Religious Inventions: Ancient Mediterranean Practice and the Study of Religion

Religion is a modern invention, a category used to describe and study certain kinds of human behaviour. Yet when it comes to the ancient world and its texts – including those that comprise the Jewish and Christian Bibles – it can be easy to forget that they did not fall from the sky as simple expressions of dogma. Rather, the ancient writings of early Judaism and Christianity are firmly rooted in the world and are the product of an astonishing array of human experience and agency: acts of self-fashioning; of imaginative speculation; of mourning and memorializing; of forming, dissolving, or refashioning group identities; and more.

Religious Inventions asks how modern conceptions of religion can shed light on the relics, textual and otherwise, of ancient Mediterranean Jews and Christians. What insights from the contemporary study of religious behaviours and practices challenge what we think we know about the ancient world? Conversely, how can thinking about the ancient world challenge what we think we know about religion today? This volume responds to these questions through explorations of the material and social circumstances behind the production of written artifacts. It examines how religious practices relate to conceptions of identity and critiques the utility of the comparative method for approaching ancient writings.

Textual authority is used and abused by many of today’s public figures. Religious Inventions offers an alternative approach to understanding how authority is constructed: from the ground up, by the creative actions and choices of real people who lived long ago.