² For example, E. B. Tylor, a central figure for both anthropology and comparative religion, viewed spiritualists as evidence of an unfortunate “survival” of a primitive way of thinking otherwise attested primarily in uncivilized colonial or yet to be colonized contexts. See Taves, Ann, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Explaining Religious Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 199Google Scholar.

³ These include: Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality (Harvard, from 1896); Foerster Lecture on the Immortality of the Human Soul (UC Berkeley, from 1928); Drew Lecture on Immortality (Oxford University, by the 1910s); and Read-Tuckwell Lectures (University of Bristol, established in the 1930s). Many other endowed lecture series included talks by classicists and biblical scholars on the afterlife between 1900–1930 (for example, Cumont, Franz, Afterlife in Roman Paganism: Lectures Delivered at Yale University on the Silliman Foundation [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1922]Google Scholar; Strong, Eugenie, Apotheosis and After Life: Three Lectures on Certain Phases of Art and Religion in the Roman Empire [1915; repr., Freeport, N.Y.: Books for the Libraries Press, 1969]Google Scholar).

⁴ See Streeter, B. H., The Four Gospels: A study of origins treating of the manuscript tradition, sources, authorship, and dates (1924; 4th impression, revised; London: MacMillan, 1930), esp. 149–360; 483–562Google Scholar. Students of the Bible and early Christian history are not, however, encouraged to read his study of the Fourth Gospel, which draws on psychology and comparative mysticism (The Four Gospels, 361–481), let alone his publications on spirits, immortality, the relation of science and religion, and comparative religion (for example, Streeter, et al. , Immortality: An Essay in Discovery co-ordinating scientific, psychical, and biblical research [New York: MacMillan, 1917]Google Scholar; Streeter, et al. , Spirit: God and his relation to man considered from the standpoint of philosophy, psychology and art [London: Macmillan, 1919]Google Scholar; Streeter, , Reality: A New Correlation of Science and Religion [London: MacMillan, 1926]Google Scholar; Streeter, , The Buddha and the Christ: An exploration of the meaning of the universe and the purpose of human life [The Bamptom Lectures for 1932; New York: Macmillan, 1933]Google Scholar). In their survey of New Testament scholarship, Stephen Neill and Tom Wright write, “Of Burnett Hillman Streeter (1874–1937) … it is impossible to write without affection, tinged in his case with a little amusement” (Neill, and Wright, , The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861–1986, 2nd ed. [1988; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 131Google Scholar).

⁵ Streeter, B. H. and Appasamy, A. J., The Sadhu: A Study in Mysticism and Practical Religion (London: MacMillan, 1923)Google Scholar.

⁶ That is, I shall not consider how postcolonial theory can yield fruitful interpretations of early Christian history nor how a consideration the Roman Empire might nuance modernist understandings of colonialism—though both are useful (see, for example, Jeremy Schott's essay above).

⁷ Since Braude's, Ann influential Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon, 1989)Google Scholar, many have written on spiritualist activism; for example, Owen, Alex, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Goldsmith, Barbara, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Knopf, 1998)Google Scholar; and McGarry, Molly, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

⁸ The third codex identified as containing “Gnostic” material prior to the Nag Hammadi find is the Askew codex containing Pistis Sophia, purchased by the British Museum in 1795.

⁹ See, for example, Mead, G. R. S., The Gnostics: Fragments of a Faith Forgotten; A Contribution to the Study of the Origins of Christianity (1900; repr., New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1960)Google Scholar. Mead presents himself as a Theosophist.

¹⁰ Streeter, , “What we know of Gnostic theosophical speculation is so grotesque that we are apt to wonder what there was about the movement that made it so alluring to that age as to become a really formidable enemy to the Church. No doubt its chief appeal lay in the dualism which offered a solution, theoretical and practical, to the problem of evil” Primitive Church: Studies with special reference to the origins of Christian Ministry (The Hewett Lectures 1928; London: MacMillan, 1929), 6–7Google Scholar.

