The chapters that open this book, those in Parts I and II, have shown how rituals facilitate interaction, whether with the divine realm or in human society. In the course of negotiating these interactions, rituals build bridges between worlds and enable both the defining and crossing of group boundaries. They are, in a nutshell, a kind of social glue that brings and knits individuals and groups together (Grimes 2011, 15). They do so by promoting cooperation and by expressing and sustaining group solidarity, and restoring it if it is lost.
Scholars who focus on how rituals operate and their role in the ordering of society—structural–functionalists—generally find in them a socially stabilizing force. This understanding of ritual goes back a hundred years to French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who saw ritual as the basis of communal life (Durkheim 2001 [1912], 258–59, 282–88; Stephenson 2015, 38–42; Uro 2016, 66–67, 128–31). More recently Roy Rappaport presented the perspective succinctly when he claimed that ritual is “the basic social act” and that it contains “the social contract itself” (1999, 138).
Rituals do not always create, display, and enhance social solidarity, however. They may be socially disruptive and destabilizing instead, especially when carried out by minority or marginalized groups. While publicly performing the Muslim call to prayer in Dubai or Damascus reflects and reinforces the social order, it has generated social conflict in Dortmund and Duisburg, Germany (Langer et al. 2011, 100–108). A same-sex wedding, depending on where it takes place, may affirm a cultural norm or challenge it (Lash 2012). Some scholars have even turned Durkheim on his head by insisting that social tension is inherent in ritual: “Ritual becomes the source of conflict precisely because it is ritual, an identity-forming activity and means of reproducing a group’s values, social structures, and habitual properties” (Langer et al. 2011, 121).
In some cases, a group may intentionally sponsor and perform rituals that lead to social confrontation. For instance, the Vishva Hindu Parisad/Hindu World Federation (VHP) organized religious processions and pilgrimages throughout India in the 1980s to unite Hindu groups and draw attention to religious sites it claimed had been commandeered by non-Hindus. Focus fell on Ayodhya, a temple town in northern India, where a mosque purportedly sat on the site of a former temple to Ram (Rama), a popular Hindu deity. VHP’s orchestration of mass rituals culminated in 1992 with the destruction of the mosque and building of a temple to Ram in its place (along with a protective wall around it) in the course of two days. Jan Platvoet sees in these events an example of a group cultivating rituals in order to mobilize allies and confront social opponents, in this case Muslims (Platvoet 1995). This example lends credence to the observation made by other scholars studying ritual conflict: “Contesting a ritual, as well as using a ritual to contest something else, are means of challenging authority, establishing agency, and negotiating power” (Langer et al. 2011, 121).
Ritual transgression, the subject of this chapter, entails conflict, contestation, and disputing identity. It belongs to the category of ritual conflict. Social context is crucial for determining when a ritual triggers conflict, as the examples of the Muslim call to prayer and same-sex wedding demonstrate. So, placing early Christian rituals in their social and historical contexts is essential for deciding when and how they were transgressive. Such contextualizing best begins with a ritual confrontation that took place in Judea in the second century bce, as it had profound implications for Judea at the time of Jesus and for the earliest Christ followers.
Situating and defining ritual transgression
Late in the year 165 (or possibly164) bce Judas Maccabeus along with his brothers and Judean followers repaired and refurbished the temple in Jerusalem and reinstated temple sacrifices to the god of Israel that had ceased several years earlier. The festivities around these events came to be known as Hanukkah, which became part of the Jewish festival calendar and is celebrated even today. The earliest sources for these events characterized the Maccabean action as more than simply rebuilding and redecorating a decayed temple and reinstituting its former rites. It also required purifying a defiled sacred place, removing an altar that been profaned, and constructing an altogether new altar that could be properly consecrated (1 Macc 4:36–58; 2 Macc 10:1–8).
What had happened to the temple that required more than its renovation? The answer revolves around Antiochus IV Epiphanes, a Greek–Macedonian king, who began his rule of Mesopotamia and the Levant (including Judea) in 175 bce. Antiochus, like his predecessors on the throne, encouraged the adoption of Greek culture as a way of uniting the various peoples and multiple ethnicities that constituted the Seleucid Empire, a successor to the enormous empire that Alexander the Great had created. Some Judean groups, especially among the Jerusalem elite, saw the advantage of cooperating with the king and established Greek institutions like a gymnasium and reorganized Jerusalem politically as a Greek city (Wills 2008, 88; 1 Macc 1:14; 2 Macc 4:9–10). But Antiochus eventually resorted to more drastic action. Rather than allowing the Judeans to adopt Greek ways gradually, he imposed them and, at the same time, banned their existing ancestral customs and practices.
Judean texts recounting this intervention paint a grim picture (1 Macc 1:20–61; 2 Macc 5:15–6:11). Not only did Antiochus loot the Jerusalem temple and its treasury, he abolished the traditional offerings and sacrifices made there. He rededicated the temple to Olympian Zeus, offering as burnt sacrifices swine and other animals Judeans regarded as unclean. From the local viewpoint, he desecrated the altar and temple. The language of “the abomination that makes desolate,” which one source used to describe these events, says it all (Dan 11:31). Antiochus also abolished other Judean practices like circumcision and Sabbath observance, threatening any who persisted in observing them with death. As a consequence, when Judas Maccabeus freed Jerusalem from Antiochus’ control, he had to do more than refurbish the temple. He had to purify it.
