ABSTRACT
The label historian", Jonathan Z. Smith writes, is the one he was most comfortable with. Smith argued here, with increasing clarity and confidence, that religion the study of religionis to be situated in relation to history, the humanities, and the human sciences religion is an inextricably human phenomenon. A situation, as Smith describes it, refers primarily to "a historical setting of incongruity' between cultural norms and expectations and historical reality which calls forth thought as expressed in myth". Application, as Smith describes it, both acknowledges and represents the profoundly human acts of diligence, creativity, hard work, effort, ingenuity, persistence, and change implicit in, and required by, a recognition of "exegetical ingenuity' as a basic constituent of human culture". Smith's first published essay examined the recently discovered Gospel of Thomas with a view to situating the text and its traditions in the context of emerging Christianities and a burgeoning scholarship that was beginning to classify.