¹¹ van der Veer, Peter, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 58Google Scholar.

¹² Viswanathan, Gauri, “The Ordinary Business of Occultism,” Critical Inquiry 27:1 (Autumn 2000): 2–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Theosophy was closely associated with spiritualism but rejected its understanding that mediumistic trance is available to all, instead appealing to a body of revealed knowledge that they linked both with ancient Christian Gnosticism and, more immediately, with Indian sages, the “mahatmas.” Also unlike spiritualism, theosophists had formal meetings, organizations, and texts, even as many continued to participate in spiritualist activities such as séances.

¹⁴ For more on Theosophy in India and Britain, see Viswanathan, Gauri, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), esp. 177–207Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Viswanathan, “Ordinary Business,” 19. As she continues, “the bureaucratization of occult knowledge” also calls into question the “notion that secularization is a break with religion” (20).

¹⁶ Streeter and Appasamy, The Sadhu, 136.

¹⁷ Singh also differentiates his Christian visions from those he experienced pre-conversion through yogic practices, which he views as trance states achieved through self-hypnosis.

¹⁸ Streeter and Appasamy, The Sadhu, 151, 152. Singh may be using spiritualist interchangeably with Theosophist in this context, but Theosophists would have felt the potential sting of this critique more than spiritualists. Spiritualists were not especially bothered by deceiving spirits or even fraudulent mediums—these underscored the indeterminacy of communication not the authenticity of spirits or the possibility of truth; this position radically undermines any claims of certainty about whether one has truth (for especially perceptive remarks on this topic, see Cottom, Daniel, Abyss of Reason: Cultural Movements, Revelations, and Betrayals [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 18, 67)Google Scholar. Both Theosophists and Christians pulled back from such radical indeterminacy, however. Theosophists and Singh aimed to persuade listeners of the authenticity of their spirit communications, locating these communications as consistent with their portrayal of a larger organizational, ethical, and philosophical program.

¹⁹ Ibid., 253. To this sentence Streeter appends a footnote: “This experience occurred to myself in 1913, and, a little later, quite independently, to my friend Mr. T. R. Glover, of Cambridge” (253). Streeter's phrasing recalls Johannes Fabian's points about how colonized others get framed as occupying anachronistic time (see Fabian, , Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983], esp. 15–18, 25–31Google Scholar). Whether we see it as an imperializing gesture or an intriguing disjuncture, Streeter finds in India the past of his own tradition, eliding Christianity-allied British Empire by analogizing the minority status of Christianity in British colonized India with that under Roman imperial rule.

²⁰ Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 101Google Scholar. “Thus what allows historians to historicize the medieval or the ancient is the very fact these worlds are never completely lost. We inhabit their fragments even when we classify ourselves as modern and secular. It is because we live in time-knots that we can undertake the exercise of straightening out, as it were, some part of the knot (which is how we might think of chronology)” (112).

²¹ As Michel de Certeau writes, “Modern western history essentially begins with a differentiation between the present and the past. In this way it is unlike tradition (religious tradition), though it never succeeds in being entirely dissociated from this archaeology, maintaining with it a relation of indebtedness and rejection.” (de Certeau, Michel, The Writing of History, trans. Conley, Tom [French original 1975; New York: Columbia University Press, 1988], 2)Google Scholar.

²² We might ask how Streeter's travels subsequently altered the way he imagined the second century; in his later book Primitive Church, Streeter emphasizes the dynamic, experimental character of second-century Christians and the lack of any single original or apostolic form of ecclesial organization: “In the Primitive Church no one system of Church Order prevailed. Everywhere there was readiness to experiment, and, where circumstances seemed to demand it, to change…. it is permissible to hint that the first Christians achieved what they did, because the spirit with which they were inspired was one favourable to experiment. In this—and, perhaps, in some other respects—it may be that the line of advance for the Church today is not to imitate the forms, but to recapture the spirit, of the Primitive Church” (Primitive Church, 261–262).

