Sacrifice and the Body: Biblical Anthropology and Christian Self-Understanding (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) 9781409418825, 9781315607405, 1409418820

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Sacrifice and the Body

ASHGATE NEW CRITICAL THINKING IN RELIGION, THEOLOGY AND BIBLICAL STUDIES The Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and research readers. Headed by an international editorial advisory board of acclaimed scholars spanning the breadth of religious studies, theology and biblical studies, this openended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. Other Recently Published Titles in the Series: Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin Reason and Faith Hilary B.P. Bagshaw The Nature of the Soul The Soul as Narrative Terrance W. Klein Cassian’s Conferences Scriptural Interpretation and the Monastic Ideal Christopher J. Kelly Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality Testing Religious Truth-claims R. Scott Smith Thomas Torrance’s Mediations and Revelation Titus Chung Dalit Theology and Christian Anarchism Keith Hebden Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities Sustenance and Sustainability Pankaj Jain

Sacrifice and the Body

Biblical Anthropology and Christian Self-Understanding

John Dunnill Murdoch University, Perth, Australia

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © John Dunnill 2013 John Dunnill has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Dunnill, John. Sacrifice and the body : biblical anthropology and Christian self-understanding. -- (Ashgate new critical thinking in religion, theology and biblical studies) 1. Sacrifice--Christianity. 2. Sacrifice--Christianity-History of doctrines. 3. Self-perception--Religious aspects--Christianity. 4. Theological anthropology-Christianity. 5. Theological anthropology--Biblical teaching. I. Title II. Series 233.5-dc23 The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Dunnill, John. Sacrifice and the body : Biblical anthropology and Christian self-understanding / by John Dunnill. p. cm. -- (New critical thinking in religion, theology, and Biblical studies) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 978-1-4094-1882-5 (hbk) 1. Sacrifice. 2. Human body--Religious aspects. 3. Worship. 4. Religion. 5. Religions. 6. Sacrifice--Christianity. I. Title. BL570.D86 2013 233’.5--dc23 2012036140 ISBN 9781409418825 (hbk) ISBN 9781315607405 (ebk)

Humility is the land where God wants us to go and offer sacrifice. (Abba Alonius)

To the memory of Alan Albany 1946–2012

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Contents Preface  

ix

Introduction 1 Why Sacrifice? Why the Body?  

3



Part I: Explorations

2

The Economic Body: Communion Sacrifice and the Kingdom of God  

33

3

The Purified Body: Expiatory Sacrifice and Justification  

65

4

The Generative Body: Covenant Sacrifice and the Resurrection of the Body  

99

Recapitulation On Theological Interpretation

137



Part II: Dialogues

5

The Victimized Body: A Dialogue with René Girard  

143

6

The Abused Body: A Dialogue with Feminist Theology  

163

7

The Atoning Body: A Dialogue with Anselm and His Followers   179

Conclusion 8 Towards the Convivial Body: A Eucharistic Trinitarian Theology of Sacrifice  

201

Bibliography   Concise Index of Biblical and other Ancient Sources   Index of Names and Subjects  

217 233 237

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Preface Sacrifice is a topic widely disparaged and avoided today. It is linked with the ‘primitive’, and with bizarre rites involving the death of animals. It is widely associated with loss (‘self-sacrifice’), a lingering glorification of war, and even with aggression and torture. I have found that if I tell people I am working on the area of sacrifice they most often start talking about ‘human sacrifice’, as if that is what I had said. What causes that jump? If I told them I was a cook would they assume I was a cannibal? But the leap is just as great. Modern people generally think of themselves as reasonable and logical, but sacrifice seems to be a notion which produces irrational responses in otherwise rational people. So it is a topic which calls out for investigation. When we look at what sacrifice means, in cultures which actually practise it, its associations are overwhelmingly positive, connected to gifts and feasts and celebration. Without being undiscerning, that should make us ask if there is something we are missing. Is there something about ‘Western’ culture (by which I mean the culture of Europe and its offshoots as it has shaped and been shaped by the Christian religion) which predisposes us to be blind to what is natural, positive and life-giving about this aspect of religion? I have observed that what many people dislike and fear about sacrifice is almost identical with what they dislike and fear in their perception of the Christian religion: its orientation on death, sin and renunciation, and the recognition of a force outside ourselves who has a claim on our lives. René Girard comments ironically that modern people have ‘a sacred horror of the Bible’, and it seems to me that this is because it will not let us forget that we do not create ourselves, and whether we like it or not our lives are bounded by death. If this is the case, and if sacrifice is intrinsic to biblical religion, there is an urgent need, not only in theology but in our culture, to come to terms with a topic which may help us to be more at peace with who we are. My particular angle on this theme is a perception that living sacrificial systems, although all different, express a very specific kind of understanding of the human body. If the body and its actions are the means by which people relate to divinity, or ‘the transcendent’, that defines the way the human body relates to the world, to the ‘mind’ and the ‘soul’ and other people, with implications for what constitutes the human person and human flourishing. Such living sacrificial systems, like the religion of the incarnation, offer an understanding of the human person which is fundamentally different from both ‘spiritualized’ and ‘materialist’ accounts of the human person. We may find that pondering the meaning of sacrifice, in examples

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drawn from the Bible and from a range of cultures, ancient and modern, gives us a clue to a more holistic way of thinking about ourselves. I have been encouraged, while writing this work, by the appearance of a number of books in theology, biblical studies and social anthropology which have approached sacrifice in a more positive light. If this book contributes at all to a changing perception and evaluation it will have achieved its aim. Earlier versions of some passages have appeared elsewhere, as follows: parts of chapters 1 and 2 in John Dunnill, ‘Communicative Bodies and Economies of Grace: Sacrifice in the Christian Understanding of the Body’, Journal of Religion 83/1 (2003),1 and part of Chapter 8 in John Dunnill, ‘Through Your Goodness We Have These Gifts to Share: Ecology, Humanity and Eucharistic Being’, in ‘Nurturing Nature: Essays on Ecological Theology from the Doctrine Commission’, St Mark’s Review 212 (May 2010). Figure 1.1 is taken from John Dunnill, Covenant and Sacrifice in the Letter to the Hebrews (SNTSMS 75, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and used by permission of Cambridge University Press. I acknowledge gladly the huge gift I have received from those who have inspired this work and assisted me in it, and to whom I offer thanks: to my colleagues and students at Murdoch University and in the Anglican Diocese of Perth, Western Australia, for providing a supportive environment for study and writing; to David Ford and Frances Young for conversations on these matters in earlier times; to the members of the Doctrine Commission of the Anglican Church of Australia for sharing in stimulating theological inquiry on many topics over the years; to Robin Tapper, Godfrey Ashby and Scott Cowdell for helpful comments on early stages of this work; to Bill Loader, Alex Jensen and Robert Daly SJ, for graciously taking time to read and comment on the final draft; to the parishes of Scarborough and Beaconsfield, Western Australia, who have kept before my mind what it is to be a Eucharistic community; and first and last to my wife Maggie for her unfailing love and support through this venture. John Dunnill 4 December 2012

  © 2003 The University of Chicago Press.

1

Introduction

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Chapter 1

Why Sacrifice? Why the Body? I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flocks, replied: “I’d be a damn’ fool if I didn’t!”1

1. Talking about Sacrifice Sacrifice is not an easy subject to discuss these days. Very few people in ‘Western’ societies have ever experienced an actual sacrifice – the offering of an animal or of vegetable matter to a deity, and its destruction by fire or other means in a ritual context. Such an action may strike us as strange or pointless, fascinating or disgusting. Yet in most societies that we know of throughout history, and in many also today, ‘sacrifice’ is virtually equivalent to ‘religion’ and taken for granted as the usual means of communicating with the deity or the spiritual world. Religion in this sense is a set of actions to perform: the devout Muslim praying five times daily towards Mecca; Balinese women weaving baskets out of leaves to fill with flowers and rice and deposit at a temple or outside a home or shop; African tribesmen killing a calf and eating it with men from a neighbouring village to settle a dispute. Such actions may be simple or complex but are seldom reflected on. This may come as a surprise, if like most moderns we think of religion as primarily a matter of belief. This very ‘Western’ concept of religion really comes out of the accident that the Jewish people, as a result of their troubled history, developed two forms for their religion. Alongside the older sacrificial system based in the Temple in Jerusalem, at least from the time of the Babylonian Exile (sixth century bce) there developed a weekly or daily practice of verbal praise and law-obedience, modelled on the holy writings of the Torah and the Prophets and practised in the synagogue. These two co-existed in harmony for several centuries, but after the destruction of the Temple in 70 ce, Judaism survived as a religion of the Law and the Book. This happened at the very time that the Christian church was separating itself from Israel and defining itself over against Israel as a rival, non-sacrificing, religion. From these developments we derive the modern idea of a religion as an ‘-ism’, fundamentally a set of beliefs expressed in words, and also leading to certain   Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems (London: Dent, 1952), introductory note. A ‘fairy ring’ is a naturally occurring circle or arc of mushrooms. In European folklore they are regarded as dangerous places, associated with elvish dancing or the entry into the fairy realm. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_ring (accessed: 19 July 2011). 1

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practices. This of course fits some religions better than others. Hindus resist the idea that they are followers of an abstraction called ‘Hinduism’ which is really an invention of Western scholarship. What used to be called ‘Mohammedanism’ is now rightly referred to as ‘Islam’ – not belief in Mohammed or his teachings but the practice of ‘submission’. For most people at most times, then, sacrifice has been virtually equivalent to religion, and has not seemed strange but familiar, although other people’s modes of sacrifice might seem questionable. In any case, as the example above indicates, it is not a matter to discuss or reflect on but to do. Is it possible to understand sacrifice? If it is true that sacrifice is a practice, and that we learn a practice (like a language) by practising it, this may indeed be difficult. Take the religion of a modern tribal culture. Perhaps we can only understand it by taking part in it, and doing so with the assumption (usually never questioned) that this is how divinity is dealt with and life fulfilled. Even with a living sacrificing culture, there is no way we can participate except as an outsider, with an outsider’s interest and questions and distance. Perhaps then we cannot in the fullest sense understand their religion and the closest we can get is through the exercise of imagination. This is still an exercise worth attempting. In particular what would the world be like if these sacrifices did not seem strange or repulsive but natural and normal and life-giving? There are three main obstacles to understanding sacrifice today. Firstly, it appears to be wholly outlandish and obscure, for the reasons given above. Secondly, the word ‘sacrifice’ carries almost entirely negative connotations, to do with death and blood. Lurid images of human sacrifice spring immediately to mind, connecting sacrifice to a world of violence and cruelty which is naturally repulsive. Such things do happen, but if we start from this extreme exception we shall not see what is really going on, and even animal sacrifices are relatively uncommon in most religions – and therefore described as special and significant. Sacrifice is not ‘about’ violence or cruelty, and sacrifices flourish in societies that are not necessarily more (and often much less) violent that our own. The negative perception also takes another, more moderate and less exotic form. In the Western world where sacrifices are not practised, ‘sacrifice’ is usually applied in a moral sense, ‘self-sacrifice’, meaning the cost involved in pursuing some worthy or necessary goal, especially a vision or commitment. This can occasionally be regarded as admirable – such as the ‘sacrifice’ commemorated on war memorials, or the ‘sacrificial’ lives of Mother Teresa and her sisters, with their selfless care for the poor – but generally, and as applied to ourselves, it has the character of an unwelcome demand. Any kind of ‘self-denial’ is in conflict with our culture’s emphasis on ‘self-expression’ and ‘self-fulfilment’. Once again there is a mistake here. Sacrificing cultures do not generally emphasize the element of loss and pain, which for us is the primary meaning of the word, but rather the benefits and blessings which are expected to flow. This leads to the third obstacle to understanding, which is this: whereas in modern English to ‘sacrifice’ something is to ‘give it up’, in the languages of

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cultures where it is a living reality (from Ancient Israel and Greece to modern Africa) it means to ‘give’. The emphasis falls, not on my loss, but on the relationship between humanity and deity mediated by a gift or other ritual gesture and bringing benefits of various kinds. Interestingly, the English phase ‘give up’ does contain a trace of an upward, heavenly motion (like ‘offer up’), but it is seldom used with any idea of ‘giving’, or to connote an upward motion towards some ‘higher’ person or being who might receive the gift. Generally it simply means to ‘cease’ doing something difficult in order to do something else more pleasurable (as one might give up going to church on Sunday morning in order to play football). Even when, for explicitly religious purposes, one ‘gives up’ something pleasurable (such as abstaining from eating chocolate in Lent) and even if the resulting savings are ‘given away’ to benefit others, there is no concept that some deity might be receiving the gift. Christian dislike of sacrifice is almost as old as Christian faith. Like the intellectuals of ancient Greece, Christians were glad from the start to distance themselves from the bloodiness and obscurity of traditional religious practices, and have bequeathed to the culture of today – for both Christians and non-Christians – a sense of sacrifice as something primitive, oppressive and disgusting. Why would we even wish to discuss it? Yet because Christianity was a reinterpretation of Judaism, even though it began as a system of beliefs and practices without any actual sacrifices, its writings (like those of the Jewish rabbis) made abundant use of Israel’s scriptures, including a range of sacrificial ideas and images drawn from Israel’s practice (‘the lamb of God’, ‘a living sacrifice’). To step aside from sacrifice is not so easy. To regard as a matter of distaste and incomprehension what Isaiah and St Paul thought normal and natural puts a barrier between them and us which intrudes itself at every point. We need to enter into their understanding of sacrifice if we want to understand what they meant when they wrote about God, sin, salvation or godly living. The topic will not go away just because we want it to. Although it is a subject seldom discussed except among specialists, it is interesting to note some recent changes. There is a widespread interest in the writings of René Girard, who propounds an anti-sacrificial theory which maximizes the negative perception of sacrifice as the source of all violence and all our woe.2 In much contemporary feminist writing, ‘sacrifice’ stands for oppressive gender relations: the violence that men inflict on women, and the

2   In addition to the key works of Girard himself, beginning with Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), I have in mind here accessible applications of his theory to the Bible and modern culture such as James G. Williams, The Bible, Violence and the Sacred (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991) and Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads (New York: Crossroad, 1995). See Chapter 5 below.

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violence they persuade them to inflict on themselves.3 By contrast, conservative Protestant defenders of Christian ‘orthodoxy’ often argue that an objective account of salvation (‘Atonement’) must centre on the ‘sacrifice’ of the cross, interpreting Jesus’ death positively as a beneficial act of divine punishment suffered by Jesus on our behalf.4 As I shall argue later, all these represent distortions and misunderstandings of sacrifice. But such distortion and misunderstanding is nothing new. Christianity has in fact misunderstood sacrifice from the beginning, and has misunderstood it more as it has progressively distanced itself from sacrificial practices. It may therefore be natural and inevitable, but this misunderstanding has had and continues to have profound consequences. It has led to a misunderstanding of the roots of Christian faith and practice in the worship of Israel, and of the character of Israel as an ongoing religious community; it has led to a misunderstanding of Christian redemption insofar as that has been expounded in terms of sacrifice, and necessarily it has led to a misunderstanding of Christ when he is named in sacrificial terms as redeemer, high priest and final victim. I shall argue, in contrast, that sacrifice, although easily distorted and misconstrued, needs to be understood as a positive feature of religious practice. To do this, I shall seek to bring critical understanding of sacrifice, particularly in Israel, into relation with reflection on the body, to develop an alternative perspective with implications for Christian thinking about creation, redemption and Christology. I shall try to show that a positive appreciation of sacrifice is necessary for a Christian theological anthropology and for an adequate philosophy of the body. 2. What is Sacrifice? What, then, is sacrifice? It need hardly be emphasized that there is no single thing, in all the many religions and cultures of the world, that constitutes sacrifice; nor is there a single ‘essence’ underlying the multiplicity of appearances. Particular religious cultures vary enormously in the ethos they present, and the roles performed in them by sacrificial actions. Likewise, the forms of sacrifice themselves, considered as individual religious practices, can of course be very varied. Among them we shall note especially gifts, meals, expiations and cosmogonic rites, but these by no means cover the whole field. 3   See, for example, Allison Weir, Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1996), who discusses the connection between identity and violence in feminist thinking: ‘Identity is the product of a sacrificial logic, a logic of domination’ (p. 3); Martha Jane Reineke, Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). See Chapter 6 below. 4   See the essays in Charles E. Hill and Frank A. James (eds), The Glory of the Atonement (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004) and Chapter 7 below.

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By ‘sacrifice’ I understand those varied aspects of religious behaviour which have the following characteristics. Seven elements of sacrifice:5 1. Action. A sacrifice is a thing done, and therefore necessarily external and material. 2. Ritual. The action is ritualized, that is, it requires some index of difference, either in the materials used, or the personnel, or the mode of sacrificing, or in the understanding of what occurs. Abnormal things are done, or normal things done differently. 3. Transcendence. A sacrifice is a ritual action mediating relations with a power of another order, in some sense ‘divine’ or ‘sacred’. 4. Exchange. In sacrifice some thing is handed over to the god, with some sense of something else received: some physical, social or spiritual benefit or ‘blessing’; or the offering is made in response to a prior divine gift received. 5. Transformation. Both as action and as exchange, a successful sacrifice is understood to involve a change (whether in the god, or the material or the sacrificer) through access to transcendent power. 6. Solidarity. The actions and materials used are always closely related to the life circumstances (the habitat, economy, social structures and concerns) of the sacrificers, which by being brought into relation with the divinity unite the god also to their life. 7. Cosmology. While individual sacrifices may be routine or trivial, the system or set of practices (insofar as they can be perceived as a whole) may be understood to represent the totality of life (biological, social, existential) for the sacrificing group. These are very general characteristics. For example a flask of wine may be brought to a shrine as a libation, a gift offering, and poured over the altar or other object. Here the action (#1) is the giving (#4). The wine, the fruit of the ground produced for human consumption (#6) has been diverted from its normal biological use (#2) to mediate with higher powers (#3). What transformation occurs (#5)? This will depend on the attendant circumstances. Is it to restore a relationship with the deity broken or spoiled by some misdemeanour, perhaps understood as persuading the god to be kind? Is it to maintain an ongoing relationship of dependence and praise? Is it a votive offering, seeking blessing in some new enterprise?

5   Kathryn McClymond, Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), offers another set of seven ‘elements’ or ‘building-blocks’ typically found in sacrifice: selection (of a substance to be offered), association (with a deity), identification (with the offerer), killing, heating (which can include both burning and cooking), apportionment (between gods, priests and others) and consumption (pp. 29–33).

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The element of ‘cosmology’ (#7) in this gift offering is represented only by the role such a gift may have in a sequence of private or communal gifts which maintain or restore the relationship and perhaps uphold the community or the priestly caste in a practical way by providing food for them to consume. At the opposite extreme is the explicitly cosmogonic rite which re-enacts a creation myth and thus ‘founds’ or maintains the world. For example, the Dogon people of Africa tell the story of a pair of primal twins who fight, and one is sacrificed to create the world.6 The ritual repetition of this primal sacred event (#2, 3) by an animal sacrifice (#1, 4) is understood to reaffirm the natural cycle of the seasons and confirm the social hierarchy descending from the king (#5); it also, by its use of circumcision and menstruation, recognizes the dependence of all these on the biological cycles (#6, 7). Indicators of transcendence (#3) may be as varied as the actions performed and the cultural contexts in which they take place. The main factor is that they are ‘special’, that is, intentionally different. A meal is eaten, but consists of special food (more or less than usual, or a different menu), or is eaten in a different way, or in a special place or time, or by a special assembly of persons, or wearing different dress, or accompanied with particular words, gestures or songs – or any combination of these differences. It is the way the elements are combined, and their differentiation from the normal, that constitutes the unique ritualization of each act (#2). The event is not necessarily exotic: a Christmas dinner may exhibit most of the required features. Hence ‘formality, fixity and repetition’ are frequent indices of rituals.7 But even these features are not absolutely invariant, for transcendence can also be represented by informality and disorder. This occurs, for example, in African ‘rites of rebellion’ which reaffirm the social order by enacting the symbolic death of the king.8 The recognition of chaos is a feature of many periodic rites, such as New Year feasts, where an outbreak of disorder (orgiastic behaviour or role reversal) at the margin between one year and another serves to reaffirm the general order.9 The so-called informality in these cases may be far from spontaneous, but may in fact observe a fixed and repetitive form. The role of chaos or ‘non-order’ is a feature also of rites of passage, such as initiation into a new stage of life. As described classically by van Gennep these typically involve a period of seclusion commenced by a ‘rite of separation’ and

  Luc de Heusch, Sacrifice in Africa: A Structuralist Approach (ET, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 125–60. 7   Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 90. 8   Max Gluckman, ‘Rituals of Rebellion in S.E. Africa’, in M. Gluckman, Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (London: Cohen & West, 1963), pp. 110–63. 9   Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History (London: Arkana, 1989 (1954)), pp. 51–62. 6

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concluded by a ‘rite of reaggregation’.10 The seclusion takes place outside the normal time/space world of the community, and often involves symbolic reversals and disorderly behaviour, as well as inculcation into the appropriate traditions by the elders. The man who rejoins the tribe, after this immersion in chaos, is different in significant ways from the boy who left. Here the action and exchange affect the body and life of the initiate himself (#1, 4), whose sojourn in the place of disorder, with the symbolic death of circumcision, is visibly as well as psychologically and socially transforming (#5). His social relations and solidarities are now changed (#6), drawn into the world of adult males with its occupations and responsibilities as hunters or farmers, and this often confers a different ritual status too. While life changes occur naturally, and boys in all societies become men, ‘adulthood’ is more than a biological concept; it is a social construction, and it is that ‘more’ which the ritualization exists to confer.11 Varied as sacrificial rites are, the action in each case will bear some relation to the ordinary life of the culture in question (#6). It is in order to maintain or restore the kinship system, or the crop cycle, or the harmony between two clans, that people perform rituals, including sacrifices, which take their specific form from their cultural function. Peoples that perform sacrifices do not operate with a ‘theory of sacrifice’ and a list of approved ‘sacrificial practices’. These are abstractions produced by the cataloguing, theorizing mentality of Western scholarship. The classical theories of sacrifice developed by British and French anthropologists in the nineteenth century were attempts to produce a general essence of sacrifice, and so to reduce it to something else more easily understandable. Was it a disguised form of magic? or trade? or access to power?12 All these, like the psychological theories of Freud,13 begin from the view that sacrifice is strange. The word names those things that we, in a secular culture, don’t do, and could not consider doing, but which are typical of the people we call ‘primitive’.14 And not only is it strange and primitive, it has a distinctly religious kind of primitive

10   Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (ET, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1960 (1909)). 11   Edmund Leach, Culture and Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 77–9. 12   For a convenient summary of these theories, see Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp.  91–140; also M.F.C. Bourdillon, ‘Introduction’, in M.F.C. Bourdillon and Meyer Fortes (ed.), Sacrifice (London: Academic Press, 1980), pp.  17–25; Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp.  128–46. For representative extracts from the main contributors, see Jeffrey Carter, Understanding Religious Sacrifice: A Reader (London: Continuum, 2003). 13   See Morris, Religion, pp. 151–63; Carter, Sacrifice, pp. 139–49. 14   Howard Eilberg-Schwarz, The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

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strangeness. No wonder the modern mind, even of religious believers, finds the word ‘sacrifice’ archaic and alien. By contrast, recent writing on sacrifice has tended to emphasize the ordinariness of most sacrifice from the perspective of those who practise it. For them, it is usually (and with certain key exceptions) a set of practices embedded in the commonplace business of life, integrating life into a relation with divinity. If that is the case, there will be, as we shall see below, a normal and natural relationship between sacrifice and that very ordinary part of human living, the body. I emphasize the element of ordinariness and solidarity (#6), because it is the separation of the Christian church from the commonplace and corporeal life of sacrificing communities that lies at the root of the history of distaste and misconstrual. By the second century Christians were well known as those who did not practise sacrifice, and were therefore to be numbered with the atheists.15 This was despite the fact that in a larger sense their Eucharistic practice was certainly sacrificial, fulfilling all the criteria #1 – #7, but differing only in not containing an animal’s death. In distancing themselves from it they came to share the distaste of Greek intellectuals for the messiness, the sheer physicality of the blood offerings of pagan and Jew alike.16 God who by definition ‘needs nothing’ is not to be insulted with offerings of the blood and fat of animals.17 They continued to use metaphors drawn from the Levitical sacrificial system, perhaps the more freely because the Jews no longer had a temple; it was easy to claim that the value of the whole tradition had always been in pointing to the single final event of the death of Christ, by which the system was ‘fulfilled’ and rendered otiose.18 Later attempts to convey the meaning of Christ’s death found the language of sacrifice increasingly obscure and replaced it with what were intended to be dynamic equivalents: purchase, feudal obligations, legal satisfaction, most persuasively, in the last five centuries, punishment. It was then natural for Christians to read back 15   M. Pol. 12: 2 (for text and translation, see Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, ed. and trans. J.B. Lightfoot and J.R. Harmer (updated edn of 2nd edn, Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999 (1891)); ET in Maxwell Staniforth (trans.) and Andrew Louth, Early Christian Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987 (1968)); Frances M. Young, The Use of Sacrificial Ideas in Greek Christian Writers from the New Testament to John Chrysostom (Cambridge, MA: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1979), pp. 92–7. 16   Ep. Diog. 3: 3–5, Ep. Barn. 2: 4–10. Christians, of course, defended themselves against the charge of atheism by affirming that when they prayed and celebrated the Eucharist they offered ‘a bloodless and spiritual sacrifice’ (Athenagoras, Plea for the Christians 13, cited by Robert J. Daly, The Origins of the Christian Doctrine of Sacrifice (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1978), p. 91). The duty to offer food and other gifts for the support of Christian ministry was sometimes urged by reference to the law concerning ‘first fruits’ (Did. 13); see Young, Sacrificial Ideas, pp. 98–9. 17   Maria-Zoe Petropoulou, Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greek Religion, Judaism and Christianity 100 bc – ad 200 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 246–51. 18   Petropoulou, Animal Sacrifice, pp. 274–8.

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their preferred metaphor into the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, so that the religion of Israel, centred on this negative element, came to be seen, variously or cumulatively, as gloomy, mechanistic, legalistic and vindictive.19 3. The Centre of Sacrifice? Gifts, Meals and Deaths The Gift In sharp contrast to the idea that sacrifice is characterized chiefly by violence, the most usual form of sacrifice is in fact the gift.20 It is widely agreed in sacrificing cultures that one does not come empty handed into the presence of the deity, so every act of prayer in a temple or other sacred space is likely to be accompanied by an offering of wine, of bread, of vegetables, of cakes. These may be daily acts of recognition, or they may have a particular purpose as thank offerings (for healing supplied, a safe return from a journey, or a good harvest), or votive offerings seeking a blessing in advance. Beattie notably excludes from his definition of sacrifice such libations, vegetable offerings and so on, ‘since they do not include what for our purposes it is useful to regard as the central feature of sacrifice, the killing, immolation, of a living victim’.21 This claim about what is ‘central’ will be disputed below. For the moment it is important to observe a continuum running from such smaller, private, routine gifts, through minor animal sacrifices, to the whole burnt offering of a goat or a bull, which in many cultures forms the most conspicuous public votive or thank offering given by the whole community or its leader. The larger examples are therefore comparatively rare, while the smaller examples are so common and low-key as often to escape the notice of literary commentators. But we should notice that the desire and obligation to give and receive gifts is in many, perhaps all societies, the foundation on which relationships (between humans and gods, as between person and person) are built. And all the other types of sacrifice can be regarded as (among other things) specific forms of gift. It is important not to confuse gift with trade, a common failure of Western observers of preliterate societies. Because the receiving of a gift generates an obligation to offer another gift in return, it is easy to conclude that the appearance of spontaneity in a ‘gift’ is a playful facade disguising a mechanical ‘do-ut-des’ contractual exchange (‘I give in order that you will give’). But, as van Baal has shown, the quality of gift exchange is fundamentally different. The content of a gift depends less on ‘need’ and ‘value’ than on expressing the quality of the   For discussion, see Chapter 7 below.   The classic study is Marcel Mauss, The Gift (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,

19 20

1954 (ET of Essai sur le don, 1925)). 21   J.H.M. Beattie, ‘On Understanding Sacrifice’, in Bourdillon and Fortes, Sacrifice, pp. 29–44, citing p. 31.

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relationship, which grows with the transaction, whereas a functional trade tends to exhaust it.22 In giving a gift it is essential that it be given, that is, that it should not be reclaimed. The gift, or at least a significant part of it, must therefore be either consumed – if not by the god then by a priest or other divine agent – or else destroyed, and so placed beyond the reach of the donor. Destruction is not universal but a widespread feature, and, when the gift is an animal, killing is a necessary preparation for either destruction or consumption. So even though animal sacrifices are highly conspicuous, and the source for us of much of the subject’s frisson (outdone only by the shocking notion of human sacrifice), neither killing nor even destruction is central or essential to sacrificing practices. What happens in a sacrifice? A selected animal or vegetable product is first offered, with appropriate words or gestures, then killed (if an animal) and either burnt up as a whole offering, or else (more usually) wholly or largely consumed by the offering community. The gift is chosen from what the community owns, and the offering community identifies with it. It may be decorated and share in a joyful procession; it may be required to signify ‘consent’ to the offering by nodding its head; the mood generally is celebratory and the sacrificial beast honoured for the part it plays. The death is swift, unemphasized, and relatively painless, with no hostility expressed. Such describes the sacrifice of the Nuer of contemporary southern Sudan, for example, as well as ancient Greece and Israel.23 Now, the Nuer have also a set of rites for dealing with alien sources of evil.24 These involve the death of an animal (and it is always an animal) by suffocation, and without any meal or ritual invocation. Here the animal is identified with the ‘Other’ to be expelled, and its sufferings are intended. The Nuer associate this rite with their neighbours the Dinka, thus pointing to the alien and outlandish character of the evil it deals with. Evans-Pritchard comments: ‘I think that perhaps what I witnessed should not be regarded as a sacrifice at all, at any rate in the usual sense, for the beast does not seem to have been consecrated and there was no

22   Jan van Baal, ‘Offering, Sacrifice and Gift’, Numen 23 (1976): pp.  161–78, reprinted in Carter, Sacrifice, pp. 277–91. 23   Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 197–217; Marcel Detienne, ‘Culinary Practices and the Spirit of Sacrifice’, in M. Detienne, and Jean-Pierre Vernant (eds), The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 1–20, citing pp. 9–10; Ed P. Sanders, Judaism, Practice and Belief 63 bce – 66 ce (London: SCM Press, 1992), pp. 107, 114– 16. Evans-Pritchard’s account of Nuer sacrifice includes the mainly joyful rites he calls ‘collective’ and ‘confirmatory’ as well those he calls ‘personal’ and ‘piacular’, and which he, echoing the general Western view, finds more interesting. 24   Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, pp.  216–19. On the religion of the Dinka, see Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).

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invocation’.25 Similarly, among the Zulu, a black sheep is on occasions buried to ward off the effects of sorcery, but it is not strictly a sacrifice, the act being done without offering.26 A clear distinction is made, therefore, between sacrificial gifts and avertive anti-gifts. Although these examples of such rites involve domestic beasts, in many societies wild animals or (the human equivalents) prisoners of war are chosen for this expulsive action. The Greeks, for whom similarly sacrifice generally meant joyful feasting, warded off disease periodically by expelling prisoners.27 The Killing What is the significance in all this of the killing? It is often taken to be the distinctive part, and Beattie speaks of ‘the central feature of sacrifice, the killing, immolation, of a living victim’.28 But the examples from the religion of the Nuer show that there is some ambiguity in this regard. Certainly the expulsion rite consists chiefly of the energetic and painful death of an animal. But in the more common rite, although the immolation is arguably ‘the culminating movement of the drama’,29 coming after the preparatory presentation, consecration and (often long) ritual invocations, and leading into the shared meal – yet the death itself, although ritualized, is also swift and functional: ‘An ox is speared on the right side, and so expert are the Nuer that I have never known a second thrust to be necessary or the beast to move for more than a few seconds after the thrust has been made. Sheep and goats have their throats cut.’30 On Greek vases depicting sacrificial rites, the moment of death is not shown.31 Coming before the events depicted, or between the procession to the altar and the complex division of the carcase, the moment of death never appears. What occupies these vases is the process of dividing the carcase, of removing key organs     27   28   29   30  

Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p. 217. De Heusch, Sacrifice, pp. 62–3. Girard, Violence, p. 94. Beattie, ‘Sacrifice’, p. 31. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p. 212. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p, 211. Similarly, McClymond, Sacred Violence, pp.  51–2, 56–61, speaks of the intentional non-violence of sacrificial killing in Vedic and Hebrew ritual: ‘In fact, sacrificial killing may be contrasted with mundane killing specifically because it provides a sacred (= nonviolent) death as opposed to a worldly (= violent) death … We must at least consider this characterization, not just dismiss it as unrealistic or euphemistic’ (p. 61). 31   Jean-Louis Durand, ‘Greek Animals: Towards a Topology of Edible Bodies’, in Detienne and Vernant, Cuisine, pp. 290–302, citing pp. 90–92. See also Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘A General Theory of Sacrifice and the Slaying of the Victim in the Greek Thusia’, in ibid., Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 290–302, citing pp. 293–5. 25 26

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and disposing of these appropriately, some to be burned on the altar, the rest distributed to different persons according to status, all the business of priestcraft. The priest’s function is to oversee, and on important occasions perform, these complex procedures.32 As in Israel, the actual killing is performed by the person bringing the sacrifice, and not by a priest; so it could be argued that killing, while a necessary part of the act of handing over of the animal into the sacred sphere, is not itself a sacrificial act in the technical sense as understood in that society. Why then the silence about this death, of so much interest to us? We may be tempted (with Durand)33 to see this as witnessing to a sense of mystery about this existential moment, represented also by the olologe, the wild yodelling cry; or else to discern in this silence, like the act of hiding the knife, signs of a certain air of guilt about the event, like a crime covered by ideological mystification (a view rejected by Vernant),34 or else (with Stowers) to read it as a sign that the death is insignificant, ‘only an unremarkable necessary prelude to what is important about sacrifice’.35 Yet none of these seems quite satisfactory. There are several reasons why the ritual killing of animals must attract attention, in any culture. To kill a sheep or an ox provides a meat meal, a conspicuous and joyful occasion in any society which employs animals for instrumental purposes and eats meat only rarely. Clearly this is a factor which varies according to economic circumstances. But equally there is an element of risk and loss involved in culling a herd to provide meat, and even more so where the sacrifice takes the form of a holocaust or whole offering. What extreme factors could call out so significant a ‘waste’? Aside from these economic considerations, there is the personal element. In a small-scale herding society, people’s bonds to their animals can be close, even intense. Among the Nuer, an initiated youth is given a bull calf which ‘becomes the young man’s friend and companion’, and ‘the youth enters through this ox into a new kind of relationship with God, the guardian spirits of his family and lineage, and the ghosts of his ancestors’.36 There is a sense in which, in the death of an animal, a person confronts his or her own death. Is this in itself not enough to cause that silence, that mournful cry? Yet it is a death which is experienced as transforming and life-giving.

32   Stanley K. Stowers, ‘Greeks Who Sacrifice and Those Who Do Not: Toward an Anthropology of Greek Religion’, in L.M. White and O.L. Yarbrough (eds), The Social World of the First Christians (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), pp.  293–333, citing p. 327; Durand, ‘Greek Animals’, p. 104. 33   ‘The moment of death as rupture belongs to the gods alone. It lies beyond human grasp, reserved for the divine world’ (Durand, ‘Greek Animals’, pp. 91–2). 34   Vernant, ‘General Theory’, pp.  293–7. Similarly, McClymond, Sacred Violence, denies that this is, in the case of Vedic sacrifice, ‘an elaborate deception’ (p. 61). 35   Stowers, ‘Greeks Who Sacrifice’, pp. 297–8. 36   Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p. 251.

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Without denying Stowers’ point that ‘the “gift” to the god is not the death but what remains after death’, whether in the form of blood, fat or flesh,37 it seems more likely that the silence of the Greek vases represents neither indifference nor mystification, nor even mystery, but reticence. For the animal sacrificed was not primarily a sacred object but ‘a faithful working companion’, ‘a member of the household like a relative or domestic slave’.38 The silence, therefore, is responding to a paradox of human living. It admits that we must slaughter animals in order to eat, yet at the same time it aims to banish acts of murder and savagery from what is human.39 In any case we must be clear that while cruelty is a regular feature of expulsion rites, this is not true of sacrifice in general. Greek vases, which, as we have seen, preserve silence about sacrificial death, in some cases depict acts of human sacrifice, complete with the event of death and the flowing of blood: does this not indicate that it is, in fact, not a sacrifice but ‘a ruthless murder, an ungodly act of violence fraudulently disguised as a sacrifice’?40 In many African religions the sacrifice of the sacred king – often represented by an animal or an ‘impure’ human – is a central event, impurities being banished by the ritual death of the king to restore order to society. The one killed (actually or symbolically) represents evil and is subject to various cruelties; alive or dead, the remains are disposed of outside the settlement. In most societies these actions are peripheral, in others central to the sacrificing cult and to cosmology; but only here is cruelty given a part in the sacred action. It is rather often assumed that such cruelty, especially in human sacrifices, is a feature of the ‘primitive’. But it can be shown that ‘one may perfectly well combine such practices as headhunting, cannibalism, human sacrifice, and the like, with extremely sophisticated and intelligent religio-philosophical systems and rationales’.41 Rites like those of the Druids, which involve dismemberment of a human victim and careful observation of patterns of the limbs, have a cosmogonic function: the rite re-enacts the myth by which the sundered members of the Primal Man made the world.42 Likewise, the Aztec practice of cutting out victims’ hearts, however little it appeals to us, was based on a theoretical cosmology and was

  Stowers, ‘Greeks Who Sacrifice’, p. 296, n. 18.   Vernant, ‘General Theory’, p.  298. This appears to confer moral status on the

37 38

animal in question, not equal to that conferred on humans, though possibly higher than those accorded to ‘barbarians’. 39   Vernant, ‘General Theory’, p. 301. 40   Ibid., p. 295. 41   Bruce Lincoln, Death, War and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 177. 42   Ibid., pp. 182–7; Eliade, Myth, pp. 55–6.

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aimed at releasing the sun’s energy stored in the body for the good of the whole community. It was ‘essentially a technology’, like splitting the atom.43 In such cosmogonic rites the victim represents the whole community. Often, therefore, the victim is, or is said to be, the king. At other times, the king, or the community, is represented by an outsider, usually a prisoner of war. But these should not be confused with expulsive ‘scapegoat’ type rites discussed above, or with modes of execution. The Aztecs, like other cultures, disposed of criminals and foreigners by violent means, such as strangulation, beating or stoning, involving intentional suffering or humiliation, but these have no connection with religion or sacrifice. Duverger remarks that for the Aztec, ‘Sacrifice was not a punishment and it should not be viewed as a repressive and barbarous act’.44 If sacrifice is not a form of punishment, then, are there any grounds for thinking that an animal victim dies as a ‘substitute’ for the death of the human offerer? Clearly this is not always the case. In a communion sacrifice, which the offerer will eat with his family and friends, the offerer is not understood, even in symbol, to eat himself. A better case can be made for this in those piacular or sin offerings in which the gift will either be destroyed entirely, as a whole burnt offering (the normal mode of sin offering in ancient Greece and in early Israelite society), or else is destined to be consumed in a sacred place by the priests alone, as with the Levitical sin offering. The animal is now identified with the ‘sin’ for which it is offered, and what is consumed, and therefore destroyed, is the sin. In this case the victim may well be thought of as a ‘ransom’ or ‘substitute’ for the sacrificer, and the rite’s purpose is to divert or neutralize evil consequences of some transgression or problem. But even if the offering is made to avoid divine punishment, I cannot think of an example where the animal is said to be ‘punished’ instead. That idea is present only when acted out in the mode of an expulsive rite, where suffering appears to be intended, and which are frequently regarded by the participants as ‘not really sacrifices’. Hence it is better to see penal acts as an alternative mode of averting evil from the community, rather than distorting the notion of sacrifice by thinking of it as a kind of aversion.45 The Meal An equal claim to centrality in the sacrifice, along with gift and kill, can be made for the meal. We should not overlook the fact that most animal sacrifices are not grim and guilt-laden but public and joyful affairs and involve meals. They   Christian Duverger, ‘The Meaning of Sacrifice’, in Michel Feher (ed.), Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 3 (New York: Zone, 1989), pp. 366–85, citing p. 369. 44   Duverger, ‘Meaning’, p.  375. Similarly, Jay, Generations, pp.  65–9, argues that so-called acts of ‘human sacrifice’ among the Ashanti of West Africa were in fact the ritual killing of condemned criminals, taking place at the royal mausoleum, not (like sacrifices proper) at the site of the royal ancestral cult. 45   See discussion in Chapter 7 below. 43

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include meals to celebrate marriages and give thanks for childbirth, meals to mark significant public occasions like a chief’s commencement or victory in battle, meals to restore relationships between alienated parties (two human parties, or a human group and the deity). Notably, although meat sacrificed in a sin offering may, in some cultures, be shared in a meal, animals killed in rites which are strictly expulsions almost never do: it is not proper to eat an impure victim.46 The significance of sacrificial feasting is often resisted by scholars brought up in the Christian tradition, which tends to create an expectation that the sin offering is the typical rite, and death is the central part of it. Evans-Pritchard remarked: ‘To regard the eating of the animal as part of the sacrificial rite would be like regarding a wedding feast as part of the marriage service in our own country’, although he concedes that ‘it forms part of the ceremony in the broader sense’.47 But Stanley K. Stowers disagrees: ‘The constant refrain that “Greeks and Romans seem more interested in feasting than religion” simply misses the significance of their religion’. He cites Dio Chrysostom to show ‘what Greeks thought important for worship’: What festivity could delight without the presence of the most important thing of all [friendship]? What symposium could please without the good cheer of the guests? What sacrifice is acceptable to the gods without those celebrating the feast?48

We should therefore regard the meal as a normal though not universal part of sacrifice, the ‘secular’ end of a single rite in which worshippers are fed following the more overtly sacred and priestly action at the altar – but not a different event. Bruce Lincoln argues that ‘to stress one of these aspects at the expense of the other is to divorce consumption from production, a move that makes no more sense in studies of ritual than it does in those of political economy’,49 and Kathryn McClymond takes a ‘polythetic’ approach to sacrifice which insists on allowing equal importance to both killing and consumption.50 Similarly, Walter Burkert says (of Greek religion), ‘The fundamental structure is  …  clear: animal sacrifice is   De Heusch, Sacrifice, p.  211; cf. Gabriel Abe, ‘Redemption, Reconciliation, Propitiation: Salvation Terms in an African Milieu’, in Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 95 (1996): pp. 3–12, citing p. 8. 47   Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p. 215. 48   Stowers, ‘Greeks Who Sacrifice’, pp. 298–9. 49   Lincoln, Death, War and Sacrifice, p. 206, n. 4. 50   McClymond, Sacred Violence, pp.  33–4. Maurice Bloch criticizes Lienhardt for his resistance to ‘the political and consumptive aspects of sacrifice’ in discussing sacrifice among the Dinka, even though ‘the Dinka word which he translates as “sacrifice” would, according to him, be more straightforwardly translated as “feast”’ (Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 36–7). 46

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ritualized slaughter followed by a meat meal’,51 and Baruch A. Levine (speaking of the Levitical system) points to the same ‘two dimensions to a sacrifice’: ‘together these parallel acts made the sacrifice complete’.52 We conclude that, on its own, a meal is merely consumption; on its own a killing belongs to the sphere of the hunt, or warfare, or punishment; but together they make a distinctive kind of human significant action. In the more detailed investigation of sacrifice, which commences with the next chapter, I shall be seeking to construct an account of sacrifice, as manifested in the life of Israel, which places the sacred sacrificial meal at its centre. And I shall do so in relation to the body. 4. The Body The intersection of this exploration of the meaning of sacrifice with current thinking about the body is the question of what effect the offering of sacrifices has on the human sense of corporeality, and the value that reflection on corporeality has for interpreting sacrificial practices. In this we are investigating the element of ‘solidarity’ (#6), that is, the ways in which sacrifice participates in a wide range of the biological, familial and economic circumstances of the offerers, and how it brings them into relation with divinity. Studying the Body The significance of ‘the body’ as a subject for study and reflection in philosophy and sociology is a key twentieth century development. When Marcel Mauss wrote his 1934 essay ‘Body Techniques’ he was consciously retrieving the topic from the realm of the miscellaneous and the anecdotal, beneath the gaze of serious scientific study.53 However, in the same period, ‘body’ was becoming a focus for philosophical reflection in the phenomenological writings of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.54 Later in the century, Foucault perhaps did more than anyone to establish the body as a centre of interest, in conscious reaction against the   Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p. 57.   Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), p. 11

51 52

(on Lev 2: 10). 53   Marcel Mauss: ‘Body Techniques’, in ibid., Sociology and Psychology: Essays (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 95–123 (originally published in Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, 35e année, 1935, pp. 271–93). 54   Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Book 2, in ibid., Collected Works, vol. 3 (ET, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (ET New York: Harper and Row, 1962); Marcel Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (ET, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). For a brief review of this literature, see Donn

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idealizing tendency in structuralism.55 Because, as Mauss put it, ‘the body is a human being’s first and most natural instrument’,56 it became the locus of cultural study.57 The body of course can be studied in many ways but we are not here concerned with medical perspectives. What will mainly concern us is the body not as an object (Körper) but as a ‘lived-body’ (Leib), to invoke a distinction made by Husserl.58 This means, firstly, it is a living object, and an animated, conscious object, and secondly, it is a locus of processes of living. Within the body (to adopt a convenient shorthand) are contained the organs of digestion by which food is transformed into energy for life; outside the body are the social practices of work (hunting, harvesting, cooking) by which nutritive meals are provided. Within the body are contained organs of speech and hearing, and also those of reproduction; outside the body are social processes of interaction, discipline and generation by which society is constituted, maintained and reproduced. Within the body are processes of growth and decay; outside the body are systems of protection, shelter, sustenance and replacement. This emphasis on the body as the locus of human being contrasts sharply with the Cartesian account of humanity as essentially an observing mind, or even a pure thinking being, ‘having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses’.59 The three highlighted areas of food, social interaction and the cycle of birth and death illustrate why we cannot think of the body except as inherently transpersonal, rooted in culture and transcending the limits of the physical. Food, sex and death are also, not quite coincidentally, the major life events with which sacrifice deals. It should be evident that the lived body is a cultural product. There is in this sense no ‘natural’ human body. This is not to deny the elements of genetic continuity and material dependence, but to point out that the body, as actually lived and experienced, is shaped by its own life, experience and understanding. Welton (ed.), The Body (Blackwell Readings in Continental Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 1–6. 55   Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (ET, New York: Vintage Books, 1979), and The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (ET, New York: Vintage Books, 1980). For relevant extracts, see Welton, The Body, pp. 252–85. 56   Mauss, ‘Body Techniques’, p. 104. 57   See Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (London: Sage, 1993); Mike Featherstone, M. Hepworth, and Bryan S. Turner (eds), The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (London: Sage, 1991); Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 58   See Welton, The Body, p.  4 and D. Welton, ‘Soft, Smooth Hands: Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Lived-Body’, in Welton, The Body, pp. 38–56. 59   René Descartes, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p.  101, cited in Paul A. Mellor and Chris Shilling, Re-forming the Body: Religion, Community and Modernity (London: Sage, 1997), p. 6; cf. Bell, Ritual, p. 95.

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Humans normally have two hands, and the right hand is ‘naturally’ more likely to be stronger than the left; but upon this natural base a range of cultural distinctions and interpretations is raised. In this instance, the difference between natural and cultural can at least be observed, in theory if not in practice, but this is not always the case. In some societies women are perceived as ‘weaker’ than men; and they may even be, in that society, generally weaker than men; but is this a fact or a discourse, or is it a fact (if it is a fact) because it is a discourse? For the lived body is a function of a range of factors with which it interacts. These include: (1) the effects of the relevant biological systems (digestion, growth, reproduction) but necessarily adapted to the physical environment with its specific resources of food, heat, shelter and so on; (2) the skills and tasks that a body adapts itself to in interacting with that environment in work; (3) the social structuring of the human community in terms of family groups, distinctions of race, gender, social hierarchy, kinship relations and so on; (4) the controls on behaviour and desire exercised on the body by this community and its structures (political, legal, religious, medical); (5) the self-disciplines taken on by individuals as agents in response to community controls and chosen life goals; (6) socially constructed notions of space and time, with symbolic systems or languages operative in the group and expressed in terms of dress, bodily markings, rituals, interpretations and so on; and (7) the stated or unstated theoretical discourse or cosmology by which a society understands what it is to be a lived body in the universe (for example the difference between understanding yourself to be a ‘created’ or an ‘evolved’ body).60 The body is thus the primary cultural artefact. It is, by the same token, necessarily social and transpersonal. Individuals live in communities and their experience of the lived body is inevitably shaped by the physical, economic, social, political and religious character of their specific community. Whereas in the rememberable past of ‘Western’ society, the body was thought of largely in economic terms (the ‘hired hand’), and subject to overtly political and religious controls, we see how popular culture today presents the body largely in hedonistic– narcissistic terms, as a locus of sensation (‘Drinking – it’s what your right arm’s for’), while controls are increasingly couched in medical terminology (‘Smoking can damage your health’). The sexualized body is equated with social maturity and acceptability (compare the different uses of the word ‘adult’), while in place of conscience there is the ‘medical morality’ of health, with its emphasis on diet, ‘lifestyle’, safety and ‘self-care’.61 To assert the transpersonal character of the lived body is not to deny the possibility of individual aspiration, self-definition and self-regulation (noted   See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp.  87–95, on embodiment. He remarks: ‘Treating the body as a memory, [societies] entrust to it in abbreviated and practical, ie mnemonic, form the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture’ (p. 94). 61   Turner, Body, pp. 201, 210–16. 60

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above), although necessarily this arises in interaction with cultural norms. The opposition of free will and determinism is not adequate to describe the mode of human agency, the lived body acting freely according to choices exercised within constraints. Pierre Bourdieu speaks of the habitus, ‘the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisation’, a set of historically grounded dispositions realized in particular practices, structures of behaviour which proceed by non-identical repetition.62 The Body in Sacrifice The focus on the body is therefore not an attempt to reduce human life, or the divine, to material phenomena. ‘The body’ is the human person, considered from a physical aspect, and it is therefore open to all aspects of the human person including psychic–spiritual phenomena (feeling, thinking) which are rooted in bodily responses. Sacrifice is a particular practice situated at this contested border, where the body’s actions are understood as having spiritual meaning, and where the spiritual is experienced physically. Despite the fact that religions may concern themselves with the ‘spiritual’ or transcendent, their practice is necessarily a physical business. Worship takes place at particular times and places. These may be communally determined (occurring in a named ‘sacred place’, according to a calendar of times and seasons) or reflect the individual’s private discipline or impulse to pray. It takes particular physical forms; as Mauss said of Yogic breathing: ‘I think that there are necessarily biological means of entering into “communication with God”’.63 Thus religion may be understood as the practice of disposing the body to enable ‘communication with God’, however conceived, whether in worship or in ethical action conformed to a sacred order or a perceived divine will. Catherine Bell, in an important discussion of ‘the ritual body’ writes about ‘the sense of ritual’ and ‘ritual mastery’. She describes ritualization as a process of differentiation both learned through practice and applied to processes dynamically. In this process ‘ritual mastery’ is achieved.64 For example, a society develops a ‘ritual environment’, in which time is ordered according to a calendar of sacrifice (such as the three pilgrim feasts of   Bourdieu, Outline, p. 78.   Mauss, ‘Body Techniques’, p. 122. On sociological study of religion and the body,

62 63

see Bryan S. Turner, Religion and Social Theory (London: Heinemann, 1983); Mellor and Shilling, Re-forming the Body. For theological perspectives, see Maria T. Prokes, Towards a Theology of the Body (Edinburgh: Clark, 1996); Linda Isherwood and Elizabeth Stuart, Introducing Body Theology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998). Recent applications of theory to ‘the body’ in Biblical literature include Joel B. Green, Body, Soul and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008); Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 64   Bell, Ritual, pp. 94–117.

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Israel or the four year ‘Olympiad’ of ancient Greece), and a sense of ritual space (such as the relation between the home and the shrine, whether local or distant; the ‘high place’; the omphalos or earth navel; ‘the city where the Lord will cause his name to dwell’). The interaction of ritual space and time has implications also for the development of certain movements: the pilgrim journey to the sacred site; modes of procession; the gathering of the community which constitutes the sacred assembly (and which may at the same time constitute ‘the community’ or ‘the nation’ in a formal, sacrificial, sense). Within a given site, the ritual character of space is learned through the geographical orientation in relation to the sun or other features, the layout of the sacred and profane zones, and the actions, personages and clothing appropriate to each.65 Such a sacred geography may be replicated at the local level in the orientation of homes and villages according to a temple plan.66 The major changes of life may be marked by rites of passage involving geographical separation into ‘liminal’ space and reincorporation into the group. There may also be the ritualized use of hands and knees in gestures which are transportable, coming by repetition to create ‘sacred space’ anywhere, as also special words, songs, or styles of utterance. Special commodities and their taste or smell may by their use in sacrifice establish, among all commodities, a hierarchy of what may only be eaten or drunk in a ritual context, either because desirable and therefore special (such as the meat meal) or because minimal (like the Eucharistic wafer) and valued only because of their sacred meaning. In all, there evolves a specialized bodily practice which achieves ritualization by the fact of being specialized (employing an arbitrary signified, distinguished from others), or because the act of (repeated) ritualization fixes a ritual control of natural value. Internalization of this practice creates ‘a ritualized social body, one that comes to possess, in various degrees, a “sense of ritual”’.67 Thus, among other rituals, sacrifice is a key signifying practice which structures the lived body of the social group and of individuals who participate in this living structure. The embodied character of sacrifice involves at least six factors, which correspond in various ways to the elements of sacrifice (#1 – #7) set out on p. 7. Thus, firstly, sacrifice is a thing done, physically, when one human body, or more, deals with other bodies (vegetable, animal or even human) in a total action (offering/destruction) which involves other physical activities, such as dancing, singing and processing (compare #1 Action and #4 Exchange). Secondly, it contains an implicit (and sometimes explicit) hermeneutic of the body. In making use of the bodies of animals (as also of humans and vegetables) sacrifice subsists in rubrics (written or recalled) concerning the significance and proper use of body 65   See Eliade, Myth, pp. 12–21, 51–92; Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 169–215. 66   For this example in Balinese culture, see Frank B. Eiseman, Bali: Sekala and Niskala: Essays on Religion, Ritual and Art (Singapore: Periplus, 1990), pp. 2–10. 67   Bell, Ritual, p. 107.

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parts (blood, fat, flesh, skin, dung, limbs, internal organs and so on), in interaction with the body of the deity and the corporate body represented by the sacrificing community and its members (compare #2 Ritual meaning and #3 Transcendence). Thirdly, the placing of the body in relation to divinity expresses an awareness of lack, and need, a hope that those who participate in bringing a sacrifice, or those they represent, may be in some way transformed in and through the change in the victim (compare #5 Transformation). Fourthly, the materials of sacrifice are usually and characteristically related to the life cycle of the human body with its needs and uses, specifically as food. As offered to divinity, they represent humanity’s dependence on the natural order (compare #6 Solidarity). Fifthly, sacrifice is necessarily social action, being typically a public event performed according to acknowledged structures of time, space, hierarchical relations, economic functions and so on. The body which acts in sacrifice (even if it does so in private) is a socially constructed body (compare again #6 Solidarity). Sixthly, and over all, sacrifice must be understood as embodied religion. It is physical action performed in relation to the divine or sacred, however conceived, which has its meaning and social significance in mediating that relationship. It will involve social controls and interior disciplines designed to conform the body’s actions to the divine, and structures of symbolism by which a transcendent cosmology is embodied (compare #7 Cosmology). 5. Cosmologies The previous section emphasizes the way sacrifices express the biological, familial and economic circumstances of the offerers, and accumulate into systems which discipline the bodies of their participants in certain ways. While individual sacrifices will necessarily be partial in their representation, it can be shown that the system as a whole approximates to a reflection of the whole. The same can be said of the understanding or worldview represented, not necessarily by any individual rite, but by the whole. As a system, a community’s sacrifices represent the ‘cosmology’ or worldview (#7) of that community. We have seen that contrary to popular perceptions, sacrifices are not primarily concerned with violence and suffering, and they do not necessarily involve killing. There is no ‘essence’ of sacrifice, for they are of many sorts, and their character and function will relate to the religion and culture they spring from. One of the key variables in all religious systems is the way they deal with the polarity between conjunctive and disjunctive views of the powers that rule the world. By ‘conjunctive’ belief systems I mean those in which the divinity is regarded as attractive and life-affirming; by ‘disjunctive’ I mean those in which it is thought of as repulsive, dangerous, or life-denying. All religions show both impulses to some extent, and both must be included in a full account. However, there is almost always a distinct difference in the character of worship (both the words and the

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actions) when a deity or supernatural realm is regarded as an object of fear or hatred to be expelled or avoided, rather than a source of blessing and life. Similarly, we can distinguish between conceptions of the power or deity which are personal and those which are impersonal. Again, it makes a difference to how people act and think (and specifically for our purposes the nature of sacrificial rites and how they are performed) whether people see themselves as dealing with some kind of a personal being (a god or gods, revered ancestors, a spirit) or with a sub-personal force (mana, sin, evil, ‘life force’). Of course there are ambiguities (‘spirit’ is a case in point) but the basic distinction is clear.68 This gives us four types of religious perspective and sacrificial action:

Figure 1.1

A Typology of Sacrifice

Source: John Dunnill, Covenant and Sacrifice in the Letter to the Hebrews. Cambridge University Press, 1993.

  This typology is derived, with qualifications, from Beattie, ‘Sacrifice’, pp. 37–43. In a different form, and illustrated as here, it was used also in John Dunnill, Covenant and Sacrifice in the Letter to the Hebrews (SNTSMS 75, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 77–9 and passim. 68

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I. Personal/Conjunctive (Communion). Whatever seeks to obtain or maintain close access to a power conceived personally. This includes relationships mediated by fellowship meals shared with the god or in the god’s presence (communions); or by speech (praise, blessing and petition); acts of dedication, discipleship and covenant. II. Impersonal/Conjunctive (Absorption). Whatever seeks to gain access to an impersonal power. A key example is the ingestion of blood, flesh or other substance as a means to obtain life power; sorcerous use of power; also theophagy, feeding on the god, to be sharply distinguished from feeding with the god in a communion meal.69 III. Personal/Disjunctive (Propitiation). Whatever seeks to ensure separation from a power conceived personally. This includes acts expressing fear of a god or the god’s wrath or baneful influence; malevolent ancestors; evil eye. It can take the form of propitiatory prayers, gestures or offerings, or in extreme cases exorcism. IV. Impersonal/Disjunctive (Expiation). Whatever seeks to ensure separation from an impersonal transcendent force. Key ideas here are taboo or material impurity, plague or death or abstract evil. It involves expulsion or protection through rites of purification, expiation or aversion. Inevitably, any single rite may fall in more than one category. A religious or sacrificial culture will employ many or all of these types at different moments, depending on whether it sees itself in relation to one god, or two opposed gods, or many; and whether impersonal forces are deployed within a personal cosmology, or personal deities perceived to exist within an overarching impersonal necessity or fate.70 The pantheon of ancient Greece contained gods of different character who must be treated differently and who were liable to changes of mood. As well as the gods of Olympos with their (mainly conjunctive) rites, there were the chthonic gods of Hades with their disjunctive rites based on fear and dread. Alongside all these personal gods, and the quasi-personal spirits (daimones) of places and winds, there was an overarching impersonal fate (moira), to which no sacrifices were due but which must be dealt with in some way. We see these forces interacting in the life of the ancient city of Athens, which in the fifth century bce attributed its independence to the heroic act of Theseus, who at some point in the past had slain the Cretan Minotaur, and thereby gained 69   Beattie, ‘Sacrifice’, p. 39, fails to make this distinction and speaks under Type I, Communion, of ‘god-eating’: ‘the theophagy central to the Christian Mass fits in here’. 70   Beattie, ‘Sacrifice’, p.  38, distinguishes between power ‘conceived of either as individual and personalised or as diffuse and impersonal’. It will be seen that I assume that these connections are not necessary. A pantheon displays divine power in a personal but diffuse way; a high god identified with the totality of things will be individual but may contain elements of both personal and impersonal being.

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the city its freedom from the oppressive power of Crete. Before that, Athens’ political subjection had been symbolized by the obligation to dispatch annually a party of young men to be offered to the Minotaur, the monstrous beast which terrorized Crete from its labyrinth.71 This now abolished disjunctive sacrifice was remembered annually in the sending of a symbolic mission to worship, or pay tribute to, Apollo at Delos: thus the city’s life was defined by the transformation of a disjunctive death into a conjunctive, cosmogonic act of worship and thanksgiving. Plato’s Phaedo contains an interesting reflection on this sacrificial understanding of the city’s life. His narrative of the death of Socrates begins with a reference to the delay in proceedings caused by the solemn quasi-sacrificial mission to Delos, since the duration of the voyage marked a sacred season during which no executions must occur. This is ironic, as Socrates himself died in some sense as a disjunctive, propitiatory offering to the dark powers, once again abroad in Athens. However, he himself makes no reference to Hades or to fate, but dies willingly, urging his friends to make an offering of a cock on his behalf (a thank offering?) to Asclepius, the god of healing.72 Cosmology and Methodology Underneath the variety of these worldviews we need to note also what they share: the presupposition that there is a transcendent sphere of power (element #3, from the elements of sacrifice listed at the beginning of this chapter,73 operating in the world for good or ill, and that this sphere communicates in various ways with human life (the exchange, #4) bringing transformation (#5). This flow of divine communication is fundamental to the cosmology (#7) implied in all sacrifice. The example above from ancient Athens also illustrates the way in which a city’s practices, its sacrificial system, relates to a sacred story, or myth, which both explains why it takes this form, and grounds the ongoing regularities of life in relationship with the divine. These three areas (ritual, myth and sacred experience) of course overlap, as the Athenian example illustrates, and they form three ways of accessing the sacred, respectively from the perspective of system, story, and relationship. System: sacred rules Anthropology has described in rich detail the way ‘primitive’ cultures are governed by systems of sacred rules, in which separating out ‘moral’ from ‘cultic’ elements may not be at all easy. Not only cultic practice (who offers sacrifices, when, where   H.J. Rose, A Handbook of Greek Mythology (6th edn, London: Methuen, 1964 (1928)), p. 265. 72   Phaedo, 57B; 59E; 118; in Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. H. Tredinnick (new edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1959), pp.  99, 183. See Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Unsacrificeable’, in Yale French Studies 79 (1991): pp. 20–38. 73   See p. 7 above. 71

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and how) but food customs (what to eat, how to prepare it, who to eat it with, where and on what occasions) and marriage systems (who to marry, how, and with what implications for ongoing relationships), as well as discrete ‘ethical’ actions, are all parts of a way of ordering the world, implicit in the practice of sacrifice.74 Story: sacred myths Sacrifice itself often claims to depend upon a foundational myth, a story explaining why a certain practice is ‘commanded’ or done, although the myth may often have come into existence to explain the practice. Biblical examples include Jacob’s dream and the sanctuary at Bethel; the Akedah and Israel’s identity as seed of Abraham; the Last Supper and the Christian Eucharist. The stories may appear to the observer to be merely fanciful, but are seldom seen this way by participants. In many traditions the act of divine creation itself is understood as a sacrifice (a character echoed in the ritual flavour of Genesis 1), so that daily or annual cosmogonic rites are not only remembering but participating in its creative power, and are themselves in some sense events of (renewed) world creation.75 Hence any ritual sacrifice will occur in the same liminal sphere as the divine action which it echoes, although, crucially, in the contrary direction: whereas in sacrifice the movement is from human to divine, and a ritual is characterized by ‘fixity, formality and repetition’, divine action breaking into the human scene will often be unique and world changing. Such events fulfil all the elements of sacrifice except in not being rituals (#2), but are qualitatively rich in other aspects, especially the transformation of life (#5), a feature which in rituals may sometimes be weak or only notional. These stories record specific and unique instances of the working of divine power which sacrifice finds at work in routine and repeated ways in ‘creation’. I shall call these actions (whether past, future or present) episacrificial, to denote both their participating in the same sphere as ritual sacrifices and also doing so from above rather than below, as active epiphanies of the divine, which reveal and also transform.76

  Jonathan Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp.  3–10, criticizes OT scholarship for adopting Mary Douglas’ systemic and semiotic approach to purity rules, while failing to apply them equally to sacrifice, preferring to ask questions about the evolution of sacrificial customs, rather than their meaning or purpose. On Douglas, see Chapter 3 below. 75   For examples, especially of cosmogonic rites, see Bloch, Prey into Hunter, pp. 46– 51; McClymond, Sacred Violence, pp. 35, 71, 86–7. 76   Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, acknowledges that what I call the episacrificial can be understood as an inversion of the genetic process: ‘The liturgical order of a society establishes its Logos’ (p. 352, with examples pp. 353–70, and the way rituals flow from ‘Ultimate sacred postulates’ and numinous experiences, pp. 404–5). 74

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Relationship: sacred experience Existing in a context defined by social structures and myths, sacrificial rituals are regularly understood as mediating relationship with the divine and embodying a response to divine initiative, whether found in an original act of creation, a divine incursion, a sacred command, or a blessing perceived in a childbirth or a harvest or a victory. Such rituals may have social functions and other purposes of which participants are unaware, and which the trained outsider may be better placed to observe. But a ‘scientific’ ethnology which tends to prioritize the observable human actions, and bracket out the meanings expressed by participants, especially when they do not conform to expected standards of religious discourse, may be in danger of completely misunderstanding what is happening. To make sense of sacrifice as it arises in and through committed and enculturated participation, we need at the very least to offer a ‘thick description’ of symbolic actions which is open to learn from those actions a worldview which could not otherwise be guessed.77 Sacrifices invariably point beyond themselves to an unseen or otherwise transcendent sphere (variously conceived), existing in some relationship with humanity and generating a power and pattern of symbolic exchange. We shall therefore need to take particular account of the ways they manifest the distinctively theological dimension that I have called ‘episacrificial’. 6. Conclusion and Prospect In this chapter, I have tried to show that the study of religions reveals that sacrificing rituals are far more positive and life-giving than they may appear to us in the twenty-first century ‘West’ with our particular historical and cultural blinkers. In the next three chapters, I shall be seeking to understand what sacrifice is, especially as it affects the character and meaning of the Jewish and Christian scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. To do this, I shall take the general ideas about sacrifice sketched in Chapter 1 and develop them as a means of interpreting the Hebrew scriptures and the early Christian writings of the New Testament. I shall ask: what understandings of the body in relation to God arise in these writings through the study of sacrifice? In chapters 5, 6 and 7, I shall turn from analysis of sacrificial systems and texts to an interaction with particular modern critics of sacrifice in order to get to the heart of their objections. These three ‘Dialogues’ will look at sacrifice in relation to ‘the body’ and violence and atonement, and try to show that a right appreciation of sacrifice is necessary for a better understanding, not only of the Christian scripture but also of ourselves in the world.   For the concept of ‘thick description’ see Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 3–30. 77

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The argument therefore seeks to incorporate analysis of historical and cultural developments, and exegesis of scripture, into a theological interpretation of scripture itself and of the place and meaning of sacrifice in Christian tradition. This will lead me finally to ask: what are the implications for the traditional understanding of Christ, the cross and Christian living? I have argued that sacrifice is a practice of disposing the body for communication with God, in which the spiritual is understood, expressed and experienced physically in gifts offered and shared, and by the same action the nature of physical being is understood and experienced spiritually. To say that in the Bible and in Christian understanding the world is created is to say that it exists in dependent relation on a power that is not itself and that brings it into being, or at least shapes it out of primal matter. Therefore matter is imbued with the life-giving quality of the one who makes it, and sacrifice exists as a mode of recognition of that transcendent origin of things and a response of submission and thanks. By the giving of gifts (with contrition, thanks, praise or intercession as appropriate) humans recognize their participation in the world as a field of divine creative energy and the simultaneous participation of the divine in the field of human life, work and sociality. To see the world in this way runs directly counter to the post-Enlightenment perception of the world as self-subsisting matter, capable of being described exhaustively in material terms, and which changes only through its own processes, such as evolution and human agency. From that perspective sacrifice – and indeed all religion – is a pointless pursuit, which is at best a waste of time, energy and resources. Conversely, any understanding of the world as created must involve a dynamic of exchange, however that is expressed. Praise and aspirations can be sacrificed as well as oxen, but the same dynamic prevails. To say that the world is gift, and that human life fulfils itself when it responds by giving, is more than a perception or ungrounded assertion about the world. It makes a claim about the fundamental being and character of God. The doctrine of the world’s createdness leads directly to Israel’s perception of itself as a people called by God to enjoy a special covenantal relationship, and to the gospel story that into this created field, and into this covenantal relationship, God himself has entered, in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ. If the One who is Gift gives himself in this way, reflection on the nature of God as Trinity finds this giving to spring from God, not only in time but eternally, in the self-giving of the Father to the Son and the Spirit, and of the Son and Spirit to the Father. As far back as we can take it, God is love and Being is gift. It turns out that sacrifice is not a strange and primitive activity better dispensed with in a rational world but a principle underlying all things, recognized widely in religious perceptions and practices and revealed supremely, Christians would say, in the incarnation of Christ.

