Green Theology: Sacrifices and Meat-Eating

Green Theology

Sacrifices and Meat-Eating

We have seen that Jesus’ attitude to animals belongs wholly within the Old Testament and Jewish tradition. In this tradition it was permitted to kill certain animals for sacrifice to God in the temple and for food.

For Jesus to have rejected either of these practices in principle would have been a significant innovation. Of course, there were innovatory aspects of Jesus’ interpretation of the law of Moses, but there is no evidence at all that he innovated in either of these two ways.

With regard to sacrifice, had there been any tradition of words of Jesus rejecting the sacrificial system, then the Gospels, probably all written by and for Christians who had abandoned the practice of sacrifice in the temple, would surely have recorded it. The so-called cleansing of the temple (Mark 12:15–17), which has sometimes been interpreted as a symbolic rejection of the system of sacrificial worship, would certainly not have been so understood by Jesus’ contemporaries.

Jesus objected to the way the priestly aristocracy who ran the temple were exploiting the sacrificial system as a means of financial profit, thus distorting the real purpose of sacrifices as a vehicle of prayer.[1] Matthew twice attributes to Jesus, in his debates with the Pharisees, a quotation from Hosea 6:6: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’ (Matt. 9:13; 12:7). In neither context is a reference to sacrifice as such especially relevant. Sacrifice must be taken here as representative of the ritual aspect of Jewish religion, to which the Pharisees are seen to give precedence over the ethical demand of God’s law. But the sharp antithesis is not really intended, any more than it is in its original context in Hosea, to mean that sacrifice is not God’s will. The meaning is that mere ritual observance is of no value in God’s sight. We can be sure that Matthew does not understand Jesus to be rejecting the sacrificial system, because in Matthew 5:23–4 he preserves a saying of Jesus which takes it for granted that his hearers, like almost all Jews, would be following the practice of offering sacrifice in the temple.[2] It seems clear that, despite his criticism of the way the priestly hierarchy ran the temple, Jesus did not go as far as the Qumran sect, who rejected the legitimacy of the worship in the temple (while not rejecting sacrifice in principle). We must also take it as virtually certain that he himself participated in sacrificial worship, both in attending the prayers that accompanied the regular sacrifices in the temple, and in offering sacrifices himself (which were not of course only offered in atonement for personal sin, but also for purification from ritual impurity and as offerings of praise and thanksgiving).[3]

His attendance at the regular annual festivals in Jerusalem (Luke 2:41–2; John 2:13 7:1–10; 10:22–3) would have involved this. If the impression the Synoptic Gospels give that the Last Supper was a Passover meal is correct (Mark 14:12–16; Luke 22:14; but contrast John 18:28; 19:14,31), then Jesus ate with his disciples the Passover lamb that had been sacrificed in the temple that afternoon.

Eventually most early Christians came to believe that the sacrificial system, or at any rate sin-offerings, had been rendered redundant by the sacrificial death of Christ (see especially Hebrews), while the principle of the Pauline mission to the Gentiles was that Gentile converts to Christianity were free from all the ritual requirements of the Mosaic law. But there is no suggestion in any of the New Testament writers (not even in Stephen’s speech in Acts 7)[4] that God had not really commanded Israel to offer animal sacrifices.[5]

However, this does seem to have been the view adopted by the later Jewish Christian sect of the Ebionites (to be distinguished from the mainstream of Jewish Christians, who were known as Nazarenes), doubtless in reaction to the destruction of the temple and the end of the temple cult in 70 CE.[6]

Accordingly, in the Gospel of the Ebionites, which is based on the three Synoptic Gospels,[7] they attributed to Jesus the saying: ‘I came to abolish sacrifices, and if you do not cease from sacrificing the wrath will not cease from you’ (apud Epiphanius, Pan. 30.16.5). In the account of the preparation for the Last Supper, this gospel borrowed from Matthew 26:17 the disciples’ question to Jesus, ‘Where do you want us to make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?’ For Jesus’ answer the words of Luke 22:15 (‘I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you’) were used, but turned into a question expecting the answer ‘no’: ‘Have I eagerly desired to eat meat with you this Passover?’ (apud Epiphanius, Pan. 30.22.4). The addition of ‘meat’ to the words taken from Luke probably indicates not only that the Ebionites could not accept that Jesus would have eaten a sacrificial animal, but also that they thought Jesus was vegetarian. To the latter point we shall return below. But it is clear that these features of the Gospel of the Ebionites are late adaptations of the gospel tradition, designed to bring it into line with the particular views of the Ebionite sect and of no historical value.

