribe the patterns of development and decline which are followed by the
various types, to determine the causes which produce these patterns and the
methods which might be used to alter them. Those who are accustomed to
hope for great things from the social sciences will doubtless expect them also

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 10 MORTON SMITH

from this scientific study of religion. Some, perhaps, will even envisage a
practical handbook entitled Religions, Their Causes and Cures. But, while we
await the development of this science of religion, we must recognize that the
first step toward it is the production of reliable histories of the individual
religions. Only when we know accurately the life histories of our specimens
can we begin to generalize about patterns of development. And lest one think
that the life histories of the major religions are already well known, so that
little remains to be done in this field, I want to indicate a few points in which
the application of proper historical methods has still to be carried through in
the study of the religions best known to our society - the religion of Israel
and two of its major descendants, Judaism and Christianity.
The first requirement of historical method is to determine the content of
your evidence. When your evidence includes texts, therefore, one of the first
steps in the historical study of religion must be textual criticism - the deter-
mination of just what manuscripts you have, just what readings stand in which,
how the different readings are related, and what was, most probably, the
original from which they derived. In the study of the religion of Israel this
work has been blocked by reverence for the common, medieval Hebrew text.
Consequently, we still have no good critical text of the Old Testament; thou-
sands of emendations almost certainly correct remain buried in the footnotes,
while students continue to memorize inferior readings and produce implausible
arguments in defense of them. To make a critical text it would be necessary,
of course, to compare with the Hebrew manuscript the readings of the oldest
versions and the quotations by ancient authors. But the one thing on which
experts in Septuagintal studies seem to agree is that there is no satisfactory
edition of the LXX, and careful study of the ancient Syriac versions is barely
beginning. Editions of many of the major Greek and Latin Fathers are far
from adequate, and the textual criticism of the Talmuds and the Midrashim is
in even worse condition.
After one has determined just what the texts, in their present form, originally
said, the next thing to be done is investigate their background. From what
group do they come? What interests do they represent? The answers given
these questions can make an enormous difference in our picture of the history
of a religion. For instance, "the religion of Israel" is commonly reconstructed
from the Old Testament on the basis of a tacit supposition that the works
preserved in the Old Testament represent the beliefs and practices of most
ancient Israelites. But there are strong reasons to believe that they actually
represent the beliefs and wishful legislation of a minority party which came
to power only for brief intervals during the period of the Kingdoms. If this be
so, then the various religious practices common in ancient Israel were actually
more like those which the Old Testament books denounce. Similar problems
have been raised for early Christianity, by the work of Bauer, Rechtgldubigkeit

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 HISTORICAL METHOD IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION 11

und Ketzerei, and for early Judaism, by that of Goodenough. In all these
instances it appears that we need very careful studies of the events which led
to the (practical or actual) canonization of the works now considered author-
itative, and to the disappearance of most of the material not thus approved.
Once we have decided what parties and interests our texts represent, we can
then go on (with due allowance for the bias of the works) to consider their
interpretation and reliability. As to interpretation, we are generally well sup-
plied with lexica and grammars, but a great deal still remains to be done in
biblical lexicography, particularly in critical evaluation of the many proposals
for interpretation of biblical texts in the half-light of ancient Near Eastern
parallels. It must never be forgotten that the bulk of the Old Testament con-
sists of works produced about the middle of the first millennium B.C., often a
thousand years later, or more, than the second millennium B.C. texts which are
advanced as explanations. Most of the biblical texts, therefore, are far closer
in time to the earliest versions, especially the Septuagint, to the traditional
interpretations (especially in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha), and to the
Phoenician and Nabatean cultures - besides being more closely related to the
traditions from which these sprang.
But these problems of lexicography are insignificant by comparison with
the questions of historical interpretation raised by much of the work, notably
the archaeological work, of the past half century. A great deal of it was based
on the assumption that possibility constituted proof: If evidence of destruction
could be found in a city, for instance, and could possibly be dated to about the
time when the Old Testament said the city was destroyed, that proved it was
to be dated then, and the date then proved that the Old Testament account was
correct and that the destruction was the work of the groups mentioned in the
Old Testament - as if nobody else could have done it! Another common
cause of error has been the tacit supposition that a source must be as old as its
oldest element, so that, for instance, a few Ugaritic terms can be taken as proof
that the Psalm in which they occur is of Ugaritic origin. The same method of
criticism would prove Paradise Lost was composed by Homer. Equally ludi-
crous has been the neglect of the literary character of much of the preserved
material, which is obviously legendary. Stories of men who entertain deities at
dinner or save them from rape, wrestle with angels, or stop the sun and moon
in mid career, are described as "substantially historical," and some scholars
have actually had the impertinence - or stupidity - to declare that "there is
no mythology in the Bible." Because of the story that Abraham came from
Ur, the centuries following the destruction of Ur have been christened "the
age of the patriarchs." One can imagine how classicists would laugh if some
pious Latinist were to christen the centuries following the destruction of Troy
VII, "the age of Aeneas." Most of this pseudo-historical criticism, therefore,
will have to be done over.

