In an influential essay, Donald Wiebe (1984) argues that there has been a “failure of nerve in the academic study of religion.” The discipline had been founded on the premise that it would pursue a scientific study of religion. Under the pressure of confessional interests, however, the theorization that is a necessary part of scientific study was forsaken in favor of theological speculation about an a priori accepted ultimate reality. Thus the scientific objectives that allowed the academic study of religion to gain legitimacy in the modern research university were abandoned for theological or cryptotheological work, which is incompatible with these core objectives.

In this article, I will take Wiebe's criticism as inspiration for analyzing scholarship on the “Parable of the Assassin” from the Gospel of Thomas. I will argue that (1) the scholarly treatments of the Parable of the Assassin represent a failure of nerve with respect to the role of violence in early Christianity; (2) this failure of nerve can be traced to contemporary political apologetic motives; (3) this failure of nerve can be corrected by turning to theories of violence in religion, which, in keeping with Wiebe's vision of a nomothetically oriented study of religion, can contribute to understanding this parable. In order to pursue this argument, I will first survey the literature on this remarkably under-researched parable.