Blood Sacrifice

[xenologer]

Upon reading the afterword to Letter to a Christian Nation I got to thinking about blood sacrifice. It's not necessary for you to read this link, and I'm not even necessarily wanting a discussion about the link; I'm just giving context.

Here's where my head is right now, though. In the days when Judaism and Christianity were having their major cultural foundations laid, the people depicted in the Scriptures in question were certainly a product of their times. Those people had certain expectations about how exchanges with supernatural beings worked. There was an unquestioned assumption about the rightful place of blood sacrifice that we really don't tend to have today. The assumption was that blood was a (literal or symbolic) manifestation of life itself, and that giving this to a divine figure would please it.

From this widespread assumption seems to spring everything from Abel's sheep to Abraham's son to Jesus himself. Without the assumption that blood sacrifice and offerings of live creatures is pleasing to a deity, the whole system falls apart. It seems to me that part of the reason why the "Jesus Christ died for your sins" narrative falls flat for a lot of people is that a lot of people just don't understand anymore why there was anything about that in "the rules" to begin with. They don't even understand why YHWH wants blood, let alone how big a deal it was that his own son was offered up. The "why" of it is lost because we aren't supposed to give blood to our gods anymore. Aside: if you think blood sacrifice is still considered part of polite religious worship, consider how afraid people are of Santeria for doing what Jewish and Christian scriptures clearly state gods want us to do.

For me personally, this means that while the "God spilled the blood of his only-begotten son to pay the blood debt humanity owed for their sins" narrative had broad resonance at the time (because basically every culture shared the assumption that a sin was a debt owed to the gods which could be repaid in blood), it has no meaning or place in societies where blood sacrifice is considered something that "savages" (word used with full scare quotes because I'm an anthropologist and can't say "savages" unironically anymore) do. If Christianity is dying, it is because the most central assumption that makes the whole thing work just doesn't have any relevance anymore.

Now, I'm anticipating somebody with a Christian background saying, "Well, the crucifixion was such a badass sacrifice that it ended the time of blood sacrifice, and nobody ever need repay YHWH in blood again." I think this is dodging the issue. The issue is that your potential converts probably don't understand why there ever needed to be a sacrifice in the first place, because they weren't raised to believe that blood sacrifice is Just What People Do. These people need to be convinced first that blood sacrifice is a natural and desirable thing, and I don't think Christians can make that case. Please feel free to prove me wrong if I'm underestimating you.

If the rule is that divine powers can be propitiated with blood, whose rule is that? Did YHWH make that rule, or is it a rule totally external to YHWH by which YHWH is bound? Seems most likely to me that it's the latter. It's a rule external to YHWH by which YHWH is bound because that's how humans thought they had to be interacting with gods. YHWH is a god. Therefore we have to interact with it by giving it blood. If we really seriously screw up big time or just really want to say "I love you" in a big way, we have to give YHWH particularly awesome blood.

For ancient people this was a serious "well duh" sort of a thing, but lots of people don't think like this anymore. Even the idea that someone else can rightly pay for the sins of another is considered unjust and barbaric by lots and lots of people. For Christianity to remain relevant, then the practice of valuing blood sacrifice has to be explained, justified, and thereby preserved for your religion to even be intelligible to modern people. Can you?

Comments

[the_future_modernes]

Funny how that works. The Aztecs have a reputation for being particularly brutal because of their blood sacrifices, when Christianity and Judaism grew out of a similar mindset. Oh my god my history books need to be burnt.

[silveradept]

I think they can. But they do it disingenuously. In their practice, no, there's no need for blood sacrifices because of [REASON X], but Those People, that Other, who might very well be kissing cousins from a more objective standpoint, They Still Use Blood Magic. From the Santeria article and the Satanic Panic idea, once it became fashionable to not do blood sacrifice, it naturally followed that an easy way of tarring your opponent was to say they continued with the practice.

A nice extension of that idea, for Christians, is that while there's blood sacrifice in the past, it's what the Jews, who reject the sacrifice of Jesus, did (blood libel and all that). That's where you get Christians being able to say that Christians don't need to do blood sacrifice any more.

I get the feeling that you've answered most of this in the post, and I'm not comprehending how, so this is what my argument consists of - Christians keep the idea of blood sacrifice alive not as a necessity for explaining their own religious practice, but as a way of delineating all the Others who are different and inferior to than their own perfected practice.

What *is* christianity, then?

[polydad]

My question's in the title; since christianity as practiced in 21st century America has more or less nothing to do with its historical roots, what is it and how and why does it continue to exist?

