Hyam Maccoby, The Sacred Executioner - Peter Myers, June 2, 2001; update September 7, 2008. My comments are shown {thus}.

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This is a substantial book which deserves to be better known; it deals with the role of Human Sacrifice in the creation of Judaism, the creation of Christianity, and the creation of modern Israel.

Here is how Maccoby contrasts Aryanism with Zionism (pp. 181-2 below):

"Each distinctive civilization has its basic myth ... the basic myth of Greek civilization is that of the victory of the Olympian gods over the crude, barbaric Titans, reflecting the historical victory of the Hellenes over the aboriginals of Greece. In the type of polytheism of Greece lies its ideal of aristocratic individualism, characteristic of militaristic invaders (such as the Normans). The basic myth of the Jewish civilization was of the liberation of a nation of slaves, pitted against all the oppressive regimes of the world by a unitary and unifying pact with a single God, who refused to co-exist with the gods who had betrayed mankind into slavery."

Note: Judaism takes on, not just Egypt but all "pagan" governments worldwide: thus Pharaoh = Hitler. Why characterise the Greeks as militaristic invaders, but ignore the Bible's genocidal accounts of the Hebrew invasion of Palestine?

In making the following criticisms, I am not denying the validity of most of Maccoby's points, but subjecting him to the same standards of analysis as he subjects others to.

Despite his apparent atheism, Maccoby remains ever the Zionist propagandist, and seems to retain a belief that Jews are the Chosen, despite the absence of a Chooser.

While many of his complaints about the victimisation of the Jews are justified - in particular, the blaming of all Jews for the death of Jesus - the reader should note that, whereas the Nazis are duly accorded their role as Sacred Executioners of Jews in our time, Lenin, Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky, Kaganovich et. al. are not portrayed as Sacred Executioners of Christians; and there is no consideration that Israelis might be Sacred Executioners of Palestinians, on the basis of the equation Pharaoh = Hitler = Nasser = Arafat.

The continuing German humiliation and atonement for Nazi victims, even while the Palestinians suffer the same fate, unacknowledged and unrecompensed, shows that the Germans are indeed being treated in a religious way, as Christians branded the Jews, and this is all the more surprising since Jews are apparently the most intellectual people in the world. Are their intellectual talents put primarily to religious uses? Is this the difference between a rabbi and a Greek Philosopher? Even atheists like Maccoby cannot free themselves from this traditional role.

Maccoby depicts God as a collective Male Super-Ego. Yet if this God is recognised as a fiction, what is the basis of the Covenant? And of being a Jew, based as it is on separateness? Of circumcision and dietary restrictions, as marks of that separateness? Of the "promised Land", as a place for dwelling apart? How can an atheist reject "paganism"? How can atheistic Jews claim to be the revealers of Truth to non-Jews? One major point of agreement between Maccoby and myself is that Christianity is not a form of Judaism, or its fulfilment, but an entirely new religion, as maintained by Marcion. This perception would benefit both Christians and Jews: Christians would stop trying to be "the true Jews", Jews could be left in peace, and Jesus could be seen as a Buddha-figure and like a Cynic/Taoist philosopher.

Arnold J. Toynbee write on Human Sacrifice in Phoenician/Canaanite/Hebrew civilization:

A Study of History VOLUME XII RECONSIDERATIONS (OUP, London 1961):

{p. 424} Human sacrifice was an atrocity of Syria's own. If it had ever been practised in Sumer and Akkad or in Egypt, it was extinct there in historical times. The Assyrians were innocent of it. The slaughter and torture of which they were guilty had no religious sanction or excuse. In the Syriac World, both at home and overseas, human sacrifice was practised as a last resort in a public crisis. In the ninth century B.C. King Mesha of Moab sacrificed his eldest son on the wall of his capital city when the combined forces of Israel, Judah, and Edom were at the gates. In similar circumstances King Ahaz of Judah 'caused his son to pass through the fire' when Jerusalem was being besieged by the combined forces of Damascus and Israel in the eighth century. King Manasseh of Judah - Hezekiah's son and Josiah's

{p. 425} grandfather - 'made his son to pass through the fire' without, as far as we know, having Mesha's and Ahaz's occasion for performing the rite.

{end} More at toynbee.html.

Hyam Maccoby, THE SACRED EXECUTIONER: HUMAN SACRIFICE AND THE LEGACY OF GUILT, Thames and Hudson, London 1982

{p. 7} Chapter One The Sacred Executioner

A figure in mythology that has received little attention is that of the Sacred Executioner. By this I mean the figure of a person (either a god or a human being) who slays another person, and as a result is treated as both sacred and accursed. Commonly, such a person in myth is ejected from society and condemned to long wanderings; yet he is also regarded as having special privileges, such as being protected from attack and having his life prolonged beyond the average. There are many variations on this pattem; sometimes the person is treated as more sacred than accursed, sometimes as more accursed than sacred. The best-known example in our culture is that of Cain, whose story will begin our discussion, but the discussion will take us to many very different examples, which may not at first seem to fit into the category suggested: Romulus, the founder of Rome; Set, the Egyptian god; Loki, the Scandinavian god; the Wandering Jew (and indeed the Jews as a whole, whose sufferings as the target of anti-Semitism will receive fresh light from this investigation); and examples in literature, such as the Ancient Mariner.

The historical reality that lies behind all these stories, I shall argue, is the institution of human sacrifice, which was practised throughout the ancient world, though usually only in times of great emergency (it is still practised in certain backward areas of the world today). Very few of the myths we shall be considering actually portray human sacrifice openly; instead, we find stories about accidental deaths on the one hand, or about murders (carried out for merely personal reasons) on the other. Both modulations are intended to absolve society of responsibility for the violent deaths that occur in the stories. For human sacrifice seems almost never to have been unaccompanied by guilt on the part of the society in which it occurred and by a consequent desire to shift the blame, despite the desperate need that was felt to accomplish the deed. (An exception is the society of the Aztecs, which seems to have been almost entirely free of guilt for the institution of human sacrifice, though even here some details are relevant to our purpose.) Thus, the myth will rarely admit openly that the slaying in the story was performed as a ritual sacrifice. Instead, it will say that an accident

{p. 8} occurred, or alternatively that the slaying was a wicked deed performed by a murderer who was subsequently punished. How do we know then, that ritual sacrifice is the real subject of the myth? This is betrayed by the equivocal character of the story. Some good consequence will be seen to flow from the slaying: a city will be founded, or a nation will be inaugurated, or a famine will be stayed, or a people will be saved from the wrath of the gods, or a threatening enemy will be defeated. Such good consequences are exactly the results that were hoped for by the performance of human sacrifice. If the slaying is blamed entirely on accident, then nobody will be blamed; but more usually the slaying is attributed to malevolence on the part of the slayer. In this case, the hidden character of the story is betrayed by the equivocal nature of the punishment meted out to the slayer. He will be cursed, but not put to death; he will acquire special magic powers; he will be driven out of society, but special pains taken to ensure that he survives. By taking the blame for the slaying, he is performing a great service to society, for not only does he perform the deed, but he takes upon himself the blame for it, and thus absolves society as a whole completely from the guilt of a slaying for which they, in fact, are responsible and by which, in theory at least, they benefit.

A key example may be taken from the religious ritual of Athens. Once a year, at the great Bouphonia (Bull Slaying Feast), a bull representing Zeus, the father of the gods, was sacrificed on the altar of the temple. The custom was that the priests, after sacrificing the bull, fled from the altar in mock panic, crying out a formula absolving them from the guilt of having slain the god. Afterwards, in a special chamber of the temple, a trial was held, in which the blame for the slaying was attributed to the knife that slit the bull's throat. The knife, having been found guilty, was punished by being destroyed.1

This ritual is not one of human sacrifice, but it is very instructive even about myths in which the victim is a human being. It shows the desire to shift the blame, and to find some person or even object that can be held guilty and punished for an act which, nevertheless, was regarded as an essential observance, the omission of which would bring disaster upon the state. Actually, the fact that in this instance the victim is an animal, not a human being, does not necessarily mean that the ritual is less primitive than rituals of human sacrifice. In the very earliest times, animals were not regarded as inferior in status to men; on the contrary, they were often regarded as divine beings. Consequently, the killing of an animal would not arouse less guilt than the killing of a man.2 The era of human sacrifice arrived when human status had increased and the gods were portrayed in human, not animal, form. The myths of human sacrifice with which we are concerned arose in a still later era, when human sacrifice occurred very

{p. 9} seldom, only at times of the greatest emergency, and at other times was hardly even mentioned as a possibility. In this period, animal sacrifice mostly took the place of human sacrifice, not because animals were regarded as the most efficacious sacrifices, but because growing civilization and humanitarianism, combined with a higher valuation of human status and a lessened awe of animals, caused a horror of human sacrifice to develop, so that not only was it confined to times of extreme emergency, but references to it in myth were censored and transformed in various ways out of recognition. This is the era when human sacrifice had the character of a great secret, and the myths we shall be examining are therefore all in a coded form.

In general, rituals are earlier than myths. The flight of the Athenian priests at the Bull Feast is a ritual, not a myth, in most versions, though we can imagine how a myth might have arisen from it. Myths often arose in order to explain a ritual; often too, they became detached from the ritual, which had become obsolete, and functioned simply as stories for poets or playwrights, though such stories also had a ritual function, being recited at festivals, and being regarded as holy writ. Ritual is not the only source of myth, which may arise from a historical event; yet in the background of such a transformation the influence of the ancient ritual may often be felt, arising from a fundamental need for placation and expiation in the face of unmanageable fear. Thus a story based on fact, by being interpreted in a way consonant with ancient sacrificial ritual, may actually take the place of that ritual and function in such a way that it is as if the ritual were being perpetually performed. The best example of this is the case of Jesus, whose death was interpreted as the sacrifice of a man-god, the placation of an angry father-god and the expiation of otherwise unpardonable sins; the blame for the shocking but necessary sacrifice was borne by a whole nation, the Jews (though crystallized in the individual form of Judas), who were given the role of a collective Sacred Executioner.

Another possibility, exemplified mainly in the Old Testament, is that a story originally about human sacrifice may be altered to serve a purpose that is the opposite to that intended - to act as propaganda, indeed, against the institution of human sacrifice. Perhaps the best example of this is the story of Abraham and Isaac, which extols the willingness of the father to sacrifice his son and nevertheless ends up as validating the substitution of animal sacrifice for human sacrifice. Here the pull towards human sacrifice is still observable, even though it is declared that God, in His mercy, has decided to abolish it. In other stories, however, where the civilizing process has progressed further, a definite polemic against human sacrifice can be discerned, though based on a scenario derived from human-sacrificial ritual. The dis-

{p. 10} guised myth is still further disguised, until not merely guilt about human sacrifice is expressed but a conscious opposition to it as a deplorable pagan practice wholly at variance with the wishes of a merciful God. Here, in analysing the myth, it is necessary to uncover a pre-Hebraic stratum expressive of guilt but not of repudiation of the human-sacrificial institution. A myth of this character, showing the whole complex development from unashamed endorsement to guilty acceptance to indignant repudiation, is that of Cain and Abel, which will therefore repay careful study.

The Bible, indeed, is a fascinating repository of information about a crucial stage in man's development - his slow progress from modes of shifting blame and responsibility through institutions of sacrifice to the acceptance of full personal responsibility for his actions, both as an individual and as a member of a society. The Biblical institution of animal sacrifice should be viewed in this perspective, since its chief characteristic is its deletion of the magical properties of sacrifice, and the substitution of a system of etiquette for the idea of magically efficacious sacrificial rites; that is, the sacrifices are only an accompaniment to moral processes of repentance, restitution and punishment.3 Such a gigantic move towards maturity could not take place in an utterly discontinuous manner; it had to build on previous stages of development, including the institution of sacrifice itself. One of the most important ways in which this process of transformation and sublimation can be traced is in the Biblical myths and stories, which are often basically pagan myths of sacrifice elaborated and essentially transforrned to accommodate the new Hebraic insights about moral responsibility and the undesirability of shifting blame by splitting-off devices and excuses of various kinds {Maccoby, ever the Jewish proselytiser, implies that the Hebrews were the first to progress beyond human sacrifice. Yet the Bible's account of the Hebrews' invasion of the Promised Land is genocidal beyond any "pagan" sacred literature}. Nevertheless, in the basic myth of the New Testament, we shall note a regression to earlier modes of atonement, and, inevitably, a revival of the idea of shifting blame by vicarious atonement, both in the form of a sacrificial victim and in the less understood form of the Sacred Executioner - the main subject of this book - who vicariously undergoes the guilt felt by mankind because of its desperate recourse to sacrificial modes of atonement for its sins.

