Religion and its reception

This book is an exploration of the form(ul)ation of knowledge in a given context – a process which might well be called education. More specifically, it is about the presentation of religious knowledge in an ancient historiographical context, though, like its subjects, it is occasionally given to ‘digressions’ which either enhance or detract from the text, depending on the reader's expectations and criteria for relevance. Like its subjects, it can be plundered for individual items of information but will only make proper sense when taken as a whole, where each item is defined to a large extent by its context.

It assumes that the historians in question were highly intelligent and deliberate men who went a long way towards achieving a fundamental cohesion in their works. It also works on the premise that they built up an image of religious systems as a whole, not by describing a system ex nihilo for outsiders. They represented their model of religion to their world by offering refinements of the understanding that they assumed would be brought to their text by their readers. They presumed to know roughly what this understanding was, though their frequent and deliberate refinements indicate that they also acknowledged that the details would be more or less negotiable and could be debated. What they did not cater for was a fundamentally different matrix of understanding, such as the modern reader brings to bear when reassembling the worlds they created. Without a compatible matrix of knowledge as a context, any statement as an intentional communication is doomed.