What triggered these drastic actions on Antiochus’ part and how best to characterize them are still debated by scholars (Grabbe 2000, 78–79; 1992, 247–56, 281–85). Surviving ancient sources labeled him eccentric (Polybius 26.1a; 26.1; Diodorus 29.32; Livy 41.20), contemptible (Dan 11:21), or sinful (1 Macc 1:10), but this hardly explains his dramatic shift in policy. Faced with an ongoing struggle with the Ptolemies, his Greek–Macedonian rivals who ruled nearby Egypt, and with rising Roman power, he needed a source of funds to support his army. Looting the Jerusalem temple and its treasury was a logical move. Once in control of the temple, he may have decided to accelerate the Hellenization of Judea that was already underway (Wills 2008, 89). It is also possible that he intervened in what amounted to a civil war between two pro-Greek Judean parties, and what was primarily a military suppression of rebellion included a clamp down on Judean religious customs and practices, that is, religious persecution (2 Macc 5:5–14; Honigman 2014, 3). The latter is certainly suggested in Judean accounts about him.
Whatever his motivation and however the actions he ordered are best described, Antiochus committed what this chapter will call ritual transgression. His interference with Judean ritual life had two aspects. He suppressed existing ritual practice at the Jerusalem temple as well as among the Judean population. This was a coerced or enforced noncompliance—transgression by failure to perform an established ritual. He also imposed a new set of rites that were transgressive in at least two ways. He redirected sacrifice away from the god of Israel to Olympian Zeus at a temple dedicated to the former, and he did so with animals, like swine, regarded as unclean or forbidden to Judeans. This form of sacrifice so deeply transgressed local norms that it required purification of the temple to counteract it.
Whether eliminating existing rites or imposing new (and in this case offensive) rites, Antiochus acted coercively. His was an assertion of power or control, and he may have felt, as colonial authorities typically do, that he was ridding a subject people of their inferior cultural practices. In contrast to these coercive examples, ritual transgression may also be voluntary. One may fail to conduct a ritual by choice, by an act of nonparticipation. Three centuries after Antiochus, for example, the Christians of Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) signaled their objection to established temple rites to the gods of Rome by neglecting to perform them (Pliny the Younger, Ep. 10.97). Likewise, one may choose to perform altered rites that violate existing ritual patterns or offend existing cultural norms. A recent example is American football player Colin Kaepernick’s sitting or kneeling—instead of standing—during the playing of the national anthem prior to games. He does so, he says, in order to protest the treatment of African-Americans in the United States (Borden 2016). In contrast to Antiochus’ ritual transgression by imposition, there is transgression by voluntary noncompliance, as these two instances show.
These various examples provide an initial profile of ritual transgression and will serve as a roadmap for the rest of the chapter. Determining the motivation for ritual transgression, which would add depth to the profile, will follow, after a survey of early Christian ritual transgression in its cultural context.
Whether voluntary or coerced, ritual transgression, especially involving taboo breaking, predictably triggers outrage and a ferocious reaction. Condemnation of Kaepernick has been widespread and vocal. In the case of Antiochus, it was certainly more than ritual transgression that sparked the Judean uprising against him known as the Maccabean revolt. He looted the Jerusalem temple, destroyed parts of the city, and slaughtered the population. Nevertheless, some Judean sources present the banning of ancestral rituals and imposition of foreign ones, that is, forced participation in sacrifice to gods other than the god of Israel, as the events that triggered the rebellion against him (1 Macc 2:15–28; Josephus, Ant. 12.268–272).
Particularly striking is the fierce resistance exhibited by a Judean scribe named Eleazar and seven unnamed brothers and their mother, presented in a narrative of questionable historicity (2 Macc 6:18–7:42). Even more fictional is a later (and much longer) version in 4 Maccabees, in which Eleazar and the family become models of the Greek virtues in resisting Antiochus (5:1–18:24). The pivotal moment in these accounts comes when Antiochus’ agents force Eleazar and the family to participate fully in the sacrifice to alien gods by having them eat sacrificial flesh, namely pork, which is forbidden according to their ancestral dietary law. The report in 4 Maccabees mentions both pork and food sacrificed to idols (eidōlothytos) as objectionable. They refuse to do so even under severe torture, and the enraged agents eventually put them all to death.
In this instance, ritual transgression, the forced eating of forbidden food, did not actually take place. Nonetheless, indignation was still the result. A contemporary example of this is the widespread protest that erupted in the Muslim world when an obscure Christian pastor in rural Florida announced plans for burning 200 copies of the Qur’an on September 11, 2010 (Ahmed 2010). While burning a Qur’an can be an acceptable and dignified way of disposing of it (Eulich 2012), for an attention-seeking Islamophobe to do so, especially on the date he proposed, would have been a transgressive version of a disposal rite. It did not matter that he did not actually carry out the burning as planned. The mere threat of it was enough to generate a powerful reaction.
The stories of heroic death in 2 and 4 Maccabees may have limited historical reliability, but they reveal much about how the Judean scribes who wrote them sought to convey the impact of Antiochus’ violent intervention in Judea. Played out on Eleazar’s and the family’s bodies was the same brutality he showed the local populace when he put down the Judean uprising, but now that intervention found vivid expression at the individual level. Eleazar and the family were metaphors for Judea as a whole. Why did the scribal imagination take this direction? A symbolic understanding of the body, anthropologist Mary Douglas maintains, is typical of human cultures: “the human body is always treated as an image of society” (1970, 70). This was the instinct behind the ancient authors’ decision to cast their narratives about Antiochus’ intervention in personal and corporeal terms.