{p. 11} Chapter Two Cain

Cain is the archetypal figure of the murderer. The story of Genesis allows him no excuse for his crime, which is actuated by mere jealousy of his brother Abel because the latter's offering to God was accepted with more favour. Nevertheless, I intend to argue that in the original version of the Cain story, Cain was not a murderer at all. He was the performer of a human sacrifice, and in the very earliest form of the story, there was no guilt attached to his deed; on the contrary, it was a meritorious act, just as the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham would have been, if God had allowed it.

A nearer parallel is the story of Romulus and Remus. This savage tale is the foundation myth of Rome, and contrasts very strongly with the advanced morality of the Hebrew foundation myth of Cain and Abel in its final forrn; yet I suggest that they have many features in common and can be traced to an identical type. Romulus and Remus were twin brothers who together founded the city of Rome. Their divine parentage and their upbringing by a she-wolf emphasize the utterly new start that they made; they were as if created by nature and were at the dawn of a new world. While they were working on the foundations of the city, they quarrelled over the plans. Remus jumped in derision over a trench that Romulus had dug, and, in anger, Romulus slew him. Nevertheless, he was not punished for the deed, but on the contrary was given a great sign of favour by the gods: a fl ght of vultures arose over him, showing that he would found a nation as strong and pitiless as the vulture.1

Again, this story is not explicitly about human sacrifice; but the disguise here is very thin. Only good consequences flow from the slaying, and it is well attested that a commonly practised form of human sacrifice was at the inauguration of a new city.2 The purpose of such a sacrifice was manifold: to placate the gods at a moment of hubris and avert their jealousy by inflicting a loss upon oneself; and also, possibly, to send an ambassador to the upper world who would act as tutelary spirit of the new city and intercede for it with the gods at closer quarters than any mortal being could command. A human sacrifice was usually over-determined in this way, and could serve multiple and even contradictory purposes.

{p. 74} Chapter Six Abraham and Isaac

We have seen in the last chapters how the Hebrew Bible transforms the stories of Cain, Lamech and Ham by divesting them of human-sacrificial content. In the case of Lamech, the result is merely a version so truncated and obscure that it serves no new purpose in the narrative, but survives only like an archaeological relic, giving clues about the stratum to which it originally belonged. In the case of Cain and Ham, however, a true transformation has been achieved, by which the stories have been made to serve new purposes. The Cain story becomes a parable of human brotherhood, pointing the moral with the Israelite redactor's great query, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' While condemning violence against one's fellow-man, the story also provides a justification of the institution of animal sacrifice, by which the craving for shedding human blood was to be diverted. In the case of Ham, the crude castration-wish of the son against the father has been transformed into a political message, justifying the Israelite conquest of Canaan. At the same time, on the moral level, a new kind of father-son relationship is inculcated, in which the father is regarded not as a tyrant but as a human being who requires protection by his sons. Ham's defect, in the Israelite story, was not just lack of respect but lack of love towards his father, whose dignity should be safeguarded even when he fails to uphold it himself.

Perhaps the most interesting story of all in this connection, however, is the story of Abraham and Isaac, for here we find not complete transformation, made from an anti human-sacrificial standpoint, but a phase of transition, in which the yearning for human sacrifice is still struggling with the desire to abolish it. The purpose of the story is to show that God Himself ordained that animal sacrifice should be substituted for human sacrifice. At the same time, the story contains no moral revulsion from the very idea of human sacrifice. On the contrary, it is imputed to Abraham as extraordinary merit that he was willing to sacrifice his favourite son, Isaac, at the behest of God. We see here the dynamics of the historic move from human to animal sacrifice: on the one hand, this is a revolutionary step, by which a higher morality is brought into effect; on the other hand, the benefits of human sacrifice cannot be lightly relinquished, and the transition

{p. 75} from human to animal sacrifice must appear plausible in the sense that animal sacrifice must acquire the same aura of reverence and holiness that previously belonged to human sacrifice. So Abraham's willingness to perform human sacrifice is in a way a validation of the animal sacrifice that takes its place; if he had not been willing, animal sacrifice would appear only an evasion or inadequate second-best that might not, perhaps, prove an effective substitute, especially in times of emergency. The danger of this method of transition, of course, is that since human sacrifice is not disowned in principle, there is always a possibility that it may return. Nevertheless, once the difficult transition has been made, there is the possibility (actually fulfilled in the Biblical record) that the practice of animal sacrifice may defuse the whole issue and lessen the tension and fear underlying human sacrifice, so that eventually sacrifice becomes divested to a large extent of its magical aspects and becomes a mere sacred meal or gift; at this stage, a genuine moral denunciation of the idea of human sacrifice becomes possible, since the psychological need for it has been transcended.

There can be little doubt that the original story of Abraham and Isaac was one of actual human sacrifice (as argued by various scholars, principally M. J. Bin Gorion 1). Like other nations, the Israelites traced the foundation of their tribe to a foundation sacrifice. The paradox that Isaac was the promised and miraculously born child through whom the perpetuation of the tribe was to be secured, and yet at the same time the inevitable victim of the sacrifice, was one that could be solved in various ways, but in any case it is typical of the dilemna of founding a nation, a city or a tribe. The device of having twin-founders, one of whom is sacrificed (as in the case of Romulus and Remus, variants of the same name) is one way of solving the dilemma. Another way could be that the next child born could be given the same name as the child sacrificed, thus being regarded as the resurrected or reincarnated lost one. But the success of the new tribe could only be assured by complete surrender to the will of the god, thus abjuring the hubristic position of setting out to fulfil the dictates of an individual will or decision. Thus the chief hope of the new nation must be destroyed, and it must be left to the god to renew the hope in some unlooked-for and miraculous way.

In the Abraham-Isaac story as we have it in the Bible, the double aim is secured by having a father willing to sacrifice, but a merciful God who forgoes the sacrifice, allowing the substitution of an animal. In the original story, in which the sacrifice actually took place, there was no doubt some resurrection motif, by which the foundation of the tribe was miraculously renewed. Some traces of this original story, as we shall see, have been preserved in the Midrashic legends.

{p. 76} The important point to notice, in relation to the main theme of this book, is that the sacrifice, or attempted sacrifice, of Isaac is accomplished without recourse to a Sacred Executioner figure. There is an extraordinary directness and lack of guilt about the sacrificial theme in the Biblical story. The slayer is Abraham himself, and he is represented as a wholly good figure. Such directness, we may say, was possible only because the decision had been made once and for all to abolish human sacrifice. If there had been some reservation in the minds of the redactors of the Bible, some idea that human sacrifice must be preserved as a secret resource for a time of great trouble, the actual death of Isaac on the altar would have been retained, but the story would have been disguised. By showing that, in the supreme moment of crisis (the actual founding of the nation, and no subsequent crisis could ever equal this moment in poignancy), the sacrifice was abrogated, no excuse was left for its reinstitution in any lesser emergency. The founding of the nation and the abrogation of human sacrifice are associated together in a manner that is decisive. It is as if, in the story of Balder discussed above, the dream devices by which the story is disguised were dissolved and the evil figure of Loki and the blind deluded figure of Hother were to disappear, revealing the scene in its full horror as the slaying of Balder by the assembled crowd of worshippers as a spring sacrifice for the fertility of the crops only for a voice from heaven to announce that the slaying, now revealed in its true colours, is to be cancelled. Or (to anticipate the argument of a later chapter), it is as if, in the story of the Crucifixion of Jesus, the disguising trappings of malevolent Jews were to disappear, leaving the allegedly Jewish crowd in its true identity as the assembled worshippers of the Christian Church itself, crucifying Jesus for their own salvation and as a foundation sacrifice for Christendom, and then, at this point, as if the Crucifixion were cancelled, since anything so plain and obvious would be impossible to proceed with.

The sheer explicitness, then, of the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac is an essential part of its function as a myth validating the permanent substitution of animal for human sacrifice. Not that this explicitness is unique to the Bible story: other legends can be found in the ancient world by which nations other than the Israelites marked the substitution of animal for human sacrifice. Among the Greeks, there is the well-known story of Phrixus, first-born son of Aeolus king of Athamas, as it is told by Apollodorus, Herodotus and Plutarch.2 In a time of great drought, the people decided to offer up Phrixus to the god Apollo. Phrixus was led out to be sacrificed, but the god sent a ram, which carried him off to safety. Phrixus then sacrificed the ram as a thanksgiving offering. What happened about the drought we are not

{p. 77} told. Such a story tells us that the gods can sometimes be merciful, but it does not validate a general and permanent substitution of animal for human sacrifice.

Even more celebrated is the Greek story of the sacrifice of Iphigellia. According to the best-known version of this legend (as recounted by Homer and Aeschylus), Iphigenia was actually sacrificed by her father Agamemnon, in obedience to the god-inspired demand of the prophet Calchas, in order to ensure a good wind to carry the Greek fleet to Troy. But according to another version of the legend (recounted by Euripides 3), Iphigenia was rescued by the goddess Artemis, who snatched her from the altar at the last moment, substituting a deer. Again, this variant legend could hardly become the basis of a general prohibition against human sacrifice, though it could certainly be used to strengthen the view that animal sacrifice could be an efficacious substitute. And such stories are evidence of a growing repugnance against the institution of human sacrifice, and a feeling that the gods, in their more merciful moods at any rate, were unwilling to accept such sacrifice.

Closer to the Abraham-Isaac story is a Hindu legend found in the Rigveda, and regarded by scholars as dating from the Vedism of about the fifteenth century BC. The legend is attached to a collection of seven hymns supposedly recited by Sunahshepa, when he was bound to a sacrificial post and was on the point of being sacrificed to the god Varuna. According to the story, a king called Harischandra made a vow to sacrifice his first-born son to the god. A son was born, called Rohita, but the king kept postponing the fulfilment of his vow until finally Rohita ran away. The king was therefore afflicted by the god with dropsy. The son Rohita, hearing of his father's affliction, determined to satisfy the god with a human sacrifice, without himself being the victim. Accordingly, he bought a youth called Sunahshepa for a hundred head of cattle from the youth's father, the Brahmin Ajigarta. He tied the youth to the sacrificial post and prepared to slaughter him. At this point a man called Vismvamitra, a member of the warrior caste (Kshatriya), came by and suggested to the victim that he should recite the seven hymns referred to. He did so, and such was the magical efficacy of the hymns that he was released, and a nearby goat was sacrificed as a substitute with which the god Varuna was satisfied. 4

While this story is superficially similar to the Abraham-lsaac story (in the binding of the victim, the demand of the god and substitution of a providentially nearby animal), it is also significantly different. The father is not a willing sacrificer; there is no foundation motif; and the chief moral is the efficacy of the hymns. The story is thus not an epoch-making story, and the same must be said of the other stories

{p. 78} cited from Greek legend. In none of them is the substitution of an animal associated with the most awesome possible occasion, the founding of the tribe; and in none of them is this substitution associated with a complete submission on the part of the sacrificing father (in the case of Agamemnon, the rescue of Iphigenia arises from conflict between the gods, and the rescuing goddess is not the deity to whom the sacrifice is being performed).

On the other hand, where we do find in Greek legend a complete devoted willingness on the part of the sacrificer, this is precisely where the sacrifice is actually performed and no substitute is allowed. For example, in Athens, the daughters of Leos were a byword for devotion to their country. Their story is as follows. There was a great famine in Athens in the days of Leos, son of Orpheus. The oracle of Delphi was consulted, and the answer was given that the famine would end only if a human sacrifice were offered. Upon this, Leos decided to offer up his three daughters, who agreed with great willingness to their death. After Leos had slain all three on the altar, the famine ended.5 Another such story concerns Aristodemus of Messenia, who sacrificed his daughter in order to bring about the cessation of a plague.6 This kind of daughter sacrifice has a parallel in the Bible in the story of Jephthah, who vowed to sacrifice the first creature to come out of his house to greet him after victory over the Ammonites.7 This was his daughter, whom he then sacrificed with great sorrow. It is surprising that such explicit stories of human sacrifice were told with approval even when human sacrifice had been officially banned, both in Greece and Israel. Probably, daughter sacrifice was felt to be not so shocking as son sacrifice (after all, in Greece, daughters were expendable and were often exposed at birth). On the other hand, the story of Jephthah, with its cultic accompaniment (a four-day annual mourning rite for the fate of lephthah's daughter), may be a survival from the early matriarchal age, when daughters were sacrificed by preference, as being superior to the male.8

The story of Abraham and Isaac, then, with its cancellation of a sacrifice of supreme importance to the tribe, must be regarded as unique in its implications. The other stories just considered are of much more local and restricted significance. Further, the doctrine of monotheism gave the Abraham-Isaac story a universality that could not be approached by a story in which one particular god or goddess showed mercy on a particular occasion, though admittedly the growth of such stories is an indication of a general trend towards disapproval of human sacrifice - a trend, however, which would have to be embodied in a story of truly focal importance before it could overcome the opposite tendency to slip back into human- sacrificial rites in times of panic. Such a story is the Abraham-Isaac story, which, placed

{p. 80} where it is in the monotheistic Israelite record, must be accounted the human-sacrificial story to end all human-sacrificial rites. If the universal God was willing to accept an animal sacrifice on such a cosmic occasion (for the founding of the Israelite tribe was an event of cosmic importance, set as it is against the background of the Creation of the universe and the choice of Abraham from all the nations and families of the earth), then there was no need to require human sacrifice on any subsequent occasion whatever, and the institution of animal sacrifice can be relied on to do anything for which human sacrifice was previously held to be efficacious.

