The greatest challenge that all of us face is trying to understand the thought-world of ancient people. For example, Aristotle famously characterized vegetative life as having a vegetative soul; animal life, an animal soul; and human life, a distinctively human soul. For Aristotle, we humans are rational animals, and our distinctively human soul is the rational soul. For Aristotle, the soul is the life-form or life-force. The Greek word that is rendered in English as "soul" can be transliterated into our alphabet as either "psuche" or "psyche." When we die, our body becomes a corpse (i.e., a body without a soul). In a similar way, vegetative life ends when the vegetative soul leaves the plant. And mutatis mutandis, the animal dies when the animal soul leaves the animal. These points are straightforward enough for us to understand Aristotle's thought about the soul.
But can we understand the thought-world of ancient peoples who did not have Aristotle's conceptual construct of the soul to work with? Ancient people understood that plants died at harvest time and that animals died when they were slaughtered for food for human consumption and that human animals died when they were killed in battle, for example, or died from natural causes (in which cases ancient Greeks, for example, thought of the people as being killed by unseen arrows from a god or goddess). In connection with the obvious loss of plant, animal, and human life, ancient peoples established ritual ways to commemorate such events. Because they associated both life and death as coming from gods and goddesses, their rituals involved gods and goddesses. Their rituals at harvest time involved giving thanks to the relevant gods and goddesses. When animals were slaughtered for food, their rituals for slaughtering and butchering the animals also involved giving thanks to the relevant gods and goddesses for the lives of the slaughtered animals.
In the monotheistic tradition of the ancient Hebrews, we find comparable rituals giving thanks to the monotheistic God for the harvest and for the animals slaughtered for food. In his book WHO WROTE THE BIBLE? (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), the Jewish biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman explains the role of animal sacrifice in the ancient Hebrew tradition: "The function of sacrifice is one of the most misunderstood matters in the Bible. Modern readers often take it to mean the unnecessary taking of animal life, or they believe that the person who offered the sacrifice was giving up something of his or her own in order to compensate for some sin or perhaps to win God's favor. In the biblical world, however, the most common type of sacrifice was for MEALS. The apparent rationale was that if humans wanted to eat meat they had to recognize that they were taking life. They could not regard this as an ordinary act of daily secular life. It was a sacred act, to be performed in a prescribed manner, by an appointed person (a priest), at an altar. A portion of the sacrifice (a tithe) was given to the priest. This applied to all meat meals (but not to fish or fowl)" (pages 91-92; emphasis in the original).
Crossan says, "In the Jewish tradition, for example, a valuable animal could be offered to God as a gift. It was totally consumed by fire and thus "made sacred' as a holocaust. Alternatively, the animal could be offered to God and then returned to the offerers after having been "made sacred' [i.e., through the ritual offering of the animal to God and through the ritual burning of the non-edible parts of the animal]. They could feast on the holy food with their God" (page 110).
In this way, Crossan establishes that sacrifices for ancient Hebrews involved their sense of distributive justice. Their monotheistic God was understood to be the life-giving source and benefactor. Their rituals were ways for them to acknowledge that they had received something and that they themselves were not the source of what they had received. Their sense of reciprocity and giving thanks through their rituals fits into the sense of distributive justice that Crossan wants to emphasize in this book.
As the followers of the historical Jesus reflected on his death after his execution, they came to understand his death as a kind of sacrifice, in which he gave up his life. In their thought-world, his life had come from God and in his death, he was understood to have returned his life to God. But centuries later, Christians made Jesus's death sound like retributive justice by saying that he had died for the sins of the world. But had he? What would happen if we were to reject their interpretation of his death? Such a rejection would involve rejecting retributive justice as the supposed explanation of why he had died.
RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE VERSUS DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE
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