²³ Streeter and Appasamy, The Sadhu, 253.

²⁴ Ibid., 254. Depictions of Singh resonate with the idea that colonized subjects occupy a different time: “while we do not suggest that the Sadhu is on the same plane as St. Francis or St. Paul, we feel that, from having known him, we understand them better” (viii). They further note: “coming from the presence of Sundar Singh, men forget themselves, they forget him—but they think of Christ” (xv); during a visit to England, Singh was mistaken for Jesus (42–43). Streeter and Appasamy quote Singh approvingly, but we also see traces of colonial anxieties when they ask him about the content of spiritual transmissions. They ask him twice if he has had visions like those in the Apocalypse of John; he says, “yes, but only like those of the end of the text” (122), never like the middle (123). In another context, Singh also denies an affinity with Book of Revelation (196).

²⁵ Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 101. Chakrabarty also calls these modes History 1 (“the past ‘established’ by capital” [64]) and History 2 (“a category charged with the function of constantly interrupting the totalizing thrusts of History 1” [66]) when analyzing historiography using Marx (see 62–71).

²⁶ Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 2Google Scholar.

²⁷ See, for example, Lyman, Rebecca, “Hellenism and Heresy,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11:2 (2003): 209–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nasrallah, Laura, “Mapping the World: Justin, Tatian, Lucian, and the Second Sophistic,” Harvard Theological Review 98.3 (2005): 283–314CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ See Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 12–16.

²⁹ For further discussion of this challenge in a different register, see Keller's, Mary persuasive work, The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power, and Spirit Possession (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

³⁰ See also Buell, Denise Kimber, “Imagining Human Transformation in the Context of Invisible Powers: Instrumental agency in second-century treatments of conversion,” in Metamorphoses: Resurrection, Body and Transformative Practices in Early Christianity, ed. Seim, Turid Karlsen and Okland, Jørunn (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Press, 2009), 263–284Google Scholar.

³¹ Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 104.

³² Ibid., 104–105, quoting Bultmann's, Rudolf essay “Is Exegesis without Presuppositions Possible?” in The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present, ed. Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt (New York: Continuum, 1985), 244Google Scholar.

³³ Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 105. We still find this distantiation in scholarship on early Christian miracles and exorcisms.

³⁴ Ibid., 108.

³⁵ Cottom, Abyss of Reason, 32. “Spiritualism was everything reason and the rationalized professions were laboring not to be, everything they wanted to overlook, or to survey and repress at the same time. It was popular, unhierarchical, inconsistent, disorganized, idiosyncratic, uneducated, uncultivated, and so, in short, undignified” (41).

³⁶ Viswanathan, “Ordinary Business of Occultism,” 19.

³⁷ For example, “Any elementary text-book of Church History will tell us that the special preoccupation of Church thinkers during the second century was the struggle with ‘Gnostic’ heresies, in the course of which a firmer and clearer orthodox presentation of Christianity emerged” (Burkitt, F. C., Church and Gnosis: A Study of Christian thought and speculation in the Second Century [The Morse Lectures for 1931; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931], 3Google Scholar. See also King, Karen L., What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 55–109Google Scholar.

³⁸ For example, sociologist Herbert Spencer's “ghost theory” of the origins of religion as veneration of dead ancestors might seem to have an obvious connection to spiritualism, but so too his pioneering articulation of the concept of “culture” as the invisible bonds that constitute a group. In his study of the development of the notion of culture, Herbert notes how this smacks of “the occult” and is “potentially scandalous” “for a would-be objective and empirical science” while quite explicitly drawing on language used by spiritualists to express their conviction in the invisible communication and forces between humans (Herbert, Christopher, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991], 14Google Scholar). Anthropologists have continued to take views and practices about death as well as spirit possession as areas of central concern since the late nineteenth century.

³⁹ See Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, 200.