Drudgery, Terminable and Interminable ¹

DRUDGERY DIVINE: ON THE COMPARISON OF EARLY CHRISTIANITIES AND THE RELIGIONS OF LATE ANTIQUITY. By Jonathan Z. Smith. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. Pp. xvi + 147. Paperback, $30.00. I finally saw “The Godfather” (1972) sometime in the early 2020s. I hated it. I remarked to my partner that it was unoriginal, filled with clichés, completely predictable, and almost comic in its abuse of common tropes. With some exasperation, she pointed out to me that those clichés, tropes, and plot lines were so predictable precisely because of the film’s influence, and because subsequent mob-related films (which I had seen) had imitated them. I imagine generations younger than mine reacting precisely the same way to Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction.” It is a happy fate to be consigned to irrelevance precisely because your work has completely changed the conversation. Such, alas, has not been the fate of Jonathan Z. Smith and his still-important 1990 book, Drudgery Divine. Yes, there is a consistent pattern of academic genuflection to Smith, and his work is frequently cited (albeit often in apotropaic fashion). And yes, the tropes of Drudgery survive, as does at least the language of its important acts of critique. In fact, these citations and turns of phrase are in common enough circulation, apparently, for a younger generation of scholars (at least some of whom have never read the book, as I had never previously seen “The Godfather”) to treat them as passé. However, the fundamental lessons of the book have yet to be actualized, especially in my own area of expertise, “Christian origins” (a designation almost as problematic as the “New Testament Studies” it replaces).2 This failure is particularly ironic, since the book used the origins of Christianity as its specific example for what were really much broader theoretical points (on which see McCutcheon, in this issue). The irony is compounded by the fact that precisely because of the use of ancient Christianity as his central illustration,3 a group of prominent Christian origins scholars initiated a long-standing seminar aiming to—to use Smith’s terminology—“redescribe” the origins of Christianity. Smith’s language of “redescription” is still used to gesture toward a revisionist or even radical approach to Christian origins, but without actually engaging in the very precise kind of redescription envisioned by him. In 1994, when Drudgery was fresh and new, in a review essay on the book in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion (Arnal 1993), I noted three major contributions of the book, and I think it is worth assessing the impact of the book today, more than 30 years later, in terms of that (admittedly, somewhat artificial) trio. The first major contribution was a critique of Christian origins scholarship, especially with respect to genealogical comparison of early Christianity with the so-called “mystery religions”4 of antiquity and the apologetic and “protectionist” impulses5 that animated that comparison. The book’s arresting opening discussion of the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, as McCutcheon notes in this issue, sets the stage for this critique. There is no doubt that Smith’s devastating evaluation of this scholarship has had some salutary effects. Theoretically informed scholars of Christian origins are probably more leery now than they used to be of claiming elements of earliest Christianity to be “unique,” and this is certainly a good thing. As Smith argues (37), uniqueness is actually a reciprocal category: if my favored datum is “unique” with respect to some undesirable comparans, then that comparans is equally “unique” with respect to the comparandum. Or, to put it differently, everything is unique, but nothing is uniquely unique. At the same time, I fear that casual readers of the book have cherry-picked Smith’s demolition of past scholarly use of the mysteries, and with results Smith himself would deplore. Notwithstanding the obligation to cite Drudgery whenever one wishes to dismiss the mysteries as an illegitimate comparans, Smith’s argument was hardly that such comparison is in itself and thus intrinsically illegitimate. Rather, the book critiques the genealogical orientation of that comparison, rooted in a desire for pristine “origins,” and in fact concludes with a forceful encouragement to compare the trajectory within early Christianities from “locative” to “utopian” orientations (see below) with the same trajectory among the mysteries. Ironically enough, Smith (101–5) specifically criticized the duplicity of reactions to revised scholarship on the mysteries which established the lateness of resurrection motifs in their central myths: when it was thought the resurrection was an early motif in the mysteries, NT scholars denied a genealogical connection; but when it was determined that the motif was late, and therefore that the purity of Christianity was no longer under threat, suddenly genealogical connections were mooted again (in the direction of Christianity now influencing the mysteries). Similarly, Smith’s criticism of the manner of comparison between Christianity and the mysteries has been opportunistically appropriated as a support for rejecting comparison between these, in fact, very similar sets of mythologies tout court, a rejection which in its turn helps preserve the very “uniqueness” Smith so roundly condemned. Indeed, the book concludes with a broadside against the very idea that any element, especially some mythically