Just as we can scarcely doubt that Jesus participated in the sacrificial system, so we can scarcely doubt that he also ate meat other than that of sacrificial animals. It is true that meat was a luxury in Jewish Palestine (cf. Sir. 39:26–7).[8] Jesus would not have eaten it regularly.

But the meals to which he was invited in the houses of the wealthy (Mark 2:15; Luke 7:36; 11:37; 14:1; 19:5) are likely to have included meat. Jesus does not seem to have disapproved of the employment of those of his disciples who had been fishermen (see especially Luke 5:3–10). In the feeding miracles, he multiplied fish, along with loaves, to provide food for the crowd (Mark 6:38–43; 8:7), while after his resurrection, he not only cooked and served fish for the disciples (John 21:9–13), but also ate fish himself (Luke 24:42–3). Even though the historical value of some of these passages in the Gospels is widely disputed, it is hard to believe that if Jesus had been vegetarian such traditions could have arisen in the early church. Some Jews in Jesus’ time did practise abstention from meat, for two main reasons.[9] One was the need, in a Gentile context, to avoid the defilement which eating Gentile food might incur (Dan. 1:5–16; Tob. 1:10–13; Jdt. 10:5; 12:2). Red meat would not have been correctly slaughtered and drained of blood. Especially there was the probability that Gentile meat had been offered to idols in pagan temples before being sold in the market. This is almost certainly the reason why some Jewish Christians in the church in Rome were vegetarian (Rom. 14:2).

But such problems did not occur in Jewish Palestine where Jesus lived. The second reason for abstention from meat was as an ascetic practice of self-denial. As such, it was relatively unusual. Jews regularly practised fasting, which meant complete abstention from food and drink for short periods. The traditional form of long-term self-denial was the Nazirite vow, which required abstention from alcoholic drink but not from meat (Num. 6:3; Judg. 13:4,7,14). According to Luke 1:15 John the Baptist, like Samson, was a Nazirite from birth, which did not therefore prevent him from making locusts part of his ascetic diet in the wilderness (Mark 1:6). However, because meat was regarded as a luxury, the practice of abstaining from wine and meat was sometimes adopted as a kind of semi-fast that, unlike true fasting, could be maintained over a long period. It was considered a form of mourning (Dan. 10:2; T. Reub. 1:10). It might be practised for a few days or weeks (Dan. 10:2; 4 Ezra 9:23–6; 12:51) or, exceptionally, for several years (T. Reub. 1:9–10) or a lifetime (T. Jud. 15:4). The Therapeutae, a Jewish community who lived a kind of monastic life in Egypt, never drank wine or ate meat (Philo, Contempl. 73–4). Apparently, after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE, many Jews abstained permanently from wine and meat, as a form of mourning for the temple (t. Sot. 15:11–15).

In an account of James the Lord’s brother, which is largely legendary but probably does derive from second-century Palestinian Jewish Christian tradition, in which the memory of James was revered, Hegesippus represents him as, in effect, a Nazirite who augmented his vow by abstaining from meat as well as from wine. Since he is also said to have been constantly in prayer for the forgiveness of the Jewish people, his asceticism is probably to be understood as a form of mourning for their sins (apud Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 2.23.5–6).

In the Gospel of the Ebionites, John the Baptist’s diet in the wilderness is said to have been, not locusts (Greek akris) and wild honey (as in Matt. 3:4; Mark 1:6), but wild honey that tasted like a cake (Greek ekris) in oil (apud Epiphanius, Pan. 30.13.4). Clearly the change is designed to make the Baptist the kind of ascetic who abstained not only from wine but also from meat. Probably, in representing Jesus also as vegetarian (as we noticed above), this gospel was making Jesus also into this kind of ascetic. Perhaps the Ebionites took the Jewish Christian tradition about the asceticism of James the Lord’s brother as the model to which they conformed both John the Baptist and Jesus.

It does not necessarily follow that the Ebionites themselves were all lifelong vegetarians. However, we can be sure that Jesus did not practise this form of asceticism. A reliable gospel tradition strikingly contrasts him with the ascetic figure of John the Baptist:

Luke 7:33–4 (par. Matt. 11:18–19): For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine; and you say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man has come eating and drinking; and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!’ Moreover, Jesus’ vow of abstention from wine taken at the Last Supper (Mark 14:25) implies that he had not previously abstained from wine, and abstention from meat without abstention from wine is unknown in Jewish or early Christian ascetic practice. When Jesus was asked why his disciples did not follow the normal Jewish practice of regular fasting, he compared his ministry with the festivities of a wedding celebration in which it is inappropriate to fast (Mark 2:18–20). With this view of his ministry, we cannot imagine Jesus adopting a practice that symbolized mourning.

