ABSTRACT
When virtually all of the scholarly world adhered to a single religion, the study of religion was, like any other study, the study of something whose existence does not depend upon ourselves: what we know and what we can know about G-d (or, in antiquity, the gods) and the consequences that that knowledge has or should have for our lives.This is what today is called theology. In times when religious beliefs become a subject of widespread controversy-at the time of the first spread of Christianity, or the Protestant reformation-the nature of this inquiry becomes more polemical, with a tendency for presupposed conclusions to determine the evidence rather than the opposite. When a generally skeptical attitude towards religion is widely adopted-as in Epicurean philosophy, or in the materialist theories of the nineteenth century-the study of religion ceases to be a study of anything outside of ourselves and becomes a study of people: scholars do not seek to understand gods (whose existence they consider unprovable, debatable or irrelevant or deny completely),1 but to
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them. instead becomes a study of human psychology and society.
