The history of traditions is not only a history of approach. It is also a history of turning away—of contempt generated, encoded, and transmitted across centuries through the ordinary mechanisms of culture: law, performance, art, liturgy, habit. Divergence examines those mechanisms. Not to indict, but to understand. The methodology is forensic rather than devotional. What gets carried forward, how it travels, and why it persists long after the institutions that generated it have formally renounced it.
In 1633 a Bavarian village promised to perform the Passion every ten years if the plague passed them by. It passed. They have kept the vow for nearly four hundred years. Rome repudiated the charge of collective Jewish guilt in 1965. The Oberammergau script was not substantially reformed until 1990.
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