L'origine delle origini. Jonathan Z. Smith e la storia naturale del cristianesimo

Hailed at its publication as one of the most significant books of the “greatest pathologist in the history of religions” (so Ioan P. Culianu), Jonathan Z. Smith’s Drudgery Divine still has not received an adequate critical reception in Italy, and this article is meant to move a first step in this direction. Throughout its five chapters, Smith’s work combines a pars destruens and a pars construens: the former devoted to a fierce deconstruction of the first modern attempts to compare Early Christianity with the religious systems of Late Antiquity, the latter to a radical overhaul of the comparative method in the history of religions. The present article aims to provide a critical assessment of both these aspects, by studying the use and re-use of metaphors drawn from the natural sciences in the understanding of what we now call, tautologically, “Christian origins.”