Reading Sacred Texts: Charity Structure Gospel

Drawing significantly on the work of Emile Durkheim and Claude Lévi-Strauss this book proposes a way to navigate between two pitfalls that undermine comprehension of alien cultures and their sacred literature. First it offers a vigorous defense of the principle of charity when interpreting religious texts. But this then must confront the oddity even deep implausibility of many religious claims. The way out of this dilemma takes seriously Durkheims seminal hypothesis that religious belief systems reflect native efforts to understand the social realities of their society. It brings to bear Lévi-Strausss claim that the structure of religious narratives reflects attempts to bring intellectual order to those realities in a way we can decipher through the use of certain analytic techniques.The next major element to this book is philosophical. What are such things as social roles institutions and conventions? Finding possible answers to that question enables the discovery of match-ups between religious concepts-of souls gods demons and the like-and social realities giving substance to Durkheims general thesis. But what about the Bible? The second half of this book is devoted to exploring what the implications might be for an understanding of the origins of Judaism and Christianity. It does so by applying anthropological analyses to puzzles posed by stories found in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament especially the Gospel of Matthew. The upshot is both a political reading of the texts and a conceptual re-framing of such baffling claims as the doctrines of the Trinity the Incarnation and Transubstantiation.