“He Has Made the Dry Bones Live”: Orientalism’s Attempted Resuscitation of Eastern Christianity Christopher D. L. Johnson* While there has been much scholarship on Orientalism in relation to Islam and other non-Christian religions, the relationship between Orientalism and Eastern forms of Christianity has rarely received any scholarly attention. Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholar- ship and travel writing from the United States and Britain contain count- less descriptions of Eastern Christianity that make use of Orientalist tropes, but also attempt to reconcile what the authors saw as two mutual- ly exclusive categories: Oriental and Christian. This article argues that the rhetoric employed in these accounts portrays Eastern Christianity using somatic language as a body that paradoxically lies between life (Christianity) and death (the Orient), and can only be resuscitated by Western intervention. *Christopher D. L. Johnson, Department of Religious Studies, University of Wisconsin-Fond du Lac, 400 University Drive C-207, Fond du Lac, WI 54935, USA. E-mail: christopher.d.johnson@uwc. edu. I am especially indebted to Susan R. Gorin-Johnson, Anthony E. Clark, and Amanda C. R. Clark for their proofreading skills and suggestions on the article. I would also like to thank the Association for the Study of Eastern Christian History and Culture for the opportunity to present part of the research for this article at their 2013 meeting, and for the helpful comments of its members, especially Roland D. Clark, Matthew L. Miller, and Randall A. Poole. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, September 2014, Vol. 82, No. 3, pp. 811–840 doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfu036 Advance Access publication on June 30, 2014 © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com by guest on August 20, 2014 http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from