The Israelite authors of Genesis (shaping a mass of primitive material on which they worked during the seventh century BC) thus adapted a story which was originally about an actual human sacrifice, but instead of disguising the human-sacrificial content while retaining the actual slaying, as was done by the myth-adaptors of other tribes, they retained the plain human-sacrificial intention of the protagonist but changed the denouement to one of animal substitution, thus ensuring that no secret validation of human sacrifice could be read, consciously or unconsciously, from the adapted story. There was thus no need to import into the story the distancing devices by which the core of meaning is surrounded by 'secondary elaboration' (in Freud's phrase). Isaac is not killed by accident, for example by an arrow shot by a blind man. Nor is Isaac killed through the plotting of some malevolent agent, on whom the slaying can be blamed, so that we (the tribe) derive benefit from the providential death without making ourselves in any way responsible for it. To put the matter another way, the failure of the Bible to provide any accident or malevolence as ingredients in the story ensures that Isaac will be reprieved from death, because it is only such disguises that steel the resolve of the tribe to go through with the ritual execution; once all the excuses have been removed, there is no alternative to abolishing the sacrifice.

A malevolent element did actually creep into the Abraham-Isaac story in some of its post-Biblical developments in the Apocrypha and Midrash. Thus, in the Book of Jubilees, we find the figure of a dark angel, Mastema, who suggests to God that He should test Abraham by ordering him to sacrifice his son. When Abraham withstood the test, 'the prince Mastema was put to shame'.9 The role of Mastema here is clearly derived from that of Satan in the Book of Job. He is not, however, blamed for the performance of the sacrifice and he has no independent power of action. Indeed, so far is he from being the dark power (Loki in the Norse myth) bringing about the death of the hero that his hope is that Abraham will fail in the test and not perform the sacrifice. In later Midrashic elaborations of the role of Satan (or Mastema), he is portrayed as putting obstacles in the way of

{p. 81} Abraham's attempts to sacrifice Isaac: 'Satan came and jogged Abraham's arm and the knife fell out of his hand. As he stretched out his hand to pick it up a Heavenly Voice cried out, "Lay not your hand upon the lad." But for that Isaac would already have been slain' (Tanhuma, Vayera, 23). Satan is here portrayed as saving Isaac's life in his efforts to prevent Abraham from obeying God's command. Ihe angels, however, in another Midrash, are portrayed as doing the same thing, but out of pity for Isaac: their tears of pity, it is said, fell upon the knife wielded by Abraham and dissolved it.10 In all these elaborations one thing is clear: that the responsibility for the sacrifice lies with God who commanded it and with Abraham who decided to obey the command. We see here a striking contrast with the role of Satan in the sacrifice of Jesus, where Satan, by entering into Judas, directs all his efforts to bring about the sacrifice, not knowing that the end result will be the breaking of his own power. The executioners, too, in the Jesus myth, are Satanised, with the result that God Himself is absolved of all responsibility for the deed, since the executioners are represented as working against Him, not in obedience to Him (though in the end, His wishes are fulfilled).

The responsibility of God Himself for the sacrifice is indeed a vitally important point. We have to note that one important element in the setting-up of a Sacred Executioner to take the blame for the execution is that the god to whom the sacrifice is made is thereby absolved of cruelty. Whatever distancing device is used (whether that of the Sacred Executioner, or the arrangement of an accident, or the plotting of a villain, or a combination of such devices) the effect is not only to clear the tribe from responsibility, but also to clear the god. The tribe, in effect, is saying, 'We are not cruel enough to perform a human sacrifice, and our god, who is merciful, does not demand one; yet if it should somehow come about, through accident or malevolence, it will be just as efficacious as if our god demanded it and we willingly obeyed.' To accuse the god of wanting a human sacrifice would be an insult, so this aspect must be carefully hidden from sight. How zealously, for example, in the Christian myth, the cruelty of the demand of God the Father is concealed from consciousness! His kindness and mercifulness, on the contrary, are stressed: it was because 'God so loved the world' that He sent His son to redeem it. That He required the son to be tortured to death (as a substitute for torturing all mankind for all eternity) is an aspect wholly swallowed up by the accounts of how wicked and cruel were the human and superhuman instruments (the Jews and Satan) through whom this requirement was fulfilled.

We now gain further insight into why the Sacred Executioner is so sacred, despite his accursed aspect which demands his expulsion into

{p. 82} the desert. For the Sacred Executioner is really a disguised form of the god himself. The hatred directed against the Sacred Executioner is really the hatred that the worshippers dare not direct against the god, whom they secretly hate because of his cruel demands {Is Maccoby being too candid here? Is any god more demanding than Yahweh, except perhaps the Aztec gods?}. But along with the displacement of hatred goes a displacement of worship; so that the institution of the Sacred Executioner, whether he is conceived as human or superhuman, carries with it a powerful charge of devil-worship, and there is always the possibility that allegiance will be transferred from the sanitized figure of the god to his evil surrogate.

In the Biblical story of the sacrifice of Isaac these dualistic possibilities are completely banished. Even in the later elaborations, in which a demonic figure does appear, he is in no way a substitute for either the god or the executioner, but, on the contrary, represents the temptations and stumbling-blocks preventing man's fulfilment of the god's demand for sacrifice. In the Bible story we are brought face to face with this demand in its utmost nakedness. And just at this point, the demand is relaxed, never to be renewed.

It will be seen that the demand for sacrifice is basic to all religion, but that the history of a given religion turns on what mode of substitution it adopts. There are two principal modes of substitution: the first is to retain the sacrifice, but to provide substitutes or disguises for the victim (such as animals or criminals), and even for the sacrificer (such as malicious or unwitting persons), and to pretend that the god to whom the sacrifice is dedicated does not want the sacrifice - this is the method of disguise and secondary elaboration; the second method is to provide substitutes for the sacrifice ritual itself - this is the method of sublimation, which is capable of progressive refinement, starting with bodily substitutes (such as circumcision) and progressing to mental and spiritual substitutions (such as asceticism or prayer).

Mythology shows in abundance how attractive the first solution is: how easy it is to retain the sacrifice in its full goriness if only one is permitted to disguise the scene by all the tricks of inversion and permutation of which the mind is capable (it is these tricks that have been made the subject-matter of the 'structuralist' school of mythology, though without any effort to explain why such tricks comprise a defence-mechanism). The second method is hard: it goes against the grain of the psyche, which constantly tries to slip back to the real thing, despising all substitutes as inadequate.

It is in this light perhaps that we should regard the stories found in the Midrash which flagrantly contradict the plain meaning of the Bible account by saying that Isaac was sacrificed, either partially (by wounding or blood-letting) or wholly. These extraordinary stories have been studied particularly by Shalom Spiegel, who refutes the

{p. 83} view that they are post-Christian inventions, intended to provide a rival doctrine to that of the Crucifixion. On the contrary, these stories can be traced to a period before the advent of Christianity. They may even be a survival of the pre-Biblical story of an actual sacrifice of Isaac, since some Midrashic material, as we have seen, may well represent ancient folklore of a kind that was excluded deliberately from the Bible.11 {see notes on p. 191 below for cases of this}

These stories take various forms. In one variant, it is said that Abraham did make a mark or wound on Isaac's throat before the angel stopped the sacrifice.12 Isaac was then taken by angels to the Garden of Eden for a period of two years in order to be healed of his wound (this accounts for the fact that only Abraham, not Isaac, is said by the Bible to have departed from Mount Moriah after the sacrifice (Genesis 22: 19). Yet another Midrash,13 from a contrary tradition, stresses that Abraham made no mark on Isaac at all, deriving this from the verse that says, 'Do not raise your hand against the boy, and do not do anything to him.' 'Anything' in Hebrew is me'umah which this Midrash, by a pun, associates with the word mum, meaning 'wound', thus explicating 'do not produce a wound in him'. This Midrash may even have a polemical intent, combating the trend represented by the other Midrashic passages. It is even possible that the Bible itself, by stressing in such a particular fashion that Abraham was told not to do 'anything' to his son, was combating a folk tradition that Abraham at least wounded his son at the Akedah (Akedah, meaning 'binding', is the name given in tradition to the incident).

Other Midrashic passages go further, saying that Abraham drew 'the fourth part of a log' of blood from Isaac, this being a loss of blood regarded as dangerous to life.14 Others go still further, saying that Isaac was actually killed by Abraham and reduced to ashes on the funeral pyre, but, by a miracle, he was brought back to life.15 This kind of tradition was popular in the Middle Ages and was much cited by the poets who wrote dirges on the Jews massacred in the Christian persecutions. Isaac became the prototype of the martyr, and Abraham became the prototype of those Jewish fathers who killed their own children rather than let them fall into the hands of the Christian mobs.

There are other Midrashic passages (also found in the Talmud), which say that the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son, and the willingness of Isaac to be sacrificed (an aspect that receives no emphasis in the Bible but became increasingly stressed in the post-Biblical literature), counted in God's eyes as an actual sacrifice.16 Thus, references in rabbinical literature to the 'blood of Isaac' or the 'ashes of Isaac' do not necessarily arise from the view that Isaac was actually sacrificed. They may equally well arise from the view that, as one Midrash expresses it, 'it was as if Isaac's ashes lay on the altar'. Some

{p. 84} scholars, however, make the mistake of regarding such references as always deriving from the view that an actual sacrifice was performed.17

There can be no doubt that the Akedah story reflects a period when human sacrifice was believed to be the divine prerogative. Even in its fully developed form, as we have it in the Bible, the story expresses no abhorrence of human sacrifice as such, but instead stresses the mercy of God in waiving His right to such sacrifice. The law of the redemption of the first-born reflects the same attitude: by right, every first-born son should be sacrificed to God, but He, in His mercy, has allowed a ceremony of redemption instead. Very far from this are the later passages of the Hebrew Bible that express horror at the very idea of human sacrifice as being indistinguishable from murder.

There is an especially striking contrast between the story of the Akedah and the story of Abraham's argument with God, on the question of the proposed destruction of the Cities of the Plain. This argument is represented as having taken place before the Akedah, yet it expresses a posture towards God that seems to belong to a much later age. Here (Genesis 18), Abraham, far from acquiescing in God's stern decree to obliterate the guilty cities, pleads with Him in urgent style to spare them if only a handful of righteous people can be found among them. In one of the greatest verses of the Hebrew Bible, Abraham even adopts a peremptory tone with God: 'Far be it from thee to do this - to kill good and bad together; for then the good would suffer with the bad. Far be it from thee. Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just?' (18: 25). God is called to account to adhere to His own rules and principles. Yet shortly afterwards, when Abraham receives the call from God to sacrifice his innocent son, he makes no protest whatever. Is this a glaring inconsistency on the part of the redactors of the Bible, who yoked together such apparently incompatible scenes? Should we not expect Abraham, on the basis of his courageous stand for justice even to the guilty, to repudiate God's demand for the blood of the innocent, and to say, 'If that is the kind of god you are, I want none of you'?

