End of Sacrifice

Guy Stroumsa’s book, The End of Sacrifice (just released from the University of Chicago) is small in size but raises huge questions. Based on lectures delivered at the College de France, Stroumsa’s book examines religious, religio-political and religio-anthropological shifts during the first centuries after Christ. He sees several new emphases arising: an interiorization of religion and specifically a largely unprecedented association of religion and truth; the rise of “religions of the book,” which involves the reconciliation of religion and philosophy; transformations of ritual, especially the fading importance of blood sacrifice and significant shifts in the meanings of sacred/profane; and the shift from civic religion to community religion.

That’s a lot, but it’s fairly well-know. Stroumsa’s real contribution is twofold:

First, Stroumsa (not unlike Walter Burkert) thinks that the division of labor betweem “mediterranean” classicists and “near eastern” scholars is deleterious to both. His book encompasses both. And that means that Judaism plays a large role in his analysis of the end of sacrifice. When the temple fell, he says, Judaism became the first people who maintained a sustained existence without sacrifice. Pagan moods were already turning against blood and religious slaughter, and Judaism was especially attractive to them. Christianity maintained sacrificial language and categories, but metaphorized or spiritualized them.

Second, Stroumsa suggests that what happened in late antiquity was not the replacement of one religion (paganism) by another (Christianity), but a fundamental transformation in the nature of religion itself. He analyzes Origen’s debate with Celsus by characterizing Celsus as a “conservative who desires to preserve society and its traditional values against an external threat of unknown nature” and who sees “the spiritual novelty of Christianity” as a threat “to the very foundations on which the civil society of the empire is established.” By contrast, Origen appears as an advocate of “a new form of religion, in a revoluionary sense, established on the ‘objective’ truth of revelation and on personal conviction.” Pagans and Christians talk past each other because “Christians were incapable of understanding the idea of civic religion,” while pagans could make no sense of the notion of “religious truth.”

There’s a great deal here, but two reflections: First, Stroumsa highlights the epochal importance of the fall of the temple in Jerusalem. This gives preterists some needed ammunition; to those who say “How can Matthew 24 be describing the fall of Jerusalem when it uses such expansive imagery,” we can say “Read Stroumsa.” In a very concrete sense, Titus made a new epoch when he toppled the temple.

Second, Stroumsa shows that everyone in the West (and beyond, in large part) assumes a post-AD 70 conception of what religion means. Today’s religious skeptics depend on a definition of religion that came to them from Judaism and Christianity. Christ is inescapable.