방법 비교

	Comparative Method in Religion	Comparative Philology of Religious Languages
분야	Religious Studies	Religious Studies
계열	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
기원 연도	1982	1995
창시자	F. Max Müller (founder); reconceived by Jonathan Z. Smith	Comparative philology tradition; Calvert Watkins (Indo-European poetics)
유형	Cross-traditional comparative analysis	Historical-comparative linguistic method
원전	Smith, J. Z. (1982). Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN: 9780226763606	Watkins, C. (1995). How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780195085952
별칭	Comparative Religion, Cross-Cultural Comparison of Religions, Comparativism in Religious Studies, Science of Religion (Comparative)	Comparative Religious Philology, Historical-Comparative Sacred Language Analysis, Indo-European Religious Poetics, Etymology of Sacred Vocabulary
관련	3	3
요약	The comparative method in religion is the systematic comparison of two or more religious traditions to identify similarities, differences, and patterns, and through them to understand religion more broadly. Founded as a discipline by F. Max Müller in the nineteenth century - who borrowed Goethe's dictum that to know one religion is to know none - the comparative project was sharply rethought in the twentieth, above all by Jonathan Z. Smith. In Imagining Religion (1982) and later work, Smith insisted that comparison is not a natural perception of objective resemblance but a scholarly act: the comparativist must specify the respect in which things are being compared (the tertium comparationis), choose comparanda for a reason, and remain answerable for the differences as much as the similarities. The method thus combines disciplined juxtaposition with explicit theory about why and how a comparison is made.	Comparative philology of religious languages applies the historical-comparative method of linguistics - regular sound laws, cognate sets, and reconstruction - to the sacred vocabulary, ritual formulae, and poetic diction of related languages. Building on the comparative method that recovered Proto-Indo-European, Calvert Watkins's How to Kill a Dragon (1995) showed that one can reconstruct not only individual words but inherited phraseology and poetics, tracing formulae such as 'imperishable fame' and the dragon-slaying narrative from Hittite and Vedic through Greek and Germanic to medieval Irish. Applied to religion, the method uses systematic phonological correspondences to establish the prehistory of divine names, ritual terms, and liturgical expressions, reconstructing the proto-forms and inherited religious poetics that underlie attested traditions, while guarding against chance resemblance and borrowing.