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I shall not, of course, be suggesting that Christians today ought to be performing blood sacrifices. But I shall try to show that reflecting on sacrificial actions, as well as taking part in them, carries a particular way of thinking about the fact that as humans we are bodies and what it means to place our bodies in relation to God. I shall argue that the fundamental dynamic of exchange and mutual participation both roots biblical faith in the common ground of religions and needs to be construed in distinctively Christian terms through the paradigmatic being of the Trinity.

Part I: Explorations

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Chapter 2

The Economic Body: Communion Sacrifice and the Kingdom of God Much misunderstanding of religions arises in our day from thinking of them primarily as systems of belief. In this book we are thinking of religions as beliefbearing practices, among which sacrifice has a special place. In Chapter 1, we looked broadly at the meaning of sacrifice as a set of practices in the religions of many cultures, ancient and modern, with particular effect on the conception of the human body in relation to divinity. In this and the next two chapters, we shall examine the religion of Israel and the early Christians as presented in Old Testament and the New Testament to ask what understanding of the body is to be found in these foundational scriptures. Israel’s sacrifices can be divided into three main types. 1. Gifts. Here I include the sacrifices offered wholly ‘by fire’, consisting of offerings of vegetables (the minchah, the ‘gift offering’), or of animals (the ‘olah, ‘burnt offering’ or holocaust), and also the first fruits offerings of crop or herd (Lev 1–2; 6: 8–13). 2. Meals. The zebach or shelamim (mistranslated by the AV as ‘peace offering’, better rendered as ‘communion sacrifice’ or ‘sacrifice of well-being’) is an animal offering of which (apart from the fat, which was offered ‘by fire’ as in the ‘olah) most is to be returned to the offerer, to be boiled and consumed (Lev 3; 7: 11–36). 3. Expiations. In the chatta’th (sin offering or purification offering) and the ‘asham (guilt offering or sacrifice of reparation) an animal is slaughtered, its blood sprinkled downwards and fat portions offered ‘by fire’, then the remainder consumed in the holy precincts by the priests. This has features of both the sacred meal and the whole offering; but where the ‘olah and the zebach can have a range of meanings, depending on circumstances, these are focused precisely on the removal of sin/impurity (Lev 4–5; 6: 24 – 7: 10). The study in Part I will likewise be in three parts, but it will not follow this division into types. Rather, it will focus on three different symbolic and practical functions of sacrifice, in each case firstly in the Old Testament, and then carried through into the New Testament. The current chapter will focus on two types of sacrifice (gifts

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and meals), exploring the idea that Israel in its life and worship was participating in a divine economy, before looking for traces or transformations of this perspective in the NT; Chapter 3 will look at the third category only, expiatory sacrifice, from the perspective of purification; Chapter 4 will take a generational perspective and, under this heading, look at the way all three types of sacrifice function to articulate the understanding of communities existing in time. 1. Gifts and Meals in the Religion of Israel The Old Testament gives prominence to the third of these groups, the expiatory blood sacrifices, and their elaboration in rites like the Day of Atonement. This emphasis reflects the significance of these rites in the systematization of Israel’s worship in Leviticus, and in the religion of the Second Temple period, but historical inquiry shows that this dominance was relatively late. Although expiatory rites no doubt existed at least in some traditions before the Exile, they were relatively little noticed at that time. The historical books and the Psalter assume that zebach and ‘olah, frequently together, are the standard forms of offering. It was to worship and offer zebach that Samuel’s parents went up to Shiloh year by year (1 Sam 1); it was the zebach of thanksgiving that worshippers were called to offer in Psalm 107: 2; it was a votive zebach that Absalom offered for 200 guests at Hebron (2 Sam 15: 7–12) when he wished to secure support for his bid for the throne. It was shelamim and ‘olah that David offered before the Ark of God, when it was brought into Jerusalem (2 Sam 6: 17–18), with a public distribution of food, including meat presumably derived from the sacrifice. Interestingly, at this period, where there was offence it was to ‘olah, zebach and minchah that people might look, or else not look, for expiation (1 Sam 3: 14; Job 1: 5). Alfred Marx has shown how similar in structure these simpler, earlier rites were to two secular forms of hospitality.1 The holocaust and vegetable offering (‘olah and minchah), which are wholly burnt up by fire, he likens to a feast set for a superior in which the host does not share. An example is the meal which Abraham, assisted by Sarah, placed before the Lord (mysteriously appearing in the form of ‘three men’) in Genesis 18: 1–8. In partial contrast, the zebach or shelamim resembles more a feast shared with an honoured guest, who is given the best portion, especially the fat parts. See, for example, the description of the feast Samuel gave for Saul before anointing him king (1 Sam 9: 22–4). In the zebach all share in the meat and the wine (‘eat and drink’) in the presence of Yahweh who has first received the fat as an offering ‘by fire’. The celebration of a zebach is therefore very close to the pattern of a normal meal. However, it is not a normal meal; so by what ritualizing process is a meal 1   Alfred Marx, ‘Familiarité et transcendance: La fonction du sacrifice d’après l’Ancien Testament’, in Adrian Schenker (ed.), Studien zu Opfer und Kult im Alten Testament (Tübingen: Mohr, 1992), pp. 1–12.

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turned into a sacrifice? There are references to special times and annual patterns; also to special places, such as Hebron and Shiloh, and to special personnel, the priests of local shrines. Aside from a regular worship cycle, they could be offered in connection with particular intentions, such as a vow or a thanksgiving. It was necessary (at least in one custom (1 Sam 16: 5)) for worshippers to ‘sanctify themselves’ as a ritual preparation before making zebach. Evidently these are fragments of a range of local customs and traditions concerning when and where and how sacrifices should be offered, but we can conclude that always some rules obtained. On the other hand, the natural sacrificer was the king or household chief so that the rite is intrinsically tied to the common life of the group making the offering. And the contents of the sacrifice – as indeed all Israel’s sacrifices – are the normal products of the community: vegetables, wine and meat from flock and herd. Contrary to the aggression theory, it is not among hunters but among pastoralists and agricultural societies that sacrifices are made, and made from the given products of that society. Caroline Mayers has shown how, in a very specific case, the materials offered by Hannah when she presents her child Samuel for temple service reflect the micro-economy of her home region, Ramah. These include bullocks, flour and wine, but no oil, from a hilly area well suited to cattle rearing but poor for olive growing (1 Sam 1: 24).2 In a subsistence economy the rarity of meat meals, especially of larger livestock such as sheep, goats or cattle, indicates not only the specialness of the event but its being under the control of those who hold the wealth of the community. It is worth comparing these rites with the better known chatta’th. Clearly, in terms of the criteria listed earlier, they are all actions through which relations to transcendent deity are mediated. But what relationship with God do they express? From one perspective, they are all forms of gift, and they all include exchange, in which some commodity is visibly parted with, to be wholly or partly destroyed. As such they express a relation of dependency to the power of God, a dependency which may be fearful, desiring to placate, but appears to have been, more normally, an affirmation of relationship. But there are differences between the expiatory offerings and the rest. Alfred Marx argues that the two modes of sacrifice modelled on hospitality express both the presence and the transcendence of Yahweh, with the emphasis falling more on transcendence in the non-alimentary offerings (‘olah, minchah) and more on presence in the festal zebach. In both, Yahweh is perceived in direct relation with human and social life. By contrast, the expiatory chatta’th expresses a consciousness of distance between humanity and divinity, a distance constituted by ‘sin’ whether individual or general.

  Caroline Mayers, ‘An ethnoarchaeological analysis of Hannah’s sacrifice’, in David P. Wright, David N. Freedman and A. Hurvitz (eds), Pomegranates and Golden Bells: Studies in Biblical, Jewish, and Near Eastern Ritual, Law, and Literature in Honor of Jacob Milgrom (Winona: Eisenbrauns, 1995), pp. 77–91. 2

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The key criterion here is solidarity.3 If it is true as a matter of fact that the materials and actions of all these rites relate to the lives of the offerers, there are sharply different understandings of that solidarity. Chatta’th establishes a bridge between alienated humanity and divinity by distancing humans from the (sinful) conditions of human living and drawing them closer to the realm of the divine. But zebach, in which emphasis falls not on destruction of the sacrificial offering but on its joyful consumption, demonstrates a much less conflictual view of human being and opens itself to a very positive account of sacrifice as a bodily practice through which sacred and profane relate within a single earthly and transcendent economy. By the term ‘economy’ is meant any system of exchange of goods or services by which physical and other needs are met through a process of demand and supply, and by which social relationships are articulated and regulated. In Chapter 1, I have discussed the way such economies may be characterized as motivated by principles of ‘trade’ or ‘gift’. In this chapter, when I describe a sacrificing culture as an economy, I mean that it is an exchange system in which deity is incorporated into social relations by inclusion in the voluntary, customary or obligatory transfer of goods and services. This should not be construed, in modernist fashion, as a secondary or optional element in a society’s total exchange: it may indeed be the original and archetypal form of exchange, from which all gift giving and symbolic social relations derive. In thinking about sacrificial economies, one reason for placing the ritual meal at the centre is that what is offered, in all forms of Israelite sacrifice, is food. Human beings are mortal animals dependent on a constant supply of nourishment for life and well-being. Human bodies are shaped by the foods they consume, and by what those foods have themselves consumed; they grow strong or otherwise according to the balance of proteins and other contents in their diet; they smell of their smell. The elements of thanksgiving and tribute, which are always implicitly present in such meal offerings, not only attribute the harvest to God, and return a small gift in recognition of the greater gift: in doing so they include God in the economy of bodily goods. God becomes a beneficiary of the harvest too, even though, being divine, God’s mode of enjoying (consuming) harvest is not identical. Indeed, what constitutes Yahweh’s ‘divinity’ is precisely being non-dependent on bodily goods for being or well-being. Nonetheless by means of sacrifice Yahweh’s role in the physical economy is affirmed. Furthermore, what is offered is not only always food, it is uniformly offered – and this confirms the centrality of the ritual meal – in cooked form.4 To make a cereal offering, grain is ground into flour, mixed with other ingredients and baked; grapes are offered as wine, and olives as oil. Other items, like sheep and cattle, are presented raw and processed in the sacrificial rite itself, killed and made an ‘offering by fire’ to Yahweh or by some other means cooked for consumption in a sacred feast.   Element #6 on p. 7 above.   ‘Heating’ in McClymond’s terminology (McClymond, Sacred Violence, pp. 31–2).

3 4

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The effect of this is to emphasize something alluded to above. Sacrifice is not generally practised in hunting societies, any more than it is in advanced urban industrial societies. It is characteristic of pastoral–agricultural societies at the point of closest connection with the means of production and supply. Cows, cereals and olives all occur ‘in nature’, but the production of fattened calves, threshed grain and crushed oil implies considerable achievements of human social organization and technological development. The presentation of these items in cooked form makes the point even more strongly, implying access to the technology, not only for making and using fire, but also for the production of pots and knives; the organization of time, space and energy needed for ploughing and reaping, seedtime and harvest, clearance of land and distribution of labour; traditions of human knowledge, skill, values and customs. Both by the domestication of nature and by the processing of its fruits, the offerers are set apart doubly from the instinctual life of animals – the life of raw food, hunting and gathering, spontaneous and disorganized effort. In sum, what is represented by these offerings is nothing less than the totality of human sociality, all that separates humanity from animals, and celebrates human skill and culture as well as a physical economy. There is therefore a third reason for giving centrality to the meal sacrifice, because in human culture nothing represents sociality more effectively than a shared meal. Unlike some cultures, Israel had no practice of feeding on the deity: the idea of drinking blood (which may be thought to contain sacred power) is explicitly banned. But here is a feast in the holy place and therefore in the presence of God (Deut 12: 7), indeed shared with God as honoured guest, although God’s mode of participation is appropriately different (at most an airy ingestion of fragrance). What then distinguishes sacrifice from normal consumption? Students of Greek religion have argued over whether communal meals taken in temples – while obviously retaining some residue from a sacrificial cultus – are in fact ‘sacrifices’ or, by the Hellenistic period, purely social affairs.5 Greek religion is a useful case since we know quite a lot about it and its development, with data derived from different viewpoints and different social levels. Does the integration of multiple cults into the life of the city effectively secularize religious practice? Evidently the Apostle Paul, writing to advise the Corinthian Christians about whether or not they should participate in such temple feasts, did not think so. 1 Corinthians chapters 8 and 10 illustrate the issue very well: if it were not so natural for residents of Greek cities to buy meat from temples, and to hold dinner parties in temples, without thinking of them as religious acts, the question would not arise. But equally the question would not arise if it were not also natural, for someone in that society, to understand that participating was at least implicitly a religious act, offering worship to a patron deity. The view taken here is that the zebach must be understood as a totality. This contrasts with the view of Milgrom, that ‘The shared meal that follows a sacrifice   See Stowers’ comments in Chapter 1, p. 17 above.

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is purely a secular affair’;6 and equally with that of Evans-Pritchard, noted above.7 I am arguing that in ancient society – and probably also among contemporary African practitioners of traditional religion – the implied distinction of secular and sacred is inappropriate. If a sacrifice is life received through death, it is through the feast as well as through the gift and immolation that the physical economy and the whole of life are included in the divine action. The prophetic critique of sacrifice expressed in passages like Isaiah 1: 11– 17 and Amos 5: 21–4 – it is now generally agreed – was aimed at correcting, not rejecting, the practice of sacrifice.8 It did not arise (as claimed, for example, by de Vaux) because ‘God demands first and foremost an interior religion’, that is, as a criticism of ‘outward religion’ per se.9 Rather, the critique expresses the view that a religion which has an outward form is exactly what God demands – a religion whose form extends beyond the bounds of the rite, a religion which is in solidarity with social life and tied not to ritual observance but to action. Israel, gathered by clans and families to celebrate the divine gift of harvest, embodies an exchange which is simultaneously physical, social and spiritual, and at the same time embodies human well-being in the form of sociality united in solidarity with mortal bodies and with God. This has ethical implications. Celebration in the divine presence is a model of human society, a model which is denied whenever some worshippers use skill, wealth or power given by God to appropriate more of the harvest than they need at the expense of others’ suffering, or by dishonest means, so that the sacrifice they offer is not truly theirs.10 The prophets demand that, as well as the blood and the fat portions, right dispositions also be offered up to God, that is, selves attuned to live justly and peaceably with their neighbours.11 What I have described is, to use Bourdieu’s term, the habitus of a sacrificial economy,12 through participation in which is developed a ‘sacrificial body’. By this I do not of course mean a body to be offered as victim,13 but a   Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Bible 3, New York: Doubleday, 1992), p. 441. 7   Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p. 215. 8   See Göran Eidevall, ‘The Role of Sacrificial Language in Prophetic Rhetoric’, in Christian A. Eberhardt (ed.), Ritual and Metaphor: Sacrifice in the Bible (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), pp. 49–61. 9   Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions (2nd edn, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1965), p. 428. 10   Klawans, Purity, pp. 75–100. 11   See Stephen Sykes, ‘Outline of a Theology of Sacrifice’, in S.W. Sykes (ed.), Sacrifice and Redemption: Durham Essays in Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 282–98, citing pp. 292–3. 12   Bourdieu, Outline, p. 78. 13   In popular thinking human sacrifice is often regarded as normative, an error which the writings of René Girard have encouraged (see Chapter 6 below). Levenson has shown 6

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body defined by membership of a particular agrarian–pastoral community and a dispositional scheme centred in zebach, and ‘olah, rejoicing in the presence of Yahweh. And although the practice of sacrifice was altered considerably through the centralizing of the cultus and the dominance of expiatory rites in the Second Temple, it does not follow that the common understanding of Judaism yielded up that fundamental notion of worship as a sacrificial body participating in an economy of grace. Centuries later, Jews were attending the pilgrim feasts and paying their temple tax, or alternatively developing ethical alternatives to sacrifice through good works and privately celebrating Passover in their homes according to the old custom.14 The development of Jewish piety generated a whole system of verbal equivalents of sacrifice, such as the daily recitation of Shema’ and the Eighteen Benedictions in the home, and the weekly act of prayer in the synagogue, with hearing of the Law.15 This was accompanied by physical practices such as the adornment of the body with tefillin (prayer-straps on hand and forehead, Deut 6: 8) and tsitsit (fringes, Num 15: 38–9), and the posting of mezuzot (prayer-boxes, Deut 6: 9) on the doorways of houses, thus sanctifying both body and house for praise. If the feast was now separated from praising, here was a vehicle for praising without feasting, and not only praising but teaching, a reciprocity of holy tradition and Law received, absorbed and handed back to Yahweh in godly dispositions, in practice and in praise. Even at the turn of the eras Judaism was, as Sanders puts it, ‘a religion of things that are done’.16 The Pharisees have been admired, as well as vilified, for their attention to the importance of practical piety, the bodily worship of God.

how deeply the motif of child sacrifice lies in the Biblical tradition, not to be conveniently dismissed as ‘foreign’ (Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993)). But J.-P. Vernant’s comment on Greek sacrifice (‘General Theory’, p. 295) would apply equally to the Biblical tradition: ‘The gap revealed by the different handling of images aims to show that a human being is neither a good meal nor a good sacrifice. Properly speaking, there is no human “sacrifice” which is not also a deviant or corrupted sacrifice, a monstrous offering.’ See Chapter 4 below. 14   Sanders, Judaism, pp. 133–4, argues that this was the case, supported by evidence in Philo (Spec. leg. 2.145–9, see Philo, Works, ed. F.H. Colson, G.H. Whitaker, J.W. Earp, and R. Marcus (12 vols, Loeb Classical Library, London: Heinemann, 1929–62)), Josephus (Antiquities XIV. 260, see Josephus, Works, H. St J. Thackeray, R. Marcus, A. Wikgren and L.H. Feldman (eds) (9 vols, LCL, London: Heinemann, 1929–53) and Jubilees (Jub. 49:1 6, 18, 20–21; ET in James H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (2 vols, New York: Doubleday, 1985), 2, p. 141). 15   Sanders, Judaism, pp. 190–212. 16   Ibid., p. 190.

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2. Jesus and the Kingdom Economy The sacrificial religious culture of Israel sketched in section 1 remained a living tradition, and the bodily perception it carried remained alive into the first century of the Common Era and beyond. It underwent various changes over time, as it interacted with the sacrificial traditions of the Hellenized world and the orient, and as it responded to the influence of other, and rival, cultures, such as the influence of secular cultural forms, the limitations of Jewish religious life in the Diaspora, the military occupation of Palestine and the destruction of the temple. The Christian movement began with Jesus’ ministry in Galilee and Judaea in the late twenties of the first century, and spread to the Greek-speaking urban world as the century unfolded. This was not an anti-sacrificial movement; nor was it, of course, introducing sacrificial ideas and practices into a world without them; but I shall seek to show that it functioned to revive and renew the sacrificial traditions of Israel in certain specific ways, ways which expressed a new and distinctive perspective on both sacrifice and the religious significance of the body. Its proclamation of Christ as redeeming sacrifice, and of his bodily resurrection, offered a symbolic transformation of religious thinking which would place it immediately in tension with Judaism, and with Greco-Roman culture, just as it is in tension with the secular culture of our own day. Fundamental to Israel’s faith is an assumption that the body participates in an ‘economy of grace’ (Deut 6: 4–9). Bodily life comes from God in creation; to God therefore are due honour and praise, the offering of the first fruits of the harvest, and a daily tribute of life offered up. The meal embodies this perspective centrally, when the animal’s fat and blood, products of agricultural and pastoral labour, are dedicated to the deity (burned on the altar), while the rest is boiled and shared by the family or wider group. A person who understands bodily living as constituted by creaturely dependence and response in this way is in solidarity with all other created, dependent bodies, and especially with those of his or her household and neighbourhood. All this is enacted especially in customs of shared sacrifice, feasting and hospitality. In Palestine, since the centralizing of the cultus at Jerusalem, there were two kinds of meat meal: a non-cultic meal, in which the animal’s blood was drained away and the rest shared (Deut 12: 13–27), and a fully cultic zebach or communion sacrifice (Lev 3). The latter would for most people form part of a pilgrim feast, celebrated in Jerusalem, extending over several days; the former (known simply as ‘eating meat’, ’akal basar, Deut 12: 15) was presumably more common, but still a special event, a festivity, which retained in the prescribed treatment of the blood an echo of its cultic origin.17 The division between ‘sacrifice’ and ‘feast’ was alien to the older, pre-Levitical religious culture centred on zebach, just as the separation 17   de Vaux, Ancient Israel, p. 338. Cf. Sanders, Judaism, pp. 134, 202 on evidence of meals and feasts in Diaspora synagogues (sundeipna and thusiai, Josephus, Ant. XIV. 216, 260), and perhaps Passover too (Philo, Spec. Leg. 2: 146–8).

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of religious and secular life was alien to that culture, before the priestly culture of ritual purity subordinated the economic to the religious. Jesus’ ministry as it is represented in the gospels is a renewed incursion of this older, integrated ‘economic’ consciousness and the kind of worship it generates. In what follows, I shall be discussing the data concerning Jesus and his ministry as they appear (mostly) in the Synoptic gospels, looking for a general impression of who he was, what Dunn calls ‘the characteristic Jesus’.18 In seeking to identify ‘the historical Jesus’, scholars have placed great reliance on the ‘criteria of authenticity’ and the supposedly scientific methods of Form Criticism.19 This has involved them in analysing the tradition detail by detail in order to establish a secure foundation (however small) of certain knowledge about Jesus on which to base a portrait. It seems increasingly unlikely that such a secure foundation can be achieved, and the variety of pictures generated by the attempt suggests that even if achievable it will not produce useful results. A different approach is taken by those who favour the general over the particular, who seek to construct a picture of Jesus based on broad repeated patterns in the gospels, arguing that even if individual details cannot be substantiated the overall impression made by Jesus is distinctive and strong.20 Note that this does not prevent recognition of complexities, or discrimination between strands in the gospel tradition. The picture which emerges is a construction, as much as any other, but one which takes as its starting point the assumption that ‘Even if human memory fails to retain the particulars, it can still get the general impressions right’.21 One pattern we can discern is the way Jesus called people into renewed relationship with God in accord with the ‘economic’ pattern sketched above, and through it the ‘revitalizing of the Jewish sign language’.22 He came into Galilee bringing a message and a power which, as the gospels report, changed those he came among.23 His ministry was experienced as the drawing near, or perhaps 18   James D.G Dunn, Christianity in the Making: vol. 1, Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 332, 335. The phrase is taken from Leander Keck, The Future of the Historical Jesus (Nashville: Abingdon, 1971), p. 33. 19   See the discussions of criteria in Dunn, Jesus Remembered, pp.  81–5; Dale C. Allison, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination and History (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010), p. 10, n. 52; and for a reasoned defence of their use, see Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide (ET, London: SCM Press, 1996), pp. 115–18. 20   Compare Dale C. Allison, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), pp. 61–6, and the detailed discussion in Allison, Constructing Jesus, pp. 1–17. 21   Allison, Historical Christ, p. 61. 22   G. Theissen, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion (London: SCM, 1999), pp. 21–40, citing p. 22. 23   For multiple attestation of Jesus’ miracles, see Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus, pp. 297–304. They conclude: ‘It is not possible sweepingly to attribute the miracle

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the very presence, of what he called the ‘kingdom of God’ (Mk 1: 14–15).24 On certain widely recorded occasions, crowds of hungry people, miles from cities and shops, were fed by Jesus in what appears to be an abrogation of the usual economy of work (Mt 14: 13–21 and parallels; 15: 32–9/Mk 8: 1-10).25 The power of evil or ‘unclean’ spirits, understood to inhabit the bodies of certain unfortunate individuals, was also subject to Jesus.26 Crowds of people flocked to him for healing and teaching, and responded typically with amazement, and with praise of Jesus and of God for this new mighty work (Mk 2: 12; 7: 37; Lk 7: 16). The life of the body was being transformed: it was said that blind people received sight, the lame walked, the deaf and dumb received ability to hear and to speak; even some bodies consigned to death were brought back to life (Lk 7: 21–2).27 If this was indeed what people experienced, it was a major disruption of the normal working of the bodily regularities of a peasant subsistence culture. It might well give rise to a hope that the conditions for bodily living were being radically altered, even that death itself was being annulled. This outpouring of power through Jesus, devolved at certain times on to his disciples, is plainly ‘supernatural’ but it operates, not in a ‘religious’ sphere so much as in solidarity with the ordinary world of human work and life. Jesus mixed with ordinary people: fishermen, and the dwellers in the Jewish towns and villages; women and children; the sick and the outcast. In his parables, the world of work and the household is vividly present: fishing, farming and housekeeping; relationships between fathers and sons, landlords and tenants, masters and servants, wealthy and poor. The stories depict the presence and the power of God in this commonplace world of labour, rivalries and needs, as vividly as his recorded actions display God’s power transforming bodily life.28 By contrast, the dominant religious ideology of contemporary Judaism is represented in the gospels as a construction of boundaries to social and bodily life, boundaries which Jesus is in the main

tradition to Jesus … But of no individual at that time were so many miracles related as they were of Jesus. That cannot be fortuitous’ (p. 304). Crossan weighs the interaction within this tradition of ‘event’ (‘the actual and historical cure of an affected individual at a moment in time’) with ‘process’ (‘some wider socioreligious phenomenon that is symbolized in and by such an individual happening’) (John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (North Blackburn, Victoria: CollinsDove, 1991), pp. 320–32, citing p. 330). 24   Crossan, Historical Jesus, pp. 265–302; Dunn, Jesus Remembered, pp. 383–487, 607–11. 25   Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus, pp. 294–5. 26   Ibid., pp. 202–3. 27   Dunn, Jesus Remembered, pp. 445–9. 28   Theissen speaks of the ‘historical’ and ‘poetic’ transformations of myth, the vivid presence of the mythical future in Jesus’ activities and stories (Theory, pp. 24–5).

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shown to transgress when he touches corpses, eats with well-known ‘sinners’, and challenges the view that certain kinds of food and work, like certain kinds of body, are unholy. 3. Embodiment and Sacrifice in the Ministry of Jesus Jesus’ ministry demonstrates very plainly most of the characteristics of embodiment listed in relation to sacrifice (Chapter 1, pp. 42–3 above). It consists, obviously, in physical action. Readers who have wanted to think of Jesus primarily as a teacher, and therefore as a disembodied teaching – almost, like Wordsworth’s cuckoo, a ‘wandering voice’ – have been scandalized by the gospels’ attention to the banal details of feasting and travelling, and equally by their sensational accounts of healings and other miracles. The life cycle of the human body is present in his ministry through attention to food and drink, poverty and wealth, sickness and death, and the need for transformation through the divine power working in him. In manifesting human dependence on God within the natural order, Jesus’ acts and words unquestionably constitute a religious way of living, despite their critique of religion. As a teacher, Jesus also offers a hermeneutic or theological commentary on the body. The body is under the care and control of God, for ‘all the hairs of your head are counted’ (Mt 10: 30); consequently, an offending body part should be ‘cut off’ to ensure the whole body does not go to hell (Mt 5: 29–30). Possession of the body by demons is like the land’s occupation by pagan forces (Mk 5: 1–20).29 Willingness to subject the body to pain by turning the other cheek rather than resisting evil (Mt 5: 39–41), is a sign of recognizing God as the giver of good and evil, as of life as a whole. Food and clothing (those key symbols of physical and social life) are to be received, not from human effort or anxiety, but from God’s kingdom (Mt 6: 25–33). The eye and the mouth are indices of the state of the heart, understood as the source of evil intentions (Mt 5: 27–9; 15: 10–11, 17–19; cf. Jas 3: 1–12). The question of what to eat and how (so important in Pharisaic thinking and practice) is dismissed (Mk 7: 5, 14–15/Mt15: 1–2, 10–11), while the social questions (who with? when? where?) are to be answered by the rule of hospitality (Lk 14: 7–14, 15–24), rather than that of purity. To give food to the hungry, or a cup of cold water to a needy disciple (Mt 10: 42; 25: 35), is an act to be rewarded by God. Yet despite his focus on the spiritual significance of social action, Jesus resists the existing social function of religion. Worship is to be practised bodily, and in relation to God, but in private not in public (see his comments on fasting, prayer and almsgiving, Mt 6: 1–6, 16–18). It affects the inside of the body, and what

  Crossan, Historical Jesus, pp. 313–20.

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comes out, rather than what goes in from outside (Mk 7: 14–15).30 Jesus’ interest in the body is not materialist, any more than it is conventionally religious, but in his teaching, and in his actions, the body is more than a physical object, for as the seat of human life and as the vehicle of human interaction, the body is from God and for God. Jesus’ economy therefore expresses a manifestation of embodied supernatural power in ordinary life. How well does it also fit the seven specific elements of sacrifice listed on p. 7 above? Caution is needed here. Like sacrifice, Jesus’ ministry shows solidarity with the totality of culture (#6), and draws it into relation with the transcendent power of God (#3); it proclaims and depicts a distinctive cosmology, ‘the kingdom of God’ (#7); and its manifestation of divine power, embodied in a range of particular actions (#1), is transformative physically and spiritually (#5). Most important, we see exchange and reciprocity (#4), in the outpouring of gifts of divine healing and feeding, and the responses of the crowds and the disciples (Mk 2: 12; 10: 46; Lk 5: 1–11). Unlike sacrifice in general, however, the exchange is initiated from above not below, proceeding from heaven through Jesus, and what is missing is the normal (we might say the indispensable) element of ritual (#2). The picture is admittedly disparate, and lacking in this one important respect. Compare the highly concentrated account in Acts 2, where the primitive Christian community in Jerusalem is presented as a living economy of embodied praise (Acts 2: 42–7; cf. 4: 32–5), manifesting all seven of these elements of sacrifice, including, significantly, the rituals of ‘breaking bread’ and ‘the prayers’. For the sacrificial interpretation being advanced here, the lack of such rituals in the ministry of Jesus is obviously a problem. In fact it seems that ritual, and the development of ritualized forms, were on the whole resisted by Jesus. The Synoptic Gospels record only one occasion when Jesus as an adult engaged in a sacrificial action, and that was his final Passover. In Matthew, Jesus emphasizes God’s desire for ‘mercy not sacrifice’ (Mt 9: 13; 12:7); he forbids the ritual words of oaths (5: 33–7) and subordinates the offering of sacrifice and tithes to the mending of the heart (5: 23–4; 23: 23–6). In his acted parable of the temple’s ‘cleansing’, he denounces the activity associated with the offering and certifying of sacrifices, in favour of a prophetic vision of the temple as a ‘house of prayer’ (Mt 21: 13 and parallels.; cf. Is 56: 7). Yet, on the other hand, scattered sayings show Jesus recognizing that the temple and its practices are points of access to divine power – in the restoring of lepers (Mt 8: 4/Mk 1: 44/ Lk 5: 14; cf. Lev. 14: 2–4), in the reconciliation of brothers (Mt 5: 23–6) and in oath-taking (Mt 23: 16–22). In Mt 23: 16–20, Jesus is even recorded as arguing that the sanctuary and the altar are themselves holy, and hallow the sacrificial

30   Thomas Kazen, Jesus and Purity Halakhah: Was Jesus Indifferent to Impurity? (Coniectanea Biblica NT Series 38, Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 2002), pp. 222–31. See Chapter 3 below.

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gifts which people bring there, explicitly denying the converse view, that it is the bringing of offerings to God which makes the place holy.31 When John, unlike the Synoptics, shows Jesus attending the temple at various festivals (2: 13; 5: 1; 7: 2, 10; 10: 22–3), should we assume that he made the usual offerings, or not? Since his avoidance of ritual in the gospel records is not absolute, it is reasonable to assume that if he observed pilgrim festivals his practice would include making the usual offering of sacrifices. The gospels’ special point, in any case, is not to deny the holiness of the temple but to deny its monopoly of grace, by demonstrating the abundance of transformative power as it exists and flows from God through Jesus and his disciples, independent of the Law and its provisions. Yet this raises another question about approaching his ministry via the category of ‘sacrifice’. A sacrifice is necessarily a human offering, but the transforming exchange in Jesus’ ministry is initiated, not from the human side but from God’s. The gospels are presenting us with an account which I have called episacrificial, that is, they narrate a myth of a particular incursion of divine power into the human sphere by which divine–human relations are initiated or (in this case) renewed and transformed. That is of course their function, whatever conclusion we draw about the way the ‘Jesus proclaimed by the church’ relates to ‘Jesus as he was in his life’. I have argued that ‘sacrifice’ as it functions in religious cultures is not restricted to observable human practices, beliefs and values, but allows and may insist on the upspringing presence and power of the divine as the one element which is essential, even when it is manifested in non-ritualized ways. I have shown that Jesus’ ministry represents such an ‘economy of grace’ with this supernatural but only minimally ‘religious’ character. Informal as it is, it is arguable that this active awareness of divine power is what religious practice regularly strives to induce or replicate. Nonetheless we need to ask: with so little to go on, and without the specific element of ritual, does anything in Jesus’ ministry really merit the name ‘sacrifice’? Meals and Sacrifices It is significant that Jesus’ resistance to religious rituals is not matched by his attitude to feasting. He shows the truth of Peter Brown’s remark, that in the ancient world, people: tended to take for granted the solidarity of any settled community around the rare commodities of food and relaxation, and … intended, through moments of high and leisurely eating, to shame the dull world of nature out of its accustomed

  This tradition is predominantly Matthaean. Against William D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to St Matthew (ICC, 3 vols, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988–1997), vol. 3, pp. 291–2, it certainly ‘enlightens us about Matthew’s attitude toward the temple cult’, but far less probably about that of Jesus himself. 31

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Jesus’ engagement in feasting is attested in all strands of the tradition, and Q-sayings acknowledge his reputation as a glutton and a wine-bibber (Mt 11: 19/ Lk 7: 34). Even though he is never said to have celebrated a zebach as such, can we understand this feasting as implicitly sacrificial? Shall we find a religious counterstructure in his meals, and in stories and sayings connected with feasting?33 The feedings of the 4,000 and the 5,000 have this in common with a communion sacrifice, that they are proclaimed to be meals provided by, and eaten in the presence of, God. The setting is scriptural in its overtones, but resolutely noncultic, based not in any temple sacrifice but the Mosaic tradition of desert feedings. Questions of purity and graded holiness are completely missing. In accounts of Jesus’ attendance at dinners, as host or as guest, the physical enjoyment of the meal (like all rabbinical questions about what is and is not proper food) is subordinated to the act of hospitality, invoking a cosmology of open communion to which all are welcome.34 Did Jesus eat meat? The texts are silent, though we should surely assume that meat was the centre of the various dinners at which Jesus was a guest (Lk 7: 36– 50; 14: 1–14; Jn 2: 1–11; 12: 1–2), which had a festal character although they were not explicitly sacrificial (zebachim). The coincidence of meat and festivity (with or without explicitly religious form) as signifying transcendence is amply shown, and would be taken for granted. But what called for special comment was the way he scandalized public opinion by preferring the company of the disreputable (Mk 2: 16) and the unmentionable (Lk 7: 38), and by rebuking a host for his inattention to the rituals – of hospitality (Lk 7: 44–7). The two constituents of a full sacrifice, ‘ritualized slaughter followed by a meat meal’,35 are found together in only a few places. They appear in the Last Supper, of course, although, uniquely there, in inverted order. Beyond this we need to look to 32   Peter Brown, ‘Response’, in Protocol of the Forty-Second Colloquy (Berkeley: Centre for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Modern Culture, 1982), cited in John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity (North Blackburn, Victoria: Collins Dove, 1998), p. 419. 33   For Crossan, Historical Jesus, pp.  261–4, 341–4, his practice of meals with ‘open commensality’ looks backwards to a vanished golden age of peasant democracy, now being recreated; for N. Thomas Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), pp. 430–3, 532–3, the meals are ‘a symbolic evocation of the coming messianic banquet’ (532). 34   We miss the point of the slur about Jesus being ‘a glutton and a drunkard’ if we interpret it quantitatively, in line with modern consumerist predilections (see Dunn, Jesus Remembered, pp. 599–600). Rather, it means that he ‘makes … no appropriate distinctions and discriminations. He has no honor. He has no shame’ (Crossan, Historical Jesus, p. 262). 35   Burkert, Greek Religion, p. 57. See discussion in Chapter 1, pp. 17–18 above.

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the parables, to two stories about feasting, where a meat meal is specified: ‘fatted calf’ (ton moschon ton siteuton) in Luke’s Parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15: 23), and ‘oxen and fat calves’ (hoi tauroi mou kai ta sitista) in Matthew’s Parable of the Great Banquet (Mt 22: 4).36 While these are not strictly sacrifices, the provision of meat itself connotes transcendence, just as Jesus’ telling of stories about wedding banquets proclaims that the present event (his ministry) is or anticipates the heavenly wedding feast. Yet, as in his own practice, attention falls otherwise not on the menu but on the guests, who will not be those expected by the world, but outsiders drawn in from the city streets, or from the ‘highways and the byways’ (Mt 22: 9–10/Lk 14: 21, 23), or even ‘gathered from east and west’ (Mt 8: 11/Lk 13: 29). These now are to be found, surprisingly, ‘reclining on couches’ in the kingdom of heaven, with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (anaklithesontai, ἀνακλιθήσονται, Μt 8: 11/Lk 13: 29), or even, like Lazarus, sharing Abraham’s couch, the favoured place of the beloved disciple (Lk16: 22–3; cf. Jn 13: 23).37 In the story of the Prodigal Son, the feast with ‘fatted calf’ (15: 23; 1 Sam 28: 24; like the feast provided by Abraham for the deity in Gen 18: 7–8) is the nearest thing to a zebach, with its mixture of solemnity and joyful reconciliation. The command to kill the animal (thuein) has inseparable linguistic overtones of sacrifice, for a thusia is a sacrificial offering, and thuein auto(i) (θύειν αὐτῷ) means to kill (an animal) for someone’s sake or in (a god’s) honour.38 The story is set in a pastoral world reminiscent of Genesis, in which communion sacrifice and whole burnt offering are the characteristic sacrifices, and the head of the household or clan the normal sacrificer. It takes place in a landscape which evokes in physical terms, through imagery of property and supply, the inner landscape of the spirit. The paternal estate is the good place, where the good things of life are richly provided, even for servants; distance from this place signifies famine, alienation, defilement, despair and death; return brings life, embracing, adornment, feasting and joy. The story culminates in a feast which is a messianic zebach for the resurrected son: ‘he was dead and has come to life’ (anezesen, ἀνήζησεν 15: 24).39

  The Greek terms translated ‘fat’, ‘fatted’, ‘fattened’ contain a reference to sitos, wheat, or grain generally, so ‘grainfed’ would be a more literal rendering. They thus contain an allusion to the meals that they have enjoyed as well as to the meal that they are now becoming. See Frederick W. Danker, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and other Early Christian Literature (3rd edn, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000 (1957)) (hereafter BDAG), p. 925. 37   Joseph Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (The Anchor Bible, 2 vols, New York: Doubleday, 1981– 85), p. 1132. 38   BDAG, p. 463. 39   John Nolland, Luke (Word Biblical Commentary, 3 vols, Dallas: Word Books, 1993), p.  786, points to the baptismal overtones, and language that is ‘close to being 36

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To sum up: we see that the sacrificial perspective discussed in this chapter so far is most fully represented, in NT narrative, by this small group of parables and by the account of the early Jerusalem community in Acts 2, a description which many would interpret as itself parabolic.40 When we see Jesus’ teaching about sacrificial renewal in stories and sayings we see it most clearly through the eyes of Luke, but across all strands of the tradition, positive use of cultic terminology is almost non-existent. However, narratives witness in dispersed ways to the actualizing, in Jesus’ healings and feastings, and in his words of power and forgiveness, of the memory and hope of God’s intimate dwelling among humanity in a new order of creation.41 Such a hope, long formalized in the cultus, was seen in what I have called Jesus’ eschatological ‘economy of grace’, as he enacted the redeeming of human bodies from the limitations of material existence. 4. Eschatological Feasts These features are just some hints and pointers to a conception of divine relations which is sacrificial without being ritualized – much as, according to Revelation 21: 22, the true and heavenly Jerusalem contains and needs no temple. In this conception, then, there is a sacred feast, but it is begun by God without waiting for human offering (see Jn 21: 9–13!). It is, in my terms, episacrificial. Here power flows out beyond the bounds of the religious system into feeding and healing and reconciliation, and so evokes its due response: the offering of praise and obedient discipleship. However, we need to acknowledge that Jesus was not the only one to demonstrate that ‘the kingdom of Heaven had to have something to do with food and drink’.42 There were the chaburah meals of the Pharisees, the ‘purity’ meals of the Essenes, and the widespread expectation of an eschatological banquet. How does Jesus’ practice of feasting compare to these? Rabbinic sources allude to chaburot, associations of those who would meet together, bound by a common state of high purity.43 These groups, about which little is known, have been identified with the Pharisees, or some of the Pharisees,

immediately symbolic’ so as (almost) to ‘break the bounds of the story’; Fitzmyer, Luke, p. 1091, points to salvation-historical overtones of dei in v. 32: ‘we had to make merry’. 40   See the discussion of literary topoi in Luke Timothy Johnson, The Acts of the Apostles (Sacra Pagina, Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1992), pp. 61–2. 41   Wright, Jesus, p. 130, comments on the parable of the Prodigal Son that it ‘does not “teach” in the sense of teaching abstract or timeless truth; it acts. It creates a new world’. 42   P. Brown, ‘Response’, in Crossan, Birth, p. 419. 43   m. Demai 2. 2–3 (ET in Herbert Danby (trans.): The Mishnah (London: Oxford University Press, 1933)), pp. 21–2.

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although the identification is questionable.44 The reference to their common meals may be due more to the way food laws functioned as an index of purity and impurity than because they thought of themselves specifically as dining clubs or meal sects. Because they emphasized the need to attain a particularly high standard of purity, they would exclude any persons or substances whose presence would compromise that standard. We cannot conclude that they thought those persons were excluded from among the people of God,45 but plainly Jesus’ open house for prostitutes and sinners was the very reverse of what these groups sought. Much better attested is the tohorah or purity meal practised by the Essenes and by the Qumran sect.46 This was the common meal of the community, and not a sacrifice, but it was clearly a sacred meal, for which washing was needed,47 and participation required a year’s novitiate (two years before sharing drink) and was equivalent to full membership of the community.48 It was not only an exclusive gathering but a highly structured one, with the Priest first blessing the food, and then others after him in turn.49 It is equally questionable whether we should think of Jesus and his disciples as defining their relationship through such a restricted meal gathering.50 In fact, apart from the Last Supper, the only occasions when Jesus is described as dining alone with his disciples occur after the resurrection.51 Before the Last Supper, the few occasions when Jesus is described as dining with his disciples seem to be recorded specifically to notice the intrusive presence of others, whether sinners (Mk 2: 15 and parallels), or a woman disciple (Mt 8: 15 and parallels; Lk 10: 38–41; Mt 26: 6-13/Mk 14: 3–9/Jn 12: 1–7; cf. Lk 7: 36–50), or because of objections to this inclusiveness voiced by critical outsiders (Mk 2: 16 and parallels). The emphasis falls, therefore, not on the gathered community, and certainly not on its having some supposedly sacred character, but on Jesus’ controversial inclusiveness,

  Anthony J. Saldarini, Pharisees, Scribes and Sadducees in Palestinian Society: A Sociological Approach (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1988), pp.  216–20; Sanders, Judaism, pp. 440–43. 45   Sanders, Judaism, p. 441. 46   See Hannah K. Harrington, The Purity Texts (Companion to the Qumran Scrolls 5, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2004), pp. 23–7. 47   1QS V.13 (Florentino Garcia Martinez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated (Leiden: Brill, 1994), p. 8). 48   1 QS V. 20–21; VI.16–17, 20–22 (Martinez, Scrolls, pp. 9–10). 49   1QS VI. 4–6; 1Q28a (1QSa) II.17–20 (Martinez, Scrolls, pp. 9, 127). 50   Sanders points out that the effect of such fellowship can be overstated: ‘those who had table-fellowship with Jesus did not, with the exception of Peter and John, become major figures in the church’ (Ed P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM Press, 1985), p. 208). 51   Lk 24: 30, 42–3; Jn 21: 9–15; Acts 1: 4 (reading sunalizomenos, literally ‘sharing salt with’); 10: 41. 44

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and the meal as an occasion of grace for those who were not, formally, Jesus’ disciples.52 In the background of all these meal practices is the tradition of the eschatological banquet found in Isaiah 25: 6–9, Ezekiel 39: 17–20, 1 Enoch 62 and 2 Baruch 29 and hinted at in rabbinic texts.53 The image is often referred to loosely and inaccurately as the ‘messianic banquet’, although the strictly messianic element (the role of ‘the Anointed’ as host and president) is found only in 2 Baruch 29. 1 Enoch 62: 13–16 refers to the perhaps ‘messianic’ figure of the Son of Man and (like Is 25 and Ezek 39) depicts feasting as an aspect of the blessed state of the righteous who will be privileged to be with him forever, ‘to eat, rest and rise’ and to ‘wear garments of glory’.54 The real common factor in all these texts is the image of the blessed state as a sharing in divine abundance, and what is distinctive in Jesus’ teaching about the banquet is its inclusive character, with ‘the sons of the kingdom’ cast out while ‘many will come from east and west and eat/recline with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven’ (Mt 8: 11–12/Lk 13: 28–9, and compare Lk 16: 19–31). It seems that this hope of an inclusive gathering is what his open table was intended, or anyway perceived, to imitate. Jesus’ Final Meal Among Jesus’ meals the so-called ‘Last Supper’ is distinctive in several respects: it is notable for being the only occasion when Jesus is recorded as dining alone with ‘the Twelve’; it is the only specifically meat meal he is said to have participated in; and its meaning is tied inextricably to both the salvation history of Israel and the complex of events surrounding his imminent death. These features are all related, though in different ways, to the fact that, as recorded in the Synoptics, the Last Supper was a Passover meal.55 As such, it was tied to specific traditions about what was to be consumed, with whom, and how: namely, a lamb (whether a sheep or a goat), to be roasted and shared by each family of Israelites at night, with bread, wine and various accompaniments, and in recollection of the events of the Exodus.   Dunn, Jesus Remembered, p. 603.   ‘Rabbi Jacob said: “This world is like a vestibule before the world to come: prepare

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thyself in the vestibule that thou mayest enter into the banqueting hall”’ (m. Ab. 4: 16; 3: 17, Danby, Mishnah, pp. 454, 452). 54   Bruce Chilton, The Temple of Jesus: His Sacrificial Program within a Cultural History of Sacrifice (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), p. 140; Dunn, Jesus Remembered, pp. 394, 603. 55   Whether the event was in fact a Passover is not significant for this argument. Anthony Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text (NIGTC, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 871–4, and Wright, Jesus, pp. 555–6, agree that it was; Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus, pp. 426–7, dispute this. Paul, as well as the synoptic writers, clearly assumes that it was (see Thiselton, 1 Corinthians, p. 874).

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So, as a Passover, Jesus would have shared this meal with ‘the twelve’, with or without unnamed attendant women.56 Unlike the larger gatherings presupposed by Jesus’ regular open feasting, these formed a group of the right size to consume a lamb, a chaburah of friends (by custom not fewer than 10 persons), fulfilling for this occasion the role of the family or household in the institution narrative of Exodus 12: 3–4.57 As such they symbolized a closed family group of Israelites sealed off by blood against the angel of death, YHWH’s protected people making ready to be brought through danger into the promised land. Yet in fact, despite the assumptions made above, none of the narratives makes any reference to the Passover lamb, or any of the traditional liturgical symbols of food or clothes or story. John’s timing casts doubt on whether it was in fact a Passover meal even if it occurred near to the festival. The element of looking to the past, with the anamnesis of Israel’s deliverance through the Red Sea, is completely absent. Instead, despite being Jesus’ final meal, the story looks forward to further feasting, in anticipation of an eschatological banquet (Mk 14: 25). Yet the key future event invoked is in the shorter term, the death he was to suffer next day. Whereas his open meals can be viewed as episacrificial celebrations of God’s kingdom, pointing to the eschatological feast – joyful, zebach-like celebrations, because, or although, they lacked any reference to death – the Last Supper engages centrally with whatever is understood to have occurred in Jesus’ death, which it foreshadows. Although it also anticipates the heavenly feast, its deepest connections are with the Passover, the Akedah and the expiatory system of Israel culminating in the Day of Atonement. In relation to a sacrificial interpretation of Jesus’ ministry the implicit transcendence represented by his practice of open feasting is hardly enough, if a full sacrifice requires ‘kill plus meal’. Where does the element of ‘the kill’ appear in Jesus’ ministry? For the authors and readers of the gospels, the only ‘kill’ of any significance is that of Jesus himself: utterly non-cultic, a shameful punishment according to the order of the Gentile regime. Yet it was understood afterwards by his followers as inaugurating a new divinely ordained cultus and covenant to replace the old, whose representatives had derided as ‘blasphemy’ Jesus’ claim to be Son of God. The death, resulting from conflict with the world’s powers, is foreshadowed from almost the beginning of the gospel narratives (Mt 2: 13; Mk 3: 6; Lk 2: 35; Jn 2: 17–19) and its significance is given in salvific and sacrificial terms: ‘he will save his people from their sins’ (Mt 1: 21); ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’ (Jn 1: 29); ‘the Son of Man came … to give his life a ransom for many’ (Mk 10: 45/Mt 20: 28). Jesus had enacted in his teaching and table fellowship with sinners a sign and parable of the kingdom, a Jubilee pointing towards the coming new age of God’s intimate presence among his people. His pilgrimage now to Jerusalem was his 56   Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (ET of 3rd edn, London: SCM Press, 1966 (1960)), pp. 46–7. 57   Josephus, War 6. 423, 425.

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challenge to the powers of Israel to accept this in-breaking kingdom and allow it to become the dominant reality. His symbolic action of ‘cleansing’ the temple of dealers and money changers was a sign of divine judgement on Israel and the overturning of the old order, and so was this final symbolic meal which put in place of rams and goats the sacrificial elements of bread and wine. The Last Supper was the final pointer to the reality of which the temple sacrificial system was a formalized simulacrum. Shaped by the sacred memory of the Passover and the understanding of the dawning kingdom, it was an intimate, family feast, historical and covenantal in cast, celebrating God’s deliverance of Israel from evil and the establishment of a sphere of freedom. It was the realizing of a new community united in grace. But the new meal and sphere of intimacy was to be defined, not by the feast, this time, but by his own death. Here is the jarring note, the limit to all celebratory sacrifice, for, like the zebach, it could not occur without a death, and in this case his own death, in which (symbolically rather than physically) his followers would participate.58 5. The Christian Sacrificial Meal We cannot know what Jesus intended. Contrary to some recent claims it does not seem likely that he was aiming to institute a new sacrificial system.59 But remembering these actions, the church forged its own quasi-sacrificial practice, no longer ‘the Last Supper’ but a continuing practice of ‘the Lord’s Supper’, an enduring symbolic and sacrificial feast of those who called themselves his friends and desired to see the symbol become reality. In this way was created the Christian zebach of the Lord’s Supper, although, as Paul Bradshaw argues, the creative process may have unfolded over some decades, and may witness less to Jesus’ intentions than to the dominance of Pauline interpretation.60 Like the open meals in which Jesus had celebrated and enacted God’s coming kingdom, it is less the predictable and minimalistic menu than the quality of reconciliation among the guests that determines how effectively the feast becomes an embodiment of the kingdom, a participation in the divine economy of grace (1 Cor 11: 28). Yet at the same time it is defined by something quite different, its attention to the sacred tradition of Jesus’ death (1 Cor 11: 20, 23–6).   Wright, Jesus, pp. 554–63.   Chilton, Temple, pp. 150–54; Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus, 433–6; disputed

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by Dunn, Jesus Remembered, pp. 795–6. 60   Paul Bradshaw, ‘Did Jesus Institute the Eucharist at the Last Supper?’, in Maxwell E. Johnson (ed.), Issues in Eucharistic Praying in East and West: Essays in Liturgical and Theological Analysis (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2010), pp. 1–19, especially pp. 18– 19. For discussion of the diversity of kinds of meals, see Andrew McGowan, Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 10–32.

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If Jesus’ table fellowship and his Last Supper therefore represent different modes of sacrifice, what kind of sacrifice was this Christian Eucharist inaugurated (in fact if not necessarily in intention) in Jesus’ last meal? Two kinds seem to be in view. Firstly, as a reiteration of a meal eaten with Jesus by his companions (recalling the farewell meal at the end of his life ‘in the flesh’, and looking forward to a heavenly feast to come), it may be called in secular terms a community renewal meal and in religious terms a covenant renewal rite. In the tradition of Israel’s covenant renewals (to be discussed in Chapter 4), and like the covenantal meals eaten at Qumran, every such gathering is understood as a reconstitution of the community and a rededication to its purpose. Secondly, in religious terms, it is a communion sacrifice, a zebach, eaten in the presence of the holy one, invoked as God of the Exodus, as Jesus’ heavenly Father, and also as Jesus himself, the community’s risen Lord. Taking both elements together, this Christian transformation of the Passover is an anamnesis of Jesus and the universal deliverance achieved by the God of Israel through his death and resurrection;61 a celebration of the church as a transcendent community and a periodic renewal of the new and eschatological covenant.62 We must be clear that none of this involves the idea of theophagy, a literal consumption of Christ’s flesh or his blood, so as to absorb his divine power through sub-personal means. A symbolic sense is required by the narratives recalled in the gospels and in 1 Corinthians 11, in which Jesus himself makes the identification of bread as his ‘body’, and the cup as his ‘blood’, to be consumed while he himself sits among them. This is true whether we understand them to symbolize his death (the body broken, the blood spilt) or the covenant which results (the body of believers, the covenantal cup). The route to a theophagous interpretation (that participants are physically consuming Jesus’ physical body and blood, or doing so metaphorically as they consume the elements) lies only through the literal identification of these elements with his death. The weakness of this view is the absence of any narrative reference to the ‘broken’ body.63 Crucifixion does not in fact cause significant anatomical breaking, any more than it involves much literal spilling of blood. Only one text speaks of blood ‘poured out’ (ekchunomenon, ἐκχυννόμενον, Lk 22: 20), but all four connect ‘blood’ with ‘covenant’, whether   On remembrance see discussion in Thiselton, 1 Corinthians, pp. 878–83.   On covenant see Thiselton, 1 Corinthians, pp. 884–5. 63   The insertion of the adjective ‘given’ (didomenon) into the words ‘my body which 61 62

is … for you’ (1 Cor 11: 24) may be due to borrowing from Luke 22: 19; but the insertion of other forms like ‘broken’ (klomenon), or, even more clearly, ‘broken in small pieces’ (thruptomenon), is manifestly echoing, not historical descriptions of the crucifixion but the liturgical practice of the fraction, from a later time when it had become become separated from the thanksgiving prayer (see Gregory Dix: The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Black, 1945), pp. 131–3; Thiselton, 1 Corinthians, pp. 764–5). John’s Gospel of course insists (for its own symbolic reasons) that there was no ‘breaking’ of Jesus’ body (Jn 19: 36; compare Ex 12: 46).

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in the form ‘my blood of the covenant’ (Mt 26: 28/Mk 14: 24) or in the form ‘the new covenant in my blood’ (Lk 22: 20/1 Cor 11: 25).] ‘Body’ and ‘blood’ in this context should be understood as symbols standing for death, and the means of participating in the saving effects of that death. It is a violent death, of which some are guilty (compare Gen 4: 10; Josh 2: 19); it is also a sacrificial death, from which some receive benefits. Because the death is accepted by the victim (the body ‘given’, the blood ‘poured out’) a sad and shameful death becomes a means of life. The cup is the celebration of the benefits derived from that event, through the sharing of wine in which community is created. The bread is the fellowship bread of those who are literally ‘companions’, bound by it into the one ‘body’ of Jesus’ followers, sharers in the covenant inaugurated by his selfoffering in death. Thus, insofar as participants are conscious of what Jesus once achieved, the symbolic supper is a covenant renewal rite in celebration of the founding death; insofar as they are conscious of Jesus’ continuing presence among them, the act is a communion sacrifice in celebration of his risen life. In passing on the traditions of the Lord’s Supper, Paul explores both aspects, covenant and communion. In 1 Corinthians 10: 14–22, his understanding is clearly oriented towards communion. The model is the way in which the Jews become ‘partners in the altar’ (koinonoi tou thusiasteriou, 10: 18) by eating the sacrifices: that is, through sharing in zebachim they enter into personal relation with God, just as pagans, by implication, enter into relation with their gods (‘demons’) by the same means. What is at issue therefore is the importance of knowing to whom you are offering sacrifice; and with whom, by means of shared consumption, you are entering into relation: whether demons or Christ. It is assumed that alimentary sacrifice, so familiar to Greek religion as well as Jewish, is efficacious in establishing such personal relations. Just because it establishes real bonds, it matters what kind you offer, and how.64 On the other hand, Paul’s reference to the ‘cup of blessing’ (1 Cor 10: 16) alludes to the Passover as a celebration of the covenant, and in 1 Corinthians 11: 17–34 he invokes the tradition of a founding event and the foundational significance attached to the symbolic foods. The inclusion of the tokens within a full meal is not mentioned in chapter 10, but probably taken for granted since the Jewish and pagan parallels took that form. It became problematic in the church when enjoyment of the physical feasting overwhelmed the element of remembrance, and in doing so clouded awareness of the difference between ordinary meals and the meal called ‘the Lord’s Supper’. This difference implied, at least to Paul’s Pharisaic mind, certain forms of sharing which would not allow for factional cliques or social distinctions, with their power to destroy the unity of the gathering. The unity theme is not in fact present in the inaugural tradition of the Last Supper cited by Paul here. That tradition points rather to the special 64   Klawans, Purity, pp. 68–72; J. Klawans, ‘Pure Violence: Sacrifice and Defilement in Ancient Israel’, HTR 94/ 2 (2001): pp. 133–55 (here, pp. 149–54); McClymond, Sacred Violence, pp. 29–30.

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significance of the foods, and therefore of the event as a whole, but it does not dictate how it should be celebrated. The importance of social unity is derived from the experience of covenantal koinonia, as discussed in 10: 16–17, but it is specifically invoked (at least, according to one interpretation) by his emphasis on ‘discerning the body’ in 11: 29.65 The key point about this double tradition and double impulse, of communion and covenant, is that it is not primarily the presence of atoning death motifs which made the Christian meal ‘sacrificial’. That character is established (1) by the act of sharing a community meal in the presence of God and the risen Christ and (2) by the fact of sharing bread symbolizing ‘my body’ and a cup symbolizing ‘my blood’, adding another and determinative layer of meaning. These (which are both Type I personal – conjunctive sacrifices) fulfil all seven of the elements of sacrifice listed in Chapter 1 (p. 7). The covenant binding the community to God and to each other is based on Jesus’ death, a symbolic ‘body’ and ‘blood’ separating the believers from sin and binding them to God, as Israel was bound to Yahweh by the feasting in God’s presence and the double throwing of blood in Exodus 24. Neither layer entails (3) a theophagous understanding of literal (or even metaphorical) ingestion of Jesus’ physical life (Type II), nor (4) an understanding that the symbols of bread and wine, or the death they represent, set aside sin in an expiatory fashion or constitute a sin offering (Types III and IV). Certainly Paul assumes an element of necessary purity among participants: he assumes that they are all joined to Christ (1 Cor 6: 15), and that they are aware of the behavioural consequences of this (1 Cor 11: 27–32). However he does not state this in terms of cultic purity but in terms of relational integrity (both towards each other and towards Christ). There is no suggestion at all that the anamnesis or remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice is itself an expiatory act which sets aside sins. 6. The Pauline Economy of Grace It is through the letters of Paul that we receive our largest insight into the way the early Christian communities experienced themselves as living in an economy of grace, a heightened state of life deriving from God as creator and redeemer, mediated through Jesus but equally through the common things of life. The responsive dependence on God expressed in their gathering as a communion sacrifice was only one expression of their renewed understanding. Other strands were added to that, as we shall see, but the act of ‘breaking bread’ on ‘the first day of the week’, a day identified as ‘the Lord’s day’ (Acts 20: 7; 1 Cor 16: 2; Rev 1: 10), was an affirmation of the sacrificial ordering of the world, time itself being ordered by participation in the mystery of salvation. The church which performed these sacrifices (occasionally or regularly) displayed other signs of seeing itself as the locus of divine exchange, a life sustained by praise and thanks and by love of   See Thiselton, 1 Corinthians, pp. 891–4.

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one another, in dynamic orientation on God (Col 3; Eph 4; Rev 4–5) recognized in the paradigmatic event of the death and resurrection of Christ. In Paul’s writings, the choice between being ‘flesh minded’ and being ‘Spirit minded’ (Rom 8: 5) is a choice of rival systems of being: do Christians choose to exist in the sphere of ‘flesh’, leading only to futility, decay and death, or do they choose to exist in the sphere of ‘Spirit’, leading to glory and life? While both come from God, the ‘flesh’, signifying the lower nature given in the order of creation, is subject to futility, and taken by itself turns into idolatry, the worship of idols and other creatures, generating corrupt minds and degraded bodies (Acts 17: 24–9; Rom 1: 18–25). Against this negative flow he offers the redemptive economy of ‘Spirit’ and of ‘faith’ which opens up the realm of flesh to the transformative power of God, who can alone bring life out of nothing (Rom 4: 16–21), change bodies of humiliation into glorified bodies (Phil 3: 21) and reveal, from out of the mass of futility, the sons of God (Rom 8: 18–19). His engagement as a servant of this redemptive community he is happy to describe, on occasions, in terms of priestly offering. A considerable amount of energy in his later ministry was expended on securing a financial gift from his Gentile communities to the founding church in Jerusalem, to be both a practical aid and an act of tribute. Although it is not clear that he intended it to be offered, literally, in the temple (as a ‘first fruits’ offering perhaps?), the gift is described as an ‘offering’ (prosphora, Rom 15: 16) and as ‘fruit’ (karpon, Rom 15: 28). In the same passage he describes his ministry as leitourgon, an act of assistance in worship, and as hierourgounta, specifically priestly action (15: 16). In Phil 2: 17 he describes his life as a libation, a drink offering accompanying, even poured over, the larger offering and sacrifice (epi te(i) thusia(i) kai leitourgia(i), ἐπὶ τῇ θυσίᾳ καὶ λειτουργίᾳ), the offering being their ‘faith’, the faithful self-surrender of his Philippian disciples. By comparison with Jesus’ Galilean ministry, therefore, the Pauline economy is more obviously religious in character, more explicitly ritualized, but it is equally opposed to the given religious culture of Israel (and in his case the pagan world also). Not only in using and developing certain religious metaphors,66 but in his whole conception of life before God, discipleship is a process of reciprocal gift and transformation. The element of embodiment is more generalized and more socially minded. The world of work, for example, is seldom at the forefront of his writings. It is assumed that there is material support for physical life, that people get a living somehow and need to do so (1 Thess 5), and he himself refuses to disengage from productive work if that means relying on the work of others to support him as a teacher in return for his teaching (1 Cor 9: 1–18). According to acknowledged custom, such reliance would be legitimate (Gal 6: 6), but he refuses to set up the gospel as an object of trade, a new product line with a cash value: it must be given and received as gift. It is consistent with this policy that, even while   See recently Petropoulou, Animal Sacrifice, pp. 240–44; Klawans, Purity, pp. 214–

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he expounds the transformative power of Holy Spirit, the apostle keeps returning to the fact that his physical life is marked, not by strength but by physical and spiritual weakness, united to Christ in whom alone is his strength (1 Cor 2: 1–5; 4: 8–13; 2 Cor 11: 1 – 12: 20). Christian life, as envisaged in Paul’s letters, is to be played out in its physicality within the existing social constraints (the household, distance between communities, the life of a hostile city, the threat and actuality of imprisonment), and in consciousness of the human cycle of life and death, above all the delay of the parousia of Christ. Paul’s ‘hermeneutic of the body’ specifically denies significance to two processes which Jewish custom construed as significant: circumcision, and the eating and drinking of special substances. In the same way, he denies, at least at the theological or eschatological level, the given social hermeneutics of bodies as defined by ethnic, social or sexual identity: ‘there is no longer Jew nor Greek, no longer slave nor free, no longer male and female’ (Gal 3: 27). Instead, he asserts a different distinction, the existence of two ‘bodies’ corresponding to the two economies operating in his thought. There is the ‘body of death’ (Rom 7: 24), derived from Adam in creation, a fleshly body characterized by disobedience and sin, oriented on death; and there is the body of resurrection, derived from Christ, a ‘spiritual body’ characterized by obedience and joy, oriented on ‘walking in newness of life’ (Rom 6: 4) and ultimate transformation (Rom 8: 11; 1 Cor 15: 44; Phil 3: 21). 7. Creation and Eschatology in Conflict In attempting to affirm the possibility of relating to God within the created body while also distancing himself from it as ‘flesh’, Paul was inevitably led into conflicting interpretations, which affected his view of both sacrifice and the body. Sacrifice: The Problem of Meat Offered to Idols Particular difficulties arose for the church from the fact of trying to live as a dedicated sect in a culture already imbued with specific religious practices. In this, it found itself recapitulating the history of Israel during its Monarchy. Specifically, for Israel if YHWH and the Baalim are worshipped in the same way, using a variety of vegetable gifts, whole burnt offerings and communion sacrifices, how is one religion to be distinguished, as a practice, from another? If this cannot be done, what distinguishes YHWH from the Baalim? In Corinth, Paul had to deal with a controversy over Christians who took part in meals in the sacred precincts of pagan temples (and perhaps private homes), consuming meat sacrificed to the

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gods.67 Did this practice abolish the distinction between pagan deities and the God of Jesus Christ? We saw earlier that the largely secular form of the distribution of meat (some to the priests, some to private parties, some to the general meat market) should not disguise the unity of the total rite (the kill plus the meal) and therefore the implicitly religious character of meat meals, whether accompanied by religious acts or not. In any case, ‘libations of wine offered to the gods followed by hymns to various deities were a standard element of formal meals, whether sacrificial food was offered or not’.68 But if every formal meal is implicitly religious, ‘dining’ is a social activity which discriminates on socio-economic grounds between those who can afford it (or have wealthy friends) and those who cannot, and therefore between those who have the liberty of choice in such matters from those who do not.69 There is an inherent ambiguity in this form of religion, since what is physical and secular (for nourishment, and for community) is also a vehicle of worship. However, different groups and individuals will place themselves differently on the spectrum these represent, and we can detect, behind Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10, responses to a number of different attitudes. For some people (those ‘having knowledge’, 8: 7), meat is simply meat, whether shared at a solemn feast in a temple or bought in the market for consumption at home, with no theological implications at all. For others (those called the ‘weak’, 8: 7), the fact that food has been offered in a pagan temple links it indissolubly to a defiling cultus. The position of the first group (who by comparison to ‘the weak’ may be called ‘the strong’, although Paul does not do so here),70 is based on a claim to superior ‘knowledge’, and could be criticized as a convenient creed for fornicators and ‘belly worshippers’ (10: 6–8; Phil 3: 19). But it could also be defended by antisacrificial arguments such as those found in Hellenistic philosophy (‘food does not link us to a god’, 8: 8) combined with Jewish or Christian monotheism (‘idols are nothing’, 8:4; ‘the earth and its fullness are the Lord’s’, 10: 26, citing Ps 24: 1).71 In 1 Corinthians 8: 8–13, Paul accepts the argument that what joins people to a deity is not the food itself but the bond of relationship which food and other means mediate. This coheres with his claim that it was not the physical symbol of baptism but his union with Christ as a servant of the gospel that united him 67   For surveys of approaches to this issue see John Fotopolos, Food Offered to Idols in Roman Corinth (WUNT 151, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003) pp.  1–48; Thiselton, 1 Corinthians, pp. 617–20. 68   Fotopolos, Food Offered, p. 258. 69   Gerd Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), pp. 124–9. 70   For discussion of these identities, see Thiselton, 1 Corinthians, pp.  644–5; Fotopolos, Food Offered, p. 2, n. 3. 71   Few doubt that these phrases are not representative of Paul’s own position but cited by him to represent that of his opponents. See Thiselton, 1 Corinthians, pp. 620–21; Fotopolos, Food Offered, pp. 621, 633–5.

