Marshall Hodgson’s intellectual heritage is commonly traced to two major sources: the Orientalist tradition of Louis Massignon, Hamilton A.R. Gibb, and Gustave von Grunebaum; and his immediate milieu at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, including again, von Grunebaum, John U. Nef the economic historian and Robert Redfield the anthropologist – the last two also were among the founders of the Committee on Social Thought. However, Hodgson’s debt to cross-disciplinary scholars such as Mircea Eliade, and especially Karl Jaspers, is less noted but crucially important in grasping the ultimate goals of Hodgson’s ideas of history as a profession, a discipline, and an ontological category. Hodgson developed Jaspers’ concept of kerygma in “The Historian as Theologian,” a 1967 lecture delivered to his university colleagues. This paper excavates Hodgson’s deployment of the kerygmatic principle as both a historical agent and a guiding force of the historian’s work, and culminates in the colocation of the historian's and the theologian’s task and purpose. Reconsidering Hodgson’s work in light of the insights put forth in “The Historian as Theologian” opens The Venture of Islam to new interpretations and understandings.