Bloody Christians

Rabbinic Judaism, Stephen Geller suggests, is the “triumph of Deuteronomy and the Word.”

After the fall of the temple especially, the place of the cult was taken by prayer and the liturgy. The literary temple became far more important than any possible future building. And with the end of the temple system, Judaism lost interest in blood: “As a religion, it abhors blood” (121).

He adds the arresting point that the bloodiness of the temple system found more of a home in the “unbloody” life of the Christian church than in Judaism: “Christianity did take up some of P’s central concerns, placing sacrifice and blood in a central theological position, albeit with much reinterpretation. Messianism is alien to P; but the redeeming blood of the Lamb, the wine of the Eucharist, which miraculously becomes the blood of God, the blood of the New Covenant?all these give to Christianity an involvement with blood alien to Judaism” (121).

He hints that Christian worship and theology has more continuity with Leviticus than Jewish. 

Geller, “Blood Cult: Toward a Literary Theology of the Priestly Work of the Pentateuch,” Prooftexts 12 (1992) 97-124.