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to the community of his disciples (1 Cor 1: 14–17). But in 1 Corinthians 10 he several times affirms the sacrificial principle that physical symbols, and eating and drinking, do establish a personal bond between the worshipper and the object of worship. Thus in the Sinaitic covenant, Israel was ‘baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink’ (10: 2–3); similarly, the cup of blessing and the bread are a koinonia (a sharing, communion, participation) in the blood and body of Christ (10: 16). These are real, personal bonds of union (Type I). To deny, then, that food offered to idols ‘is anything’ (10: 19) is to give priority to the theological theory that since there is only one God, idols do not exist, over the experienced religious reality that what has been offered in worship, and shared as something offered, binds people to something – and if not to God then to a demon.72 In this Paul assumes two sacrificial perspectives. The first is that all is gift, and a festal meal is implicitly a thank offering. He is prepared to make allowances for differing perceptions: if you think of something as a sacrifice to a pagan god then it is one in fact, and a Christian should not participate; if you think of it as a mere meal for physical sustenance then that is what it is for you, because in truth all is from the one God (10: 25). However, this advice applies to a meal served in a private home with meat of uncertain origin ‘sold in the meat market’ (10: 25); he allows less freedom to those who engage in public consumption in temples (8: 9–13), just as he allows no leeway for private opinions when discussing conduct at the Lord’s Supper (10: 22–3; 11: 17–34). But he presupposes also a second sacrificial principle: that adherence to a god is mediated largely through feasting and therefore includes participation in a group of adherents, a social bond. Specifically, for a Christian there is no relationship to Christ which does not entail concern for Christian ‘brothers’, which is why failure to act out of such love, especially for ‘the weak’, can loosen their relationship, not only to each other, but to Christ himself. Therefore any private perception has to be subject to that of others, for higher than disputing about truth is the demand of love, which requires that anything that undermines a fellow Christian’s faith (such as being seen to pursue an apparently syncretistic belief or practice) must be avoided. It has been argued in this chapter that the social aspect of feasting is always an element of its sacrificial character, but Paul’s position here is very distinctive, in giving to the social aspect central place, rather than subordinating it to the usual questions about where, when and how the sacrifice is offered.73 For Paul, it is a community in which people give primacy to the needs of others, more than any action with food or drink, that glorifies God (10: 24, 31; Phil 2: 4).   Thiselton, I Corinthians, p.  620, citing K.K. Yeo, Rhetorical Interaction in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), p.  101, comments that ‘only an apocalyptic thinker like Paul can hold both the power and the vanity of idols in tension’. 73   Compare Petropoulou, Animal Sacrifice, p.  239: ‘the most original element in Paul’s letter is that he deters Christians from eating idol-meat on the basis of the conscience of the other’ (italics original). 72

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Paul writes as a liberal Jew, free of kashrut on the Christological ground that all persons and all foods are now ‘clean’ (Rom 14: 14). While he could recognize that his ‘freedom’ was in some sense equivalent to that of a philosophically oriented Gentile who attached no intrinsic sacral significance to foods, the cause of adopting this position was actually quite different. His is not a non-sacrificial position but a Christian sacrificial perspective oriented towards mediating relations within the body of Christ. The extent of his ‘freedom’ is open to doubt. Whether he could himself actually stomach food that was not only non-kosher but actually derived from a sacrifice in a pagan temple – even if he understood that ‘the earth and all its fullness are the Lord’s’ (1 Cor 10: 26) – we do not know. We may assume that he sometimes felt constrained, as an apostle, to limit his freedom of action on grounds of a duty of love towards the weak; but whether he felt that this constraint (whatever the force of his argument about love) soiled his conscience (10: 28–30) by causing him, in public, to appear to maintain distinctions between foods that he believed to be false – we also do not know. In disputing the manner of celebrating the Lord’s Supper (where he assumes that the meal unites the sharers to Christ) he again gives the priority to love and the expression of care for each other within the covenant community, so that it remains open to dispute whether ‘discerning the body’ (1 Cor 11: 29) refers to the recognition of Christ in the meal or in the community.74 Either way, the Christian body united to God is not only part of the economy of creation and redemption but also part of the constitution and transmission of the covenant community, as will be discussed in Chapter 4. The Body as the Vehicle of Worship For Paul, this question about eating idol meat is no minor religious quibble, as it may seem for a modern reader who does not accept the sacrificial principle, which Paul takes for granted, that eating and drinking in the presence of a transcendent power binds sharers to that deity. The topic of how the body engages in the graced interchange of worship, whether through eating and drinking or through praise, occupies Paul in various ways throughout 1 Corinthians 8–14. In one sense all these chapters are commenting on a principle enunciated earlier, while discussing the very different topic of sexuality: ‘the body (soma) is for the Lord and the Lord for the body … therefore glorify God in your body’ (6: 13, 20). In 1 Corinthians 5–6 we see the collision of appropriate and inappropriate ways of using the body, in face of the temptations for his disciples to revert to pagan lifestyles in a pagan culture. Issues of sexual misconduct are addressed   Thiselton, I Corinthians, pp. 891–3, argues against adopting the social sense, but includes it in a larger view: ‘The social is founded on the salvific: the issue is understanding the entailments of ‘sharing as participants in the death of Jesus “for you”’ (citing C. Wolff, Der erste Brief des Paulus an die Korinther (THKNT 7, Leipzig: Evangelische Verlaganstalt, 1996), p. 279. 74

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chiefly in terms of a purity code specifying those who will and will not enter the kingdom of God (5: 6–13; 6: 9–11). Soma frequently means ‘flesh’, as opposed to spirit (5: 3; 7: 34), but in 6: 13–20 soma takes on the wider meaning of ‘the whole person’, although still seen from its physical aspect (cf. 7: 4; 13: 3), and Paul begins to develop a relational concept of ‘body’ as mediating the personal relationship with Christ. This relational concept is developed both in Eucharistic terms (where participants share in ‘the body’ in two senses, as discussed above) and in corporate terms (denoting the church as the ‘body of Christ’, united to Christ through baptism and the Eucharist). If the church is no mere society but is Christ present among his people, the right manner of participation in the Lord’s Supper is essential to true membership of the ‘body’. But this is not worked out in ‘purity’ terms concerning holy foods, holy places, holy times or holy (circumcised, purified) bodies, but through the prophetic theme of true worship expressed in social cohesiveness. Even where purity concerns are evident, in two passages regarding the ‘shame’ attached to women’s speaking in worship (11: 3–16; 14: 33b–36), the issue is explicated with reference to the order of creation and the prophetic concern with community order.75 He goes on, in chapters 12–14, to deal with relationships with God mediated through praise and speaking. This is synagogal rather than hieratic, but no less bodily than the alimentary worship discussed in earlier chapters. He asserts that whereas idols are ‘dumb’, the Spirit of God ‘speaks’ (12: 2–3), and Christians must strive for the true form of speaking in worship (chapter 14). But the controlling theme remains the same: unity expressed through the image of ‘the body’. The single alimentary image (‘we were all made to drink of the one Spirit’, 12: 13) leads to an exposition of the church as ‘the body of Christ’, using that metaphor to indicate not only a complex unity (12: 14–26) but the Christ-inspired orientation of the body on weakness, not power, through an emphasis on the needs of the weakest members (12: 22–6) and on offices of service (12: 27–31). This principle of service, seen in chapters 8 and 10, is restated in the love hymn of chapter 13 (‘If I give my body to be burnt but have not love I am nothing’, 13: 3), and continues into chapter 14 where Paul demands that they worship in a way which subordinates purity of (verbal) worship to the needs of the outsider (14: 16–17, 23–5) and whatever builds up the church as a whole (14: 12, 17, 26, 31, 33a). In place of the Christological body, which is the criterion of truth in chapters 1, 10, 11 and 15 (though some discern a Christological model in chapter 13 also),76 in these chapters he emphasizes the ‘one Spirit’ who begets unity in Christ through true worship.

75   For different views of the authorship and meaning of the second passage, see Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), pp. 699–708; Thiselton, 1 Corinthians, pp. 1146–61. 76   Fee, 1 Corinthians, p. 640.

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In Romans likewise, Paul demonstrates his fundamental understanding of the body as participating in a created order of life received from God and subject to God, who has power to make a new creation and who does so in Jesus Christ. Those who fail to perceive this divine origin of the body attach false value to the creature: the result is a fundamental distortion of life, the degrading of bodies (Rom 1: 24) displayed in disordered affections and destructive actions (Rom 1: 20–32). By contrast, Abraham is presented as showing a faith in the faithful working of God, and despite the state of his own body’s deadness and that of Sarah’s womb (Rom 4: 19) remains convinced of the promise of God ‘who gives life to the dead and brings into being the things that are not’ (Rom 4: 17). Hence death, although a feature of the created order, is not the main determinant of bodily being: beyond death, God’s life-giving purpose points to a redeemed order, a new creation, hinted at in Isaac and revealed in Christ (Rom 4: 22–4). This renewed body realizes itself now in openness to divine power poured out in Jesus and the Holy Spirit. 8. Summary and Conclusion In this selective review of the biblical material we see that there is in both the Old and the New Testament a sacrificial conception of the human body, and one that is describable within (though not solely within) the terms of an ‘economy of grace’. In studying the patterns of gift and meal sacrifices in Israel and other cultures we saw that sacrifice may express an awareness of life as created and lived in relation to divine energy. Religious and secular life are integrated in an action which affirms food, work and social relations in the presence of deity. Because of this integration, it is possible (within the scope of a seven-fold set of elements, set out in Chapter 1) to identify patterns of thought and practice as ‘sacrificial’, even in some cases which are not overtly religious. The danger of losing this integrated transcendent awareness is the restriction of religion to certain specified domains. Then the body and its feasting become suspect as sources of impurity; the zebach is subordinated to the sin offering. Jesus’ Galilean ministry was a renewal of the sense of God’s presence in all life, and therefore of sacrificial awareness, even though this was expressed mainly through preaching and healing, and his participation in religious sacrifices, and even explicitly in meat meals, was strikingly small. In his teaching of the kingdom he declared that the heart of sacrifice is not certain religious actions but the awareness of the divine presence, ‘episacrificially’, and his open meals especially showed this. The Last Supper by contrast was remembered, through the Synoptic gospels and the tradition passed on by Paul, as a closed meal focused on Jesus’ death understood in terms of Passover and Akedah as a covenant-founding event with expiatory overtones. While the sacrificial dynamic of expiation was not attached to the Eucharistic anamnesis of the Last Supper, it combined covenantal renewal with a continuing zebach communion for the new age.

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Paul offers in a wider sphere a continuing economy of grace. For him, the church exists insofar as it receives divine blessing ‘in Christ’, ‘in the Spirit’, and responds by praise. In his writings, the Christian body understands itself as dependent on divine power in creation and eschatology, united together as a ‘body’ and conjoined with the risen body of Christ. The church united to Christ is the locus of the divine reciprocity of blessing and praise, in which God’s kingdom is discerned and God becomes present in the Christian community through Christ. This understanding is found, of course, not only in Paul’s writings, but is a general feature of early Christian literature, such as in Acts, Hebrews and the Didache.77 It is not to be defended as a new equivalent of the temple, a new human religious institution, but reaches for the underlying pattern of life given by God. The self-understanding of the early Christian community is therefore charismatic and pneumatic, ‘sacrificial’ mainly in being open to the eschatological action of God. Such a stance is dangerous, from the perspective of Torah, because it bypasses the ‘purity’ which distinguishes Israel. In sitting light to the Law and allowing access to the uncircumcised, it moves into the area of general religion (which is, from a Torah perspective, simply idolatry) while claiming to be the fulfilment of the worship of Israel’s God. But the New Testament asserts that such a move is necessary in order to find the new way of being corresponding to God’s new covenant in Christ. In the next chapters we shall examine, first, the issue of danger raised by this open sacrificial economy, and secondly, how Christ was understood to have established that new covenant.

77   For review of sacrifice of grace in Hebrews see Dunnill, Covenant and Sacrifice, pp. 239–60.

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Chapter 3

The Purified Body: Expiatory Sacrifice and Justification 1. The Scope of Sacrifice in Israel In Chapter 2 we have looked at sacrifice as a mode of exchange, a religious expression of the agricultural and social life of the people with an emphasis on gifts and the shared meal. We have seen that in Israel as in many other cultures such a practice can survive and thrive with very little in the way of religious superstructure. It may generate permanent shrines and a professional class of priests, or it may not; it may exist at a purely local level, or become, through a centralized sanctuary and a pattern of pilgrim feasts, a major form within the national life; it may be unified or diverse. In turning to the ‘purified body’ we are to a large extent looking at the same phenomena from the other end, from the point of view of religion. ‘Purity’, ‘purification’, ‘sin’ and related concepts and practices encode the religious conditions for the offering of the kind of sacrificial worship described earlier. The prominence of these features in the Hebrew scriptures reflects the fact that Israel’s story and literature were collected and ordered within circles reflected in the Priestly document (P) at the time of the Exile and after, and received the stamp of its understanding. Because of this, in Jewish, Christian and secular reflection on ‘sacrifice’ down to our own time, priority has been given to the expiatory chatta’th, ‘sin offering’ (better rendered ‘purification sacrifice’, as will be argued below). Despite the prominence given to this pattern in the OT, there are several reasons why its treatment has been delayed until now. Firstly, as stated above, a starting point for this inquiry is the cross-cultural pattern which makes a kill plus a meal essential, or at least normative, for the full sacrificial act. In the case of Israel, this gives centrality to zebach, and it has been argued that ‘olah also is best construed as a kind of meal (in which the whole, not merely the best part, is consumed by YHWH). We shall see that, although chatta’th too is usually a kill plus a meal, the meal element is restricted and frequently dispensed with, for reasons which are significant. Secondly, the communion offering, zebach, can include expiation, chatta’th, but not vice versa. Zebach is the more general term, the verb zabach being the usual one for slaughter/sacrifice including all types of animal and even vegetable sacrifice: a chatta’th is therefore a special type of zebach. This is not the impression gained from reading Leviticus, where both zebach and ‘olah are incorporated, together with minchah, into a short preface (Lev 1–3) to the main body of its

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expiatory regulations (Lev 4–6). The ‘olah is explicitly said ‘to make atonement’ (lekapper, 1: 4), but this claim is not made for the zebach. However, to the extent that Leviticus incorporates these older rites into its system, it does so only by narrowing and distorting their function and meaning. The description of the zebach in Leviticus 3 appears especially incomplete and unsatisfactory. No purpose is assigned to it, except to be ‘a meat offering by fire for a pleasing odour’ (3: 5). Attention focuses exclusively on the altar rite, with no mention of the distribution of the meat in a shared meal; this is referred to only in a supplementary section (7: 11–36), where the emphasis falls on the securing of the priests’ portions of the post-incendiary ‘residual substance’.1 Thirdly, although the practice of chatta’th may be much older than the text of P, the prominence given to chatta’th in the Hebrew Bible is clearly a product of a historical development which has brought the Priestly perspective to the fore, suppressing or reinterpreting the others to bring them into conformity with its own perspective and to order these disparate traditions into a coherent frame. The older sacrificial culture, which features strongly in the religious culture of Canaan in the times of the Judges and the monarchy, is nowhere explained, let alone defended. It does not appear to be derived from Yahwism, but represents patterns of religion common across the Ancient Near East, including Greece. The fact that the manner of worshipping Yahweh and the Baalim does not appear to differ is of course a point of criticism from the codifying perspective of the Deuteronomistic writings (D) and the Priestly editors (P). It was argued in Chapter 2, following Alfred Marx, that ‘olah and zebach should be understood as transformations of types of hospitality in which humanity and deity are united in a shared meal, emphasizing the presence (as well as the transcendence) of YHWH. But the chatta’th will not fit this pattern, being focused not on what unites humanity to the transcendent deity but on the separation caused by ‘impurity’. It is much more specifically ‘religious’ in its form. So whereas other chapters analyse sacrifice in relation to basic areas of common human experience, economics and generation, the primary reference point in this chapter is the specifically religious complex of ‘sin’ and ‘impurity’. This difference should not be overstated. If we apply the seven elements of sacrifice outlined in Chapter 1, we note that all seven are present in chatta’th, as in the older forms. The element of ritual (#2) is tighter, since it matters more exactly how sacrifice is performed; and in the sacrificial exchange (#4) what is received by the offerer is the explicitly religious good of ‘atonement’. The element of transcendence (#3) is emphasized here, in accordance with its stress on the distance between God and humanity wrought by ‘impurity’; but the element of solidarity (#6) remains, since the prescribed offerings are still the normal produce

1   A. Marx, ‘The Theology of the Sacrifice According to Leviticus 1–7’, in R. Rentdorff and R.A. Kugler (eds), The Book of Leviticus: Composition and Reception (VT Supplement Series 93, Atlanta: SBL, 2003), pp. 103–20, citing p. 107.

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of the land – bull, goat, sheep, pigeon or flour – thus incorporating relations with YHWH into the life and economy of the group. One aspect in fact gives a new importance to the relationship between the offering and the offerer. This is the very explicit grading of requirements according to the offerer’s social and economic status. Presumably the choice of offering for the zebach had always allowed for this, in that these were voluntary offerings, and a group would offer whatever it could provide and expect to eat. The same principle would apply to ‘olah and minchah in Leviticus 1–3. But Leviticus 4–5 removes this element of choice from the chatta’th, specifying precisely when it is to be offered, and what the offering is to consist of. Thus, for the sin of a priest or the whole congregation, a bull is required (4: 7, 13); for a ruler, a male goat (4: 23); for an ordinary person, a female goat or sheep (4: 28, 32); for a poor person, two birds, or even, in extreme poverty, a handful of flour (5: 7, 11). So while a larger animal remains the norm (in accord with the generally public and priestly perspective of P, and its concern with what sets barriers between YHWH and the people as such), the text allows for many, perhaps most, actual individual offerings to be inconspicuous in scale and affordable in kind. People offer what they have and what they handle daily. An incidental effect of this stipulation is that, even in the case of a public sacrifice, there is no occasion for the multiplication of offerings even as a statement of the great wealth or extreme grief of the offerer (Mic 6: 7). Despite this residual element of human and economic solidarity, there is in chatta’th an unmistakable distance between the worshipper and YHWH. Neither for the worshippers nor for YHWH is this a feast, with the personal bonding which that implies. In chatta’th, an animal sacrifice is wholly given away, as in ‘olah, but received by Yahweh only in part and/or through intermediaries, the priests; if there is a meal, only the priests are entitled to share it. In both ways, then, chatta’th points to a disabling distance between the worshipper and God reflected in this rite. The emphasis on impurity indicates that something has gone wrong with the relationship, with the result that the range of human experience dealt with is drastically reduced to sin/impurity, and the need for atonement (kipper) and forgiveness (nimlach). But rather than think of it in isolation, as a failed or incomplete conjunctive rite, the chatta’th is typically part of a sequence, to be followed by other rites (Lev 5: 7–10; 8: 14–18; 16: 24). It exists, then, not to stand on its own but as a disjunctive rite to remove the barrier of impurity so as to make nearer approach possible.2

  Marx, ‘Theology’, p. 117; against Klawans, ‘Pure Violence’, p. 154.

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2. Impurity and Expiation What is Impurity? In her seminal essay Purity and Danger and subsequent writings,3 Mary Douglas has drawn attention to the significance of order in the formation of worldviews, and of the metaphor of uncleanness to describe whatever challenges or dissolves order. Fundamental here are distinctions such as outside/inside, male/female, friend/enemy, human/animal, nature/culture. It is upon these (as mediated to humanity in a given context) that the psyche develops its awareness of the world, a cosmology (#7) or mental framework within which past experience can be placed and new experience received. According to this argument, the division between clean and unclean animals in Leviticus 11 has no medical basis (against Maimonides and modern rationalizing accounts) but relates to a set of classifications (such as the opposition between domestic/wild, creeping/walking/flying and so on), in which the ‘unclean’ are those which fail to observe the anatomical rules. Hence cattle are cleft-footed and chew the cud, whereas the pig, like the hare and the rock badger, is ‘unclean’ because it meets one of these requirements but not both (11: 7, cf. Deut 14: 8).4 A similar argument can be applied to the definition of skin disease (‘leprosy’), so hard to establish on medical grounds (Lev 13). It stands for the blurring of wholeness and clear boundaries.5 This is why garments and houses too can contract ‘leprosy’ (presumably referring to some kind of mould) and require cleansing by an identical rite. Otherwise why does the Mishnah specify that only members of Israel and their houses are liable to leprosy,6 and that it cannot be contracted by a house which is not really a house (‘a round house or a three-cornered house or a house built on a ship or on a raft  …’) or one which is situated either in

  Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966); see also John F.A. Sawyer (ed.), Reading Leviticus: A Conversation with Mary Douglas (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). 4   Douglas, Purity and Danger, pp. 41–57. To this reason based in conceptual hygiene was later added the empirical fact that pigs were kept by other peoples so that the keeping or not keeping of pigs became a visible distinction between Gentile and Jew. There is none of that in the text, although the fact that apart from these two verses there are only two other mentions of pigs in the entire Hebrew Bible (both disparaging: Prov 11: 22, Is 66: 17) and no reference to any Israelite keeping pigs, let alone offering them in sacrifice, may confirm – although of course the texts have been subject to editing – that this avoidance was uniform and older than Leviticus. 5   See Douglas Davies, ‘An Interpretation of Sacrifice in Leviticus’, ZNW 89 (1977): pp. 387–99 (citing pp. 396–7), reprinted in Bernhard Lang (ed.), Anthropological Approaches to the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press; London: SPCK, 1985). 6   m. Negaim 3.1 (Danby, Mishnah, p. 678). 3

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Jerusalem or outside the land of Israel?7 This explains also why a person ceases to be ‘unclean’ not only when the signs of skin disease disappear (Lev 13: 6) but also when they cover the whole body (13: 12–13).8 Medical concerns are present, but the dominant factor is not so much ‘health’ as physical and conceptual wholeness. On this argument the function of Leviticus 11 is to define which animals are good to eat (and therefore good to sacrifice) and at the same time to give a model of classificatory thinking which applies analogously to persons and actions. In doing so it expresses a worldview: creation is highly structured and the Law exists as a guide to action. ‘An equation emerges: Pure creatures are … to impure creatures as the Israelites are to other nations. A pure people eats pure creatures in a pure state.’9 Other chapters similarly classify sexual activity, family relations and modes of ritual: how to sacrifice properly and who should do it. In articulating such distinctions, the systematic rules of holiness, the focus necessarily falls on what tests them, especially instances of anomaly. Such purity awareness is to be found in all strands of the OT, although the earlier material in J and E appears to be fairly relaxed about purity issues. Menstruation is mentioned in a context which implies that it is classified as impurity (Gen 31: 33–5) but the same passage shows tolerance of ‘household gods’, which D and P would denounce as idolatrous. In this early period we know of no clear set of ritual rules or explanations, either for sacrifice or for purity (perhaps because both were well known by common custom). Ritual transgressions are recorded, even if the nature of the error is not always clear in the text (1 Sam 13: 11–13), but purity issues are rarely involved. By contrast, the Priestly Code is highly conscious of such distinctions. In Leviticus 11-15, laws of purity are set out at great length: first foods (11), then childbirth (12), then leprosy (13-14), then genital discharges (15). Others are added in the Holiness Code (H), in chapters 17-22, notably the use of blood, and sexual relations; while the topic of corpse impurity is dealt with in Numbers 19. One principle of interest to us is that impurity is a bodily state, arising either through the body’s conditions or through its actions, and liable to be communicated to other bodies as well as to the land and the sanctuary. The laws are largely concerned with impurity affecting the body through what enters it (foods) or what leaves it (offspring, genital discharges), what causes distortion to its boundaries or transgresses the border between life and death (skin disease, corpse), or what causes confusion about what kind of body it is (whether male or female, human or animal, of one flesh or of different flesh). The body is thus the basic metaphor of unity and integrity. The body’s wholeness consists in being closed to alien influences; yet the wholly closed body is dead. A 7   m. Negaim 12.1, 4 (Danby, Mishnah, p. 691). That is, neither the holy city, nor the pagan lands are liable, but only the ambiguous areas where most Jews live. 8   For the Talmud this paradoxical pure impurity is ‘a parable for the messianic age (b. Sanh. 97a, cited by Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, pp. 785–6). 9   Levine, Leviticus, p. 248.

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body requires access to food through its openings, and corresponding excretion of waste; the maintenance of human life over time requires the seminal penetration of female bodies and delivery of infants. At the level of the ‘social body’, the produce of ‘nature’ must be brought into the sphere of ‘culture’ and wives acquired, often from neighbouring settlements or even enemy tribes. All these exchanges are points of danger, and typically hedged about (it is impossible not to use such images of exclusion and containment) with rules. Hence circumcision can be explained as rendering the penis unambiguously masculine by removal of the foreskin, as subincision, removal of the clitoris, renders the female genitalia unambiguously feminine.10 And the language of dirt hovers around those things which do not belong, or which, being ambiguous, disturb the clarity of the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. The benefit of Douglas’ argument is that it offers a systematic symbolic explanation for material which presents aspects of ordinary experience as symbols of spiritual relations and states of being, and is clearly systematic in its mode of thought. Although its details continue to be debated by exegetes, its overarching conception has exercised a large influence on biblical scholarship. Other explanations of ‘impurity’ (from disease, or physical disgust, or idolatry, or demons, or sin, or death) will explain some of the material, but none will cover all.11 They are, for the most part, attempts to account for the biblical concept of ‘purity’ in the Bible’s own terms. One explanation which must be considered, however, is the argument that the ‘common denominator’, among these elements of impurity, is death.12 The idea should not surprise us, since mortality is the key difference between humanity and divinity, expressed in concern for food and generation, but most centrally in death itself. The symbolic charge relating to food and generation increases when either or both of them is coupled with death (as in the sacrifice of edible animals, or the ‘loss of life force’ associated with genital discharges).13 Taking such factors into account may be an attempt to gain breadth by supplementing an ‘idealist’ account derived from anthropology with a ‘realist’ or ‘materialist’ observation of the problems caused by death.14 But more needs to be said. While corpses are ‘unclean’, and so are some bodily processes which may make us think of ‘loss of life force’, we need to ask why some discharges are held to be polluting and

  William R. LaFleur, ‘Body’, in Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 39. 11   David P. Wright, ‘Unclean and Clean’, Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 6, pp. 729– 41, citing p. 739. 12   Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, p. 1002. 13   Klawans, ‘Pure Violence’, pp. 141–2. 14   Philip Peter Jenson, Graded Holiness: A Key to the Priestly Conception of the World (JSOTSS 106, Sheffield, JSOT Press, 1992), pp. 81, 88. 10

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others not; and why human blood in particular is not polluting when flowing from a wound, and positively life-enhancing when shed in circumcision.15 An additional element, pointed to by Berquist and Eilberg-Schwarz, is that some discharges are controlled, and others not. Controlled breach of bodily boundaries, or symbolic structures, amounts to enlargement of the human sphere, not its dissolution.16 The clue therefore is not in death itself, nor in order itself, but in the combination of wholeness and control (and their opposites) especially in association with death. In relation to sacrifice, we need to go still further.17 For this, both Milgrom’s quasi-medical principle of ‘loss of life force’18 and his ethical principle of ‘reverence for life’19 seem anachronistic and inadequate. More convincing is the assertion that in killing animals humanity performs a fundamental transgression of its place in the created order, a transgression expressed, as several cultures witness, by ‘a guilt  …  embedded deep in the psyche of the human race’.20 It is a guilt seldom addressed directly, but the mysterious pronouncement of Leviticus 17: 11 that ‘blood, as life, makes atonement’ ‘informs the Israelite that slaughtering a sacrificial animal for its flesh constitutes murder unless he offers its blood upon the altar to ransom its death’.21 What is Expiation? The Hebrew noun kipper with its cognate verb has a variety of meanings according to context.22 Outside the cultus, it usually describes a divine act of setting aside, blotting out, removing or forgiving sin, with the general sense of ‘removal’ of an obstruction to the relationship caused by human wickedness or rebellion. In cultic   Eilberg-Schwarz, The Savage in Judaism, pp. 141–76.   Jon L. Berquist, Controlling Corporeality: The Body and the Household in Ancient

15 16

Israel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), pp. 40–43; Eilberg-Schwarz, The Savage in Judaism, pp. 186–8, 194–9. 17   Klawans, Purity, pp. 3–10, has pointed out the failure of exegetes to apply Douglas’ systematic symbolic approach to sacrifice, even when they apply it to purity rules. Instead it tends to be treated in evolutionary terms as a vestige. 18   Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, p. 1002; supported by Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of Leviticus (NICOT, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), p. 188. 19   Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, p.  712; cf. Jacob Milgrom: ‘Biblical Diet Laws as an Ethical System’, Interpretation 17 (1963), pp. 288–301. 20   Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, p. 713. 21   Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, p. 712; and compare ibid., ‘A Prolegomenon to Leviticus 17: 11’ JBL 90 (1971): pp.  149–56, arguing that since Lev 17 is addressed to ordinary Israelites (not priests), and discusses ‘eating blood’ in sacrifices, it must be dealing with the zebach shelamim; in calling this, too, an ‘atoning’ sacrifice (though atoning only for the impurity contracted in its own action) it draws it into the same system of thought. 22   Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, pp. 1079–84.

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settings, it is often an action performed by a priest with regard to a contaminated thing, and so means ‘purge’.23 Here too some infringement or cause of offence is being removed. The details of the sacrificial regulations are complex, and their interpretation is controversial. The following discussion mostly follows recent treatments by Milgrom, Wright and Klawans. The argument of Jacob Milgrom, advanced over several decades, is now commanding general assent.24 He maintains that the chatta’th should be rendered ‘purification offering’, rather than ‘sin offering’, to indicate that it exists, not to deal with ‘sin’ but in order to remove ‘impurity’ (tuma‘ah) caused by accidental infringements of the ritual. The LXX translation of chatta’th as hamartia, ‘sin offering’, was transmitted into later European translations, and is still retained in NRSV, causing this cultic action to be moralized, as in some way a penalty paid to God for a moral infringement. This leads to further confusions – is the animal victim, for example, being ‘punished’ as a substitute for a human offender?25 – and gives the impression that chatta’th exist to deal with sin, that is, moral offence, implying moral culpability: ‘When anyone sins unintentionally  …’ (Lev 4: 2 NRSV). But in reality the rite exists largely to provide for technical infringements, ‘inadvertent’ errors in ritual; although these are not sinful, they are serious, because they may disable the operation of the cultus by introducing impurity into the sacred space. If the appropriate name is ‘purification offering’ it does not follow that ‘sin’ is a redundant notion, however, because alongside the category of ritual impurity, there remains a separate category of moral impurity.26 We need therefore to distinguish between two types of impurity dealt with in Leviticus: ritual impurity (what Wright calls ‘permitted impurity’), and moral impurity. Ritual impurity Ritual impurity can itself be divided between those states of minor impurity which are purified without need of sacrifice, usually by ritual washing, and those more serious impurities for which sacrifice is required. The distinction is effectively between what may be called ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ uncleanness. ‘Normal’ or   On the two senses, see J. Sklar, ‘Sin and Impurity: Atoned or Purified? Yes’, in B.J. Schwarz, D.P. Wright, J. Stackert and N.P. Meshel (eds), Perspectives on Purity and Purification in the Bible (London: Clark, 2008), pp. 18–31. 24   Jacob Milgrom, ‘Sin-offering or Purification-offering?’, VT 21 (1971): pp. 237–9; Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, pp. 253–4. 25   The effect of this punitive idea of sacrifice on the Christian understanding of atonement is discussed in Chapter 7 below. 26   Wright: ‘Unclean and Clean’, pp. 729–30; Sklar, ‘Sin and Impurity’, pp. 22–3. It has been common in recent ethical debates over sexual matters to overlook this distinction, thus eliminating the moral component of purity. See for example L. William Countryman, Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), pp. 20–39. 23

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‘minor’ uncleanness includes touching the dead carcase of an animal declared ‘clean’ according to the dietary laws of Leviticus 11: this causes uncleanness ‘until the evening’, which is cleansed by washing (11: 39–40); whereas an ‘abnormal’ uncleanness would be eating the carcass of an unclean beast, for which no purification is given. How this is dealt with, see below. Sexual relations between a man and a woman, or a man’s seminal emission (15: 16–18) count as ‘normal’ in this sense, rendering a person unclean until the evening and being cleansed by washing. But abnormal genital discharges, whether of a man or of a woman, not only render the person unclean for seven days but may impart minor uncleanness to others by contagion. These require multiple sacrifices, chatta’th and ‘olah, though small in scale, consisting only of two pigeons (15: 2–12, 25–30). A middle case is someone who has touched a human corpse (cleansed over seven days by the use of ‘water of purgation’); or a woman after her menstrual discharge, whose uncleanness is highly contagious, rendering anyone and anything unclean, but requiring only ritual cleansing at the end of the 7 days (15: 19–24).27 Wright’s designation of ritual impurity as ‘permitted’ reinforces the need to detach these impurities from the area of ‘sin’. They are states which arise in the course of daily life and need to be dealt with (as the requirements of hygiene do for us) but they do not confer guilt, either psychologically or theologically. The causes of minor impurity in daily life were many (tending to grow over time) and affected not only persons but also objects: beds, clothes and cooking vessels (Lev 15: 4–12). Even serious secondary impurity, at least at the low end of the scale, could therefore be contracted from indirect contact with ‘abnormal’ states in the common areas of diet, generation/sexuality or the corpses of humans or animals. More serious impurity could also result, for priests, from unintended mistakes in ritual. It is important to distinguish what defiles the person and is cleansed by washing (people cleanse themselves, and in any place) from what defiles the sanctuary and is purged by blood (purging is done by another, and takes place necessarily at the Temple).28 The purpose of the chatta’th is to remove defilement, ‘make atonement for’ these more serious impurities, but strictly speaking it is not the person who is defiled, rather the sanctuary is defiled by their offence. Such defilement can be considered ‘an aerial miasma’ defiling the sanctuary even at a distance,29 although it only becomes actual when a person comes into contact with the sanctuary (so that chatta’th must precede other offerings). Persons are purged by water, but the blood of the chatta’th is applied to the altar (or the Holy Place when the offence is caused by the nation or the High Priest (4: 5–7, 16–18), or in extreme cases

27   No cleansing is in fact mentioned in these cases, though it can be argued that this can be assumed by comparison with other texts, as it is by the rabbis and by 2 Samuel 11: 4 (Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, p. 935). 28   Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, p. 256, on Lev 12: 6. 29   Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, p. 257.

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the Holy of Holies itself (16: 14–16)) but never to persons.30 The chatta’th makes expiation (kpr) for (‘al) the altar and so restores the relationship and allows subsequent sacrifices to be offered. Moral impurity By contrast with ritual impurity, moral impurity (‘prohibited’) relates to a completely different class of actions, broadly those named ‘abomination’ (to‘evah) in the Holiness Code (Lev 17–26), generally requiring punishment rather than sacrifice.31 Examples specified in Leviticus 18-20 include idolatry (Lev 20: 2–9), incest and other sexual offences (Lev 18) and these are punished by death or by being ‘cut off’ (18: 29). The border between ritual and moral offence is not absolute, for it is true that ‘sin’, which brings extreme uncleanness on the person (Lev 18: 24), does also defile the land (Lev 18: 25–8; Num 35: 33–4), and idolatrous offerings are both sinful and defile the sanctuary (Lev 20: 2–5). Thus, in certain circumstances, ‘abomination’ falls within the sacrificial system, and conversely ritual offences may become sinful. The key distinction is between ‘inadvertent’ and ‘intentional’ offences. For an ‘inadvertent’ ritual offence, such as delaying to make a prescribed offering for a ‘permitted’ impurity (Lev 5: 2–6), or inadvertently bringing ritual impurity into relation with the sanctuary (Lev 7: 19–21; 22: 3–7), ‘guilt’ (‘awon) is incurred; that is, the ritual error becomes also an unintended moral offence (4: 2–3, 13, 22, 27). For these, chatta’th is the prescribed means of purification, which both purges the sanctuary and brings forgiveness on the offenders (4: 20, 26b).32 There is an additional rule for dealing with ‘unwitting’ moral offence, in the case of the ’asham (Lev 5: 14–26 MT, 5: 14 – 6: 7 NRSV). Usually rendered ‘guilt offering’, older commentators have difficulty distinguishing it from the chatta’th, understood as ‘sin offering’, to which it is identical in form (7: 7). However the term is better translated ‘reparation sacrifice’, because it is used where there is legal damage, requiring restitution. This explains why it is commutable into monetary value, so that either a ram or the cost of a ram (according to Temple rates) counts as an ’asham (5: 15). A person who has committed ‘unwitting sin’ must ‘bear his sin’ (‘awon) that is, carry the responsibility or consequences of his act.33 This form could be construed as a legal penalty rather than an offering, especially when given in monetary terms; but note that, if so, it is the human transgressor, not the animal (or of course the money), that is being punished.   When blood is daubed on the right ears, thumbs and toes of priests in their ordination, this is blood of the ‘ram of ordination’, an ‘olah (8: 22–4), subsequent to the atoning chatta’th (8: 14–16). See below for the other apparent exception, in the related leprosy rite. 31   On holiness see Nathan Koltun-Fromm, Hermeneutics of Holiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 31–52. 32   Notably this is not stated in regard to the inadvertent offence of the high priest. 33   Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, pp. 294–5, Levine, Leviticus, p. 26. 30

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Intentional moral impurity, sin, therefore receives little attention in the sacrificial code, not because it is unimportant but because it is dealt with in a completely different way, by being ‘cut off’ (18: 29). But when a moral sin is voluntary, it cannot be set right by means of regular sacrificial action: only the Day of Atonement can deal with such sins. Impurity and the Power of Evil Evil and disorder afflict the community in other ways. The regulations in Leviticus contain numerous references to goat demons, and to other aspects of Canaanite religion: sacrifice to Molech, drinking blood, consulting mediums and so on.34 Idolatry and impurity are clearly closely related. Among the behavioural prescriptions of the Holiness Code (H), too, the connection is made between aberrant forms of sexuality (bestiality, homosexuality, even adultery) and the practices of the nations.35 The concern for ethnic purity which inspires EzraNehemiah is here expressed symbolically in terms of the national and physical body. Purity of the national body requires pure blood, pure action, pure worship. Although, as in the prophets, it would be accepted that worship of foreign gods could lead Israel astray, the Priestly document does not concede to them any actual existence: there is only one God, YHWH, while evil is depicted as a demonic power to be placated (propitiation), or as impersonal negative force to be purged by impersonal means (using water or blood). Some rites and rules witness to evil as normal and natural, others as special and difficult; but all evil tends to undermine the system and must be dealt with. Chatta’th therefore is an opposite of zebach: disjunctive (avertive) impersonal action against the force of death and destruction. Yet in many texts YHWH too is envisaged as an impersonal force (‘wrath’ or ‘plague’, equated in Num 16: 46) ready to break out on the people (Num 8: 19; 11: 33). So the congregation must be protected against this dangerous divine force by the Levites encamped around the sanctuary (Num 1: 53; 8: 19), and by the priests interposing in times of rebellion to stop the plague (Num 16: 46–8; 25: 1–9). These officials are understood as an ‘offering’ upon which hands have been laid (Num 8: 10–11) or who have been consecrated by blood (Lev 8: 24, 30) and are therefore able to act as a propitiatory/avertive sacrifice to appease divine wrath or avert divine destructive force. In a converse action, Israel is commanded to eliminate any idolatrous community entirely, and then to ‘burn the town and all its spoil with fire, as a whole burnt offering to the LORD your God’, the defiled objects being offered as a sacrifice to avert the fierce anger of God (Deut 13: 15–17). The direction of the ritual is a significant marker. While the general movement in Israel’s rites is inwards towards the sanctuary and upwards towards the heavens 34   On goat demons see discussion below of Azazel (Lev 16: 8); Molech (Lev 18: 21; 20: 1–5); drinking blood (17: 10–16; 19: 26a); mediums (19: 25, 31; 20: 6, 27). 35   Lev 18: 1–5, 24–30; 20: 23–6.

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(and this is especially true of ‘olah and minchah with their rising smoke), the purificatory rites contain elements directed outwards, and often also downwards, gestures which suggest an origin in, and perhaps a significance as, apotropaic acts designed to banish the evil which afflicts the community. The classic example is the ‘red heifer rite’ in Numbers 19, which (uniquely) takes place entirely ‘outside the camp’ in the place otherwise used for disposal, although it involves sprinkling of blood seven times inwards ‘towards the sanctuary’. The purpose of the rite is to provide resources for major purification, as the ashes of the heifer (specifically ‘red’, suggesting blood), together with cedarwood, hyssop and scarlet material, are to be preserved and added to ‘water for cleansing’ to purify those who touch dead bodies. But chatta’th combines these movements in a double action. The major movement of the burning of the carcase and the use of blood is inwards and upwards, rubbed on the horns of the altar and sprinkled towards the sanctuary itself, the curtain and the altar of incense. But there is also a contrary movement, downwards and outwards, in the pouring out of the remains of the blood ‘at the base of the altar’, conveying a downward motion. This action, preserved also in the Greek holocaust which is an explicitly chthonic sacrifice, may suggest a latent sense of blood as belonging to the powers of evil and death. This is reinforced in the ‘disposal’ of the ashes ‘outside the camp’. Is this an apotropaic or demonological remnant? A more pronounced example of this double movement is found in the cleansing rites for leprosy (Lev 14: 1–32). In the first stage, ‘outside the camp’, two birds are used. One of them is slaughtered in a ‘downwards’ movement ‘over fresh water’ and its blood sprinkled on the person; after that, the priest ‘shall pronounce him clean, and he shall let the living bird go into the open field’ (14: 7). Thus one goes downwards and the other upwards, the distinction between the live and dead birds symbolically announcing the threshold which the person has now crossed, from ‘unclean’ to ‘clean’. Later, on the eighth day, there are further sacrifices (’asham, chatta’th, ‘olah and minchah), offered on the altar in the usual way (thus predominantly inwards and upwards) but with an apotropaic daubing of oil and blood from the ’asham on the body’s extremities (right ear, thumb and big toe) (14: 10–20). The Day of Atonement The other rite involving a double direction with a differential use of a pair of animals is the better-known and very important Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur, Lev 16: 1–34). In this rite a pair of goats is taken and discriminated by lot, one to be offered in sacrifice (inwards and upwards) and the other to be released (outwards and downwards), ‘one lot for the LORD and the other lot for Azazel’ (Lev 16: 7). Here again, a boundary seems to be being established, and all elements of the system are brought together in this composite rite.

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After extensive preparations, the High Priest makes offerings and takes the blood into the Holy Place, and even, uniquely, beyond the inner curtain, so as to sprinkle the mercy seat itself, amid a cloud of incense. By these acts he makes kippur first for himself and his house and secondly for the sanctuary, ‘because of all the uncleannesses of the people of Israel, and their transgressions and their sins’ (16: 16). By means of these movements to the extremity inwards and upwards, all impurity arising from ritual infringements (witting or unwitting) and also from deliberate sins, is purged. But the live goat is subject to a very different kind of action. It is ‘presented’, has both hands laid on it by the High Priest, with confession of all Israel’s sins ‘putting them on the head of the goat’; it is then sent away, ‘and the goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region’ (16: 20–22). Evidently, this is understood to be a place of death, and the Mishnah and other later texts witness to developments in the rite, with reference to further apotropaic gestures and to a ravine into which the goat was pushed – thus completing the ‘outwards and downwards’ motif.36 It has been much discussed whether the traditional term ‘for Azazel’ stands for the name of a goat demon or other evil force, or whether it is the name of a place. The former is more likely. However, the most that can be said with certainty is that this action, like all these rites designed to expel evil at the boundary, shows vestigial traces of awareness of evil powers, while the intention in incorporating them into the Temple ritual was to undermine demonological use, all these being overtly directed towards Yahweh alone.37 With all this multiplication of sacrifices, two elements signify that the relationship has in fact been restored. Firstly, Numbers 29: 7–11 contains alternative rules for this day, with variant prescriptions which were, characteristically, taken to be additional sacrifices. The prescription for ‘a male goat for a sin offering’ was taken to be additional to the two named in Lev 16: 5, and this alone was ‘consumed at evening’.38 Thus in later practice the priests at least may have concluded with some form of meal in celebration of the achieved atonement. Secondly, the description (Lev 16: 1–28) is followed by a short commentary (16: 29–34) which includes the words: ‘For on this day atonement shall be made for you, to cleanse you from all your sins; you shall be clean before the LORD’ (16: 30). In the liturgy set out in the Mishnah, this verse is recited twice by the priest, first in presenting his sin offering (16: 11) and then in the confession over the scapegoat (16: 21), and both times, exceptionally, the ‘Expressed Name’, ‘YHWH’, was pronounced by the priest. This sign of the awesome presence of

  m. Yoma 6: 3–6 (Danby, Mishnah, pp. 169–7); Ep. Barn. 7.   Levine, Leviticus, pp. 250–53; Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, p. 1021, cf. 42–5; David

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P. Wright, The Disposal of Impurity: Elimination Rites in the Bible and in Hittite and Mesopotamian Literature (SBLDS 101, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), pp. 72–4. 38   m. Menahoth 11.7 (Danby, Mishnah, p. 509).

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God led to an appropriate response of praise: ‘Blessed be the name of the glory of his kingdom for ever and ever.’39 The rite witnesses to the pervasive power of impurity and positive evil undermining the religious institutions of Israel at every level, but in recognizing this it was understood to be the means by which evil was decisively dealt with and the validity of access to God secured. All sins were reckoned to be atoned for, including deliberate sins. It was said, ‘Like ministering angels, Israelites are innocent of all sins on the Day of Atonement’.40 On the basis of the composite process of this annual Day of Atonement rite, Israelite bodies could come into the presence of God in his Temple, and rejoice in God’s blessing in daily life. So the fact that this rite enunciates a very high doctrine of the purity appropriate to coming into the divine presence does not imply that exclusion from that presence is the human norm. In fact the opposite is the case. Purification sacrifice is a means to an end, which is the restoration of communion with Yahweh,41 and the re-establishment of solidarity between YHWH and humanity mediated by the common things of life (especially food) and in the commonplace circumstances of life. 3. Jesus and Purity Purity and Impurity in First-century Galilee The expiatory cultus of the Second Temple is inseparable from the emphasis in Torah on purity and holiness as separation. It answers the question: Which aspects of living is it necessary to separate myself from in order to be fit to enter the divine presence, and how may this separation be made? Bodily impurity thus stands for a breach in the highly unified symbolic system, such impurity obstructing the system’s purpose of uniting the bearer to YHWH. However the existence of a complex system, such as the Temple sacrificial cultus and the Levitical laws, dedicated to removing that obstruction, leads to a presupposition that bodily being is in fact intrinsically problematic. It implies that bodies can come before YHWH only when not rendered unclean by a host of minor or major kinds of impurity or, more likely, only when their uncleanness has been ritually cancelled. Bodily being becomes a problem for purity, and therefore for relating to God. We have examined the evidence of the OT, but how seriously was this purity perspective taken in first-century Palestine? An older scholarship described a   m. Yoma 3.8, 6.2; m.Tamid 3.8 (Danby, Mishnah, pp. 165, 169–70, 585).   Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer 46, in Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, ed. and trans. G. Friedlander

39 40

(New York: Hermon Press, 1965 (1916)), p. 364. 41   Compare this later remark: ‘If a woman suffered five issues that were in doubt … she need bring but one offering, and she may then eat of the animal-offerings’ (m. Kerithoth 1.7 (Danby, Mishnah, p. 564)).

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Judaism in which the Law was moribund, ignored by the common people and only of interest to religious specialists, priests and Pharisees; Jesus, by contrast (it was said), offered a religion of the heart, for which he was killed. Although still heard in preaching and popular discussion, that picture has long been exploded. From archaeology and literature, there is abundant evidence that the Law remained the basis of Jewish life, and even revived in the wake of persecution in the Maccabean period. Sanders, in describing what he calls ‘Common Judaism’,42 points to five distinctive practices which show the Law being generally, if not universally, observed by Jews in the first century (both in Palestine and in the Diaspora). These are: daily and weekly worship; Sabbath keeping; circumcision of sons; purificatory ablutions; support for the Temple.43 The extent of the application of the purity laws in daily life is perhaps the best test case of whether the separative ideology of Leviticus was deeply influential at this time. Archaeological evidence points to the existence of three hundred immersion pools (miqvaot) in Palestine dating from the first century. Sanders claims that this supports the view, assumed by the Mishnah, that at this time the purity laws were widely kept by ordinary Jews,44 a claim dismissed by Neusner and questioned by Berquist, who remarks that ‘the logistics of obedience to such laws would make one wonder if they were meant to be taken seriously at all’.45 Were these laws merely ‘an important (even if counterfactual) part of Israel’s ideology and body rhetoric’?46 No one can doubt the difficulty people would experience in preventing uncleanness, when almost all activities and events of life, including childbirth, menstruation, sexual intercourse, irregular discharges and touching corpses, rendered unclean not only one’s body but anything one touched. Not surprisingly, as Sanders observes, ‘most people had corpse uncleanness a lot of the time’, along with other kinds.47 And what were the implications for households of the seven days per month in which a woman was rendered unclean by her menstrual cycle? Plainly, ‘impurity’ was a far-reaching concept. But were the constraints which observance would place on daily life such that following them was impossible, in fact? If purification was understood to be enjoined, as Josephus said, ‘in view of the sacrifices’,48 immersion was needed only before going to the Temple, and not   By this term he means ‘what the priests and the people agreed on’, Sanders, Judaism, p. 47. 43   Sanders, Judaism, pp. 236–7. 44   Sanders, Judaism, pp. 229, 237. 45   Jacob Neusner, Reading and Believing: Ancient Judaism and Contemporary Gullibility (Atlanta: University of South Florida Press, 1986), p. 4, cited by Sanders, p. 229; Berquist, Controlling Corporeality, p. 42. 46   Berquist, Controlling Corporeality, p. 201, n. 29. 47   Sanders, Jesus, pp. 182–5, citing p. 182. 48   Josephus, Contra Apionem, II, 198, as cited by Sanders, Jesus, p. 182. 42

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separately for every cause of impurity. If immersion of the whole household and its utensils once a month, following the wife’s menstruation, would suffice, normal life would be possible. And a device to mitigate the Law’s effects was the concept of the tebul yom, a term for a person who has bathed but not yet reached sunset, whose impurity is reckoned to have dropped by one degree so that most normal activities including work and eating could be carried out.49 Surely the number of pools shows, not an implausible concern to avoid impurity, but a pragmatic recognition of impurity as a fact requiring a specific response, at any rate before visiting the Temple. We can observe over time a debate between ‘reductionist’ and ‘expansionist’ movements in relation to purity, with a revival of purity thinking in the first century led by the ‘expansionist’ Pharisees.50 Kazen argues that ‘the widespread use of miqvaot made an expansionist view of impurity possible to implement’,51 and provision for that purpose seems the most likely reason for their existence (whether or not they were in fact used). The Pharisees were widely regarded and admired as proponents of what Catherine Bell calls ‘ritual mastery’,52 which in this context means the ideal of the controlled body which never infringes, even accidentally and unwittingly, or which sets right any infringement by immediate obedience. They seem to have shared the view of the authors of Leviticus that ‘impurity incurred anywhere is potentially dangerous to the sanctuary’ and, like them, were ‘very much concerned with the need to eliminate, or, at least, control the occurrence of impurity anywhere in the land’.53 In Pharisaic and rabbinic practice, such a mastery is to be inscribed on the physical body and its social and temporal environs (Deut 6: 4–9). Their aim has been interpreted as pursuing in daily life a standard of purity appropriate for a priest to function in the Temple, although this has also been questioned: ‘The evidence is that Pharisees aspired to a level of purity above the ordinary, but below that of priests and their families, and also well below that of the Qumran sect.’54 We have seen that ritual impurity is not to be confused with sin, in the moral sense. It is rather that these natural processes of generation, farming and cooking are recognized as needing to be placed under divine control. To seek to offer sacrifice while in a state of defilement would be a sin. But to those such as Pharisees who promoted the objective of maximum purity in daily living, all actions which incurred impurity were implicitly sinful insofar as they could be avoided. Without implying that disapproval of others’ practice was their main concern, they would necessarily wish to distance themselves from those who     51   52   53   54   49 50

Kazen, Jesus, pp. 76–80 (see above Chapter 2, n. 30). Ibid., pp. 72–8, 86. Ibid., p. 75. Bell, Ritual, pp. 107–8. Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, p. 1007; cf. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, p. 268. Sanders, Judaism, p. 440; cf. Kazen, Jesus, pp. 69–70.

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chose not to avoid infringements, sitting light to divine commandments, who could therefore be regarded, from their rigorist perspective, as ‘sinners’. Jesus and Separation This range of views about purity and Torah active in first-century Palestine is replicated within the Jesus movement, and affects the way Jesus was both remembered and understood. The continuing validity of Law and Temple is taken for granted in material derived from the sayings source Q, and equally by Matthew, and in his own way Luke; Mark and John (like Paul) represent a radical alternative stance which sees the Law set aside, in whole or in part, in the new age inaugurated by Jesus. But it seems that the cross currents in the gospel material represent also different aspects of Jesus’ own stance, as well as different angles on it. He was, and was remembered as, both a defender and a critic of the Law.55 In contrast to the Pharisees, his challenge to the equation of separation and holiness is well known and appears in all sources. His refusal to avoid certain modes of bodily impurity, such as those caused by touching a leper or a corpse, at least in a situation where touch was able to effect a cure, affirms the need to do the work of God without regard for ritual impurity (Mk 1: 40–45; Lk 7: 11–19). Keeping the Sabbath, as the day set aside from labour and other worldly concerns, was an important marker of the Jewish identity and of the Jewish understanding of God. The stories relating Jesus’ refusal to abstain from healing and other actions on this day, while they may have originated in debates about whether they counted as work (Mk 2: 23–8 and parallels; 3: 1–6 and parallels),56 appear in the Gospels as assertions of Jesus’ right and duty to exercise the creative, life-giving power of God on the day set aside for remembrance of God’s work in creation (Mk 2: 27–8; cf. Jn 5: 16–18).57 According to the Synoptic Gospels Jesus mixed freely with ‘toll gatherers’, whose relations with the Gentile administration of Palestine rendered them unclean, at least in the eyes of some, as well as politically undesirable.58 He seems to have found the company of prostitutes congenial, and perhaps had friendly dealings

  See William Loader, Jesus’ Attitude towards the Law: A Study of the Gospels (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997). 56   According to the Mishnah, ‘Whenever there is doubt whether life is in danger, this overrides the Sabbath’ m. Yoma 8. 6 (Danby, Mishnah, p. 172), but none of the stories of Jesus’ Sabbath healings show signs of such danger. 57   Did he understand this as a creation ordinance affecting every ‘son of man’ or an eschatological privilege of this ‘Son of Man’ alone? See Robert A. Guelich, Mark 1–8: 26 (Word Biblical Commentary, Dallas: Word Books, 1989), pp. 123–30. 58   ‘If tax-gatherers enter a house [all that is within it] becomes unclean’, m. Tohoroth 7. 6 (Danby, Mishnah, p. 726), but the general applicability of this rule has been questioned (see Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark (Hermeneia, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), p. 192. 55

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with Gentiles.59 All this could depict someone who was merely ‘indifferent’ and ‘casual’ in legal matters, but coming from someone recognized as a teacher of righteousness it constitutes a challenge to the purity structure of Jewish society and religion.60 In an important passage, the dispute with the Pharisees over purity in Mark 7: 1–23/Mt 15: 1–20, he denies that impurity associated with food or unwashed hands can defile people, since it does not enter ‘the heart’ but only the stomach and so is naturally disposed of (‘goes into the drain’).61 Defilement is real, only it comes from the evil intentions of the heart; from ‘what comes out’ rather than ‘what goes in’ (Mk 7: 15/Mt 15: 11). Real evil is personal not impersonal, ‘inner’ rather than ‘outer’.62 This makes it if anything more bodily, not less, since the evil is not connected to human bodies accidentally and superficially but emanates from the heart, the body’s centre. Using the language of defilement (koinos) Jesus acknowledges that the evil which Israel’s Law combats under such terms is real, only the Law has mistaken the source and character of its working. This extends to an implicit critique of sacrifice as such. We have seen (Chapter 2, above) that he is never stated as making a sacrificial offering. According to Mark, he draws from a scribe an admission that to love God, in accordance with the Shema’ (Deut 6: 4), and to love one’s neighbour, in accordance with Leviticus 19: 18, ‘is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices (holokautomaton kai thusion, ὁλοκαυτωμάτων και θυσιῶν, Mk 12: 33). According to Matthew, he cites Hosea 6: 6 (‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice’) in support of his authority over the Sabbath (Mt 12: 7). He pays the Temple tax, but only as provided by God’s bounty (Mt 17: 24–7). But Jesus shows that the world is indeed subject to evil, and that this evil overcomes the power of Israel’s religion. Its culmination will be the entry of the ‘desolating sacrilege’ into the Holy of Holies (Mk 13: 14), a challenge which will bring about, not God’s defeat but the world’s crisis, and will lead to God’s final victory and the sending of the Son of Man to gather the elect into the divine presence (Mk 13: 27). All this implies a view that the Law and the purity concerns which it generates are simply irrelevant to the forces at play in the time of the inbreaking of God’s   See Sanders, Judaism, pp.  72–6, on the question whether impurity applies to Gentiles as well as Jews. Since there were no means of purification for Gentiles, and they would not offer sacrifices in the Temple, specific impurity could not be reckoned; but it would be true to say that they were avoided by many Jews as permanently unclean, or even loosely as ‘Gentile sinners’ (Gal 2: 15, cf. Mt 26: 45); see Richard N. Longenecker, Galatians (Word Biblical Commentary, Dallas: Word Books, 1990), p. 83. 60   Dunn, Jesus Remembered, pp.  88–90; Kazen, Jesus, pp.  197–8, summarizing Chapter 4. 61   On handwashing as a voluntary Pharisaic practice, see Sanders, Judaism, pp. 437– 8; Kazen, Jesus, pp. 60–88; Yair Furstenberg, ‘Defilement Penetrating the Body: A New Understanding of Contamination in Mark 7: 15’, NTS 54 (2008): pp. 176–200. 62   Kazen, Jesus, pp. 228–9. 59

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rule. The best explanation for his strikingly conservative view of divorce (Mt 5: 32; 19: 9; Mk 10: 11–12; Lk 16: 18) is that the old relative time of ‘marrying and giving in marriage’ (Mt 24: 38) is coming to an end, and in the resurrection ‘they will be like angels in heaven’ (Mt 22: 30) and should anticipate this now by living in celibacy (19: 11–12). Such a vision relativizes the Law and all concerns about its detailed application, not by disputing it but by radicalizing its demands in the light of the eschatological teaching of the kingdom.63 The same radical vision underlay the acted parable of his open table fellowship, discussed in Chapter 2, where we saw evidence to support Dunn’s judgement: ‘Holiness for Jesus, we might say, was not a negative, excluding force, but a positive, including force.’64 But in the meantime Jesus, far from being an opponent of Torah, is also described as supporting it, with its purity structures, by his actions.65 We are told he wore fringes on his clothes, in accordance with Numbers 15: 37–41 (Mt 9: 20; Mk 6: 56); he worshipped in the synagogue on the Sabbath day (Lk 4: 16) and observed at least some of the pilgrim feasts and other requirements of Torah; he ordered the leper to go the priest and ‘make the offering prescribed by Moses for your cleansing’ (Mk 1: 44 and parallels; cf. Lev 14: 1–32); he accepted the centurion’s self-assessment of his unworthiness, as a Gentile, to have him under his roof (Lk 7: 1–10/Mt 8: 5–13); he regarded his followers, in comparison with God, as ‘evil’ (Lk 11: 13) and in need of repentance (Lk 13: 5). Some of these features have been often overlooked in stressing his distinctiveness within Judaism, and others in stressing his critique of the Law. From the silence of the texts, we should assume conformity to the norm in other matters too: if he failed to practise ritual immersion or avoid unclean food, we should surely hear about it, at least as a matter of ‘embarrassment’; but if he acted in these ways like everyone else, why mention it?66 Some aspects of his reported conformity, like wearing fringes, may reflect the pro-Torah sympathies of the evangelist rather than his master, just as the disputes with doctors of the Law probably reflect the later Christian concern to develop a new religious structure.67 In any case, his support for the purity structure

  Loader, ‘Jesus and the Law’, in Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter (eds), Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus (4 vols, Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 2745–72, citing pp. 2759–61. 64   Dunn, Jesus Remembered, p. 603. 65   Wright, Jesus, p. 389; Loader, ‘Jesus and the Law’, p. 2761. 66   ‘Since entry into the Temple required purity, it is reasonable to suppose that Jesus and his disciples immersed on such occasions like other people’ (Kazen, Jesus, p. 248; cf. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, p. 789, n. 140; Loader, ‘Jesus and Law’, pp. 2763–4); of course an earlier generation of scholars, emphasizing Jesus’ distinctiveness from Judaism, would think it reasonable to suppose, in the face of the texts’ silence, that he did not. 67   Thus it is generally agreed that it was Mark, not Jesus, who ‘declared all foods clean’ (Mk 7: 19b), an interpretation omitted by Matthew (Mt 15: 17) and at variance with the major role played by this issue in the early church (Guelich, Mark, pp. 378–9). 63

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plays a limited role in his ministry, just as his criticism of Law is less of its essence than of the expansionist tendencies of the Pharisees and Essenes.68 The language of impurity is in fact used more often in the gospels to characterize the demonic. The world of Palestinian peasant religion was dominated by evil forces, by Satan and Beelzebub, by ‘unclean spirits’ (pneuma akatharta) taking possession of bodies, minds and hearts (Mk 1: 21–8; 9: 14–28). This extended to oppressive natural forces such as earthquake and tempest, also ‘rebuked’ by Jesus (Mk 4: 39); and also to the weight of the evil power of Rome and the international Greek culture it fostered (Mk 5: 1–20). However, the primary warfare in the Gospels is not political but eschatological, directed against Satan and his armies (Lk 10: 18–20). Against these, Jesus is depicted as wielding a cleansing power, rebuking demons and casting them out with an authoritative word.69 In a world besieged by evil he was seen to be an agent of disjunctive power, banishing with a rebuke the quasi-personal possession. The demons knew his name, and he knew theirs. This exorcistic avertive action should be distinguished from his acts of healing, in which he is the agent of divine creative power transmitted by means of a word or gesture. In rare cases he used a material substance (saliva, Mk 7: 33–4; 8: 23; earth and water, Jn 9: 6–7) to bring this about. However beneficent the actions, dabbling in materials charged with special power raised suspicion of ‘magic’, perhaps especially linked to the title ‘Son of David’.70 The tradition tends to suppress these, and to emphasize transmission of healing or of forgiveness by a word of command; however, the fact that some of his healing words are preserved as Aramaic intrusions into the Greek text (talitha koum, Mk 5: 41, ephphatha, Mk 6: 34) shows that they were understood and retained as in some sense words of power with overtones of magic.71 The danger implied here is seen also in the dispute over whether his control over evil forces was due to his being under their power himself (Mk 3: 22–30 and parallels). In other incidents he himself was expelled as though possessed by a demon. When Peter and the Gerasenes urge him to depart (Lk 5: 8; Mk 5: 17), we see that, on those who are or see themselves as sinners, the power of God comes as a force to be resisted, as if evil. When Jesus challenged the people of his own city by the example of God’s saving work among Gentiles, they tried to cast him off a cliff, presumably to stone him (Lk 4: 28–9),72 with a hint of the scapegoat sent out to Azazel on the Day of Atonement. There is more than a suggestion of this also in the Passion narratives with their apotropaic words and gestures: Jesus is cursed, mocked, denied, struck, tortured.   Kazen, Jesus, p. 273; Loader, ‘Jesus and Law’, pp. 2764–5.   Kazen (Jesus, p.  348) speaks of his ‘eschatological power-perspective’ (cf.

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pp. 324–39). 70   Ibid., pp. 322–4. 71   Collins, Mark, pp. 285–6, 372. 72   Nolland, Luke, p. 201.

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Others in the Gospels are rebuked or rejected, too, and Jesus welcomes these rejected ones as bearers of signs of the kingdom (Mt 5: 10–12; Mk 10: 29–30; 13: 10–13). But he rebukes his disciples when they turn away other exorcists, or children, or the woman who broke a jar of ointment over his head (Mk 9: 38, 10: 13–16, 14: 5). He himself rebuked Peter when he became a bearer of Satan’s name (Mk 8: 33/Mt 16: 23), and cursed a fruitless fig tree in a symbolic gesture pointing to God’s judgement on Israel (Mk 11: 12–14/Mt 21: 18–22). What all this amounts to is that Jesus aligned himself with the power of holiness poured out by God for the redeeming of the world, and against all that opposed it: demonic power; the corruption of moral evil; and the distinctive Jewish concern for purity when it led to separation of the needy from the source of grace. Ritual purity itself was not a matter of great concern, except when it served one side or the other in that contest. His ministry of praise, healing, forgiveness and feasting therefore constituted a challenge to the equation of holiness with separation. Without necessarily flouting the Law, he enacted a ‘kingdom’ characterized by openness, generosity, inclusiveness. If we grant that revealing divine mercy and inclusion was the missionary purpose of the Pharisees also – but premised on the need for repentance, cleansing and obedience73 – his easy association with sinners, and his pronouncements of (divine) forgiveness would naturally be found offensive by some. But would they be so offensive that his death became a necessity? Was Jesus’ Attack on Law the Cause of His Death? It is common to find in older writers the claim that Jesus’ message of divine love, or his criticism of the Law, led naturally and inevitably to his death.74 Taking a more sympathetic view of Judaism makes it harder to understand exactly why the authorities had him put to death. Had Jesus remained in Galilee, attracting crowds and generating enthusiasm, and unless he generated political unrest, it seems unlikely that his teachings could have stimulated a reaction so strong as to lead to his danger or death. There are many attempts to reconstruct the personal, political and religious reasons for Jesus’ death, but at the back of them rests a symbolic question: was his death effectively an apotropaic sacrifice to avert an evil influence threatening to undermine the purity system? At a historical level, much discussion has centred on the purpose and provocative effect of his action in the Temple, variously described as a ‘cleansing’,75

73   See Ed P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (London: SCM Press, 1977), pp. 147–50, 155–7; also Sanders, Jesus, pp. 180, 199, 216. 74   See Sanders, Jesus, pp. 270–93, 326–7. 75   James D.G. Dunn, ‘Jesus and Purity: An Ongoing Debate’, NTS 48 (2002): pp. 449–67, esp. p. 466, emphasizes the purity connotations of ‘cleansing’.

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a ‘demonstration’76 or an ‘occupation’.77 In the gospels it is clearly a symbolic rather than a practical action, and related in some way to his disputed claim to ‘destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up’ (Jn 2: 19; cf. Mk 14: 58 and parallels). Earlier arguments have shown that we should not see Jesus as attacking the Temple or sacrificial worship as such. It was therefore either a sign of divine judgement on the Temple as symbol of the nation,78 or a more focused protest against some aspect of the Temple’s use or management which obscured or denied its true purpose, or both.79 Recent suggestions of specific contemporary problems include: a protest at the high cost of doves, the prescribed purification offerings of the poor;80 a protest against the burden of the Temple Tax, especially as a means of maintaining a priestly oligarchy;81 a protest at the custom of requiring sacrificers to purchase certified animals in the Temple, rather than bringing their own.82 All of these can be claimed as offering some support for the sacrificial theory worked out in this study, that Jesus was reviving a lost culture of popular celebratory religion and reclaiming it from the power of the priests. We lack direct evidence for any of these as motivating this action of Jesus, but they would all be concrete ways of justifying his allusion to Jeremiah 7: 11: ‘You have made it a robbers’ den’ (Mt 21: 13/Mk 11: 17b/Lk 19: 45), interpreted literally as referring to corrupt or dubious business practice. The full context in Jeremiah however is much broader, naming offences against five of the ten commandments: ‘Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house … ?’ (Jer 7: 8–10). Does Jesus exhibit, like Jeremiah, a concern for pure worship, and a warning of divine judgement enacted in his expulsion of traders? – ‘Therefore I will do to the house that is called by my name, in which you trust, and to the place that I gave to you and your ancestors, just what I did to Shiloh. And I will cast you out of my sight …’ (Jer 7: 14–15). Another approach suggests that Jesus’ real concern was for God’s Temple to be ‘a house of prayer for all nations’ (Mk 11: 17a), citing Is 56: 7, from a passage concerned with ‘foreigners who join themselves to the Lord’ (Is 56: 6–8). Both Matthew and Luke, despite their Gentile sympathies, remove the italicized phrase,

  Chilton, Temple, pp. 100–11.   Richard Bauckham, ‘Jesus’ Demonstration in the Temple’, in Barnabas Lindars

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(ed.), Law and Religion: Essays on the Place of the Law in Israel and Early Christianity by Members of the Erhardt Seminar of Manchester University (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1988), pp. 72–89. 78   Crossan, Jesus, pp. 355–60; Sanders, Jesus, pp. 61–76. 79   Davies and Allison, Matthew, III, pp. 135–6. 80   Bauckham, ‘Demonstration’, pp. 76–7. 81   Ibid., especially pp. 73–6, 79–81. 82   Chilton, Temple, pp. 100–11; cf. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, p. 638, n. 118.