The focal point of the brutal encounter between both Eleazar and the family and Antiochus’ agents was not their torture and deaths but their refusal to ingest sacrificial meat they regard as unclean. Why did the narrative turn on what crossed or rather might have crossed their lips? Why was this the pivotal instant and not their gruesome deaths? Again, Mary Douglas is an insightful guide. The mouth is one of several entries into the body, and attention to it or other bodily orifices signals a concern about external boundaries. Douglas notes that “Interest in [the body’s] apertures depends on the preoccupation with social exits and entrances, escape routes and invasions” (1970, 70; see also Douglas 1966, 121–23). If concern about bodily boundaries and the crossing of them reflects a larger concern about social boundaries—in this case the boundaries of the Judean body politic or people—then the cause of such preoccupation is clear: Antiochus’ intervention or invasion of Judea.
Yet Antiochus’ was only the latest in a string of incursions into Judea. From the sixth century bce on, Judea endured invasion, deportation or exile, and domination by larger, more powerful neighbors: first the Babylonians followed by the Persians. Then came Alexander and his successors, who were but another in a series of colonial powers that controlled Judea. Prior to this, Judea and the larger entity to which it belonged, Israel, had enjoyed relative independence. An army protected its borders; it was governed by kings; a monumental temple housed a well-developed cult. But that was a distant memory by the time of Antiochus:
The political, geographical, and religious boundaries that typified pre-exilic life were no longer fixed. Whatever infrastructures held communities together previously were no longer available: indigenous monarchy was a thing of the past, and the land was … a post-collapse society.
(Eskenazi 2014, 231)
There were Judeans but no longer a Judea, except as a province in an empire ruled by non-Judeans.
Shorn of borders, a king, and a temple, Judeans had to establish their identity in new ways or face extinction as a distinct ethnic group. The Persian rulers allowed the Judeans to rebuild the Jerusalem temple, and scholars consequently use the term second-temple period to refer to Judea under foreign domination. But other “criteria of unity and cohesion,” as Tamara Eskenazi calls these identity markers, had to be devised (2014, 231). A lack of geographical borders and the loss of social institutions to define the people clearly generated insecurity among Judeans, prompting a preoccupation with boundaries and thus a concern about what crossed the body’s oral boundary.
What were these new identity markers that would define Judeans and set them apart from other ethnic groups? Marking the (male) body in the ritual of circumcision became important in this period, as did Sabbath observance and participation in a series of festivals, Passover prominent among them. The Torah or first five books of what would become the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament were reaching their final form and gaining authority at this time, and they provided guidance about such rites (Neh 8–13; Grabbe 2000, 294–95; Sandgren 2010, 183). Marriage within the ethnic group (endogamy), as opposed to mixed marriage (exogamy), arose as a defensive strategy to preserve Judean identity (Ezra 9–10). A distinctive diet, normed by the Torah and concerns about ritual purity, also came into prominence, as the opening of this chapter underscores (Brumberg-Kraus, Marks, and Rosenblum 2014, 23). Deuteronomy 11 detailed what foods were clean and unclean.
The importance of diet is evident in the literature. Judean writings from this period present the reader with exemplary protagonists who, in whatever situation they found themselves, exercised extreme caution about what they ate. Often the stories were set in an imagined past, much earlier than their date of composition:
•Daniel’s high status in the Babylonian court entitled him to royal rations of food and wine, but he feared defilement from the king’s fare and opted instead for a diet of vegetables and water (Daniel 1:3–16).
•The virtuous Tobit married within his (extended) family and refused to eat the food of the Gentiles (non-Judeans) when he was forced into captivity in Assyria (Tobit 1:9–11).
•The widow Judith exploited her beauty by insinuating herself into the camp of an enemy general named Holofernes. When he attempted to seduce her by plying her with food and drink, she turned the tables and beheaded him. Before journeying to her enemy’s camp, she packed her own food and wine, so as to avoid the offence of consuming Holofernes’ delicacies and wine (Jdt 10:5; 12:1–2, 9, 19).
•Second Maccabees reports that the hero of the revolt against Antiochus, Judas Maccabeus, fled Jerusalem when the temple was desecrated not simply to avoid capture: “But Judas Maccabeus, with about nine others, got away to the wilderness … they continued to live on what grew wild, so that they might not share in the defilement” (5:27).
Judeans were negotiating their identity by what they did and did not eat; adherence to a particular diet became a key mark of distinction in the second temple period.
A preoccupation with diet was sometimes paired with concern about one’s dining companions (Rosenblum 2010, 36–45). Dining was (and is) a social event, so this linkage was predictable. Some Judean writers expressed fear of pollution not only from unclean food but also from eating with unsavory characters. In articulating why restricting one’s diet to clean animals was reasonable, the Letter of Aristeas opined that god imposed strict dietary observances in order to shield Judeans from being perverted by others (142–71). An exclusive diet would keep Judeans from joining non-Judeans at their tables and perhaps vice versa. But why would sharing a table with a non-Judean taint the Judean diner? Another second-temple writing, Jubilees, recommends such disassociation and offers a rationale:
separate yourself from the gentiles, and do not eat with them, and do not perform deeds like theirs. And do not become associates of theirs. Because their deeds are defiled, and all of their ways are contaminated, and despicable, and abominable. They slaughter their sacrifices to the dead, and to the demons they bow down. And they eat in tombs.
(22:16–17)
Ethical, religious, ritual, and dietary matters become intertwined in this justification. Inappropriate or improperly prepared food, misdirected sacrifices (meat offered to idols), or consuming food in places considered to be polluting may be at issue here—perhaps all three. Indiscriminate dining was evidently thought to open the door to all manner of impurity and corruption.