Using the insights of Kierkegaard 18 and Freud, we may arrive at a different view about this Biblical sequence. The Biblical ideal is one in which man has a covenantal relationship with God, but, though within this relationship he has rights on the basis of which he can make demands, the covenantal relationship itself is not a right but a gift of God's grace. Abraham has been admitted to a relationship ('walking with God') within which he is called 'God's friend' and may even call God to account. But when this Covenant itself is questioned and annulled, there is nothing he can do but revert to the pre-moral and pre-covenantal state of utter submission. The results of this sub-

{p. 85} mission is the renewal of the Covenant on a stronger basis than before; but while enjoying the Covenant, he and his descendants are never to forget its underpinning of grace, with those concomitants of grace, awe and horror, the tremendum which God voluntarily lays aside when He enters into covenantal terms with man.

In patriarchal society, the image of the father-god is built up through the sacrifice, by individual men, of their own fatherhood, which is then given back to them in a conditional form. In this way, a tremendous father-image is created, by which men, collectively, are able to overcome their awe of the mother and subordinate her to the father. By sacrificing their own rebellious feelings towards the father, the men strengthen the father-image to the point where it is invincible. If there are any reservations about this sacrifice or surrender, the father-image is correspondingly weakened, and the power of the mother is restored. It is as if the men elect an all-powerful leader in their battle against the power of the women; the more they subordinate themselves to this leader, the more powerful they are in the battle. Loyalty to the leader expresses itself in a declaration of willingness to sacrifice their own lives, or, more important, their manhood (embodied in their generative powers and most sharply focused in the first-born son, especially an only son). Psychologically, every such sacrifice increases the vital force of the father; he is fed and sustained by such sacrifice, which acts as reparation and restitution for the aggressive desires of the sons against the fathers. But, by making the sacrifice (which may be made once and for all on their behalf by some mythical figure), the men now have the powerful father as their ally and friend; he expresses this friendship by restoring their manhood to them, requiring some token of submission, perhaps, such as circumcision, to remind them of what he could have exacted and of what power still remains behind his affability and reasonableness. Indeed, as the history of Judaism shows, the more secure and unquestioned the power of the father-god is, the more he is able to relax, show affability, and treat man as his partner in a covenantal relationship.

Accordingly, the tendency of distancing devices, blurring the responsibility for the sacrifice, is to leave room for aggressive inclinations of the sons towards the father, to weaken the bonds of patriarchal society, and to restore strength to the mother. Where, for example, the son is sacrificed through the machinations of an evil enemy, no true submission has been made to the father, and the death of the son may even serve as an aggressive move against the father, designed to dislodge him from his authority. The aggressive feelings, by being redirected against the evil power plotting against the son, have been given a new lease of life and are coveltly directed against

{p. 86} the father himself (disguised in the surrogate figure of the Devil). The sacrifice can thus regain the character it had in matriarchal society of being an expression of rivalry between male aspirants to the favour of the mother (we saw an example of this matriarchal type of sacrifice in the myth underlying the conflict between Noah and Ham). This rebirth of matriarchal attitudes within a context of imperfect (because distanced) patriarchal sacrifice can be designated as romanticism, and will be discussed at more length in connection with Christianity, and especially in relation to the rise of the cult of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages.19 We turn now, however, to discussion of a topic closely related to the theme of sacrifice in the Israelite culture, namely the rite of circumcision.

{p. 87} Chapter Seven Moses and Circumcision

According to the Hebrew Bible, the rite of circumcision was instituted by a command of God to Abraham (Genesis 17). This rite marked a Covenant between God and Abraham, by which God would recompense the loyalty of Abraham and his descendants by making them a fruitful nation and by giving them the land of Canaan. Abraham was ninety-nine years old at the time of his circumcision, his son Ishmael was thirteen, and Isaac had not yet been born, but was circumcised eventually at the age of eight days, the correct time for the rite for future generations. No connection is made in this Genesis account between the rite of circumcision and the idea of human sacrifice. It is not suggested, for example, that there is any connection between the rite and the sparing of Isaac at the Akedah, so that circumcision might be regarded as the price paid for God's forgoing of his due of human sacrifice. As far as this account goes, the rite of circumcision seems to have no aura of fear or horror, but to be simply a way of marking on every male Israelite that the Covenant was in existence.

A difficulty is that an entirely different account is given of the actual inauguration of the Covenant between God and Abraham. This is the awe-inspiring episode known as the 'Covenant between the Pieces' (Genesis 15). In this account, the horror inherent in the motif of sacrifice is certainly present. Abraham (at this time still called Abram) is commanded by God to offer as a sacrifice three animals and two birds. He is to halve the carcasses of the animals, making a kind of corridor between the halves. He now keeps a day-long vigil, keeping off the birds of prey as they swoop down on the carcasses. As the night falls, he goes into a trance and is afflicted by a great fear. He hears the voice of God telling him that his descendants will suffer as slaves in Egypt, but that God will deliver them. In the dusk, he sees a fiery presence passing between the divided pieces; and the Covenant is thus sealed: 'To your descendants I give this land from the River of Egypt to the Great River, the River Euphrates, the territory of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaim, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, Hivites and Jebusites.' This scene, symbolic in multiple ways, is worthy of the greatness of the occasion;1 after this, the institution of circumcision in Genesis 17 is presented as a mere confirmation or mark of the Covenant.

{p. 96} as opposed to the root hatan, which refers to marriage circumcision. The latter meaning is in fact dropped altogether from the Hebrew language, though it remains in cognate languages; from now on hatan in Hebrew connotes only 'bridegroom' and related meanings, without any connotation of circumcision at all.

The story as a whole thus contains a complex process of bargaining by which a modus vivendi is achieved between men and women in the changed circumstances of patriarchal society. Men have won, but they have had to concede something to women. The special relationship of the mother to the son has been preserved, for the mother is pictured as the saviour of the son in the face of the aggression of the father. It should be noted that the previous rite, marriage circumcision, also represented such a compromise, since the men won it as a more merciful substitute for the death of the consort after mating, at least in the case of a king or priest. The war between the sexes is full of these compromises or arrangements. While a continuation of first-born sacrifice would never have won the women to support of patriarchy, the institution of infant circumcision was very successful in the Israelite culture: the preservation of the infant circumcision rite became a special concern of the mothers, who no doubt saw in it, unconsciously, the best safeguard of their infant's life. Thus Israelite and Jewish religious history is full of instances of Jewish mothers who, even at great personal danger to themselves, kept up the rite of infant circumcision at times when their husbands were helpless or even unwilling to preserve it.14

Yet the story of Zipporah did not retain the status which, I am suggesting, it originally had as the myth validating the institution of infant circumcision. The redactors of the Bible relegated it to a mere incident in the life of Moses, related in such a cryptic and abbreviated way that its significance almost disappeared, though its esoteric, primitive style (similar to that of the story of Lamech) has made it intriguing to all those who can sense a mystery. It has never been the official doctrine of Judaism that circumcision is a substitute for human sacrifice, or anything more than a 'sign of the Covenant'. The only institution regarded as a substitute for human sacrifice is that of animal sacrifice, validated by the myth of the Akedah, in which no female character has any part to play, except off the scenes in the Midrashic remarks about Sarah. The story of Zipporah, indeed, gives the female too great a part to be acknowledged in patriarchal Judaism as it eventually developed, a part as great as that of Athene in the acknowledgment of Zeus.

{p. 97} Chapter Eight The sacrifice of Jesus

Much of the argument so far has turned on the idea that human sacrifice is particularly connected, historically, with a certain kind of great event, namely, the foundation of a new human grouping, whether a tribe, a city or a religion (categories that sometimes overlap). The stories in which the foundation is described we call 'foundation myths'. The recourse to human sacrifice at moments of great danger to the politico-religious entity is really only a variety of foundation sacrifice. When the very being and continued existence of the society is in doubt, to save it is to call it back from death, to resurrect it, and thus to found it anew.1

In the story of Abraham and Isaac, we find a foundation myth of quite unusual explicitness; as suggested above, the lack of any attempt to hide the nature of the sacrifice can be attributed to the fact that the sacrifice (in the myth as it developed) was called off - there was no need to disguise something that in fact did not happen. On the other hand, this very abrogation of the sacrifice is itself a disguise, or what I have called a distancing device. No society is willing to admit fully what happened at its birth; but the nature of a society is to some extent determined by the type of distancing devices it adopts; this is especially the case when distancing devices are employed as a way of shifting responsibility for the sacrifice, for this means that the shifting of moral responsibility is built into the moral ethos and fabric of the society in question.

The Abraham-Isaac foundation sacrifice is at the base not only of Judaism but also of two other great religious communities, Christianity and Islam. In the case of Christianity, the sacrifice of Jesus marks a new foundation, but this is to some extent supplementary to and modelled on the sacrifice of Isaac, though with some extremely significant variations and new distancing devices that alter very much the character of the sacrifice and its consequent effects on community ethos. In the case of Islam, it is the sacrifice undertaken by Abraham itself that serves as a foundation myth, but the victim is changed from Isaac to Ishmael, on the theory (derived by the Arab founder of Islam from Jewish sources) that Ishmael, the son of Abraham, was the founder of the Arab nation.2 Thus a foundation

{p. 98} myth originally told to validate the foundation of the holy nation of the Israelites was adapted to validate the foundation of another holy nation, the Arabs, whose religious mission, modelled on that of the Israelites, was retrojected to a time about 2,500 years earlier than that of Muhammad, the actual founder of Islam.3 Thus no sacrificial myth was required in relation to Muhammad himself, though the presence of a gap or psychological need here is no doubt signalized by the rise of Shiite Islam with its foundation sacrifice centred on the figure of Ali, whose death in a dynastic squabble was elevated into a mystical event.

We now turn to a fuller consideration of the extraordinary revival of human-sacrificial ideas in the concept of the sacrifice of Jesus, the foundation myth of Christianity. This concept is largely the work of Paul, who never knew Jesus personally, but became devoted to his person through a vision some years after Jesus's death. Jesus himself never regarded himself as a sacrificial figure. By declaring himself as the Messiah (at a rather late point in his career, which began with Jesus in the role of a prophet heralding the coming of the Messiah as John the Baptist had done), he announced his intention to overthrow the Roman invaders of Israel and to reign over the Jews in the manner of his ancestors David and Solomon, who also had the title 'Messiah' {this a standard Jewish interpretation, but inconsistent with the Gospels' rejection of an earthly kingdom}. Being an anti-militarist (though not a pacifist), he expected to defeat the Romans with the aid of a divine miracle, as prophesied by Zechariah, rather than by force of arms. The Gospels, written for the Paulinist Christian Church, are based on authentic traditions (which can be discerned by appropriate methods), but are slanted in such a way as to hide Jesus's anti-Roman intentions {a Jewish view, based on Jewish hostility to Rome; the Gospels, unlike the more Jewish Book of Revelation, are reconciled to Roman rule}. Jesus's death on a Roman cross is interpreted as being due to Jewish, not Roman, hostility, and Jesus is portrayed as a rebel against Judaism, instead of as an opponent of the cruel occupation of the Holy Land by the Roman idolaters and militarists. By the rewriting of the Gospels, Jesus was detached from his Jewish background and cleared of the suspicion of having been anti-Roman, and was thus made a suitable object of worship for a Church now consisting mainly of non-Jews seeking official Roman recognition for their new cult.4

It is not, however, with the historical Jesus that we are concerned in this book, but with the mythical figure of Jesus and the way in which his death functioned as the foundation myth of the Christian Church. Yet the fact that this myth was grafted on to a historical incident that was in reality unsacrificial in character was important for the development of the myth and for its historical consequences.

The Christian version of the death of Jesus certainly comprises a foundation myth of a most grandiose type. It marked the beginning of a new tribe, Christendom, to whom the death of Jesus opened the way

{p. 99} to the favour of God who was regarded as angry with all mankind because of the sin of Adam. To belong to the new tribe was the only way to escape God's wrath, which would manifest itself by condemning all non-Christians to eternal torture.5 It is of course true that every tribe ever founded has regarded itself as superior to the rest of mankind in some important respect. In polytheism, however, this intolerance was tempered by the view that each nation had its own god or gods, whose existence one's own god recognized and respected. Christianity, being a form of Jewish monotheism, did not have this option {why does Maccoby, apparently an atheist, retain a loyalty to Judaism, given this admission of its intolerant monotheism? Does not Tolerance today, which Maccoby presumably supports and demands, require a return to Multicultural Polytheism?}. It therefore condemned all forms of community except its own, and required all mankind to join Christendom. Judaism itself, though monotheistic, had not taken this path, having a pluralistic vision of many separate communities worshipping the one God in their own ways, with Israel, God's chosen people or 'firstborn', playing a priestlike role among the nations of the world. The foundation myth of Judaism was regarded as a preparation for this role, and did not therefore apply to all mankind, nor did it exclude non-Jews from God's grace (though those who wished to join the priest-nation as proselytes, such as Ruth, were accepted) {But (1) Is Maccoby not aware of those Jews who want to enforce the Jewish "Noahide Laws" on Non-Jews, e.g. at http://www.noahide.com/? (2) Is he unaware that Jewish leaders envisage non-Jews having to accept Jerusalem as the spiritual centre of the world - see bengur62.jpg (scroll down) and http://www.templemountfaithful,org/ ? Does this not refute his argument about Judaism's superior Tolerance?}.

