Religion in Ancient History by S. G. F. Brandon (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 679 Religion in Ancient History. By S. G. F. BRANDON. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969. Pp. 412. $12.50. Professor Brandon of the University of Manchester, England, wrote his new book, Religion in Ancient History, not only for specialists in the general or comparative science of religion or religiology, that is, for professors or students, but particularly for the intelligent lay people of the new middle classes in Great Britain, the United States, and other English-speaking countries. With his new study of the science of religion the author would like to reach the specialists in industry and commerce who provide the economic foundations upon which academic life is built. He wants to popularize the results of one hundred and fifty years of scientific exploration in the province of religion. He achieves this purpose by a simple and beautiful language, a clear diction, an acute pedagogical sense, many outstanding illustrations, and many well-chosen quotations from ancient religious texts. The latter two points alone justify the price of the book. But Brandon does much more than merely popularize the results of the general science of religion. In his new book, Religion in Ancient History, Brandon sums up his whole scholarly life's work in the field of religion: his books on The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church, Time and Manlcind, Man and His Destiny in the Great Religions, Creation Legends of the Ancient Near East, History, Time, and Deity, Jesus and the Zealots, The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth, The Judgment of the Dead. Brandon's new book is not only an excellent popularization of his previous works but is in itself a great scholarly contribution to the further progress of religiology . It stands at the very front of the evolution of this science. But that is not all. This recent book, as well as the author's previous works, is written in the spirit of a new humanism which today permeates the whole science of religion. It is an excellent guide for the layman through the vast and complicated province of religion. But certainly no specialist in the field of religion-religiologist or theologian-can afford to miss reading Brandon's summary of his life's work. His new book should be part of any library for the science of religion or theology, in fact, of any library. It is the fundamental law of evolution of all sciences concerned with the functions of the human spirit that they go through a continual process of inner differentiation and through a process of mutual interdependence with the disciplines from which they originated and with their respective neighbor sciences. In the last one hundred and fifty years the science of religion differentiated itself into the history, sociology, psychology, phenomenology , and philosophy of religion. At the same time, religiology entered into a mutual exchange with philosophy, theology, history, and philology from which it had arrived and with the neighbor disciplines of sociology, psychology, literary science, and ethnography together with which it had come into existence in the last century. 680 BOOK REVIEWS In his latest book Brandon combines two of the branches of the science of religion: the history and the phenomenology of religion. In the chapters on the Jewish and Christian religion the historical method has somewhat priority over the phenomenological method. In the chapters on the preJudeo -Christian religions this relationship is reversed. The history of religion simply traces the evolution of a specific positive religion. The phenomenology of religion consists of a comparative analysis of religious phenomena or forms. Brandon is master in both methodological perspectives . He traces the evolution of religions-Chinese, Indian, }\l[esopotamian, Egyptian, Jewish, Greek, Roman, and particularly Christianity. At the same time he gives a comparative analysis of a variety of religious forms as they appear in different positive religions, for instance, the religious idea of soul, death, time, creation, space, devil, angel, providence, and saviourgod . The history of religion will always remain the very fundament of religiology. But since the First World War the phenomenology of religion has gained supremacy over the other sub-disciplines of the general science of religion. Brandon participates fully in this ascendency of...