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volume’s title. Certainly, any broad presentation of Luther’s thought will be confronted
with managing the overlapping boundaries between content, context, and form.
Depth in content is sometimes substituted for breadth in the desire to do justice to
the scope of Luther’s writings. In the introduction to “A Sermon on the Estate of
Marriage” (1519), for example, the editors summarise Luther’s view of marriage as
a desacramentalised, faithful Christian vocation. While hints of this shift are present
in this sermon, Luther rather maintains the Catholic, sacramental meaning of marriage
(p. 389). While not a major detail, it points to the need for interested readers ultimately
to pursue more detailed volumes of Luther’s works.
Despite some minor limitations, the material selected for inclusion aptly reveals
the shape of Luther’s convictions and biases, both provocative and tender. The volume
is an essential educational sourcebook for teachers and students of Luther, Reforma-
tion theology, and church history located in all settings. Space limitations prevented
the inclusion of a biography, thus reading this volume with a brief outline of
Luther’s historical and theological positioning will ensure the greatest appreciation
of its contents.
JILL COX
Monash University
E. J. MICHAEL WITZEL: The Origins of the World’s Mythologies. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012; pp. xx + 665.
This exhilarating study confirms what many in the academy have so far scarce dared to
hope: “big history” is back, the comparative project in Religious Studies and related
disciplines such as mythological studies has been rehabilitated, and the resurgence of
metanarratives (confirming the demise of “postmodern” approaches) is both welcome
and inevitable. Witzel’s huge, enormously learned, book constitutes an archaeology of
what it means to be human and to hold human-constructed cosmologies, moralities, and
anthropologies. His project is to trace myths “back, step by step, ultimately to the stories
told by early Homo sapiens or, to use the now popular term, to the period of the African
Eve who lived some 130,000 years ago” (p. 3). Methodological awareness characterises
the research, which Witzel (a philologist and Sanskritist) has taken care to distinguish
from Jungian-inspired works such as Christopher Booker’s best-selling The Seven Basic
Plots: Why We Tell Stories (2004). Despite this, there are synergies between The Origin
of the World’s Mythologies and Booker’s popular book (rather like the way that Martin
West’s landmark The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry
[1997] blew open the contention that Greece was the unique origin point of Europe and
definitively established that much of what we thought of as “Greek” was Near Eastern,
almost coincidentally confirming the claims of far less respectable scholars like Martin
Bernal, author of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization [1987]).
In fact, West (along with Garry W. Trompf, author of The Idea of Historical Recurrence
in Western Thought [1979], and Robert Bellah, author of Religion in Human Evolution:
From the Palaeolithic to the Axial Age [2011]), is one of the trailblazers of this type of
macro-historical project.
Witzel draws upon two disciplines that are usually neglected by scholars of religion:
comparative linguistics and the human genome project. He contends that it is possible
to distinguish two families of myths that correspond to the two super-continents that