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 12 MORTON SMITH

From all this it can be seen that there is a great deal to be done before we
have reliable histories even of the individual religions best known to our own
cultural tradition. The science of religion, for which these histories of particular
religions are prerequisites, is still far in the future. But, when and if it comes,
both it, and the individual histories already developing, will be shaped by a
basic supposition of sound historical method.

This supposition, in classical terms, is "atheism." I say "in classical terms"

because the adjective "atheist" was regularly used in classical times to de-
scribe, for instance, the Epicureans, who insisted that there were gods, but
denied that they ever descended to any special intervention in the world's
affairs. It is precisely this denial which is fundamental to any sound historical
method. Whether or not supernatural beings exist is a question for meta-
physics. Even if they exist and exercise some regular influence on the world,
some influence of which the consequences are taken to be part of the normal
course of natural events - let us say, for instance, that they determine the
motion of the sphere of fixed stars, or that the whole of nature, including its
regular operation, is a manifestation of some unchanging divine nature or
will - even this is of no concern to history, since it is not history's task to
inquire into the causes of the normal phenomena of nature. But the historian
does require a world in which these normal phenomena are not interfered with
by arbitrary and ad hoc divine interventions to produce abnormal events with
special historical consequences. This is not a matter of personal preference,
but of professional necessity, for the historian's task, as I said at the beginning,
is to calculate the most probable explanation of the preserved evidence. Now
the minds of the gods are inscrutable and their actions, consequently, incalcu-
lable. Therefore, unless the possibility of their special intervention be ruled
out, there can be no calculation of most probable causes - there would
always be an unknown probability that a deity might have intervened.
In all this I am, of course, contradicting the recent statement of Professor
Thorkild Jacobsen, that when writing the history of religion we are only
concerned to determine what ancient beliefs were, not whether or not they were
true. This is false, because a great many ancient beliefs concerned supposed
cases of divine intervention in history, and these are questions of historical
fact. Whether Joshua's defeat of the Amorites at Gibeon was or was not
prolonged by his stopping of the sun in mid heaven for the space of a day is
just as much an historical question as whether a recent congressman's defeat
of his opponents was or was not affected by tampering with the voting
machines. In both cases, the historian must collect the evidence and try to
discover the most likely explanation.
Let me give an example of the way in which this practical atheism of

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 HISTORICAL METHOD IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION 13

historians works. A recent Ph.D. candidate undertook to write on interna-

tional relations in the ancient Near East. He dutifully collected all the rele-
vant passages he could find, and, not being historically minded, he took them
at face value. Consequently, he produced the following preliminary report:

International relations in the ancient Near East were entirely in the hands of the
gods. The gods decided when war was to be declared, and when peace was to be
made; they settled the boundaries and authorized the treaties; they directed the
rulers by their oracles, and the rulers consistently represent themselves as merely
the agents of the gods. An exception must be made in the case of Egypt, where
the ruler was himself a god. He was consequently able to direct Egyptian affairs
himself, and to take a more independent line vis-h-vis the other gods, than could
the other rulers, who were only men.

The first and most obvious thing wrong with all this is the failure to ask,
Who were the gods? - that is, what human beings were accepted as the
mouthpieces of the gods or as able, for official purposes, to determine their
wills? The historian must of course suppose that these human beings produced
the directives represented as divine, and he will therefore look in those direc-
tives for indications of the interests and intentions of their human authors. He
will therefore find, by the way, that the rulers of Assyria, who were evidently
able to get whatever oracles they wanted, and promptly, were much less
subject to "the gods" than were many Pharaohs who found their own divine
wills opposed by those of "the gods," that is, the priesthoods of the great
temples. And even if we suppose (as is probable) that many oracles were not
cooked to order, but were expressions of the individual or group unconscious,
or of the prophet's "sincere conviction," or whatever, and if we call the sup-
posed cause of such oracles Amon or Ishtar or Yahweh - even this account
of the cause permits and, indeed, requires naturalistic, psychological analysis
and explanation. It is a mesh in the coherent web of natural causes and con-
sequences, which a god is not. This fact has been much obscured by German
romanticism, which liked to give divine names to psychological phenomena,
but the difference is clear.
To make it clearer, let me conclude with a legal example. Shortly after a
recent accident the police, arriving on the scene, found two cars in the ditch
on the right hand side of the road. One car was overturned and its left side was
mashed in; both persons in it were dead. The other car, its nose mashed in,
was piled on top of the first. The driver's ribs were broken and he was uncon-
scious, but alive; he smelled strongly of whiskey. It seemed evident that he
had come out of the side road to the left, which there adjoined the main road,
without stopping, and had hit the first car (which was traveling along the main
road) in the side. When the driver recovered and was faced with the charges
he explained the evidence as follows: "It's true I'd had a little drink, but I

