It is principally because, aside from a few fugitive notions, often quite obsolete, on the mythology of Greek and Latin antiquity, the history of religions is wholly unprovided for in our courses of instruction; and, secondly, because there prevails a mass of prejudices tending to restrict the application of scientific methods to this study.
Among these prejudices there are some which are always found, although in a less degree, in all the subdivisions of historical science, while others are peculiar to this particular branch. Some of them tend to hinder even the existence of hierography, while others simply falsify its applications or vitiate its conclusions. My object is to point out the most formidable of these prepossessions by exhibiting, through a few examples, the mistakes into which they may cause even the best intentioned persons to fall.
We will begin with examining some prejudices that are connected with the very object of our study—the religious and the anti-religious prejudice. It should be understood that when I use the word prejudice in this connection, I employ it in its etymological sense of a judgment fixed in advance, and not in the ordinary sense of something offensive. Our purpose is to study religions, not to insult them.
Max Müller has written that there have existed two systems broad enough to tolerate a history of religions—primitive Buddhism and Christianity. He doubtless meant Christianity as he professes it, and as he saw it professed around him—the Christianity of Stanley and Colenso, of Maurice and Martineau, of Kuenen and Tiele, of Reville and Lenormant. He does not hesitate to recognize with what facility one may be led away from the historical method by belief in the possession of a supernatural revelation, when this revelation is formulated by the agency of a man of reputed infallibility, of a church assembled in council, or of a book finished and closed forever: when it pretends to trace around its affirmations a circle impenetrable to free examination, it is wanting in the most essential conditions for passing serious criticism. When the believer's right to interpret the sacred books is acknowledged, a place is left open for exegesis, but that exegesis still remains the slave of particular texts or dogmas that limit and consequently trammel it.
Let us take a single story from the Bible—that of Jonah, and examine the different acceptations it has received. We could hardly find a richer stock of interpretations vitiated by what I call the religious prejudice. According to the rationalist mode of interpretation that flourished in Germany at the beginning of this century, Jonah was an envoy from Israel to Nineveh, who was picked up after having been shipwrecked, three days from the shore, by a ship carrying the image of a whale as its figure-head. Another interpretation is that of Grimm, that the whole history passed off in a dream. This is to save the letter, but at the expense of the spirit. The important matter in the critical study of a text is to find what its authors intended to put in it, and
