Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities. By Carlin A. Barton and Daniel Boyarin

In this book, Carlin A. Barton and Daniel Boyarin argue that the use of the word “religion” to translate the Latin religio and the Greek thrēskeia distorts our understanding of antiquity. In assessing their argument, I judge that it helps to distinguish between (1) their lexicographical claim that the modern concept does not capture the shifting semantic range of the Latin and Greek terms; and (2) their ontological claim, foregrounded in the book’s title, that religion did not exist in antiquity. The lexicographical claim is the book’s central thesis and I find their discussion of it fascinating and persuasive. But the ontological claim does not follow from it. Barton and Boyarin argue that “religion” is a procrustean concept that occludes how religio and thrēskeia were used. They therefore want to “untranslate” these terms and return them to their original contexts to discover “what you can see when you stop looking for what isn’t there” (1–9). The book provides a host of examples of how these words were used in their time, and it takes the writings of Tertullian (chapters 3–7) and Josephus (chapters 9–11) as two extended case studies. What one then discovers when one looks is that the Latin and Greek terms were used to name oaths, curses, inhibitions, and similar kinds of obligations that compel a sense of duty. In one of several instances when the authors offer nice analogies to contemporary experiences, they compare the earliest uses of religio not to “going to church” but rather to the feeling of impurity and obligation one might have when one begins to leave the lavatory to head back into a restaurant without having washed one’s hands and then turns back to wash (32–33).