Though the human-sacrificial myth of Christendom marked a new start, it was linked in many ways to the old dispensation of Judaism, and therefore to the foundation myth of Judaism, the Akedah, or attempted sacrifice of Isaac. As several scholars have pointed out, the language used by the New Testament in describing the sacrifice of Jesus frequently echoes the Old Testament description of the Akedah. For example, we find the following: 'For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son' (John 3:16). Elsewhere we find Jesus described as God's 'beloved' son, the same Greek word (agapetos) that is found in the Septuagint in reference to Isaac (Genesis 22:2). It is clear that a parallel is intended: just as Abraham was willing to sacrifice his beloved son, so God the Father was willing to sacrifice His son Jesus. The parallel, however, is strangely incomplete. For in the Akedah there were three dramatis personae, Abraham, Isaac and God who demanded the sacrifice. In the Christian myth, God the Father plays two roles at once: He is the sad, sacrificing father, and He is also the father-god who demands the sacrifice in appeasement of His anger at the Original Sin of mankind. God denies His fatherly feelings in order to bring about a sacrifice to Himself. As self-denying parent, God bows to some dark necessity beyond His control; but as fathergod, He is Himself that necessity. This double-faced role of the Christian father-god arises (as briefly pointed out on p. 81) from the chief difference between the Old Testament foundation sacrifice and that of the New Testament: the determination, in the latter, to shift responsibility for the sacrifice. In

{p. 100} the story of Abraham and Isaac there is no attempt to burke the full horror of the occasion: it is quite explicitly God who demands the sacrifice and it is quite explicitly Abraham who sets himself to perform it. In the story of the sacrifice of Jesus, however, so many distancing or responsibility-shifting devices are used that it can be regarded as a compendium of such devices. Other myths we have examined (for example, that of the death of Balder) were good examples of the art of shifting responsibility for a human sacrifice; but the Christian myth is the supreme example. And the compelling motive behind all these devices is the utter necessity that the sacrifice should actually take place; by hook or by crook, Jesus has to die. He cannot be reprieved as Isaac was, for there can be no substitute for his actual death, if even a fraction of mankind is to be saved from the eternal wrath.

In the myth of Balder, as we saw, one of the devices involved was the deification of the victim. That the victim of a human sacrifice should become divine at the point of death was demanded by many possible aspects of such a sacrifice. In the founding of a city, for example, the victim became the tutelary deity of the new city, his death having added him to the number of gods, among whom the city would now have its personal representative. In the sacrifices of the Aztecs, the victims became divine in the sense that their life-energy went to replenish that of the sun-god who would otherwise become weak; thus the victim attained an unindividuated immortality {this is far-fetched: does an animal eaten by a carnivor thereby partake of the soul of that carnivor?}. Sometimes, however, the victims became divine even before their death; in such cases, the sacrifice was regarded as the enactment on earth of a cosmic process of death and rebirth that was continually taking place in the heavens. The myth of Balder took place in 'mythical time', which meant that it was always taking place; the death of a human victim on earth in the role of Balder ensured that the human community was not left out of the sweep of the cosmos.7

In the latter cases, however, there was another factor at work, namely that to kill a god, or to assist a cosmic process of death and rebirth, is something different from killing a fellow human being. It is therefore possible to disguise from oneself, in an ecstasy of cosmic participation, what one is actually doing. This particular kind of disguise has been very powerful in Christian worship. It is very rare indeed for Christian believers to regard the death of Jesus as belonging to the history of pagan human sacrifice (a notable exception was T. S. Eliot, one of the few adherents of Christianity who have understood fully its affinities with rites of pagan sacrifice 8). While a Christian is accustomed to thinking of Jesus as both man and God, when he thinks of the atonement aspect of the Crucifixion, he attends to the divine aspect of Jesus; the thought that Jesus was a human

{p. 101} sacrifice thus never enters his mind, or, if it does, is fended off with the thought, 'But Jesus was not a man, he was God.' While thinking of the actual death of Jesus, however, he attends to the human aspects - his pitiable sufferings, and the wickedness of his human enemies; he becomes a man done to death by evil-doers, not a god suffering cosmically. Thus the thought that Jesus was a human sacrifice (or rather that his death functions as one in the mind of the worshipper) is overlooked, or, if momentarily evoked, dismissed as too barbaric to be relevant. We have therefore the phenomenon of a religion in which human sacrifice is more central than in any religion known to us (so much so that the Aztecs, who rivalled Christianity closely in this respect, found the doctrines of Christianity very familiar and unremarkable 9), but which neverthele'ss repudiates human sacrifice as an alien an outdated notion.

It is necessary, therefore, to dwell somewhat on the place of sacrifice in Christianity and to bring out its full meaning. It must be stressed that the definition of a human death as a sacrifice depends on the use to which it is put religiously. It does not depend on historical proof that the worshippers or their ancestors actually participated in an openly acknowledged rite in which a human being was put to death for the purpose of founding a tribe or a religion, or to save the tribe from extinction or external torture after death, or to ensure the continuance of the agricultural cycle (all these possible reasons are really variations of each other, though which of the variations is selected as basic is a matter of taste). As we have seen, it is very rarely that the community that benefits, or thinks it benefits, from human sacrifice acknowledges reponsibility for performing it. It much prefers to ascribe the death to accident or malevolence beyond the control of the community. The means by which the death took place, whether human or even non-living, is in some way ostracised or repudiated. But, if the death is regarded as having saved the tribe, then we are in the presence of human sacrifice.

It may be objected that the above definition has left no room for a distinction between a human sacrifice and a martyr. The Christian religious history is full of martyrs, starting with Stephen, and it might be (and sometimes is) argued that Jesus was simply the first of this line of martyrs. But a martyr means a 'witness', and the reason for the death of martyrs is that they witness to some truth that they hold dearer than their lives. The truth for which the Christian martyrs died was the saving power of the Crucifixion of Jesus. It would be meaningless to say that this was the truth for which Jesus himself died. An act cannot witness to itself. Socrates can be called a martyr, for he died rather than renounce his philosophical beliefs. But, if he deliberately chose to die so that his death might shield the people of Athens from

{p. 102} the consequences of their sins, this would be an act of sacrifice, not of martyrdom. Of course, there can be some overlapping between the ¥ functions of sacrifice and of martyrdom. Martyrdom is quite commonly venerated as also having some of the quality of a sacrifice. It is believed that the martyr's suffering has a protective effect on believers, and (in Christianity) that he partakes in and renews the mystery of the Crucifixion.l° The one case, however, in which this overlap does not and cannot occur is that of the original sacrifice itself, for without it, there would be no Crucifixion for the subsequent martyrs to participate in.

With the growth of modern liberalism, there have been Christians, even in the Roman Catholic Church, who have denied that the death of Jesus was a sacrifice, and who have insisted instead that it was a martyrdom. As one Roman Catholic theologian said to me, 'Jesus simply showed how a good man could die'. 1I To substantiate this view from the Gospels, one would have to demonstrate that there were some beliefs which Jesus advocated in the face of dangerous opposition and which he was prepared to die for rather than renounce.

What were these beliefs for which Jesus was prepared to die? If we say that it was his belief in his own divinity, then we are back in a vicious circle of reasoning. For the belief in Jesus's divinity, as expressed in the Gospels, is inextricably bound up with his sacrificial role. It was not simply as the Son of God that Jesus came into the world (imagine a Christianity in which Jesus declared himself to be the Son of God and lived on to a ripe old age!), but to enact the soteriological role of the Son of God who dies and is resurrected and acts as a 'ransom for many'. We cannot say, then, that Jesus was a martyr who died for his belief in the necessity of his own martyrdom. Such a death would be entirely empty of content. To 'give an example of how to die' when there was no reason why he should die would not be a good example at all, but a pointless suicide. Good men may certainly choose to die, very often by violent deaths; but only when there is something to die for.

What then shall we say (pursuing the idea of Jesus as a martyr) were the beliefs or principles for which Jesus gave his life? A commonly given answer is that he was a reformer, who lost his life in the struggle against reactionary authority. If this were so, Jesus could certainly be regarded as a martyr, like, say, Socrates, or Martin Luther King, in the cause of justice, freedom or progress. It is true that Jesus is portrayed in the Gospels as conflicting with the Pharisees on questions of Sabbath observance and as denouncing the Pharisees as oppressive authorities. When it comes to describing the circumstances of Jesus's death, however, these matters are forgotten. In the accounts of his

{p. 103} trial, it is nowhere said that the matter of Sabbath observance was brought up, or that the Pharisees denounced him for opposing their authority. Jesus's chief prosecutor was the High Priest, who was a Sadducee; and the charges against Jesus were all connected with his role as Messiah, or Son of God. The issue is represented to be entirely one of whether Jesus had committed blasphemy by claiming to be a divine figure. It is clear that if Jesus had been regarded as merely a reformer of the Jewish Law, he could not have become the centre of a new religion, but, at the most, the founder of a new sect of Judaism, such as Karaism. The essence of the charge against Jesus, as it was conceived by the Paulinist writers of the Gospels, was that he wished not to reform the Law, but to abolish it altogether {perhaps as Buddha wanted to abolish Brahmanism}, and to substitute for it a new form of religion, based on his own personality as divine saviour {Maccoby does not consider whether Jesus might be seen as a Buddha-like figure, executed, unlike Buddha, because of the intolerance of Jewish Monotheism}.12 In order to fulfil this soteriological role, his death was a necessity. So we return to the point that Jesus, whatever his reforming activities, was not a martyr to reform or to anything else. His death was not that of a martyr but that of a saviour, as far as Christian doctrine is concerned. If he had succeedeed in getting the Pharisees to relax the Sabbath laws, he would not have fulfilled his mission at all.

It is possible of course that, as a matter of historical fact, Jesus was a reformer {or a Buddha-like figure, as the Sermon On the Mount suggests}. This is irrelevant, however, to the question of what kind of Jesus-figure acted as the basis of Christianity as a religion distinct from Judaism. When we come to examine the historical facts about Jesus, as opposed to the history of the Christian Church, the most probable solution (as I argued in full in Revolution in Judaea) is that Jesus was a committed adherent of Judaism, who intended no reform of Judaism other than that for which the Pharisee movement was responsible; for Jesus's alleged Sabbath reforms all turn out, on examination, to be identical with those already instituted by the Pharisees.13 Historically, Jesus's mission was neither to be a reformer nor to be the divine saviour, but to be a Messiah in the Jewish sense of the word, that is, a Davidic king, who would fulfil the prophecies of the Old Testament by driving out the foreign invaders, restoring Jewish independence, and inaugurating a worldwide era of peace {if this is so, why is he not celebrated in the Talmud? Why is he vilified there?}. His alleged conflicts with the Pharisees can all be traced to two redactorial motives: to shift the blame for Jesus's death from the Romans to the Jews and thereby to depoliticize Jesus's aims; and to retroject into Jesus's lifetime the conflict of the early Church with the Pharisees in the period of the redaction of the Gospels (AD 70-120).

All such facts or theories are irrelevant to our present task, which is to examine the Christian myth, a myth that is not about the death of a reformer or religious patriot, but about a cosmic sacrifice. Some of the details of the myth would not be as they are were it not for historical circumstances, and it may be necessary to note such connections at

{p. 104} times, but the main theme is the myth itself. If there are Christians nowadays who prefer to jettison the myth and to regard Jesus as a reformer, they are of course entitled to do so, but their decision has nothing to do with Christianity as a historical movement, which came into exlstence only through belief in the myth.

The Christian myth being about a sacrifice, the relevant questions are: who was the sacrificer? who was the victim? for whose benefit was the sacrifice performed? to what divine being was the sacrifice offered? Having answered these questions, we shall have to consider what type of sacrifice this is: in particular, how is it related to pagan human sacrifice, to the mystery religions of the Hellenistic world and to Gnosticism? But, first of all, it is necessary to consider how it is related to Judaism itself, and to the sacrificial system of the Jerusalem Temple.