According to Genesis, both meat-eating (Gen. 1:29; 9:3) and winedrinking (Gen. 9:20–21) began after the Flood. So it is possible that the ascetic practice of abstaining from both was associated with a return to the practice of early humanity, before divine concessions to human corruption. But there is no evidence for this, and it is not easy to relate this notion to the fact that abstention from meat and wine symbolized mourning. Nor is there any evidence of any Jews or early Christians adopting vegetarianism out of a desire to return to the paradisal condition of humanity.[10]We might think this would have been appropriate in Jesus’ case (especially in view of Mark 1:13, to be discussed in our

next section), but the evidence is entirely against it. We must conclude that Jesus neither adopted vegetarianism for reasons that other Jews had for doing so nor adopted it for innovatory reasons of his own. Of course, it does not follow that there cannot be any kinds of valid Christian arguments for vegetarianism,[11] but an argument that meat-eating is absolutely wrong would clearly contradict the Christian belief in the sinlessness of Jesus. It would also cut Christianity’s roots in the Jewish tradition of faith to which Jesus so clearly belonged.

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[1] Richard Bauckham, ‘Jesus’ Demonstration in the Temple,’ in Law and Religion (ed. Barnabas Lindars; Cambridge: James Clarke, 1988), pp. 72–89.

[2] Note also Luke 17:14 (cf. Lev. 14:1–32).

[3] For a general account of sacrifices in the time of Jesus, see Ed P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief: 63 BCE – 66 CE (London: SCM Press/Philadelphia: Trinity Press

International, 1992), ch. 7.

[4] In context, Stephen’s quotation of Amos 5:25–7 (Acts 7:42-3) means that Israel in the wilderness failed to offer the sacrifices to God which they should have offered, but offered sacrifices to idols instead.

[5] According to Acts 21:26, even Paul participated in sacrifices in the temple.

[6] The passages in the Pseudo-Clementine literature that treat the laws in the Pentateuch prescribing sacrifices and other aspects of the temple cult as later additions to the law of Moses, not belonging to the law originally given by God (Clem. Hom. 2:44; 3:52), are probably of Ebionite origin.

[7] G. Howard, ‘The Gospel of the Ebionites’, in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen

Welt, vol. 2/25/5 (ed. W. Haase; Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 1988), pp. 4034–53.

[8] See Schochet, Animal Life, pp. 15–17.

[9] On Jewish and Christian vegetarianism in New Testament times, see Roger T. Beckwith, ‘The Vegetarianism of the Therapeutae, and the Motives for Vegetarianism in Early Jewish and Christian Circles,’ Revue de Qumran 13 (1988): pp. 407–10 (but he overlooks some evidence: Dan. 10:2; 4 Ezra 9:23–6; 12:51; T. Reub. 1:9–10; T. Jud. 15:4; Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 2.23.5). He divides his evidence into five categories of vegetarianism, but it can all be included in my two categories, with the exception of his fourth category. This is a single reference in Philo (Prov. fragment 2, 69-70), which commends vegetarianism on the grounds that eating meat reduces humans ‘to the savagery of wild beasts’. On the more general question of vegetarianism in the ancient world, see David E. Aune, in Hans Dieter Betz ed., Plutarch’s Theological Writings and Early Christian Literature (SCHNT 3; Leiden: Brill, 1975), pp. 305–8.

[10] It is not very clear whether, in Jewish and early Christian eschatology, people in the messianic age are expected to be vegetarian, though it is clear that they will drink wine (1 Enoch 10:19; Mark 14:25). But if wild animals are to be once again vegetarian (Isa. 11:6–9; Sib. Or. 3:788–95; cf. Gen. 1:30), it would seem that humans must also be, and the abundance of food that is to be provided without human effort (2 Bar. 29:5; 1 Enoch 10:19; Papias, apud Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 5.33.5–6) is to be vegetarian. On the other hand, Leviathan and Behemoth are to be slaughtered to provide food (4 Ezra 6:52; 2 Bar. 29:4).

[11] For an argument for vegetarianism which takes account of the fact that Jesus was not a vegetarian, see Andrew Linzey, ‘The Bible and Killing for Food’, in Using the Bible Today (ed. Dan Cohn-Sherbok; London: Bellew Publishing, 1991), pp. 110–20.