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 14 MORTON SMITH

wasn't drunk, 'n' I wasn't goin' fast at all, 'n' I meant to stop when I come to
the main road, but the ol' Devil, he's always out to get me; so when I come
up to that corner he come up right behin' me 'n' g'me a shove slam into that
other car. There jus' wa'n't nothin' I could do about it."
This explanation is irrefutable. It accords perfectly with the traditional
beliefs of both Christianity and Judaism, the major religions of our culture;
therefore it cannot be said to describe a course of events which, by the tradi-
tional standards of our culture, could be called impossible. But the traditional
standards of our culture are not its present, practical standards. For practical
purposes we now work by the presuppositions common to history and science,
among which, as I have argued, is one to the effect that supernatural inter-
vention does not alter the normal course of physical events. Anyone who
doubts that this presupposition is common might be asked to undertake the
legal defense of this driver. I think he would be well advised to defend him on
the ground of insanity. No jury would swallow that story. For a jury's task is
essentially one of historical criticism - to determine whether or not the
evidence presented establishes a probability strong enough to be taken as proof
that the accused is guilty as charged. And the ordinary jury's refusal to accept
accounts of supernatural intervention as explanations of historical evidence is
an example of common sense which historians of religion would do well to
follow.
I hope this conclusion seems a truism scarcely worth stating, because I now
propose to give evidence of the need for stating it. I shall draw my evidence
from the most authoritative work by the most eminent and competent general
historian of religion now teaching in the United States, that is to say, from
Professor Mircea Eliade's book, Shamanism, in its recent English edition
(Bollingen Series, LXXVI, New York, 1965). In discussing shamanic initia-
tion Eliade makes practically no distinction between initiations performed by
men, in which there can be deliberate communications of traditional teachings
and techniques previously unknown to the candidate, and initiation by sickness
and hallucination, in which any unknown material must emerge from the
candidate's subconscious. Thus he writes (p. 253 ff.), "Most of the (Chuck-
chee) shamans . . . claimed to have had no masters, but this does not mean
that they did not have superhuman teachers. The meeting with 'shamanic
animals' itself indicates the kind of teaching that an apprentice might receive."
This failure to distinguish between yarns about supernatural instruction and
reliable historical reports about human instruction has obscured in Eliade's
work the extremely important difference between two types of shamanism-
one hierarchic and usually hereditary, the other charismatic; it has also
obscured the almost equally important problem of the interrelation between
these two types, the ways, for instance, in which charismatic shamans attempt

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 HISTORICAL METHOD IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION 15

to transmit their powers (or, at least, their power) to their children, or a

shamanic hierarchy adjusts to extraordinary powers in an outsider. These are
serious faults of historical analysis. Equally serious is Eliade's acceptance of
the stories about feats of the shamans of the good old days; for instance, in
Shamanism, 254, 290: "The Eskimo remembers a time when the angakut were
far more powerful than they are today. 'I am a shaman myself,' one of them
told Rasmussen, 'but I am nothing compared with my grandfather Tiqatsaq. He
lived in the time when a shaman could go down to the mother of the sea
beasts, fly up to the moon,' " and so on - that is to say, the old man either
had more fantastic hallucinations, or was a less inhibited liar; or, most likely
of all, the stories of his feats had grown with time. It would be a matter of some
historical interest to know which, or what combination, of these possibilities
was the correct explanation. If hallucinations have actually become less ad-
venturous as primitive groups have come into contact with civilization, or,
if the influence of higher cultures has produced conscious caution in the in-
ventions of primitive religious personnel, we should like to know more about
the changes. But Eliade simply swallows the stories whole (Shamanism, 299,
500, etc.). What is worse, he goes on to make them into evidence for an
historical process, an actual decline in shamanic powers, which makes it im-
possible for shamans now to fly through the air as they used to! (Loc. cit.) If
by this he means an actual change in the content of the hallucinations to which
shamans are subject, let him say so and let the question be investigated - if
there is adequate evidence for an investigation. But it is worth remarking in
this connection that both Homer and the Old Testament picture a world in
which the powers of men in general have far declined from what they were in
the good old days. Perhaps Eliade would accept their picture, too, but the fifth
century B.C. author of the Battle of Frogs and Mice could already parody
such stories in the spirit of historical criticism, making his hero frog lift a
great mud ball "which not nine frogs of these degenerate days" could hope to
move.
Actually, the most striking characteristic of Eliade's work on shamanism is
its total and deliberate neglect of the importance of sham. This is characteristic
of a great many works of contemporary anthropology and ethnology. It is a
reaction against the unsympathetic, either dogmatic or rationalist, approach to
primitive beliefs and practices which vitiated the work of many early observers.
For good observation it is of course necessary to study with sympathy. But for
good judgment it is necessary to regain objectivity. The study of religion is in
this respect like the study of poetry. One must come to the material with what
Coleridge called "that willing suspension of disbelief which constitutes poetic
faith," or one will never feel the moving power which the material has, and
one will never, therefore, be able to understand what the believers are talking
about. But neither religions, nor even poems, exist in vacuo. Therefore, having

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 16 MORTON SMITH

experienced what the cerem

like the critic, must then be able to return from the world of imagination to
that of fact, and to determine the relation of the poetic or religious complex to
its environment in the historical world.

Columbia University

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