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44 chapter 2 Blood and the Covenant The Jewish and Christian Careers of a Biblical Verse The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 c.e. radically challenged the “blood cult” that stood at the heart of biblical religion. How could a sacrificial religion preserve its central practices when it no longer had the physical facility to offer sacrifices? If blood in the Bible was a signifier that “indexed” the power of the temple priests, what role did it play when priests no longer served as the primary religious and political authorities? And how could such a religion demonstrate that it deserved recognition as a religion in the Greco-Roman world, which continued to be dominated by blood sacrifices until the late-fourth century? (The sacrifices were finally banned by Emperor Theodosius.) These were challenges faced in different ways by rabbis and church fathers, even as the two groups competed to show that their tradition was the chosen one of God. As we saw in chapter 1, Steven Geller has argued that the blood cult of the priests fed into Christianity, which, although its origins predated the destruction of the temple by a generation, nevertheless came to represent a spiritualized substitute for sacrifice. Geller claims that the Deuteronomic transformation of sacrifice into textuality found its proper home in rabbinic Judaism, which also offered a nonsacrificial alternative to the temple cult. Indeed, on the “eating” of blood, Judaism and Christianity clearly parted company: whereas Judaism retained the biblical horror at consumption of blood, Christianity ultimately made the “eating” of its founder and the “drinking” of his blood a central sacrament. Blood and the Covenant 45 In this chapter I want to examine whether the blood discourse of the Bible really did result in two different trajectories, the Christian and the rabbinic. I will suggest that such a radical distinction between these two religious formations is not borne out by the evidence. The fathers of the early church often turned the sacrifice of Jesus into a textual memorial, rather than an event to be literally repeated. And conversely, the rabbis never abandoned the actual sacrifices, even as they sought alternatives to them. Rabbinic Judaism had certain features of a blood cult, in theory if not in practice. Guy G. Stroumsa has suggested that late antique Judaism and Christianity were both “sacrificial religions without blood sacri- fices.”1 Each of them “spiritualized” sacrifice in distinctive ways but also developed physical practices that substituted for sacrifice. In addition, although the pagan world of pre-Christian Rome was, of course, a world of blood sacrifice, Greco-Roman philosophers leveled their own critiques of sacrifice, some even seeing in Judaism a worthy model of a religion without a temple.2 The “end of sacrifice” in Western religion was therefore a complex and dialectical process rather than an abrupt caesura. My discussion starts with a premise that a number of researchers have recently advanced: for at least the first four centuries of the Common Era, both Judaism and Christianity developed in close interaction —dialogue and polemic—with each other.3 The so-called parting of the ways happened over a long period of time, and the relevant familial metaphor for the two traditions was not “mother-daughter,” but two siblings, perhaps even fraternal twins. In fact, one might extend the metaphor further and argue that the two were really identical twins: one embryo that later split into two. Rather than the “elder” giving rise to the “younger,” the two developed side-by-side in the wake of the temple’s destruction and the Christianization of the Roman Empire . Instead of splitting off from an already-existing Judaism, orthodox Christianity developed in parallel to rabbinic Judaism, itself a “Second Testament” in its relationship to the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, Seth Schwartz goes so far as to argue that it was Christianity that provoked the “rejudaization” of Palestine after around 350 c.e.4 The scholarly consensus seems now to be that the boundaries between Judaism and Christianity were fuzzy and their identities unclear until perhaps as late as the fourth century, despite the repeated efforts of the church fathers and rabbis to define orthodoxy as against heresy. Nevertheless, in the argument I make here, my goal is not primarily to identify lines of influence between Judaism and Christianity (except where they can actually be proven), especially since some of the texts...

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