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thus reinforcing the theme of pure worship rather than inclusiveness.83 Were they right to do so? Would Jesus have been concerned, in fact, to provide a praying place for Gentiles? The gospel traditions show contrary tendencies. On the one hand they are all wanting to show the relevance of Jesus as universal saviour, but on the other hand they offer little evidence to deny the view that Jesus’ own ministry was restricted almost entirely to Jews.84 Most references to Gentiles in the Jesus traditions depict them as those favoured by God, or whose response to God will put Israel to shame: pagan cities like Sodom and Gomorrah (Mt 10: 15), Tyre and Sidon (Mt 11: 21/Lk 10: 12–16), Nineveh and the Queen of the South (Lk 11: 30–32) will turn to God; the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian are preferred objects of God’s mercy (Lk 4: 24–7); a centurion displays exemplary faith unlike any found in Israel (Mt 8: 10/Lk 7: 9), and so does a pagan woman (Mt 15: 28). Compare Romans 11: 11: ‘Salvation has come to the Gentiles, in order to make Israel jealous’. What is consistent among these is that every reference contains either praise of Gentiles or prediction of judgement falling, not on Gentiles, as might be expected, but on Israel. There is even a promise: ‘Many will come from East and West and will eat with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into outer darkness (Mt 8: 11–12/Lk 13: 28–9). Taken together with Mark 11: 13, ‘a house of prayer for all the Gentiles’, this indicates that the role of the Gentiles is not merely a rhetorical foil but is intrinsic to Jesus’ teaching about Israel’s status as God’s elect – elect for the sake of the world. This tradition shows Jesus challenging another form of Israel’s attachment to separation. The purity code enshrines a distance from Gentiles and therefore a denial by Israel of its vocation, as discerned by some prophets, to bring about the return of the nations to Zion (Is 2: 1–4; Mic 4: 1–5; Zech 14: 16). The restored Israel symbolized in the appointment of the Twelve, the Temple cleansing and the inauguration of a ‘new covenant’ is aimed at refreshing Israel’s sense of mission. When Jesus fulfils the prophecy of Zechariah 9: 9 by entering Jerusalem as a prince of peace (Mt 21: 5) he is looking to inaugurate the ‘day’ foreshadowed a few chapters later (Zech 14: 16, 21c), when the Temple will be a house to which the nations come and ‘there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord of hosts in that day’.

83   Davies and Allison, Matthew, 3, p. 133, suggest that in a post-70 context they do not want to give Jesus’ authority for looking to a (rebuilt) Temple as a universal sanctuary. 84   On Gentiles, see Mt 15: 21–8/Mk 7: 24–30; Mt 8: 5–13/Lk 7: 1–10. On Samaritans, see Lk 17: 11 19; Jn 4: 1–42.

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4. Sacrifice and the Death of Christ Paul and Purification For Jesus, evil is real and powerful in its effects, but he sits light to Torah because he sees God acting to bring about renewal and redemption apart from the provisions of the Law. Where Torah excludes sinners from the divine presence, God acts to draw them to himself. Paul also notoriously challenged the purity code of Israel, especially the key markers of circumcision and the food laws.85 By being willing to set these aside, to admit uncircumcised Gentiles into the Christian fellowship and to eat with them, he struck a blow against the understanding of the church as a community constituted by ritual purity in accordance with Levitical order, and defined by its rites and observances. Paul’s freedom from concern about eating idol meat, and about worship in a mixed assembly, is striking. But his concern for purity reappears, in a curious inversion, in a demand for Christians to show concern for one another and purity of behaviour in worshipping together and in the whole of life (1 Cor 6, 8, 10, 14). He thus emphasizes moral purity as vigorously as he dismisses the need for ritual purity. For Paul the prevalence of various kinds of vices in Gentile society makes it a sea of defilement from which Christians are necessarily separate (Rom 1: 18–32; 1 Cor 6: 9–11; cf. Eph 5: 3–14; 1 Tim 1: 8–11).86 In 1 Corinthians 5–6 (see also 2 Cor 6: 14 – 7: 1), the distinction between pure and impure is the governing idea: now that Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed, life for Christians is a feast to be eaten in purity, and they must cast out ‘the old leaven’ (1 Cor 5: 6–8). So although access to God was no longer, by God’s grace, restricted to those who conformed to the ritual prescriptions of Torah, this was so that the purifying power of God might flow outwards into the whole of creation. In this metaphor, all life is conceived as the festal celebration of a purified community, the timeless and eternal Passover of the new age already begun. This state of purity has been achieved, not by washings and the disposal of actual ‘leaven’, but by the one purifying sacrifice of Christ, in which Christians participate through baptism, righteousness of life and mutual generosity and love.

  Notably absent from this list is the Temple, which Paul neither affirms nor attacks. Acts describes him as being willing to make offerings there (Acts 21: 21–4, 27–9; cf. 18: 18). He often uses metaphors drawn from sacrificial practices (Greek as well as Jewish) in describing his ministry (Rom 15: 16, 27–8). 86   In discussing Paul’s letters I assume Pauline authorship of the seven undisputed letters (Romans, 1/2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon). I incline to the view that 2 Thessalonians is Pauline; that Colossians, while not written by Paul, was written under his supervision, and that Ephesians came from the same stable although after Paul’s death; the Pastoral Letters are later still. All these are to be treated, with due care, as preserving evidence of genuine Pauline tradition. 85

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Sacrificial language relating to the cross appears explicitly in a number of what look like credal or traditional formulae scattered through the major letters. Nonetheless, as Fee remarks, ‘the sacerdotal system does not provide the primary metaphor for salvation in Paul’.87 This is not the place where he starts, and it forms one of a number of metaphors of salvation, though with a special place among them. Others include redemption, reconciliation and justification. The Redemption of Humanity In Jewish tradition, the saving event of the Exodus began with the incursion of YHWH into history with the words, ‘I have observed the misery of my people’ (Ex 3: 7), words which themselves imply a long prehistory of that event in God’s dealings with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Likewise, in Paul’s understanding, the saving event of Christ began from the divine initiative of the sending of the Son, ‘born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law’ (Gal 4: 4–5), an event laid down in God’s eternal plan and enacted ‘when the fullness of time had come’ (4: 2, 4; cf. Eph 1: 10).88 In the terminology used earlier, the salvation event is therefore episacrificial, that is, it is an event of divine and human encounter initiated from ‘above’, the divine making creative transformative power available, drawing humanity into a holy place, and seeking a response. It is here rather than in the anaphoristic sphere of human religion that we find the event of renewal. Theologically, this implies the pre-existence of the Son or Word with God prior to the Son’s enfleshment in the human life of Jesus. Despite well-articulated arguments to the contrary, especially that of Dunn, there is no reason to rule out from Paul’s thinking a doctrine of what would later be called incarnation.89 While some allusions to this ‘sending of the Son’ theme (Rom 1: 3; 8: 32; Gal 3: 19, 23, 25) could imply no more than a divine plan to act in a certain way,90 pre-Pauline hymns (Phil 2: 5–11; Col 1: 15–20; Heb 1: 1–4) and credal 87   Gordon Fee, ‘Paul and the Metaphors for Salvation: Some Reflections on Pauline Soteriology’, in Stephen J. Davis, Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins (eds), The Redemption: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Christ as Redeemer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 43–67, citing p. 56. 88   The emphasis here is on the event ‘coming to pass’ rather than birth itself, and the verb is ginomai not gennao (as in Jn 1: 14 and Rom 1: 3), although the two verbs were sometimes used interchangeably (see Longenecker, Galatians, p. 171). 89   James D.G. Dunn, Christology in the Making (2nd edn, London: SCM Press, 1989 (1980)). For the contrary view, see Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), pp.  32–59, 182–232; Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 135–53. 90   Hans Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Churches in Galatia (Hermeneia, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), pp. 206–7.

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fragments (1 Cor 8: 6; 2 Cor 8: 9) show that plan embodied in a transcendent figure associated with creation itself, and perhaps identified with divine Wisdom (cf. Sirach 24: 1–22; Wisd 7: 1–6). Unlike John and the author of Hebrews, Paul does not speculate or comment on the heavenly relationship which this implies, but focuses on the presence of the Son in a life lived ‘from a woman’, ‘under law’ and ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’ (Gal 4: 4; Rom 8: 3), indicating his identification with human being in the human sphere, and specifically in the place of strife, that is ‘flesh’ and ‘Law’, where the effect of sin is felt. Paul sees humanity ‘in Adam’ separated from the source of life in God, and this is true not only of ‘the nations’ but of Israel too. As worked out in the opening chapters of Romans, this has often been taken to be a basic perspective and ground of his theology.91 More recently Sanders has argued that it represents a conclusion based on Paul’s personal experience of the revealing of a new humanity in the resurrection of Christ (another episacrificial incursion into the human sphere). The radical extent of God’s new ‘solution’ suggests a human ‘plight’ so total and all-encompassing that the old division between Israel and the rest will no longer suffice.92 In any case, at the point at which we read him, this is where he stands, awaiting an eschatological fulfilment for the whole created order in which Israel has no assurance except in having been privileged to receive the Law and the Prophets (Rom 9: 5). In this saving event the incarnation, cross, resurrection and parousia each have their place. In the incarnation, God identifies with the human plight by entering into it in the person of Jesus, in whom God’s plans and purposes are embodied. God does so ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’, taking ‘likeness’ in its fullest sense, as ‘a perceptible expression of a reality’, not as a potentially misleading appearance.93 In Jesus, God is identified with ‘flesh’ in its sinfulness; that is, allowing for a certain slipperiness in Paul’s terminology, ‘flesh’ is not sinful as such but it does represent human weakness (flesh as mortality) and human liability to submit to the driving force of evil impulses working through the flesh as lower nature.94 As Bell argues, we should understand the Son as a sinner, not functionally (although Paul does not comment on Christ’s absence of active sinning) but ontologically.95 ‘He made him   Notably by Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament (2 vols, London: SCM Press, 1952–55), 1, pp. 191–246, but it goes back to Luther and Augustine. See James D.G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), pp. 51–127. 92   Sanders, Paul, pp. 442–3; Dunn, Paul, p. 181. For a defence of the traditional view, see Frank Thielman, From Plight to Solution: A Jewish Framework for Understanding Paul’s View of the Law in Romans and Galatians (NovTSup 61, Leiden: Brill: 1989). 93   Richard Bell, ‘Sacrifice and Christology in Paul’, Journal of Theological Studies 53/1 (2002): pp.  1–27, citing p.  6, n. 32. For discussion, see Charles E.B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary of the Epistle to the Romans (ICC: Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), vol. 1, pp. 379–82; BDAG), p. 707. 94   Dunn, Paul, pp. 62–73. 95   Bell, ‘Sacrifice’, pp. 13–14. 91

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to be sin who knew no sin’ (2 Cor 5: 21) is a formulation which acquires a further nuance relating to the cross (see below), but it begins as an account of the saving identification of the Holy One, who ‘knew no sin’, with the human condition of sinning. The same point is made in the pre-Pauline hymn in Philippians 2: 6–7, when he who is ‘in the form of God’ (en morphe(i) theou, ἐν μορφῇ θεοῡ) takes ‘the form of a slave’ (morphen doulou, μορφὴν δούλου) which is ‘human likeness’ (en homoiοmati anthropοn, ἐν ὁμοιώματι ἀνθρώπων) especially in its liability to death. Compare also Hebrews 2: 14–15, where it is said that Christ ‘shares blood and flesh’ up to the point of death ‘to free those held in slavery’, through the fear of death, to ‘the one who has the power of death’. Here Paul shares a common early Christian understanding of the human situation and the divine identification with humanity in it. Hamartia (‘sin’) should be read primarily in its neutral sense of ‘missing the mark’. God’s will is made known to Israel in his positive Law, and to others in the inner awareness of God ‘by nature’, in the heart and the conscience (Rom 2: 14–15). Although humans in their weakness rebel against God, and are therefore all culpable and liable to judgement (Rom 1: 19–21; 2: 12, 15–16), God chooses not to hold these sins against them. Divine wrath and divine righteousness (setting right) are equally real and equally being revealed in the end times brought on by the coming of Christ (Rom 1: 17, 18). ‘All have fallen short’ (Rom 3: 23) but the offer of salvation is extended to all, whoever can recognize the presence of God in Christ and ‘believe’, receive the gift of grace (Rom 3: 22–4). Dikaiosune (‘righteousness’ or ‘justification’) is one name Paul uses for this divine work of welcoming the ungodly, redeeming the rebellious and obdurate. This legal metaphor achieves a disproportionately large place in certain writings because the question of criteria for salvation becomes a point of controversy with more conservative defenders of Law: is it bestowed ‘by Law’ or ‘by faith’? – where ‘faith’ itself comes to be a (somewhat unsatisfactory) code word for the grace of salvation made available to all (even sinners, even Gentiles) through Jesus Christ. The dikaiosune theou (‘righteousness of God’) should be understood, therefore, not as divine holiness held over against human sin in judgement, and certainly not as ‘God’s concern for God’s own glory’,96 quite the reverse: it is the mode of salvation, the divine setting right of all things, long prophesied and now revealed ‘through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe’ (Rom 3: 22). The death of Jesus displays how far God’s love goes. It is the place of love’s testing, at the extremity where human good intentions so easily falter and give way to fear (Phil 2). Hence the recurrent theme of Jesus’ obedience (Rom 5: 19;

96   John Piper, The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2007), pp. 62–71, cited by N. Thomas Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (London: SPCK, 2009), pp. 45–6. See Chapter 7 below.

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Phil 2: 8), his faith or faithfulness (Rom 3: 22; Gal 2: 16; Heb 12: 2);97 and even his learning through suffering (Heb 5: 8). This tale of redemption is a story which, to be true, has to work at both the divine and the human levels. At the human level, it is the story of the obedient holy one who is rejected and destroyed by the powers of this world, but vindicated by God, and who calls his followers to faithfulness even in the place of darkest testing. At the divine level, it is the story of the Son and Word who identifies with humanity, not only in its virtues and piety but also in its rebellion and seeming rejection by God, by becoming ‘sin’ (hamartia), ‘a cursed thing’ (katara), and one ‘forsaken’ (2 Cor 5: 21; Gal 3: 13; Mk 15: 34). It is in this place of rejection that the glory of God is revealed: the sinless one ‘was made sin so that we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Cor 5: 21), ‘became a curse  …  in order that the blessing … might come’ (Gal 3: 13–14); ‘emptied himself … humbled himself … therefore God highly exalted him’ (Phil 2: 7–9). The Great Expiation So far, none of this exposition of Paul’s understanding of the human plight and the divine response has required the use of the language of purification or sacrifice. It evokes the memory of the Exodus, God ‘redeeming’ his people from a slavery even greater than that of Egypt; it suggests an act of ‘forgiveness’ or ‘acquittal’ of those who are guilty and without defence before a holy judge; it shows, most broadly, God’s desire for reconciliation (katallage). Through the incarnational narrative, the means of salvation is divine identification, and the cross demonstrates just how far divine love will go in pursuing this purpose. But if it is asked why Jesus needed to die, what function his death, in particular, had in achieving this purpose, some different frame of reference is needed, something which will explain ‘how it works’.98 Here the model of effective action and life-giving death found in sacrifice becomes a lively metaphor, although like the others it remains a metaphor, and needs to co-exist with other ways of understanding the mystery. Like Leviticus, Paul assumes that humanity’s plight is being cut off from God, a separation which God chooses to bridge by giving a means of atonement. To explicate this saving action, his (largely traditional) language draws on different aspects of the sacrificial system. The idea that God ‘gave him’ or Christ ‘gave   On the argument that pistis Christou means ‘the faithfulness of Christ’ rather than ‘faith in Christ’, see John Dunnill, ‘Saved by Whose Faith?: The Function of pistis Christou in Pauline Theology’, Colloquium 30/1 (1998): pp.  3–25, and literature cited there. On the theme of obedience and sonship, see Richard N. Longenecker, ‘The Foundational Conviction of New Testament Christology: The Obedience/Faithfulness/Sonship of Christ’, in Joel B. Green and Max Turner (eds), Jesus of Nazareth: Lord and Christ: Essays on the Historical Jesus and New Testament Christology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 473–88. 98   Fee, ’Metaphors’, p. 55. 97

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himself’ contains elements of ‘sending’ and therefore identification, but the shift from ‘gave’ to ‘gave up’ (edoken to paredoken) makes a transition into the notion of a saving death, a sacrifice: ‘God gave his only Son’ (edoken, Jn 3: 16) but ‘God gave him up for us all’ (paredoken, Rom 8: 32); Christ ‘gave himself for our sins’ (dontos, Gal 1: 4); but ‘the Son of God loved me and gave himself up for me’ (paradontos, Gal 2: 20); ‘Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God’ (paredoken, Eph 5: 2). Likewise, though in non-technical language, Paul says ‘Christ died for the ungodly … while we still were sinners Christ died for us’ (Rom 5: 6, 8). But when Paul says ‘God sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to deal with sin’ (Rom 8: 3), the term peri hamartias evokes a technical use in the LXX to mean ‘as a sin offering’.99 This is a consciously metaphorical use of the term which can encompass both ideas at once: in his life of identification the dominance of sin is dealt with, ‘condemned … in the flesh’ when Jesus demonstrates the possibility of a life of obedience under the Spirit’s guidance; and by his death he becomes a sin offering with the same effect.100 The most developed sacrificial metaphor is found in Rom 3: 24b–25a: ‘the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith’ (NRSV). Here the imagery of the Day of Atonement evokes a single and all-encompassing event. In Leviticus 16: 13 LXX, hilasterion means the mercy seat sprinkled with blood on the Day of Atonement to remove all sin; but more broadly it can have the sense of the place of divine mercy, or else the means of this all-encompassing atonement.101 All these senses point to the Yom Kippur rite as a divine mystery which is episacrificial, provided by God to burst the bounds of the expiatory system. Rites which are ordained to remove ‘unwitting sins’ (or more likely ‘unwitting impurities’) now remove all sins, both accidental and intentional (if not annulled by recalcitrance).102 So the event points, not so much to a more effective example of sacrifice, as to a mystery, an event of divine grace, in which God makes himself present in the sanctuary to annul all sins, and invites the people, through their representative the High Priest, to come into a special relationship. It is this mystery as a whole which Paul applies to Jesus who (through his faithfulness, or through reception ‘by faith’) is ‘set forth’ by God

99   Douglas Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (NICNT, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), p. 480, records that it has this sense in 44 of its 54 uses in the LXX. 100   Some have argued for a similar sacrificial reference in 2 Cor 5: 21, noting that not only peri hamartias but hamartia alone can sometimes mean ‘sin offering’ (Lev 4: 24 LXX), especially when translating chatta’th with its double sense of ‘sin’ and ‘sin offering’ See Bell, ‘Sacrifice and Christology’, p. 13; compare Ralph P. Martin, 2 Corinthians (Word Biblical Commentary, Waco: Word Books, 1986), pp. 140, 157. 101   James D.G. Dunn, Romans 1–8 (Word Biblical Commentary, Dallas: Word Books, 1988), pp. 170–71. 102   m. Yoma 8: 8–9 (Danby, Mishnah, p. 172).

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to be the ‘mercy seat’ or ‘atoning sacrifice’ ‘by means of his blood’ (in the general sense of a sacrificial death). The logic of this metaphor is expiatory, since the fundamental problem is presented in Leviticus as sin, that is, impurity obstructing the relationship with God; as the Day of Atonement is said to ‘remove sin’ from Israel, the Son as hilasterion removes all sin from all people. A different element is introduced by traditional renderings of hilasterion as ‘propitiation’, drawing on the sense of ‘appeasement’, and an ‘appeasing sacrifice’, which was its original meaning in Greek culture and religion. It is hard to argue that the connotations of the Greek word have been wholly lost by its transplanting into a Jewish context; and if so Paul refreshes these by expounding the impending threat of ‘the wrath of God’ in the sweep of Romans 1–3 before coming to this sacrificial metaphor. Consequently, a propitiatory element here cannot be ruled out and translation using the inclusive term ‘sacrifice of atonement’ allows for both aspects of the metaphor. While the sacrificial sense in Israel’s traditions is basically expiatory, and the divine purging of sin is the fundamental concept here, we can also think of Jesus’ death as an offering (‘in his blood’) which averts divine wrath against human wickedness. There are other instances of propitiatory sacrifice. When Paul says ‘Christ our Passover [lamb] has been sacrificed’ (1 Cor 5: 7), he is similarly likening Jesus’ cross to the apotropaic death of the lamb to ward off the angel of death and create a covenant community, ‘purified’ and therefore committed to pure living.103 The same theme of reconciliation to God as judge by the removal of the ground of offence appears in Rom 5: 9: ‘now that we have been justified by his blood, we will be saved by him from the wrath of God  …  reconciled to God through the death of his Son’, and elsewhere: ‘through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, making peace by the blood of his cross’ (Col 1: 20); ‘in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses’ (Eph 1: 7); ‘but now in Christ Jesus you who were far off have been brought near by the blood of Jesus, for he is our peace’ (Eph 2: 13). Sacrifice in Hebrews We have surveyed the very varied language of salvation used by Paul, of which expiatory terms form a small but highly focused subset. The language of the ‘blood of Jesus’ and ‘he gave himself up for us’ is of course not original to Paul. It appears in diverse forms in many strands, including 1 Peter, Revelation and John.104 Paul’s importance is in building this into his many-sided theology, but it remains one aspect among many. We give a special place here to the Letter to the Hebrews because it alone, among the NT writings, places this language at the centre of its 103   On the debate over propitiation, see Cranfield, Romans, I, pp.  215–16; Dunn, Romans, p. 171. Young, Sacrificial Ideas, pp. 185–92. 104   For ‘blood’, see: 1 Pet 1: 2, 19; Rev 5: 9; ‘suffered for us/you’, 1 Pet 2: 21; ‘bore our sins’, 1 Pet 2: 24; a new priesthood, 1 Pet 2: 5; Rev 1: 6.

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exposition, to explore in detail what it means to consider life, death and salvation in a purificatory perspective.105 The kerygma that Jesus’ death on the cross was, in divine perspective, a saving sacrifice, is simply taken for granted by this anonymous writer. Jesus suffered and died (2: 9); and his death was an expiatory sacrifice (1: 3; 2: 17) which brought salvation and life (2: 14–15; 5: 8–9). He shares Paul’s understanding that Jesus was the divine Son, sent to identify with humanity, and explores the reason why this identification is intrinsic to the saving efficacy of his death. The divinity and the humanity of the Son are affirmed equally, if not without tension: he is both divine wisdom and co-creator and ‘the reflection of God’s glory’ (1: 2–3), and one who by choice shares ‘blood and flesh’, with his ‘brothers’, and ‘learned obedience by what he suffered’ (2: 14, 17; 5: 8). The writer also uniquely explores the idea that if Jesus’ death is not to be thought of as a contingent calamity but as eternally ordained sacrifice, Jesus must be seen as the agent, the ‘high priest’ of his own sacrifice. His ‘blood’ appears first as an aspect of his sharing in human being (‘the children share blood and flesh’ 2: 14) and then as the saving substance offered in the sanctuary by himself as High Priest (9: 12, 14; 10: 19, 29; 12: 24; 13: 20), always in contradistinction from the ‘blood of bulls and goats’ which has at best a secondary and outward power (9: 7, 12–13; 10: 4; cf. 9: 18–22, 25). Hence while the suffering of the Son of God is intrinsic to this eternal saving event, considered theologically, the cross as a historical fact is referred to only twice and in passing (6: 6; 13: 13), and his sacrificial action is less the death as such than the high priestly offering of blood in the Holy Place. Often the suffering is presented, not as salvific in itself, but as a qualifying test for the true high priesthood (2: 17–18; 5: 7–10), although elsewhere it is explicitly a saving death (9: 26b; 10: 20; 13: 12). The three motifs of identification, sacrificial death and priestly offering are run in parallel, and sometimes in pairs, but all three together only really appear once, in 9: 24–8, with an echo in 10: 19–21. In this way the author teases us with juxtapositions and pregnant metaphors, and refuses to reduce the theological truth, the mystery, to either historical or religious categories. Implicit in all this are two parallel descriptions of the human plight: it is a condition of mortality which enslaves humans to fear and sin; and it is a condition of defilement which cuts them off from God. The author assumes that the Levitical system has correctly described the human condition, and the need to offer ‘gifts and sacrifices’ (8: 3), but that system is not able to provide the solution, being bound up in both the mortality and the sin (5: 3; 7: 23). The only sacrifices it can offer are rendered unfit to deal with human sin, either by being associated with sin in the offerer, or by employing subhuman means, ‘the blood of bulls and goats’. The fleshly is characterized variously: by physical descent (7: 14); by the temptations of sexuality (13: 4), hunger (12: 16), avarice (13: 5), cruelty and indifference (11: 35–7; 13: 3); also by weakness (2: 14–16), suffering and mortality (10: 32–3; 11: 32–8); but this is the state chosen by the Son as the locus of salvation even in those   On Hebrews see Dunnill, Covenant and Sacrifice, pp. 227–38.

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signs of limitation (4: 15; 5: 7; 7: 14; 8: 4). The fearfulness of God to those who are in a state of impurity is vividly described: ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God’ who is ‘a consuming fire’ (10: 31; cf. 12: 29); and 12: 18–21 evokes the physical terror of standing before Mt Sinai, a place of ‘darkness and gloom, and a tempest’. It is in this realm of the physical that the sacrifice of Christ is offered. But those who ‘enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus’ (10: 19) have passed into a realm of direct knowledge of God, of the new covenant written on the heart, all sins forgiven, in the city of the living God (8: 10–12; 12: 22–4). The ‘purification of sins’ (1: 3) has allowed access into divine communion through the ‘sacrifice of praise’ and mutual giving (13: 15–16). Unlike Paul, whose resurrection theology envisages both Jesus and his followers being transformed into a new way of being for the new age (1 Cor 15: 35–57), this writer’s Christology envisages Jesus after his suffering ‘exalted’ and ‘ascending’ into the heavenly sanctuary (1: 3; 6: 20; 7: 23–8), freed from the selfimposed limitation of the flesh even while remaining in the body. The readers are likewise exhorted not so much to be transformed through resurrection (though compare 13: 20– 21) as to hold their human being with a certain lightness that he calls ‘boldness’ (parrhesia, 3: 6; 4: 16; 6: 9–12, 19–20; 7: 24 – 8: 2; 10: 19–25, 34–9; 11: 1–3; 12: 1–3, 12), a mode of being appropriate to those associated with the exalted one, while they wait for the fulfilment of God’s promises (8: 13; 9: 28; 10: 36–9; 11: 39–40; 12: 26–9). As sketched in Hebrews, the redeemed state of being, now achieved, is therefore fully sacrificial, oriented on relating to God through gift, but it is not expiatory, since the atoning work has been done ‘once for all’ by Christ. It is a weakness of the letter’s theology that the writer is so keen to demonstrate this as a reality, that he allows no possibility of further expiations for subsequent sins, nor any other mode of purification. If some are not able to maintain their parrhesia and fall into lassitude or disobedience (2: 1; 4: 1–2, 11; 6: 11–12; 10: 25, 39; 12: 3, 15–16; 13: 4–5), this will bring them into a state of defilement without remedy, for ‘there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins’ for those who have known the gift of God and rejected it (10: 26–8; cf. 6: 4–6). 5. Summary and Conclusion Despite the prominence of the expiatory rites in Leviticus, they need to be understood as forming part of a whole culture, a cosmology of purity and impurity. The OT assumes that there is a direct relation between God and humanity (Israel, anyway), presented episacrificially in covenantal narratives and prophetic oracles as well as the giving of Torah, understood as a means of grace. But the transcendence and wonder of God naturally cause humanity to shrink back in the face of God’s presence, as Moses did before the burning bush. The sin offering and the purity laws give institutional expression to this hesitation and separation; but the gift of the covenant remains primary. Disjunctive sacrifice is therefore not

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the whole of sacrifice but a means for acknowledging humanity’s distance from God, and reaffirming the desire to re-enter the conjunctive relationship offered by God, expressed in the importance of the pilgrim feasts as invitations to approach the deity. The Levitical texts do not share this holistic view, however. For them, expiation is the essence of sacrifice, and other modes are pale imitations. This has certain consequences. The tendency for impurity to be associated with bodily substances, actions and states casts a pall over bodily being as such, as if it was this which constituted the distance between humanity and deity; and the tendency to conflate ritual with moral impurity leads (in time) to a baleful association of sin with the body. The Christian era begins in a time when the norm is assumed to be the separation of the impure (and often sinful) human body from the holiness of God. While both the Qumran community and John the Baptist reinforce this, in asserting the need as well as the means of restoration, Jesus is a voice speaking against it. Jesus recognizes the existence of impurity but operates out of the episacrificial outpouring of grace which seeks to include and not exclude, drawing the weak, the sinful and even (perhaps) the uncircumcised into the new covenant of God. The grace which enables this communion is seen by NT writers to spring from the resurrection (as we shall see in the next chapter) but also from the cross, understood as a sin offering or as the final Day of Atonement rite that puts away all sin for ever, for those who place themselves under it. The language of Israel’s religious structures (both the impure body and the purifying sacrifice) is found in most strands of the New Testament, notably the Synoptic gospels, Paul and the post-Pauline writings, 1 Peter, Hebrews, 1 John and Revelation. In Paul’s writings it appears in a variously articulated narrative of fall and redemption, in which Christ is the second Adam restoring humanity to its lost condition and the only Son of God coming to set humanity free, with key attention to sin, flesh, righteousness and incorporation into Christ; sacrificial language as such is secondary but consistent with this presentation. Hebrews shares the view of humanity’s distance from God, and gives centrality to sacrificial means of expressing it. But the retaining of this language and the worldview it expresses, however transformed in Christian usage, carries with it definite dangers. Did Christian theology bind itself from the start within the limits of an expiatory ideology? Purity, in Israel as in most sacrificing cultures, is a relative and repeated state, reflecting worship as one ‘pure’ activity in a generally impure world. Against this idea of a rhythmic alternation between purity and impurity – of approach to God and removal from God – the Christian gospel proclaimed an eschatological fulfilment in an eternal Sabbath, a state of permanent freedom from evil and of access to God. Christians were to be constantly living in the presence of God and therefore behaving in ways appropriate to that state. In place of the many washings prescribed by the Mishnah and the Qumran Scrolls, one baptism ushered Christians into the glorified state of a cleansed body; in place of many purifications and sin

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offerings, the one sacrifice of Christ rendered those who identified themselves with it (having, as it were, laid a hand on the head of Christ as their sin offering) permanently and wholly reconciled to God. Day of Atonement language, with its singular and total claims to atone, appears disproportionately in Christian writings, along with other indicators of a unique sacrifice: ‘the lamb … destined before the foundation of the world’ (1 Pet 1: 20), ‘sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all’ (Heb 10: 10). Whatever religion has sought to achieve in relative and repeated action is now completed in Christ, and the redeemed community is corporately identified with Israel as ‘holy nation’ and ‘holy priesthood’, or as ‘body of Christ’. Two images of Christian living thus overlap: (1) sacrifice as deliverance from evil powers into the life of ‘the age’, claiming the anticipatory presence of the parousia; (2) sacrifice as purification from sin(s) and access to God in his Temple, claiming the privilege of the priesthood. Both are essentially static pictures of Christian living and both suggest there is no more to seek. The language of impurity in the NT epistles is used to describe the world’s problem and how it has been dealt with; it is also used to urge Christians to realize fully in their actions the state to which they have come, and not to fall back into lower modes of living. But apart from the danger of overstating this (so that any sinful act, however minor, may be regarded as equivalent to the rejection of Christ’s salvation (Heb 10: 29; 12: 17)) it effects a Christian removal from the world. The metaphor of expiation is dangerous because, assuming the imminence of the parousia, it allows for no neutral space for Christian bodily living, between the divine realm and the world now classified as evil. Yet the anticipated eschaton failed to arrive, and the world continued to be where Christians lived, and live. On the basis of this metaphor, an eschatological community was left striving to sustain itself indefinitely with the resource of a crisis theology. One purpose of the next chapter is to explore how this situation was faced.

Chapter 4

The Generative Body: Covenant Sacrifice and the Resurrection of the Body In Chapter 2, the ‘sacrificing body’ was considered in relation to the world of creation, labour, social life and the transformative act of cooking culminating in the shared meal. We saw how a distinctive bodily consciousness arises from seeing these aspects of life in relation to God, and how an awareness of life as lived from and to the creator was renewed in the ministry of Jesus and embodied in acts of koinonia among the early Christians. In terms of the typology set out in Figure 1.1 on page 24, the symbolism is mainly conjunctive, the furthering of communion through gift sacrifices such as minchah and ‘olah, In Chapter 3, the sacrificing body was considered in relation to the threats to life arising from impurity and sin. We saw a different consciousness of the body and divinity, expressed mainly through separative, disjunctive rites. Both perspectives tend to view human communities in relatively static or cyclical terms: the alternation of the seasons, or the rhythm of defilement and purification. But how does sacrifice relate to the fact that communities exist in time, with a past and a future? And how does it relate that other bodily economy, the begetting, bearing and raising of children through which the reproduction of community is achieved? To study this we shall need to survey a mixed group of sacrifices, preserved in a range of texts and traditions, to see how sacrifice interacts with the narratives of Israel’s history, both in broad patterns like covenant renewal rites, circumcision and firstborn sacrifice, and in certain key events, the Akedah, and the Passover, laying the ground work for the resurrection and the revealing of an eschatological community of the new age. 1. Israel as a Generative Community Founded on Sacrifice One of the key functions of sacrifice is to constitute a sacrificing community, thus bringing the empirical ‘natural’ community under divine control and defining the purpose and character of the social order. This fact of being ritually constituted is not peculiar to Israel. Jean-Paul Vernant shows that in Greece citizenship, as a

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function of the human order of being, was sacrificially defined.1 It was in being initiated into the civic hearth that a male became a sacrificer and a citizen. To be able to share political responsibility was implicit in taking part in the cultus around which social life revolved. To establish a colony it was necessary to extend the city by kindling in a new location a fire lit from the sacred hearth: so the ‘city’ itself was as much a transportable, sacrificial phenomenon as a social or geographical one. Nancy Jay proposes: a common sacrificial principle: that it is by participation in the rule-governed (moral, not biological) relatedness of father and son in a ritually defined social order, enduring continuously through time, that birth and death … and all other threats of social chaos may be overcome.2

For Israel, the ritual constitution of its identity through sacrifice is linked to the theme of the covenant. Israel’s understanding of itself as ‘a people’ is inseparable from the memory of the Exodus from Egypt and the establishment of a Yahwistic religious order in Canaan: by these events, symbolized centrally in the Passover, Israel is constituted as a covenant community, a community identified by its corporate relation to God. So the past event is present, not only causally but sacrificially. The mainstream tradition sees this event as a divine affirmation of an existing ‘natural’ community, biologically descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; but even in the Bible there are descendants of Abraham who are not part of ‘Israel’ (Lot, Ishmael, Esau), and foreigners like Ruth who are. Critical history reconstructs an alternative story: Israel’s creation as a process by which tribes of disparate origin, united by alliance and intermarriage, became ritually constituted as ‘the children of Israel’, taking on a shared worship and history.3 In the biblical records, tensions between the sacrificial and biological understandings of Israel’s identity are obliterated as far as possible, chiefly by pushing the notion of ‘covenant’, which centres on the events of the Exodus, further back into the tradition, to become coeval with the origin of the people itself. A past covenant necessitates a promise of blessing to be realized in the present and future. Hence, associated with these ideas, especially in the Priestly document, ‘covenant’ (berith) becomes a leading concept, first treated in the time of Noah (Gen 6: 18; 9: 8–17), cemented with Abraham (15: 5, 8–21; 17: 2–21) and Joseph (45: 4–8), renewed under Moses in Egypt (Ex 2: 24; 6: 2–8) and at Sinai 1   Vernant, ‘General Theory’, pp.  297–8. See other examples in Jay, Generations, pp. 30–40. 2   Jay, Generations, p. 39. On the conception of the sacrificial founding not only of society but the world, in Vedic and other traditions, see the classic treatment in Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 92–4 and passim, and Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter, pp. 46–51. 3   Martin Noth, The History of Israel (ET, London: A. and C. Black, 1960), pp.  85–109.

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(19: 3–6; 24: 3–8), and then reaffirmed in Canaan by Joshua (Josh 24: 1–18). The covenant was symbolized by sacrificial signs to be maintained ‘throughout your generations’, such as circumcision (Gen 17: 10–14; Josh 5), Passover (Ex 12: 24; Deut 16: 1–8), and the construction of a Holy Place (containing manna, the ark and a burning lamp, Ex 16: 32–3; 25: 10–22; 27: 21), the site of daily sacrifice and an incense offering (Ex 29: 38–42; 30: 7–8). In this process, social customs and laws were absorbed into the sacral law codes and placed under the guardianship of the priests, who especially after the end of the monarchy became the sacrificial custodians of the national identity. Alongside this public, communal, historical dimension of continuity and identity, sacrifice functions also in the intimate, familial sphere as a determinant of individual identity and community membership. It is a fact that parenthood in all societies is a social (legal, sacrificial) concept as well as a biological concept. In Rome, the distinction was made between the genitor, the biological father, and the pater, the official and sacrificial father.4 Where such a distinction exists, adoption into the family of a different pater can be as normal a mode of obtaining sonship as biological descent from a genitor. It is possible for an alien, or a slave, to be counted more easily as part of the community where biological relations are not the sole determinant of identity. On this basis the practice of polygyny is less problematic. Although it weakens the biological ties between siblings born to different mothers, it strengthens the authority of the common father (whether as pater or genitor). So is the practice of biological generation through a surrogate, whether the ‘virtual’ childbearing of Sarah through her slave-girl Hagar (Gen 16: 1–3) or the ‘levirate’ marriage of a widow by her dead husband’s brother to raise up ‘children for him’ (Deut 25: 5–10). The connection between sacrifice and childbirth is found in many strands of the biblical tradition. The role of generation and family is built into the zebach by the element of sociality inseparable from that meal offering: if sacrifice is something you do with your kinsfolk it celebrates (as well as shared work and companionship) the ties of blood across generations and across social and geographical divisions (Gen 31: 54). But sociality and generation are linked in other, more overt ways. The religious festivities of local shrines led, perhaps inevitably, to sexual festivities also. Prophetic texts inveigh frequently against the connection between worship at the high places and prostitution, with implications of adultery and idolatry (1 Kings 15: 12; Hos 4: 10b–19). This made the zebach a place of danger for women as well as men, and for the nation as well as individuals. To feast with the Canaanites was implicitly to practise zebach to their gods, and would probably lead to your sons taking their daughters as wives.5   Jay, Generations, pp. 36–40; on the implications for Paul’s theology of adoption, see Cranfield, Romans, 1, pp. 397–8 (on Rom 8: 15). 5   G. von Rad, Old Testament Theology (2 vols, ET, London: SCM Press, 1975), 1, p. 22; 2, p. 142. Compare Jub. 2: 20, ‘Be careful, my son Jacob, that you do not take a wife from any of the seed of the daughters of Canaan, for all of his seed is [destined] for 4

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Likewise, although it is hard to know what kind of sacrificial practice is envisaged for Abraham in the earliest strands of tradition, the texts alluding to worship are all also connected to issues of generation, so strong is this theme in the narratives. The building of an altar at a place of theophany is linked to divine promise: ‘To your offspring (seed, lezaraka) I will give this land’ (Gen 12: 7). In 21: 8, he gives a quasi-sacrificial feast (mishteh) ‘on the day that Isaac was weaned’. The single sacrifice that Abraham is said to have offered was the ‘olah of the ram, provided by God as a substitute for the binding (’akedah) of his son Isaac (22: 13), and resulting in a renewed promise of blessing on his ‘seed’. In the centre of the Abraham narratives there occur two symbols of separation, the cutting of a covenant (15: 7–19) and the institution of circumcision (17: 9–14, 23–7), both symbolizing the establishment of a divine covenant with promise of blessing on the seed. The connection between sacrifice and generation is also maintained in the group of stories concerning barren wives. In 1 Samuel 1 it is through the story of a family at worship, making its annual zebach at Shiloh, that the generative theme of Hannah’s barrenness and her rival’s fecundity is unfolded, as though it was particularly when gathering before the Lord at Shiloh that Hannah was conscious of her shame and vexation at being a childless wife. The outcome of the story is the dedication of the child Samuel as a Nazirite in the Temple. The theme appears in similar stories in Genesis: Rebekah’s barrenness is relieved by God after prayer (Gen 25: 21–2); Rachel receives a child not (except biologically) from her husband but from God (Gen 30: 1–2, 22–3); most importantly, in Genesis 18 the amply foreshadowed ending of Sarah’s barrenness is set in motion by nothing less than a physical visitation of Yahweh in the form of three ‘men’ (’anashim). The meal of a hastily slaughtered calf which Abraham ‘set before their face’ (18: 8), although described in non-liturgical language, is, within this mysterious narrative, the most direct account of the bodily and sacrificial relating of deity with graced humanity anywhere in the Hebrew scriptures. We see in these traditions a profound and consistent connection between generation (marriage, sexuality and especially childbirth) and the manifestation of divine presence through sacrifice and other means. It is interesting to note that marriage, apparently the element in generation most easily subjected to ritual control, while sometimes related to divine guidance (Gen 24: 10–21; Tobit 3: 16–17) is a wholly civil matter and never connected to cultic sites, personnel or rituals.6 But childbirth is a different matter. The experience is naturally fraught with mystery and with danger, giving rise to a range of apotropaic practices designed to ward off evil influence over the woman and the child in their vulnerability, as well as rites of dedication and thanksgiving following successful delivery. In P, it is surrounded by ritual prescriptions. A menstruating woman is unclean for seven uprooting from the earth’ (Charlesworth, Pseudepigrapha, 2, p. 98; discussion in Sanders, Paul, p. 374). 6   Berquist, Controlling Corporeality, pp. 60–62; de Vaux, Ancient Israel, pp. 33–4.

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days (Lev 15: 19–24), and after childbirth (‘producing seed’) for 40 days, if the child is male, and 80 days, if the child is female, followed by burnt offering and purification-offering (Lev 12: 1–5, 6–8). Significantly, circumcision, in Israel, does not take place at puberty representing initiation into marriageability, as in most cultures, but eight days after birth (Lev 12: 3) representing entry into the covenant. The male Israelite body is sacrificially constituted by this blood-rite (Ex 4: 24–6; Josh 5: 1–9); perhaps, as Jay argues, the controlled shedding of male blood purifies from the uncontrolled shedding of female blood.7 2. The Firstborn Sacrifice and the Akedah Child Sacrifice and Endangered Succession Within the generative community founded on sacrifice, the significance of childbirth, and especially the birth of the firstborn male, is emphasized by the following legal pronouncement: You shall not delay to make offerings from the fulness of your harvest and from the outflow of your presses. The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me. You shall do the same with your oxen and your sheep: seven days it shall remain with its mother; on the eighth you shall give it to me. (Ex 22: 29–30 NRSV, 22: 28–29 MT)

Thus every firstborn son is to be offered to Yahweh, just as are the first fruits of livestock and agriculture. In this, perhaps the oldest form of the requirement, the command is stated absolutely. An even wider rule is stated in Ex 13: 12a: ‘You shall set apart for the Lord whatever first opens the womb’; however, this is immediately qualified as ‘all the firstborn of your livestock that are males’. Further exceptions are introduced relating to male donkeys and human children: ‘A male donkey you shall redeem (tifdeh) with a sheep’; and similarly: ‘Every firstborn male among your children you must redeem’ (13: 13). No substitute for a child is named, although the context implies that a sheep is due. Does the parallel suggest that a child, like a donkey, must be either redeemed or else killed? In these texts there is (1) a general sacrificial principle: ‘No one shall appear before me empty-handed’ (Ex 34: 20c). There is also (2) a principle of first-fruits offerings: ‘You shall not delay to make offerings’ (Ex 22: 29), and this is applied to   Nancy Jay, ‘Sacrifice as a Remedy for Having Been Born of Woman’ in Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan and Margaret R. Miles (eds), Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), pp. 283– 304; cf. Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, pp. 746–7. 7

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all forms of life, not only vegetables and the young of animals, but also to human children – ‘Consecrate to me all the firstborn; whatever is first to open the womb among the Israelites, of human beings and animals, is mine’ (Ex 13: 2; 22: 29b). But then there is (3) a principle of redemption, stipulating that human children (like donkeys) must not be sacrificed but must instead be redeemed: ‘Every firstborn male among your children you shall redeem’ (Ex 13: 13).8 Unfortunately, the principle of the offering of the firstborn is more consistent in these rules than the principle of redemption. Even when redemption is commanded (as it is not in Ex 22: 29) there is no consistency (as there is for a donkey, Ex 13: 17; 34: 20) about what is an appropriate substitute for a human child. Should it be a sheep (implied in Ex 13: 13); or a price of five shekels (Num 18: 15–16)? The variation is disturbing: was this not an issue on which it would be forgivable – in legal texts much given to repetition – to state the obvious in order to be clear? Besides, not only the price but every other feature of this motif is variable. Numbers offers in fact two versions: as well as fixing the price at five shekels (Num 18: 16), it maintains that the tribe of Levi, being without its own land, suffices for all time as a substitute for the firstborn children of Israelites (Num 3: 12–13) and their livestock for Israel’s livestock (3: 41, 45), at least up to the number of the Levites (Num 3: 46–7). Consequently, no redemption is needed, for either human or animal births. Yet this Levitical ideology is not referred to in the book of Leviticus itself, which neither prescribes nor bans child sacrifice; perhaps it presents circumcision, as performed on all male children at eight days, as a symbolic substitute, a means of redemption (Lev 12: 3).9 In other texts, the dedication of a child as a Nazirite seems to function as an alternative form of offering (Jg 13: 2–7; 1 Sam 1: 24–8), although this could hardly have general application. In other words, far from there existing ‘some familiar and established practice’,10 it looks as though there were a number of alternative and parallel traditions about how to ‘redeem’ a firstborn son. And along with these varied applications of the Law, there were also rival and contradictory attempts at explaining the practice. Cultic texts present it as a regular practice linked to the offering of first fruits; in Exodus 13 it is given an aetiology as a memorial of the divinely initiated but unique event of the death of the Egyptian firstborn and the salvation of Israel’s firstborn at the Passover; but in Ezekiel 20: 25–6 sacrifice of the firstborn is described as one of the ‘statutes which were not good’, given to Israel, paradoxically, to shock them into returning to Yahweh. 8   Marx, ‘Familiarité et transcendance’, p.  8, places them, like other first fruits offerings among feudal dues to the deity. 9   See Levenson, Death and Resurrection, pp.  48–52. Milgrom denies that ‘circumcision is a purificatory rite for the boy’ because ‘there is no equivalent rite for a newly born girl’ (Leviticus 1–16, pp. 746–7); but his argument fails to observe the regular imbalance of gender. Unlike mothers, fathers are not defiled by the birth of their children. 10   Nahum M. Sarna, Exodus (The JPS Torah Commentary, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991), p. 67 (on 13: 13).

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So much variability of treatment points to the existence of an actual, living, problematic practice of firstborn sacrifice to Yahweh, despite the general reluctance to countenance it.11 The evidence renders most unsatisfactory Durham’s bland remark that ‘Firstborn sons were dedicated in Israel to Yahweh both actually and vicariously, but in service, not by sacrifice’, and it equally calls into question the overstatement of de Vaux: ‘It seems certain that no Israelite ritual ever prescribed the sacrifice of the first-born’.12 On the contrary, it appears from this evidence both that firstborn sons were offered up to Yahweh, as a first fruits offering, a minchah, and that Yahweh was understood, at least in some circles, to desire this.13 The practice of child sacrifice is well attested elsewhere in the ancient world, with a number of distinct patterns.14 The custom of offering a child as a ‘foundation’ sacrifice, buried beneath wall or gate to ensure the well-being of a house, a city or a nation is found especially in Mesopotamia, but is seen among Israel’s neighbours also (1 Kg 16: 34, a firstborn son). The offering by Mesha, King of Moab, of his firstborn son as an ‘olah to ensure success in battle is described without comment, except that it was apparently rewarded with success: ‘a great wrath came upon Israel’ (2 Kg 3: 27). These narrative examples concern rulers, whose firstborn are sacrificed in relation to political and military success. It could be argued that a king’s son is in some sense son of the nation, for whose well-being he may be required to die, whether in youth or age. In Micah 6: 6–7, the alignment of firstborn sacrifice with the conspicuous expenditure of ‘thousands of rams’, while forbidden, likewise suggests a practice connected with rulers. The evidence points to a climate in which such a sacrifice was conceivable, even if exceptional, objectionable and extreme. In none of these cases is a law of redemption mentioned.15

11   Levenson, Beloved Son, p.  4; against Jacob Milgrom, ‘Were the Firstborn Ever Sacrificed to YHWH? To Molek? Popular Practice or Divine Command’, in A.I. Baumgarten (ed.), Sacrifice in Religious Experience (Leiden: Brill, 2002) pp. 49–55. 12   John Durham, Exodus (Word Biblical Commentary, Waco: Word Books, 1987) 330; de Vaux, Ancient Israel, p. 444; Levine, Leviticus, 258–60. 13   Jason Tatlock, ‘The Place of Human Sacrifice in the Israelite Cult’, in Christian A. Eberhardt (ed.), Ritual and Metaphor: Sacrifice in the Bible (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), pp. 33–48. 14   For examples, see Levenson, Beloved Son, pp. 18–35; A.R.W Green, The Role of Human Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East (ASOR Dissertation Series 1, Missoula: Scholars Press, 1975); S. Brown, Late Carthaginian Child Sacrifice (JSOT/ASOR Monograph Series 3, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991). 15   Levenson, Beloved Son, pp. 11–12. The same is true of Jephthah’s foolish vow (Jg 11: 30–40) to offer up as a burnt offering ‘whoever/whatever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me’ if he were to return from battle successful. Here the vow has been made to Yahweh, no foreign god, and the girl herself agrees that such a vow must be kept (11: 36–7, compare Num 30: 2). Although in this instance the initiative does not come from a divine command but from Jephthah’s vow, the law is explicitly invoked to show that the vow must be performed, but without making reference to any law of ‘redemption’.

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Evidence that child sacrifice was practised among Israelites is almost uniformly associated with foreign deities, especially ‘Moloch’. The custom of making a son or daughter ‘pass through the fire’ is alluded to in 2 Kings 16: 3; 17: 17 and forbidden in Deuteronomy 18: 10 – in all three texts associated with divination, sorcery and other alien religious customs. Jeremiah speaks of the valley of Hinnom where some ‘burn their children in the fire as a burnt offering to Baal’ (19: 5) and ‘offer up their sons and daughters to Moloch’ (32: 35), and the practice is condemned also in Leviticus 18: 21; 20: 2–5. The condemnation is uniform in these texts of the seventh century and later, as is the theme that this is not a part of Yahwistic religion: They offer up their sons and daughters to Moloch, though I did not command them, nor did it enter my mind that they should do this abomination, causing Judah to sin. (Jer 32: 35)

The mention of ‘sons and daughters’, rather than firstborn sons, may be a clue that what the prophet is condemning is not obedience to the Israelite law of the firstborn (Ex 22: 29), but part of a more general practice of child sacrifice, originating from popular religion. In Carthage and other Phoenician centres the practice of making sacrificial offerings of children up to four years old was not common, but occurred in times of crisis.16 It therefore had a disjunctive character, quite different from the conjunctive minchah of Israelite tradition, and abandonment of animal substitution in the later period may be a return to a misunderstood past, doing what YHWH was perceived to really want.17 Micah 6: 8 also appears to relate to disjunctive offerings in a crisis. Whether this was understood as a genuine outflow of Yahwism or not – there is dispute about whether ‘Mlk’ is a god (‘Moloch’) or a type of sacrifice18 – it was rejected with unusual vehemence by the Deuteronomic and priestly schools. However hard for us to conceive, these practices do demonstrate a principle discussed in Chapter 1: that what a person offers must be what he or she identifies with, an offering in solidarity with the general mode of life. The offering is made from a person’s life, and so articulates a relation with deity in which both share, and it is in giving up what is closest that the relation to deity is most fully advanced. So the willingness to make these sacrifices, and without substitution, should not be construed as expressing, in themselves, either violence or indifference towards the lives of children. There is no evidence of intention to reject or hurt the children. On the contrary, all the evidence suggests that these young human victims – like the animal chosen to be an ‘olah, but more so – were to be honoured for their   Levenson, Beloved Son, pp. 18–22.   Green, Human Sacrifice, pp. 173–9, citing p. 179. 18   Levenson, Beloved Son, pp. 18–19; George C. Heider, The Cult of Molech (JSOT 16 17

Supplement 43, Sheffield: JSOT, 1985) pp. 252–8.

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role in securing the future well-being of the community.19 The preciousness of the child is stressed: Mesha offered ‘his firstborn son who was to succeed him’; Jephthah’s daughter was ‘his only child; he had no son or daughter except her’, and her delight in her father and her obedience towards God are both made plain. Nonetheless it was a consistently resisted practice. The Akedah The emotional significance of the firstborn offering, and the suffering this entails, are presented most forcefully in the great and terrible story of the Akedah or Binding of Isaac. In the story related in Genesis 22, Isaac is to be offered as an ‘olah, not because of a pagan custom, a foolish vow or even an interpretation of divine law, but because God (Elohim) has explicitly commanded it. The preciousness of the child is emphasized by stepped repetition – ‘take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love’ (22: 2) – and the story unfolds with a deliberateness and a pathos which preclude us from finding here anything other than the absolute will of God meeting unswerving obedience. This is no primitive narrative, but a carefully constructed piece of artistry. The love of the father for his child and his abhorrence at what is commanded are not allowed to occupy the narrative surface but appear in tiny details of the narrative. It is a story that opens up into unseen depths, ‘fraught with background’.20 In the context of the Abraham cycle, the reality of God and of God’s appearing before Abraham for his good have been abundantly shown. The divine voices and visions spread through the Abraham narrative (12: 1–3; 15: 1–21; 17: 1–22; 18: 1–33) culminate in a promised blessing attested by the birth, beyond the possibility of nature, of a son. It is this son, whose very life is divine gift, and on whom the entire future of Israel depends, who is now to be given back to Yahweh as a burnt offering. Affirming the sacrificial principle, this text says, as clearly as any text can, that all life is divine gift and must, to be true to itself, be

19   Brown, Child Sacrifice, pp. 171–6, notes criticism of offering children up to four years old, either because they would be aware of what was happening, and so suffer, or else because by that age they could be recognized as in some way members of the human community, whereas newborn infants, whose lives were in any case precarious, were not so regarded. 20   Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 12. On the interpretation of the story see Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and the Sickness unto Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) pp.  21–132; Claus Westermann, Genesis 12–36: A Commentary (ET, London: SPCK, 1981), pp. 353–4; Omri Boehm, The Binding of Isaac: A Religious Model of Disobedience (London: Clark, 2007), Bruce Chilton, Abraham’s Curse: The Roots of Violence in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (New York: Doubleday, 2008).

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offered back to God.21 In the binding of Isaac it is not one child only but the entire future of his potential descendants that is offered up to God. Readers have sought to justify this story as illustrating and authorizing the general substitution of animals in place of children (‘redemption’), but Levenson rightly questions this traditional interpretation.22 Abraham is presented here most of all as a model of pious obedience, whose faithfulness is shown precisely in his willingness to make this sacrifice: ‘Now I know that you fear God since you have not withheld your only son from me’ (22: 13). Admittedly, he is then commanded, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy’, and the ram which he offers instead appears as if miraculously as a further gift from God (‘The Lord will provide’ (22: 14)).23 However, the substitute offering is not actually commanded here, nor is any conclusion drawn from this narrative event to subsequent ritual practice.24 Abraham is commended for his willingness to sacrifice his ‘only’ son, not for his willingness to redeem him. Although Isaac himself is not to be sacrificed, as it transpires, the story offers no guidance as to how any other father might demonstrate an equal willingness to obey God, except by actually performing the sacrifice. It is a highly dangerous story. What then is its function? Firstly, it is a covenant foundation sacrifice. Abraham, whose election by God for the bearing of the promise is apparently arbitrary and unmotivated in chapters 11–12, has been sacrificially constituted, by the interaction of promise and response (15: 1–6) and by the divine covenant sealed with circumcision (15: 12–21; 17: 1–14), as the promise bearer and ‘father of a multitude of nations’ (17: 5). Biological life, the ‘natural’, is thus brought within the sphere of divine purposes. Then, in Genesis 22, Isaac, whose birth is ‘natural’, in that it results from human biological generation, notwithstanding the supernatural elements surrounding it, is sacrificially constituted as Abraham’s successor and ‘father of our nation’ (4 Macc 16: 20). As Jay comments: ‘By this

21   Compare 4 Macc 16: 18–20: ‘Remember that it is through God that you have had a share in the world and have enjoyed life, and therefore you ought to endure any suffering for the sake of God. For his sake also our father Abraham was zealous to sacrifice his son Isaac …’ (also Josephus, Antiquities 1.230). 22   Levenson Beloved Son, p. 13; also Westermann, Genesis 12–36, p. 354. 23   See John Bowker, The Targums and Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 113–4, for the rabbinic tradition that the ram was one of the 10 mysterious objects created ‘between the suns’ at the end of the sixth day of creation, thus showing both that the course of this incident was planned by God, and its place in the divine plan of salvation. 24   Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (The JPS Torah Commentary, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), p. 153, points out that this is Abraham’s interpretation. Compare the explicit aetiologies in Gen 32: 32; Jg 11: 39–40.

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act, Isaac, on the edge of death, received his life, not by birth from his mother but from the hand of his father as directed by God (Elohim)’.25 The original emphasis on Abraham’s testing and faithfulness (Gen 22: 1, 12, 16–18, and reaffirmed in many texts, Jewish and then Christian)26 gives way later, in the wake of the Maccabean crisis, to a focus on the faith of Isaac himself, not now reckoned to be a child but an adult 37 years old who fully understands and chooses his fate.27 This martyrdom motif in turn develops into a positively sacrificial version in which his virtual death is treated as a covenant-securing rite: God sees the ‘blood’ and ‘ashes’ of Isaac, and accords them power to save Israel through the memorial of the Passover.28 But secondly, in the context of the Maccabean martyr literature it becomes an archetypal narrative affirming the requirement of initiation into the covenant, a ritual death required of all generations of males, even if usually given in the form of circumcision on the eighth day. Speculation about this initiation theme is fuelled by the text’s failure to mention Isaac as returning with his father in 22: 19 (‘Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beersheba’). What has happened to Isaac? The Palestinian Targum adds: ‘And the angels led Isaac to the school of Shem the great (or teacher) and he was there three years’, alluding to the house of Shem where, after the scattering of the languages at Babel, the Hebrew language was said to have been preserved, and where the divine Shekina dwelt.29 This amplification envisages, instead of Isaac’s sacrifice, 25   Jay, Generations, p.  102. Her argument is about the tension in the patriarchal narratives between matrilineal and patrilineal descent, and how Isaac’s failure to offer sacrifice leaves tensions to later generations. 26   Sir 44: 20; 1 Macc 2: 52; Wisd 10: 5; Jub. 17: 15–18 (Charlesworth, Pseudepigrapha, 2, p. 90); Josephus, Antiquities 1: 233; Heb 11: 17–18; Jas 2: 21 and perhaps Rom 4: 20–21. 27   4 Macc 7: 14; 13: 1–17; 16: 16–23; Targums on Gen 22: 1, 8, 10 (Bowker, Targums, pp. 224–7); Josephus, Antiquities 1. 228–32; Pseudo-Philo, Biblical Antiquities, 32.3; 40.2 (Bowker Targums, Appendix 1, pp. 301–14, here pp. 313–14). 28   Pseudo-Philo, Biblical Antiquities, 18.5; 32. 3–4; Fragment Targum on Gen 22: 10 (Bowker, Targums, pp. 227, 311–14). See Samuel Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legend and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice: The Akedah (Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1993 (1967)), pp. 41–59. Bowker (Targums, pp. 231–2) attributes this key development to the fall of Jerusalem and the need for Jews to find an equivalent to the redeeming death of Christ in this sacrifice which fulfilled by anticipation the sacrifices they could no longer offer (see also Philip R. Davies and Bruce Chilton, ‘The Aqedah: A Revised Tradition History’, CBQ 40 (1978): pp. 514–46); others argue for a preChristian date (R. Hayward, ‘The Present State of Research into the Targumic Account of the Sacrifice of Isaac’, JJS 32 (1981): pp. 127–50). 29   Bowker, Targums, pp. 226, 176–7; H.C. White, ‘The Initiation Legend of Isaac’, ZAW 91 (1979): pp. 1–30. It is also noted that Sarah, as well as Isaac, disappears from the narrative, and is understood in rabbinic readings to have died of shock at the news of Isaac’s (near) death. Is her death the real substitute for Isaac’s? See Bowker, Targums, p. 234; S.C. Halevy, ‘Sarah’s Sacrifice’, Midstream 42/4 (1996): pp. 12–13.

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a double substitution: both the offering of the ram in his stead, and the dedication of the child to a place of sacred learning or religious service. There are parallels in the tradition, in the tale of Jephthah’s daughter, before her sacrifice, wandering in the mountains among the virgin ‘daughters of Israel’, perhaps pointing to a ritual initiation into a guild of virgins; and in the tales of Samson and Samuel, where a barren wife is given a son who is to be dedicated as a Nazirite to God, with a view, in each case, to future blessings on Israel (Jg 13; 1 Sam 3). However, all of these interpretations, ancient and modern, are secondary attempts to defuse the principle that firstborn sons belong to God. The story itself provides no neat way out, and presents the tension between divine and human allegiance with inescapable clarity. There is no doubt that in the role of children, and in this story above all, we encounter the darkest side of the theme of sacrifice, touched for many ancients as well as moderns with a sense of horror and dread: can this really be what God requires?30 Can an event which falls on both the sacrificer and the one sacrificed with such an experience of evil really be the desire of a loving God? It is a question raised again in the Maccabean crisis. Were the prophets not right to find in this impulse not divine command but the teasing of a malignant demon?31 For Israel in the twentieth century, heirs to a tradition in which, as we have seen, the generative process is constantly subject to threats from evil forces and maintained only by divine grace, the catastrophe of the Shoah, the so-called ‘Holocaust’, bringing dereliction and death to millions, young and old, may realize the most fearful apprehensions of sacrifice. For Jews in the modern world to be dehumanized and slaughtered simply for being Jews seems like an awful parody of the divine claim to ownership. Not surprisingly, there has been speculation about whether the voice commanding Isaac’s death was in fact not the voice of God but the vehicle of a malicious temptation. Several ancient texts report a scene in the heavenly court, similar to that in Job 1–2, in which a heavenly protagonist (variously named as Satan, Mastema or ‘the angels’) seeks to test the faithfulness of Abraham.32 As with Job, therefore, God is seen to allow the testing, but to intend from the start to prevent actual harm to Abraham or the boy. As we shall see with the Passover, this way of receiving the Akedah story eases the ambiguity of the biblical narrative and serves to show that God does not desire the death of the firstborn. 30   Terence Fretheim, ‘The Binding of Isaac and the Abuse of Children’, Lutheran Theological Journal 41/2 (2007): pp. 84–92. 31   Boehm, Binding, argues, with Kant, that Abraham, like Job, is a ‘God-fearer’ who challenges God from the ground of righteousness. He argues that in the earlier version of the text (vv. 1–10, 13, 19) Abraham chose to offer the ram instead of his son; the text presents him as standing against the pagan myth of the sacrifice of the beloved son and thus as a model of disobedient righteous action. 32   Satan, B. San. 89b; Mastema, Jub. 17: 10–18; the angels, Ps.-Philo, Biblical Antiquities, 32: 1 (Bowker, Targums, p. 228).

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3. The Covenant Tradition and the Passover Endangered Succession and the Covenant The story of the Akedah thus brings together the law of the firstborn with the theme of endangered succession observed earlier in stories of foreign marriages, barren wives and fraternal rivalry. The problem of endangered generation is constant in the pre-Sinaitic narratives of Genesis and Exodus 1–15, and leads to the narrative of the Passover and its institution as an annual celebration (Ex 12; Deut 16). The theme of endangered generation is implicit from the start in the description of humanity as both two and one, an ‘adam created ‘male and female’ (Gen 1: 27), and incomplete without a ‘helpmeet’ (2: 18). The resolution of this tension requires separation as well as union: This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh … Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife and they become one flesh. (2: 23–4)

The ‘one flesh’ created in the joining of man and woman (2: 24) refers to the power of sexual union to create, from those of different descent, a new kinship cemented in ‘bone and flesh’.33 The continuity of human being into the future depends on the constant breaking up of the old (‘a man leaves his father and mother’) and the creation of new social units based on kinship (‘bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh’, compare Gen 29: 14). In the chapters which follow, the precarious recreation of the ‘one flesh’ out of which humanity emerged provides the dramatic thread underlying the history of Israel. Marriage is problematic in the light of the rebellion in Eden. Female experience, centred in childbearing, is in tension between desire and pain, under the husband’s rule (3: 16); male experience, centred in physical work, is in tension between eating bread and wrestling with heat and thistles, in a life conformed to the dust from which bodies are made and to which they return. Continuity is immediately threatened by the dispute between their sons, leading to the death of Abel, and to Cain’s banishment. Significantly, the dispute between brothers arose out of sacrifice, when Abel’s animal offering (minchah) was accepted while Cain’s vegetable offering (minchah) was not. The cause is not because Cain does not offer sacrifice (as is sometimes said), or only an inferior vegetable offering, but the failure of Cain’s sacrifice to render appropriate praise to God, which manifests his failure of full humanity. With the birth of another son, Seth, there is a new start, celebrated in the recitation of ‘the generations (toledoth) of Adam (Gen 5). The union of angels (‘sons of God’) with ‘daughters of Adam’ in 6: 1–4 is not linked to the narrative of human wickedness – although later interpreters would 33   Compare Jub. 3: 6: ‘God ‘brought her to [Adam] and he knew her and he said, ‘This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh’ (Charlesworth, Pseudepigrapha, 2, p. 59).

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speculate about that connection34 – but the flood narrative presents a massive threat to the continuity of the generations, a threat brought to an end by Noah’s gigantic ‘olah of every clean animal and bird (8: 20), leading to divine promise and covenant (9: 12). The rainbow is given as ‘a sign of the everlasting covenant (berith ‘olam) between God and every living creature’ (9: 16) for ‘perpetual generations’ (ledoroth ‘olam, 9: 12). But immediately a disruption of generation occurs, when Noah’s sons see his nakedness, causing a curse to fall on his descendants (9: 20–27). The renewed list of Noah’s ‘generations’ is followed by the large-scale disruption of Babel, and further lists of descendants. The Genesis narrative thus constructs the early story on twin themes of endangered succession and divine promise. The future of the human race, established with a promise that every plant, tree, bird and beast is given for their good (1: 29–30), is immediately threatened by the failure of the first man and woman to respond with obedience and trust; it is threatened again by the quarrel between their sons; and threatened again by the sinfulness of humanity which leads to the flood. Only the gracious election of Noah, and his response, allows there to be any survivors of that catastrophe and they are given a covenant promise in the context of an ‘olah (8: 20–22), that ‘I will never again curse the ground because of humankind’, a promise described explicitly as a covenant (9: 8–17). The Abraham cycle begins with a command, ‘leave your father’s house’ (compare 2: 24), a command linked to a promise of becoming ‘a great nation’ (12: 1–2, compare 15: 5; 17: 2; 22: 17–18). But generation is threatened when Sarai/ Sarah is absorbed into Pharaoh’s harem, and Abraham and Sarah must become ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ (12: 10–20; 20: 1–18), and by the failure of Sarah to produce a child. But the divine promise of blessing is renewed with a grant of land (15: 12–20), the institution of the initiatory/purificatory rite of circumcision (17: 9–14), which is a sign for ‘your offspring after you throughout the generations’ (17: 12), and by the promise of seed (18: 14) secured in the birth of Isaac (21: 1–4). Yet it is all this that is placed in jeopardy, in Genesis 22, by the command to make the child a burnt offering. The chapters which follow develop three great themes related to generation. The question of election (who is to be the bearer of the promise, the representative of God?) is foreshadowed in the divine preference for Abel over the elder Cain and for Isaac over Ishmael, and repeated in the struggles between Jacob and Esau and between Joseph and his brothers. The problem of securing generation despite misdirected sexual activity appears in the defilement of Dinah by uncircumcised Canaanites (35); the refusal of Onan and Judah to provide Tamar with seed (an outcome secured only by incestuous seduction) (38); and the attempted seduction of Joseph by a foreigner (39). The narrative also witnesses, perhaps unconsciously, to a threat to the tradition of Israel, when its patriarchal and patrilineal customs come under influence from the matrilineal practices of surrounding peoples; this 34   1 Enoch 6–11; Jub. 5: 1–11 (Charlesworth, Pseudepigrapha, 1, pp.  15–19; 2, pp. 64–5); midrashic literature cited in Bowker, Targums, pp. 151–8.