There is evidently a considerable desire, on the part of the New Testament writers, to relate the sacrifice of Jesus to the Jewish sacrificial system. Thus, Jesus is likened to the Paschal lamb by Paul: 'For indeed our Passover has begun; the sacrifice is offered - Christ himself' (I Corinthians 5:7). According toJohn, the fact that the Roman soldiers did not break Jesus's legs after his death, as was usual with crucified corpses, was in fulfilment of the law in Exodus about the Passover sacrifice: 'For these things were done that the scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken' (John 19:36). The Epistle to the Hebrews particularly sees the death of Jesus as the culmination of the Jewish sacrificial system: 'Such a high priest does indeed fit our condition - devout, guileless, undefiled, separated from sinners, raised high above the heavens. He has no need to offer sacrifices daily, as the high priests do, first for his own sins and then for those of the people; for this he did once and for all when he offered up himself' (Hebrews 7:26-7). Jesus thus combines in himself the role of sacrificer (high priest) and sacrifice; and the function of atonement that was performed by the Jewish sacrifices imperfectly (since they had to be renewed daily) was performed perfectly and for ever by the sacrifice of Jesus.

The Passover sacrifice, as it happens, was not an atoning sacrifice in the practice of Judaism. It was rather an affirmation of thanks to God for the deliverance from Egypt and for the Covenant. It is true that the 'Passover sacrifice of Egypt' (as the original sacrifice described in Exodus was called) was a protective sacrifice by which the disaster decreed against the Egyptians was warded off from the Israelites. But the 'Passover sacrifice of the generations' had none of this aura of fear; it was carefully distinguished from the Egypt sacrifice and had different laws for its observance.14 This is not a trivial point, for it applies to the Temple system of sacrifices as a whole. This system was

{p. 105} not directed towards salvation. That had taken place long ago, at the time of the institution of the Covenant. All Jews lived within the Covenant, and did not have to worry about anything so basic as salvation. What they had to worry about was to fulfil the conditions of the Covenant, and even this was not really a great worry, as the existence of the Covenant did not depend on every single act performed. For individual sins could be wiped out by repentance, and atonement could then be ratified by the bringing of the appropriate sin-offering.15

As has been well argued by Professor J. Milgrom,16 the sacrificial system of the Bible, in its finally redacted form, has eschewed the more primitive features of animal sacrifice as practised in other cultures of the Near East. The majority of the sacrifices have taken on the character of 'offerings' (as their Hebrew names attest), and are gifts to God rather than redeeming rites. Even the sin-offerings have lost all magical character, and are regarded as inefficacious without repentance on the part of the sinner. Most remarkable is the fact that the cleansing rites required before entry into the Temple precincts have been divested of all reference to evil spirits, and are therefore regarded as rules of etiquette rather than as substantive forms of exorcism, as in other cults. Even the rites of the Day of Atonement, which retain more of the awesome primitive quality than any others, are not a foundation ceremony in which the world is renewed, but merely a wiping-up of sins accumulated during the past year, a kind of annual spiritual reckoning which does not pretend to change the nature of the human lot, since another Day of Atonement will be required each year.

This piecemeal, rational approach was due to the conviction that the great sacrifice (the Akedah) had taken place long ago, that the Covenant had resulted from it, and that the worshipper thus lived in spiritual security within it. The Christian attitude to sacrifice, on the other hand, arose out of the shattering of this sense of security (or, more accurately, it arose from the standpoint of those who had never acquired it). To the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the fact that the Jewish sacrifices had to be continually repeated showed that they were 'imperfect' - that they left the problem of sin essentially unsolved. What was needed was a solution that would end the problem of sin once and for all. Christianity, in fact, was a return to the condition of primitive dread, in which the primary problem is not 'How shall I improve my deeds?' but 'How shall I be saved?'17

It is therefore quite mistaken to see the Christian concept of sacrifice as arising naturally out of the Jewish sacrificial system, or as providing the climax to which it tended. On the contrary, the natural tendency of Judaism was in Christianity catastrophically reversed. The whole tendency of the Jewish system was to reduce the importance of

{p. 106} sacrifice; the very term 'sacrifice' is a misnomer in relation to the majority of the offerings of the Jerusalem Temple, where in general the tone set was that of a communal meal with God, with the aim of thanksgiving rather than of redemption. In Christianity the age-long Jewish process of sublimation disappears as if in a sudden bout of psychosis. We are back at the primitive level at which the abyss opens and panic requires a victim. It is not surprising in these circumstances that the human victim reappears, after so many centuries of animal substitution {the meaning must be, that Christianity is an entirely new religion, not the fulfilment of Judaism}. It is not surprising either that the theme of mass redemption reappears, so long after its replacement in Judaism by the theme of individual self-improvement.

But this air of sudden psychosis is really misleading, because Christianity is not an incident in the history of Judaism, but in the history of Hellenistic religion. Though Christian theorists set great store by the alleged continuity between Judaism and Christianity, and though this continuity has been claimed from the earliest days of the Christian Church (except by heretics such as Marcion, who vehemently denied it), it was never much more than an illusion {correct; this perception would benefit both Christians and Jews: Christians would stop trying to be "the true Jews", Jews could be left in peace, and Jesus could be seen as a Buddha-figure and like a Cynic/Taoist philosopher}, as far as the central foundation doctrines of Christianity are concerned (though this is not to deny the enormous influence of the Old Testament on Christian movements and individuals of a later age). In order to illuminate the Christian sacrificial myth, therefore, it is necessary to turn away from Judaism to the salvation cults of the Hellenistic world.

{p. 107} Chapter Nine Christianity and Hellenistic religion

Christianity, with its concern with salvation, and its achievement of salvation through the death of a divine figure, shows a striking discontinuity with Judaism, which is concerned with neither of these motifs. In Judaism the word 'salvation' is used often enough, but it refers usually to physical or political deliverance. Moses, for example, was a 'saviour' (Hebrew - moshiy'a) because he delivered the Israelites from Egypt, and even the rather disreputable Samson was a 'saviour' because of his exploits against the Philistines. In Christianity 'salvation' means deliverance from eternal death, or hell; or, positively, it means the acquisition of eternal life for the soul. A doctrine of the 'resurrection of the dead' existed in Judaism at the time of Jesus, referring not the immortality of the soul but to the resurrection of the body in the time of the 'World to Come'; doctrines of the immortality of the soul have also existed in Judaism, but not with the full force of dogma.1 In so far as the term 'salvation' was associated occasionally with these doctrines, it was God Himself who was the saviour, not any emissary or sacrificial figure; and nothing could be further removed from Judaism that the concept of God Himself suffering death.2

Yet the idea of a divine figure who dies and thereby 'saves' was very common in the ancient world. lt therefore seems obvious that Christianity should be considered in relation to the other cults which had this concept. Such comparison, however, has been strongly opposed by most Christian scholars of the ancient and modern world.3

From the special standpoint of this book, we may begin by considering whether there were any devices in the mystery religions for shifting the blame for the death of the god. One of the best-known rites in the religions of Attis (Phrygia), Adonis (Syria) and Osiris (Egypt) was the rite of mourning the death of the god. This mourning rite was the special concern of the women, and has been described in many ancient sources.4 How should we understand this rite? The god died in each of these religions only to rise again in glory, so why was it necessary to mourn his death with paroxysms of simulated grief as if entirely unaware of the happy outcome? There is of course a certain dramatic effect in this; the women are taking part in a kind of sacred

{p. 108} play, in which the whole myth of the god and goddess is being enacted. It is in such simulations, regarded as having magical effects on a cosmic scale, that drama as an art form has its origin. Yet, at the same time, the mourning also has a motive of purgation of guilt. By mourning, the women, acting as representatives of the female principle or goddess, are disclaiming responsibility for the death. Yet we know that, in fact, the chief responsibility for the death lies with the goddess. For the death of Attis, or Adonis, or Osiris, is actually decreed by the goddess; the myths arise from a social reality in which the young king had to die at the end of his short reign in order to make way for a new consort for the queen.5

This social reality, of course, had long ceased to exist at the time of the Hellenistic mystery cults that were concerned with the worship of Attis, Adonis and Osiris. Though each was derived from a specific, non-Hellenistic region, each had adopted a universalistic colouring which would be helpful in spreading the cult throughout the Greco-Roman Empire. Moreover, the specifically agricultural connotation of these religions had been transcended in the mystery cults derived from them. It was no longer in the interests of a good harvest that the god died and came back to life, thus enacting the miracle of the revival of the fields in springtime. Nor was any earthly representative of the god actually done to death, as had been the case in the earlier history of these religions. Further, the 'mystery' aspect of the Greco-Roman cults was foreign to the religions into which it was grafted and which had originally been quite open and public systems of observance involving the total community, though containing some rites performed secretly, yet on behalf of the whole community, by a priestly caste. This priestly secrecy had now taken over the whole cult, which was for the benefit of an initiated minority, not of a whole national or tribal community.

The indigenous mystery cult of Greece was that of Eleusis, where secret initiation rites were performed in connection with the worship of Demeter, the goddess of agriculture. These ancient rites, however, should not be confused with the mystery cults of the Greco-Roman empire. The Eleusinian mysteries were carried on as a sort of adjunct to the public cult of the Olympian gods, not as a substitute for them. They were frankly for the privileged few, and carried with them a stamp of ultra-respectability, rather like the Masonic lodges of our own day. The majority, who were not initiates, were not thereby damned souls. The mysteries were held to give special insight into the hidden world and to equip the initiates with special qualifications for the next world, but they were not regarded as essential for salvation.6 The less official Orphic mysteries, on the other hand, beginning in the sixth century BC, did have an evangelical tone, and can be regarded as

{p. 109} the precursors of the Greco-Roman mystery cults. In them also can be found the origins of the anti-world and anti-flesh orientation that became characteristic of the mystery cults.7

The Eleusinian mysteries, centring on the worship of a goddess of agriculture, may be regarded as an outlet for the matriarchal religion which had been supplanted by Greek patriarchalism, but practice of the cult was strictly limited and not allowed to interfere with the duties of citizenship in patriarchal society, which were regarded with great respect as the chief business of that society. It was when this respect began to break down, because of the decline of the city-states and the rise of great military empires in their place, that the mystery religions developed an aura of escape and ecstatic other-worldliness. The matriarchal elements in mystery cultism now acquired a new importance, because patriarchal society had become oppressive in a way it had not previously been; a man could no longer identify himself with his society, but felt tiny and powerless before the great patriarchal machine. The process of dying with the dying - and subsequently resurrected - god was a way of breaking down the patriarchal 'armour' (in Reich's term8) and achieving a new birth and a new identity, free of the crushing weight of a militarized and bureaucratic society.

Yet the matriarchal emphasis differed in the different mystery cults. In Mithraism, which, despite its origins in Persian religion, was the most artificial of the mystery cults, the matriarchal element was entirely suppressed, and the death and resurrection of the god, with the attendant initiation rites, were elaborated in purely masculine terms. This was a religion for the recovery of male pride rather than for escape into the maternal bosom.9 In Osiris-worship, on the other hand, there was great emphasis on the figure of Isis, a mother-figure who anticipated the figure of the Virgin Mary in later Christianity, being portrayed as the mourner of the god and also as a mother with divine infant in the setting of a manger or cow-byre (with overtones of the ancient worship of the cow as a sacred animal symbolizing motherhood). The ecstatic sentimentality of Isis-worship was one reaction to the surrender of male supremacy, by which the death and emasculation of the male was diverted from the sphere of responsibility of the female.10 In this type of religiosity, there was a proliferation of distancing devices that were important for the development of Christianity, especially the emergence of a dark male figure of evil as antagonist and slayer of the god; but there was no grim father-god demanding the sacrifice of the young god on patriarchal grounds, as there was in Christianity - which thus provides a unique amalgam of patriarchal and matriarchal motifs, with distancing devices derived from both.