Early Christian dietary and dining transgressions
Passage after passage in early Christian writings focuses on who dines with whom, what one can eat, Sabbath observance, and circumcision. Yet rather than confirming the second temple period consensus about such issues as definitive for Judean identity,
these passages do quite the opposite. For example, in the earliest extant account of Jesus’ life, the Gospel of Mark, controversy about these very matters swirls around him. The Pharisees, a Judean party recognized for their piety, take issue with Jesus for dining indiscriminately—with sinners and tax collectors (Mark 2:15–17). Later in the same account, Jesus’ disciples are caught working (harvesting) instead of resting (as prescribed) on the Sabbath, and when Jesus defends their action, his justification includes a story about violating food restrictions (Mark 2:23–30; Collins 2014). Controversy over Sabbath observance returns shortly thereafter, when Jesus heals a person in need (Mark 3:3–6). Because these violations—all ritual transgressions—involve agreed-upon markers of Judean identity, they trigger an outrage that the gospel writer presents as the impetus for the plot against Jesus that results in his execution.
Of all these Judean identity markers, what one ate (or might eat) and with whom one ate commanded the most attention. They appear in one of the earliest New Testament documents, in which the apostle Paul responded to a query from the Christ followers in Corinth about the eating of food, probably meat, that was previously part of a sacrifice to a god or gods other than the god of Israel (eidōlothytos; 1 Corinthians 8:1). This was the kind of meat that Eleazar and the family of 4 Maccabees refused. Paul allowed it, however, at least in principle: he reasoned that since the idols one sacrificed to represented gods that did not actually exist, eating food offered to them posed no problem (1 Cor 8:4–6). Yet Paul was aware that such eating was very troubling to some at Corinth—no doubt followers of Judean extraction—so he ultimately recommended against doing so. At least, he himself would not eat meat that had been sacrificed.
Where one ate food offered to idols and what it implied came up as a related issue in Paul’s response, and he expressed concern about eating with others in a temple dedicated to a god other than the god of Israel (1 Cor 8:10). Reminiscent of the way Jubilees combined eating the wrong food and eating with the wrong people—non-Judeans—Paul cautioned the Corinthians about sharing a table with those who worshipped what amounted to false gods or demons. Shared eating or commensality implied a mutuality or partnership with nonbelievers that compromised one’s allegiance to Christ (1 Cor 10:18–22).
While in the end Paul seemed to abide by Judean food and dining prescriptions, the situation he addressed at Corinth reveals that consensus about this matter was lacking among Corinthian believers. Some of them had abandoned Judean food restrictions or did not abide by them. Their rationale for doing is reflected in what Paul wrote (1 Cor 8:4–6). And this is not an isolated instance of dietary transgression, for Paul returned to the matter later. Toward the end of his letter to Christ followers in Rome, the issue of dietary restrictions and Sabbath observance appear. Paul did not know the Roman assemblies or house churches personally, but he knew the controversies that had plagued other churches, and these were evidently two of them. There were those who did not consider Judean identity markers relevant, and thus violated dietary and Sabbath restrictions: “Some believe in eating anything” (Rom 14:1); “Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike” (14:5). Again, in principle Paul agreed with those who found all foods acceptable: “I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself” (14:14). But for the sake of community harmony he wanted to accommodate those who found some foods unclean, as he had done with the Corinthians.
Contestation over food continued long after Paul. In letters attributed to Paul, but clearly from a later period, readers or listeners are instructed not to let anyone condemn them “in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths (Col 2:16).” Another post-Pauline letter condemns those who would “demand abstinence from foods … For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected” (1 Tim 4:3–4). For the communities reflected in these letters, dietary transgression was evidently no longer an issue. Yet in documents from the same period, dietary restrictions were still in force, and violating them brought condemnation. The author of Revelation, for instance, rebukes certain Christ followers in Pergamum and Thyatira for eating food sacrificed to idols (2:14, 20), and the early Christian writing called the Didache forbids the practice (6:3). The controversy stirred by transgressing Judean dietary practices lived for several generations after Paul.
Contestation over food and dining likely went back to Jesus, as the earlier examples from the Gospel of Mark indicate. Though Mark and the other gospels were written well after the time of Jesus, their reports about Jesus’ associating and dining indiscriminately with others—the practice of open commensality—are historically reliable. Less historically certain are reports that present Jesus totally at odds with the Judean purity system (Wassen 2016). These could just as easily reflect later disputes between Christ followers and other Judean groups like the Pharisees. Mark ascribes a pronouncement to Jesus that suggests he sought to redefine the basis of Judean purity, or at least critique it, not overturn it: “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile” (7:15) This saying is rephrased a few lines later: “Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from the outside cannot defile, since it enters, not heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?” (7:18b–19b). But the parenthetical comment that follows concludes that Jesus eliminated all food restrictions: “(Thus he declared all foods clean)” (7:19b). If this interpretation of the saying, likely coming from a later time, was in force among Christ followers in the generations after Jesus, it meant their dining ritual transgressed Judean dietary prescriptions.
An even more defining moment appears in the Acts of the Apostles, the earliest extant writing about the development of the movement around Jesus after his death. Acts reports that Peter, a disciple of Jesus and leader of the movement, had a vision in which a large sheet containing all manner of livings creatures dropped down from heaven. A voice instructed Peter to kill and eat them, but he refused: “‘By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean’” (Acts 10:14). But the divine voice is insistent: “‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane’” (10:15). Peter’s resistance reflects the Judean perspective on diet: there are clean and unclean animals, and the latter are off limits. But the narrative provides divine authorization for transgressing this distinction.
