Abstract

Up until recently the academic study of religion has been dominated by Protestant Christian paradigms of religious tradition, in which precedence is given to such categories as belief, doctrine, and theology, and tradition-identity is rooted in the missionary character of Christian traditions. The essay argues that rabbinic Judaism and brahmanical Hinduism provide alternative paradigms of religious tradition as "embodied communities" in which priority is given to issues of practice, observance, and law, and tradition-identity is embodied in ethnic and cultural categories that reflect the predominantly nonmissionary character of these traditions. The manner in which the rabbinic and brahmanical traditions construct their respective categories of scripture—Torah and Veda—reflects the more fundamental affinities shared by these traditions as representatives of a distinctive paradigm of religious tradition: as elite textual communities that have codified their respective norms in the form of scriptural canons; as ethnocultural systems concerned with issues of family, ethnic and cultural integrity, blood lineages, and the intergenerational transmission of traditions; and as religions of orthopraxy characterized by elaborate legal systems, sacrificial traditions, purity codes, and dietary laws.

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