Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greek Religion, Judaism, and Christianity, 100 b.c. to a.d. 200 (review)

As Christianity spread, animal sacrifice ceased to be a standard ritual practice in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean region. Petropouplou explores this development by focusing on the period from 100 b.c. (a time when Greeks and Jews, among others, still practiced animal sacrifice) to a.d. 200 (when Christianity was recognized as a religion which lacked altars for slaughter). Petropoulou surveys Greek texts (literary and epigraphic) along with the Mishnah (in English translation) and elicits a detailed picture of attitudes towards sacrifice held during this period. The study is geographically limited, covering only the Greek-speaking East and Jerusalem and excluding Egypt and evidence for specifically Roman ritual (such as the Roman imperial cult). Through a close reading of texts, the book shows that ambiguity about sacrifice gradually gave way to rejection of the practice among early Christians.

Chapter 1 outlines various scholarly approaches to sacrifice. Most of the relevant theorists are included: most importantly for this book, M. Nilsson's work on Greek religion. It is Nilsson's claim that animal sacrifice was in steady decline in the period 100 b.c.–a.d. 200, which Petropoulou convincingly refutes. The second half of chapter 1 describes the book's theoretical approach. Petropoulou sees sacrifice as "a composite of beliefs, gestures, objects and materials, which are defined by both vertical and horizontal lines … that is, vertical is the line linking offerer and recipient, and horizontal is the one linking the offerer with objective reality" (28). This admittedly structuralist approach serves mostly as an aid to understanding the book's conclusions, while the major parts of the succeeding chapters employ close readings of primary texts with only occasional reference to this schema.

Chapter 2 reviews material on Greek sacrifice, drawing evidence from a variety of sources (especially epigraphy, Plutarch, and Pausanias) and illustrating both the details of sacrificial practice as well as proof of its unflagging importance in the period under discussion. The Greek for many of the passages is helpfully included in two appendices placed directly after the chapter. A short "bridge" chapter (3) follows, touching on the primary differences between Jewish and Greek sacrificial practices. Chapter 4 then deals with Jewish sacrifice in the Second Temple Period, using primarily Philo, Josephus, and the Mishnah as source material. It is clear that sacrifice did not decline before and up to the destruction of the Temple in a.d. 70, and was also of importance for Diaspora Jews, as represented by Philo. Another bridge chapter (5) links Jewish practice to Christian ideas by stressing the sacrificial backgrounds from which all people of the period came.

Chapter 6 discusses Christian sources. The author shows that there was no single approved stance on sacrifice for first-century members of the Jesus movement, and that some may have participated in Temple sacrifices before a.d. 70, while others apparently questioned Paul's admonition to refuse meat from pagan sacrifices. It is in the second-century authors that Petropoulou finds more explicit movement towards rejection of sacrifice in general and makes much of the emerging attitude that the Christian god is self-sufficient and not needful of whatever it is that sacrifice has to offer. It is this change in belief that affects the "vertical" axis and eventually allows for the shift in "horizontal" practices to come about (following the book's theoretical schema), coupled with the acceptance and deployment of sacrificial metaphors in discourse about ritual practices.

The conclusion in chapter 7 offers some elaboration of this thesis, yet finally makes appeals to a notion of "experience" as affecting a change in the psychologies of those in contact with Jesus or witness to the destruction of the Temple. This last idea sounds little different from evolutionist approaches to the history of religion which posit "internalizing" as a major step in the spread of Christianity, a theory...