This vision episode (10:9–16) is artfully inserted in the story of Cornelius, a non-Judean, who had been instructed by a vision of his own to seek out Peter and listen to his proclamation (10:1–8 and 10:17–48). Messengers from Cornelius found Peter and invited him to return with them to Cornelius, which he did. Peter agreed to visit Cornelius’ household because of his divine vision; as he said to the gathered household,
You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew [Judean] to associate with or to visit a Gentile [non-Judean]; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without objection.
(10:28–29)
With these words Peter linked the indiscriminate eating encouraged by his vision with indiscriminate association, which opened the door to recruiting non-Judeans to the circle of Christ followers. Accordingly, Peter preached to Cornelius in the narrative that follows, and he and his household became believers. A Judean logic is at work in these intertwined accounts: indiscriminate eating implies indiscriminate association and the reverse. At the same time, Judean sensibilities are offended when Peter embraces both transgressive eating and fellowship.
The narrative that follows underscores the offense that Peter’s actions generated among followers of Jesus, who in the early years were exclusively or at least largely Judean. When Peter reported the results of his encounter with Cornelius to the circle of followers in Jerusalem, those among them who were circumcised objected: “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” (11:3). This is a fitting question from a Judean viewpoint. Peter’s transgressive dining destabilized a foundation stone of Judean identity. Indignation was understandable.
Peter recounted his vision in response. In fact, he summarized the entire story about Cornelius, and doing so proved sufficient to silence those who objected to his indiscriminate dining (Acts 11:1–18). Yet the debate over what one ate, and with whom, was not so easily settled, as the evidence presented indicates. The matter may not even have been settled for Peter, whom Acts presents as having been persuaded by the divine mandate to transgress food and dining restrictions. In a report much closer to Peter’s time than Acts, he seems to vacillate. The report from Paul makes him look two-faced. In Galatians he writes,
But when Cephas [another name for Peter] came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles [non-Judeans]. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction.
(Gal 2:11–12)
Whatever one decides about the accuracy of this report—Paul was not a neutral observer—it confirms that what one ate and with whom one ate were matters of intense debate among the early Christians. The simple rituals of eating and sharing a table with others, if done in ways that transgressed accepted patterns, could and evidently did generate heated controversy, both within circles of Christ followers and between Christ followers and their fellow Judeans.
What emerges from the literary record of the early Christ followers is a continuum that ranged from continued observance of Judean dietary and dining practices to the complete abandonment of them. Paul appears sympathetic to both ends of the spectrum and found himself trying to mediate between the two. Whether his mediation was successful or not is unknown. In the case of another movement leader, Peter, there are two portraits of him: one in which he is divinely authorized to transgress Judean dietary practices and share a table with non-Judeans; and another in which he waffles between compliance with, and violation of, Judean dietary and dining practices. Widening the spectrum further is the Gospel of John, which this chapter will turn to in its closing pages. There Jesus is presented commanding the violation not just of Judean dietary prohibition, in this case consuming blood (Lev 17:10–12; Cahill 2002), but also of the most basic taboo against eating human flesh (John 6:51–59).
What motivates ritual transgression?
Given the intense indignation and resistance that ritual transgression generated, why would individuals and groups engage in it? Answering that question will add essential detail to the portrait of ritual transgression that has emerged so far. In the example of Antiochus, explored at the beginning of this chapter, his banning of Judean ancestral ritual and imposition of non-native rituals was an assertion of his power and control of Judea. At the same time, since social identity is inscribed and expressed through ritual, Antiochus’ imposition of ritual reflective of Greek culture may have been a heavy-handed attempt at Hellenizing a subject people.
Whatever his motive, this example of ritual transgression is rather different from most of the examples presented in this chapter so far, which reflect situations in which individuals or groups are not at the pinnacle of society but farther down the social order. Of particular interest are individuals or groups belonging to or constituting minority or fringe movements, because that was the social location of early Christians, whether in Judea or Roman cities. In their situation—again, unlike Antiochus’—it was not a matter of imposed ritual transgression, hence imposed identity, but rather intentional or voluntary ritual transgression. In line with the earlier observation that ritual is “an identity-forming activity” and that contesting ritual is a “means of challenging authority” (Langer et al. 2011:121), this chapter proposes that the goal of ritual transgression was (and is) either (1) to challenge existing ritual conventions and the identity or identities they support or (2) to forge and assert a new identity. In some cases, a mixture of the two aims may be at work. Several analogies to early Christian ritual transgression are worth considering as way of gauging the mixture.
Contemporary American Satanism: the Satanic Temple
Challenging existing ritual convention and belittling the attendant religious identity seems to be the primary point of contemporary performances of the Black Mass or Satanic Mass by self-identified Satanists, especially when they are publicized. While the Black Mass may be largely a literary invention or even churchly propaganda designed to stigmatize aberrant parishioners, there is consensus that it follows the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Mass but parodies it by inverting or distorting its components and features in certain ways: (1) prayers go to Satan or demons rather than God; (2) the cross or crucifix, if it is included in the ritual, is inverted; (3) the traditional elements of bread and wine are replaced by urine, feces, the blood of an infant or aborted fetus, or other repellant substances; (4) if the Satanists can obtain a consecrated host, it is defiled in the course of the ritual; (5) a naked woman serves as the altar; and (6) in order to confront and undo the repressed sexuality Satanists attribute to Christianity, the language and bodily movements of both officiates and celebrants are intentionally lascivious (LaVey 1969, 99–105; Lewis 2001, 27–29; Urban 2006, 208). The possible inversions and perversions are endless, but they all serve to mock and desecrate the traditional Roman Catholic Mass and thus offend the practitioners and custodians of it.
