I was trying to use underscore.js templates for templating in a rails 2.3 app which does not have jammit as an asset packager. Here is the simple Template: <script type="text/template" id="q-template"> <div class="current-body"> <span class="q-index"><%= title %></span> <span class-"q-text"><%= body %></span> </div> </script> Rails tries to parse these as erb variables and throws an ArgumentError.