March 15, 2004

• You might want to take a look at an old post on Metafilter regarding Rene Girard and Scapegoat Theory. Metafilter seems to be off-line right now so I can't post the link, but Girard sheds a lot of light on mythology, sacrifice and Christianity. He really should be required reading regarding this whole Passion movie, the Iraq war for that matter too and everything involved with violence.
• You mean this one, I take it. That's brain food for this evening. Thanks.
• It's not unreasonable to suppose that the writers/compilers of the Gospels might have been familiar with Roman, Greek or Jewish traditions of ritual sacrifice. And it's not so very far-fetched to conjecture that they might have constructed their narratives of Jesus's death to echo certain aspects of those traditions. Further than that, however, it's difficult to go. The main problem is that we don't have much information about ritual sacrifice at this date, other than a general outline. The historian Bernhard Lang has hazarded a guess that blood sacrifices in the Jerusalem Temple might have followed a certain ritual formula, with the priest performing the sacrifice in the name of the person making the offering: so that if your name was Philo, the priest would sprinkle the blood on the altar with the words '"this is Philo's blood". This, he suggests, might be the origin of the eucharistic formula, "this is my blood". But as he admits, it's all desperately conjectural. We don't know; we can only guess. In short, there is no good reason to suppose that Eric "Fritter" Riley's ideas about ritual sacrifice (based as they are on ancient Roman sources, filtered through the imagination of modern pagan ritualists, and transferred from a private to a public context) have much to tell us about the Gospels.
• I have a background in religious studies, and my take is that this is just another subjective interpretation of a set of mythological tales that were crafted to appeal in just such a way to dozens of different ethnic groups with their own various mythological themes. You can literally see dozens of different influences in there. That was the point: the gospel writers were clever blighters that wanted the story to appeal to a lot of different people, so they could usurp the groups of worshippers of different faiths. That's precisely what they were setting out to do. The crucified/reborn deity itself is an ancient concept which goes back centuries before the era of Yeshua ha-Nostri. I think he was only about the 10th or 11th crucified deity. Krishna was one. Mithras was another. It's an ancient human meme. Even the Celts of Briton had their own version of it. Although I do agree that the concept of human sacrifice is writ large within the legend of Christ. That's why I've always found it rather distasteful. I don't want to focus on the manner of the bugger's death, I'd rather listen to what he had to say while he was alive, and I dearly wish more Christians did the same. Usually they're a sour bunch of hypocrites in that department. Yes, I am making a broad statement; so sue me. 1000 years of enforced ignorance is a lot to answer for. Anybody who claims to be a 'true pagan' is full of it, anyway. Modern paganism does not derive from an unbroken line of wisdom-traditions going back into prehistory; most of it has been a reconstituted set of principles put together by some fellow in the 19th century, if memory serves. Same goes for Golden Dawn teachings, et al. The only truly ancient philosophical/metaphysical systems we have access to are from the far east and from northern shamanism. The rest is fragmentary crap.
• Great comments, all. I posted a link to this thread in the MeFi one, which needs a touch of expertise.
• Wow! Thank you all. Specially for the link to the Girard thread on MeFi.