ABSTRACT
The "spirit of the law" is usually contrasted with the "letter of the law" with which a different set of ideas is invoked, such as perspicuity and literalness. In the history of Christianity, the distinction between "the letter of the law" and "the spirit of the law" has often been made in theological debates about the relationship between the Old and the New Testament. The second legacy, which seems to have inhibited ethnographic analyses of the "spirit of the law" in the context of religions of the book, has to do with the fact that anthropological references to literacy still tend to follow certain outlines set by Jack Goody and Ian Watt in 1963. Being Christian thus involved reference to a divine truth which had been revealed in the distant past and of which the Bible was an emanation and materialization. But the Scripture was also made significant for religious practitioners by being consulted as a contemporary source.
