Ebook: Sacrifice in Pagan and Christian Antiquity

Robert J. Daly examines sacrifice in the ancient Mediterranean world, showing how the rise of Christian sacrifice – which was unbloody – and the use of sacrificial language in reference to highly spiritualized Christian lives, would have seemed unsettling and radically challenging to the pagan mind. Acknowledging the difficulties posed by an overwhelmingly Christian scholarly narrative around the topic of sacrifice, Daly specifically sets out to tell the non-Christian side of the story. He outlines the pagan trajectory, and then the Jewish-Christian trajectory, before concluding with a representative series of comparisons and contrasts (prayer and sacrifice; divination and sacrifice; ethics, morality, and sacrifice; the purpose of sacrifice; the rhetoric of sacrifice; the economics of sacrifice; heroes and saints) and a final chapter looking ahead at how this study might inform further study of sacrifice.