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is seen especially in Jacob’s long captivity in the matrilineal sphere of Laban (married to his mother’s brother’s daughter), from which he is not released until he establishes a patrilineal boundary by offering a zebach ‘to the Fear of his father Isaac’ (31: 51–5).35 Through all these large movements, sacrifices, although not frequent, are offered by major figures at significant points: Abel (4: 3–5), Noah (8: 20–22), Jacob (28: 11–22; 35: 14), with other quasi-sacrificial events in the story of Abraham at 12: 8; 15: 17; 17: 23; 18: 8; 21: 8; 22: 13. The Joseph cycle, which begins with a crime and a deviant substitution of a son for a goat (37: 31), and turns on Joseph’s intended substitution of his elder brothers for the youngest, Benjamin, ends with Jacob’s performing of sacrifices (zebachim 46: 1) and the celebration of the generations of his 12 sons (46: 8–27) and the blessings on his descendants (Gen 48–49). The Passover The theme of endangered generation opened up in the patriarchal narratives of Genesis is thus immediately present as the story continues into the early chapters of Exodus. Pharaoh’s command to kill the male children (Ex 1: 16, 22) is circumvented by the cunning of the Hebrew women, the midwives as well as Moses’ mother and sister, and by the compassion of Pharaoh’s daughter. Within an almost entirely female context, the succession is secured through Moses. In the desert, where again Moses is protected by women and becomes a father (Ex 2: 15–22), the theophany is Yahweh’s reaffirmation of the covenant, a covenant ‘for all generations’ (3: 15). The renewing of the covenant is secured through a demand to ‘worship’ or ‘offer sacrifice to God on this mountain’ (3: 12, 18), and focused in the Passover, both as historical event and as ‘perpetual ordinance’ to be celebrated ‘throughout your generations’ (12: 14). This brings us to the Passover (pesach) itself, which, both as event and as commemorative rite, has distinctive features. In form and content, it cuts across the divisions outlined earlier between ‘gift’ and ‘meal’ sacrifices. Like a zebach shelamim, it is a feast. The animal prescribed is a year-old lamb or goat, which is, however, to be roasted whole, not boiled, and consumed whole; its blood is to be smeared on the lintels and doorposts of the house; none of it is to be brought into contact with any altar; no priest is specified.36 In origin, it is presumably a feast of pastoral nomads, celebrated at the new moon of spring. A similar feast is made by modern Bedouin at the renewing or enlarging of a tent, complete with   Jay, Generations, pp. 103–9.   Later attempts were made to adapt pesach to the usual practice of the zebach,

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for example in the mode of cooking of the body (Deut 16:7), but, as the Mishnah shows, without success in this case (m. Pes.7: 1–3); in the Temple, the blood was poured out at the base of the altar (2 Chron 30: 16; 35: 11; m. Pes. 5: 6) and in NT times the fat parts were burnt on it, as for a zebach (Lev 3: 3–4, m. Pes. 5: 10) (Danby, Mishnah, pp. 142–5).

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blood smeared on lintels and doorposts.37 As a feast, it symbolizes sociality and the unity of the group, but the blood-rite is overtly apotropaic, the blood-smeared entrances protecting the interior from the evil outside. Further marginal imagery – the slaughter timed to take place ‘between the evenings’ at the time which is neither day nor night, with the stipulation for the participants to remain within the house but to be dressed for travel – expresses the duality of evil expelled (by blood) and blessing experienced (by the shared meal). The character of this as a covenant community is emphasized by the promise of protection and the command (reflecting the history of later Jewish practice) for an annual celebration. Here Yahweh appears paradoxically both as Israel’s protector and covenant Lord, and as ‘the Destroyer’ attacking the houses of the Egyptians, against whose power the blood protects Israel. The gathering and the celebration of this sacrifice constitutes the people of Israel as belonging to YHWH: those who feast together at the Lord’s command and who are separated from the judgement that falls on those outside. Acknowledging this special status, ‘the people bowed down and worshipped’ (Ex 12: 27). The association of Passover with the unique event of release from captivity in Egypt gives its annual celebration a special character. Whereas Tabernacles and Pentecost are in essence feasts of an agricultural economy centred on harvest (whatever covenantal motifs were later assigned to them: for example, atonement at Tabernacles, lawgiving at Pentecost), Passover’s economic base in nomadism is completely transmuted by the shift into a covenantal rite, even when modified by being joined to the agricultural feast of Unleavened Bread (Ex 12: 13–20; Deut 16: 1–8). Significantly, the lamb offered here symbolizes not so much the people’s work as pastoralists, as the people itself in its historical setting as Israel divinely constituted as God’s first fruits and firstborn son, self-offered. The year-old male lamb is effectively the redemption sacrifice for the firstborn of Israel, saved from the work of ‘the Destroyer’ while Israel as a whole is dramatized as God’s elect and firstborn son, chosen out of the nations and preserved by God through death (symbolized by the Passover, the Red Sea and the Desert) to life in the Promised Land. It is no accident that the fullest exposition of the sacrificial status of Israel’s firstborn is given here in Exodus 13: 1–2, 12–15: Israel’s willingness to sacrifice/ redeem its own firstborn sons is recognition of its status as YHWH’s redeemed firstborn. 4. Israel ‘Before the Face of the Lord’ in Worship and Judgement One outcome of the developments examined so far is the key image of Israel’s identity as those who are called to stand ‘before the face of Yahweh’ or ‘in the 37   Roland de Vaux, Studies in Old Testament Sacrifice (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1964), pp. 7– 8.

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presence of Yahweh’ (lifnei YHWH; in the LXX enantion kuriou or enopion kuriou). The phrase appears over 200 times in the Hebrew scriptures, in all layers of tradition and in all kinds of literature. Many of them appear in the legislative portions of the Pentateuch and other texts ascribable to P. In most of these, ‘before the Lord’ means ‘in the Jerusalem Temple’ understood as successor to the desert tabernacle or Tent of Meeting. Hence manna is to be kept ‘in the presence of the Lord’ (Ex 16: 32–3) and Israel is to present itself ‘before the Lord three times yearly’ (Ex 34: 24). For Deuteronomy likewise this necessarily occurs ‘at the place that the Lord will choose as a dwelling for his name’ (Deut 16: 2, 16). In P, of course, ‘Israel’ is conceived of a highly structured sacral community, graded from Aaron and the priests, through Israelite men and women to Gentiles. Although all may participate in worship in some fashion, only the first two categories may appear ‘before the Lord’ in the full sense, and only the High Priest may enter the Holy of Holies, and then only once a year. By contrast Deuteronomy speaks mainly of ‘rejoicing’ ‘before the Lord’ (Deut 16: 16) and has a more egalitarian understanding of Israel: emphasis falls on zebach and pilgrim feasts (inclusive of laymen, women and children) as representing Israel’s appearance ‘before the Lord’. These texts speak of God’s local presence in particular places, but other texts envisage Yahweh’s presence localized but in a less restricted way. Thus David ‘danced before the Lord’, whose presence was symbolized by the movable ark (2 Sam 6: 14); Josiah ‘made a covenant before the Lord’ while he ‘stood by a pillar’ in the open court of the Temple; Abraham once ‘stood before the Lord’ somewhere overlooking Sodom (18: 22; 19: 27). In other texts, Yahweh’s presence is envisaged in an even less localized way, so that Israel is conceived as living ‘before the Lord’ wherever they are in the normal course of life, as when Abraham prayed to God, ‘O that Ishmael might live before you’ (Gen 17: 18), or when Isaac offered to bless his son ‘before the Lord’ while in his own tent (Gen 27: 7). To walk or stand before the Lord may bring blessing (Ps 116: 9) or judgement (Jon 1: 3, 10; Num 5: 16–22). The later prophets speak of ‘entreating the face’ of Yahweh (Zech 7: 2; 8: 21–2, Dan 9: 13, 20; Hag 1: 12). While the non-spatial and non-cultic senses of the term can be found in all ages, P represents a drastic narrowing of the idea to reflect the concerns and practice of the priests. For the Qumran sectaries, likewise, ‘standing before Thee’ was equivalent to being members of the sect.38 But with or without such a particular understanding, Israel in its selfpresentation in Temple and scripture, and in older traditions and models of practice, is a sacrificially constituted community, consisting of bodies which understand themselves to subsist in a heritage of grace through receiving life from God, and maintained by God’s covenant of promise and blessing (‘a goodly heritage’, Ps 16: 6). Writings from Second Temple Judaism and later are unanimous that Israel is the recipient of God’s election, even though they differ on which groups constitute 38   1QH 15: 30–31 (7: 30–31), 12: 21 (4: 21) (texts in Martinez, Scrolls, pp. 335, 344; see discussion in Sanders, Paul, p. 315).

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‘Israel’, and whether ‘all Israel will be saved’ or only those classified (variously) as ‘the righteous’.39 Regardless of whether salvation depended on this or not, there was agreement that observance of the Law, with atonement when necessary, was essential to the life of the ‘righteous’ and the fulfilment of human living under God: ‘By three things is the world sustained: by the Law, by the [Temple]-service, and by deeds of loving-kindness.’40 The habitus of a sacrificing body took definite shape in the changing conditions of the Second Temple period, not only in Jewish territory but in the Diaspora. In a Hellenistic setting, the distinctive bodily mark of circumcision assumed special importance in the dedication of sons to Yahweh. The active fostering of traditional story, belief and practice in the synagogue and the home became a way of reproducing enculturated and disciplined bodies for the maintenance of Israel as a remembering and obeying community. Such discipline of Sabbath and food purity, in the development of oral law, served to relocate the standing ‘before the Lord’ from the single Temple with its priestly activity to the scattered bodies of those Jewish men and women who sought to realize in time and space the character of a body formed by Torah, constituted by sacrifice and embodying the sacred tradition. This habitus – developed over centuries from the time of the Exile and adopted at least by some, and to some extent by all who continued to be identifiable as Jews – encountered a massive threat in the Hellenistic period. Under intense cultural pressure, Jews adopted Greek clothes and foods, Greek patterns of artistic, social and political ordering, and attempted to disguise the circumcised body, publicly visible in the baths and athletic stadium, as shameful (1 Macc 1: 11–15). The violation of the Jewish body in the Maccabean period – when Jews were forced to eat pork, circumcised infants murdered, adults who refused to deny their identity as Law-observant Jews tortured and killed (1 Macc 1: 41–61; 2 Macc 6: 1–12) – raised new fears that the world might be ruled, not by Yahweh, but by malignant demons. It reawakened the spectre of children dying to feed the lust of foreign gods. Central in the written memory of this time is the story of the woman and her seven sons, all of whom chose martyrdom – a passing through the fire – rather than allow themselves to blaspheme (2 Macc 7; 4 Macc 8–18). Their deaths are explicitly aligned with the offering of Isaac on Mount Moriah (4 Macc 16: 20; cf. 14: 20; 15: 27–8). It was in this bitterly contested circumstance that Isaac’s offering came to be thought of as a voluntary self-offering, as attention moved from the obedience of the father, and fathers in general, to the active self-offering of the son, and sons. Emphasis shifted from questions about the cruelty of a father, or of God, and came to focus on the inner dynamic of commitment. Looking back on that short but crucial period, the authors of the Maccabean histories celebrated 39   m. San. 10: 1 (Danby, Mishnah, p. 397). See discussion in Sanders, Paul, pp. 147– 50, 180–82, 257–70, 333–46, 80–83. 40   m. Aboth 1: 2 (Danby, Mishnah, p. 446).

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the realization of a sacrificial body in extreme circumstances through which the threat to Israel’s continuity had been defeated and the providence of God affirmed. At the same time, the hope of resurrection emerged to make bearable the memory of those who had died. This brought assurance that the Jewish body would not be cast off by God but would live into the new age (Dan 12: 2; 2 Macc 6: 9, 14, 23, 29; 4 Macc 16: 24); and these deaths came to be understood sacrificially as betokening purification and blessing on Israel: they having become, as it were, a ransom for the sin of our nation. And through the blood of these devout ones and their death as an atoning sacrifice, divine Providence preserved Israel that previously had been mistreated. (4 Macc 17: 21b–22)

These were ideas which were to be developed significantly by the early Christians. 5. The Eschatological Crisis and the New Covenant Community What arises in the biblical traditions is the notion of the Jewish body as at once both a natural body and sacrificially constituted, through descent from the patriarchs within a particular tribe, and through the separative sign of circumcision, which together bind the body with rights and obligations concerning approach to YHWH and abstention from certain activities. The time of danger for the nation was symbolized by the lapse of ritual practices, with the effacing of ritual signs, such as allowing mixed marriages (Num 25: 1–9), or hiding the marks of circumcision (1 Macc 1: 14–15). By contrast with this consensus of the biblical tradition as it emerged in firstcentury Judaism, the Christian scriptures proclaimed a ‘new covenant community’ which had no natural existence, and which owed its existence entirely to a complex of divine sacrificial events: the death and resurrection of Christ entered into in baptism. Its members, as individuals and as social groupings (households) participated of course in the biological order of birth and death, the solidarity of humanity, but it was not this which in any sense effected membership of the new community, which existed in the tension between ‘fathers and sons’ and between the old age and the new. Only much later, in the emergence of a continuing Christian community and the practice of infant baptism, do we see a growing understanding that bodies can be born into the church – that is, born naturally as well as ‘born from above’ (Jn 3: 3). Until then, Christian membership and identity rested on a choice, a ritual commitment, made or refused. In this section we shall look at the New Testament’s witness to the resurrection of Jesus as the foundation sacrifice by which the new covenant community was brought into being. Noting especially motifs which occur in several strands of tradition, we shall reconstruct the New Testament’s presentation of the historical event of resurrection, and its theological significance as the inauguration of the

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new covenant community, together with the role of baptism as the ritual act by which community membership was gained. But first we shall note that the context of this sacrificial event was the consciousness, for Jesus’ disciples as for Israel at different times, of standing in a covenant with God now placed under terminal threat. Eschatology and Endangered Generation We have seen that the literature of the Jews expresses awareness of a pervasive threat to the continuity of the nation and of life itself, through narratives of the Akedah, the Passover and the Exile. In the centuries before Christ this awareness is contained in the narratives of the Maccabean crisis and in that bundle of symbols we know as ‘apocalyptic’ or ‘eschatology’. The perception, through several centuries, of a disjunction between the fragility of the world as experienced and the immoveable holy order of God expressed in Law and prophecy, could only be resolved by a purgative, and probably punitive, act of God. This is no new theme, but there is evidence of an intensifying awareness of the prevalence of evil and of the need for deliverance. As the texts offer various analyses of where and when and how the blow will fall, they also vary in their view of which groups will lie most particularly under judgement, and as to whether the author’s aim is to warn the threatened or to comfort and encourage those who, being in harmony with God, could hope to survive the catastrophe. Jesus’ own ministry springs out of that of John the Baptist, which consists centrally of warning about the consequences of individual and collective sin, in face of the imminent coming of the Holy One as judge. In his preaching, the envisaged destruction will evacuate the benefits of membership of Israel, considered as a natural phenomenon: being ‘sons of Abraham’ (by birth, or even by adoption) will be no defence (Mt 3: 9/Lk 3: 8). However, hope remains for those who seek forgiveness of sins by being baptized (Lk 3: 3/Mk 1: 4) and by bearing ‘fruits which befit repentance’ (Lk 3: 8–9/Mt 3: 9–10), ‘fruits’ like charity and justice, sharing of benefits and abstention from misuse of power (Lk 3: 10–14). The gospels witness to the Christian conviction that John was Jesus’ forerunner, and that his water baptism, while it was an effectual sign of repentance and forgiveness, was also a pointer to a ‘baptism in Holy Spirit’ which Jesus was to bring (Mk 1: 8, cf. Jn 1: 33). In the sayings source Q this Spirit baptism is depicted less as salvation than as the arrival of the judgement predicted by John: He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. (Mt 3: 11–12; cf. Lk 3: 17–18)

Like the Baptist, Jesus himself uttered warnings of divine judgement against those who opposed God by not responding to his mission (Lk 10: 10–15; 11: 29–32),

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and warnings to expect sudden judgement (Lk 12: 35–40; 12: 54 – 13: 9; 17: 20–37), directed especially against Jerusalem (Lk 13: 34–5, 19: 41–4; 21: 20–24). The same eschatological tone runs through Paul’s letters and he gives the same warning: ‘the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness’ (Rom 1: 18), a wrath directed equally against Gentiles and Jews, and which could be averted only through laying hold of God’s other disclosure, ‘the righteousness of God for all who believe’ (Rom 3: 22; compare also Gal 3: 10, 12; Heb 6: 4–6; Jas 5: 1–6; Rev 6). The sense of crisis prompted a return to the age-old covenant, with its promises, now apparently under threat, generating reflection, in several traditions, on the theme of endangered succession and childless marriages. The divine promise, made in face of Abraham’s extreme old age and the barrenness of Sarah’s womb, that they would have seed ‘as many as the stars of heaven’ (Gen 22: 17; cf. 15: 5) is recalled in Romans 4: 3, 17–25, where God is known by a new name: ‘He who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that are not’ (Rom 4: 17), a character confirmed by another name: ‘He who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead’ (Rom 4: 24; cf. Heb 11: 11–12). When Paul cites Isaiah’s promise that the childless wife will bear children (Is 54: 1; Gal 4: 27), what had been directed to Israel is now understood as given, through Christ, to the Gentiles instead. Luke’s story of the birth of a son to the aged Zechariah and Elizabeth echoes this patriarchal pattern of pregnancy through trust (Lk 1: 5–25, 39–45, 57–80), as does the prophetic song of Mary (Lk 1: 46–55). Of course the primary existential fact which underlies the eschatological crisis, reflected in these different traditions, is that of mortality. Only for mortal bodies is there need for the constantly vulnerable process of regeneration, together with the care to hand down true understandings of what constitutes being a people. Death is present in the gospels in the throngs of the sick seeking healing, and in those who have actually died, whom Jesus is able to restore to life. In Hebrews 2, death is the natural condition of ‘sharing blood and flesh’, and it is not angels but ‘the seed of Abraham’ in their weakness that Jesus comes to save by entering the condition of mortality ‘so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil’ (2: 14). It is as a mortal race in fragile relation with God that humanity feels its continuity under threat from the ravages of evil, manifest in the opposition of the Gentiles (Lk 21: 20–24; Rev 18), in the corruption of sin (Mt 3: 7–10; Lk 13: 1–5; Rom 2: 12–16; Eph 2: 1–3; Heb 6: 7–8); and in the threat of Satan and his demons (Mt 13: 28; Mk 5: 9–10; 9: 20–21; Rev 2: 9). The Generation of the Firstborn Among many images of hope in the NT (healing, purification, victory, kingdom), a powerful image of ritual regeneration of the people is a wedding feast. In John 2: 1–4 a wedding provides a model of salvation, with Jesus the true Bridegroom still incognito but revealing his glory by the way he turns water – the water of Jewish purification rites – into the wine of eschatological celebration (and compare Rev

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19: 6–9). This is the one final feast, which fulfils all the ‘marrying and giving in marriage’ which constitutes the old age (Mt 24: 38; see also the parables about weddings and feasting (Mt 22: 11–14; Lk 14: 7–24; also Mk 2: 19–20)). From this point on, the balance between mortality and eternity is fundamentally altered. The image speaks of unity and festivity, and depicts the new age as a timeless festival – for those who perceive ‘the hour’ and respond to the divine invitation. In parallel with this festal image is the proclamation that God’s means for securing the continuance of his people is a single decisive act of generation, the begetting of the Son of God, through whom will come a ‘new creation’, the new community of the ‘sons of God’. The begetting or manifesting of Jesus as ‘Son of God’ appears in various forms, connected with his birth, his baptism, his temptation or his resurrection.41 Each is a moment highly charged with danger as well as the possibility of grace. For the establishment of this new covenant, while it ensures continuity, is at the same time a rupture because it passes judgement on the old order. Both the danger and the grace are seen in the narratives of Jesus’ birth. Matthew’s Gospel begins with a solemn recitation of the genealogy (the genesis Mt 1: 1) of the Christ in which Jesus’ solidarity with Israel is laid down in his descent from Abraham and David. Yet the inclusion in the list of four female names from scripture, whose stories hint at irregularity and disruption in what is taken to be God’s due order,42 prepares the way for the divinely appointed irregularity of Jesus’ birth, who as messiah will both fulfil and overturn the genealogy of Israel, and who will be known as ‘God-with-us’ and ‘Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins’ (Mt 1: 23, 21). Joseph, when he takes Mary as his wife, is obeying the voice of God in contradiction to extreme demands of purity, and so placing himself in an eschatological order of obedience, the new order of the truly ‘righteous’ (Mt 1: 19).43 To this new order, now inaugurated, the Magi testify when they come and make the first New Testament act of sacrifice, worshipping God in the child and offering their gifts (2: 11). This new order is also from the first under threat from the powers of this world, as Herod attempts to stifle God’s 41   On birth, see below on Matthew, and Paul’s motif of the sending of the Son, who ‘comes about through woman, under the law’ (Gal 4: 4). On baptism, see the baptism narratives (Mk 1: 11/Lk 3: 22: ‘you are my son, the beloved with whom I am well pleased’), with their echoes of the messianic Ps 2: 7 ‘today I have begotten you’, and Is 9: 6 ‘a child has been born for us, a son given to us’. On temptation, see the revealing of Jesus’ sonship in resisting the threat of Satan in the wilderness (Mt 3: 17 – 4: 11; Lk 3: 22, 38; 4: 1–13). On resurrection, see Paul’s proclamation, using a traditional formula, that Jesus was ‘declared Son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead’ (Rom 1: 4). 42   See Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (rev. edn, London: Chapman, 1993), pp. 71–4. 43   Loader, Jesus’ Attitude, p. 155.

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new creation, killing instead the children of Bethlehem while the Son of God is protected by an all-seeing Providence (2: 12–18). The generation of a new community requires the birth of children, among whom ritual considerations tend to place special importance on firstborn sons. Accordingly, Jesus is named as ‘the firstborn’ (Mt 1: 25 NRSV mg; Lk 2: 7; Heb 1: 6); the ‘anointed one’ born of the lineage of David (Mt 1: 17; Lk 1: 27; 2: 4; Rom 1: 3) although outside and in opposition to the powers of this world; the one who will be ‘firstborn from the dead’ (Col 1: 18; Rev 1: 5). This is the one whose disciples are, collectively, ‘the firstborn’ (Heb 12: 23), those chosen by faith to dine with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in heaven while ‘the sons of the kingdom’ are thrown out (Mt 8: 11–12). Paul develops the image of ‘sonship’ gained by incorporation into ‘the Son’ through the power of Holy Spirit (Rom 8: 14–17, 19, 21; Gal 4: 4–7). These are those who have been ‘born anew’ or ‘born from above’ (Jn 3: 3), ‘born into a living hope … and an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled and unfading, kept in heaven for you’ (1 Pet 1: 4–5). Here again the texts witness to the notion of dual paternity, with priority accorded to legal (that is ritual and social) paternity, over biological. Although the idea is said to perplex Nicodemus (Jn 3: 4), the idea of adoption (huiothesia), originally a legal term, has a wide use in religious texts to refer to those initiated into spiritual sonship of a deity.44 Just as Jesus’ family is to be discerned, not according to natural affinity (despite Mk 6: 3, Jn 7: 3–10) but as ‘whoever does the will of God’ (Mk 3: 35), so Jesus’ sonship is from God by Joseph’s act of obedience (Matt 1: 24) and Mary’s (Lk 1: 38). Like his, the true paternity of believers can be discerned in their actions. When Jesus addresses the crowd in John 8 he asks whether their father is God (8: 38) or Abraham (8: 41) or the devil (8: 44)? Mere biological descent from Abraham is of no account, a point agreed by John (8: 39), the Q tradition of John the Baptist (Lk 3: 8) and Paul (Rom 4: 11–12; Gal 4: 21–31). Since the real sons of Abraham are not those descended from him naturally ‘in flesh’ but those who share his faith in the divine promise, Abraham’s heirs are those who are united to Christ in baptism (Gal 3: 29). They are to be known only by this sacrificial status and not at all by their former natural status as ‘Jew or Greek … slave or free … male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal 3: 28). The Christian church, like Israel, understood itself as a covenantal community founded on a sacrifice, the sacrificial self-offering of the one known as ‘the firstborn’ and ‘seed of Abraham’ (Col 1: 18; Heb 1: 6; Gal 3: 16). Such sonship confers danger. In Rom 8: 15 and Gal 4: 6 those who cry ‘Abba Father’ are thereby shown to be God’s sons; but they use this Aramaic form, not in imitating the Lord’s Prayer but in re-enacting Jesus’ anguished cry to his heavenly father in Gethsemane (compare Mk 14: 36, the only other NT occurrence of this phrase). The words are a ‘cry’,45 like the ‘loud cries’ (krauges ischuras) of Jesus ‘in the   See references in Betz, Galatians, pp. 208–9 (on Gal 4: 5).   krazomen, Rom 8: 15, krazon, Gal 4: 6.

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days of his flesh’ (Heb 5: 7; cf. Lk 22: 44). Only when they know in their bodies their need for God, as Jesus did, and can cry to God with urgent faith (Mt 27: 50; Mk 15: 27), do Christians truly know themselves as ‘sons’ of God. 6. The Cross and Resurrection as a Foundation Sacrifice The resurrection of Jesus is the extreme example of an event in which life is discovered in the face of death’s ultimate threat, and succession found in the midst of extinction. It is the pre-eminent example of an episacrificial concept. The texts show signs of an original set of experiences which called for radical reinterpretation of the world in sacrificial terms. From fairly early, Christian apologetics concentrated on emphasizing the historical reality of the resurrection (against suggestions that it was a fantasy or a fraud) so that theological interpretation was discouraged and displaced on to the cross, redeeming it from the status of a tragic and scandalous prelude to the salvific event of Easter, into the saving event itself. At the very least we need to consider Jesus’ death and resurrection together as a single sacrificial complex. The model for this heroic and transforming stance is the tale of the Maccabean martyrs, touched on briefly above. Death and Resurrection of the Martyrs It was the Maccabean crisis of 167–164 bce which provided the spur for the development of the idea of resurrection, otherwise found only in scattered hints and metaphors (Is 26: 19; Ezek 37: 1–14; Hos 6: 1–3), now united to the memory of holy deaths. The assault on Jewish traditions presented by the radical Hellenizing policy of the Seleucid King Antiochus Epiphanes IV resulted in the image of the ‘martyr’, the witness to God who stood firm against all pressure, even to death if necessary. It is an image celebrated in the Book of Daniel, retelling stories from the Babylonian exile about pious young men surmounting death through the public demonstration of their faith and their resolve. In its final chapter the book holds out the hope that those who have died for their faith will ‘awake to everlasting life’ and ‘shine like the brightness of the sky’ while others will awake ‘to everlasting contempt’ (Dan 12: 2–3). The histories of the Maccabees likewise contain these complementary motifs of noble death and resurrection. 2 Maccabees 6–7 contains a vivid account of the death of Eleazar, an elderly scribe, and of seven young brothers and their mother, who refuse to participate in pagan sacrifices and eat pig’s flesh, when required to make this sign of their conformity to the king’s rule. The cost of their refusal is death, and the reward, for those who die on the nation’s behalf, is resurrection, renewed bodily life at some future time: ‘the King of the universe will raise (anastasei) us up to an everlasting renewal (anabiosin) of life, because we have died for his laws’ (7: 9). This pagan assault on Jewish bodies is understood as merited because of Israel’s sins, but there is hope that after this ‘rebuke’ there will be reconciliation (7: 33), their death

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availing ‘to bring to an end the wrath of the Almighty which has justly fallen on our whole nation’ (7: 38). These deaths are therefore effectively a propitiatory sacrifice offered to appease the righteous anger of God. When this story is retold at length in 4 Maccabees 5–18, it is reshaped to fit the book’s theological purpose to present Judaism as a religion of reason, whose prime adherents prefer God to worldly life. God is now a beneficent providence, protecting Jews against the monstrous evil of pagan enmity. Like a virgin sacrificed to appease a ravaging monster, the seven brothers offer themselves up to death in obedience to God’s Law, putting behind them the sinful temptation of cowardice. The sacrificial language is more explicit: Eleazar the scribe (2 Macc 6: 18) is now ‘a priest worthy of the priesthood’ (4 Macc 5: 4; 7: 6), who puts himself in the place of death like Aaron removing the plague of the ‘fiery angel’ (7: 11; cf. Num 16: 46). He appeals to God to have mercy on the nation, on the basis of his act of obedience: ‘let our punishment (dike) suffice for them. Make my blood their purification (katharsion) and take my life in exchange for (or ‘as a ransom [antipsuchon] for’) theirs’ (6: 28–9). The references to Aaron and the nation’s punishment confirm the idea that Yahweh is being appeased, as well as sin expiated. The deaths of the brothers too are presented in religious terms. They are a ‘holy chorus’ (4 Macc 13: 8; 14: 8), whose bloody death is likened to an athletic tournament (agon, not forgetting that the games themselves were an aspect of Greek religion) in which they win the prize of ‘immortality in endless life’ (17: 11–16). They resolve to ‘consecrate’ themselves: since ‘God gave us our lives, let us use our bodies as a bulwark for the Law’ (13: 13), and in this faith they are compared to Abraham, to Isaac, to Daniel and others (13: 17; 16: 20–23; 18: 11–19) and described as ‘sons of Abraham’ (18: 23) and their mother as Abraham’s daughter’ (18: 20). By their death which has ‘purified’ (katharisthenai) the land, they are ‘consecrated’ (hagiasthentes), as a ransom (antipsuchon) and an atoning sacrifice (hilasmos) for the nation’s salvation (17: 20–22). Again, they are cast as a pure offering to avert divine displeasure, expiate sins and restore peace to Israel. The martyrs expect that they will ‘live to God’ with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob (16: 25), indeed they begin to take on immortality even in life (9: 22), and we are assured that ‘they now stand in honour before God (entimos kathestekas theo)’, having shown themselves to be truly ‘children of Abraham’ (17: 5), and ‘have received pure and immortal souls from God’ (18: 23). They stand in the continuing line of Abraham, affirming faith in Yahweh as the one who brings life out of death (18: 6–19). As the covenant sacrifice of a community of resurrection, this corporate death has many sides: it averts evil and expiates the nation’s sins; it consecrates these brothers to join the patriarchs as an enlarged first fruits offering, pointing to the destiny of all true Jews, to live with God.

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The New Testament Appropriation of the Martyrologies The narratives of the martyrs have a partial New Testament parallel in the death of Stephen (Acts 6: 8 – 8: 3), which imitates motifs like the persecutors’ irrational rage, the verbose and provocative defence, the martyrs’ ability to see already the heavenly realm they have chosen. But when we turn to the passion narratives which crown the structure of the gospels we are more aware of differences. If Jesus in these stories is a ‘martyr’, he is not on trial for what he believes but for who he is. His response to provocation is not defiant rhetoric but (especially in Mark and Matthew) an uncanny silence, and his torments are narrated with extreme brevity. Although he too dies at the hands of the Gentile ruler, it is presented as a judicial death subject to legal processes, and with the agreement of the authorized leaders of Israel. It could be said that Jesus, in his death, accepts the brand of shame put on him by his executioners, even to the point of confessing himself abandoned by God (Mt 27: 46/Mk 15: 34). So it is hard to find the materials for presenting this death as a witness (martus), and as either glorious or sacrificially pure. But Luke, in his gospel and in Acts, retains clear elements of a martyrology, displaying Jesus as ‘a prophet mighty in deed and word’ (24: 19), who dies a death that is visibly ‘righteous’ including offering prayer for his executioners and for his mourners (23: 28, 34). The Pauline writings seem to be citing common kerygmatic formulae when they say that Jesus ‘gave himself for our sins, to set us free from this present evil age’ (Gal 1: 4), ‘gave himself for us … to purify for himself a people’ (Tit 2: 14), ‘loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering (prosphora) and sacrifice (thusia) to God’ (Eph 5: 2). This idea of Jesus suffering a righteous death, although in conflict with some of the outward facts, grows in importance especially when Jesus’ self-giving is identified with the selfgiving of God, so that the act which appears a denial of God (blasphemy, curse, Gal 3: 13) can be seen as the necessary fulfilment of God’s plan, especially when accompanied by eschatological signs (Mt 27: 51–4; Mk 14: 38–9). Key scriptural passages also point to Jesus, even in his apparent shame, as one, like the Maccabean martyrs, vindicated by God and raised up into his presence: ‘the stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’ (Ps 118: 22; cf. Mt 21: 42; Acts 4: 11; 1 Pet 2: 7); ‘like a lamb silent before his shearer so he opened not his mouth … he had done no violence and there was no deceit in his mouth’ (Is 53: 7, 9; cf. Acts 8: 32–3; 1 Pet 2: 22–3). Like the martyrs, but more so, he was seen to be exalted and given life, not for himself alone, but for the salvation of the people: ‘the LORD said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I have put all your enemies under your feet’ (Ps 110: 1; Mt 22: 44 and parallels; Acts 2: 34–6; 1 Cor 15: 25; Heb 1: 13). In Paul’s proclamation, Jesus’ death was both destined by God and an intentional self-offering: he ‘gave himself’ (Gal 1: 4), being ‘sent’ for this purpose (Gal 4: 4–5). Betz expresses surprise that that the cross is not mentioned in Gal 4: 5 in relation to the redeeming those ‘under the law’, but the orbit of these

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ideas has little to do with the cross, directly, and much to do with resurrection.46 He who is ‘firstborn’ in his coming into the world (Lk 2: 7; Heb 1: 6) is ‘firstborn from the dead’ (Col 1: 18) and will be ‘firstborn among many brothers’ who are conformed, justified and glorified to be with him (Rom 8: 29–30). In the Letter to the Hebrews the presentation draws explicitly on sacrificial traditions and images to focus on what happens beyond the cross. His exaltation is both an ordination to priestly office in the heavenly Temple and at the same time the presentation of a sin offering of which he is both sacrificer and victim. When Jesus brings his sacrificial ‘blood’ into the Holy of Holies (the real heavenly one, not the architectural symbol ‘made with hands’) he enacts his priesthood. He thus effects a unique and final atonement and so inaugurates a new covenant relationship on behalf of the people, within which, as High Priest, he intercedes for the people and prepares to complete the salvation of those whom he has united to God (Heb 5: 5–10; 8: 1–2; 9: 11–14, 26–8). The Narratives of the Passion and Resurrection However, it is doubtful if such scriptural archetypes and concepts alone would have achieved the transvaluation of the cross from an object of shame to a cause of proclamation, without one or both aspects of the experiential syndrome we know as resurrection. It was this which led the Christians to a radical reapprehension of Jesus which at the same time transformed their understanding of the human body in which, as they proclaimed, he had died and been raised to new life. The NT asserts that Jesus had been encountered alive after his death; and that he was experienced by Christians as present, in some spiritual form, in their unfolding corporate life. Past encounter and present experience are not easy to keep apart. The resurrection narratives contained in the gospels interweave historical reminiscence with symbolic references to the church’s ongoing life – Eucharistic sharing, discipleship, debate about the nature of the risen body, mission and authority. The stories draw on traditions and memories of actual early experiences of Jesus encountered alive, at least by a few, and for a while; yet ‘resurrection’ was not primarily contained in the memory, collective or individual, and certainly not restricted to the kind of fragmentary experience contained in the gospel accounts. Apart from the ‘fact’ of the tomb found to be empty, and the bare list of appearances in 1 Corinthians 15: 3–8, there was no way to express the reality of resurrection that would not include aspects of the church’s ongoing experience of that reality. The fragmentary character of the data makes the narratives notoriously problematic. The need to present resurrection in narrative form may have been put upon the evangelistic communities by the felt need to tell a coherent story which confirmed their claim that the cross, despite appearances, was not a thing of shame but of triumph. Yet the telling of the Passion, soaked in scripture, ‘fraught with   Betz, Galatians, p. 208.

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background’ and heavy with tragic inevitability, created a standard of authoritative narrative by which the accounts of the empty tomb and the appearances to the disciples signally fall short. They are short, enigmatic, incoherent as a group, and betray signs of the tellers’ worldview. It may be that it was a mistake to attempt to do more than indicate ‘resurrection’ as an opening into a possibility beyond death. To present it as a narratable event within the same space–time dimensions as everything that preceded it placed an evident strain on the telling. Yet the very unconvincingness of the stories perhaps witnesses to an unignoreable reality which challenged both understanding and literary mastery. How well do these events, Jesus’ death and resurrection, meet the requirements for a ‘sacrifice’ (see p. 7 above)? To assess this, it will be helpful to set them alongside the martyrologies. The protest and death of the martyrs in 2 Maccabees was clearly a vivid action (#1), a self-offering (#4), made to God (#3) and in solidarity (#6) with God’s people; but these were not rituals (#2), nor did their violent deaths bring about transformation (#5) except in hope (2 Macc 6: 31; 7: 37–8). In 4 Maccabees, as noted above, we see both these missing elements, ritual (#2) and transformation (#5), strengthened by the use of the sacrificial language of priesthood, purification and atonement and the emphasis on the hope of resurrection to life with God. In that form the accounts became fully sacrificial in their character, capable of conveying a cosmology of eschatological faith (#7). Jesus’ death equally lacked ritual elements (#2), but the fundamental difficulty was to show that the crucifixion was an action done by him (#1), rather than one he suffered. How could a judicial execution, in a form which was associated with horror and shame and understood to place its victim under a curse (Deut 21: 22–3; Gal 3: 13), be in reality a holy offering of the self to God (#3, 4) done in solidarity with (and for the salvation of) the nation which was manifestly rejecting him (#6)? It seems an impossible transposition. All seven elements of a sacrificial act can in fact be found in the passion cycle recited by Mark and largely replicated by Matthew; but they are largely implicit, unstressed. Despite the strong statement in 10: 45 (‘a ransom for many’) Jesus’ willed acceptance of this death, and its being undertaken in relation to God and not in separation from him, are only made explicit at the supper (‘the Son of Man goes as it is written of him’, 14: 21), in Gethsemane (‘Not my will but yours be done’, 14: 36) and the centurion’s testimony (‘Truly this man was God’s son’, 15: 39). However, both elements of offering and transcendence (#4, 5) are strengthened in various ways by each successive revision in Matthew, Luke and John: in Matthew, see Jesus’ appeal to his Father and 12 legions of angels, and Pilate’s wife’s revelatory dream (Mt 26: 53; 27: 19); in Luke, Jesus’ final dedication to his Father (Lk 23: 49); in John, his knowledge of this act as fulfilling his commission from God (Jn 13: 1–3; 19: 11). So too there is a strengthening of the signs that this is done in, with and for a sinful world (#6): see in Luke his words of comfort for the women, the soldiers and the thief (Lk 14: 28, 34, 43), and in John his purpose of love for his own (Jn 12: 32; 13: 1; 17: 25–6). To the elements of ritual (#2) already present in Mark (the anointing for burial, the inauguration of the

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Eucharist, the ironic crowning, Mk 14: 3–8, 17–25; 15: 16–20) more are added by Matthew (Pilate’s hand-washing, Mt 27: 24–5)47 and by John (the Passover, 19: 24, 36, and most powerfully the foot-washing, Jn 13: 3–14), until the whole event can be seen as a sacrificial act embodying the gospel altogether (#7). Notably, the more the narratives emphasize that this is Jesus’ self-offering, the more they show him to be at one with the will of God, so that the initiator of this event is finally neither the Sanhedrin nor Rome, nor even Jesus, but God. In all four accounts, but inescapably in John, it is a sacrificial and redeeming action because it is ordained by God. Meanwhile, alongside the development of the passions, the motifs of Jesus’ exaltation and resurrection also developed as a necessary counterbalance, presenting a story of Jesus taken up by God (#3) and transformed (#5) into a new identity as Lord, Christ, King and High Priest; a story of Jesus encountered alive in a renewed body. In the light of that, Jesus’ death could be seen to be very much in solidarity with the needs of humanity and the purposes of God (#6), and called for a reconceiving of the believers’ worldview (#7). But how well does Jesus’ resurrection itself, taken apart from the cross, meet the requirements for a ‘sacrifice’? While it is plainly a transformation of the body (#5), with implications for the human perception of mortality (#6, 7), and a striking event (#1) which occurs in relation to God and gives hope of blessing (#3, 4), it meets the same question that we found (in Chapter 2) in relation to Jesus’ ministry, and now in relation to the cross: can it be a sacrifice at all if it is not a ritual (#2)? While the Empty Tomb story is surrounded by funerary rites (the tomb, the anointing, the watching and lamenting) all of these represent the assumption which resurrection denies: the finality of death. Only the formulaic angelic greeting in each gospel lifts this into a ritual sphere. However the appearance narratives give more opportunity for ritual development, with further greetings (Lk 24: 36; Jn 20: 21, 26); falling down in worship (Mt 28: 9, 17; Jn 20: 28); shared meals including the explicit breaking of bread (Lk 24: 28–31; cf. Mk 16: 14; Lk: 24: 42; Jn 21: 12–13); and a formal symbolic commissioning conferring authority to preach and teach (Mt 28: 20; Mk 16: 15; Lk 24: 46–9), absolve (Jn 20: 22–3) and baptize in the name of the Trinity (Mt 28: 19; cf. Mk 16: 16). In such ways the church came to understand the remembered experience of the radical transformation of Jesus’ body in ritualized terms, involved with patterns derived from Israel’s religion and its own unfolding life. Yet all these refer to the reception of the risen Jesus, not to the event of resurrection itself. In what genre or under what pattern could that unique and world-changing event be described? Certainly not with the ‘formality, fixity and repetition’ of a ritual.48 Like the power of the kingdom in Jesus’ ministry, like the cross, the resurrection must be understood as an inverted sacrifice, an episacrificial event, because it 47   Matthew develops the theme of righteous and innocent blood (27: 6–8, 24–5; also 23: 35) but this is about human death (of Judas, Jesus and the prophets), not sacrifice. 48   Bell, Ritual, p. 90.

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is a transformation which can only come from God, not from humanity, as an outpouring of grace bringing life precisely where it is not looked for, through the inauguration of a new order of regeneration in the midst of death. Despite these hints, then, it is not made complete as a sacrifice until the element of ritual finds expression in its appropriation in baptism. 7. Baptism and the Life of the Renewed Body Israel celebrates its founding sacrifice in the Passover, a divinely initiated event which became ritual as it was commemorated in ritual practice. This is true even if scholarship argues that the ritual practice shows signs of predating the divine event celebrated in the story of the Exodus, or if the event has been misdescribed through taking on some features of the rite – perhaps mistaking the strangeness of an alien ritual practice of nomads for the weirdness of God. In the church, resurrection is the unrepeatable divine act which was institutionalized in the Christian community in baptism, both a foundation rite and an initiation rite, drawing on features of both John’s baptism and circumcision. By taking place in the River Jordan, John’s baptism presented itself as a rite of entry into the new Israel for the new age, a renewal of the mass circumcision practised by Joshua at Gilgal when Israel crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land (Josh 5). In Christian practice it enacted the entry of an individual or household into ‘the name’ of Jesus and the new community. It was also an eschatological apotropaic rite, warding off the coming divine judgement by repentance and by entry into the place of death. It thus picked up the elements of liminality (crossing the border of the land) and of symbolic death (passing through the Jordan/Red Sea), present in the blood-rite of circumcision as well as in the Exodus tradition of Israel’s passage through the saving waters. When Paul argues that baptism is entering into the death, burial and resurrection of Christ (Rom 6: 2–4), he is defining baptism, not as a new or repeated aversion rite, but as a participation in one already enacted, claiming for the individual or group the aversion of evil and expiation from sin already achieved by Christ through the cross. But Paul is celebrating in baptism something more than a ‘sign’ of the new age. For him, resurrection is the actual transformation of the mortal body of Jesus, the reversal of the deathward trend established by Adam: not merely the resuscitation of a dead body but a change in his mode of being human which begins with death and moves outward into life. Baptism, which he understands as a symbolic death, is the mode of entry into this new order, a transformation which begins during mortal life and reaches beyond physical death into eschatological and eternal living. It is the necessary transformation of the nature of humanity if it is to be able to share in the divine glory.49 49   It should be self-evident that ‘symbolic’ does not mean ‘merely symbolic’: it is an act which represents and effects a transcendent reality. Cranfield, Romans, 1, pp. 298–

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Paul’s Christian claim was that the redeemed body is essentially different. Of course, superficially the Christian body was the same as all other human bodies; indeed in lacking the visible, physical distinctives of circumcision and the alimentary discipline of the food laws, it accepted, as compared to the Jewish body, ‘common’ status. In the same way its baptism was ‘common’ by occurring not in the Jordan, nor so far as we know in any sanctified space, but in ordinary water. But, for Paul, the link to Christ draws the body into the renewing of humanity through ‘the last Adam’ (1 Cor 15: 46). The ‘common’ Adamic body is characterized by the material which comprises it, ’adamah, dust, that is ‘flesh’, basar (in Greek, sarx), and also by its physical derivation from the first rebellious pair; and on both counts it is liable not only to physical corruption but to actual sin. But the Christian body is impelled by Holy Spirit which leads it away from rebellion and towards obedience and trust. In some sense it participates in the life of the one whose sarx was so transformed as to live after death as a ‘spiritual body’ (soma pneumatikon), subject to the dominion of neither death nor sin (Rom 6: 9–10), living in direct relation to the source of life, God. What was true absolutely of Christ is true relatively of all others, in whom the Spirit of God and the Adamic flesh co-exist in tension – a subject Paul addresses in Romans 8 and Galatians 5, with the need for conscious and positive choice, a need which recognizes both the hope of utter transformation, at least eschatologically (Phil 3: 21), and the shadow of a possible failure. What are the marks of the new covenant community? What are the signs of the body on the way to becoming glorified? Negatively the key indicator especially for converted Gentiles is avoidance of all those practices which to a Jew were plainly impure, ‘works of the flesh’ (Gal 5: 19–21). It is worth noting that ‘flesh’ here is by no means defined in sexual terms, and nor is the criterion ritual purity. Although Paul’s list of its ‘works’ begins with three terms that denote or connote sexual transgressions (fornication, impurity, licentiousness), it proceeds to religious offences (idolatry, sorcery) and ends with forms of excessive consumption (drunkenness, carousing), but before the last pair it lists no less than seven forms of social disorder (enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy), amounting to half of the whole. So although the arrangement is apparently ‘chaotic’,50 it serves to indicate that its focus is communal rather than individual, and social rather than religious. Positively, several criteria are used. There is the ‘fruit of the Spirit’ (Gal 5: 22–3), a single or composite ‘fruit’ spelled out in nine qualities which arguably form three groups of three: ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control’.51 Notably, these do not conform to lists of 300, argues for a fourfold sense in which ‘you have died to sin’. He calls them juridical (archetypal would be a better term), baptismal, moral and eschatological. In each case death implies an opening into a reality beyond death. 50   Betz, Galatians, p. 283. 51   Ibid., pp. 286–8; Longenecker, Galatians, pp. 258–60.

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conventional ‘virtues’ to be achieved by moral effort, and are rather benefits which flow from allowing the Christ life to take shape in a person and a community. Significantly it begins with ‘love’ and ends with ‘self-control’.52 There is also the triad of ‘faith, hope and love’, which appears in various orders in different places (1 Cor 13: 13; 1 Thess 1: 3; 5: 8; Col 1: 4–5). Of these ‘faith’ stands for initial belief and also ongoing trust in the work of God in Christ (although for Heb 11: 1–3 it is a mode of perception), and ‘hope’ stands for affirmation that grace is indeed at work leading to assurance of future benefits. Both point to an end, which can be looked at equally as ‘love’ or as ‘identification with Christ’. Christ as the embodiment of divine love, who is known when disciples identify with him through love, is arguably personified in the hymn in 1 Corinthians 13. This understanding is a key theme of the Farewell Discourses in John 13–17; and of the Philippian Christ hymn (Phil 2: 6–11) set in the context of pastoral concern for the form of a communal life (politeuesthe, Phil 1: 27) and its shared mindset (phroneo, Phil 2: 2, 5) modelled and oriented in the self-giving of Christ. Such identification is not necessarily shown by possessing the supernatural ‘powers’ that might be expected of an eschatological body, such as miracles or tongues or visions. Paul was very suspicious of such conspicuous religiousness (1 Cor 12: 4–11; 14 passim), though Luke promotes belief that the Holy Spirit causes power beyond the usual to be visibly present. The New Testament in general does not expect Christians to be healers or prophets, although space is there for both. It is acknowledged that both are found outside the church too – which may be genuine exercises of spiritual power (Lk 9: 49–50) but are also suspect because they tend, like gnosis, to puff up (1 Cor 8: 1). What is emphasized is a love of the Christian brethren which orients lives on God through mutuality, leading to redeemed living – a lifestyle able to pass through a passion or any other test into God’s kingdom. Paul and his disciples offer a hermeneutic of this redeemed body, for example in the analysis of body parts and their interdependence (1 Cor 12). In Ephesians 6 the ‘armour of God’, despite the military metaphor, is really a set of ritual vestments for engaging in sacrificial living. Ephesians 4 develops the body image in two ways: Christ as the ‘head’ to whom the body looks (4: 15), and the growth of ‘ligaments’ through faith and love and the exercise of ‘gifts’ into the full stature of Christ (4: 11–16). This bodily growth is the life of the sacrificial body in the process of being transformed. Romans 8: 5–17 speaks of the body in the tension between the Spirit (or ‘spirit’?) and the ‘flesh’, and looks to a transforming consciousness rooted in the Spirit; 2 Corinthians 3: 18 – 4: 6 speaks of a mode of ‘seeing the Lord’ which transforms the beholder ‘from glory to glory’, into ‘a new creation (2 Cor 5: 17). Other texts speak of a renewed mind (Phil 1: 9; 3: 15), heart (Heb 10: 16), mouth (Col 3: 8) and body (Phil 3: 21). The model for all these texts is ‘Christ’, exemplar of obedience and of the mystery of wisdom, the Christ   Betz Galatians, p. 286; Longenecker, Galatians, p. 260.

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who manifests divine love and who, identified with the Christian community, is recognizable by the marks of ‘peace’ and ‘love’ (Col 3: 1–4, 14–15). A significant feature of eschatological consciousness is that it sees only one determination of the future. If the parousia is imminent, what point is there in continuing to practise humanly, in work, or family lives, or citizenship? In the early church, the threat to generation came from the (factually mistaken) belief that fleshly, ‘natural’ generation was about to be displaced by the spiritual order. Hence we hear of Christians who have stopped working, and are chided by Paul for doing so; yet Paul’s one extended commentary on marriage (1 Cor 7) is plainly governed by his similar perception of the uselessness of marriage in light of the shortness of the time. It is notable for our theme of generation that while the begetting, bringing to birth and caring for spiritual children is a repeated theme (Rom 8: 19–23; Gal 4: 5, 19, 31; 1 Jn 2: 1), the bearing of actual children is an activity hardly discussed in the New Testament (but see 1 Tim 2: 15; 5: 10, 14). Children figure chiefly among those things to be left behind (Mk 10: 29–30 pars.). We might wonder whether the ‘innocents’ of Matthew 2: 16–18 are a symbol that children are expendable – in the wrong sense, ‘sacrificeable’ – before the inevitability of the new spiritual order. But when the gospels record Jesus welcoming children and (despite the efforts of his disciples) blessing them (Mk 10: 13–16 and parallels), when he placed a child in the midst as a sign of God’s kingdom and commended the care of ‘little ones’ (Mk 9: 35–7, 42 and parallels), we see the evangelists recognizing that the hallowing of children, those who are ‘little ones’ before God (whether actual children, or symbols of discipleship),53 is constitutive of the new age. Does Jesus’ ‘receiving’ of children stand for a church which set no store by producing its own offspring but took care for children in need, perhaps orphans exposed and left to die?54 In the same way all those who society’s structures declare (explicitly or implicitly) to be expendable, are greeted by Jesus, given help and food; according to the parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Mt 25) it is by the way they treat such as these that Christians’ places in the kingdom will be determined. The Haustafeln in the epistles also witness to a Christian awareness of the continuity of household life, and the importance of fathers respecting and caring for their children as well as children obeying fathers. The inclusion of these codes in the New Testament appears to be premised on the continuance of the natural world (at least for the time being), as are the appeals to Christians to be good citizens (Rom 13: 1–7; 1 Pet 2: 13–17). They signify that the new community established by Jesus’ covenant sacrifice is not an affair of adult males only; that   See Joel Marcus, Mark 8–16 (Anchor Bible, London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 675–6, 681–3, 688–9, 714–18. Arguments that ‘let the children come to me’ (Mk 10: 14 and parallels) is a coded reference to infant baptism cannot be sustained (Marcus, Mark 8–16, pp. 714–5). 54   See Marcus, Mark 8–16, pp. 681–3. For condemnation of the practice of killing (one’s own) children, see Ep. Barn. 20: 2; Did. 5: 2. 53

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women and children are full members of this community (at least in theory, however the practice developed historically). Jesus the servant–son (pais) who was condemned and cast out by the world – but raised up by God – shows how central is the welcoming of the child and the outcast to the Christian understanding of what makes us human and what opens human life to divinity. The same may also be said of the awareness of the author of Ephesians that there are patriai, patriarchal families, whose fullness lies in their closeness to the divine father (Eph 3: 14), and that the dynamic of Christian life is not waiting but growing, losing the weakness and irresponsibility of children to ‘grow up into Christ’ (4: 15), the measure of the ‘mature man’ (4: 13; cf. Heb 5: 8–9). This coheres with the letter’s doctrine of anakephalaiosis: the redeeming of the world, not by cutting off evil, destroying it, but by the fulfilling of God’s incomplete plan, gathering up ‘all things’ into a new and higher order (Eph 1: 10).55 8. Summary The sacrifices considered in this chapter are of various sorts: expiations, gifts and meals; vegetable offerings and animal offerings and vows; but together they form a group, too often ignored, in which the episacrificial act of God as founder and preserver of the common life is affirmed and celebrated. Almost every element discussed here is clearly a response to the perception of a life-giving action of God, creating and recreating the community in the face of pervasive threats from barrenness, from the compulsion or commandment to offer children in sacrifice, from the threat of extinction under pressure from other nations. For Israel, biological existence cannot be separated from sacrificial existence as the community of God’s blessing, signed by the blood of the covenant (Gen 15, Ex 24) and of circumcision, and reaffirmed in the Passover. Thus the Israelite body, living ‘before God’, is special, and yet also shares the common circumstances of humanity. The New Testament likewise presents the Christian body as a sacrificial body, a ritually constituted body, but one existing not in the natural order of kinship, life and death but in the eschatological symbolic order of the new covenant community which comes into existence through the episacrificial gift of the body of the Son of God, raised up into new life. The rituals which constitute this new community, this ‘body of Christ’, and individuals as its members, are the cross and resurrection (unrepeatable foundation rites enacted by God) and baptism as the act of appropriation through the power of the Spirit. The cross, by itself, can be considered as a gift sacrifice and a whole offering (‘olah), Jesus’ total self-dedication to God’s purposes; the resurrection by itself is God’s act of creating a new people, and therefore a covenant sacrifice in Jesus ‘blood’ (Ex 24) inaugurating a state of communion. Because entry into this state requires   Ernest Best, Ephesians (ICC, Edinburgh: Clark, 1998), pp. 139–43.

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the setting aside of sins, Jesus’ death and resurrection (and later his death by itself) can be also considered an atoning sacrifice. Baptism likewise is firstly a dedicatory sacrifice, a rite of passage by which the individual enters into the divine purpose for his or her life. This entails giving up a claim to ‘life’ in the natural sense and is seen by Paul as a symbolic mode of entry into the death and resurrection of Jesus. It too is a transforming gift of the self, embodying an alternative cosmology, the new humanity revealed in Christ, in a lived body which seeks to display the marks of participation in redeemed living: the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5: 22–3) and a common life directed by the distinctive phronesis, the way of thinking and acting for others, set forth in Christ (Phil 1: 27 – 2: 11).

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Recapitulation

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Recapitulation

On Theological Interpretation As we turn from ‘explorations’ of biblical themes to ‘dialogues’ with strands in modern theology it is appropriate to pause to reflect on the shape and purpose of the argument of this book. In the conclusion to Chapter 1 (p. 29) I proposed to ‘incorporate analysis of historical and cultural developments, and exegesis of scripture, into a theological interpretation of scripture itself and of the place and meaning of sacrifice in Christian tradition’. This proposal needs further explication in the light of the last three chapters. As Marcus Bockmuehl argues, the phrase ‘theological interpretation’ may have several meanings. It may describe no more than a style of exegesis, perhaps one conscious of theological as well as historical or literary issues arising in texts,1 or, at the opposite extreme, it may be what Alan Torrance calls the ‘theologistic fallacy’ of allowing biblical assertions to be adopted uncritically into modern discourse.2 What I have in mind is neither extreme, but rather a process of theological interaction with the text. This is a process, ‘in which the living and lived word of Scripture shapes both exegesis and theology reciprocally, and in which dogmatics articulately engages and in turn illuminates the hearing of that word’.3 That is to say, I assume that every interpreter brings theological presuppositions to a reading of the biblical text and that interpretation is not complete until it yields theological results. Neutrality of approach is not a human possibility, although it is a legitimate and necessary precedural aim, through such objectivity as the scholarly guild can collectively achieve. Neutrality of outcome is possible (for example when we use the text to deduce features of Hebrew grammar), but only as a means to a larger end, falling short of complete interpretation of the Bible’s essentially theological character. More specifically, any genuine reading of the Bible has to allow itself, not only to explain what it finds, but to be shaped by it, and therefore must assign to this text provisional authority.4

1   Marcus Bockmuehl, ‘Introduction’, in M. Bockmuehl and Alan J. Torrance (eds), Scripture’s Doctrine and Theology’s Bible: How the New Testament Shapes Christian Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), pp. 7–13, citing pp. 7–8. 2   Alan J. Torrance, ‘Can the Truth Be Learned? Addressing the “Theologistic Fallacy” in Modern Biblical Exegesis’, in Bockmuehl and Torrance, Scripture’s Doctrine, pp. 143–63. 3   Bockmuehl, ‘Introduction’, p. 8. 4   See John Dunnill, ‘Theological Interpretation: Reading the Bible as if We Believe It’, in Scott Cowdell and Muriel Porter (eds), Lost in Translation: Perspectives from the

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One way of practising such a reciprocal engagement with the Bible is the indwelling of its world through a ‘suspension of disbelief’ which allows it to colour and illuminate our worldview. How would it be to see the world like this? L. Gregory Jones and Luke Timothy Johnson call for readers to develop a ‘Scriptural imagination’.5 Johnson illustrates what this means through: the metaphor of “the way” [as] a basic metaphor that organizes a complex system of subsidiary images and metaphors that depend on its maintaining its radical character for their own life and effectiveness. The metaphor also contains an implicit but comprehensive view of reality.6

It is as such a ‘basic metaphor’ that this book concerns itself with sacrifice as a fundamental motif which works through many different biblical institutions, narratives, images, practices and theologies. As a feature of many cultures, whether ancient and modern, and whether simple or sophisticated, but all strikingly different from our own, the exercise of imagination and the willingness to indwell it as a ‘possible world’ is indispensable if we are to allow it to enlarge our understanding of what may be.7 Questions about how we engage or resist the ‘comprehensive view of reality’ which sacrifice presents will occupy us in chapters 5–8, but in chapters 1–4 the aim was to provide a description and exploration of this large-scale set of phenomena. The methods used sought to match the task in hand. Although the biblical presentation in chapters 1–3 had a general historical drift, in moving from earlier to later, and from Old Testament to New, there was no consistent attempt to trace historical chains of causality; likewise, the procedure was not mainly through exegesis of particular texts, although exegetical conclusions were drawn on frequently and can be seen to underlie every stage of the argument. For purposes of analysis, the Bible was treated in these chapters as a field of cultural phenomena, changing over time, and displaying diversity between different traditions. To explicate this field, overlapping patterns of religious practice and ideology were first drawn from ethnological studies in order to ensure that we are not reading Doctrine Commission of the Anglican Church of Australia (Thornbury, Victoria: Desbooks, 2004), pp. 71–89. 5   L. Gregory Jones, ‘Theology and Scriptural Imagination’, in L. Gregory Jones and James J. Buckley (eds), Theology and Scriptural Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 1–2; Luke Timothy Johnson, ‘Imagining the World Scripture Imagines’, in ibid., pp. 3–18. 6   Luke Timothy Johnson, ‘Imagining’, p. 14. 7   Paul Ricoeur speaks of ‘a proposed world, a world I may inhabit and wherein I can project my own most possibilities’ (‘Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation’, in ibid., Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis S. Mudge (London: SPCK, 1980), pp. 73–108, citing p. 102).

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biblical sacrifice in a vacuum, and to enable us to identify underlying trends with or without specific sacrificial terminology. These analyses, set out in Chapter 1, were then used to offer a ‘thick description’ of various aspects of the biblical materials, that is, to provide interpretation of some of the ‘socially established structures of meaning’ gathered under this heading.8 The result is hopefully to expand the understanding of sacrifice, at the very least challenging the widespread reduction of sacrifice to animal sacrifice, death and sin offering, and offering an alternative account of sacrifice which draws out some positive and life-enhancing features. From the dynamic of gift and meal offerings, I trace an underlying pattern of an ‘economy of grace’, in which humans interact with the divine in a cycle of bodily receiving and thanksgiving: here YHWH is the God who creates the world and gives harvest to the people. We noted the downplaying of this conjunctive and largely unreflective pattern in the theologically inspired distancing of Israel from agricultural religion associated with the gods of the nations. We noted also its revival in thoroughly theistic and eschatological form by Jesus, and its variation into the unfolding Eucharistic worship of the Christian community. By putting that conjunctive strand first, we were able to see how the dominant Levitical emphasis on purification, with its complex and ubiquitous symbolism of sin, defilement and cleansing, is best understood as a corrective element within an overall relationship with divinity: here YHWH is the holy God who demands holiness of the people. We saw Jesus criticizing the dominance of this purificatory demand in proclaiming the episacrificial and eschatological act of God. And we saw the theologians of early Christianity, especially Paul and the author of Hebrews, adopting it, though never alone. In a third pattern, we explored the unfolding of Israel’s awareness of itself as a community in time, both enjoying and struggling with its special covenant relationship with the divine, celebrated in circumcision and firstborn sacrifice and focused in key events like the Akedah and the Passover: here YHWH is the God who acts in history to protect, renew and guide the people. We saw how the New Testament proclaimed the cross and resurrection of Jesus as the surprising ground of a ‘new covenant’ for a new community empowered by the Spirit of God. The Spiritualization of Sacrifice A pervasive theme in sacrifice as a metaphor, even in literary texts, is the way it encodes a theological understanding of the body as the means by which humanity relates to divinity, in the preparing and offering of gifts, in the sharing of meals, in feasts and fasts, in defilement and cleansing and all the rest. Is it possible for us, divorced from these practices, to indwell such an understanding of the self? In Chapter 8 I will contend that it is, but only after interacting, in chapters 5–7, with three strands of current thinking that are consciously or unconsciously antagonistic   Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 6, 12.

8

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to the possibility of indwelling such an understanding. However, it is clear that the difficulty of doing so is far from new. A significant feature of the material surveyed in Part I as a whole, as among sacrificial practices in the ancient world in general, is a progressive ‘spiritualization’ of sacrifice, seen in a change of emphasis from physical practice to the appropriate internal dispositions, from substance to symbol, from action to words.9 Such changes may arise from an ethical critique of particular practices, most notably human sacrifice: the ‘virtual’ sacrifice of the firstborn, through an offering of an animal or money, goes back as far as we can discern. Other changes come over time as circumstances demand. It used to be said that Israel in Jesus’ day had abandoned any real attachment to the Temple and its worship, but it seems now that this was a theologically inspired misreading. Nonetheless, we know that at Qumran, where the community held that there was no real Temple in Jerusalem, good deeds were regarded as acceptable substitutes for sacrificial practice; the same concession was made, for reasons of distance rather than ideology, in the communities of the Jewish Diaspora, where the Temple tax took the place of the thrice-yearly pilgrimage feasts. Such an ethicizing tendency inevitably weakens the bodily engagement with worship, so that over time faith becomes more a matter of private mental resolution than of public action or shared experience. This disengagement from the body is all too familiar in the modern world in the wake of the Reformation and the European Enlightenment. What is physical comes to seem not merely neutral but positively unspiritual, and an easy dismissal of sacrifice and sacrament is a feature of modern Christian worship as well as secular consciousness. However, rituals are created as well as destroyed, and worshippers still need bodies and use them to affirm or deny the grace of God flowing through the created order. The three chapters in Part II will look at some of the distortions which arise in the modern era when a spiritualized perspective dominates the way sacrifice, religion and the body are perceived. They will suggest that there is more to be said.

9   Stephen Finlan, ‘The Spiritualization of Sacrifice in Paul and Hebrews’, in Eberhardt, Ritual and Metaphor, pp. 83–97.

Part II: Dialogues

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Chapter 5

The Victimized Body: A Dialogue with René Girard The term ‘sacrifice’ immediately suggests two ideas to readers in Western cultural contexts: the idea of loss, giving up, necessary surrender; and the idea of killing, the bloody death of an animal (or even a human) in a context of strange rites and religious compulsions. Both convey such strongly negative connotations that to say ‘sacrifice is a good thing’ would be to appear merely perverse. Since sacrifices are not generally practised in the mainstream of Western cultures, the effort of imagination required to envisage circumstances in which they were a part of common experience and had a completely different connotation may be too much to ask. The connection of sacrifice with what is ‘primitive’, ‘pagan’ and ‘barbarous’ runs very deep, perhaps beyond the reach of informed or rational argument. The earlier chapters have tried to show that sacrifice, far from being ‘primitive’, arises in fact at a comparatively late stage of civilization as a normal and natural vehicle of the interaction of economic, social and spiritual life. It is characterized generally by gifts and meals, with killing as a necessary feature of animal sacrifice, and therefore conspicuous and costly, but not valued in itself. Through a fourfold typology, we can see sacrifice as both disjunctive and conjunctive; both personal and impersonal; and each of these takes many forms. Among all these my argument has emphasized the place in Judaism and Christianity (but not only there) of the human experience of embodiment, ritualized through participating in a relationship with the deity mediated by these very physical offerings of grain, wine and blood. By exploring three modes of Israelite sacrifice – communal meals, expiatory purity rites and foundation sacrifices – and their transformations in the New Testament, I have tried to show what is lost when we reject this aspect of our culture. The institutions of sacrifice dramatize the doctrine of creation and redemption; they affirm the place of the divine in the human sphere and reject every merely materialistic account of human being, and equally every Gnostic account too. Through its actions and images sacrifice has a necessary place in an understanding of life which is large enough to incorporate death. But in recent decades the long-standing prejudice against sacrifice has been reinforced by strong arguments depicting it as a manifestation of aggressive violence. In the writings first of Walter Burkert,1 then of René Girard and his 1   Burkert, Greek Religion; W. Burkert, Homo Necans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983 (1972)); W. Burkert, ‘The Problem of Ritual Killing’ in R.G.

