Displacing Christian Origins

Recent critical theory is curiously preoccupied with the metaphors and ideas of early Christianity, especially the religion of Paul. The haunting of secular thought by the very religion it seeks to overcome may seem surprising at first, but Ward Blanton argues that this recent return by theorists to the resources of early Christianity has precedent in modern and ostensibly secularizing philosophy, from Kant to Heidegger.

Displacing Christian Origins traces the current critical engagement of Agamben, Derrida, and Žižek, among others, back into nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century philosophers of early Christianity. By comparing these crucial moments in the modern history of philosophy with exemplars of modern biblical scholarship—David Friedrich Strauss, Adolf Deissmann, and Albert Schweitzer—Blanton offers a new way for critical theory to construe the relationship between the modern past and the biblical traditions to which we seem to be drawn once again.

An innovative contribution to the intellectual history of biblical exegesis, Displacing Christian Origins will promote informed and fruitful debate between religion and philosophy.

Ward Blanton is lecturer in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Glasgow.

“Ward Blanton asks in this innovative study, who has the property rights to the early Christianity legacy? The recent interest exhibited by Continental theorists in early Christianity, Blanton argues, has a pre-history in the engagement of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger with Christian origins, the backdrop against which they attempted to ground modern secularity. Examining the critical and philosophical engagements that deeply informed New Testament scholars D. F. Strauss, Adolf Deissmann, and Albert Schweitzer, Blanton uncovers a largely unrecognized strain in the making of modern biblical studies. Displacing Christian Origins is a call for a radical historicization of historical criticism of the Bible, as well as for a more theoretically-aware crossing—or breaking down—of disciplinary boundaries.”

“In this academic tour de force, Ward Blanton drags early scholarship on Jesus and Christian beginnings out of the closet of a history of an academic sub-discipline where it has been safely hidden. In a surprising but convincing move, he puts 19th and 20th New Testament scholarship in the context of the expansion of modern technology in the production and dissemination of literature. Thus, the construction of history becomes part of the production of modernity. Blanton shows in brilliantly sharp readings of Strauss and Schweitzer how they interacted with Hegel and Kant in a common search for Christian beginnings as a paradigm for identities of modernity. In a book that is intellectually challenging Blanton also manages to create in the reader a desire to engage in dialogue with history as a way of working through one’s own identity.”

"Blanton's work nicely underlines the importance of interdisciplinary work, particularly, between philosophy (theory) and biblical criticism. . . . Such historically chosen engagements may prove enlightening and enlivening for biblical criticism."

"A penetrating study of aspects of the interaction between philosophy and biblical studies."

"The author’s analysis is cogent and reflects a mastery of the relevant materials. Blanton’s declared intention is to persuade philosophical theorists and biblical critics to pay heed to one another, but it is biblical critics whom he most often takes to task, for both their positivist conviction that it is possible to isolate historical truth through textual analysis and their ignorance of the philosophical presuppositions that underlie their work."