I have to admit to an ulterior motive; I'd be delighted to redirect any energy currently going towards it into more societally useful endeavors.

best,

Joel. Who followed you over here from LJ.

[knitminder]

I first started questioning my faith with the question of sacrifice. It seemed illogical. When I seriously entertained that first question, that first doubt, I was flooded with more.

[cleverthylacine]

No offence, but if you haven't learned anything about the Talmud and you only know what Christians say about 'the old testament' you really haven't the first idea what Jewish scripture is about. (Which is true of Sam Harris as well as 99.9% of people who think they know what Judaism is about based on what's been codified in the Christian Bible. I'm really not picking on you personally.)

The Talmud and the dialogues between rabbis which continue today are the way that Judaism evolves and changes over time as our understanding of the world changes and improves and our understanding of G-d therefore also improves. Only a very small sect within Judaism - Kairites - operate on only the scriptures that were codified as such at the time the Nicaean Council was deciding how much and what it wanted to appropriate from our culture and religion in the process of picking and choosing what it wanted from the various Christian mystery cults so that Constantine could have his unified Christian religion to serve as a tool of intellectual conquest and colonisation.

There are people in the world who think that the literal arrival of Moshiach is imminent and must result in a literal rebuilding of the Temple and a return to the practise of (animal) blood sacrifice.

But I don't think there are a lot of those people.

[xenologer]

Actually, my Bible professor was a rabbi, and I took a midrash course later with another rabbi, so I'm not relying on Christian pastors or Sam Harris or whatever to tell me what Jews thought about stuff. Doing that would... probably not work too well, I agree.

I just think, from what I have read and studied as well as what was then built upon by Christians, that blood sacrifice was A Thing for ancient people. If Judaism has moved past this and is less interested in blood as valid currency between mortals and the divine, I'll trust you on that (since you undoubtedly know better, and anyway I find it totally believeable). It's... probably a good thing for that sort of ritual to fall out of vogue.

Christians can't really toss it aside, though, not fully. They've got that whole "Christ died for us and the blood of the lamb washed away our sins" thing that's sort of important to them, and it means that they've staked a lot more on preserving this assumption that gods like blood, and give preferential treatment to people who offer up the best blood. Without the assumptions behind blood sacrifice as an idea and a practice, the crucifixion makes no sense (and I don't mean in the literal "wtf no this makes no sense" way, I mean that it's not even coherent within the narrative).

[a-tergo-lupi.livejournal.com]

And that's why it's now so abusive. You first have to convince people that they are so bad and so worthless that they should be killed. It didn't use to be this way. We've changed.

[mumbly-joe.livejournal.com]

Please feel free to prove me wrong if I'm underestimating you.

I always understood the crucification as an overt callback to Abraham and Isaac, and Abraham and Isaac as really only incidentally about the blood sacrifice elements: Abraham isn't just being asked to spill blood, or to just sacrifice the life of his child, even, but his sole heir and one last shot at the legacy that God had promised him (he is very old at this point, even by Biblical lifespan-dilation standards). It always read more to me like a test in Abraham's faith in God's ability and faithfulness to keep his end of that bargain than anything particularly significant about the symbology of blood, per se. God, quite frankly, comes across as jerking Abraham around about his offspring great deal throughout his life leading up to this, and giving Abraham every reason to balk at this demand. Tying back to the animal sacrifices themselves, this is an element you're missing above: the faithful were asked not simply to spill blood, but make a sacrifice in terms of their own well-being in the process. The sacrifice Abraham was asked to make is pretty plain, and even the animal sacrifices were supposed to be the best cuts of the best livestock; it was never simply about the symbology of the blood, but about symbolically and literally deferring some of your personal well-being and prosperity to a higher power. Circumcision has a similar basis, although the sacrifice at heart there is considerably more symbolic than with animal offerings.

As to your other point, about where the rules come from, and why God is bound by them, there's a pretty simple answer: whatever other significance Christians heaped on the crucification after the story was constructed, it was primarily a call back to Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac, and specifically meant to be framed as a fulfillment of the terms of that covenant. The rules were God's, yes, but they were also Abraham's and his decedents', just as the conditions of any agreement between two people proceeds from, and binds each of them jointly. For God to change the conditions after the fact would have amounted to reneging on that entire promise, and further would have rendered Abraham's display of faith in God's faithfulness to that promise both unjustified and hollow. The notion is that God plays by the same rules that Abraham had to not because He particularly has to, but because He agreed to in advance, and His other promises to The People were premised on that agreement.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