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followers,2 the connection with violence has been used to mount a powerful antisacrificial argument with theological overtones. Feminist writers also have picked up the Enlightenment critique with new fervour, seeing sacrifice as a pernicious aspect of patriarchy. Some of these writers (Burkert, Julia Kristeva)3 join sacrifice to Christian theology to attack both; others (Girard, Hamerton-Kelly, Gil Bailie, Carter Heyward)4 criticize sacrifice in the interests of presenting a non-sacrificial Christian theology. Others again, like Maurice Bloch,5 are able to link sacrifice to violence while taking a generally more positive view. Burkert and Bloch will be discussed below, while the feminist critique will be examined in the next chapter. But first we need to examine the general case for saying that sacrifice is intrinsically and centrally characterized by violence. 1. Girard and Mimetic Violence René Girard is referred to these days variously as an anthropologist, a philosopher, or even as a theologian, but while his primary work was in the area of literary criticism, his training was in medieval history.6 His writings on the question of sacrifice and violence are contained substantially in three works,7 but the ideas Hamerton-Kelly (ed.), Violent Origins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 149–76. 2   For Girard, see below; the followers include Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992); Bailie, Violence Unveiled; and Williams, Bible, Violence and Sacred. 3   For Burkert, see above; Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (ET, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984 (1974)); also Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 199–200, on the place of women in ‘the order of sacrifice and/or language’, and the ‘essentially sacrificial relationship of separation and articulation of differences …’. 4   For Hamerton-Kelly and Bailie see above; Carter Heyward, Saving Jesus from Those Who Are Right (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999). 5   Bloch, Prey into Hunter. 6   Michael Kirwan, Girard and Theology (London: Clark, 2009), pp.  4–6. Julia Kristeva cites Girard as a representative ‘anthropologist’, using his critique of sacrifice, without further examination, as an authoritative refutation of all sacrifice as violence (Kristeva, Revolution, pp. 75 and 250, n. 100). 7   René Girard, Violence and the Sacred; ibid., The Scapegoat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986 (1982)); and ibid., Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987 (1978)); along with ibid., Job: The Victim of His People (London: Athlone, 1987 (1985)), ibid., I See Satan Fall like Lightning from the Sky (New York: Orbis, 2001 (1999)) ibid., Sacrifice (ET, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011 (2003)) and now ibid., Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre (ET of Achever Clausewitz (Paris: Carnet Nord, 2007), East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010).

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are foreshadowed in his early critical essays.8 It was his examination of symbolic and psychological patterns appearing in modern fiction and Greek tragedy that led him into fruitful study of broad anthropological questions, which in turn led him into the fields of biblical scholarship and Christian doctrine. Responses to his developing theory have come from scholars in all these fields, but also from economics, politics, legal studies, biology and more. There is no doubt that his ideas, with their claim to provide an account of the foundation of human culture as a whole, have been found immensely suggestive from many points of view.9 Girard’s theory is in fact modular, built up from four (or, some would argue, three) largely separable components.10 These show increasing specificity, with a corresponding decrease in general applicability. While the first two components have attracted comment from the full range of disciplines mentioned above, and the third has been widely noted, the last, containing Girard’s Christian turn, has excited little interest outside theological circles. Although the higher, more specific, levels are dependent on the lower, the logical links between the four levels are the weakest aspect of his theory, and have not convinced all readers. It is perhaps better described as a loose constellation of theories, rather than a single structure.11 The first component is nothing less than a theory of the origin of evil in human affairs, which Girard attributes to the process of mimetic rivalry. Put simply, he argues that rivalry is a self-generating feature of human life. The self’s identity emerges as a reflection of that of others; when competition for a common object occurs, the dynamic is generally competition itself, desire responding to desire in the imitative or mimetic rivalry of the self and the other, rather than the intrinsic desirability of the object. There may in fact be little desire for the object itself. Consequently, when one object is attained or removed people will habitually fall into competition for some other, perhaps quite different, object. This account, developed on ethnological, literary and psychological grounds, has a high degree 8   R. Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965 (1961)); R. Girard, ‘To Double Business Bound’: Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 9   See, for example, the interdisciplinary essays in Paul Dumouchel (ed.), Violence and Truth (London: Athlone Press, 1988); and the recent collection by Ann W. Astell and Sandor Goodhart, Sacrifice, Scripture and Substitution: Readings in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). 10   Mark Juergensmeyer identifies three key ideas, in effect conflating the second and third components as set out here (M. Juergensmeyer (ed.), Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World (London: Cass, 1991), pp. 3–4). Kirwan, Girard, pp. 21–4, likewise speaks of a ‘tripartite theory’. The significance of this conflation, in the view of this study, will emerge below. 11   Other summaries of Girard’s theories can be found in Williams, Bible, Violence and Sacred, pp.  6–14; Kirwan, Girard, pp.  20–32; Raymund Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats?: Violence and Redemption in the Bible (Leominster: Gracewing, 2000 (1987)), pp. 1–25.

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of plausibility and application: it can be illustrated both from the behaviour of small children and from that of international superpowers. Whether on its own it is sufficient to explain (or even describe) the genesis of social disorder must be doubted, and this question may be the first hint that what we have here is a theological construct under another name, a reworking of the Christian doctrine of original sin. In the second component, Girard argues that the rivalry generated by mimesis, left to itself, undermines social order, leading to loss of conceptual differentiation beyond the scope of religious or other institutions to contain. This is what he calls the sacrificial crisis, a state of anarchy in which unity can only be achieved by an act of ‘sacrifice’, by which he means violence directed on to a single (probably arbitrary) victim, the ‘surrogate victim’ on whom vengeance falls as a substitute for the whole group. Girard argues, rather as Freud does in Totem and Taboo,12 that this event has actually occurred, and that the calm and unanimity which result cast upon this victim a transcendent glow, so that the ‘monster’ becomes a ‘god’, venerated as the bringer of peace. This spontaneous achievement of social order with religious overtones is the moment of ‘hominization’. Humanity leaves the animal realm in the discovery of the power of violence. Here again, the psychology carries some plausibility even if the question remains whether what is envisaged is really a single chance historical happening, or a mythical event, or a genetic programming. The third component, and the one which particularly concerns us here, is the identification of that so-called ‘sacrificial’ killing as the beginning of religious institutions. As noted above, this is often treated as an aspect of the second component, but the point of origin and the continuation through time are of a very different order. In Girard’s view, ritual systems develop to recall, reiterate and when necessary reanimate the salvific power of the first killing, by instituting sacrificial killing at the heart of the social order. In time, the myths surrounding the sacrifice generate traditions of drama and literature, and the sacred ordering power of the rite generates systems of justice and political authority. From this routinized symbolic re-enactment of an act of arbitrary vengeance springs the whole of human culture (religion, drama, law) and within it the latent violence which maintains social cohesion from the beginning down to our own day. Girard’s theory, developed largely in relation to classical tragedy and anthropology, is given a significant twist in the second part of Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, when it is applied to biblical examples, out of which emerges the fourth and last theoretical component. This is the argument that despite the apparently universal scope of the proposal so far, there exists an alternative to the way of rivalry, an alternative hinted at in aspects of the Hebrew scriptures and fully revealed by Jesus of Nazareth when he accepted the role of 12   Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, in James Strachey et al. (eds), Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955 (1913)), vol. 13, pp. 1–161, esp. pp. 132–46.

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surrogate victim on behalf of others, thus demonstrating the possibility of the ‘non-violent kingdom’ he preached. This then becomes a counter-moment to the act of violence on which society depends. However, the New Testament’s use of sacrificial language to proclaim the significance of Jesus and the cross represents for Girard an early reversion to the now exploded conceptuality of violence, a reversion from which the church has never freed itself.13 Before turning to examine the third component and the question of sacrifice, something more should be said about the first two, since it is on his claim to have created an explanatory theory of violence, and of violence as the root of human culture, that Girard’s reputation largely depends. The theory has intuitive appeal and can be illustrated easily in literature and in life: ‘It is sobering to note how frequently societies turned to exclusion and violence, expulsions, lynchings and pogroms, often justified by religious imagery, to cement the social order.’14 But it is often objected that the theory of ‘mimetic rivalry’ is constructed on an unscientific basis; that it alludes to psychoanalysis and social anthropology without committing itself to definite procedures or standards of empirical verification; so that while it may give a recognizable description of how things work, in certain social settings, it offers no viable explanation. Identifying the ‘roots of violence’ is a large task, and it has to be noted that Girard sidesteps detailed psychological and sociological analysis, in favour of observations from literature. While those observations are acute in themselves, and lead to persuasive readings of particular texts, we may ask whether this is a sufficient basis for a ‘global theory of religion’. Conflict does appear to hold a particular fascination which is hard to break, but where does this come from? What Girard offers is a Saussurean analysis of violence as endemic to relationships, in opposition to psychological or geneticist (or indeed theological) accounts of innate desire, but it needs to be tested in a range of situations.15 Some have objected to the pessimistic tone of his writing. Is violence all there is? From a psychological perspective, it is argued that we need to distinguish between two very different kinds of mimesis: the intrinsically rivalrous mimesis of ‘emulatory desire’ and the positive ‘imitative desire’ which causes people to suppress their ego in submission to a chosen model.16 Others have pointed out that a theory of ‘good mimesis’ is necessary – not least if there is any substance in the idea, developed in Girard’s fourth component, that there is a ‘non-violent kingdom’ which people can create, in accepting Jesus Christ as model.17   On Girard’s partial revision of this judgement see section 4 below.   Leo D. Lefebure, Revelation, the Religions, and Violence (New York: Orbis, 2000),

13 14

p. 20.

  See Paisley Livingstone, Models of Desire: René Girard and the Psychology of Mimesis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 1–16. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (ET, London: Fontana, 1974 (1915)). 16   Livingstone, Models of Desire, pp. 54–7. 17   Williams, Bible, Violence and Sacred, p. 9; see also Bruce Chilton, ‘René Girard, James Williams and the Genesis of Violence’, Bulletin of Biblical Research 3 (1993): 15

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Nor is it clear how the social dynamic of ‘mimetic rivalry’ is related to the second component, the theory of the ‘sacrificial crisis’ leading to the unloading of violence on the surrogate victim and that victim’s subsequent veneration. Paisley Livingstone speaks of ‘the unspecified mimetic fluid that seems to allow the argument to slide from step to step’.18 If the crises are demonstrable events, the breakdown of order due to uncontrollable internal conflict, other narratives of the nature and origin of violence may be able to account for them just as successfully, and the same can be said of the familiar ‘scapegoat’ phenomenon. The significance of mimeticism as an independent dynamic rests on the inversion of rivalry into unanimity through the veneration of the victim as a god, but Girard offers no convincing examples to show that this has actually occurred in historical times. The studies collected by Juergensmeyer cast doubt on the applicability of this theory, in modern times, even to religious conflicts within Judaism or Islam. 2. Misrepresenting Sacrifice Girard has created, in these two stages, a special rather than a general theory of violence and social disorder; out of which he generates a special, rather than a general, theory of sacrifice. His theory is true for certain kinds of sacrifice, but not for the whole. This is the point that is particularly important in the context of this book’s aim to defend the language and conceptuality of sacrifice against easy dismissals. Even allowing the validity of the first two stages of his argument, therefore, his broad comments about sacrificial systems in the religions of the world are deeply flawed since they depend entirely on presuppositions derived from the prior argument. These presuppositions include: 1. Sacrifice involves killing and therefore in sacrificial language ‘blood’ = violence. 2. The typical sacrifice is a human sacrifice, performed to deal with an outbreak of disorder, so sacrifice and punishment are closely related. 3. The perceived efficacy of sacrifice depends on release of aggression. 4. The sacrificial victim is necessarily excluded from society, and acts as a substitute for the true inner operations of violence. 5. Sacrifice withers away as its role in ritual vengeance is taken over by judicial processes of the state. 6. All concepts of ritual impurity are founded on violence.

pp. 17–29, citing p. 27; James G. Williams, ‘Sacrifice, Mimesis and the Genesis of Violence: A Response to Bruce Chilton’, Bulletin of Biblical Research 3 (1993): pp. 31–47, citing p. 43. 18   Livingstone, Models of Desire, p. 119.

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Each of these statements has an element of truth, but as generalizations all of them, except perhaps the fifth, are false. It is notable that the first two, on which all the rest are based, are simply asserted.19 For example, in the first chapter of Violence and the Sacred, the connection between sacrifice and the primal murder is established by a reference to Cain and Abel: Cain is a tiller of the soil who gives the fruit of his labour to God, whereas Abel is a shepherd who regularly sacrifices the firstborn of his herd.20

Out of this contrast between Cain who ‘gives’ fruit and Abel who ‘sacrifices’ animals is derived from the start what Girard calls ‘the difference between sacrificial and non-sacrificial cults’. But the text of Genesis 4 does not support this distinction, describing both Cain’s and Abel’s offerings as ‘gift’ (minchah). In Girard’s terminology, vegetable offerings are not ‘sacrifice’, since they are nonviolent, but, as we have seen, this contrasts with the large part played by offerings of grain, wine, oil and cakes in most sacrificial cultures. Intent on the motif of ‘killing’, Girard fails to discern a positive place for ‘gift’ in sacrifice: in his view, sacrifice as ‘gift’ is an attempt to ‘feed the god’ to placate the divine anger. But as Daly has observed the most significant difference between the understanding of sacrifice among those who practise it and among those who do not is that for the modern ‘West’ sacrifice is ‘giving things up’, associated with loss, especially loss required by religious authorities.21 It carries overtones of resentment or, when done voluntarily, of heroic self-effacement or gullible submission to manipulation. But ancient writers regard a sacrifice as something given – given to a god. The emphasis falls, not on me and my loss but on the recipient of the gift and the resulting altered relationship between the god and the individual or community represented by the gift. It was observed very early by Burkert that Girard pays insufficient attention to the meal;22 yet in most cases where animals are offered, most of the flesh is consumed by the offerers. The preponderance of the meal is evident in Greek sacrifice, and in early Israel, and contrasts with the emphasis, in Western theology and anthropology alike, on killing as the centre of the event. That emphasis reflects an anti-sacrificial prejudice in Judaism, in Greek philosophy and in modern, especially Protestant Christianity, which Girard simply assumes. 19   As noted by Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1995 (1987), p. 303, n. 29: ‘One remains confounded by his assurance (the prophetic texts are “too numerous and too explicit to allow the slightest doubt”, [Girard, Des choses caches, p. 473, n. 54; = Things Hidden, p. 451, n. 52]), all the more so because the author cites not a single exegete in support of his blunt assertions’. 20   Girard, Violence, p. 4, emphasis added. 21   Daly, Origins, pp. 1–4. 22   Burkert, ‘Ritual Killing’, pp. 149–76, citing p. 172.

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Rejecting ‘gift’ and ‘meal’ as significant elements in ritual practice allows Girard to define sacrifice as ‘ritual killing’; and his theory of mimetic rivalry and the surrogate victim dictates that ‘ritual killing’ necessarily appears for him in a context of rivalrous vengeance and symbolic substitution. The typical sacrifice is that of the ‘surrogate victim’ or scapegoat who, human and probably innocent, bears the aggression of the collectivity and, at the cost of his or her own life, secures its peace. Thus Raymund Schwager states: ‘the purpose of every sacred– cultic sacrificial event is to transfer aggression to the outsider.’23 Consequently, in ancient Israel the scapegoat rite is regarded as typical of all others. In this rite the priest ‘places all the sins of the Israelites upon the animal’ and, he says, ‘the same is probably meant in numerous other texts on sacrifices which require the priest or the sacrificer to lay his hand on the animal’s head in order to effect an atonement’.24 We have seen that the interpretation of the hand-laying movement in the chatta’th as an ‘atoning’ transfer of evil, rather than a gesture of identification, is not supported by other features of the rite:25 likewise there is no reference to confession, no mention of atonement, no association of the animal as ‘outsider’. Rather than conflating the treatment of the two goats, one ‘for Azazel’, the other ‘for a sin offering’, Leviticus 16 simply juxtaposes them as complementary but different. Of course, there are examples where aggression is a visible feature: disjunctive sacrifices where the victim is disposed of by being cast out into the desert, thrown over a cliff or into a river; ritual cannibalism, practised on prisoners captured from enemy neighbours; the paradoxical role of the ‘sacred king’ in many African cultures, and probably in early Greece, who is first honoured and finally cast out and killed. Many religions have rites which consist in exclusion of some symbolic representation of evil. In ancient Athens, prisoners were kept in order to become pharmakoi at the annual festival. They would be paraded through the city, beaten with rods and driven out. But this was one ritual event only, and not really considered a ‘sacrifice’ since it did not take place in a temple and the hapless individuals were humiliated and driven out rather than offered up.26 Like other such rites, it may be a relic of an ancient human sacrifice, and may be an opportunity for aggression, although it is surprising how often the texts point to attempts to avoid actual death or injury. But cases like these are granted a far larger place than is warranted by their incidence in the religious cultures of the world, and the negative connotation given by such selective examples needs to be challenged. While the Day of Atonement rite in Leviticus 16 contains the animal first named ‘the scapegoat’, it actually fits Girard’s general pattern rather poorly. Firstly, there is exclusion, but no overt killing. Although the scapegoat is the best candidate in the OT for an object of aggression, the level of aggression is slight and symbolic,     25   26   23 24

Schwager, Scapegoats, p. 87. Ibid., p. 88 (emphasis added). See pp. 67, 76–8 above and Dunnill, Covenant and Sacrifice, pp. 94–6. See examples in Burkert, Greek Religion, pp. 82–4.

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with no sign of the frenzy or brutality that Girard reads into it. Burkert rightly criticizes Girard for confusing the scapegoat/pharmakos with the frenzied tearing apart of the Dionysian sparagmos.27 If that is the case with his prime example, how well will other rites stand up to this description? Secondly, while the act forms part of the complex ritual for the Day of Atonement, and this special rite was understood to absolve Israel, once a year, of all unintended sins, there is no evidence of the veneration which, according to Girard, should attach to the ‘scapegoat’, on the grounds of its redemptive work. There is, in fact, no other reference to it in the Hebrew scriptures. Thirdly, the pairing of the two goats (Lev 16: 8) demonstrates the co-presence of the twin impulses of disjunction and conjunction – both a separation from evil and a reconciliation/communion which follows. This is not a simple division: a god whose blessing is desired can also be feared because of its power or unfavourable judgement, just as communities require positive unifying factors as well as security from attack. It is true that many African religious systems are overwhelmingly disjunctive (without ignoring the conjunctive elements), just as the religions of Greece and Israel (without ignoring the disjunctive elements) were overwhelmingly conjunctive on their style. But a general theory of sacrifice is unwise to give priority, in advance, to one or the other. Girard’s theory, identifying sacrifice exclusively with killing, is wholly inadequate to deal with the conjunctive element represented by the gift, the meal and blessing. It is astonishing how seldom these limitations are allowed by Girard to modify the assumption that this enigmatic, once-yearly rite of the ‘scapegoat’ was and is the typical and normal sacrifice. The real centrality of violence, with the animal victim as a substitute for a human victim, is asserted within the first two pages of Violence and the Sacred, reinforced by the first chapter headings (‘Sacrifice’ and ‘The Sacrificial Crisis’) and never properly examined. When the question is raised, later, it is immediately brushed aside: In my first chapter I suggested that there is no essential difference between human and animal sacrifice. If this is true, the origin of all sacrifices must be the same. The celebrated Judaic scapegoat and all animal rites of the same type lend support to my hypothesis.28

The movement from ‘I suggested’ to ‘if it is true’ to ‘must be the same’ to ‘all animal rites of the same type’ sweeps away the need for description or analysis to establish whether there may be more than one type of sacrifice, with more than one origin. OT sacrifice does not provide such blanket support for his hypothesis. Moving on, he then presents a single illustrative ethnological example, without asking whether it is in fact typical, for which he gives a composite (unreferenced)   Burkert, ‘Ritual Killing’, pp. 173–4.   Girard, Violence, p. 97 (emphasis added).

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summary of material on Dinka sacrifice from Godfrey Lienhardt.29 The illustration is certainly relevant, but overstated and also partial.30 The contrast between the often violent, expulsive rites of the Dinka and the more peaceful customs of their neighbours the Nuer has been noted in Chapter 1 above, and Girard had also earlier named both peoples as a pair;31 so it is reasonable to ask why the disjunctive form of sacrifice is chosen as representative, to the exclusion of the other. The reader of Girard’s volume called The Scapegoat may be surprised to find that the book does not make use of the Hebrew rite in Leviticus 16 in defining the meaning of the term. The sole reference to it forms part of a critique of Frazer for (and this seems somewhat ironic) committing ‘a grave injustice to ethnology’ by constructing a theory of his own in place of real data.32 In an earlier writing I remarked that ‘Girard offers for our day a sweeping theory as rich in its imaginative appeal, and as shaky in its empirical base, as Frazer’s was for his’, and I see no reason to dissent from that view now.33 In the context of this book, it will be clear that this methodological failure has far-reaching consequences. The nature of a major family of human customs and institutions has been misrepresented, relegated yet again to the darkness of the primitive.34 Of the six presuppositions stated on p. 148 above, it is simply not true that (1) sacrifice necessarily involves killing; nor that (2) the typical sacrifice is a human sacrifice, or penal in purpose; nor that (3) its efficacy depends on aggression. Nor (4) does it typically work by exclusion.35 The necessity for a sacrificial victim to be an outsider is several times repeated by Girard, and he makes the point that this diverts feuding and vengeance on to one who cannot be avenged and so renders it harmless. It is possible that victims for human sacrifice are first kept as prisoners so that their own people no longer regard them as living members of their tribe whose death should be avenged. But conversely some symbol of identification is a frequent part of the preparation, in normal cases and even with   Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience.   The rites contain gestures of both hostility and reverence. Girard interprets the first

29 30

as genuine (speaking of ‘scorn’, paroxysm’, ‘death-sentence’), the other as mere show, where Lienhardt’s account presents both equally. See Girard, Violence, pp. 97–9; Lienhardt, Divinity, pp. 267–8, 293–4. 31   See above, pp. 12–13; Girard, Violence, p. 3. 32   Girard, Scapegoat, p. 120. 33   John Dunnill, ‘Methodological Rivalries: Theology and Social Science in Girardian Interpretations of the New Testament’, JSNT 62 (1996), pp. 105–19, citing p. 114 (reprinted in Paul Foster (ed.) New Testament Studies (4 vols, London: Sage, 2010), vol. 1. 34   See Eilberg-Schwarz, Savage in Judaism. 35   The fifth and sixth presuppositions named earlier will not be discussed here. The historical question of the replacement of sacrifice by legal processes (5) is beyond the scope of this work. For a different view of the origin of purity rules (6), see Chapter 3 above, pp. 67–71; for more on punishment and sacrifice (2), see Chapter 7 below.

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human or disjunctive sacrifices, as when those who are to be sacrificed are for a while given freedom to enjoy the fruits of society.36 Perhaps, since they now ‘belong’, the good flowing from their banishment or death may be expected to accrue to their new society. In the performance of conjunctive rites, the emphasis on identification is even stronger. Animals sacrificed are rarely wild, but domesticated members of the tribe’s herd or flock, just as vegetable offerings are not usually from wild plants but from the cultivated crop. As Jonathan Z. Smith puts it: Sacrifice is an elaboration of the selective kill, in contradistinction to the fortuitous kill  …  the artificial (i.e. ritualized) killing of an artificial (ie domesticated) animal.37

Pastoral societies typically enjoy a close relation with their animals, and Girard rightly remarks that: the Dinka never sacrifice an animal fresh from the herd: first it undergoes a period of isolation from its fellow cattle, being sheltered in a special place adjacent to human habitations.38

But perversely he claims that the reason for bringing the animal from the herd into the settlement is so that it not only ‘draws all the reciprocal hostilities of the community on to itself’, but even ‘assumes the role of the original outcast’.39 There is nothing in the rite being described to suggest this last point, and not all rites are disjunctive even among the Dinka: the burial of certain elders, while alive, which might be interpreted as an act of human sacrifice or aggression, is portrayed by Lienhardt as a ceremony of great reverence.40 There obviously remains great and terrifying power in the impulse to exclude and curse. My purpose is in no way to play down the significance of the role of hatred and violence or its influence in the life of society. My aim is to put some distance between the discussion of that problem and the understanding of sacrifice as such. What applies to disjunctive acts – whether penal or sacrificial – does not apply to conjunctive acts. In particular there is, in the conduct of sacrifices culminating in a whole offering or a joyful feast, no hint of the aggression which Girard asserts as operative in all sacrifice. His determination to attribute all sacrificial ideas to violence causes him, for example, to view menstrual blood as related to murder and linked to sexual   Burkert, Greek Religion, p. 83.   Jonathan Z. Smith, ‘The Domestication of Sacrifice’, in Hamerton-Kelly, Violent

36 37

Origins, pp. 191–205, citing pp. 200–201. 38   Girard, Violence, p. 272. 39   Ibid., p. 273. 40   Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience, pp. 298–319.

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‘impurity’. While sexual impurity systems and sexual violence exist, the link he makes is quite arbitrary. With Nancy Jay I would place menstrual blood in relation not to sexuality but to childbearing. Here is an event which tests Girard’s whole theory: a violent event, in the sense that it involves the release of huge physical force, but wholly non-aggressive; bringing about life but in a context inseparable from the possibility of death; a profoundly dangerous event without which, ultimately, there is no life. Is this a better paradigm of sacrifice?41 Another parallel event, also natural and non-aggressive, is the act of cooking. In this event, living matter (vegetable or animal) is destroyed and transformed in order to sustain human life. The transformation involves actions which are violent with regard to the living character of what is to become food: corn is cut, threshed, ground, mixed, baked; an animal is killed, bled, divided, then boiled or roasted. The violence is destructive, but not in itself necessarily aggressive. Without such a destruction of the natural form of life (the intentional dissolution of a life which will by nature dissolve in time) no release of life power is possible. In this lifegiving death, therefore, there is a mystery, recognized in the human impulse to offer the first fruits of crop and herd, to celebrate an animal’s death both with an offering and with a solemn (which does not mean unjoyful) feast. Not only physical life but all human sociality derives from this mystery, and also, by the sowing of crops and the breeding of cattle, is oriented on producing it. Behind both these actions is the mystery of life and death itself. Mortal beings, by definition, live and die. Not only do they derive life from the death of animals, by consumption, they derive their own life from the dead, the ancestors, and come into being through an event which resembles death in its violence, in the issue of blood, and in the irreversibility of the transition it achieves. Just as sacrifice is typically a controlled mode of cooking, it may be viewed as a controlled representation of childbirth; in both cases it is a voluntary and transcendent act by which the mystery is set forth and its necessity accepted. For such an act a solemn joy is appropriate. 3. Other Views on Aggression Burkert and Aggression An alternative proponent of the view that sacrifice is rooted in aggression is Walter Burkert. His argument is simpler and less far-reaching than Girard’s, but also more plausible, being better grounded in empirical data. It is that the archetypal death from which the sacrifice stems is the hunt.42 This is the basis on which he understands sacrifice to represent life springing out of death. For Burkert, humanity is Homo Necans, because the race has been programmed genetically through the   Jay, Generations, pp. 30–40; ibid., ‘Sacrifice as a Remedy’.   See Burkert, Homo Necans, pp. 1–22.

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long span of the Palaeolithic Age – and no doubt before – to find in the collective action of the hunt the basis of its social order and the source of its life. Male and female gender roles relate still to the contrast between the aggressive physicality of the hunting brotherhood (the ‘Männerbund’), alternating between activity and passivity, and the quieter, more sustained, operations apportioned to women, such as building families and rearing crops. As groups acquire the skills to control their source of food by cattle breeding, the male role comes to approximate to that of women, except in time of war; the kill becomes ritualized, at first with wild cattle, later with domestic animals. The sacrifice itself becomes a controlled and peaceful celebration. Like Girard, Burkert argues that aggression is a part of the human genetic inheritance which cannot be avoided, and which causes endless outbreaks of destructive violence if it is not dealt with. Unlike Girard, however, Burkert does not discern any latent aggression in the treatment of the sacrificial victims. He sees it being diverted instead on to the accompanying trials of strength and other competitions, thinking especially of the Greek passion for incorporating games and dramatic contests in their religious festivals, although it is not clear that this is a universal tendency. Similarly, he sees the aggressive impulse channelled into the initiatory rites for male groups, with symbolic death and rebirth as a significant feature. And, like Girard, he recognizes the Christian gospel as offering an alternative to violence, although for him the idea that any single event can effect a fundamental transformation of human being into a ‘new man’ is ‘incredible’: humans must learn to recognize what they are, and live with that.43 Interestingly, Burkert makes little use of the pharmakos type rites, because the blood and kill elements in them are generally subordinate to the ritual exclusion.44 In all Greek culture these are the rites which most closely resemble a hunt, so it is interesting to ask why, if sacrifice is a domesticated form of the hunt, its violence amounts only to a purificatory chase and expulsion of what offends, and does not develop into a hunt. One factor emphasized by Burkert is the necessity of feasting in Greek sacral practice, so that to hunt the human pharmakos would entail a cannibalistic rite. While there are signs of ancient acts of cannibalism retained in mythology, this is not an overt feature of classical times, and there are no signs of such an origin behind these purificatory rites.45 In reconstructing origins, the continuity of descent is often the hardest to certify. Hunting passed from being the noble and necessary work of finding food into the sport of kings. It has a key place in the religions of cultures in process of passing from hunting to pastoral economies. He comments on the archaeological evidence from Çatal Hüyük, in Anatolia:

  Ibid., pp. 82, 297.   Burkert, Violent Origins, pp. 173–4. 45   Burkert, ‘Ritual Killing’, pp. 175–6; cf. Homo Necans pp. 83–134. 43 44

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The most important religious symbol in this farming town where goats and sheep had long been domesticated was a pair of horns from the wild bull, and wall paintings contain clear, thrilling depictions of the ritual hunt of a band of leopard men.46

We note that the depiction is of hunting, and not of sacrifice, and Burkert concedes that: We can even trace the gradual extinction of wild cattle in Çatal Hüyük, though not the critical step that followed: in place of the dwindling bands of wild animals, domestic ones were now used for sacrifice.47

While the hunt and the sacrifice of domestic animals are in some sense parallel events – both involving life-giving death – and one in time superseded the other as the culture’s central symbolic event, it cannot be shown that the one generated the other. For it is precisely the distinguishing features of the hunt (use of cunning, collective aggression, the external victim) which are excluded from sacrificial rites. Even today a range of animal totems retain their evocative power in the form of stag heads, heraldic lions, bearskin hats, and so on, but the connotations are now military and quasi-military (sporting), not religious. Humanity may indeed be Homo Necans, but the change from hunting to pastoral society represents a significant diversification of fundamental symbolic patterns: religious and military, once one, become two. If the features which represent the deposit of hunting culture in a pastoral– agricultural society are not religious practices but military and sporting traditions, they naturally focus on the Männerbund and initiation.48 Here, rather than in sacrifice, is the ritual heart of hunting societies, and while such societies and their rites obviously undergo change with their altered status, it is not adequate to interpret an initiation as a ‘kind of sacrifice’ in which the initiate becomes the victim.49 They are part of a different pattern. Rites of passage characteristically include acts of separation and aggregation, divided by a period of marginality or symbolic death. This can be demonstrated of birth rites and marriage rites as well as rites of adolescence and entry into sacral or secret orders. All these involve transition from one state to another by passing through a sphere of ‘non-order’ which belongs to neither but observes inverted rules, often apparently shameful, such as the use of dirt, nakedness, chaotic behaviour or ritual humiliation. Passage into adult status or into a secret society often includes infliction of pain, but this should be understood, not as aggression or an incomplete scapegoating, but as a ritual and practical testing and acclimatization for the ‘manly’ tasks ahead. Thus     48   49   46 47

Burkert, Homo Necans, p. 43. Ibid., p. 43. Smith, ‘Domestication’, p. 198. Burkert, Homo Necans, p. 46.

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Burkert’s theory of violence in religion does not provide support for Girard’s critique of sacrifice. Maurice Bloch A very different theory of religion, although again giving an important role to violence, is that of Maurice Bloch. In Prey into Hunter he offers a materialist account of religion, arguing that the common patterns found in religious systems, along with their differences, express responses to the common shape taken by life in human experience. Birth, growth, sexuality and childbirth, ageing and death, forming the structure of life in every culture, represent a problematic transience against which ‘the vast majority of societies’ construct ‘a permanent framework which transcends the natural transformative process’.50 This framework is therefore an inversion of the material experience. To that extent, it fits well with the argument of this book, that sacrifice, initiation and other experiences of the transcendent generate and are generated by particular understandings of the conditions of material existence which I have centred in ‘the body’. The basic character of ritual is described in terms similar to van Gennep’s rites of passage, with a threefold movement of separation, of rest in a ‘liminal’ phase, and of return transformed. He especially focuses on the third movement, but he interprets it, not as ‘reincorporation’ (as Victor Turner would have it), but as ‘rebounding violence’ which alters the conditions of the group’s life.51 He is quick to distance himself from Girard and Burkert by pointing out that the universality of violence is not due to some ‘innate aggressiveness’, but ‘is due to the attempt to create the transcendental in religion and politics’.52 Because the ‘vital’ and the ‘transcendent’ are in opposition, it is the denial of the vital which leads to violence. This ‘rebounding violence’ takes various forms: The symbolism of rebounding violence offers at least three alternative avenues of legitimate practice and in addition any mixture of the three: (1) the assertion of reproduction; (2) the legitimation of expansionism, which itself takes one of two forms: (a) it may be internally directed, in which case it legitimates social hierarchy or (b) it may be externally directed and become an encouragement to aggression against neighbours; (3) the abandonment of earthly existence.53

The variations are such that it is far from clear whether ‘violence’ is the best word to describe all these, along with other terms he favours, like ‘conquest’ and ‘consumption’. Really it only fits type (2), ‘legitimation of expansionism’, where   Bloch, Prey into Hunter, p. 3.   Ibid., p. 6; Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,

50 51

1969) p. 94. 52   Bloch, Prey into Hunter, p. 7. 53   Ibid., p. 98.

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it serves to demonstrate the connection between religious aspiration and political aggression. We could more neutrally identify the common factor as transformative energy derived from exposure to the transcendent sphere, leading to various effects in life, including violent conquest (2), but also reproduction (1) and surrender (3). Taken as a whole, Bloch’s argument seems like an attempt to distance himself from Durkheim’s separation of sacred and profane while actually presupposing just that within his conflictual framework. De Heusch’s objection, that this does not really fit for African religion, is registered but not answered.54 The theory describes the genesis of some aspects of violence within ritual and their effects on social life, but the aspect of violence itself is tendentious and overstated.55 Burkert and Bloch, then, give us alternative strategies for accounting for the place of violence in sacrifice. Both have the complexity and incompleteness of hypotheses grounded in the empirical, and both resist the attraction of universal theory. There is of course an irreducible element of violence in animal sacrifice, violence sufficient to kill the victim. I have argued that this is better likened to the destructive but non-aggressive motion used to process vegetable offerings, rather than the aggressive action of the hunt or the lynching of a surrogate victim. However, animal sacrifices are a more prominent cultural phenomenon, and they involve death. A key question in determining the plausibility of aggression theory is: what is the place of death in the ritual? Christian theology has naturally tended to emphasize this aspect, in interpreting the cross as sacrifice, and has applied that understanding, drawn from the metaphorical sacrifice of the cross, on to other, actual, rites. Yet in the sacrificial systems of which we have most information, even in the majority of disjunctive rites, the emphasis falls very lightly, in a symbolic rather than aggressive manner, on the death itself. 4. Transcending Sacrifice? Louis-Marie Chauvet, in commenting on Girard, remarks drily: There are grounds for doubting whether this thesis of the sacrificial process is the only key for understanding rituals, religions and finally societies themselves. There are also strong reasons for questioning whether Jesus is the universal revealer of this unique key, that is, whether Christology is ultimately only an answer to the author’s anthropology.56

54   Ibid., p. 28; the reference is to the French original of de Heusch, Sacrifice in Africa (ibid., Le sacrifice dans les religions africains (Paris Gallimard, 1986), p. 20). 55   For a further critique, see David N. Gellner, ‘Religion, Politics and Ritual: Remarks on Geertz and Bloch’, Social Anthropology 7 (1999): pp. 135–53, especially pp. 138–44. 56   Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 307.

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Unless we are convinced that Girard has said the last word about religion – that is, about the origins of violence, about the scapegoating mechanism, and about the way in which this generates religious and all other institutions – we are unlikely to be persuaded by the surprising fourth stage of Girard’s theory in which he claims he has revealed the real meaning of Jesus and the cross. The effect is in fact to imprison Christology within his bold but inadequate theory, because salvation would then come to lie, not in the cross and resurrection, but in apprehending the Girardian understanding of violence. It is certainly possible to point to biblical passages in the Psalms and the Servant Songs which speak of God’s concern for the victim, though whether there are no such passages in other scriptures is an open question. We can, however, see this as a trajectory leading to Jesus’ concern for the poor, and to Jesus’ acceptance of the status of victim on behalf of humankind. If we find him to be an inspiring possibility of how to be human and a representative of God, his death makes us aware of the awfulness and inevitability of violence. That his life and death offer an alternative to the way of rivalry and victimage through trust in God, is also surely true. But is it not the case that what distinguishes Jesus from the Maccabean martyrs is less the manner of his dying than his vindication by God in the resurrection and exaltation? And what is happening when ‘taking away sin’ becomes ‘exposing the mechanism of sacrifice’? Bruce Chilton has said: The Christian claim to transcend Judaism and its temple combined with the Greco-Roman philosophical desire to replace bloody custom with intellectual system. The combination was so influential, it has outlasted commitment to theology among modern intellectuals. And so we have researchers in the humanities speaking of the transcendence of sacrifice, as if that were a secular remark, a commentary on the human condition.57

One might put it another way: the ‘transcendence of sacrifice’ is an article of faith for many modern and modernist intellectuals. And along with the dismissal of sacrifice, even for those who are Christian believers, may go rejection of any combination of what appear to be regressive, naïve, primitive or barbarous aspects of religion, including prayer, worship, discipleship (‘self-sacrifice’) or spiritual formation. But sacrifice is a basic feature of religious life which cannot simply be transcended. This statement recognizes that within any religious structure the value of certain kinds of sacrifice may be constantly under debate: our forms of sacrifice are right and theirs are wrong; this kind is more efficacious or more beautiful than that; certain acts remain in force but others are superseded; and so on. But sacrifice itself, as argued above, is the way people come to terms with mortality in its most basic conditions (life and death, sin, sexuality, childbirth). It is not avoided by   Bruce Chilton, ‘Sacrificial Mimesis’, Religion (1997): pp. 225–30, citing p. 228.

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calling sacrifice ‘violent’ or ‘aggressive’; nor by adopting vegetarian practices; nor by renouncing the use of the word ‘sin’. What sacrifice does, and the reason it arouses so much intellectual passion, is to place before our eyes those aspects of human being which are non-negotiable, and which embarrass us by not having changed in the passage from ‘primitive’ to ‘civilized’ living. Mortality is one of those aspects, and so is aggression. Here Girard and Burkert are right, of course, although the equation between aggression and sacrifice is mistaken – and it too must be reckoned with. But sacrifice does not simply equate to violence. Consequently, Girard’s argument that violence (including sacrifice) has become unnecessary because Jesus (and he alone) has revealed an alternative, non-violent, kingdom, simply reveals the anti-sacrificial and idealizing ideology underlying his entire system. Although Girard comments that ‘sacrificial Christianity’ is not to be victimized as by secular humanism with what he rightly calls its ‘sacred horror’ of the Bible,58 this is exactly what he does by treating all arguments about the efficacy of the cross as restatements of violence (which he calls ‘sacrifice’, in his own private sense)59 and by acknowledging only with reluctance the NT’s demonstration of the transformative power of God in resurrection and Holy Spirit.60 Since these elements are as deeply embedded in the NT text as the ‘kingdom’ and ‘logos’ theologies he favours, their exclusion from consideration is doctrinaire. Michael Kirwan argues that Girard has in later years altered his theological stance, from what he calls ‘non-sacrificial’ (in Things Hidden) to a position he names ‘anti-sacrificial’ (Chauvet) or, perhaps more helpfully, ‘exodus from sacrifice’ (Keenan).61 What is meant by each of these terms is the need to recognize some value in sacrifice even while arguing for a position which moves beyond it. Unfortunately I cannot find that Girard really has taken a broader position of this kind. In passing references in interviews, he has retracted his criticism of Hebrews for reintroducing sacrifice into Christianity, and accepted the need to allow for a ‘spiritualized’ understanding of sacrifice which applies both to the cross and to Christian action.62 However, he takes away as much as he gives:

  Girard, Things Hidden, p. 245.   For example in his critique of Hebrews, Things Hidden, pp. 227–31. 60   See for example, I See Satan, pp. 121–7, 189–90. The difficulty of these motifs is 58

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that they tend to classify Jesus as a deified victim, an example of the myth whose falsity his death is supposed to demonstrate (I See Satan, p. 125). 61   Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, pp. 307–10; Kirwan, Girard, p. 76, citing Dennis King Keenan, The Question of Sacrifice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). 62   Rebecca Adams, ‘Violence, Difference, Sacrifice: A Conversation with René Girard’, Religion and Literature 25.2 (1993): pp.  11–33, especially pp.  28–9; James G. Williams, ‘The Anthropology of the Cross: A Conversation with René Girard, in James G. Williams (ed.), The Girard Reader (New York: Crossroad, 1996), pp. 262–88, especially pp. 272, 280. See also the next note. The issue is not discussed at all in his subsequent major works, such as I See Satan (1999, ET 2001), nor in the recent Sacrifice (2003, ET 2011).

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There is the sacrifice of the other, and self-sacrifice; archaic sacrifice and Christian sacrifice. However, it is all sacrifice. We are immersed in mimetism … .63

The distinction, while it is welcome, is still premised on the same blanket categorization of sacrifice as scapegoating (‘sacrifice of the other’) which underlies his system. A major change would need to involve a reconsideration of the nature of religion, archaic and modern, and would have implications for other parts of his overall hypothesis. Others have found Girard’s focus on this area, and the unsatisfactoriness of his arguments, a stimulus to further thought. Chauvet rejects the ‘non-sacrificial’ stance he sees in Girard (Things Hidden), but he also recognizes that the ‘sacrificial’ impulse can be distorted in ways that are spiritually dangerous. He sees this danger operating in a traditionalist Catholic emphasis on oblatory action not connected to the Word and therefore not realized in action and life;64 in any oblation which sees itself as initiating the process by making an offering for sins (a ‘work’ in the Pauline sense rather than a response to the work of God);65 in a representation of self-dedication as the work of ‘happy slaves’, who ‘find the certainty of themselves and their world’ in their sacrifices, because they provide mechanisms for fixing God rather than take the risk of living by God’s ‘lettingbe’.66 All these are rightly understood as distortions of sacrifice and of theology; but calling them distortions implies the existence of a true understanding, in which the reality of sacrifice is revealed. For Chauvet, this true understanding is the notion of a ‘reverse sacrifice’, a ‘sacrificial letting-be’ identified with Jesus’ kenosis.67 His choice of the term ‘anti-sacrifice’ to name the position thus marked out is confusing because it suggests that he has abandoned any positive notion of sacrifice, indeed (in a Girardian sense) sacrificed the word altogether. What he means by ‘reverse sacrifice’ is in fact positive, and close to what I have called the ‘episacrificial’, although with a more evident ethical component.68 The eschatological outpouring of Holy Spirit (John 16, Acts 2, Romans 8) is a classic example of what Bloch would call ‘rebounding violence’ and which I would call episacrificial ‘exchange of life’: through Jesus’ self-offering on the cross as representative of the whole of Israel, humanity or the cosmos, a power is released which enables renewed forms of living. As a human action, this death is agreed on historical grounds to be an act of violent ‘scapegoating’ by the powers of this world of one who in God’s name challenged secular and religious order 63   Girard, Battling to the End, p. 35. Despite Kirwan’s argument, and Girard’s own claim, this does not seem to represent an advance from the position expressed by Girard in Things Hidden, pp. 235–7. 64   Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, pp. 309–10. 65   Ibid., p. 290. 66   Ibid., p. 300. 67   Ibid., pp. 297–301. 68   This will be discussed in Chapter 8 below.

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(similar to the persecution of Elijah, Jeremiah and John the Baptist, of Socrates and Diogenes). But to call the cross a ‘sacrifice’ is not, as Girard has argued, to regard Jesus as a victim of divine violence.69 In every true sacrifice, God is understood to be the source and giver of that which is now given up to God; in this sacrifice, a particular purpose is said to be at work for the revealing of human sinfulness (including violence) and its setting aside through divine forgiveness; hence it is in a special way both Jesus’ own self-offering and God’s setting forth of Jesus as sacrificial victim (Rom 3: 25). The violence is human; the sacrifice is divine. On this basis the NT proclaims, not that Israel’s sacrifice has ended – this was the result of the fortuitous and calamitous destruction of Israel’s temple in 70 ce – but that it has been fulfilled. Since ‘we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ’ (Rom 5: 1) the relationship towards which all sacrifice strives was now secure. Whether or not this theological position is recognized as true, it has a greater claim to truth than the Enlightenment programme of setting Jesus against the NT and against ‘religion’. We recall that Jesus was not above invoking the symbolism of violence himself (in words like ‘I have come to set fire to the earth’, ‘I have come not to bring peace but a sword’, and also in deeds, such as his cleansing of the Temple – unless all these are in the gospels only as effects of the church’s ‘sacrificial’ regression). Nor was Jesus by any means anti-sacrificial (in the usual sense) just because he criticized the religious institutions of his day. When he gave himself into the powers of evil, he manifested a faith in the episacrificial grace of God to establish a space within which humanity can live. The Christ hymn in Phil 2: 5–11 theologized both divine episacrificial grace and human faith response in the kenosis of the pre-existent Son. His death is the fulfilment of the sacrificial cosmology, but not its denial. If Christianity has not demonstrated the peaceable kingdom Jesus proclaimed, that is not because it preferred ‘sacrifice’ (though it did allow room, both in its communal life and in its treatment of outsiders, for rivalry and often scapegoating), but because participating in the true sacrificial living which Jesus inaugurated (the way of self-giving) is a hard way which many have wished to acknowledge but few to follow. It is a way which cannot be followed except in acknowledgment that life comes out of death. As the popularity of the argument that dismisses sacrifice as a mere manifestation of ‘violence’ shows, that is a truth that we prefer to avoid.

  Girard, Things Hidden, pp. 180–85, 224–62.

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Chapter 6

The Abused Body: A Dialogue with Feminist Theology ‘Redemption’, that very old-fashioned Christian word, is once again a hotly contested topic. In feminist writing, in particular, it is taken for granted that the church’s traditional symbols and its stories of the redemption of the world through Jesus Christ are either irrelevant to modern experience or, increasingly, that they are actually harmful. On the other hand, the claim is repeatedly made that it is precisely this critique which is ‘redeeming’ what is true and valuable in such symbols and stories.1 In rejecting particular ancient and modern theories about how Jesus, through his death especially, might be understood to ‘save’, feminist Christian writers often reject the idea that Jesus has any significance now except as providing a paradigm or example. But what remains most objectionable, to Christian and post-Christian feminism as to nineteenth- and twentieth-century theology in general, is the attributing of saving significance to his death. Along with this goes a rejection of every aspect of sacrifice, since sacrifice is regarded as necessarily death centred, ‘necrophilic’; and even notions of sin and grace which have depended on it, such as original sin, obedience and self-sacrifice, tend to be treated as part of the problem, not of its solution. This chapter has three aims. Firstly, it will identify ways in which these traditional motifs are misused in some prominent feminist theological writings, indeed parodied and distorted, so that their rejection is all too easy. Secondly, it will examine ways in which important feminist concerns and presuppositions can be brought into a more accurate and more incisive engagement with the Christian tradition. Thirdly, it will offer a sketch of an alternative approach to sacrifice and atonement and related theological issues including death, sin and obedience, in order to show both that these matters can be dealt with in a way that is not destructive of women’s experience and hope, and that they need to be incorporated into theology if the faults of patriarchy and of the Christian theological tradition are to be addressed.

  See, for example, the chapter title ‘The Feminist Redemption of Christ’, in Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart (New York: Crossroads, 1988), pp. 50–70, and the titles of books by Carter Heyward and Mary Grey (Heyward, Saving Jesus from Those Who Are Right (see Chapter 5, n. 4); M. Grey, Redeeming the Dream (London: SPCK, 1989)). 1

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1. The Dismissal of Atonement In Saving Jesus from Those Who Are Right, Carter Heyward debates the character of the Christian atonement tradition with the Scottish theologian D.M. Baillie.2 She concedes that Baillie offers ‘a clearer, fairer exposition’ of atonement doctrine than anyone,3 and she follows his arguments as he shows the need for human wholeness to be rooted in divine initiative. But at this point, she diverges sharply: Baillie and with him much of Christianity maintains that it is precisely God’s willingness to punish and be punished (for remember that JESUS is God in this story, both Father and Son [sic]) – as a surrogate in our place – that reveals His relentless love for us sinners.4

She appears to accept Baillie’s image of divine love as, like that of a true friend betrayed, combining correction with forgiveness, but then adds: But what Baillie and most Christian theologians seem not to see is that such a truly beloved friend does not punish by humiliating or destroying those whom he or she loves.5

It is interesting that no page reference to Baillie’s writings (let alone those of ‘most Christian theologians’) supports these allegations of a supposedly punitive understanding of atonement. What Baillie in fact says is to note, sympathetically, that when theologians in his day ask, ‘What room is there for an atoning sacrifice?’ they do so ‘usually perhaps in violent reaction against falsely crude and subChristian theories of atonement’.6 At the end of his argument he writes: We cannot answer speculative questions about what might have been, what God might or might not have done; and we certainly dare not say that God could not have been merciful but for the cross of Christ.7

In saying this, Baillie is supporting his case by contradicting a fundamental tenet of both Anselm and the Anselmian ‘Penal Substitutionary Atonement’ school he is being taken to represent, that the cross was necessary for redemption.8 2   Donald M. Baillie, God Was in Christ: An Essay in Incarnation and Atonement (New York: Scribner’s, 1948). 3   Heyward, Saving Jesus, p. 167. 4   Ibid., p. 173. 5   Ibid., p. 174; Baillie, God Was in Christ, p. 173. 6   Baillie, God Was in Christ, p. 172 (emphasis added). 7   Ibid., p. 201 (emphasis original). 8   For Anselm, see Chapter 7 below.

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For Heyward, however, it is just obvious that ‘atonement’ means ‘Penal Substitutionary Atonement’, and that this is what any theologian, especially a male ‘neo-orthodox’ theologian like Baillie, must mean by God: The deity we must reject is the one whose power over us is imagined to be His love … Such a concept of deity is evil – a betrayal itself of our power in mutual relation – in a world being torn to pieces by violence done in the name of gods who demand blood sacrifice.9

No other theological views are cited in Heyward’s text, although the positions of Anselm and Abelard are described briefly in a footnote.10 In a book described by its publisher as ‘a theological resource for spiritual transformation and social change’, it seems no nearer approach to a complex theological tradition is needed.11 A similar perspective is given by Rita Nakashima Brock in the chapter cited above, ‘The Feminist Redemption of Christ’.12 She offers a four-point classification of NT images of atonement as reconciliation, ransom, debt, sacrifice – a classification attributed to a single, rather dated, secondary source.13 This is introduced by the remark that ‘the patriarchal father-god fosters dependence and, in his latent, punitive aspects, haunts many atonement doctrines’. It appears that ‘the punishment of one perfect child has to occur before the father can forgive the rest of his children and love them’.14 It is not explained where the idea of a necessary punishment has come from, or how it might be ‘latent’ in the NT images. Nor does she explain how Jesus fits the description of ‘a perfect child’, a formula she uses frequently to reinforce the governing idea of ‘divine child abuse’. This last phrase, which is offered by Brock as if it were a fair description of the doctrine of the mutual participation of the Father and the Son in bringing about the world’s redemption, is criticized by another feminist writer, Mary Grey, as representing ‘the lunatic fringe of feminist redemption theology’, so extreme, perhaps that, like penal substitutionary atonement, she does not trouble to engage with it in her own 1989 writing.15 But in much recent feminist writing the phrase ‘divine child abuse’ is bounced from text to text as if no analysis or explanation were needed.16   Heyward, Saving Jesus, p. 175.   Ibid., p. 214, n. 19. 11   Ibid., back cover. 12   See n. 1 above. 13   She cites (p. 55) J.F. Bethune-Baker, An Introduction to the Early History of 9

10

Christian Doctrine (n.p., 1903). 14   Brock, Journeys, p. 55. 15   Grey, Redeeming, p. 180, n.7. 16   The phrase appears to originate in an essay by Joanna Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker, ‘For God So Loved the World?’, first circulated in 1986 and later published in J.C. Brown and C.R. Bohn (eds), Christianity, Patriarchy and Abuse: A Feminist Critique (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1989), pp. 1–30.

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We see that there is in much current feminist writing a tacit and (I shall argue) largely unexamined nexus between patriarchy, atonement, sacrifice and child abuse, such that any of the sacrificial images and any claim for a decisive atonement made by Christ (and certainly if made through his death) are understood as implicitly punitive and (consciously or unconsciously) supportive of child abuse. Traditional theology is held to mean by the word ‘atonement’ the following propositions (with their corollaries): 1. Christ’s death was necessary and central (so upholding a dubious logic of sacrifice). 2. Christ’s death was required by God (so that God appears to be a sadist). 3. The Father’s treatment of the Son is a model for Christians (so encouraging the victimization and abuse of women, children, the poor and blacks by those in power).17 By contrast, in Mary Grey’s much more careful and reflective Redeeming the Dream, a whole chapter is given to a critical assessment of traditional approaches to atonement before she offers her ‘Feminist Perspective’ in a further chapter.18 The older approaches are arranged under a threefold classification: ‘Greek’ (Aulén’s Christus Victor), ‘Latin’ (Anselm’s satisfaction theory and Abelard’s moral influence theory) and ‘Modern’. Among the ‘modern’ types, she discusses nineteenth-century ‘speculative idealism’, Christ as revelation, and Christ as bearer of God consciousness, and she notes: I have omitted the ‘forensic’ and ‘penal’ theory of atonement of the reformer as a special category … because Greshake does not see this as a separate type, but rather blames nominalism, the Reformers, and liberal theologians for the distortion of ‘satisfaction’ teaching.19

For her source Greshake, writing in German in 1973, as for Baillie in 1948, the derivative and distorted nature of penal substitutionary thinking rendered it unnecessary to discuss.20 Perhaps this was true also for Grey, writing in Britain in the late 1980s. But the soaring influence of the Religious Right in the USA results in this being ‘what atonement means’ now, in the media and apparently in theological discourse, so that Heyward can parody the Christian tradition by virtually blanking out all other views.

    19   20  

See Heyward, Saving Jesus, pp. 176, 151, 175 respectively. Grey, Redeeming, pp. 109–25, 126–52. Ibid., p. 195, n. 24. G. Greshake, ‘Der Wandel der Erlösungsvorstellungen in der Theologiegeschichte’, in L. Scheffczyk (ed.), Erlösung und Emancipation (Questiones Disputatae 61, Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 1973), pp. 61–101. 17

18

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The article by Brown and Parker, ‘For God So Loved the World?’, referred to earlier as popularizing the claim of ‘divine child abuse’, is praised by Rosemary Radford Ruether as ‘the major piece that opened up this question of redemptive suffering’.21 The article itself is much more balanced in its criticism of sacrifice than some of those who quote it in support of their own positions. Although their account, too, is based on a single secondary text, the authors do offer a commendably broad account of what sacrifice is and why it has been practised by the vast majority of peoples in the range of human cultures across space and time, by no means all overtly ‘patriarchal’ in their tone or structure. Four symbolic functions of blood are related (it ‘protects … intercedes … establishes a covenant … makes atonement’), together with their root in ‘the understanding of blood as essential to life’.22 However, when it turns to criticism, the article is less sympathetic. The authors’ view is that, in the church’s proclamation of the redeeming work of Christ, ‘divine child abuse is paraded as salvific and the child who suffers “without even raising a voice” is lauded as the hope of the world’.23 Consequently, when Christianity commends patient suffering, it unwittingly encourages the victimization of the weak by the strong. Ancient and modern understandings of atonement are reviewed to show this. It is found in the view that spiritual struggle leads to grace, a tradition linked here oddly to the idea of ‘Christus Victor’, usually connected with the defeat of cosmic evil. Anselm is credited with the view that the satisfaction (payment) offered by the Son of God is divinely devised punishment, which therefore provides a ‘sanctioning of suffering’.24 That Anselm’s followers have done this is clear, and perhaps the ‘satisfaction’ theory can hardly be stated without this implication, but this is not what he himself says. The article’s authors are more sympathetic to a third position, the ‘moral influence’ theory of Abelard, although this again is surprising, since he offers the most overtly positive presentation of suffering, based on the value of innocent suffering to inspire love. The modern ‘critical tradition’ is viewed no more hopefully. In modern theology, they criticize the widespread ‘theopaschitism’ of the redeeming ‘suffering of God’ in Moltmann and others, because although it dethrones the God of patriarchal power it glorifies suffering.25 They attack liberation theology’s view that the suffering of the poor on the path to the kingdom is a heroic necessity which will 21   For Brown and Parker, see n. 15 above. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Introducing Redemption in Christian Feminism (Introductions in Feminist Theology 1, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), p. 100. 22   Brown and Parker, ‘Loved the World?’, pp. 9–10. The source for this material is given as J. Driver, Understanding the Atonement for the Mission of the Church (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1986), pp. 129–46. 23   Brown and Parker, ‘Loved the World?’, p. 2. 24   Ibid., p. 7–8. 25   Ibid., pp. 14–19; the reference is to Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

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change the hearts of the oppressors: this ‘martyrdom theology’ is not only naïve, it furthermore glorifies the role of those who resist change, ‘mythologized as part of a divinely ordained process of transformation’.26 The second point seems to overextend criticism, and in the end the authors also praise those: who have challenged unjust systems … and who in that struggle have refused to be victims and have refused to cower under the threat of violence, suffering, and death.27

Jesus is our example of this heroism of liberation, by which the ‘the power of death is overthrown. Resurrection is radical courage’.28 The authors do not discuss the terrible anomaly that sometimes it is only through a person’s death that their refusal to give in to threats of death can be discovered. They are wanting to affirm the life-creating power of decision, response, will, over against all inevitabilities. But their bold statement that ‘suffering is never redemptive, and suffering cannot be redeemed’ sits oddly with their renewed appeal to the suffering of God, revealed in the cross and wherever life is denied by violence.29 The claim that suffering is meaningless is overturned by their vision of the ‘fullness of life’ that arises in response to the suffering of threats of violence, so that: ‘On Good Friday, the Resurrected One was Crucified.’30 It cannot be denied that the Christian church has sometimes found a glory in the idea of suffering, and that at least in certain times and places this has been internalized especially by women, and exploited by those in power over them. It has also condoned and even encouraged misuse of power. What the authors are trying to show is that these tendencies are not misuses or distortions but central to the tradition, that Christianity itself is ‘essentially an abusive theology’.31 However, this article, with its spare reference to primary documents, its emotive tone and its quirky selection of examples, does not convincingly establish this position. 2. Engaging with the Theological Tradition I am not arguing that the Christian tradition should be judged exclusively on the basis of its most perfectly formed and least objectionable examples. Refined and subtle speculation may not always be responsible for the crude forms into which it is translated at the popular level, but sometimes it is, and must be aware of ways in which it can be misused. It is certainly arguable that Anselm’s attempt to provide     28   29   30   31   26 27

Brown and Parker, ‘Loved the World?’ p. 21. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 26.

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a human cultural analogy to explain the mystery of divine atonement invites the creation of cruder, popularly apprehensible mechanisms.32 Timothy Gorringe has shown the coincidence and likely interconnection, at certain times, between the popularity of a penal understanding of atonement and the flourishing of violence in state and society.33 This suggests that we are looking at a specific, culturally influenced, deformation of the tradition and not at its heart. As such it needs to be exposed as a false growth, a misrepresentation of Christianity, but that cannot be done by a criticism in which Christianity is itself misrepresented. It is necessary therefore to consider the underlying issues. For example, the emotive language of atonement as ‘child abuse’ is used without asking the obvious question: is Jesus a child? Plainly the NT represents him as an adult, a free agent, who freely speaks for God against the powers of evil even if, against his personal desire, that leads to his death.34 The freedom of the Son’s self-offering is crucial to Anselm’s argument also, a fact which must relativize the claim that he glorifies oppression. Likewise, physical pain is not a conspicuous feature of the NT passion narratives, however strong it has become in Christian imagination, when in picture and word it has tended to magnify physical suffering as if that in itself were redemptive (‘I cannot know, I cannot tell what pains he had to bear …’). By comparison with the near-contemporary martyrologies in 2 Maccabees and 4 Maccabees, with their assault on the senses through horrendous and repetitive details of sufferings inflicted (see especially 2 Macc 7 and 4 Macc 8–12, and comments in Chapter 4 above), the gospels, and most notably the passion narratives, treat those pains with a restrained and potent silence. In general the NT dwells more on the cross as a site of shame and rejection (Acts 4: 30; Heb 12: 2), and as the place where the divine purpose of mercy clashes with human blindness and perversity (Acts 3: 14–15; 1 Cor 2: 8).35 Some authors develop the prediction that ‘the Son of Man must suffer many things’ (Mt 16: 21 and parallels) by using ‘suffer’ and ‘suffering(s)’ as a general term for Jesus’ betrayal, trials, death and resurrection, considered as a single redemptive event: ‘Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things?’ (Lk 24: 26), ‘a witness of the sufferings of Christ’   R.S. Franks, The Work of Christ (London: Nelson, 1962), p. 142.   Timothy Gorringe, God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric

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of Salvation (Cambridge Studies in Ideology and Religion 9, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 34   It is not clear that even the infancy narratives are exceptions to this. In Luke, words of prophecy cast the picture forward beyond childhood to adult tasks (Lk 1: 32–3; 2: 33–5); if John the Baptist can leap in the womb in recognition of the unborn Messiah (Lk 1: 41) we should not think of the Messiah himself as merely passive, and we see him, while still a child, take authority in the Temple (Lk 2: 39–52). Matthew emphasizes the vulnerability of the child (Mt 2: 13–23), but always as prelude to the adult task to be achieved. 35   Compare Sally B. Purvis, The Power of the Cross (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993), p. 91.

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(1 Pet 5: 1; cf. Heb 9: 26; 1 Pet 1: 11). In this context ‘suffering’ (pathos, pathein, pathema) is sometimes a technical term for Jesus’ death, connoting shame and rejection but without particular connotation of physical pain (Acts 17: 3; Heb 2: 9; 13: 12; 1 Pet 4: 1). Where the reference is to suffering as experienced, it can refer equally to Gethsemane, a spiritual trial which is educative (for him, perhaps, and certainly for us), as a practice of obedience and resistance to evil, not in itself either physically painful or directly redemptive (Heb 2: 10; 5: 7–10; 1 Pet 2: 21–4; 5: 8–11). However, for Paul and these other writers Christ’s sufferings, taken together, are certainly more than an example, and convey a redemptive purpose in which Christians under persecution can share (2 Cor 1: 5–6; Phil 3: 10; Col 1: 24; see also 1 Pet 4: 13). A closer look at the texts therefore throws doubt on some generalized statements. Linda Woodhead has criticized feminist theology for being insufficiently theological, for taking its stand on a common Enlightenment reduction of religion to a vehicle for ‘dogma’, and a corrupt institution which at best preserves a few salvageable ‘bits and pieces’ of the true spiritual reality. ‘In so doing it ignores the discourses of Christianity itself. It occludes the thick reality of the Trinitarian God and of those communities which are caught up in His life.’36 Likewise Kathryn Greene-McCreight contrasts those for whom scripture ‘absorbs the world’ with those who fit scripture into the world.37 Both are critiquing a tendency to subject the Bible or Christian doctrine to a higher criterion, whether ‘women’s experience’ or the liberationist defence of the victims of patriarchal oppression. The relegation of the biblical narrative to secondary status, and along with it concepts like covenant, incarnation and of course the cross, results in the substitution of a modern idealism for the ‘holy materialism of Christianity’.38 Both show how even prominent ‘constructive’ feminist theologies, struggling with the particularity of a male Christ and the ‘abusive’ Christology discussed above, reduce Christology to a Jesus who exemplifies divine wisdom. The specificity of the Christ event is thus eliminated.39 However, we do find, within feminist theology, different and more nuanced approaches, both to the atonement tradition and to feminist criticisms of it. For example, Darby Kathleen Ray confronts the options for a Christian feminist, in view of the way the atonement tradition has been misused to others’ harm. For her the options are to leave Christianity, to practise Christianity without atonement or to find a way to restate it which surmounts the problem. She is clear that the   Linda Woodhead, ‘Spiritualising the Sacred: A Critique of Feminist Theology’, Modern Theology 13/2 (1997): pp. 191–212, citing p. 195. 37   Kathryn Greene-McCreight, Feminist Reconstructions of Christian Doctrine: Narrative Analysis and Appraisal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 10. 38   Woodhead, ‘Spiritualising’, p. 192; cf. Greene-McCreight, Reconstructions, pp. 8–27. 39   Greene-McCreight, Reconstructions, pp. 70–110; Woodhead, ‘Spiritualising’, pp. 200–204. 36

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second option is unreal: ‘to see atonement as ancillary to Christianity and thus to opt to embrace Christianity sans atonement’ is simply not possible because it is ‘to deny either the centrality of the process of reconciliation to Christianity or the important role that Jesus plays in this process, or both’.40 To deny these would lead to ‘a spineless “feel good” religiosity that perpetuates all manner of injustice and oppression because of its inability to model and empower resistance to such evils’, or else to ‘an ahistorical religiosity offering little relevance or hope in a world in desperate need of concrete words and acts of transformation, of liberation from evil’.41 Likewise, the first option is ruled out. She has no truck with those who regard Christianity as so imbued with patriarchy that the only option is to leave it.42 In seeking to restate the question of atonement, her aim is to sidestep the objective/subjective polarities of the Anselm/Abelard debate, and also of the atonement/liberation debate, by restating Aulén’s Christus Victor, or rather the positive understanding on which it is based, by seeing Jesus in his life and death as God’s agent defeating evil, and so opening the way to the defeat of evil now.43 The result is a prophetic, revelatory account of the atonement, in which Jesus is the revealer of a possibility of life reconciled to God, a possibility which has to be claimed in action now to be realized. This revelatory view is familiar in feminist writing, but Ray is at odds with those who deny value to Jesus’ death. She criticizes the tendency to refuse to see any point in suffering – ‘ignoring the witness of centuries of the faithful and assuming that hardship and injustice can never yield growth or transformation’.44 This is a tendency which also puts feminist theology at odds with liberation theology, as we have seen. Ray’s presupposition that Christianity has to have a way of confronting evil which does not simply attribute it to ‘the other’ forces her to find value even in self-offering, and to acknowledge that ‘Jesus’ cross is understood as the actual and symbolic meeting point of good and evil, of justice and injustice’ and that it has, with its key specificity, an irreducible role in the work of God.45 ‘According to many feminist theologians’, she writes, ‘to make meaning out of suffering and death … merely perpetuates them, and any religion or belief that 40   Darby Kathleen Ray, Deceiving the Devil: Atonement, Abuse and Ransom (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1998), p. 4. 41   Ray, Deceiving, p. 4. 42   ‘Christianity as it exists is ridden with sexism, racism and elitism … [but] I am unconvinced that it is any more saturated with such evils than society at large, and I do not think “leaving” patriarchy is an option for any except those privileged enough to set up utopian communities on uninhabited islands (!).’ Ray, Deceiving, p. 152, n. 1. 43   Ibid., pp. 5–8. Another appropriation of the Aulén position, though from a different angle, is found in Jon Denney Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). 44   Ray, Deceiving, p. 144. 45   Ibid., p. 144.

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does such a thing is demonic. God is a God of life, not death.’ But she commends liberation theologians for their view that ‘to affirm that God is a God of life does not mean that God is not also a God of death, for as their daily experience reflects, death is a part of life’.46 This is a ground on which theology can be built. Like Ray, Sally B. Purvis insists that a Christian feminism needs to find an anthropology within which the cross can be seen as a source of life. She contrasts the usual understanding of power as control with a concept of power as life, found especially in the erotic, the power of love. She finds the archetype of this form of power, which looks like weakness, in Paul’s exposition of the cross as the divine wisdom that looks like foolishness (1 Cor 1: 18–31). In contrast to rejections of the cross which appear to be caught within rival systems of power as control, she argues for the cross as a sign of the non-controlling power of God which is able to liberate us from such chains, but without invoking victim status. ‘Just as the cross is not a violent symbol, so also it is not a passive one’; ‘the cross does not justify suffering and the cross does not deny it.’ ‘Suffering is. Love is stronger.’ She concedes that it will not serve as a theodicy (an attempt to control experience by explaining it), but ‘as a witness to these realities … which cannot be explained but can be lived’.47 Both Ray and Purvis are calling for a review of the symbolism of sacrifice in order to understand death positively as an aspect of life. Implicit in their arguments is a need for a feminist theology which takes a broader and more comprehensive view of sin, because evil is not wholly a product of patriarchy, however much patriarchal attitudes, pursuing a ‘politics of submission’ have misdescribed it. In a now classic article,48 Valerie Saiving Goldstein argued that ‘sin’ is constructed typically in a male-dominated society (represented for her by the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr) as ‘pride’ and ‘rebellion against God’, a specifically masculine trait, the opposition of wills, whereas the characteristic feminine sin under patriarchy, she claims, is not in fact pride and resistance to due authority but ‘triviality, distractibility and diffuseness … dependence on others for one’s own self-definition … in short, underdevelopment or negation of the self’.49 In such a scheme, suppression of the self (sometimes called ‘hiding’)50 becomes a virtue serving the creation of a common good as defined by ruling males. She argues for the importance of women’s sharing in the ‘divine discontent’ which would enable them, like men, to enlarge their lives and thereby make a larger contribution to society. However it is essential, for her, that this does not entail women giving up the specificity of feminine experience arising from a closeness to the body’s   Ibid., p. 84.   Purvis, Power, pp. 88–9. 48   Valerie Saiving Goldstein, ‘The Human Situation: A Feminine View’, Journal of 46 47

Religion 40 (1960): pp. 100–12. 49   Goldstein, ‘Feminine View’, p. 109. 50   Susan Nelson Dunfee, ‘The Sin of Hiding’, Soundings 65/3 (1982): pp. 316–27.

