ABSTRACT
The term "sacred" was not part of the biblical scholar's vocabulary. Biblical studies had ever questioned the dual anthropologies, cosmologies, and ontologies imagined and assumed by the Christian religion. Religion seemed such an unlikely place to illustrate, much less work out, the structures of comparative meditation for an intellectualist anthropology. Jonathan Z. Smith's intellectualist anthropology represented a way of looking at the world that was very different from that which prevailed in religious studies. Smith has actually set me up for another go at worldview with his comprehensive descriptions of the structural translations of Second Temple Judaism into Rabbinic Judaism's preoccupation with the Mishnah, and Christianity's myth-ritual displacement of pilgrimage. The Christian canon is surely a bundle of sticks and stones that is shaken and poured out in persistent cultivations of divination by hermeneutes. Theory of persistence can shift from Smith's location of persistence at the particular situational level to a more collective, social distribution of Christianity's cultivations.