I agree with mumbly_joe also think that a big part of the crucifixion was that Jesus was, unlike scapegoats, animal sacrifices, and even many human sacrifices, a willing victim. Animal sacrifice certainly doesn't resonate much for me as a modern person, and I've got a sort of a complicated relationship to Jesus as a religious figure since I've been sort of Jewish lately, but here's my take on the "sacrifice" of Jesus. It's not quite mainstream, though:

Jesus was born into a society where individual human lives didn't really matter and were frequently sacrificed as means to an end. In response to a prophecy saying that the "King of the Jews" was about to be born, the Romans systematically slaughtered male babies so that nobody born around that time could claim to be the fulfillment of that prophecy and destabilize the region. And when Jesus amassed a huge, relatively radical following and people started saying that he was the fulfillment of that same prophecy, mainstream leaders in his community got scared that he'd start a revolt and that the Romans would exact revenge against the whole community, and that the only way they could adequately distance him was by accusing him of blasphemy and sedition and having the Romans sentence him to death.

Both groups were acting according to pretty universal human nature - people are often willing to sacrifice others' lives for their own purposes (and here, the purposes themselves weren't too evil: both groups were trying to keep a highly volatile region stable and probably thought that overall they were saving lives. They may have even been right).

To me the thing that cleansed humanity's sins was not that Jesus died but that he allowed himself to die, and asked God to forgive the people who killed him. Also, although most Christians think that God only forgives people who become Christians, I think it's pretty clear that God did forgive all those people. At least, it's pretty clear if you assume that that God is the same one who had previously usually responded to the sins of any given city or country by afflicting random people and cattle with plague or famine.

This represents a huge departure in God's relationship with people. It's a signal that he now actually gets that people aren't that good at being good.

I understand that many Christians take the "blood sacrifice" thing a lot more literally than I do; to me, though, it's just a metaphor for what happened, that was created back when it made more sense to people.

[virginia-fell.livejournal.com]

I understand that many Christians take the "blood sacrifice" thing a lot more literally than I do; to me, though, it's just a metaphor for what happened, that was created back when it made more sense to people.

They really do, and for good reason. The idea that the wages of sin must be death (either of an animal or the guilty party or an innocent party like Jesus) because That's How It Works is an assumption we don't have today but that is a common theme through Jewish and Christian scripture. However, today, even the people who accept that the sins of humanity meant someone's blood had to be shed or we'd all be cosmically and eternally fucked will still probably not claim that they can get YHWH to forgive their adultery by cutting open a puppy.

That aside, your interpretation of the practical motives behind why various agents would have wanted a guy like Jesus to die? Makes perfect sense to me. I also thought that the bit about YHWH "getting it" now was really really awesome.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

I've also seen people note that there's an ambiguous parallelism with Abraham and Isaac: Abraham is being asked to sacrifice his son, which appears to be parallel with God sacrificing his son. But on the other hand, Jesus may be closer to the ram that God provides as an "alternative" to Isaac.

[virginia-fell.livejournal.com]

The fact that the alternative is "kill this ram instead" or "kill my son instead" and not "nobody needs to die" is still evidence of an assumption that blood sacrifice has just got to happen because Those Are The Rules.

[virginia-fell.livejournal.com]

Tying back to the animal sacrifices themselves, this is an element you're missing above: the faithful were asked not simply to spill blood, but make a sacrifice in terms of their own well-being in the process. The sacrifice Abraham was asked to make is pretty plain, and even the animal sacrifices were supposed to be the best cuts of the best livestock; it was never simply about the symbology of the blood, but about symbolically and literally deferring some of your personal well-being and prosperity to a higher power.

Then why are all offerings not equally valuable if they represent an equal share of one's material wealth? There is a story of two people offering the best out of their livelihoods, and when the offerings are laid side by side, YHWH clearly prefers one. Abel brought a lamb, and Cain brought produce because it was what he had.

Why was Cain's sacrifice not just as good as Abel's? Abel had other sheep. Cain had no sheep at all. Cain gave what he had, because Cain was a farmer. If Cain had come to the altar and literally smashed his farming tools as an offering to YHWH, it still wouldn't have been what was required. YHWH wanted a live animal, and wanted it killed.

There's no part there were YHWH asks for a lamb that'd make Cain disobedient for bringing something else. We're just supposed to take it for granted that lambs make more pleasing offerings, and the implication is that Cain should have known that "without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin." (Heb. 9:22)

Blood sacrifice seriously really is A Thing.

Edit: Needed to change a word. Anyway! Sorry for the delete.

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

Of course, no blood sacrifice was made by the people. Jesus was not offered to God; he was executed as a heretic.

If you look at it as Jesus offering *himself* to God, seems to me it's a lot of navel gazing on the part of the Deity and that nothing the people did enters into it.