History and Religion: Narrating a Religious Past (Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten, 68)

History is one of the most important cultural tools to make sense of one’s situation, to establish identity, define otherness, and explain change. This is the first systematic scholarly study that analyses the complex relationship between history and religion, taking into account religious groups both as producers of historical narratives as well as distinct topics of historiography. Coming from different disciplines, the authors of this volume ask under which conditions and with what consequences religions are historicised. How do religious groups employ historical narratives in the construction of their identities? What are the biases and elisions of current analytical and descriptive frames in the History of Religion? The volume aims at initiating a comparative historiography of religion and combines disciplinary competences of Religious Studies and the History of Religion, Confessional Theologies, History, History of Science, and Literary Studies. By applying literary comparison and historical contextualization to those texts that have been used as central documents for histories of individual religions, their historiographic themes, tools and strategies are analysed. The comparative approach addresses circum-Mediterranean and European as well as Asian religious traditions from the first millennium BCE to the present and deals with topics such as the origins of religious historiography, the practices of writing and the transformation of narratives. Table of Contents 5 History and Religion 9 Section 1. Origins and developments 27 Introduction 29 The historiography of Brahmanism 35 Construing ‘religion’ by doing historiography: The historicisation of religion in the Roman Republic 53 The use of historiography in Paul: A case-study of the instrumentalisation of the past in the context of Late Second Temple Judaism 71 Flirty fishing and poisonous serpents: Epiphanius of Salamis inside his Medical chest against heresies 101 Reading sutras in biographies of Chinese Buddhist monks 117 History and Heilsgeschichte in early Islam: Some observations on prophetic history and biography 127 The development and formation of religious historiography in Tibet 159 Medieval memories of the origins of the Waldensian movement 173 The use of history by French Protestants and its impact on Protestant historiography 197 Section 2. Writing histories 211 Introduction 213 A Perso-Islamic universal chronicle in its historical context: Ghiyas_ al-Din Khwandamir’s ?abib al-siyar 217 Conditions for historicising religion: Hindu saints, regional identity, and social change in western India, ca. 1600–1900 235 Practitioners of religious historiography in early modern Europe 249 Impartiality, individualisation, and the historiography of religion: Tobias Pfanner on the rituals of the Ancient Church 265 ‘The gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it’: The narrative of the victorious Church in French Church histories of the nineteenth century 277 Conflicting historiographical claims in religiously plural societies 295 Religion and economic development: On the role of religion in the historiography of political economy in twentieth century China 315 Section 3. Transforming narratives 333 Introduction 335 The notion of tradition in liturgy 341 Verbs, nouns, temporality and typology: Narrations of ritualised warfare in Roman Antiquity 363 Judaism: An inquiry into the historical discourse 379 President de Brosses’s modern and post-modern fetishes in the historiography and history of religions 401 Historia sacra and historical criticism in biblical scholarship 415 A Catholic ‘magician’ historicises ‘magic’: Éliphas Lévi’s Histoire de la Magie 427 Locating the history of Christianity between the history of the Church and the History of Religions: The Italian case 453 Contributors 463 Index 467 This volume is the first systematic scholarly study that analyses the complex relationship between history and religion. It considers religious groups as both producers of historical narratives and topics of historiography. From different disciplinary perspectives, the authors explore how religions are historicised. In so doing, they address the biases and elisions of current analytical and descriptive frames in the history of religion. Analyses the complex relationship between history and religion. This book considers religious groups as both producers of historical narratives and topics of historiography. It explores how religions are historicised.