{p. 110} On the other hand, in the Attis-worship of Phrygia, there was no attempt to disguise the cruelty of the goddess in demanding the death of the young god. The mother-goddess, Cybele, was worshipped in her full power. There was an ecstatic male masochism, evinced ritually by the orgiastic self-castration of devotees described so graphically by Catullus,11 in which the devotees, often seized by an unforeseen impulse, enacted the role of the god Attis himself.12 In Adonis-worship, however, the cruel aspects of the goddess Astarte (Venus) were muted; there were extended scenes of female mourning for the dead god; and the death was attributed to a malign male power in the form of a boar, sent by or incarnating a rival god. Yet Adonis-worship did not develop the sentimental divine mother-and-child motif found an Isis-worship, and its emphasis seems to have been on a more adult love-relationship between goddess and young lover, renewed continually through the death and resurrection of the young god.13

Each mystery religion thus had its own tone and character. They all had in common a turning-away from public to private religion, by which the cult no longer served to validate the tribal or national existence, but served the needs of the individual, alienated from the world around him and belonging to no earthly city. There was thus a paradoxical character about the mystery cults, in that they combined an atmosphere of secrecy and separatism with a tendency to universalism, whereas the national cults, such as Judaism or the Greek Olympian worship, were openly practised, but confined to a given culture and historical background (these cults had universalistic aspects too, though of a multi-cultural and pluralistic, rather than individualistic, nature).

Perhaps even more important than the mystery cults for the development of Christianity is the movement known as Gnosticism. This built largely on the mystery cults, but divested them entirely of their local affiliations. Gnosticism was a religion not about a god of Phrygia, or Syria, or Egypt, but about planet earth and its place in the universe as an outlying region occupied by the evil force struggling against the power of good (in describing Gnosticism, it is almost impossible to avoid the language of science-fiction, which indeed is partly given over to a modern form of Gnosticism) {Gnosticism might be seen as a Western form of Buddhism, influenced by Zoroastrian dualism}.

To some extent Gnosticism arose also out of Judaism, from which it derived part of its cosmic scope, but here too it shed the local colouring and nationalist rootedness of Judaism, thus becoming the perfect expression of alienation in the Hellenistic world. From the mystery religions it took the idea of salvation through the death and resurrection of a god, but the sexual significances of salvation, still strongly retained in the mystery cults in male-female themes, were again made abstract. The entity to be saved (the soul) was regarded as sexless, and

{p. 111} the aim of religion was to achieve this sexless state {this being an important similarity with Buddhism, but Buddhism never associated the body with an evil cosmic force}. As a consequence of this desexualization, the paranoia inherent in mystery religion became much sharper; the dualism of good and evil became central, and the discerning of evil forces, both on earth and in the heavens, became an urgent preoccupation. Where the mystery religions had vaguely adumbrated evil gods responsible for the death of the young god, Gnosticism focused its anguished attention on the cosmic evil which it became the main aim to escape or overcome. Zoroastrianism had previously regarded life as a struggle between cosmic good and evil, but not in terms that put the earth and its activities on the side of evil.14

There have been great fluctuations in the opinions of scholars on the history of Gnosticism. The traditional Christian view was that this movement was an offshoot of Christianity, and was in fact a Christian heresy, founded originally by Simon Magus. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries scholars such as Reizenstein and, later, Bultmann took the view that Gnosticism actually began before Christianity, and that it had a strong influence on Christianity itself, especially in the formation of the view of Jesus found in the Epistles of Paul and in the Gospel of John. Then came a phase in which the view of Bultmann was discounted as without sufficient historical basis, and it became scholarly orthodoxy once more to regard Gnosticism as merely an eccentric variant of Christianity. Quite recently, however, new light has been thrown on Gnosticism by the discovery of a great library of Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt. These are Coptic translations of Greek originals, and are still being studied by an army of scholars. But one striking fact that has emerged is that some of these texts are Gnostic without being Christian. Consequently, it has become once more probable that Gnosticism preceded Christianity and was an important influence on it.15

Of the non-Christian Gnostic texts recently found at Nag Hammadi there are two main kinds: the pagan ones, without reference to either Judaism or Christianity, and the 'Jewish' ones, which contain much reference to Judaism, but none to Christianity. It would be more accurate, however, to call these latter texts 'anti-Jewish' rather than Jewish. Their wealth of references to Judaism has caused scholars to regard them as having been written by Jewish sectarians; but their uniformly hostile attitude towards Judaism as a limited or even evil religion makes it more likely that these texts were written by non-Jews who had come into contact with Judaism and were both fascinated and repelled by it; or perhaps an even more accurate description of their standpoint is that they wished to build their religious views on Judaism and at the same time repudiate it. Thus they selected from the Bible the figure of Seth for special reverence, because he was not a Jew

{p. 112} but a figure of the antediluvian period before Judaism began (in exactly the same way, and for the same reason, we find in the New Testament special reverence paid to the figure of Melchizedek). The sources of Judaism are used, with great ingenuity, to attack Judaism and develop a religious system transcending, yet in a way incorporating, the tenets of the Jewish Bible.

The peculiar combination of dependence on Jewish sources and hostility towards them is shown especially in the Gnostic attitude towards Jehovah, the God of Judaism. It was acknowledged by the Gnostics that there was such a God and that He was the author of the Old Testament, which He had transmitted to Moses. It was even admitted by some that He had created the earth. But it was denied that He was the supreme God, or that His handiwork was admirable, in either its literary form, the Torah, or its material form, the world. Far above Him was the true 'Highest God', to whom He failed to give due reverence, pretending to be the Highest God himself. But there had always been some, starting with Seth, who had seen through His pretensions, and had true knowledge (gnosis) of the Highest God. These people knew that one day the Highest God would intervene in the affairs of the lower world, so bungled by the jealousy and arrogance of the Jewish God, by sending down a son, who, by his death and resurrection, would overthrow the Jewish God, rescind the latter's imperfect Law, and rescue chosen souls for eternal life.

It is doubtful, however, whether Gnosticism itself contained the concept of sacrifice in the sense that is important for the present study. There was certainly in Gnosticism, even in its pre-Christian varieties, the figure of a saviour called the 'Son of God', who descended from the 'World of Light' and later ascended again.16 But the accent was laid on the knowledge or esoteric information that he brought to the world, rather than on his suffering while on earth. If he was temporarily overwhelmed by evil powers, this was the inevitable result of his selfless descent rather than the main aim of his mission; it was not his death that brought salvation, but the knowledge, or gnosis, that he imparted to his disciples {another mark of Buddhism} while on earth, and which they transmitted to further disciples. The Gnostics were thus the originators of the theory of the saviour as martyr, rather than as sacrifice, a theory that became popular in Christianity only at a very late stage, under the influence of modern liberalism, in which concepts of sacrifice had come to seem antiquated and irrational. In Gnosticism, the figure of the dying-and-resurrected god, derived from agricultural rites of sacrifice, became for the first time divorced from the idea of the beneficial, death-producing renewal. It is true that evil figures were concerned with the death of the saviour and these evil figures had their earthly incarnation, especially in the Jewish people, so that

{p. 113} Gnosticism was a seed-bed for anti-Semitism; but the particular equivocal aura of the Sacred Executioner, the guilty performer of the necessary sacrifice without which the rest of mankind could not be saved, was absent. The Jews were the villains of the story (even before the saviour was identified by some Gnostic sects as Jesus), but only in the sense that they were the special minions of the Demiurge who had created this evil world, and were therefore the enemies of gnosis.17 It could even be said that Gnostics did not take death seriously enough to have a real concept of sacrifice, for death, to them, was merely a release {this is another mark of Buddhism} from the material world and a highly desirable thing; on the other hand, the cosmic impact of death as the source of renewal of life is essential to sacrificial doctrine. Alternatively, one could say that Gnostics did not take the world and the flesh seriously enough to have a concept of sacrifice; for sacrifice implies that the world is worth redeeming and that the suffering of the flesh is of real significance. So it is not surprising that the heresy known as Docetism was characteristic of the Christian Gnostics: that is, that Jesus did not really suffer in the flesh, but only appeared to do so.

Christianity, therefore, was not identical either to the mystery religions or to Gnosticism, but built from them a new synthesis which at the same time reverted to the ancient prehistoric doctrines of sacrifice of which they were sophisticated developments. The fact that the sacrificial figure, Jesus, was a historical personage, who had actually lived and died on earth, gave an actuality to the sacrifice that was lacking in the mystery religions. There it had been a god who died and rose again, and no human representative of the god was killed as had once been the case in the remotely early times of the cults. But what Christianity did take from the mystery cults was the idea of the saving power of the death of the god and the conviction that it was not any gnosis imparted by the god that brought about salvation, but a mystic participation in his death. And from Gnosticism, Christianity took the cosmic framework, transcending all the local geographical reference of the mystery cults, and the concept of a battle between cosmic powers of good and evil (derived ultimately from Persian religion) {Christianity also got this from the Jewish Essenes, who got it from Zoroastrianism}, as well as the concept of a saviour, or Son of God, descending from the World of Light. From Gnosticism too came the idea of a fallen world ruled by an evil power, Satan, though this power was not identified, as it was in Gnosticism, with the God of Judaism. From Gnosticism, it must also be said, came the anti-Semitic tone of Christianity, with the Jews cast in the role of antagonists of the Light, though in Christianity this role is sharper and more specific than in Gnosticism. From Judaism itself came the apocalyptic scheme of history, by which the saviour was identified with the Jewish figure of the Messiah, and the whole sacred history of the Old Testament was

{p. 114} pressed into service as prefiguring and leading up to the advent of Jesus, while the Christian Church took over the role assigned in Judaism to Israel, becoming the 'chosen people' of God and the bearer of His message to mankind.

The person in whose mind all these elements fused into unity was Paul, who was thus the true founder of Christianity. Jesus himself cannot be regarded as the founder of Christianity, since he was not, in fact, a Christian, but lived and died as a believing and practising Jew, to whom the Hebrew Bible alone was the Word of God {a Jewish view}. To him, the term 'Messiah' had no connotations connecting it with the Gnostic saviour or with the dying-and-rising gods of the mystery cults. It was simply the title (meaning, literally, the 'anointed one') of every Jewish king of the Davidic dynasty, and by claiming this title (at a rather late stage in his career, which he began in the role of a prophet) Jesus was claiming the Jewish throne and setting up a banner of revolt against the invading occupying power of Rome, which he identified with the invaders mentioned in the prophetic books of the Old Testament. Jesus thus had no intention of playing a sacrificial role, and his hope was to eject the Romans by means of a token resistance backed up by a mighty miracle from God, which was prophesied by Zechariah to take place on the Mount of Olives. When his revolt was crushed after some initial success and wide support from the Jewish people, Jesus was crucified by the Romans like many thousands of other Jews who took part in attempts to regain their liberty during this period. Jesus, like the other failed Messiahs, was quickly forgotten by the Jews,18 except for a handful of his devoted followers who comforted themselves for his heroic failure by believing that he was still alive (like King Arthur in a later legend) and would come back soon to continue his mission of liberation. These loyal Jewish followers of Jesus (the Nazarenes), who continued to believe in him after his execution, did not regard him as a divine figure, but as a human Messiah whom God had brought back to life, like Lazarus, in advance of the general resurrection of the dead prophesied for all deserving human beings. The Nazarenes did not regard Jesus as an opponent of the Jewish Law or religion, and they themselves regarded themselves as Jews, observed Jewish laws, and attended the Jewish synagogues and Temple {hence the question, when the Third Temple is built, will Christians want to worship in it? will Jews allow them? Will there be a new split between "Rome" and "Jerusalem"?}.