conceived “origin,” of earliest Christianity is radically incomparable (143). In short, in at least some of the reception of Drudgery, we find Smith, just as Marx found Hegel, standing on his head. More broadly, the genealogical approach to thinking about Christianity and its beginnings is still as prominent as ever: it indeed remains the default of the field (i.e., the field as it has long been practiced presupposes this approach and is thus a product of it). The continued production of book after book about the “historical Jesus” (e.g., Schröter and Jacobi 2022; Crossley and Myles 2023; Crossley and Keith 2024), and indeed the existence of an entire journal devoted to this topic (Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, Brill since 2003), is a clear indication of how firmly wedded the field is to a genealogical model of “explanation.”6 The quest for the historical Jesus is but one example (albeit the most egregious one) of a continued tendency in our field to fall back on a kind of old-fashioned “history of ideas” approach, and reflects what Willi Braun (2020) aptly calls our “addiction to origins.”7 A second contribution of Drudgery Divine was theoretical, offering the two already mentioned “middle-range” categories—locative and utopian—as ways of categorizing ancient (inter alia) religious orientations.8 These categories are efforts on Smith’s part to use spatiality as a framework for offering more useful comparisons, ones that did not depend on genealogical lines of influence. Here, the book’s impact has been even more limited. In my 1994 review, I offered a (somewhat muted) appreciation for this framework. I especially found then (and continue to find now) Smith’s formulation of locative orientations a persuasive and helpful tool. The concept gives us tools for thinking critically about the “salvific” agenda of mythic frameworks that stress restoration, re-emplacement, and reordering. In sharp contrast to ideas of total transcendence, inversion, removal of structure, and the introduction of a complete divine novum, such locative agenda undergird, for example, ancient apocalyptic literature (Jewish, Christian, and “pagan”; see Smith 1983), an important insight. Smith highlights a broadly human concern (order, emplacement, intelligibility of the world) and allows us to think of—in a word, redescribe—quintessentially mystified and frankly grotesque imagery (angels, demons, dragons, falling stars, heavenly thrones) in coherent terms. The value of this particular lens is not limited to canonical texts, either: it applies very nicely to some of the Nag Hammadi cosmogonic texts, such as Hypostasis of the Archons. The locative/utopian binary is especially useful for disaggregating earliest Christianity. Locative frameworks, which Smith associates with, for example, the social project of Q, as well as with the kind of early Christian art analyzed by Graydon Snyder (2003), are sharply contrasted with a Pauline “utopian” orientation (one that appears later still in the mysteries’ adoption of resurrection language). This contrast had the very tangible benefit of demonstrating the absence of continuity, the difference, between several of the earliest attested projects associated with the character of Jesus (such as Q), on the one hand, and a quite eccentric and marginal Paul, on the other hand, which in its turn suggests that early Christianity is not a singular and unified entity, to be read through a singular set of theological (mainly Pauline) lenses (hence Smith’s predilection for the plural “Christianities”). As Smith rather sharply notes (142), the categories of locative and utopian allow us to see that most of the earliest forms of Christian tradition and the mysteries had more in common with each other than either did with Paul. And yet … several considerations suggest that this theoretical model did not have very much influence on subsequent Christian origins scholarship. For starters, I have seen very little use of these categories, and especially the pairing of these categories, to reconfigure the conceptual apparatus of Christian origins. Scholars of early Christianity could accept the critical interventions of the first part of Drudgery, while blithely ignoring the more programmatic theoretical proposals toward the end of the book, perhaps because the latter were to a very considerable degree based on the innovative historical reconstruction of Burton Mack’s 1988 book, A Myth of Innocence. It is no surprise that the people most receptive to the theoretical and methodological suggestions of Smith were precisely the same people who endorsed Mack’s reconstruction of Christian origins. But since the mainstream of the field has, on the whole, dismissed Mack’s reconstruction, most usually not by engaging its arguments but by ignoring it,9 any theoretical proposals based on it could likewise be ignored. It is also suggestive that Myth of Innocence appeared two years before Drudgery Divine. The implication is that the disaggregating historical work already being done by Mack (who was in his turn dependent on burgeoning work on Q being conducted in the 1980s) could proceed without needing Smith’s theoretical framework. And generally, this is so. By the 1980s (and presaged even earlier), scholars were beginning to read ancient Jesus-adjacent writings like Q as vehicles for independent ideas, rather than through the distorting lens of a supposedly universal (Pauline) kerygma. This tendency, moreover, continued after the publication of Drudgery, but without reference to it. Case in point: Markus Vinzent’s