The Black Mass may serve other purposes as well. It may celebrate hedonism, carnality, sexuality, and the obscene (Faxneld and Petersen 2014). Medieval and early modern accounts suggest that it was used for occult or magical purposes, though such reports may be largely or entirely legendary (e.g., Introvigne 2016, 35–43; Somerset 2004). The twentieth-century occultist and self-described magician Aleister Crowley found in the Eucharistic transformation of bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood an alchemical force that could be used for cursing or enchanting people (Crowley 1976 [1929], 179–89). Still, Crowley devoted very little attention to the Black Mass in his massive study of magic—he preferred the term magick—and American Satanist Anton LaVey did not consider the Black Mass a part of Satanic ritual (La Vey 1969, 100). Contemporary performances of it are aimed primarily at offending conventional sensibilities more than anything else (Urban 2006, 191–221).
A case in point is the Black Mass that was to take place on the Harvard University campus in spring 2014. It not only stirred intense controversy on campus and attracted broad media attention but also prompted vocal opposition from local Roman Catholic officials. The sponsoring organization, the Cultural Studies Club of the Harvard Extension School, had sought to recognize little-known or minority religions by inviting groups to make presentations on campus. There was to be a Shinto tea ceremony, a Buddhist presentation on meditation, and an exhibit on the Shakers. The Satanic Temple also agreed to conduct a Black Mass (Introvigne 2016, 550–54). Public reaction to this last presentation was vocal and fierce, both on and off campus. The club defended its decision to sponsor a Black Mass on the grounds of inclusivity and free speech. University president Drew G. Faust, who felt compelled to involve her office, weighed in with a letter condemning the enactment of the Black Mass as abhorrent but permitting it as an act of free expression (Faust 2014). Catholic officials countered with a call to ban the event. Father Roger Landry of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, began his letter to President Faust bluntly: “I am writing to ask you to use your office to intervene to shut down the terribly ill-advised and totally insensitive Satanic Mass” (Landry 2014). The Archdiocese of Boston chimed in as well, stating its strong opposition to the staging of a Black Mass on the Harvard campus.
The Cultural Studies Club eventually reconsidered and withdrew its sponsorship of the mass. It was held off campus instead on the second floor of a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge’s Harvard Square. About fifty people attended. On the same night, the archdiocese held a Eucharistic procession from the MIT chapel to St. Paul’s Catholic Church near the Harvard campus, where a Eucharistic Holy Hour and Benediction took place. Fifteen hundred attended, including President Faust (Delwiche and Patel 2014).
The Boston Globe, the BBC, and other media analyzed the controversy in the days that followed and offered assessments of what motivated the Satanic Temple. The editors of the Boston Globe opined that the Satanists had baited the public and the Roman Catholic church in particular in hopes of eliciting an angry response and attracting attention to themselves (Editors of the Boston Globe 2014). BBC’s Anthony Zurcher pointed out that the Satanic Temple had been behind the plan to erect a statue of Baphomet, a goat-headed deity, next to the statue of the Ten Commandments at the Oklahoma state capitol—obviously a sensationalist ploy (Zurcher 2014). These analyses focused more on the reaction to the Black Mass than the actual performance of it, and suggest that the Satanic Temple’s primary objective was to ridicule a conventional ritual, the Roman Catholic mass, and provoke the religious institution behind it. Confirmation that the Temple’s aim is social provocation comes from another ritual it has sponsored: it has conducted so-called Pink Masses at the family graves of anti-gay Christian extremists, claiming that the ritual sexually reorients the deceased in the afterlife (Jauregui 2013).
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the nineteenth century
On the other end of the motivation scale is ritual transgression deployed and utilized to assert and forge a new identity. This is the case with plural marriage and the cluster of rituals connected with it in the early Mormon tradition. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, British and North American Christianity underwent a vigorous religious revitalization that came to be known as the second great awakening. Along with boosting church affiliation and attendance, it fostered social movements like abolitionism and groups distinguished by reformist impulses. These groups drew from various sources—Christian millenarianism, the Enlightenment, and the idiosyncratic thinking of their charismatic founder(s)—to create communities that were utopian and communalist in orientation. They freely experimented with interpersonal relations at all levels. For instance, the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, better known as the Shakers, began in the eighteenth century but reached their peak of popularity on American soil in the mid–nineteenth century. They lived collectively in settlements, embraced pacifism, empowered female leaders, and practiced celibacy (Foster 1981, 21–71).
Another group, the Oneida Community, motivated by founder John Humphrey Noyes’ belief in human perfectibility, gave up traditional households and private property in interest of an ideal communal life. Community members shed monogamous marriage and took up group or “complex” marriage, a system with multiple partners, which detractors condemned as “free love” (Kephart and Zellner 1994, 74–82; Kern 1981, 207–79). Both the Oneida Community and the Shakers (and many others) took their inspiration from the portrayal of the early church in the Acts of the Apostles as a group that pooled the resources of all its members (2:43–47; 4:32), and they took seriously the words attributed to Jesus about the next world: “‘For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven’” (Matt 22:30). If the next world did not include traditional marriage arrangements, then they were inappropriate in this life as well (Foster 1981, 72–122).
