Jonathan Z. Smith

Dates: 1938–2017 Domain: History of Religions, Comparative Religion

Biography

Jonathan Z. Smith spent his entire academic career at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1968 until his retirement in 2012. He studied at Haverford College and Yale, where he worked with Erwin Goodenough. Smith became the most influential critic of the phenomenological approach to the study of religion associated with Mircea Eliade, his colleague at Chicago (Eliade held the chair Smith would later occupy). Smith did not deny the reality of religious experience; he questioned the methodology by which scholars compared experiences across traditions.

Smith was a devoted teacher and a meticulous scholar who published relatively little compared to his intellectual influence. His arguments circulated through lectures, graduate seminars, and a handful of concentrated, precisely argued books and essays. He died in Chicago in 2017.

Key Works

Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (1982) collects the essays that define Smith's critique. The opening line is canonical: "Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study." Smith does not mean that religious experience is unreal. He means that the category "religion," as a unified phenomenon susceptible to cross-cultural comparison, is a scholarly construct, and that scholars must attend to what their categories are doing rather than assuming they describe natural kinds.

Map Is Not Territory (1978) develops the argument that scholarly descriptions of religious phenomena are always maps, never territories, and that the interesting questions concern what the map includes, excludes, and distorts. Drudgery Divine (1990) attacks the comparative method applied to early Christianity and the dying-and-rising-god motif, showing how scholarly comparisons produce the patterns they claim to discover.

Role in the Project

Jonathan Z. Smith is the project's internal critic — the figure whose rigorous methodological objections to Eliade's comparatism the project must constantly engage. Smith's insistence that comparison without attention to historical specificity produces only the illusion of understanding provides the essential check on the project's cross-traditional claims. His arguments are never dismissed, only incorporated as methodological discipline.