It was when Paul began to see the resurrection of Jesus in an entirely different light that Christianity was born. Paul was brought up not in Judaea or Galilee but in Tarsus, a great Hellenistic centre in Asia Minor. Here all the mystery cults were represented, and the conventicles of Gnostics were beginning to impart their secret knowledge. Later, Paul called himself a 'Pharisee of the Pharisees', and was careful not to mention in his Epistles that he was born not in Judaea

{p. 115} but in Tarsus, which was certainly no centre of Pharisaism. It is probable that Paul was at some time briefly attached to the Pharisees, though he was certainly not a disciple of the great Gamaliel, as was claimed for him by Luke, though not by Paul himself. It seems, however, that he soon left the Pharisees and became attached to the Sadducees, for we find him carrying out a mission against the Nazarenes under the instructions of the High Priest, who was a Sadducee. The Pharisees had no quarrel with the Nazarenes, who were loyal adherents of Pharisaic Judaism and were protected by the Pharisees under Gamaliel from the persecution of the High Priest, who was a Roman appointee and regarded the Nazarenes as followers of a rebel against Rome.19

There is extant a report by the Nazarenes about the early life of Paul.20 This is a valuable corrective to the picture of Paul as Pharisee that is given in Acts and in Paul's Epistles. In this account, Paul, so far from being a 'Pharisee of the Pharisees', and 'descended from the tribe of Benjamin', was the son of Gentile parents of Tarsus converted to Judaism {which makes the point, that Judaism had been a major proseltysing religion prior to Christianity; Maccoby emphatically says that it accepted converts as Islam did, in note 4 to Chapter 8, on p. 193 below. Perhaps the relation between Marxism and Judaism in our time, is like that between Christianity and Judaism then, such that there is confusion over whether Jewish Marxists are really "Jews", or a breakaway group. The question of whether Judaism has accepted converts is tied to the question of whether Jews should be seen as a race - as Nazis saw them, and emulated - or an ethnic group, a people, a caste, a religion, or some combination of these. Given Maccoby's statement that Judaism and Islam had similar policies on conversion, I take the view that being a Jew is primarily a matter of religion. When there are few converts and out-marriage is rare, the group becomes, as a secondary result, a racial one, but this is a temporary aberration}. If this is true, Paul's background of Judaism was recent and superficial. He was brought up in near contact with Hellenistic religion, and would have been familiar with notions of dying-and-resurrected gods - concepts that were alien and unfamiliar to Jesus's Judaean and Galilean followers, the Nazarenes. Paul left Tarsus and came to Judaea, where he sought a Jewish identity, first with the Pharisees, then with the Sadducees, and perhaps with other Jewish groups too, such as the Essenes. He was a man seeking some way of reconciling and amalgamating the welter of influences to which he had been subjected, including the strange new sect which he had undertaken to harass on behalf of the quisling High Priest, but which evidently had a striking effect on him. The solution to his spiritual turmoil came to him on the road to Damascus, when all the religious influences that had impinged on him from his childhood onward suddenly coalesced into a new synthesis, ratified by a vision of Jesus as the culmination of the succession of dying-and-resurrected gods.

In Paul's Epistles we find expressed the synthesis that he created, which has remained characteristic of Christianity, despite efforts from time to time to suppress the Gnostic and mystery-religion elements in favour of Jewish concepts (as was done, for example, by Pelagius in his controversy with the Paulinist Augustine 2l), or to suppress the Jewish elements in favour of pure Gnosticism or mystery religion (as was attempted by Marcion 22). Paul's debt to Gnosticism is shown in his vocabulary and basic framework of concepts: for example, in his distinction between 'spiritual' man (pneumatikos) and 'natural' man (psychikos); and in his terms for cosmic powers of evil, such as 'principality' (arche), 'power' (exousin) and 'might' (dunamis). It is seen

{p. 116} also in his insistence that the Torah was given to Moses not by God, but by 'angels',23 a strange idea for which there is no warrant in the Hebrew Bible or in later Jewish literature, but which is Paul's somewhat watered-down version of the Gnostic doctrine that the Torah was given by the Demiurge, or inferior power, who created the world and was identical with the Jewish God. For Paul, the God of the Old Testament was identical with the Highest God, and the role given by the Gnostics to the Demiurge was given by Paul, in a modified form, to Satan, a figure derived not from the Hebrew Bible (where he hardly appears, except as a being entirely subservient to God) but from the Apocryphal literature, which is regarded as authoritative only by a tiny minority of Jews. Satan was regarded by Paul not as the creator of this world, but as its 'prince' (in John's phrase), who had corrupted the world and thus gained power over it. The purpose of Jesus's descent to the world was to break the power of Satan, and return the world to its true owner, the Highest God, to whom Jesus had the relationship of son, and through whom he was lord and saviour. The terms 'lord' (kurios) and 'saviour' (soter) are used in a sense indistinguishable from their use in Gnosticism and quite different from the use of the corresponding terms in Hebrew. Paul even at times uses the expression gnosis, but for him the ' knowledge' which saves is that of faith and participation in Jesus's death, not the system of mystical exercises and passwords by which the Gnostics claimed to circumvent the powers of evil and pass through the 'Seven Heavens' to the domain of the Highest God.

Thus, though the outward limbs of Paul's system are those of Gnosticism, the heart of it is derived from the mystery religions, which preserved the ancient concept of the sacrificial death of a god. Whenever Paul writes about the sacrificial efficacy of the Crucifixion, he uses the language of the mystery religions. The interpretation of the Communion meal, for example, as a participation in the blood and body of Christ (for instance, in I Corinthians 10:16) is entirely alien to Judaism, and has no part in Gnosticism, but is a common theme in the mystery religions. Such communal meals, in which the food eaten was held to represent mystically the body and blood of the sacrificed god, are known to have featured in Mithraism and in the worship of Attis.24 These communal meals are in fact sophisticated versions of a much older type of communal meal, found for example in the worship of Dionysus, in which an animal, often a bull, was torn apart and eaten raw as representative of the god. This ceremony itself is derived from an even earlier rite in which the animal was not regarded as representing a god (since the concept of personal deity had not yet arisen) but simply as the carrier of life-force which could be incorporated in the members of the tribe through a ceremonial meal. The Com-

{p. 117} munion, or Eucharist, indeed, goes back to the basic reason for the god sacrifice, which is simply to eat the god. It may be said that the Christian Communion meal has Jewish origins too, being based on the Kiddush ceremony, in which a festival or Sabbath meal is inaugurated by blessings on wine and bread. But the Kiddush ceremony has no sacrificial connotation whatever, being merely thanksgiving blessings to God for providing food, combined with a blessing for the festival day. It is true, however, that there is a historical connection between the Kiddush ceremony and the Eucharist, for it was the Kiddush ceremony performed by Jesus on the occasion of the Last Supper that was reinterpreted in mystery-religion style and thus transformed into a sacrificial rite. In the Gospels, Jesus is represented as giving this interpretation to the Last Supper himself, and the latest Gospel, John's, even represents Jesus as referring to the spiritual nutrition of his blood and flesh independently of the Last Supper: 'Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat of the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day ... He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him' (John 6: 53-4). These expressions are good examples of the reworking of the historical traditions about Jesus in order to make them accord with Paul's mystery-religion interpretation of Jesus's life and death.

{Why is the Catholic Eucharist centred on body and blood? What is the rationale for the rules of kosher slaughter and helal slaughter? Max Weber (a Jew) wrote in his book Ancient Judaism (George Allen & Unwin, London 1952): "The later Deuteronomic and priestly ... prohibition of the enjoyment of blood on the grounds that one must eat the soul neither of man nor animal" (p. 141).

The Christian West has inherited two incompatible psychological theories, and fused them, papering over the differences. One was the Platonic (originally from India, as Schopenhauer argues: schopenhauer.html), with its view that the person is made up of body and spirit; the other was the Jewish, with its view that the person is made up of body and blood (that is why the Catholic Mass celebrates Holy Communion as body and blood). One sees the "life-giving" component as spirit, the other as blood. The former envisages that the spirit can exist separately from the body, whereas the latter denies this, being strictly "material" (as blood is material). The former envisages an immaterial "heaven" as our true home, the latter insists on an earthly paradise. The former is amenable to reincarnation, the latter to resurrection. Historically, the former was first found in Europe about 500BC, articulated by the Pythagoreans and Plato, while the latter was a feature of Jewish thought, a concept the Jews may have inherited from the Zoroastrians (who called it Renovation), and possibly from the religion of Osiris.}

{p. 118} It is clear that the manner of Jesus's death, by hanging on a cross, was itself of great significance to Paul, since it was so evocative of the mystery religions, especially that of the Phrygian god, Attis. Here Paul has recourse to an interesting interpretation, or misinterpretation, of a verse in the Hebrew Bible (which Paul, incidentally, read in Greek, not in Hebrew, since it can be shown that his quotations are from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament25). Deuteronomy 21:22-3 reads (in the Authorized Version):

And if a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be to be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree: his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day; for he that is hanged is accursed of God; that thy land be not defiled, which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance.

In Jewish exegesis, this was not held to mean that a hanged man was under a curse, for, on the contrary, it was held that an executed man was purged of all guilt by his execution. If his dead body, contrary to the law, was allowed to hang overnight, this could bring no curse upon the dead man, who had paid the penalty of his crime, but only upon those who contravened the law by exposing his body. Thus the relevant sentence is translated in the New English Bible, 'A hanged man is offensive in the sight of God', a translation very much in accord with Jewish traditional exegesis.26

Paul, however, understood the sentence very differently. His comment is, 'Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree' (Galatians 3:13). Many commentators have assumed that Paul was merely repeating here a current interpretation of the verse in Deuteronomy; some commentators have even given this as an example of Paul's 'rabbinical' mood. But the idea that a crucified man was under some kind of curse (presumably in the next world) would have been regarded by all Jewish authorities of the time as bizarre. After all, Jesus was only one of many thousands who were crucified by the Romans during this period. So far from being regarded as under a curse, these crucified people were regarded as martyrs and saints who had secured their place in the World to Come by their suffering.

How then did Paul arrive at his interpretation? The answer is that the theme of the hanged god was one that carried for him a charge of meaning from mystery religions. The god Attis, the lover of the goddess Cybele, was represented every spring by an effigy that was hung on a pine-tree. The actual myth of Attis does not tell that the god was hanged on a pine-tree, but that he met his death under a pine-tree by self-castration. But the annual rite points to an older version of the myth, in which he (or his human surrogate) was not only mutilated

{p. 119} but hung alive on a tree so that his oozing blood might fertilize the fields. That such a story once existed is shown by the legend of Marsyas, also a devotee of Cybele, who was tied to a pine-tree and flayed and otherwise mutilated (allegedly as the result of his rivalry with the god Apollo). Norse religion too offers relevant evidence: human sacrifices to Odin were strung up on a tree or a gallows, wounded with a spear and left to die.27

To Paul, who came from the very area where the religion of Attis and Cybele was indigenous, the fact that Jesus died on the cross would have seemed especially significant - once he began to think of Jesus as a mystery god. Here was the very mystery of the hanged god, for which, as he would feel, mystery religion of the Phrygian variety had already prepared mankind. And he would very naturally look into the Septuagint to see whether Holy Writ contained any veiled prophecy of these things. He found such an allusion in the verse of Deuteronomy about the curse involved in leaving a corpse of a condemned man hanging overnight. This seemed to him to be much more than a strongly worded prohibition about the respectful treatment of corpses; it conjured up a dramatic picture of a hanged figure suffering from some cosmic curse. The sacrifice of Jesus, in Paul's eyes, was directed not towards the fertility of the fields but towards the removal of the curse of sin. Thus Jesus took the curse upon himself, and assumed the character of a condemned criminal bearing the weight of sin that mankind found intolerable. This is stated explicitly by Paul in another Epistle: 'For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him' ((II Corinthians 5:21). (The New English Bible translation is 'Christ was innocent of sin, and yet for our sake God made him one with the sinfulness of men, so that in him we might be made one with the goodness of God himself'.)

That the innocent should take upon himself the sins of the guilty had always been essential to the purificatory kind of sacrifice, especially belonging to times of crisis such as famine or foreign invasion, but it was now being applied by Paul to the crisis of mankind as a whole faced with the wrath of God. Only the most innocent person could qualify as the sacrifice, not only because of the need in any sacrifice for perfection or lack of blemish, but because in a guilt-offering for the people any guilt in the sacrificial person himself would detract from his efficacy as a vicarious offering. There was thus an extraordinary paradox in the sacrificed person: a combination of total innocence with total depravity. It is this paradox that Paul read into the verse of Deuteronomy about the curse on the hanged man, and applied to the sacrifice (as he saw it) of Jesus.

It may even be that Paul saw further into the historical background of the Deuteronomic vcrse about the hanged criminal than did the

{p. 120} rabbis. For it is very possible that the Deuteronomic curse on leaving the body of a criminal hanging ovemight was based originally on a desire to stamp out any vestiges of the fertility-worship in which the prolonged hanging of a human victim was a central rite. There is evidence that in some periods capital punishment itself became a kind of religious sacrifice; a condemned criminal might be treated with the same kind of ceremony as an innocent sacrificial victim, in the hope that the execution might have the same effects as a sacrifice without the need for the crueller performance of sacrifice of the innocent. The same kind of shifting can be seen in the use of enemy prisoners as sacrificial victims. Crucifixion itself began as a sacrificial rite and only gradually became a form of civil execution, and probably never quite lost its religious overtones. Thus Paul, like a modern anthropologist, was disinterring traces of paganism in a post-pagan document. He was bringing back to life the pagan ways of thought against which the Hebrew Bible had carried out its long struggle and of which there remained only fossilized remnants in certain passages whose meaning had been forgotten in rabbinical Judaism.

Christianity, therefore, as it developed under the influence of Paul, was much indebted to the mystery religions for its central concept of a divine sacrifice. But whereas in the mystery religions the divine sacrifice took place in the mythological realm, Pauline Chnstianity located i