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rhythms and an intimacy of relating, especially in the dimensions of childbirth, which is necessary to the hope of realizing love and community.51 While there would be dangers in giving primary authority to any construction of ‘women’s experience’, as noted above, the importance of affirming this materialist perspective in feminism remains. Sigridur Gudmarsdottir points to a long-standing feminist suspicion of mysticism and apophatic theology on these grounds, because it appears to rely on an anti-materialist separation of body and spirit.52 Marjorie Suchocki draws on the feminist discussion in developing her processoriented account of sin as rebellion against creation, in humanity and the body, and therefore to be found, like virtue, within the realm of the natural order rather in removal from it into the world of ‘spirit’. For her, self-transcendence is the virtue of becoming fully human and she shows that transcendence is possible within the created order, and in harmony with its purposes, as well as out of it.53 When this is expressed through the modes of memory, empathy and imagination, such transcendence is a necessary attribute leading to the interdependence of selves in community.54 It is intrinsic to the perspective offered in this book that bodies are capable of mediating relations with the divine, and that the self-giving symbolized in sacrifice provides, in a given social context, means for self-transcendence in a way which has nothing to do with ‘pride’ or a striving to be more than human which brings us into conflict with the deity. It can equally be argued, as by Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil, that true obedience, far from being an act of self-suppression, requires a dynamic of ‘attention’ and attachment to an other, such that it becomes a form of healing self-transcendence, without which the self is condemned to live within its own limitations.55 Hence, whatever the possible abuses, it is simplistic to equate obedience, as such, with absolute, slavish submission: a respectful and self-respectful obedience can be a feature of mutuality both within marriage and in society at large, a mode of self-transcendence. An absolute denial of the value of obedience looks like wilful refusal to learn, to respond, to grow, a closing in on

  Goldstein, ‘Feminine View’, p. 107.   Sigridur Gudmarsdottir, ‘Feminist Theology and the Sensible Unsaying of

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Mysticism’, in Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller (eds), Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation and Relationality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), pp. 273–85. 53   Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, The Fall to Violence (New York: Continuum, 1994), pp. 33–46. Compare Ruether, Redemption, p. 75, who speaks of the ‘transformative metanoia’ of soul-making through love. 54   Suchocki, Fall, pp. 35–6. 55   ‘Attention … a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality’, Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 33, 54–5, citing p. 33; Simone Weil, Waiting on God (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), pp. 51–9.

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oneself rather than an opening to receive fullness of human being from beyond the self as a possibility to be accepted and grown into. 3. Reclaiming Sacrifice It is necessary to come to the question about the meaning of sacrifice, atonement and the cross by way of such reflections on the equally difficult areas of death, sin and obedience. If feminism is not confined within a rationalist resistance, but can find avenues of approach to the central elements of the Christian tradition, it would be helpful to explore how the tradition can present itself in a way that may meet it. As Ray has tried to restate ‘atonement’ in terms which recognize the necessity of a specific event (and perhaps even a death) but do not take the form of an oppressive action, so I am arguing for a reappraisal of sacrifice which will not be connected to victimization and which will give new value to Jesus’ life and death as in some sense ‘necessary’ and bringing about a new relation between humanity and God. It should be possible to let liberation theology and feminist theology function for us, like some statements from the Old Testament prophets, as a necessary critique of religion without justice, a due demand for ethical social outcomes to religious belief and practice, without dismissing the totality. Can it be shown that the feminist critique, like that of the prophets of Israel, is not really against sacrifice once it is freed from misunderstanding and misuse? Sacrifice It was argued earlier that the normal and natural mode of sacrifice in most societies is a joyful offering of gifts, and the sharing of a feast in the presence of the deity. Such a feast, if it is a meat meal – and most great occasions call for a meat meal if it can be obtained – will involve an animal’s death. But this gives no support for the widespread rumour that sacrifice is chiefly concerned with death for its own sake, or that it is a mode of cruelty, with human sacrifice as its normal or preferred form, associated with ‘scapegoating’, ‘victimization’ and ‘child abuse’. The blood sacrifices which tend to absorb the interest of the Western intellectual are in most cultures relatively infrequent and restricted to spheres of economic affluence. Sacrifice has many practical and symbolic attributes but in all of them it serves to mediate between human life and the transcendent power. Because ‘life’ is a large and complex field, sacrifices take many forms even within a single culture, but what it does should not be confused with other functional activities. Thus, to restate in this context points made earlier, it is not trade. Despite Tylor’s nineteenth-century explanation of sacrifice as do-ut-des, attempts to manipulate the divine through payment or bribery, the difference between gift relations and trade relations is crucial. And likewise it is not magic. The idea that those who offer sacrifices with a prayer for rain believe themselves to be manipulating the divine for their own ends has simply no basis in facts. It would

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be truer to say that making such an act is placing the human need before the deity with an awareness (whether pious, cynical or uncommitted) that its outcome is ‘in the lap of the gods’. And sacrifice is not punishment. Clearly, the obligation to make sin offerings, often costly, performs in many societies an important function in the control of evil, and the subjective cost is often regret and penitence, and an intention to amend life. To that extent it may function like a fine or loss of privilege imposed by custom or authority to produce reformative effects. But the idea that sacrifice has a retributive function to enact corporate vengeance, or that the death of the sacrificial animal is a punishment, inflicting on a defenceless animal what is due to the sinner, is completely wide of the mark. And sacrifice is not willed suffering. We are fascinated by the mistreatment of human bodies in order to inflict pain, humiliation, disfigurement and death. The urge to do these things appears to be present in all human cultures, including our own. In a ritually structured society, they may take ritual forms; in a non-ritually structured society like ours (although not forgetting the continued practice of ritual execution, such as the electric chair) they find other forms. Sacrifices of this kind where symbolic or actual pain is inflicted nearly always operate on the edge of the sacrificial system as such. In each case, then, sacrifice touches on and expresses a major necessary or unavoidable area of human activity. It will not do to label any of these areas ‘sacrificial’ simply because we dislike them, as though by banishing the supposedly ‘primitive’ practice of sacrifice we could reform human nature. Nor is sacrifice inherently ‘patriarchal’. Like any other institution, it takes the shape of its culture, and so takes patriarchal forms under patriarchy, but it not exclusive to those cultures. Nancy Jay’s valuable study of the role of sacrifice in the patriarchal religion of Israel concentrates on the development of male cult guilds as a parallel to the female blood-mystery of menstruation and childbirth.56 But sacrificing also occurs in matriarchal and matrilineal societies. Death, Sin and Obedience Does this then allow us to look again at three contested themes: death, sin and obedience? Any theology which claims to be complete has to find some way to incorporate an understanding of death into its system. Although sacrifice does not necessarily involve death, the prominence of animal sacrifice, especially in relatively affluent societies such as second temple Judaism, with the death of an animal as a prelude to offering and/or consumption, constitutes a reminder that we who are mortals depend on the production and destruction of other forms of life for our continued existence. The identification of the sacrificial animal with the individual or group that offers it ensures that their death also is symbolized in its life-giving death. This positive addressing of the place of death in life is healthier, I would argue, than the denial involved in purchasing meat on wrapped plastic trays in supermarkets, and the refusal of the urban sensibility to contemplate consuming   Jay, ‘Sacrifice as Remedy’.

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a goose or rabbit that has formed part of the family life. Sacrificing communities (and indeed rural communities, ancient and modern) tend to take a completely opposite view, and not necessarily out of indifference or cruelty.57 Likewise sin and original sin, though their nature is under debate, need also to be dealt with. The high profile of the sin offering is a one-sided view promoted by the priestly document and Christian reflection on Christ’s death as the final and paradigmatic sin offering. If it can be said that too much is made of sin in the Christian tradition, we should not attribute our distortion to this symbol. We may take a more optimistic view of human nature, and identify much sin as a structural feature of oppressive social orders and within human power to set right. But while sin operates as resistance to the integrity of creation it operates also as offence against God. The idea that sin will disappear with the revolution which brings the end of patriarchy or capitalism, and is not also an enduring personal deformation of the heart of powerful and powerless alike, is simply not tenable. The persistence of some mode of ‘sin offering’ in this sense stands for the recognition that ‘sin’ is a reality in human relations which cannot be removed simply at will but only (if at all) by access to the transforming power of life which flows ultimately from divinity. This requires that something be done to bring humanity into right relation with God, a ‘something’ which (however we spell it out) is indispensable for Christian faith. The symbolism of sacrifice preserves Christian theology from being reduced to a purely revelatory understanding of Jesus as a prophet or exemplar of human potential, and from succumbing to a transactional simplification of divine redemption. Obedience is a word which often connotes hierarchical control and the obliteration of the self and its legitimate desires at the behest of a supposed superior; the expectation of obedience can mean a demand for total and unquestioning acquiescence backed up by threats of violence, shaming and other sanctions. That is a recognizable if extreme sense of the word. But we need to recognize the dependence of communities, like institutions, on defined and limited obligations, and the difference between coerced and freely chosen obedience. In the usual meaning of the word ‘God’, it cannot be denied that we stand in a hierarchical relation with God; however, we may wish to name also God in different ways, for example, as ‘friend’, or the ‘power of life’ opening us up to a deeper self-knowledge. Even absolute authority does not have to be coercive or abusive. When, in 155 ce, Polycarp the bishop of the Christian community in Smyrna refused even in the face of death to revile Christ – on the grounds that ‘Eighty-six years have I served him and he has done me no wrong. How than can I blaspheme my King and my Saviour?’58 – are we to think him merely deluded? Within this context, then, it may be possible to view ‘self-offering’ as a positive and life-giving stance. The idea that a life dedicated to God’s service, and marked by faithfulness and obedience (if necessary to the point of death) is a   Sanders, Judaism, p. 114 and p. 50, n. 14.   M. Pol. 9: 8.

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kind of ‘sacrifice’ – and indeed the ideal form of sacrifice, of which the offering of material possessions is hardly more than a shadow or outward expression – can be found in Christianity from the beginning. Paul and Ignatius think of their life and death in Christ’s service as a libation offered to God (Phil 2: 17; 2 Tim 4: 6; Ign. Rom. 2: 2); Ignatius hopes his bones will be ground so fine they become like flour for a pure bread-offering to God (Ign. Rom. 4: 1–2); Polycarp, bound to the stake, is likened to ‘a noble ram taken out of great flock for sacrifice: a goodly burnt offering all ready for God’.59 The triumphalist imagery is uncomfortable, but these are no commendations of self-destruction for its own sake. In the Martyrdom of Polycarp a certain Quintus first leads others to surrender themselves to the persecuting authorities then later, seeing the wild beasts in the arena, retracts his confession and makes the blasphemous offering to Caesar, thus betraying Christ and his Christian fellows. The author voices his suspicion of such voluntary selfsurrender as a sign of instability: ‘We are not taught anything of that kind in the Gospel.’60 The paradoxical witness of these early martyrs is that (even in the extreme stance taken by Ignatius in writing to the Romans) such an act of ‘sacrifice’ is not self-obliteration or a glorifying of death, but a paradoxical triumph of selfrealization and self-transcendence. It declares that life lived without affirming where one stands is not worth living, and that the self is fulfilled, not by itself but by being united to Christ. That such union with Christ is experienced as liberating (even, if need be, in death) is widely testified. It is of course Jesus’ own testimony in Gethsemane: that to do God’s will, even if the form it takes is the very last thing desired, may be a life’s fulfilment. Response Sacrifice has been described here centrally as consisting of gift and joyful feasting, an expression of homage, and as a mode of social action which gives recognition to the necessity of death, the reality of sin and the value of obedience and faithfulness. I suggest that these create a far fairer picture of what sacrifice is, in human experience, than the acts of oppression and blood lust depicted by some writers who begin from the Enlightenment’s suspicion of religion as such. The central characteristic of sacrifice is response. To offer sacrifices of whatever sort is to recognize one’s place as a human being in the order and cycle of created life, to affirm the dependence of life on God and its limitation by death. In making an offering, a person or group participates actively in that order, in a gesture of thanks, submission or appeal, as appropriate, just as ethical action recognizes the human place within the social order. To offer a first fruits offering of the harvest may or may not be held to ensure a good crop next year; it certainly trans-signifies the material harvest as an object of thankfulness, as a gift of a good creator/provider; in so doing, it trans-signifies all human living as responsive and responsible.   Ign. Rom. 2: 2; 4: 1–2; M. Pol. 14: 1.   M. Pol. 4 (Staniforth, Writings, p. 126).

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The gospels present us with a story of Jesus responding to God’s grace by taking responsibility, under God, for his own life and the life of God’s people. For the sins of God’s people, and the distress caused by the sins of others, he is not ‘responsible’, legally or morally, insofar as they are not his fault; but he makes himself responsible for the people by setting forth a new possibility, God’s kingly rule, and by acting to bring about that kingly rule in people’s lives. His ministry is response – to God and to human need – and it is supremely the act of a free agent. As such it collides with the responses of those who feel their control being usurped (the scribes and the Pharisees, the priestly oligarchy and the Roman governor), and who, despite their position, are slow to bear their share of responsibility for the world’s evil. Despite the lack of encouragement given by the gospel writers, all this may invite description in terms of sacrifice, since not only was Jesus’ life a responsible self-offering to God but he called all Israel (and the gentiles also, at least through his followers) into a renewed sacrificial relationship. However, this is not to say that the necessity of his death arose from some ‘sacrificial logic’ whether oppressive or benign. It is possible that the world, responding to the love of God and the hope of transformed living revealed in Jesus, might have turned to God, and the seed of the kingdom begun to flourish. Jesus might, like the Buddha, have died in old age, loved and revered in a world made new. Such ‘newness of life’ would include turning away from oppressive modes of living, including those we may characterize as ‘patriarchy’, and would aptly be named a state of ‘redemption’. The main reason for regarding Jesus’ death as ‘necessary’ is the fact that it happened; the second reason is that those who loved him, before his death and after it, regarded him as revealing a divine purpose behind the apparently random or uncontrolled events of history. In view of the tradition of Israel’s martyrs, it was natural that they should seek a saving significance in his death, but only on the basis of his life already redolent of ‘sacrifice’ by its demonstrable freedom in faithfulness and obedience to God (Rom 5: 19; Gal 2: 16; Phil 2: 5–11).61 This chapter is not an argument against, or even with, feminist theology as a whole. It has tried to listen to some key concerns, and to criticize only places where traditional Christian positions have been misunderstood or mis-stated in the heat of debate. A reappraisal of the language of sacrifice can provide us with the means to assess the competing Christological claims of both radical and conservative notions of salvation. Superficially ‘outmoded’, it recalls us to features of living before God which are not necessarily perennial or universal but which are deeply rooted in biblical religion and the life of Jesus. Unless Christian theology turns its back on its historical anchorage in a particular life and the God whom that life reveals, sacrifice must remain a point of reference and a seed for further reflection.

  See Longenecker, ‘Foundational Conviction’.

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Chapter 7

The Atoning Body: A Dialogue with Anselm and His Followers Why did Jesus have to die? Christian preaching down the ages has attempted to convey the strangeness, the power and the inevitability of this event in order to bring its meaning home to their hearers. It is a mystery, at once salvific and appalling, from which both the rebellious and the devout instinctively turn: Who sees God’s face, that is self-life, must die; What a death were it then to see God die?1

In trying to explore the meaning of this event many models have been employed, each of which rests on what appears to be a dead metaphor: at-one-ment, salvation, sacrifice, substitution. My argument is that, here as well as elsewhere, sacrifice provides the basic stratum of images and logics for understanding the Bible’s accounts of divine–human relations – not excluding others but incorporating and controlling them. The fading of the sacrificial perspective in the modern era, at least among those lacking a biblically informed mindset, exposes the cross as needing special reasoning disconnected from the necessities perceived to operate in most of life. The idea that a death can achieve something has either been sentimentalized or simply lost to view: then how can this death be called ‘good’ let alone necessary? The last two chapters have attempted to engage with groups who regard sacrifice as in various ways an alien or negative element in Christian theology. In them, I have tried both to learn from their critiques and to defend sacrifice as a conceptuality that we need to engage with because it is fundamental to human self-understanding, especially if any element of transcendence is to be retained. This chapter now addresses a third group, those who also identify sacrifice with violence and punishment, but wish to rescue it as a means to justify the notion of a saving death. I shall argue that this is an equally unfortunate attempt to build a system of thinking on a misunderstanding of the character of sacrificial language. If the preaching of the cross has foundered in modern times for lack of a compelling logic, the view that through it Christ deals with sin by taking on himself the punishment due to many may have the virtue of offering an accessible explanation. But is it also true? That account has raised objections from the dawn 1   ‘Good Friday 1613, Riding Westwards’, in John Donne, Poetical Works, ed. Herbert J. Grierson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 306–8.

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of the modern period, and not only from those who are opposed to all objective accounts of atonement. Attempts to justify the penal view as a paraphrase or fulfilment of the sacrificial view have seldom been found persuasive, and have tended to confirm the negative view of its critics, like Girard and feminist theologians. What would be the point of retaining the language of sacrifice? Is Christianity to be seen as a death cult, drawing solace in a world of guilt from the cruel death of its saviour, so long ago? Or is the avoidance of death part of the modern/postmodern world’s problem? Can sacrifice be defended as a living metaphor which draws on ancient sources to provide a vehicle for a counter-cultural philosophy large enough to contain death as a part of life? Hans Boersma, in Violence, Hospitality and the Cross, faces the contradictions which he sees in the Reformed tradition between divine violence and divine hospitality.2 He argues that violence is necessary to enable divine hospitality to take effect, for example in the judgement of ‘wrath’, but it is not ultimate, for in the end ‘God is love, not wrath’ and therefore we can and must look beyond violence to ‘an eschatological situation of pure hospitality’.3 In developing this, Boersma’s definition of violence is quite wide: ‘any act which contravenes the rights of another … [or] causes injury to the life, property or person of a human being, oneself or others.’4 It therefore includes corrective discipline (as in parental punishment for a child’s good) and non-physical coercion (as in a government’s laws), or restraints which may be necessary for the safety and order of society. He points to the way defenders of political practices of non-violence may define violence solely in physical terms, excluding from the definition forms of active resistance such as boycotts and strikes, or even well-intentioned forms of physical restraint, thus allowing the pursuit of active interference, while not counting it as ‘violence’. This is more than a verbal matter. Boersma is arguing against those (like Weaver) who want to define action for good as non-violent so as to propose the possibility of a coercive but ‘non-violent’ world here and now. He is equally opposed to those (like Derrida) who claim that all exertion of influence on others is violence, so that violence is necessary and therefore ineradicable.5 Between these poles is his claim that violence is sometimes a necessity, requiring justification in each case. I take it that what sacrifice and punishment have in common is that they each represent forms of contingently necessary violence: punishment, because people   Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004). 3   Boersma, Violence, p. 49 (emphasis original). 4   Boersma, Violence, p. 44, citing Donald X. Burt, Friendship and Society: An Introduction to Augustine’s Practical Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 162 (emphases original to Burt and Boersma). 5   Boersma, Violence, pp. 44–7 (on Weaver), 28–38 (on Derrida). 2

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must sometimes be restrained in order to allow freedom to the rest; sacrifice, because domesticated animals are bred to die in controlled circumstances to provide meat for humanity, and in doing so are sometimes held to mediate relations with divinity at the border of life and death. At a human and historical level the cross was a punishment, according to specific Roman procedures, but absolutely not a sacrifice; but both terms, and others, have been used to interpret the divine purpose which it served. In this chapter I shall first engage with defences of the penal view in order to separate it from sacrifice, before showing why sacrifice, rightly understood, remains a necessary component of any account of atonement. 1. Sacrifice, Punishment and the Anselmian Tradition While the story of the crucifixion achieved a common form early in the church’s life, the meaning of that event has always defied definition. Images and metaphors employed in the New Testament include sin offering, propitiation, punishment, ransom, justification, reconciliation, and more. Others were added in subsequent centuries, including satisfaction, payment of debt, medicine and demonstration of love, and preachers especially have felt free to ring the changes on a range of evocative metaphors in order to convey in heartfelt terms the spiritual power of the cross. Among these, some have gained more favour than others, and some have been at various times restated in more conceptual terms, but there had never been a formal or conciliar definition to guide and limit understanding of the work of Christ in the way that was provided for Christ’s person at Chalcedon and elsewhere. Yet, amidst this reverend pluralism, the figure of Anselm does stand in the centre of the tradition of Western Christian reflection about atonement, as the theologian who in the eleventh century created a systematic presentation of the doctrine of atonement, based on the necessity of ‘satisfaction’. Every subsequent theological formulation can be understood as a response to the brilliance of his conception. The ‘moral influence’ or ‘subjective’ theory of Peter Abelard (d. 1142) was given as a complementary emphasis, but has been adopted by modern liberalism as a rival system;6 the ‘Christus Victor’ theory of Gustav Aulén was an attempt to revive an older model;7 and there is a proliferation of modern models which will not be discussed here.8 The reformers took Anselm’s model, developed it and mingled it with other strands, to create the notion of penal substitution. It 6   See Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘The Power in the Blood: Sacrifice, Satisfaction and Substitution in Late Medieval Soteriology’, in Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins (eds), The Redemption: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Christ as Redeemer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 177–80. 7   Gustav Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement (New York: Macmillan, 1969 (1930)). 8   See Weaver, Nonviolent Atonement, pp. 14–19, for a brief description of the positions of Anselm, Abelard and Aulén.

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is this last element which has been put forward loudly in recent years as the true formulation of this tradition. Anselm’s role is controversial within evangelical writings. For one writer, penal substitution is the ‘reformational refinement of Anselm’s satisfaction theory’,9 while another recent collection is so determined to classify penal substitution as ‘biblical’ that Anselm’s contribution is not even discussed.10 As we shall see, Anselm’s view of atonement was in fact neither sacrificial nor strictly penal. But insofar as the debate is between those who are for or against objective presentations of atonement in general, and penal substitution in particular, as the true or classic Christian understanding of the cross, Anselm is necessarily in the thick of the debate.11 Anselm on Atonement Anselm (1033–1109), Abbot of Bec and later Archbishop of Canterbury, set out his view of atonement in the two-part work Cur Deus Homo (‘Why God became [a] man’)12 completed in 1098. As the title suggests, the book incorporates incarnation and cross into a single theory: God took humanity in Christ in order to bring about redemption. But why was redemption needed? For Anselm, sin is an objective disorder in the universe, a disruption of the original harmony of creation, for which objective ‘satisfaction’ is due, a payment made to restore God’s honour. This satisfaction is ideally voluntary, but if necessary will be required by God in the form of punishment. Since every sin of human beings is an infinite sin, there is need, ultimately, for an infinite satisfaction, but no human being is able to make such a satisfaction, being mortal and enmeshed in sin. Instead, God   Frank A. James, ‘The Atonement in Church History’, in Hill and James, Glory, pp. 209–19, citing p. 211. 10   Steve Jeffery, Mike Ovey and Andrew Sach, Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution (Nottingham: InterVarsity Press, 2007). The book offers a 40-page survey of ‘the heritage’ of penal substitution with over 20 entries, patristic, reformation and modern, but conspicuously omitting the name of Anselm. His name is missing also from the index, although it does appear once in the text (p. 314), and the adjective ‘Anselmian’ once also (p. 219), but without explanation in either place. In a book which carries pages of commendations for itself as ‘comprehensive and fair’, ‘serious and scholarly’, and so on, this appears to be a less than commendable attempt to expunge a major theological contributor from the record. 11   References to Anselm’s ‘Cur Deus Homo’ (hereafter CDH) are to Jasper Hopkins and Herbert Richardson (eds and trans.), Anselm of Canterbury (New York: Edward Mellen Press, 1976), vol. 3, pp. 39–137 (hereafter Anselm). A recent critique of Anselm, and a critique of Charles Hodge as representative of the ‘Penal Substitution Model’ will be found in Joel B. Green and Mark D. Baker, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2000), pp. 126–36 and 140–50. See also Weaver, Nonviolent Atonement, pp. 179–224. 12   See the discussion of the translation of the title, CDH, in Anselm, pp. 253–4, n. 1. 9

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chooses to provide the means of redemption in the voluntary death of the immortal and sinless Son. The argument proceeds with almost mathematical precision to a necessary conclusion. The action of Christ is presented by Anselm under a number of metaphors. It can be thought of in military terms as the outweighing and overcoming of the power of sin; or in heroic terms as a free, obedient and righteous act done on another’s behalf; or sacrificially as the cleansing and blotting out of sin; or religiously as an act offering intercession for sinners. However, all these are subsidiary to the fundamental juridical idea of a satisfaction which restores due order. Notably, Christ’s death is not penal, for Anselm, since ‘he viewed satisfaction and punishment as mutually exclusive’.13 Satisfaction is necessarily a voluntary act. There is therefore no discussion of the Son accepting punishment, condemnation, curse or suffering, and while the Son shows perfect obedience this is not a due that he owes but arises from the perfection of his nature.14 Within the structure of Anselm’s thought, to consider the divine Son as suffering any kind of deprivation, even at the hands of God the Father, would surely be to introduce a deeper disorder and dishonour into the universe, not annul it. What Anselm offers is a coherent theory based on justice, and a key theme is the necessity of restitution: Nothing ought less to be tolerated in the order of things than that the creature remove the honor owed to the Creator, and not repay what he removes … Therefore, God keeps nothing more justly than the honor of His dignity.15

This theme of the removal of honour will be important in later developments of the theory. And yet Anselm argues that: No one can honor or dishonor God as He is in Himself; but someone seems to do so, to the extent that he can, when he subjects his will to the will of God or withdraws it from the will of God.16

Hence God’s honour is unimpaired by human actions, and yet the debt to God and the necessity of compensation remain.17 When the question is asked ‘whether it is fitting for God to forgive sin out of mercy alone, apart from any repayment of the honor stolen from Him’, Anselm simply asserts that it would be ‘not fitting’ to allow ‘something disordered’ in this way to remain.18 Yet this appeal to an aesthetic     15   16   17   18   13

14

Boersma, Violence, p. 158. CDH 2.18, Anselm, pp. 131–2. CDH 1.13, Anselm, pp. 70–71. CDH 1.15, Anselm, pp. 73–4. CDH 2.6, Anselm, pp. 102–3. CDH, 1.12, Anselm, pp. 68–9; cf. 1.24, Anselm, pp. 92–5.

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principle of what is ‘fitting’ is no arbitrary assertion but a recognition that beauty and order are characteristics which the universe derives from God, and which naturally shape contemplation and the perception of Christian truth.19 If it seems that God is demeaned by being tied to a ‘necessity’ outside himself, Anselm replies that nothing binds God except his own unchangeableness in completing the plan of salvation he has chosen in grace.20 And yet, in the larger view, as he argues at the end of his text, the entire act of incarnation by which salvation is brought about can be considered an act of sheer mercy. For: what can be thought to be more merciful than for God the Father to say to a sinner … “Receive my only begotten Son and render him in place of yourself” and for the Son to say “Take me and redeem yourself”?21

So, although the arguments cited above from both 1.24 and 2.20 appear to make mercy conditional on the necessary process of satisfaction, justice and mercy are not finally in opposition since divine mercy underlies all. Calvin on Atonement What Anselm mainly bequeathed to his successors was this argument for a quasisacrificial juridical necessity, laid out with compelling elegance and brilliance. It was a philosopher’s argument about the reasons of things, dispensing with the usual preacher’s assemblage of biblical texts and images. Four centuries later, John Calvin (1509–1564), writing in the context of the Reformation, gave a far wider scope to affective metaphors in setting out his account of salvation, but at the centre of his thinking was again a group of juridical images.22 What controlled his scheme was the underlying logic, derived from Anselm, of the necessary restitution to be made for evil, and the death of Christ as fulfilling this necessity by making satisfaction for sin. But he emphasizes that the necessity was no ‘absolute necessity’ but a heavenly decree, and Christ’s obedience ‘was not compelled by violence or necessity, but was induced purely by his love for us and by his mercy’.23 The military metaphor of Christ’s victory in cosmic warfare, much favoured by Anselm, is hardly apparent in Calvin’s writing, and appears mainly in relation to the resurrection as victory over death. But the heroic image of Christ’s personal   David S. Hogg, Anselm of Canterbury: The Beauty of Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 168, points out that words concerning ‘fittingness’ occur 76 times in the Cur Deus Homo. 20   CDH 2.5, Anselm, pp. 100–102. 21   CDH 2.20, Anselm, pp. 135–6. 22   References are to the 1559 edition of the Institutes: John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill (2 vols, Louisville: Westminster, John Knox Press, 2006 (1960)). 23   Ibid., II.12. 1, 16.12, pp. 464, 518. 19

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obedience through trials is greatly strengthened and emphasized. Those trials are not only physical but spiritual too, so that it is said that Christ underwent every trial known to humanity, accepting shame, humiliation, condemnation, and the curse laid upon sinful humans, in order to triumph over the devil. This was the personal substitution and cost of redemption, by which sin was redeemed, the price was paid, the penalty borne, the wrath appeased. In expounding the logic of this substitution, sacrificial imagery is also used – the death of Christ is the expiation, purging and washing away of sin – but it is secondary, an evocative pattern of biblical religious imagery not related to a sacrificial logic of its own, but reinforcing the logic of judicial substitution. We need to know that Christ was ‘a sacrificial victim’ if we are to be sure he is ‘our redemption, ransom and propitiation’.24 Here sacrifice, in the form of ‘propitiation’, is named as one of three forms of redemptive exchange. Yet from where does this necessity of sacrifice arise? In previous paragraphs, Calvin has argued that ‘it is not enough for [Christ] to suffer [just] any kind of death’, such as being murdered by thieves or slain in an insurrection’; to give ‘evidence of satisfaction’ he must die in a particular way, under condemnation as a sinner, thus ‘taking our guilt upon himself’.25 And ‘the form of Christ’s death also embodies a singular mystery’ for ‘the cross was accursed’.26 It is this judicial logic, rather than any logic of sacrifice itself, which requires that ‘blood is accordingly mentioned wherever Scripture discusses the mode of redemption’.27 Indeed the only efficacy of sacrifice lies in its being a death by which sins are expiated, by divine decree, without pain to the sinner; that is, it is a sign and shadow of the death of Christ.28 Calvin’s method, then, is to present moral, juridical, commercial and sacrificial terms as equivalents within an overarching logic of judicial restitution.29 Paying the penalty, bearing the curse, acting in obedience, appeasing the wrath, taking the punishment upon himself, vanquishing sin, making expiation – all of these, and more, are used to account for the effect of the death of Christ. Since the problem is defined as sin, the solution has to be thought of primarily in terms of religious law, and sacrifice is incorporated (with others) into that perspective. Christ’s death is explicated as a bearing of penalties due to others, placing himself there voluntarily, as the just suffering for the unjust. He suffers in his soul as well as his body, and is not demeaned to be seen to be weak and in

    26   27   28   29   24

Ibid., II.16.6, p. 511 (emphasis added). Ibid., II.16.5, p. 509. Ibid., II.16.6, p. 510. Ibid., II.16.6, p. 511. Ibid., III. 4.30, p. 657. Henri Blocher, ‘The Atonement in John Calvin’s Theology’, in Hill and James, Glory, pp. 279–303 (especially pp. 285–96). Blocher also emphasizes (p. 286) that Calvin preached ‘God’s love as the great motive of our redemption’, a ‘primary datum’ of penal substitution and not a modification of it. 25

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fear of death.30 But what he takes is not only the penalty but also the blame, ‘transferring the condemnation to himself and taking our guilt upon himself’.31 Not all defenders of penal substitution would agree that condemnation and guilt can in fact be transferred in this way, some preferring to speak with Luther of ‘a wonderful exchange’.32 And Calvin (like Paul in Gal 3: 13) holds back from saying directly that Christ is punished by God. What is necessary for Calvin is both the punishment, by which divine vengeance is settled, and the self-offering of the divine Son who shares our flesh. In this, as in drawing the incarnation as a whole into the picture of atonement, Calvin’s thought is in accordance with Anselm’s. However he is not tied to the feudal metaphor of insulted ‘honour’, although he uses it, but shifts from recompense to punishment as the vehicle for restoring order. Because the force of his exposition shifts to substitution and punitive processes, Calvin provides the main support for the doctrine of penal substitution, although the phrase itself does not appear. ‘Anselmian’ Motifs before Anselm Hans Boersma accepts that Anselm occupies a central place in the tradition of satisfaction thinking, but he wishes to show that the ‘Anselmian theories’ which flow on through Calvin into the Reformation tradition in fact pre-date Anselm, using this term as a ‘broad umbrella’ to include ‘most talk of sacrifice, satisfaction, vicarious suffering, punishment and propitiation’.33 He claims all these as forms of ‘substitution’ by which Christ in his death does something on behalf of all. The umbrella term ‘Anselmian’ with a focus on substitution is preferred, even though he admits that it is very broad, since ‘sacrifice does not necessarily involve punishment, and vicarious suffering does not imply satisfaction or propitiation’; and even though he points out, as noted above, that ‘Anselm viewed satisfaction and punishment as mutually exclusive and thus had a non-penal understanding of the cross’.34 Despite these qualifications, which seem to call for careful distinctions, Boersma quotes the second-century apologetic text Epistle to Diognetus, where Christ is named as ‘a ransom for us, the holy one for transgressors … covering our sins … O sweet exchange’.35 This ransom and exchange by which Christ ‘took our sins upon him’ is identified as ‘the principle of substitution’, and then, on the basis of nearby references to punishment and death, he comments: ‘it would not   Calvin, Institutes, II.16.12, p. 517–20.   Ibid., II. 16.5, p. 509. 32   James I. Packer, ‘What Did the Cross Achieve?: The Logic of Penal Substitution’, 30 31

The Tyndale Biblical Theology Lecture 1973 (Cambridge: Tyndale House, 1973): p. 31. 33   Boersma, Violence, p. 158. 34   Ibid. and n. 16. 35   Ep. Diog. 9 (translation in Staniforth, Writings, pp. 147–8).

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be too far-fetched to presume that the sweet exchange carried a penal element.’36 But it is too far-fetched, and presupposes the point at issue, that punishment is the only or typical way of dealing with sins, so that the cross, if it redeems by means of an exchange or substitution, must be understood in penal terms. Boersma goes on to argue that ‘penal substitution as such was not a Calvinist invention’, but in the Fathers too ‘the cross becomes a place where sin is judged and punished, a place where God satisfies his justice and his wrath’.37 He attempts to illustrate this claim from Irenaeus, in the teeth of the evidence, admitting that even the presence of sacrificial (and specifically propitiatory) language is ‘presumed’, ‘mostly an argument from silence’, and at best ‘weakly expressed’ and ‘marginal’. Yet he does not hesitate, in summing up, to claim these as ‘penal elements’ when punishment as such has not in fact been mentioned.38 He says that ‘Origen  …  argues that Christ is the sacrificial victim through whose death on the cross “propitiation” is made’, and continues ‘similarly Cyril of Alexandria … argues that Christ “accepted the punishment of sinners”’.39 Cyril’s judicial metaphor is simply equated with Origen’s sacrificial metaphor. Granted that the Fathers move smoothly from one figure to another in attempting to convey the meaning and power of the cross, it does not aid discrimination to imitate them in this practice. It only carries conviction if we assume from the start that the synthesis of sacrifice, propitiation and punishment, achieved by Calvin, is merely a restatement of an ancient tradition. Ironically, Boersma then protests against the ‘reductionism that limits the divine–human relationship to judicial categories, and that views the cross solely in terms of laws, infractions, judicial pronouncements, forgiveness, and punishments’.40 It seems that God’s wrath can only be satisfied by punishment, and sacrifice is simply one example of this. Yet there are two important limitations to this sweeping claim. Boersma does not strive to find the penal view in the Bible; and nor, as we have seen, does he find it in Anselm. However, this important distinction does not appear to affect his argument, while the ‘umbrella effect’ of conflating satisfaction with punishment is assumed by him, as by many writers on both sides. Thus J. Denney Weaver says, ‘The understanding that doing justice meant inflicting punishment is an assumption that Anselm never doubted’, and furthermore ‘satisfaction atonement is based on an intrinsically violent assumption – restoring justice means punishment. Restoring justice means balancing the evil of sin on one side with violent punishment on the other’; he says this is true ‘in any of the versions of satisfaction’.41 We have seen that Anselm, at least, does not conflate justice and punishment in this way. However, to his credit, Weaver does     38   39   40   41   36

37

Boersma, Violence, p. 159 and n. 20. Ibid., p. 160. Ibid., pp. 161–2. Ibid., p. 163 (emphasis added). Ibid., p. 164. Weaver, Nonviolent Atonement, p. 201.

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not replicate the common confusion of ‘satisfaction atonement’ with sacrifice, specifically because sacrifice, as he points out, does not contain ‘the element of satisfying a legal penalty’, and he argues that its use in Paul and elsewhere is better expounded in eschatological terms.42 Penal Substitution in the Bible? We have seen that Boersma, like many others, treats all forms of objective atonement (including sacrifice and penal substitution) as ‘Anselmian’, whether found before Anselm or after, and despite neither of those elements being present in any significant way in Anselm. It is a convenient if sometimes misleading conflation, which accords Anselm the credit for unifying the understanding of atonement. Other defenders of penal substitution, however, manifest considerable irritation at having it attributed to this medieval philosopher and theologian, since to call penal substitution ‘Anselmian’ implies that it is not a biblical teaching but a secondary construction, perhaps a distortion of the true understanding. A striking if extreme expression of this irritation is found in the book by Steve Jeffery, Mike Ovey and Andrew Sach: Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution.43 This semi-popular apologetic takes as its starting point that penal substitution is in an unqualified sense ‘the Bible’s teaching’. In seeking to prove that penal substitution is ‘biblical’, the book argues that retributive justice is the key concept in God’s dealings with the world’s evil, and that what restores justice is punishment. The Bible is then searched for examples of this construction. We can observe some examples of how this is done, beginning from the institution of the Passover (Ex 12), which the authors rightly see as colouring important strands of the OT and NT.44 The role of the Israelite ‘firstborn’, and the Passover lamb dying instead of them as their symbol and substitute, show that the Passover was a substitutionary process. But other aspects of the event such as the blood on the doorposts are simply glossed over – the writers are not interested in symbolism. On the basis of a reference, in Ezekiel 20: 4–10, to Israel’s rebellion in Egypt which God ‘thought to’ punish, the whole Passover episode is seen as a judgement on Israel averted by means of the lamb which is therefore understood as being punished in Israel’s stead.45 We see here a failure to attend to sacrificial logic by which symbolic offering restores relationships and averts wrath. In our world punishment is the one such effective action, perhaps, and colours the way people see religion and also war (the myth of redemptive violence). But this is not the dynamic of the Passover, either in Exodus 12 or in later manifestations.     44   45   42 43

Ibid., pp. 60, 58, 65. See n. 7 above. Jeffery et al., Pierced, pp. 34–42. Ibid., p. 38.

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Reviewing Leviticus 16, the authors identify four senses of the verb kpr (forgive, cleanse, ransom, avert wrath) and predictably seize on the fourth as the main one, reading the Day of Atonement as a symbolic punishment of the goat or goats which removes the sins of Israel.46 Without denying that aggression is an element in some treatments – the spitting on the scapegoat – we have seen that this is not central.47 The Suffering servant in Is 52: 13 – 53: 12 is likewise read as penal.48 Here there is a stronger case, since it is said: ‘Upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his wounds we are healed’ (53: 5b), and ‘Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain’ (53: 10). If these words are taken as defining, then other lines may amplify that picture: ‘Yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted’ (53: 4b); ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities’ (53: 5a); ‘The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all’ (53: 6b); ‘Stricken for the transgression of my people’ (53: 8b); ‘The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities’ (53: 11b). Most tellingly of all, ‘crush him with pain’ appears as a parallel of ‘make his life an offering for sin’ (53: 10; asham; peri hamartias LXX) which seals the notion that sacrifice is punishment, and the Servant’s sufferings are penal, not for his own sins but as a substitute for Israel/humanity. There are certainly penal elements here, but there are too many problems with reading the text in a univocal way, such as its allusiveness, and the ambiguity of the prepositions (where min means ‘for’ or ‘on account of’ our transgressions (v5), and l- means ‘on behalf of’ the many/the transgressors (vv. 11, 12) but not ‘in place of’),49 and the question whether this Servant is an individual or the nation, or an individual who represents the nation. And there are phrases which call equally clearly for a reading in sacrificial terms as a life offered up to bring release to others: ‘When you make his life an offering for sin’ (53: 10b); ‘Because he poured himself out to death’ (53: 12a); ‘He made intercession for the transgressors’ (53: 12bb); ‘Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter’ (53: 7b). In other words we have to run these two schemes side by side. ‘Crime and punishment’ is a schema we know, and this Servant figure was or seemed to be punished although innocent, punished on our behalf. ‘Sin and sacrifice’ is also a schema we know and this figure seemed like one who offered himself as if a sacrificial lamb to take away the people’s sins. The puzzle how either of these could be said of a real historical figure of the sixth or the eighth century bce was resolved for Christians by referring them to Jesus, whose death was indeed an     48   49   46

Ibid., pp. 42–52. On the Day of Atonement rite see above, pp. 76–8. Jeffery et al., Pierced, pp. 52–67. See Sue Groom, ‘Why Did Christ Die?: An Exegesis of Is 52: 13 – 53: 12’, in Derek Tidball, David Hilborn and Justin Thacker (eds), The Atonement Debate: Papers from the London Symposium on the Theology of the Atonement (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008), pp. 96–114, esp. pp. 108–13. 47

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oppression, a ‘perversion of justice’ (53: 8), occurring ‘because of’ the sins of Israel; and yet understood to be ordained by God as a sin offering to bring healing and life. What the world intends as a punishment is accepted by God as a sacrifice. But the two need to be held alongside each other. To say that he bore the pain of the punishment we deserved is not to say that he was in a legal sense ‘condemned’ by God, or that ‘God acted justly in condemning the servant for others’ sins’.50 This passage is a key locus for the traditional Christian proclamation of a saving death, a death which is both condemnation and salvation, a witness to the sinfulness of humanity and the generosity of God. In defending against a perception that some wish to remove the element of sin, so that the cross becomes a tragic event but not a saving one, these authors read the penal element literally. They do not adequately explain why, in NT passages which cite this text, it is to proclaim salvation in various ways, but (with the important exception of 1 Peter 2: 24)51 no use is made of the penal verses, which this argument claims are central. In the same way the book makes much of Galatians 3: 13: ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.’ This is read as ‘we were cursed as sinners under the Law but Christ took our curse on himself’. However, this is not what Paul says. It could be argued that he does say almost this in 2 Corinthians 5: 21: ‘For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin.’ But again care is needed. Does ‘made him to be sin’ mean ‘condemned him’ or ‘caused him to be identified with sin and sinners’? And does hamartia here stand not only for ‘sin’ but also, by extension, for ‘sin offering’ (as in LXX), thus making it clearly if subtly a sacrificial reading?52 Interestingly, the book contains no discussion of this verse. Returning to Galatians 3: 13, it has to be read as an identification in the same way. We should be wary of saying Christ was literally ‘cursed by God’ since Paul does not say that. Certainly Jesus is seen as standing in the place of condemnation, shame, sin, and curse (‘becoming a curse’, as elsewhere ‘he made him to be sin’, ‘enduring the shame’, ‘forsaken’) but the authors are too quick to take these terms literally, where others have been more circumspect.53 50   Jeffery et al., Pierced, p. 60. For more careful exegesis, see J. Alan Groves, ‘Atonement in Isaiah 53’, in Hill and James, Glory, pp. 61–89. Groves points (p. 88) to the extraordinary character of the purification envisaged here, which uses cultic language but cannot be reduced to conventional cultic acts. By analogy, we should resist reducing it to conventional penal terms too. 51   See discussion in Jeffery et al., Pierced, pp. 61–7. The quotation of ‘bore our sins’ (1 Pet 2: 24) is certainly atoning and in some sense substitutionary, but if it alludes to the scapegoat in Lev 16 the question remains whether that in turn should be understood as penal. 52   Martin, 2 Corinthians, pp. 156–7 (cf. Chapter 3, n. 100, above). 53   For example Justin Martyr, for whom it was ‘as if he had been accursed’, cited by Jeffery et al., Pierced, p. 165, but apparently without observing the ‘as if’: ‘our sin was transferred to him’.

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The reason for examining this particular flawed presentation is to see what happens when penal substitution is allowed to direct exegesis rather than arise from it. This is not the only way it can be employed. James Packer, in his defence of the teaching,54 places it as one of a group of ‘interpretative models’ (alongside verbal inspiration and divinization – and, I would add, sacrifice) ‘which particular theologians and theological schools developed for stating the faith to contemporaries’. It therefore lies between the foundational ‘control models’ given in scripture (such as God, Son of God, justification and so on) and the ‘dogmatic models’ (like homoousion, Trinity or sacrament) developed by theologians ‘to define and defend the faith’.55 Identifying it as a kind of ‘middle axiom’ in this way allows him to defend it positively and non-anxiously, while noting the dangers of doing so in ‘crude’ or ‘one-track-minded’ ways.56 The authors of Pierced for Our Transgressions seem to want to evacuate that middle ground and make this teaching, in Packer’s terms, both a scriptural control model and a dogmatic model. It will not bear the weight. From pointing to penal elements in a range of biblical texts, they come to force every sign of atonement into one construction, overlooking that the force of the text, and the means by which death is seen to be saving, is usually sacrificial rather than penal. Even where sacrifice and other features are noted they are brushed aside by broad conclusions like ‘thus Mark’s Gospel teaches penal substitution’.57 And the premise that sacrifice is propitiation of wrath, and therefore punitive, is never questioned. This key premise is what now needs to be examined. 2. Sacrifice and Punishment in the Atoning Death of Christ F.W. Dillistone, writing in 1968, argued that ‘no strictly penal theory of atonement can be expected to carry conviction in the world of the twentieth century’. This was because ‘responsible citizens are increasingly uncertain about the validity of the idea of purely retributive or deterrent punishment’.58 He pointed to R.W. Dale’s book of 1875 as ‘perhaps the last great treatment of the atonement in terms of the concept of law’.59

    56   57   58   54

Packer, ‘Cross’. See n. 32 above. Packer, ‘Cross’, p. 12. Ibid., pp. 25–6. Jeffery et al., Pierced, p. 73. Frederick W. Dillistone, The Christian Understanding of Atonement (London: SCM Press, 1984 (1968)), p. 214. 59   Ibid., p. 206; Robert W. Dale, The Atonement: The Congregational Union Lecture for 1875 (9th edn, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1884). 55

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But as we saw in Chapter 6, this dismissal was premature.60 The current defence of the teaching within the Reformed tradition represents a renewed attempt to reinstate an absolutist concept of law which had its heyday in the sixteenth century, operating largely with a retributive concept of punishment. In a democratic age it is arguably more natural to see law in more consensual terms, for example as an outworking of a ‘social contract’ by which we accept constraints for the sake of order. That generates a different understanding of God, not as transcendent judge but as covenant lord, whose aim will be to restore a broken relationship rather than to seek satisfaction for injury to honour or order.61 Likewise, what happens to atonement when punishment is given a psychological function, as by R.C. Moberly’s classic Atonement and Personality?62 In Moberly’s scheme, punishment forms part of a sequence: Punishment, Penitence, Forgiveness, Mediation; its purpose is to bring an offender to penitence so that forgiveness can flow, and without that outcome ‘punishment has no meaning or justification’, just as ‘forgiveness has no meaning or justification unless it is a response to awakening penitence’.63 This leads to a concept of law which is subservient to relationship. It is not necessarily ‘subjective’, for it looks to law as foundational for human communities, and assumes that they will flourish best when ‘the framers of the rules are willing to make every conceivable effort to see the total situation from the point of view of the child, the pupil, the worker, as the case may be’. However, this will not align well with an image of God as ‘a despotic parent, giving commands and inflicting punishments’ rather than one who is able to ‘enter into the child’s view of the world’.64 One of the salient features of both sacrifice and retributive justice is that their practitioners hold them to ‘set things right’, but are seldom able to say just how this happens: it ‘just does’. In this they both differ from other views of justice, such as the deterrent or the restorative, which also make a claim to be effective but are open to empirical verification of their claim. There remains a sense of mystery about the operation of retribution, as about sacrifice. Perhaps we should 60   Thomas Torrance, for example, took it as an element in a whole scheme of atonement without giving it special place, but he operates out of some of its presuppositions, such as that sacrifice is a form of judgement: ‘The death of Christ was an expiatory sacrifice in which God judged sin’ (Thomas F. Torrance, Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, ed. Robert T. Walker (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2009), p. 120). 61   See Charles F.D. Moule, ‘Punishment and Retribution: Delineating Their Scope in NT Thought’, in Brad Jersak and Michael Hardin (eds), Stricken by God?: Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), pp. 252–67, especially pp. 265–7. 62   R.C. Moberly, Atonement and Personality (London: John Murray, 1917 (1901)). 63   Dillistone, Atonement, pp.  255–6. See also Christopher D. Marshall, Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime, and Punishment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). 64   Dillistone, Atonement, p. 261.

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see the faith some place in retributive justice as a transfer into the secular sphere of the mystery attaching to biblical images of sacrifice. If so, is it a vehicle capable of carrying the image of God without distortion? We can of course ask the same question about sacrifice. But if law is not limited to retribution, neither is sacrifice limited to expiation. We have seen how broad and multidimensional sacrifice is in the Bible and elsewhere. In Chapter 1 (pp. 23–6 and Figure 1.1), it was suggested that we need to look in any sacrificial or other religious system for both personal and impersonal polarities, and also for both conjunctive and disjunctive polarities, and the same is true of law (Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1

A Typology of Law

We are focused here on the Type IV: the Impersonal/Disjunctive element, consisting of retributive justice, which (like expiatory sacrifice) is cold but necessary to maintain the order of the system. But at the opposite extreme is the Type I: the Personal/Conjunctive element, consisting (as with communion sacrifices) of the community defined by law, the relational purpose for which law exists, at least according to a social contract model. This is where the focus of reformative or restorative policies is found. As in sacrifice so in law, the disjunctive is necessary,

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not in itself, but to protect and enable the conjunctive, while the second gives life and purpose to the first. These describe the main dimensions of law in our times. The others also exist. Propitiatory sacrifice (Type III: the Personal/Disjunctive element) has an important parallel in informal and more personal legal systems, where acts of feudal homage to appease the displeasure of the ruler may be the natural means of restoring right relationship. Among us that would be disallowed and called a bribe, an attempt to subvert the proper impersonality of the system. Type II: the Impersonal/Conjunctive element (almost excluded from the biblical account of sacrifice) remains a key political function of legal systems in the form of the acquisition of power. In light of the way law and sacrifice take on similar shapes, we need to question the presupposition that punishment is the standard model of effective action for dealing with guilt, so that sacrifice, if it does anything, must be a kind of punishment. This priority of the penal is assumed by Girard, for whom sacrifice is scapegoating, the community’s punishment of the supposed offender; punishment meted out more formally within a legal system is therefore a more refined, and hopefully more just, replacement for sacrifice. What sacrifice (specifically the sin offering) and punishment have in common that each deals with a situation of offence, and each has both personal and legal aspects. But in terms of their function, sacrifice and punishment are mutually exclusive. Where a goat offered as sin offering expiates divine wrath, it excludes me from death or any other divine punishment due to me on account of my sin, but it does not follow that it is being punished ‘in my stead’ or that I am being punished ‘in it’. Punishment, whether inflicted by God or humanity, is a consequence of wrath unappeased, offence unexpiated. So perhaps we can say about these two systems that they differ in relation to power: that sacrifice works where power is recognized and submitted to (in religion or state), punishment where it is contested. In any case, if they are complementary, it makes sense to ask, ‘Must there be punishment?’ Isn’t that what God desires above all to avoid – ‘who desireth not the death of a sinner but rather that he should turn from his wickedness and live’?65 Like Boersma, Kevin Vanhoozer accepts that punishment is somehow necessary. He affirms postmodern critiques of the way atonement theories attempt to create structures to explain the workings of grace, and in doing so posit systems of indebtedness.66 He argues for the possibility (contrary to the secular reason of Derrida, but following Marion and Ricoeur) of a free gift from God, and contends that the biblical model of covenant lordship offers an alternative to a system of debt and retribution, pointing to a vision of the kingdom as restored relationships. In the light of these, he acknowledges that the penal substitution view falls short: 65   Book of Common Prayer 1662 (Oxford: OUP, 1912), Communion service, invitation to confession. 66   Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ‘The Atonement in Postmodernity’, in Hill and James, Glory, pp. 366–404.

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‘with regard to method, it privileges one metaphor over others; with regard to matter it processes the metaphor according to the economy of law that leads to the notion of God’s retributive justice and Jesus’ punitive death’;67 and it leads to a practice in which coercion is a feature of the life of the church as well as the social structure.68 He offers an alternative account of atonement free of these faults, summed up as: ‘Jesus’ death on the cross “for us” is the means by which God gives and forgives.’69 It is an act of excess by which all economies are transcended. And yet for him the question remains: ‘Does God renounce or fulfil his righteous indignation on the cross?’70 After all the arguments, penal substitution remains for him, somehow, a necessary constituent of grace.71 Defenders of penal substitution often insist that God has promised to bring judgement on sinners and therefore he ‘must’ punish iniquity in order to be true to himself. On this axiom stands the necessity of the cross and the impossibility of offering free forgiveness without punishing. Athanasius is quoted in its support: ‘It is unthinkable that God should go back upon his word.’72 But of course Scripture contains numerous occasions when God does go back on his word: he goes back on his decision to blot out humanity from the earth (Gen 6: 7); he decides to have mercy on the repentant Ninevites, to Jonah’s disgust (Jonah 4: 2; compare Jer 18: 7–11); his promise to Adam that ‘in the day that you eat of [the fruit] you shall die’ (Gen 2: 17) is commuted into a lifetime of painful struggle instead (3: 17–19); sacrifice is often accepted as a sign of repentance causing God to stay his hand (2 Sam 24: 15–25; compare Joel 2: 13–17). These passages should not be read as suggesting that God’s judgement can be dismissed or treated lightly, but they undermine the attempt to tie God to a supposed necessity of penal retribution. Likewise Gaffin speaks of ‘Paul’s teaching that God’s wrath is such that concerns of his person, his holy and just aversion to sin, require that to be true to himself he punish sinners’.73 Amid the narcissistic overtones of ‘concerns of his person’ it is hard to recognize here the God whose unconditional love for the sinner is dramatized in the loving father in the parable of the prodigal son.74 Nor is the case improved by adding that ‘God’s mercy and his just wrath are equally ultimate concerns’, even if both need to be taken into account. We noted above Boersma’s affirmation that ultimately ‘God is love, not wrath’.75 The text which   Ibid., p. 381.   Ibid., p.  381; cf. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular

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Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 422. 69   Vanhoozer, ‘Atonement’, p. 400. 70   Ibid., p. 401. 71   Ibid., p. 403. 72   Jeffery et al., Pierced, p. 170, cf. p. 123. 73   Richard Gaffin, ‘Atonement in the Pauline Corpus’, in Hill and James, Glory, pp. 140–62, citing p. 157. 74   See Boersma, Violence, pp. 174–5, 178. 75   Boersma, Violence, p. 49 (emphasis original).

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Gaffin cites in support (Romans 9: 22–3) involves both mercy and wrath, but it comes in the middle of an incomplete process which ends, in the scope of Paul’s argument in Chapters 9–11, in a vision of the ultimate triumph of mercy (‘For God has imprisoned all in disobedience in order that he may have mercy upon all’ (11: 32)) and the overarching mystery of God (11: 33).76 Which is final: mercy or wrath? Philippians 2: 10–11 provides a test case, proclaiming that God’s purpose in exalting Jesus is: So that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

How do we read this? Do we find in the image of bending knees the coercion of recalcitrants or a spontaneous recognition and acclaim of Jesus the exalted lord? Is Paul envisaging the eschatological grace of universal submission, or God’s final punishment on all who oppose him? The passage rests on a clear echo of the divine appeal in Isaiah 45: 22 (‘Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God, there is no other’), now made possible and ecstatically fulfilled through Christ; but, surprisingly, not everyone agrees. Certainly, the Isaiah passage ends on a rather different note (‘Only in the LORD, it shall be said of me, are righteousness and strength; all who were incensed against him shall come to him and be ashamed’, Is 45: 24), so that its words allow both for some to come to Christ willingly and for others to come under duress. Commentators are divided.77 While the judgement and subjection of ‘all things’ to Christ is a common Pauline motif (1 Cor 15: 24–8; Eph 1: 22), it seems that this passage envisages in a different way a response free from that hint of violence. Not that it affirms universal salvation as a fact, even eschatologically, but the restoring of all things is what it seems to long for as the right and natural outcome of creation and redemption. Either way, what is happening if we can only see this as an act of coercion? What is happening if we can only see spontaneous acclaim?   Ibid., p. 94.   Beare sees here a ‘universal acclamation’, and Hawthorne understands this to be

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‘the hope of God’ (Frederick W. Beare, The Epistle to the Philippians (3rd edn, London: Black, 1973), pp. 86–7; Gerald F. Hawthorne, Philippians (Waco: Word Books, c.1983)[?], pp. 93–4.). On the other hand, many follow Calvin who says ‘Paul is not speaking here of voluntary obedience’ (cited by Moses Silva, Philippians (2nd edn, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), p. 111, followed by Peter T. O’Brien, The Epistle to the Philippians: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), p. 243; Gordon D. Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 224; and Silva, Philippians, pp.  111–12. Martin occupies the middle ground, speaking of ‘common acknowledgement’ but also, ambiguously, of ‘total surrender’ (Ralph P. Martin, Philippians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), p. 101).

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Does the feeling that punishment is somehow necessary arise from the nature of God, or from reading into God the condition of an alienated world? This is a major divide or chasm within Christian thinking. The question can be turned around to ask: can we envisage grace without punishment? Can forgiveness extinguish guilt? Can the gift exceed what is owed? Granted that as humans we can’t do that, because there always remains a deposit of resentment (Milbank’s word)78 on both sides, it may be that we therefore need a sign, to believe that God has not only spoken forgiveness but enacted it. But still that is our human need, not a necessity we can place on God. One of the features of sacrifice is a certain objectivity, impersonality, a necessity which transcends argument. Hebrews says, ‘Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. Thus it was necessary …’ (9: 22–3). It seems that satisfaction has that same character for Anselm, and for Calvin both sacrifice and punishment are impersonal necessities. But it is typical of some recent arguments for a penal view that it is the personal wrath of the deity that is being insisted on. That alters the character and function of judgement, and invites some of the misunderstandings noted in this and the previous chapter, by appearing to describe a rift within divinity, setting Father against Son. It can be stated that an adequate understanding of atonement must be at once three things: personal, impersonal and Trinitarian. The New Testament finds the impersonal element in the transcendence of God, and the objective necessity of an event for removing sin (imaged as sacrifice, or marginally as punishment); it finds in Christ the incarnate one the personal involvement of God in setting all things right; and in the harmony of Father and Son in this event it finds the spring of Trinitarian theology. But if we see punishment as a self-substantiating personal necessity, we shift it into the realm of the arbitrary (and therefore the at least apparently non-necessary), we turn Christ’s self-giving act of love into a passive reception of an unexplained violence, and in doing so we split the Trinity. In the end we must conclude that both sacrifice and law are good analogies, but no more. Do we allow either of them to shape our understanding of God? The Bible, taken as a whole, does not show God to be to us a detached enforcer of laws, nor an arbitrary and despotic monarch, even though both images are found in Scripture. A truer biblical picture is of a covenant lord in a relationship of interparticipation with his people, a relationship which begins in gift and uses law and sacrifice to convey a movement towards ideal harmony. The Bible, as well as common sense, requires us to allow the possibility of divine punishment (judgement), but theology presses us to ask whether even the possibility arises from us rather than from God. Milbank points to the way Augustine’s argument that all power and property and violence are sinful privations of being failed when he allowed the legitimacy of violence done within the church for a ‘good end’. If we have legitimized violence in God’s kingdom have we not done so in God? The question may be, not ‘Must God punish?’ but ‘Can God   Milbank, Theology, p. 420.

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punish?’ For a covenant lord involved with the life of his people, to punish his people, in whose life he participates, is in some sense to punish himself. For John Scotus Eriugena, God neither wills nor enacts punishment, for all punishment is sinful privation of Being and contrary to God’s nature who is Being itself. All punishment, like all sin, is therefore self-punishment, depriving myself of being as I seek to deprive others.79 Kathryn Tanner calls us to see God’s grace as endless and unconditional, and never turning to the violence of punishment: God does not stop giving to us because we have misused and squandered the gifts that God has given us … It is our sin itself that interrupts the reception and distribution of God’s gifts, bringing suffering and death in its train. The loss of what we might have enjoyed is not God’s punishment of us, but the natural consequence of our turning away from and refusing what God is offering us for our good.80

It follows that ‘If God does not punish in response to sin, it cannot be the case that Christ on the cross is being punished by God in our stead’. Nor is Christ meeting any other condition or necessity placed by God because grace is prior to all possible conditions. Rather, on the cross, God in Jesus freely enters into the privation of Being which is our human lot, accepting the blame for all the sin and evil practised in the world and so discharging it. All is forgiven and set aside, and the cost and blame is borne wholly by God. It is the episacrificial gift of God by which all that is amiss is set right. We may call this ‘self-sacrifice’ or ‘self-punishment’ so long as we are aware that both terms strain the limits of these conceptualities. The necessity of violence does not lie in God but in the sinful resistance of created being to God’s love. Discipline or grace which impinges on our resistance will be experienced as violence (as Boersma shows) but the source of the violence is in us, not in God. ‘Although he causes grief, he will have compassion … for he does not willingly [lit. ‘from the heart’] afflict or grieve anyone (Lam 3: 33). In Christ God puts himself in our place, in the incarnation and on the cross identifying with our state, both enacting the judgement of God on all sin (including punishment) and, by bearing its pain, bringing reconciliation. But this works, for us, only if we can envisage the relationship between God and humanity as a covenant of love, and likewise the relationship of Jesus and the God of Israel as taking place within the Trinity of love. In that case its mysterious efficacy is the enlargement of Being that we call grace: the self-offering of one who gives himself (as a sacrifice?) to bring all to completion. Then the bearing of pain is an act of love which fulfils the being of humanity and God.   Ibid.   Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), pp. 64–5.

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Chapter 8

Towards the Convivial Body: A Eucharistic Trinitarian Theology of Sacrifice 1. Sacrifice in Religion and Theology In his recent book, with the bold title Sacrifice Unveiled, Robert Daly has argued that a Christian understanding of sacrifice has to place the Trinity at the centre and allow that key doctrine to generate an account of incarnation, atonement and Eucharist which includes an understanding of sacrifice. He criticizes the attempt to reach a Christian account while starting from sacrifice as a mode of general religiousness as presented in the ‘history of religions’. In his view, such an approach is ‘defective in the extreme’ because it misconstrues Christian sacrifice (including ‘the sacrifice of Christ’ and ‘the sacrifice of the Mass’) in terms derived from the world’s religions.1 I find myself sympathetic to his viewpoint because hostile and frequently uninformed attitudes towards sacrifice in general have distorted the language and conceptuality of sacrifice and rendered it extremely dangerous as a tool for presenting a positive account of theology. But two things need to be said. Firstly, we saw in chapters 5, 6 and 7 that some of the distortion of sacrifice has come from Christian attempts to read it in theological terms. The appropriation of sacrificial language concerning the cross, when allied to a punitive conception of the world, has caused or added to a general culture-wide misreading of sacrifice as punitive, which is then thrown back against theology as a missile. So if we were to place the Trinity at the centre we need to be sure we would not be injecting another theological virus into the debate. If the doctrine of the Trinity is poorly understood, and widely undervalued by Christians, including many Christian theologians (as section 4 below will discuss), it may be more likely to compound the misperceptions of sacrifice, rather than remove them. Secondly, the attempt to distinguish ‘our’ (true) sacrifice from ‘theirs’ (false or inadequate) goes a long way back in the biblical and Christian tradition, at least as far as the Book of Leviticus and the prophets of Israel, but it has been questioned by critical scholarship. We have to recognize that the form and practice of sacrifice in Ancient Israel was not notably different from that of the surrounding cultures, until it came to be  Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, p. 10.

1

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reshaped in accordance with theological understandings. There are differences but also similarities, and the attempt to rule out the latter has not been productive. For both these reasons, this book is attempting to ground a theological account of sacrifice in an approach to the study of religion as practised in the social sciences. I use the term ‘social sciences’ as a more useful term than ‘history of religions’, since it does not imply a progression from primitive to developed forms, or from error to truth. I have pointed to common features of sacrifice in ancient and modern societies and claimed that (with many particularities which must make us wary of offering generalizations) we do find here recurring patterns of embodied religiousness. I criticize the tendency in Western observers to emphasize expiations and killing as the essence of sacrifice, a tendency which embodies a particular cultural distortion derived largely from unexamined theological presuppositions. Instead we need to look for conjunctive as well as disjunctive modes of sacrifice (see Figure 1.1), and see all of them as functioning within a broad cosmology. The obsession with violence is generally ours, not theirs. In these matters, there are inevitably limitations in the anthropological stance of ‘observation’, which gives priority to observable patterns of behaviour in religious rites rather than the inner meaning experienced by participants. Of course this is a methodological limitation that anthropologists are well aware of and frequently struggle with. But in many cases we can discern that sacrificial behaviour is understood by its agents as a response to past, present or future action of the divinity, a transformative event or environment which I call ‘episacrificial’ because it exhibits most of the features of sacrifices, and provides a transcendent foundation on which sacrificial systems are based. Unlike the practice of many in the social sciences, theology is not obliged to bracket out a story or experience of divine incursions, sacred presence or holy relationship, even if it cannot necessarily confirm its truth. It can treat the activity and the understanding which accompanies it as implicitly theological. It may indeed, whatever its source, be revealing aspects of divinity and humanity not apparent within the mainstream tradition, Christian or other. In Part I of this book, therefore, the cultures presented in the foreground or background of the Bible were examined for signs of a mode of religiousness embodied in sacrificial action, beginning with the literature of Israel and moving on to their transformations in the Christian literature of the New Testament. Chapter 2 looked at gift and meal sacrifices and the way they show people relating to divinity through the matter of creation, in an economy of exchange. This conjunctive orientation is the aspect of religion which is least theoretized within the Old Testament, being closest to ‘folk religion’, and downplayed by the dominant Levitical strand. Jesus’ teaching of the kingdom, and its manifestation in his healing ministry, were depicted as a renewed manifestation of what I have called episacrificial energy, evident also in the Pauline responsive culture of praise, and the Christian zebach of the ‘Lord’s Supper’ springing out of Jesus’ open feasting and the tradition of the Last Supper.

