Other terms in religious history that would benefit from a similar unpicking: “Puritan” (and its relationship to “professor”, which baffled me when I first looked at George Fox’s writings); “heretic” (is it now more of a hurrah word than a boo word); and perhaps most of all “gnostic” (ancient exonym revived in C20th thanks to e.g. Jungians self-identifying as gnostic and Voegelin describing vast tracts of modernity as neo-gnostic).
This is a really excellent and illuminating post.
Other terms in religious history that would benefit from a similar unpicking: “Puritan” (and its relationship to “professor”, which baffled me when I first looked at George Fox’s writings); “heretic” (is it now more of a hurrah word than a boo word); and perhaps most of all “gnostic” (ancient exonym revived in C20th thanks to e.g. Jungians self-identifying as gnostic and Voegelin describing vast tracts of modernity as neo-gnostic).