The enthusiasm of the second great awakening also fueled the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as Mormonism, and its founder, Joseph Smith, Jr. Matthew 22:30 was a key verse for Smith as well, but he took the verse in a rather different direction from his contemporaries, finding in it support for yet another experiment in family arrangements, namely plural marriage or polygamy. The ideal existence for Smith, like those in the movements just noted, was communal. He pictured the heavens populated by families whose members had been bound together by eternally valid rites. These he called sealings or ordinances, and they could reunite the living and the dead in this existence and guarantee their fellowship in the next. Smith and his followers believed that he had been specially chosen to introduce and perform such rites in the last days of human existence—the latter days. Ordinary weddings were deficient because the marriages they enacted ended at death; they lacked validity because Smith or other Mormon authorities had not performed them. True or restored marriage was for time and eternity, and only Smith and other duly authorized Saints could properly seal civil marriages in this life and eternal or celestial marriages for the next life. The latter were not only the ideal, they were “crucial for one’s place in the hereafter” (Daynes 2001, 4). For without the eternal ties to family that celestial marriage and allied sealings created, the glories of the afterlife could not be fully realized. Since, according to Jesus, there were no weddings in the afterlife, it was crucial to establish permanent wedding bonds in the here and now (Bergera 2002).
How exactly did plural marriage or polygamy figure in all this (Foster 1981, 123–80)? Smith claimed to have received a definitive revelation about the eternity of marriage on July 12, 1843 (Smith 1903 [1830], §132 [pp. 463–74]). In that same message god answered his query about the polygamy (more accurately polygyny) practiced by the patriarchs of the Old Testament: Abraham, David, and others. Just as god had given them many wives and numerous offspring, Smith would likewise be blessed: “I [God] will bless him and multiply him and give unto him an hundred-fold in this world, of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, houses and lands, wives and children, and crowns of eternal lives in the eternal worlds” (§132.55). As this last clause indicates, expanding family and family ties gave participants in plural marriage an elevated status in heaven, what Smith called exaltation, that made them godlike (§132.19–20). Smith’s thinking essentially linked marriage and family with his theology of salvation and the afterlife (Kern 1981, 144–57; Daynes 2001, 4–5).
The revelation of 1843 validated practices that Smith had already been engaged in for a decade (Brooke 1994, 209–34). In Kirtland, Ohio, where the Latter-Day Saints had established themselves after fleeing persecution in upstate New York, Smith defied local authorities by performing weddings without a license on the grounds that all existing civil marriages were invalid without his authorization. In Ohio also began a series of marriages between Smith and his female followers, so that by July 1843 Smith’s wives numbered about two dozen (Compton 1997, 2–8). While plural marriage was offensive to many in and outside the movement, including Smith’s first wife, Emma, it and other sealing rituals introduced in the early 1840s had their appeal. Baptism for the dead or proxy baptism allowed Mormons to bring deceased ancestors into the church and thus guarantee familial continuity in the afterlife. Proxy marriage allowed living Mormons to reconnect with their deceased spouse or spouses. Parents could be sealed to their children. Plural marriage established inter-family bonds. And, as noted above, celestial marriage promised that these ties would endure into the next life. Smith’s followers, those that trekked to the Salt Lake valley after his death, institutionalized these rituals, most of which have survived to today (Bergera 2002; Daynes 2001, 25–27).
It is difficult to picture the exact protocols of these various rites, with living individuals standing in for the deceased and the same person groom or bride to several others, all the more so because a secrecy attended these proceedings from the beginning and attends them still. That these rites violated the conventions of the day, however, was clear. Such ritual transgression was denounced by some within the movement, and it attracted the attention of, and triggered alarm in, non-Mormon neighbors. While it did not play a major role in prompting the persecution that drove the Mormons westward from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the isolation of what became the Utah Territory, it did provoke later confrontations between Mormons and non-Mormons and eventually prompted the intervention of the federal government (Daynes 2001, 35–36). Such ritual transgression, especially plural marriage and the polygamy it propagated, was the key identity marker of Mormons in the nineteenth century, among Mormons and non-Mormons alike.
Unlike the Satanic Temple, Joseph Smith and his followers did not adopt the practice of plural marriage simply to provoke their non-Mormon neighbors. The ritual transgression that plural marriage entailed, while it did challenge existing practices and norms, was part of Smith’s reformulation of Christianity. The novel practice was a way of framing a new identity and setting that identity off from that of non-Mormons. As such, Mormon ritual transgression was very much like that of the earliest Christ followers. Their indiscriminate table fellowship and diet distinguished them from their fellow Judeans. By engaging in transgressive dining, the early Christians were challenging the existing consensus about what marked a person as Judean. They were essentially redefining Judean identity.
As for what fostered such ritual transgression, the first Mormons and first Christians had much in common. The Latter-Day Saints, as their name implied, had an eschatological or millenarian outlook, identifying Joseph Smith as an end-time prophet bringing new revelation to prepare true believers for the Kingdom of God. This was understood variously as the restoration of an ideal past or the ingathering of believers to Zion (Underwood 1993). The approaching new age justified a radical break with the status quo, and it was incumbent upon believers to live in a way that anticipated the ideal, restored state. Likewise with the early Christ followers. There is broad scholarly consensus that an eschatological and millenarian orientation was behind much of their theology. They likely thought that their dining should mimic the great banquet promised at the culmination of human history, to which God would invite all peoples—quite indiscriminately (Isa 25:6–9).
The Islamic State
A millenarian orientation has also motivated the Islamic State, along with a strong impulse to reform Islam and return it to its perceived origins—the restoration of an idealized past. While ISIS bears the marks of a political enterprise, with the apparatus of a modern state bent on territorial expansion, it is also a religious movement (Wood 2017, 72–81). Literalist in its interpretation of the Qur’an, embracing violence as a way to purify Islam, it qualifies as a militant version of Salafism. Added to this Salafi worldview are elements from the millenarian stream of Islam, which goes back to its beginning (Cook 2002, 2). Islamic eschatology has blossomed in the last quarter century (Filiu 2011). Islamic State leaders articulate and subscribe to an end-time scenario (Cook 2002, 4–24; Cook 2005, 39, 151; McCants 2015): As the world approaches the final judgment, true Muslim warriors, i.e., ISIS fighters, are battling the secular western states, who are in league with the Antichrist (Dajjāl). Until 2016, when it was captured by anti-ISIS forces, Islamic State authorities located the final battle between good and evil, the biblical Armageddon, in the town of Dabiq, Syria. Dabiq was also the name of ISIS’s polished online magazine at the time, designed to spread its perspective and draw recruits (Wood 2017, 62).
