Sacrificial death?

In some ways, Daniel Ullucci’s The Christian Rejection of Animal Sacrifice helpfully complicates our picture of views on ancient sacrifice, both pre-Christian and Christian. He challenges the standard narrative that claims that Christians straightforwardly and pretty much immediately recognized Jesus’ death as a final sacrifice, and pretty much immediately abandoned animal sacrifice. A debate about animal sacrifice was already going on before Christianity appeared, and it usually did not involve a rejection of animal sacrifice per se. “Critics” of sacrifice were actually competing to define sacrifice against other “critics” who wanted to define sacrifice for their own ends.

There was competition to define sacrifice within the early church too, so the path to a sacrifice-free faith was much more fraught than is usually thought, with “competing culture-producers” offering different accounts of how Christianity related to animal sacrifice in Israel and among Gentiles. Christians did not abandon sacrifice, he claims, because they were convinced they didn’t need to perform them; the temple was destroyed, and Christian thinkers formulated varied accounts of why that was OK, and indeed part of the plan all along. 

In some of its broad contours, this makes sense. Certainly, the fall of the temple is huge, since every indication is that Jewish Christians continued to worship in the temple right up through the 60s. I’m not convinced that the accounts of the “end of sacrifice” are as incompatible as Ullucci claims, nor am I at all convinced that this theme was as rare and late as he claims. 

Hebrews gives the later position on the end of sacrifice in its earliest form, Ullucci thinks, sometime in the late first century. As for Paul, he doesn’t think Paul rejected animal sacrifice as such (true) and he denies that Paul thought of Jesus’ death as a sacrifice. He states (75-6), “there is nothing sacrificial about what Paul is saying in Romans 3:24-25.” 

That would surprise many, if not most commentators, who have found all sorts of indications of sacrifice in that text. Drawing on the work of Stanley Stowers, he argues that the death of the animal did not have “major significance” in ancient sacrifice; that atonement for personal sin was not a major feature of sacrifice; that the reference to blood doesn’t demand a sacrificial reference, and that the parallel between Paul’s description of Jesus’ death in Romans 3 and the death of a martyr in 4 Maccabees 17:22 (both speak of blood and use the term hilasterion) doesn’t mean they are sacrificial. The violent nature  of their deaths, the messy bloodiness of their deaths, makes them very unlike animal sacrifice, where the use of blood was carefully controlled. Jesus died a “heroic or noble death,” which “was not directly associated, much less equated, with the ritual of animal sacrifice.”

Ullucci presents his case with impressive doggedness, but he does not persuade. Long before the first century, “sacrifice” terminology was being widely used for types of events, including types of deaths, other than animal sacrifice. “For an altar they have a tomb, for libations remembrance, for wine mourning,” said Simonides of Ceos about the dead of Therymopylae (in Martin Hengel, The Atonement 11; Hengel assembles a great deal of further evidence). To insist that no ancient person would have found an analogy between a martyr’s death and an animal sacrifice flies in the face of a good bit of evidence that many ancient persons discerned just such analogies. And if ancient persons could, why not the ancient person named Paul?