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Chapter 3 examined the necessity for bodies to be ritually and morally ‘pure’ to come into the presence of God. This opens up the disjunctive elements of lustration and, especially, expiation by which impurity is excluded from divine presence. We saw that Jesus, starting from the episacrificial assumption of God’s desire to include the outsider, was critical of some applications of the purity laws, but also took steps to oppose the powers of evil when they acted on God’s people. Paul’s proclamation that all expiation had been performed by God through the episacrificial work of the cross and resurrection, led to the abolition of the purity rite of circumcision and the food laws. In Chapter 4, we looked at the ways in which sacrifices mediate a divine covenant over time, especially the first fruits rite, firstborn sacrifice and the mythic offshoots in divine initiatives of Akedah and Passover, through which Israel became God’s people. In the NT, the episacrificial event of the resurrection of Jesus manifests divine power creating a new people through incorporation into Christ in baptism and faith living. Without attempting to trace the story of sacrifice beyond the end of the first century, Part II picks up some aspects of current debates about sacrifice, debates which arose through the spiritualizing tendencies in post-Greek and post-Jewish culture as people became distanced from bodily practice of sacrifice, and amplified by the anti-sacrificial tendencies in post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment and now postmodern culture. In this environment, sacrifice is questioned and attacked precisely for being embodied religion, as attention focuses on its supposedly ‘violent’ and ‘primitive’ character. This bias is shared by both Girard’s critique of sacrifice as scapegoating, and the identification of sacrifice with oppression in some feminist writing. Chapters 5 and 6 try to identify the sources of this misunderstanding, and to identify positive features of sacrifice which make it an essential component of the Christian teaching on atonement. Chapter 7 engaged with those who, by contrast, approve of sacrifice and atonement, but defend these motifs by building in a view of sacrifice as punishment, a view which I argue is equally misleading. 2. The Given Gift The major sections of this book have sought to lay the groundwork for a Christian theology of sacrifice, which is the main task of this final chapter. I have assumed from the start that a sacrifice is essentially a gift, an act of generosity which establishes, confirms or enriches a relationship between humans and gods. There are rituals which are not sacrifices because they are not gifts, although gifts may accompany them. But a sacrifice as such always involves a handing over of some material or spiritual substance to another.

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But now Jacques Derrida has questioned whether a gift can ever in fact be given.2 For him the essence of giving is the pure motive which does not even envisage, let alone require, a return for the gift. As soon as I consider getting a return for my gift, it becomes a disguised investment: I am giving in order to receive some good, and that purpose creates (at least in my mind, as donor) a debt and an obligation. Even the recognition of a gift as such annuls its character as gift because it entails an obligation of return. And if I give a gift without such recognition (place money secretly in your bank account, say) this only defers the potential moment of recognition, and in any case is not free from the pleasure of giving pleasure. So I should give gifts without being aware of it, and the result should be a response I do not desire: the gift should be rejected, or lead the recipient to act in ways which counteract my interests. The question is challenging but unreal. A completely unconditioned gift could only be given to someone who had not first given me some ground or obligation. It envisages a world of total strangers making spontaneous and pure acts of generosity. This apparently is the only alternative to a world of usury and trade. But trade is a system of non-obligatory exchange focused on goods, while gift entails exchange which is obligatory, and focused on persons. The requirement of total purity seems to denote a distaste for the human condition of mixed motivations and the need humans have for one another. It also seems to ensure that if a gift or a sacrifice could occur, it would be an act of pure masochism and arise out of self-hatred. Somehow the topic always leads us back to a state of oppression, but that tendency arises, not from the ‘primitive’ but from the modern psyche. In traditional societies described by anthropologists the characteristic tone is generosity.3 A chief is indeed obliged to give gifts and thereby retain the favour of his people; a chief who gives little is no real chief at all, and those to whom gifts are given are obliged to receive them and to make a response. Unlike a trading relationship, which can be freely entered into or declined, to refuse a gift is to reject the person and destroy the relationship. Likewise trade expects an equivalent and ideally immediate return, but a gift response entails an appropriate delay and appropriate variation – so that the return gift is not the same, and therefore effectively a refusal.4 Nonidentical repetition is therefore a key factor: a lower person is not expected to match a superior’s gift; that would be claiming equality. The gift therefore operates according to its own laws. But why should it be assumed that such obligatory generosity is oppressive or unreal, especially if we cannot make real the concept of a pure, that is, non-obligated, gift? Kathryn Tanner argues that we should not focus on the solipsistic question of my (or any 2   Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992). 3   Marcel Mauss, Gift, pp. 17–45. 4   John Milbank, ‘Can a Gift Be Given?: Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic, Modern Theology 11/1 (1995): pp. 119–61, citing p. 125.

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else’s) motivation but on the act of giving and the quality of relationships it sets up. ‘Unconditional giving is not a matter of feeling or interior disposition but a social matter, an economic matter, a question of the way benefits are distributed to form social relations.’5 A gift exchange begins not from pure altruism, nor from self-hatred, but from generosity and excess. The gift is really given, and it does not reduce desire (as trading does): it increases it, leads to more life.6 Jan-Olav Henriksen argues that what is lacking in this philosophical discussion of the gift is the concept of grace.7 Derrida’s stipulation seems to require that humans achieve a level of purity possible only for God. But surely God, at least, can do so. Such a cycle has to begin from wherever the source of life is held to be, which is why I have argued that sacrifice is misdescribed if we begin from the human offering to God and questions about human motivation. Ultimately the gift must have a beginning outside ourselves. The divine gift of life is the model of grace, preceding any possible desert or response. This is why those who offer sacrifice typically (if not universally) understand themselves not as doing the deity a favour but as making a response to a gift already given, an episacrificial act. Humans can seek, in their own way, to imitate such pure love, which gives out of love, and without imposing conditions in terms of deserving or responding. 3. Eucharistic Being Gifts can be given, then, and are a fundamental clue to the human condition. The giving and receiving of gifts, in feasting and other sacrificial practices, enacts an understanding of the source and character of life. The Eucharist is the symbol of the church’s desire to be a community of gift, living in thankfulness for what has been received from God (in creation and redemption), expressed not only liturgically but in the offering of its life, corporate and individual. Like the biblical sacrifice of the zebach the Eucharist begins in a recognition, response and celebration of the act of grace. Chauvet describes a movement of symbolic exchange, from ‘Gift’ to ‘Reception’ to ‘Return-Gift’.8 In this movement, ‘Gift’ and ‘Reception’ are joined in what he calls the ‘axis of contradiction’ because in the process one loses and another gains, whatever the matter may be. ‘Reception’ and ‘Return-Gift’, in turn, are joined by the ‘axis of implication’ (one might say obligation) because acceptance of a gift obliges one to make a certain response. He uses this figure to spell out the dynamic of the Eucharist: (1) the   Tanner, Economy of Grace, p. 61.   Van Baal, ‘Offering, Sacrifice and Gift’. 7   Jan-Olav Henriksen, Desire, Gift and Recognition: Christology and Postmodern 5

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Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), pp. 44–6. 8   Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 267; attributed to A. Delzant, La communication de Dieu (Paris: Cerf, 1978).

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Gift of God’s gracious acts in Israel and especially in Christ; (2) the Recognition and Reception of these in the sacrament; (3) the Return Gift of seeking to be, individually and collectively, the Body of Christ living according to the way of grace and love.9 There is a certain doubling in the middle point of this movement, since Chauvet locates the responsive element of oblation or thanksgiving within the Reception. To offer thanks for food or other benefits is a mode of acknowledging them as given, not merely ‘there’: ‘Only those receive it [“like the manna in the desert”] who open their hands anew each day.’10 Yet that act of Reception could equally be thought of as a beginning of the Return Gift. Chauvet makes a distinction between sacramental Reception and ethical Return, which is in itself perhaps too schematic, and yet it makes a valid point, for we have seen all along that there is an important social dimension in the zebach, as in all sacrifice, not only in the performance but in its implication for social harmony. What is returned to God must be not only symbol and song but also active response in transformed living. The Eucharist clearly fits all seven elements of sacrifice set out earlier in Chapter 1. It is an action involving matter, movement and words; it is a ritual making special use and giving special meanings to ordinary elements; it takes commonplace matter and puts it into relation with the transcendent order of God, in anamnesis of the sacred story and the divine plan; it involves an exchange as gifts (of praise, and of bread and wine) are offered in response for those received (salvation history, specific blessings, the sacramental presence of Christ); through this exchange there is (in some way much disputed) a transvaluing of the elements and of the community, therefore a transformation; its matter of bread and wine, while ritualized and special, is at the same time in solidarity with the conditions of our life. The whole can be held (as we shall see) to symbolize the whole cosmology of Christian living, to ‘make the church’.11 The Eucharist is therefore recognizably a sacrifice, in which the central dynamic is offering to God what is God’s own, in celebration of God’s blessings: ‘Thine own of thine own we offer unto thee.’12 The redemptive focus should not disguise the foundation of sacrament in a celebration of creation. Of course it is more than a celebration of creation, though not less. The danger in using sacrificial language for the Eucharist is our tendency to say that ‘real’ sacrifice is about sin and ‘real’ sacrifice contains a death. This has led people to see the Eucharist in expiatory terms as itself a sin offering, a perception which has skewed the theology of the rite, especially when it has been seen, not   Ibid., p. 278.   Ibid., p. 279. 11   John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Darton, Longman and Todd: London, 9

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1985), pp. 143–69, especially pp. 148–9. 12   From the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, cited by John D. Zizioulas, ‘Preserving God’s Creation 3’, www.resourcesforchristiantheology.org/?p=132, accessed: 14 November 2009, p. 7.

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as a remembrance of the atoning sacrifice of Christ but as a re-offering of Christ’s ‘once for all’ sacrifice. All this was extensively discussed in the Reformation period. The Eucharist is not a sin offering (although it depends on one) and it does not contain a death (although it depends on one). By analogy with the zebach and the covenant renewal rite, we can understand the Eucharist as a feast following and flowing out of the offering, in this case the one unique historic self-offering of Christ, the one final sacrifice for sin (John 1: 29; Rom 3: 25; Heb 9: 11–15; 1 Pet 1: 18–19; 1 Jn 2: 2), of which the bread and wine become a memorial and anamnesis through the recalling of the Last Supper. The community celebrates and grounds its ongoing life in the relationship enacted once by Christ. Yet there is an element of truth in the privileging of the sin offering, since its expiatory aspect recognizes the distance between humanity and deity. We recall that the purpose of the chatta’th and other purificatory rites generally was to enable God’s people to set aside whatever would defile the temple and so free them to draw near to God’s presence. The disjunctive moment is necessary, but subordinate to the conjunctive. A disjunctive moment is likewise necessary in the liturgy, as recognized by the custom of making pre-Eucharistic confession (whether sacramentally or, more minimally, in a corporate act). It acknowledges an ineffaceable but bridgeable distance between humanity and God; there is a need to be reconciled in order to be open to receive grace, to celebrate the covenant rites by which this group is constituted and graced as God’s people. Just as the covenant at Sinai was inaugurated with a communal zebach and holocaust, with the sign of blood (Ex 24: 5–8), so Christians share in their new covenanted identity in Christ through the sharing of the bread and the cup (1 Cor 10: 16–17). That this Christian zebach with bread and wine contains a necessary backward look to the cross should not outweigh the awareness that it is itself a celebration, occurring in knowledge of the resurrection and in anticipation of eschatological fulfilment: ‘As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes’ (1 Cor 11: 26). As these are given and received sacramentally, and in company, they embody the self-presentation to God of the worshipper as a whole person, body and spirit, ready to be transformed through participation in God’s new and eschatological order opened up for us by Christ. We have been speaking about the Eucharist in terms of sacrifice, an exchange act within an ongoing relationship. Christian thinking has preferred to move away from the language of sacrifice and to consider the Eucharist rather as a sacrament, understood as a material means by which grace is embodied. This tends to take the emphasis away from the relationship and places it on the material elements themselves and on a puzzle, the epistemological and metaphysical question of how matter can communicate grace and spiritual power, how for example, Christ can be said to be ‘present’ in the Eucharist.

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Chauvet speaks of this element of materiality, the necessary mediation of grace through matter, whether words or things, as ‘the sacramental stumbling block’.13 In the context of our culture it can seem to be a compromise, a defeat of true spirituality, which locates the action of God in matter and therefore situates it in an institution. He says: ‘To become a believer is to consent, without resentment, to the corporality of the faith.’14 Hesitations about how ‘Christian sacrifice’ can be sure to be distinguished from ‘archaic sacrifice’ express a similar fear and resentment about matter, but this study assumes that both the corporate (social living) and the corporeal (bodily living) are essential to our condition. Is sacramentality merely a stumbling block, then, or does it have a positive contribution to make to a true understanding of the world we live in? Eucharistic Ethics To place at the centre of the church’s life a celebration of the created order implies a commitment to seeing the world not only as it is but as it might be if perfected by God. What account of bodily being does this require of us? In the biblical perspective, the world is ‘created’: that is, it exists in a state of dependence on God, who is the ground of all being. All life flows out of God and into God. This is true of all mineral, vegetable and animal beings, with which humanity exists in a web of created relationships, and survives through a continual exchange of life at the biological level. For some animals, and certainly for humans, this biological exchange of life is replicated at the higher levels of social and spiritual being. If the physical world mediates a relationship to its creator, addressed as landlord or as guest, it is appropriate that praise should be not only vocal but bodily, involved in dancing, and in eating and drinking. Yet now we find ourselves in an ecological crisis, beset by dwindling resources and rising demands, fearful that humanity is incapable of putting a stop to processes of environmental change which it has caused. Arguably the ecological crisis is less about an objective ‘scarcity’ than about the way human beings understand themselves in relation to the natural order, including their fellow humans, other living beings and God. The attempt to live in separation from God manifests itself in greed and many other disorders, which largely create the scarcity we complain about. In their complaining, humans now often blame the God they don’t believe in for not making a cosmos better suited to their tastes and needs, or turn to secular apocalyptic scenarios, or pantheistic modes of nature worship. The problem cannot be divorced from the assumption in Western thought that soul and body are somehow separate, as if we think human beings (uniquely?) stand outside the web of created being and are entitled to use the earth for their own purposes. The doctrine of creation offered here insists that matter is good and God is to be found in and through matter; what obstructs our passage to God is   Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 153.   Ibid., p. 153.

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not matter itself but the denial of our created status, which consigns us to illusion and unreality. We affirm the natural order therefore as ‘iconographic’: it represents to us the one who has created it, and invites us into the place of recognition and response. This presents us with a vision and a challenge. John Zizioulas argues that effective action to solve the ecological crisis will not be generated by imposing ethical requirements on ourselves or other people, by means of treaties or sanctions, nor by the deployment of technical expertise or managerial skill, even disguised under the biblical metaphor of ‘stewardship’, but only by the creation of an ethos, a culture in which a truly Eucharistic way of being can subsist.15 This will require a fundamentally different understanding of what human being is and might be: ‘Man has to become a liturgical being before he can hope to overcome his ecological crisis.’16 To ‘become a liturgical being’, to practise the formation of a ‘Eucharistic self’,17 which understands itself in sacrificial terms as living in response to gift, is not an aesthetic stance but an ethical one. It means making concrete choices about food, work and politics under the rubric of thanksgiving, not in liturgy alone but in action. It involves acknowledging that humanity is not merely involved in creation, but has a representative role in relation to the created order, a role we may call priestly if we model our understanding of humanity not on Adam’s failure but on Christ’s act of self-offering. If humanity can claim any special quality that sets us apart (whether we think of that as reason, or self-consciousness, or creativity, or love) those things are given us to give back to God through using them for the widest possible good of the whole. Taking responsibility for the offering of the cosmos, directed not at our own need but at the widest good, fulfils that special role and enters into the blessing God desires to give: As God’s gifts, all his creatures are fundamentally eucharistic beings also; but the human being is able – and designated – to express the praise of all created things before God.18

  Zizioulas, ‘Preserving God’s Creation 3’, p. 7.   John D. Zizioulas, ‘Proprietors or Priests of Creation’, www.rsesymposia.org/

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themedia/File/1151679350-Pergamon.pdf, accessed: 14 November 2009, p. 2. 17   David F. Ford, Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999), pp. 137–65. 18   Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation (London: SCM Press, 1985), p. 71.

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4. A Trinitarian Theology of Sacrifice Daly contends that: authentic Christian sacrificial activity does not begin with human beings, and then get accepted or rejected by God; it is a responsive, interpersonal, selfcommunicative activity that has begun with the initiative of the Father.19

This is a crucial insight, which I have approached from the other end by identifying the element of the episacrificial as a characteristic (if not necessarily universal) feature of religious sacrifices in general. Sacrifice takes place in one form or another in almost every culture, and its meaning is spelt out according to many theologies or cosmologies. Yet, as a response to being, actual sacrifices are always flawed since what is given is limited by what is held back. Ultimately, in the Christian view, the only true sacrifice (here Chauvet and Daly are right) is that revealed in the kenosis of the Son of God who gives himself utterly for the good of the world. Yet the Christ event does not appear out of nowhere but springs from the eternal self-giving of the Father and is superimposed upon the act of creation, God’s endless self-giving out of which life springs at every moment, through which God seeks to draw creation to himself in love. I have emphasized the element of creation in the Eucharist because this is frequently overlooked in separating (Christian) sacrament from (primitive?) sacrifice. The ancient writing called The Didache shows how bread and wine function first as symbols of all human food and work in the created order. It reproduces a very early liturgy which proclaims: Almighty Ruler, you have created all things for the sake of your name. You have given humankind meat and drink for their enjoyment, so that they might praise you, but to us you have graciously given spiritual meat and drink, and eternal life through your Servant [Jesus].20

But of course it was always, in origin and in name, an act of thanksgiving for a Christological fact, the fulfilment of createdness through the achieved possibility of entering joyfully into God’s presence through Jesus. It presupposes that the relationship desired by God in creation has first been obstructed by sin, and is now renewed. At Jesus’ last meal, by identification with his saving death, these natural elements were given specific meaning as his body, his blood: signs of his selfoffering to God for the life of the world.   Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled, p. 14.   Did. 10: 3 (author’s translation). For the whole text, see Staniforth, Writings,

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pp. 191–8.

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As an event therefore Eucharistic sacrifice sets before us the cross as an image of God’s self-giving in Christ. Mark tells us that at the moment of Jesus’ death the veil of the sanctuary was ‘torn in two from top to bottom’ and the centurion standing at the cross affirmed, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son’ (Mk 15: 38–9). Whatever an actual historical centurion might have meant by such words they can only mean for Mark that the one who died in apparent God-forsakenness is the one in whom God is present in human form.21 It is ‘from the top’ that the veil is torn, as the heavens were torn at Jesus’ baptism when he was named God’s Son, denoting a new mode of divine presence. In the Christ hymn in Philippians, Paul likewise proclaims that the one who emptied himself utterly on the cross is the one to whom we are now called to bend the knee as Lord of everything in heaven and on earth and under the earth, bearer of ‘the name above all names’, and when we do so we ascribe glory, not to a man or to a rival deity, but to the one God revealed through Christ (Phil 2: 5–11). Who then is this God whose nature is revealed in the self-emptying of the cross? The doctrine of the Trinity as it emerges from these texts enables us to think of God in more than one dimension: as the primordial mystery known to Israel as YHWH, who Jesus taught his followers to call ‘Father’, infinitely different from us in kind; also as ‘Spirit’, dynamic breath or wind from God poured out in creation and always present, sustaining, renewing and transforming; and as present once, definitively, embodied in the person of Jesus the Christ whose death and resurrection life we are invited to share. The doctrine invites us to think of these dimensions as ‘persons’, eternally existing in relation to one another before, after and underneath all that exists. There are many conceptualities of the Trinity. The Western tradition has tended to emphasize the one divine substance revealed in these three ways, and recent critics point to the speculative and theoretical cast this gives to Trinitarian doctrine; its tendency to give only secondary value to the divine triunity, until it becomes an unnecessary postscript; and its related tendency to bypass Trinitarian relationships when actually spelling out the doctrines of creation, incarnation and grace.22 Recent constructions have wished to show that Trinitarian theology can be thoroughly relational, practical and engaged with soteriology.23 For the theology of sacrifice a better (although not a necessary) starting point may be the Eastern tradition, especially that derived from the Cappadocian Fathers, and what follows draws on the restatement of this tradition by Zizioulas, linked to his relational ontology.24 In this scheme, being is defined as being in relation, so that God’s being

  Marcus, Mark 8–16, pp. 1066–8.   See Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (New

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York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 214. 23   See David S. Cunningham, These Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 19–54. 24   Zizioulas, Being, pp. 39–49; LaCugna, God for Us, pp. 243–6.

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is inherently relational and Trinitarian, originating not in a unity of substance but in the hypostasis of the Father. Thus the Father who is source and well of life begets in love the Son and generates the Spirit, and they exist together in a union of love, receiving their being from the Father and making as a return gift their response of love. The life of the Trinity is a sacrificial economy of love flowing from the episacrificial, gracious act of the Father. God subsists in a giving and receiving of love, from which all things flow. Co-inherence is the mode of God’s loving, the objective for which God desires an “other”. As the Father loves the Son by making the Son the agent of the Father’s self-expression, so the blessed Trinity loves the creation by calling it to be the agent of the divine action.25

Creation occurs as the life who is God flows outwards into the act of bringing into being a world that would otherwise not be, and can only be through such a flow outwards from a hidden source, and which in turn subsists only in reception, response and transformative return gift. Thus creation is a Trinitarian event, ‘from the Father’ ‘through the Son’ (John 1: 3) and ‘in the Spirit’. Creation’s reception of the gift of life takes many forms, at first automatic and unconscious but in time generating sentience and consciousness. Humans who can knowingly receive and respond to life’s gift, or else resist, are gifted with a capacity for choice, which may be experienced as grace or as a burden. The gospel tells of a further enlargement of life in the incarnation of God in the flesh of Jesus issuing in the supreme responsive, sacrificial event and the outpouring of yet more life in the resurrection, in the union of humanity with God in Christ and the transformation effected through the Spirit’s power. This appropriation of the Trinitarian life of God is what takes place in the Eucharist, understood both as a particular kind of Christian ritual and as that mode of being which the ritual articulates. In the Eucharist the plan of God and the self-giving action of Christ are recollected in celebration of the making present of transforming power in and beyond the community. 5. Conclusion This book is premised on the observation that ‘sacrifice’ names a rich, varied, interesting and on the whole benign conglomeration of life forms from which there is much to be learned about how to live fully and humanly ‘before God’. It is an area of human experience from which Christian theology has generally distanced itself by connecting it with idolatry and superstition, whether seen outside or inside the church, or else adopting it in a spiritualized form which may   John V. Taylor, The Christlike God (London: SCM, 2004), p. 212.

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be real but emaciated. The Enlightenment critique of the ‘primitive’ has added a further element of fear, raising for bourgeois churches in imperialist cultures the unwelcome nexus of religion and savagery. These unresolved theological issues have infected the motivations and methods of social anthropology as it became the ground for proving the barbarism of all religion (like Frazer and Freud) or for defining good against evil forms (like Robertson Smith and Girard). In debates about sacrifice, or the avoidance of such debates, we see Christianity at war with itself. In its connection with death and with the animality of the body, sacrifice is what Jung would term the shadow side of a religion which seeks to present an outward face of faith, hope and love. Is there a connection between the avoidance of this shadow element and the emergence of other dark matter into the public gaze – institutional corruption, spiritual ennui, sexual abuse? I will not argue that here, though it is a question to address. What I will claim is that it is intrinsic to the dynamic of Christian theology, located in the death and resurrection of Christ, that by facing such an area of darkness it can become a place where life is found to spring up in unsuspected ways, a ‘golden shadow’. This approach has informed the substantive arguments of this book, which have been summarized earlier in this chapter and will not be rehearsed in detail here. Part I has tried to work with insights from social anthropology (set out in Chapter 1), in a way which is common in OT scholarship but less so beyond, to sketch a picture of the biblical symbol system out of which Christianity emerged in history. Part II has tried to show that distorted perceptions of sacrifice have especially influenced modern attitudes to questions about atonement, and perhaps it is the (unfounded) fear of sacrifice which generates the notable passion for certain views. The aim of this last chapter is to present a positive theological statement that sacrifice rightly understood is Eucharistic and Trinitarian, and therefore not an alien intruder into Christian theology to be repelled, but near the heart of its character and concerns. To do this, in conclusion, and to draw these insights together I will use a simplified version of the sevenfold ‘elements of sacrifice’ set out in Chapter 1 and referred to at various points since.26 I will argue that the pattern of sacrifice is necessary for the fullness of Christian life and theology, and indeed for the fullness of human living. Sacrifices themselves are ritual representations of this pattern, and I will not argue for the necessity of any particular ritual forms (to that extent this argument is situated within the tradition of ‘spiritualization’) but I will argue that some ritual representations are necessity to present and affirm the foundational pattern (and if we find ourselves avoiding it we need to ask why). A Sacrificial Model The pattern of sacrificial religion that I offer here is threefold: Exchange, Transformation, Action. So firstly Exchange (#4) is essential to anything called   See p. 7 above.

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sacrifice. It contains the ‘gift’ element, the ‘offering’, but it was stated from the start that sacrifice implies more than a one-way offering (which may be perceived as loss), rather it assumes a two-way exchange with a higher power. Gifts are given in the expectation of blessings being received. This can be parodied at a distance as a mechanical interchange, a sort of bribe, but anthropologists, sensitive to the tone of the life of those they observe, tend to dispute this interpretation, which fails to respect the way in which any act of sacrifice takes place within an ongoing relationship with the divine. A human ritual may seem to be demanding a specific response, but it is itself a response to particular or general gifts already received and must be understood as having the underlying purpose of reaffirming that relationship. I have called this element of divine initiative or response ‘episacrificial’, to indicate that it is an essential part of the ongoing sacrificially mediated relationship, and without it the rituals become curious and questionable procedures. As social life subsists in a two-way exchange (which may be multiple), so religion subsists in a two-way exchange with ‘the transcendent’, whatever form that takes. Theology, as the theory of religion, necessarily ‘cancels out the double abstention from judgement of religious phenomenology’,27 in order to affirm the possibility and actuality of some such exchanges (‘grace’, ‘religious experience’) and their necessity for fullness of life. This leads us on to the predictable second part of the pattern, which is Transformation (incorporating here #5 of the original elements, ‘transformation’, but also aspects of #3 ‘transcendence’ and #6 ‘solidarity’). Whatever form the exchange takes it assumes that there will be a change, and that through this change there will be more of life. A sacrificial offering takes what belongs to us in our bodily lives (food, gestures, sins, purposes) and places them into the transcendent sphere in hope that they and the selves they represent will be transformed through the encounter. Whether what changes is the god, the offering or the offerer, and whether the change is momentary or lifelong, concrete or discernible only to the few or ‘by faith’, it is the dynamic and energizing component of religious culture. The third part is Action. This was placed at the head of the original list (#1, ‘a thing done, and therefore necessarily external and material’) in order to point to the character of sacrifices, unlike some other religious acts, as public and bodily, and sometimes scandalously violent. It poses an alternative to the view of religion as an ‘-ism’ subsisting in belief, or a ‘spiritual’ realm of pious thoughts. Of course, there can be spiritual actions, including the act of believing. I am not wishing to take as typical and paradigmatic either a ‘rationalized religion’ of belief and inquiry or its opposite, a ‘concrete, action-centered’ practice in which ‘you

  Gerd Theissen, ‘Theory of Primitive Christian Religion and New Testament Theology: An Evolutionary Essay’, in Christopher Rowland and Christopher Tuckett (eds), The Nature of New Testament Theology: Essays in Honour of Robert Morgan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 207–30, citing p. 226. 27

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can believe virtually anything you want’.28 But however conceived there must be action, and this must (to draw the pattern together) be an exchange with the transcendent oriented on transformation. I am offering this sacrificial pattern as a framework for that transcendent relationship we call religion (a cosmology, #7, therefore), and as an outworking of the doctrine of the Trinity, with particular focus (respectively) on God the Father, the Spirit and the Son. But what about the element of Ritual (#2), so far omitted? Is this not also essential, especially if sacrifice is the basic category being explored? This exclusion may seem paradoxical, because sacrifice is by my own definition a ritual which exhibits these other features (action, exchange, transformation), but the point is that while these three are necessary to religion as such, and while religions will surely always involve rituals of various kinds, not all manifestations of religion are rituals. All true rituals will be actions articulating such a transforming exchange, but not all actions, exchanges or transformations will be ritual in form. There are ethical actions which may need, precisely, not to be rituals in order to achieve their aim. The Holy Trinity conforms to my pattern (for God’s being is the exchange of love located in the action of the incarnation and transformation through the Spirit) but the Holy Trinity is not a ritual. The cross is not a ritual, either, however soon it gathered sacrificial interpretations around it. Those interpretations gathered, not to present an image of the cross in ritual terms, but to show how it conformed to, and fulfilled, patterns of sacrificial exchange, action and transformation present in Israel’s life and scriptures, such as the sin offering and the Passover. The function of ritual in religion is to present symbolic structures which point, not to themselves, but to these substantial components. I am saying, then, that ‘sacrifice’, rightly considered, offers a paradigm for human flourishing, in transformative and reciprocal exchange with the transcendent, expressed in action.29 As a model, it asks us to consider how far all our relationships, and not only relationships with deities, rise to the possibility of mutual exchange in selves given and received. What hinders that mutuality and what would release it? It asks us also how far our relationships are really transforming, really expressive of who we are and open to the transcendent experienced in the other. It asks how far the exchange and transformation are really expressed in action, committing and engaging the whole self, ‘body and soul’. Of all this I have pointed to the Eucharist as a paradigm not only for ritual (worship) but for life modelled on the Trinity of love revealed in incarnation and aspiration. We could look at how far the paradigm is seen in the life of Christian discipleship, in worship, action, preaching.   Clifford Geertz, ‘“Internal Conversion” in Contemporary Bali’, in ibid., Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 171–89, citing pp. 175, 177. 29   See Alistair I. McFadyen, The Call to Personhood: A Christian Theory of the Individual in Social Relationships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 17–44. 28

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It has negative implications too, since this pattern implies that there are ways of living and acting which deny the possibilities to which the pattern of the Trinity beckons. Whenever we live in a way which oppresses others we place ourselves in opposition to this life, since acts of oppression refuse the exchange of life, and are seeking to destroy and not transform. This negative test connects with two points in earlier arguments. When we see or engage in behaviour which oppresses those who are weak or vulnerable, including ‘scapegoating’ them for the faults of others, this life-denying activity is not rightly called ‘sacrificial’, indeed it is the opposite of the pattern set out here. I argued in chapters 5 and 6 that important arguments in the work of Girard and some feminist theologians against such behaviour are weakened by this category mistake which attaches it to a distorted notion of ‘sacrifice’. It is also true that punishment does not fit this pattern. A punishment is an action which may seek to transform (‘reform’) an other, and may intend this for the other’s good, as well as the good of society. But it too is not an offering, certainly not one which is open to receive life, in exchange, from the punished person. So while there may need to be punishing, it is in itself a deficient relationship. Because of this, it was argued in Chapter 7 that punishment is an inadequate vehicle for expressing the divine transforming exchange called the act of atonement. It becomes adequate only by amending the image extensively: setting the Father’s punishment of the Son within a Trinitarian context (‘God in Christ accepts the burden of sin’), and adding a transformative element like ‘satisfaction for sin’. That is why it is misleading and better avoided. Indeed most images used in discussing atonement (including much-used military, commercial and judicial images) are misleading, because in various ways they are based on deficient human relationships. We need to use images drawn from human life to explore the many dimensions of atonement, but they will be misleading to the extent that they depart from the sacrificial model. I have argued that the pattern articulated in the doctrine of the Trinity is the theological awareness implicit in some way in all sacrifice, and celebrated among Christians especially in the Eucharist. But the pattern can be seen wherever there is recognition of life as a gift, received with thanks and with offering in words or deeds which enlarge life. It is manifested in many instances and many contexts, including some we may reject as primitive, idolatrous, or otherwise objectionable: we do not have to approve of everything done in the name of sacrifice or religion. But it does always call for a way of being and thinking which is integrated, finding in matter that which transcends matter, and therefore for a way of accepting ourselves as bodily beings open to what is not ourselves, both to possibilities and to limitations. It calls us to give thanks for what we are, as bodies that live and die, and to find in that being a possibility of yet more being.

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____, ‘Jesus and the Law’, in Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter (eds), Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus (4 vols, Leiden: Brill, 2010). Longenecker, Richard N., Galatians (Word Biblical Commentary, Dallas: Word Books, 1990). ____, ‘The Foundational Conviction of New Testament Christology: The Obedience/Faithfulness/Sonship of Christ’, in Joel B. Green and Max Turner (eds), Jesus of Nazareth: Lord and Christ: Essays on the Historical Jesus and New Testament Christology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994). McClymond, Kathryn, Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). McFadyen, Alistair I., The Call to Personhood: A Christian Theory of the Individual in Social Relationships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). McGowan, Andrew, Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Marcus, Joel, Mark 8–16 (Anchor Bible 27A, London: Yale University Press, 2009). Marshall, Christopher D., Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime, and Punishment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). Martin, Dale B., The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Martin, Ralph P., Philippians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980). ____, 2 Corinthians (Word Biblical Commentary, Waco: Word Books, 1986). Martinez, Florentino Garcia, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated (Leiden: Brill, 1994). Marx, Alfred, ‘Familiarité et transcendance: La fonction du sacrifice d’après l’Ancien Testament’, in Adrian Schenker (ed.), Studien zu Opfer und Kult im Alten Testament (Tübingen: Mohr, 1992). ____, ‘The Theology of the Sacrifice According to Leviticus 1–7’, in Rolf Rentdorff and Robert A. Kugler (eds), The Book of Leviticus: Composition and Reception (Vetus Testamentum Supplement Series 93, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003). Mauss, Marcel, ‘Body Techniques’, in ibid., Sociology and Psychology: Essays (ET, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979 (1935)). ____, The Gift (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954 (ET of Essai sur le don, 1925)). Mayers, Caroline, ‘An ethnoarchaeological analysis of Hannah’s sacrifice’, in D.P. Wright, D.N. Freedman and A. Hurvitz (eds), Pomegranates and Golden Bells: Studies in Biblical, Jewish, and Near Eastern Ritual, Law, and Literature in Honor of Jacob Milgrom (Winona: Eisenbrauns, 1995). Mellor, Philip A. and Shilling, Chris, Re-forming the Body: Religion, Community and Modernity (London: Sage, 1997). Merleau-Ponty, Marcel, Phenomenology of Perception (ET London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962).

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Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). ____, ‘Can a Gift Be Given?: Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic’, Modern Theology 11/1 (1995): 119–61. ____, ‘Stories of Sacrifice’, Modern Theology 12/1 (1996): 27–56. Milgrom, Jacob, ‘Biblical Diet Laws as an Ethical System’, Interpretation 17 (1963): 288–301. ____, ‘A Prolegomenon to Leviticus 17: 11’, Journal of Biblical Literature 90 (1971): 149–56. ____, ‘Sin-Offering or Purification-Offering?’, Vetus Testamentum 21 (1971): 237–9. ____, Leviticus 1–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Bible 3, New York: Doubleday, 1992). ____, ‘Were the Firstborn Ever Sacrificed to YHWH? To Molek? Popular Practice or Divine Command’, in A.I. Baumgarten (ed.), Sacrifice in Religious Experience (Leiden: Brill, 2002). Moberly, Robert C., Atonement and Personality (London: John Murray, 1917 (1901)). Moltmann, Jürgen, God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation (London: SCM Press, 1985). ____, The Crucified God (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). Moo, Douglas, The Epistle to the Romans (New International Commentary on the New Testament, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996). Morris, Brian, Anthropological Studies of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Moule, Charles F.D. ‘Punishment and Retribution: Delineating Their Scope in New Testament thought’, in Brad Jersak and Michael Hardin (eds), Stricken by God?: Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007 (orig. 1965)). Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970). Nancy, Jean–Luc, ‘The Unsacrificeable’, in Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 20–38. Neusner, Jacob, Reading and Believing: Ancient Judaism and Contemporary Gullibility (Atlanta: University of South Florida Press, 1986). Nolland, John, Luke (Word Biblical Commentary, 3 vols, Dallas: Word Books, 1989–93). Noth, Martin, The History of Israel (ET, London: A&C Black, 1960). O’Brien, Peter T. The Epistle to the Philippians: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991). Packer, James I., ‘What Did the Cross Achieve?: The Logic of Penal Substitution’, The Tyndale Biblical Theology Lecture 1973 (Cambridge: Tyndale House, 1973). Petropoulou, Marie-Zoe, Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greek Religion, Judaism and Christianity 100 bc – ad 200 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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Philo, Works, ed. F.H. Colson, G.H. Whitaker, J.W. Earp, and R. Marcus (12 vols, Loeb Classical Library, London: Heinemann, 1929–62). Piper, John, The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2007). Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, ed. and trans. G. Friedlander (New York: Hermon Press, 1965 (1916)). Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. H. Tredinnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1959). Prokes, Mary Timothy, Towards a Theology of the Body (Edinburgh: Clark, 1996). Purvis, Sally B., The Power of the Cross (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993). Rad, Gerhard von, Old Testament Theology (2 vols, ET, London: SCM Press, 1975). Rappaport, Roy A., Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Ray, Darby K., Deceiving the Devil: Atonement, Abuse and Ransom (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1998). Reineke, Martha Jane, Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Ricoeur, Paul, ‘Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation’, in ibid., Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis S. Mudge (London: SPCK, 1980). Rose, H.J., A Handbook of Greek Mythology (6th edn, London: Methuen, 1964 (1928)). Ruether, Rosemary Radford, Introducing Redemption in Christian Feminism (Introductions in Feminist Theology 1, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998). Saldarini, Anthony J., Pharisees, Scribes and Sadducees in Palestinian Society: A Sociological Approach (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1988). Sanders, Ed Parrish, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (London: SCM Press, 1977). ____, Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM Press, 1985). ____, Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 bce – 66 ce (London: SCM Press, 1992). Sarna, Nahum M., Genesis (The JPS Torah Commentary, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989). ____, Exodus (The JPS Torah Commentary, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991). Saussure, Ferdinand de, Course in General Linguistics (ET, London: Fontana, 1974 (1915). Sawyer, John F.A. (ed.), Reading Leviticus: A Conversation with Mary Douglas (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Schwager, Raymund, Must There Be Scapegoats?: Violence and Redemption in the Bible (Leominster: Gracewing, 2000 (1987)). Schwarz, B.J., Wright, D.P., Stackert, J. and Meshel, N.P. (eds), Perspectives on Purity and Purification in the Bible (London: Clark, 2008).

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Wright, Nicholas Thomas, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996). ____, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (London: SPCK, 2009). Yeo, K.K. Rhetorical Interaction in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1995). Young, Frances M., The Use of Sacrificial Ideas in Greek Christian Writers from the New Testament to John Chrysostom (Cambridge, MA: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1979). Zizioulas, John D., Being as Communion (Darton, Longman and Todd: London, 1985). ____, ‘Preserving God’s Creation 3’, www.resourcesforchristiantheology. org/?p=132, accessed: 14 November 2009. ____, ‘Proprietors or Priests of Creation’, www.rsesymposia.org/themedia/ File/1151679350-Pergamon.pdf, accessed: 14 November 2009.

Concise Index of Biblical and other Ancient Sources

Old Testament Genesis 1 – 3, 27, 111–12, 195 4, 54, 113, 149 5 – 9, 100, 111–13, 195 12, 102, 107, 112–13 15, 100, 102, 107–8, 119, 132 16 – 17, 100–102, 107–8, 112–13, 115 18 – 21, 34, 47, 102, 107, 112–13, 115 22, 107–10, 112–13, 115, 119 24 – 35, 69, 102, 108, 111–13 37 – 49, 100, 112–13 Exodus 1 – 6, 89, 100, 103, 111, 113, 116 12 – 13, 51, 53, 101, 103–4, 111, 113–14, 188 16 – 19, 32–3, 101, 115 22 – 24, 101, 103–4, 106, 132, 207 25 – 34, 101, 103–4, 115 Leviticus 1 – 3, 33, 40, 65–7, 113 4 – 8, 33, 66–7, 72–5, 93 11 – 12, 68–9, 73, 103–4 13 – 15, 44, 68–9, 73, 76, 83, 103 16, 74, 76–7, 93, 150–52, 188 17 – 22, 69, 71, 74–5, 82, 106 Numbers 1 – 8, 53, 75, 104, 115 11 – 19, 39, 69, 75, 83, 104, 123, 25 – 35, 74–5, 77, 105, 117

Deuteronomy 6, 39, 80, 82 12 – 14, 37, 40, 67, 75 16, 101, 111, 113–15 18 – 25, 101, 106, 126 Joshua 2 – 24, 54, 101, 103, 128 Judges 11 – 13, 104–5, 107–8, 110 1 Samuel 1 – 3, 34–5, 102, 104, 110 9 – 28, 34–5, 47, 69 2 Samuel 6 – 24, 34, 73, 115, 195 1 Kings 15 – 16, 101, 105 2 Kings 3 – 17, 105–7 2 Chronicles 30 – 35, 113 Job 1 – 2, 34, 110 Psalms 2 – 24, 58, 115, 120 107 – 118, 34, 115, 124 Proverbs 11, 68

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Isaiah 1 – 9, 38, 87, 120 25 – 45, 50, 122, 196 52: 13 – 53: 12, 119, 124, 188–9 56 – 66, 68, 86

1 Maccabees 1 – 2, 109, 116–17

Jeremiah 7 – 32, 86, 106, 195

4 Maccabees 5 – 18, 108–9, 116, 123, 169

Ezekiel 20 – 39, 50, 104, 122, 188

2 Baruch 29, 50

Daniel 9 – 12, 115, 117, 122

1 Enoch 6 – 62, 50, 112

Hosea 4 – 6, 82, 101, 122

Jubilees 2 – 49, 39, 101, 109–12

Joel 2: 13–17, 195

Pseudo-Philo Biblical Antiquities, 109–10

Amos 5: 21–4, 38

Qumran, Josephus and Philo

Jonah 1 – 4, 115, 195 Micah 4 – 6, 67, 87, 105–6

2 Maccabees 6 – 7, 116–17, 122–3, 126, 169

Qumran Scrolls 1 QH, 115 1QS, 49 1Q28a, 49

Haggai 1: 12, 115

Josephus Antiquities, 39–40, 108–9 Jewish War, 6 Contra Apionem, 79

Zechariah 7 – 14, 87, 115

Philo De Specialibus Legibus, 39–40

Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha

Rabbinic Texts

Tobit 3: 16–17, 102 Wisdom of Solomon 7 – 10, 90, 109 Sirach 24 – 44, 90, 109

Mishnah Demai, 48 Pesahim, 113 Yoma, 77–8, 81, 93 Sanhedrin, 116 Aboth, 50, 116 Menahoth, 77 Kerihoth, 78 Tamid, 78 Negaim, 68–9

Concise Index of Biblical and other Ancient Sources Tohoroth, 81 Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, 78 Babylonian Talmud, 69, 110 Targumim on Genesis 22, 109 New Testament Matthew 1 – 3, 118–21, 131, 169 5 – 9, 43–4, 49, 83, 85, 87, 121 10 – 12, 43–4, 46, 82, 87 13 – 15, 42–3, 82–3, 87, 119 16 – 20, 51, 82–3, 85, 87, 169 21 – 25, 47, 83, 85–7, 120, 124, 127, 131 26 – 8, 49, 54, 82, 122, 124, 126–7 Mark 1, 42, 44, 81, 83–4, 118, 120 2 – 3, 42, 44, 49, 51, 81, 84, 120–21 4 – 7, 42–4, 82–4, 87, 119, 121 8 – 10, 42, 44, 83–5, 119, 126, 131 11 – 13, 82, 85, 87, 96 14, 49, 51, 54, 85–6, 121, 124, 126–7 15 – 16, 92, 122, 124, 126–7, 211 Luke 1 – 2, 51, 109, 119, 121, 125, 169 3 – 5, 44, 83–4, 87, 118, 120–21 7 – 9, 42, 46, 49, 81, 83, 87, 130 10 – 13, 47, 49–50, 83–4, 87, 118–19 14 – 19, 46–8, 50, 83, 86–7, 119–20, 126 21 – 24, 49, 53–4, 119, 122, 124, 126–7, 169 John 1 – 2, 46, 51, 86, 89, 118–19, 207, 212 3 – 4, 87, 93, 117, 121 5 – 10, 45, 81, 84, 121 12 – 17, 46–7, 49, 126–7, 130, 161 19 – 21, 48–9, 126–7 Acts 1 – 4, 44, 48–9, 124, 161, 169 6 – 21, 49, 55–6, 88, 124, 170

235

Romans 1 – 2, 56, 62, 88–9, 91, 119–21 3: 22–25, 91–3, 119, 162, 207 4, 56, 62, 109, 119, 121 5 – 7, 57, 91, 93–4, 128, 161–2, 178 8, 56–7, 90, 93, 121, 125, 129–31, 161 9 – 15, 56, 60, 87, 90, 131, 196 1 Corinthians 1 – 4, 57, 59, 61, 169, 172 5 – 7, 55, 60–61, 88, 94, 131 8, 37, 58–61, 88, 90, 130 9 – 10, 37, 55–6, 58–61, 88, 207 11 – 14, 52–5, 59–61, 130 15 – 16, 55, 57, 61, 88, 96, 124–5, 129, 196 2 Corinthians 1 – 11, 57, 88, 90, 130, 170, 190 Galatians 1 – 2, 82, 92–3, 124, 178 3: 10–14, 92, 119, 124, 126, 186, 190 3: 16–29, 57, 89, 121 4, 89, 90, 119–21, 124, 131 5 – 6, 56, 129, 133 Ephesians 1 – 3, 89, 94, 119, 132, 196 4 – 6, 56, 88, 124, 130, 132 Philippians 1, 130, 133 2: 1–11, 59, 89, 91–2, 130, 162, 178, 196, 211 2: 17 – 3: 21, 56–7, 58, 129–30, 170, 177 Colossians 1 – 3, 56, 89, 94, 125, 130–31, 170 1 Thessalonians 1 – 5, 56, 130 1 Timothy 1 – 5, 88, 131 2 Timothy 4: 6, 177

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Titus 2: 14, 124 Hebrews 1, 89, 95–6, 121, 124–5 2 – 3, 91, 95–6, 119, 170 4 – 5, 95–6, 122, 125, 132, 170 6 – 9, 95–6, 119, 125, 196, 207 10 – 11, 95–6, 98, 109, 119, 130 12 – 13, 92, 95–6, 121, 169–70 James 2 – 5, 43, 109, 119 1 Peter 1 – 5, 94, 98, 121, 124, 131, 170, 190, 207

Early Christian writings Ignatius to the Romans, 177 Martyrdom of Polycarp, 10, 176–7 Didache, 10, 131, 210 Epistle of Barnabas, 10, 77, 131 Epistle to Diognetus, 10 Athenagoras Plea for the Christians, 10 Other Ancient Writings

1 John 2, 131, 207

Dio Chrysostom Oratio 3.97, 27

Revelation 1–21, 48, 55–6, 94, 119, 121

Plato Phaedo, 26

Index of Names and Subjects

Abe, Gabriel, 17 Abel, 111–13, 149 Abelard, Peter, 165–7, 171, 181 Abraham, 27, 34, 47, 50, 62, 87, 89, 100–123 passim Adam, 57, 90, 97, 111, 128–9, 195, 209 Akedah, 27, 51, 62, 99, 102–3, 107–11, 118, 139, 203 Allison, Dale C., 41, 45, 86–7 Anselm, 164–9, 171, 179–88, 197 anthropology, biblical, 33–133 passim feminist, 170–74 Girardian, 144–7, 149 social, 3–29, 144–9, 154–8, 202, 213 theological, 6, 29–30, 158–62, 172, 202–16 atonement in Christian doctrine, 6, 28, 163–74, 179–98, 216 in feminism, 163–74 in Israel’s religion*, 65–7, 71–8, 92–4, 150–51 in Paul, 88–94, 190, 195–6 Atonement, Day of, 34, 51, 75–8, 84, 94, 97–8, 150–51 Auerbach, Erich, 107 Augustine, 90, 197 Aulén, Gustav, 166, 171, 181 avertive (apotropaic) rites, 12–13, 15–17, 25, 75–8, 84, 114, 128, 150–54 Azazel, 75–7, 84, 150 Baal, Jan van, 11–12, 205 baalim, 57, 66, 86, 106 Bailie, Gil, 5, 144 Baillie, Donald M., 164–6 Baker, Mark D., 182 Note: * indicates main references only given

baptism, 47, 58, 61, 88, 97, 117–21, 128–32, 203, 211 Bauckham, Richard, 86, 89 Beare, Frederick. W, 196 Beattie, J.H.M., 11, 13, 24–5 Bell, Catherine, 8, 19, 21–2, 80, 127 Bell, Richard, 90, 93 Berquist, Jon, 71, 79, 102 Best, Ernest, 132 Bethune-Baker, J.F., 165 Betz, Hans Dieter, 89, 121, 124–5, 129–30 Bloch, Maurice, 17, 27, 100, 144, 157–61 Blocher, Henri, 185 blood, of Christ, 53, 59, 93–6, 125 consumption of, 25, 37, 53, 71, 75 essential to human being, 19, 91, 95, 101, 119, 167 menstrual, 103, 153–4, 175 (see also menstruation) polluting, 70–71, 76 protecting, 113–14, 117, 167 purifying, 73, 75–6, 103, 123, 167 in sacrifices, distaste for (ancient and modern), 4–5, 10, 159, 177 prominence given to, 34, 174 signifying effective sacrifice, 15, 54–5, 93–6, 103, 109, 117, 210 signifying violent death, 4–5, 15, 117, 123, 148, 165, 177, 185 symbolic action with blood, 33, 40, 73–4, 76–7, 113–14, 125, 188 uniting in covenant, 51, 53–5, 103, 132, 207 Bockmuehl, Marcus, 137

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body*, 6, 9–10, 16, 18–23, 29, 38–40, 42–4, 57, 60–63, 69–71, 79–80, 116–17, 139–40 of Christ, 53–5, 59–61, 63, 98, 132, 206 lived -, 19–22, 133 resurrection -, 125–33 sacrificial, 21, 38–9, 117, 130, 132 spiritual, 57, 125, 129 Boehm, Omri, 107, 110 Boersma, Hans, 180, 183, 186–8, 194–5, 198 Bourdieu, Pierre, 20–21, 38 Bowker, John, 108–10, 112 Bradshaw, Paul, 52 Brock, Rita Nakashima, 163, 165 Brown, Joanna Carlson and Rebecca Parker, 165, 167–8 Brown, Peter, 45–6, 48 Brown, Raymond, 120 Brown, S., 105, 107 Bultmann, Rudolf, 90 Burkert, Walter, 17, 18, 46, 143–4, 149–51, 153–8, 160 burnt offering, see whole burnt offering Burt, Donald X., 180 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 181

circumcision, 9, 57, 61, 63, 70–71, 99, 101–4, 108–9, 112, 116–17, 128–9, 132, 139 citizenship, 99–100, 131, 191 Collins, Adela Yarbro, 81, 84 communion sacrifice, 16, 25, 33–43, 47, 57, 193 (see also meals, sacred) eucharist as, 53–5, 59–65 communion with God, 78, 96–9, 132, 151 cosmology, as worldview, 15, 23–6, 46, 96, 133, 162, 202, 206, 215 as one ‘element of sacrifice’, 7–8, 20, 23, 44, 68, 126, 215 Countryman, L. William, 72 covenant*, 25, 29, 51–5, 59–63, 99–103, 108–25, 129–32, 197–8, 207 covenant renewal sacrifice, 52–4, 59, 62–3, 87, 99–133 passim, 207 Cranfield, Charles E.B., 90, 94, 101, 128 cross, the*, 6, 29, 88–98, 122–8, 158–74, 178–98, 211, 215 as sacrifice, 6, 92–8, 124–8, 132, 158–74, 179–98, 201 as saving event, 6, 29, 88–98, 122–8, 139, 158–74, 178–98, 211 Crossan, John Dominic, 42–3, 46, 86 Cunningham, David S., 211

Cain, 111–12, 149 Calvin, John, 184–7, 196–7 chatta’th, see sin offering Chauvet, Louis-Marie, 149, 158, 160–61, 205–6, 208, 210 childbirth, 17, 28, 69, 79, 100–122 passim, 154–9, 173, 175 Chilton, Bruce, 50, 52, 86, 107, 109, 147–8, 159 Christology, 6, 29, 88–98, 120–33 passim, 206–16 passim and atonement, 164–8, 179–98 and feminist critique, 164–8, 170–72, 177–8 and Girard, 147, 158–9, 162 church, 10, 52–7, 61, 63, 88, 117–22 passim, 127–31, 147, 195–7, 205–13

Dale, Robert W., 191 Daly, Robert J., 10, 149, 201, 210 Davies, Douglas, 68 Davies, Philip R., 109 Davies, William D., 45, 86–7, death and the body, 19, 42–3, 52–5, 91, 117–19, 132–3 and impurity, 69–71, 74–8 of Jesus, 6, 10, 50–56, 85, 91–6, 124–8, 163–74, 181–98, 211 life-giving, 38, 92–4, 122–3, 128–30, 162, 174–8 and sacrifice, 4, 11–17, 25–6, 38, 71–8, 91–6, 150–54, 206, 213 symbolic, 8–10, 52–5, 128, 156–8, 206–7 in eucharist, 10, 50–55, 206–7 Derrida, Jacques, 180, 194, 204–5 Descartes, René, 19

Index of Names and Subjects Detienne, Marcel, 12–13 Dillistone, Frederick W., 191–2 Dix, Gregory, 53 Donne, John, 179 Douglas, Mary, 27, 68–71 Driver, J., 167 Dunfee, Susan Nelson, 172 Dunn, James D.G., 41–2, 46, 50, 52, 80, 82–3, 85–6, 89–90, 93–4 Durand, Jean-Louis, 13–14 Duverger, Christian, 16 economy, 36 (see also episacrificial) divine, 34, 36, 44, 60, 202, 205–8, 212 of grace, 39–40, 45, 48, 52, 55–7, 62–3, 139, 198, 204–5, 212 physical, 7, 17, 35, 37–8, 42, 57, 60, 67, 99, 114, 155, 195, sacrificial, 38, 63, 212 Eidevall, Goran, 38 Eilberg-Schwarz, Howard, 9, 71, 152 Eiseman, Frank B., 22 Eliade, Mircea, 8, 15, 22 Enlightenment, 29, 140, 144, 162, 170–71, 203, 213 episacrificial movement*, 27–8, 161–2, 198, 202, 205, 210–16 examples in NT, 45, 48, 51, 62, 90, 97, 122, 127, 132, 139, 203 examples in OT, 89, 93, 96, 132 Esau, 100, 112 Essenes, 48–9, 84 (see also Qumran) Eucharist*, 10, 52–5, 61–2, 205–16 and ecology, 208–12 Eucharistic being, 209–16 and the Last Supper, 27, 46, 49, 50–54, 62, 202, 207 as sacrifice, 53, 62, 201, 205–8, 211 Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan, 12, 13, 17, 38 expiation, 6, 25, 33–4, 62, 65, 68–98, 185, 202–3 feminist theology, 163, 166, 170–74, 178 critique of atonement, 163–70 critique of sacrifice, 163–8, 172–4 Finlan, Stephen, 140 Fitzmyer, Joseph, 47–8

239

first fruits offering, 10, 33, 40, 56, 103–5, 114, 123, 154, 177, 203 firstborn offering, 99, 103–7, 110, 114, 119, 121, 125, 139–40, 145, 188, 203 and the Akedah, 107–11, 139, 203 and Maccabean martyrs, 122–5 and Passover, 111–14, 139, 188, 203 Ford, David F., 209 Fotopolos, John, 58 Foucault, Michel, 18–19 Franks, Robert S., 169 Frazer, J.G., 152, 213 Fretheim, Terence, 110 Furtenberg, Yair, 82 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 146, 213 Gaffin, Richard, 195–6 Geertz, Clifford, 28, 139, 158, 215 Gellner, David N., 158 generation, 19, 34, 66, 70, 73, 80, 101–2, 108–9, 111–13, 118–21, 128, 131 Gennep, Arnold van, 8, 9, 157 gift, 10, 29, 34–5, 44, 56, 107, 132, 197–8, 203–6 distinguished from trade, 11–12, 36, 174 as sign of grace, 5, 7, 29, 44–5, 91, 107–8, 132–3, 139, 194, 197–8, 205–16 passim offered in sacrifice (minchah)*, 5–13, 15–16, 29, 33–8, 56–9, 76, 95–6, 103–7, 139, 149–51, 174–7, 214 Girard, René, 5, 13, 38, 143–80, 194, 203, 213, 217 mimetic rivalry, 144–50, 159, 162 pharmakos, 151, 155 scapegoat, 144–62 passim, 174, 194, 203, 216 victimage, 146–62 passim Gluckman, Max, 8 Goldstein, Valerie Saiving, 172–3 Gorringe, Timothy, 169 Green, A.R.W., 105–6 Green, Joel B., 21, 92, 182 Greene-McCreight, Kathryn, 170 Greshake, G., 166 Grey, Mary, 163, 165–6

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Groves, J. Alan, 190 Gudmarsdottir, Sigridur, 173 Guelich, Robert G., 81, 83 Hamerton-Kelly, Robert G., 144, 153 Harrington, Hannah K., 46 Haustafeln, 131 Hawthorne, Gerald F., 196 Hayward, R., 109 Hebrews, Letter to the, 90–91, 94–7, 119, 125, 139, 160, 197 Heidegger, Martin, 18 Henriksen, Jan-Olav, 205 Heusch, Luc de, 8, 13, 17, 158 Heyward, Carter, 144, 163–6 holiness as separation, 45–6, 69–70, 81, 85, 97, 120, 139 Holiness Code (H), 69–70, 74–6 holocaust, see whole burnt offering hospitality, 34–5, 40, 43, 46, 66, 180 Hubert, Henri, 100 Hurtado, Larry W., 89 Husserl, Edmund, 18–19 immersion pools (miqvaot), 79–80, 83 Isaac*, 47, 50, 62, 102, 107–16 passim, 121, 123 in the Akedah, 107–10, 116, 123 Isherwood, Linda and Elizabeth Stuart, 21 Ishmael, 100, 112, 115 initiation rites, 8, 103, 109–10, 128, 156–7 Jacob*, 27, 47, 50, 104, 112–13, 121, 123 Jay, Nancy, 9, 16, 100, 101, 103, 108–9, 113, 154, 175 Jeffery, Steve, Mike Ovey and Andrew Sach, 182, 188–91, 195 Jenson, Philip Peter, 70 Jephthah, 105, 107, 110 Jeremias, Joachim, 56 Jesus Christ, 40–48, 50–52, 62, 78–88, 118–22, 125–8, 131 birth, 119–21 and the body, 43–4 ‘characteristic’ or ‘historical’, 41 death, 6, 51–2, 55, 62, 85–6, 121–2, as martyrdom, 122–4

as punishment by God, 6, 162, 165, 168–9, 189–90, 195–6 as sacrifice, 124–7, 131–3 as saving event, 92–6, 162–71, 210–12 as self-offering, 161–2, 177–8, 198 as surrogate victim, 147, 158–60 its episacrificial quality, 62, 139, 203 and gentiles, 85–7 and kingdom of God, 40–43 last supper, see Eucharist, Jesus’ meals meals, 45–53 ministry, 40–48, 56, 62, 99, 118–9, 131, 202 resurrection, 117–19, 126–8, 132–3 and ritual purity, 78–85, 97 sacrifice, his view of, 44, 48, 51–2, 162 Son of God, 29, 62, 89–91, 120, 132 table-fellowship, see Jesus’ meals John the Baptist, 97, 118, 121, 128, 162, 169 Johnson, Luke Timothy, 48, 138 Jones, L. Gregory, 138 Juergensmeyer, Mark, 145, 148 Jung, Carl, 213 Kant, Immanuel, 110 Kazen, Thomas, 44, 80, 82–4 Keck, Leander, 41 Kierkegaard, Søren, 107 Kirwan, Michael, 144–5, 160–61 Klawans, Jonathan, 27, 38, 54, 56, 67, 70–72 Koltun-Fromm, Nathan, 74 Kristeva, Julia, 6, 144 LaCugna, Catherine Mowry, 211 LaFleur, William R., 70 law, 146, 180, 185, 187, 191–7, 204 of Israel (Torah), 3, 39, 45, 63, 101, 104–7, 111–24 passim, 190, 203 purity laws, 69, 78–96 passim, 116 food laws, 49, 73, 129 Leach, Edmund, 9 Lefebure, Leo D., 147 leprosy, 44, 68–9, 74, 76, 81, 83, Levenson, Jon D., 38–9, 104–6, 108 Levine, Baruch, 18, 69, 74, 77, 105

Index of Names and Subjects Lienhardt, Godfrey, 12, 17, 152–3 Lincoln, Bruce, 15, 17 liturgy, 27, 51, 53, 77, 102, 205–10 Livingstone, Paisley, 147–8 Loader, William, 81, 83–4, 120 Longenecker, Richard N., 82, 89, 129–30, 178 Luther, Martin, 90, 186 McClymond, Kathryn, 7, 13, 14, 17, 27, 36, 54 McFadyen, Alistair, 215 McGowan, Andrew, 54 Marcus, Joel, 131, 211 Marion, J.-L., 194 marriage, 17, 27, 83, 100–103, 111, 117, 119–20, 131,156, 173 martyrs, Maccabean, 109, 116, 122–4, 126, 159, 169, 178 echoes in NT, 124–5, 168, 177 Martin Dale B., 21 Martin, Ralph P., 93, 190, 196 Marx, Alfred, 34–5, 66–7, 104 Mauss, Marcel, 11, 18, 19, 21, 100, 204 Mayers, Caroline, 35 meals, sacred*, 16–19, 33–40, 45–62, 65–7, 113–4, 149–51, 205–11 see also Eucharist, Passover, Jesus’ meals Mellor, Philip A., 19, 21 menstruation, 8, 69, 79–80, 175, Merleau-Ponty, Marcel, 18 Merz, Annette, 41–2, 50, 52 methodology, theological, 26–30, 41, 185, 195, 138, social-scientific, 41, 152, 202, 213 Milbank, John, 195, 197, 204 Milgrom, Jacob, 37–8, 69–74, 77, 80, 103–5 minchah, see gift offering Moberly, Robert C., 192 Moltmann, Jürgen, 167, 209 Moo, Douglas, 93 Morris, Brian, 9 Moule, Charles F.D., 192 Murdoch, Iris, 173

241

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 26 Neusner, Jacob, 79 Nolland, John, 47, 84 Noth, Martin, 100 O’Brien, Peter T., 196 obedience*, 3, 57, 163, 173–8, 196 in the Akedah, 106–8, 116, 123 of Jesus, 85, 91–3, 95, 130, 170, 183–5, 196 as self-transcendence, 57, 123, 129, 173–8 ‘olah, see whole burnt offering Packer, James I., 186, 191 Paul the apostle, 55–63, 88–94, 97, 119, 124–5, 128–33 body as ‘flesh’, 55–7, 129 transformed by Christ, 60–62, 128–33 Christology, 89–92, 120–31 atonement, view of, 93, 186, 190, 195–6 incarnation, 88–90 resurrection as transforming body, 128–33 economy of grace, 55–63, 202 purity laws, 54–5, 88, 91, food laws 59–60 sacrifice, his view of, 5, 37, 57–62, 88, 177 sacrifice to idols, 57–62 sin and righteousness, 88, 91–2, 97, 119 See also Eucharist, Cross Passover, 39–40, 50–54, 88, 94, 113–14 peace offering, see communion sacrifice Petropoulou, Marie-Zoe, 10, 56, 59 Pharisees, 39, 48–9, 79–82, 84–5 Piper, John, 91 Plato, 26 prayer, 3, 10–11, 21, 25, 39, 159, 174 (see also Eucharist) Jesus and, 43–4, 86–7, 121 Priestly document (P), 41, 65–70, 75, 100, 106, 176 Prokes, Mary Timothy, 21

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propitiation, 25–6, 35, 75, 91, 94, 122–3, 149, 180–81, 185–91, 194–7 punishment, 180, 192–8, 216 and the cross, 6, 10, 165–7, 179–98, 216 and sacrifice, 6, 10, 16, 148, 175, 180, 188–90, 192, 194, 203 purification sacrifice, see sin offering purity and impurity, 25, 33, 41–4, 48–9, 54–5, 61–3, 66–88, 96–8, 148, 152–4, 203–5 moral and ritual, 72–5 Purvis, Sally B., 169, 172 Qumran, 49, 53, 80, 97, 115, 140 Rad, Gerhard von, 101 Rappaport, Roy A., 22, 27 Ray, Darby K., 170–72, 174 Reineke, Martha Jane, 6 religion, social scientific study of, 3–30, 201–3 theories of, 146–7, 157–62, 174, 177, 201–3, 214–16 resurrection, 40, 53, 56–7, 88, 90, 96–7, 99, 119, 139, 159–60, 168–9, 184 as foundation sacrifice, 117–33, 203–13 passim Ricoeur, Paul, 138, 194 Rose, H.J., 26 sacrifice*, 3–18, 21–9, 33–9, 138–40, 174–8, 201–16 in Africa, 3, 5, 8, 12–17, 38, 150–53, 158 in Ancient Greece, 5, 10, 12–15, 16–18, 22, 25, 66, 99, 123, 149–51, 153, 155 conjunctive and disjunctive, 23–6, 55, 67, 97–9, 106, 139, 143, 151–3, 193–4, 202, 207 elements of, 7–8, 22, 26–7, 44, 55, 66, 126, 201–2, 213–16 materials of offerings, animal, 4, 8, 10–12, 15–17, 139, 143, 151, 158, 175 drink (libations), 7, 11, 56, 58, 177

vegetable, 3, 11–12, 33–5, 111, 132, 149, 153–4, 158 purposes, cosmogonic offerings, 6, 8, 15–16, 26–7 thank offerings, 11, 26, 59 votive offerings, 7, 11 sociality in, 37–8, 101, 114, 154 theories of, 5–6, 9–10, 174–7, 201, 210–16 violence in, 11, 13–17, 106–7, 143–62 see also avertive (apotropaic) rites, blood, the body, communion sacrifice, covenant sacrifice, economy, episacrificial, expiation, firstborn offering, first fruits offering, propitiation, sin offerings, whole burnt offering Saldarini, Anthony J., 49 Sanders, Ed Parrish, 12, 39, 40, 49, 79–80, 85–6, 90, 102, 115–16, 176 Sarna, Nahum M., 104, 108 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 147 scapegoat rite, 16, 77, 84, 174, 189–90 see also Girard Scarry, Elaine, 19 Schwager, Raymund, 145, 150 Shilling, Chris, 19 sin, 49, 51, 80–92, 118–19 172–98 sin offerings, 16, 33–6, 55, 62, 65–78, 92–6, 150, 207 Smith, Jonathan Z., 153, 156 Smith W. Robertson, 213 Socrates, 26, 162 solidarity, 7, 40 and the body, 18, 23, 36–40, 106, 117 as an ‘element of sacrifice’, 7, 10, 36, 38, 66, 106, 206, 214 with human community, 44–5, 67, 106, 17, 120, 126–7 Spiegel, Samuel, 109 spiritual dimension, 3, 7, 21, 24, 29, 43–4, 70, 121, 125, 129–31, 167, 170, 173, 207–10, 214 see also body, spiritual Spirit, Holy 56–7, 61–3, 93, 118–21, 129–33, 139, 160–61, 212, 215 spirits, 14, 25, 42, 84, 170–71

Index of Names and Subjects spiritualizing, 139–40, 160, 170, 203, 212–13 Stowers, Stanley K., 14, 15, 17, 37 Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt, 173 Sykes, Stephen, 38 Tanner, Kathryn, 198, 204–5 Tatlock, Jason, 105 Taylor, John V., 212 thick description, 28, 139 Theissen, Gerd, 41–2, 50, 52, 58, 214 Thiselton, Anthony, 53, 55, 58–61 Torrance, Alan J., 137 Torrance, Thomas F., 192 Turner, Bryan S., 19–21 Turner, Victor, 201 temples, 3, 11, 22, 35, 37, 57–60, 63, 98, 102, 150 in Jerusalem, 3, 10, 34, 39–40, 44–6, 48, 52, 56 transcendence, 7–8, 19–29 passim, 34–6, 44–47, 60–66 passim, 128, 157–9, 173–9, 197, 202, 206, 214–16 Trinity, doctrine of, 29–30, 127, 170, 191, 197–8, 201, 211–16 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 174

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Vanhoozer, Kevin J., 94–5 Vaux, Roland de, 38, 40, 102, 105, 114 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 12–15, 39, 99–100 Weaver, Jon Denney, 171, 180–2, 187 Weil, Simone, 173 Weir, Allison, 6 Welton, Donn, 19 Wenhan, Gordon J., 71 Westermann, Claus, 107–8 White, H.C., 109 whole burnt offering*, 11–14, 33–5, 65–7, 73–6, 102–7, 132 Williams, James G., 5, 144–5, 147–8, 160 Wolff, C., 60 Woodhead, Linda, 170 Wright, David P., 70, 72–3, 77 Wright, Nicholas Thomas, 46, 48, 50, 52, 83, 91 Yeo, K.K., 59 Young, Frances M., 10, 94 zebach shelamim, see communion sacrifice Zizioulas, John D., 206, 209, 211