Islamic State leaders reject modern interpretations of Islam that prohibit slavery and rely on pre-modern Islamic legislation on war and its consequences. Leaders recognize that militant jihad will produce prisoners of war who can be disposed of in four ways: execution, manumission, ransom, or enslavement (Wood 2017, 20). Options one and four were applied to the Yazidi ethnic group in 2014 when ISIS swept into northern Iraq. Since ISIS fighters regarded the Yazidi as Satan worshippers, they showed the Yazidi no quarter. They executed the ethnic group’s males and enslaved the females, who now serve as sex slaves of ISIS fighters (McCants 2015, 111–14).
The western press has seized on this vicious mistreatment of women as another example of the Islamic State’s barbaric behavior, though it is important to remember that violent exploitation of women is hardly unique to this group. ISIS authorities have justified their actions by arguing that enslavement of captive women adheres to Islamic practice. Moreover, the act of rape itself has been interpreted as a form of devotion (ibadah)—of prayer or worship (Callimachi 2015).
Rape as prayer or worship?! That this is ritual transgression there can be no doubt. Devotional rape violates every Islamic notion of what constitutes devotion or worship (Wiegers 2004). What motivates ISIS adherents, however, is less clear, although male control of the female body clearly plays a role. That ISIS offends both Muslim and western sensibilities is obvious in many things its adherents say and do, but it is possible that devotional rape is more than pure provocation. If ISIS is considered as a new religious movement—this is one way of evaluating what is arguably a hybrid phenomenon—devotional rape may belong to a cluster of rituals defining a new religious identity. It may not just be another intentional provocation or simply the brutal mistreatment of a despised enemy.
Taboo violation and identity creation
Less uncertainty about motivation attends the most shocking understanding of dining among the first Christians, namely that in Eucharistic dining participants drank the blood and ate the flesh of their leader, Jesus. In the several narratives about his last meal with the disciples, Jesus identifies the bread and wine as his body and blood and he commands that they be consumed (Mark 14:22–25; Matt 26:26–29; Luke 22:14–23). While the phrases “this is my body” and “this is my blood” can be (and have been) understood symbolically or metaphorically, the Gospel of John’s version of this language is more graphic and literal (Kobel 2011, 251–70):
The Jews [Judeans] then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.”
(John 6:52–55)
The rhetorical question that begins this quotation suggests that whoever presented Jesus in this way meant to confront and provoke. Yet taboo breaking can also reflect the assertion of a new identity (Harrill 2008, 136). When Joseph Smith linked plural marriage to salvation, he made a transgressive ritual central to Mormon identity. So, too, with earliest Christianity. If consuming Jesus was necessary for salvation, as this passage indicates, then transgressive dining was an essential part of an emerging Christian identity. This link between eating and eternal life marked the beginning of the theologizing around the meal that made it definitive for later generations of Christians. What is not to be overlooked, however, is how flagrantly transgressive this form of dining was. It was one thing to break Judean dietary law by consuming forbidden food, idol meat, or blood. But the Johannine Jesus insisted on something even more scandalous. Eucharist, according to the Gospel of John, is cannibalism (Theissen 1999, 136–37).
Even though the Johannine Jesus commanded it, Jesus’ followers did not eat him for dinner. Yet, this kind of rhetoric, even if it did not spread widely, may have attracted attention. In several cases explored in this chapter, a transgressive ritual did not have to be carried out in order for it to trigger alarm. The very threat of conducting a mass Qur’an burning or carrying out a Black Mass is enough to trigger public outrage and to stigmatize the instigators. In the case of early Christianity, by the second century ce defenders of it were facing a host of accusations: debauchery, incest, child sacrifice, and cannibalism (Justin, 1 Apol. 26; 2 Apol. 12; Tatian, Or. Graec. 25; Theophilus, Antol. 3.4, 15; Tertullian, Apol. 7–8; Nat. 1.7, 15; Minucius Felix, Oct. 9). While most of these charges can be dismissed as fabrications concocted to demonize an unpopular and legally prohibited group (McGowan 1994), which Christianity was at the time, the charge of cannibalism may not have been groundless. For the mere whiff of ritual transgression, as this chapter has shown, carries a long way.
Conclusion
Anthropologist Mary Douglas has written that, “Probably all movements of religious renewal have had in common the rejection of external forms” (1970, 52), and embryonic Christianity was no exception. This rejection came to expression variously. Constructively it meant that the earliest Christ followers freely modified existing ritual forms and developed altogether new rituals, as Chapter 9 will show. On the negative or adversarial side, it meant their violating accepted ritual patterns, along with the cultural norms supporting them, or simply not participating in them. Such violations, expressed either through noncompliance or by active departure from customary ritual protocols, this chapter considered under the rubric of ritual transgression.
This chapter also considered the motivation for ritual transgression. Understood as an embodiment of social conflict, ritual transgression expresses social protest and is a means of confronting or provoking the ruling hierarchy, power structure, or status quo. It may also reflect and enact the formation of a new cultural identity. Ritual transgression is typical of reform movements or new religious movements which are distinguished by their innovative and often socially deviant ritual practices.
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