brilliant (2011) argument for the marginality of Paul’s views on resurrection until their much later second-century appropriation by Marcion and others does not list Smith in its copious bibliography. Finally, in contrast to the nicely fleshed out concept of locative religious orientations, Smith’s utopian category is underdeveloped, a point I also made in my initial review of the book. More than this, there is a case to be made that Smith has misread Paul, who is probably much more locative, and much less utopian, than Smith makes him out to be. Paul, not least inspired by apocalyptic concepts, imagines transformation but frames that transformation, at least partly, as a restoration of the divine order on earth. If we dispense with “utopian,” then its partner “locative” loses some salience as well: whatever intellectual leverage the latter may have provided us, the binary on which it is based falls apart. Smith seems to have felt this way as well. By 2000, a decade after Drudgery was first published, he had abandoned this terminology and reformulated the spatial orientations of (ancient) religion in terms of a of of (e.g., of (e.g., and of (e.g., and other religious see Smith It is that this revised framework has in fact to about like in the work of scholars like and as I I turn finally to the and in ways most important contribution of Drudgery its methodological argument in of acts of comparison, especially the and character of Smith, be to and by the intellectual And it and among with respect to some theoretical rather than as (i.e., and of this be offered in the of the of which is to its from this methodological of argument from its critique and its theoretical contributions as I have done (and did in is itself since it is precisely the of genealogical to comparison that Smith’s critique of past scholarly of the mysteries, and since his of the categories of locative and utopian from and in to acts of comparison. it is this methodological argument of the book that in my has had the most if influence on Christian origins the It is also the contribution of the book that I think if has the most to our in and Smith’s use of early and especially Burton Mack’s innovative historical reconstruction as a example much more theoretical and methodological the of Christian origins scholars in theoretical they have little This was especially of Mack himself and of that of scholars who found Mack’s historical reconstruction to have a of religion a particular of Christian origins, and on theoretical at was good (and an to And in first a and in a at the of the of with Smith and Mack as prominent their scholarship was for the of and The and was and of Christian but its agenda was quite one of “redescription” and and its initial results were under that and Mack has that he Smith’s approach, the use of comparison to categories, was fundamental to any of Christian is the way in which that I would like to as a model for the project we have in be as the of not in comparison, and the of and in of to and by Smith in the project of the just the did not in the end really Smith’s at of the was a failure to the fundamental to redescription of and that be after for what Smith to as the see the first of this from Smith’s already in Mack’s own on in our the in Smith’s project be without to so The us with more than enough for comparison, as we well But of earliest Christianity was in fact one of the of the and the of ancient Christianity that by Smith in is of of comparison between Christian and the seminar a and very theoretical framework that its own efforts to categories that would The of earliest Christianities has been But … there is more to be There is a second of as redescription This is redescription as a of comparison. 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And this is the more so for scholarship on a of NT and other early Christian that have been again and again and again and for almost two that are as or as perhaps any other literature in the such what redescription as Smith imagines it really is not a social that our but that allow us to our in ways and thus see it This is not a has no no and way of Rather, as “The also I would for Smith’s use of comparison to we are not out some and set of categories for our never some that or or it in a way we find more Rather, we are categories of and by the that allow us to see the and at a from their conceptual and so in a way that allows us to and our in a of and As have noted (e.g., in a very and ideas are acts of (one of the of the as for (a and less not to to us to the of being This is Smith’s agenda as well: he quite argues that comparison is to and such as the as historical human and not as there is no between Smith’s particular of redescription and other projects that to an approach to is a In any Smith does not a theoretical that suddenly what really in the earliest beginnings of Christianity. Rather, his is a to be to the and he some tools to this, one of the most of which is even comparison. It is as I that acts of comparison by the were (and in The with a rather historical for the of but it be that Christianity and has done precisely in terms of historical a of the between people and As a the or by the revised of social and is quite is still a of and after almost as and as the more And by the theoretical on the origins of with the the or of like and so The human and of the specific Christian was but little was made to this or its as if for the first time, and so leverage a of what are in fact the very human them. 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