Animals, Gods and Humans - Chapter 8

8 THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE LAMB OF GOD Judaism and Christianity There was no single Christian view of animals in antiquity, and no single view of animals in the New Testament. None of the New Testament texts make animals a special issue, and no systematic theology of animals can be deduced directly from these texts. However, even if none of the New Testament texts treat animals as a specific issue, many of them reflect atti-tudes towards animals more indirectly. The aim of this chapter is to survey attitudes to animals in the New Testament. Let us start with the Jewish background. In the earliest form of Christianity, there was some continuation of Jewish tradition at the same time as Christians used animals as cultural and religious markers in the process of separating themselves from Judaism. The different New Testament genres reflect various perspectives on animals. In the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, animals are part of the natural environment and frequently used in parables; in the letters of Paul, animals appear only sporadically and are described more negatively, while in the Revelation of John, fantastic animals are included in the rich imagery of apocalypse. These animals are, except for the slaughtered lamb, used mainly to describe destructive forces. Christianity started out as a Jewish sect and took much of its outlook on the world from Judaism. The close connection between the two religions is to be seen among other things in the fact that the Septuagint was the canon-ical text for Christians in the first century and that the Jewish Bible was later made part of the Christian canon. It is safe to say that Jewish traditions about animals formed the background to most conceptions of animals in the New Testament. Some of these conceptions continued to be meaningful to Christians, some were rejected, and others were developed in new directions. Crucial texts about animals are found in Genesis. Here God created animals directly, on the fifth and sixth days of creation, without any inter-mediaries (Genesis 1:20–5; cf. 2:19), placed the natural world under human dominion (Genesis 1:26–8), and let Adam give names to the 161 THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE LAMB OF GOD animals and thus made him their lord (Genesis 2:19–20). In this way, a distinct hierarchy of being was established between man and animals. None of the animals is Adam’s partner, and only man was made in the image of God: So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living crea-ture, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. (Genesis 2:19–20) After the flood, God strengthened the position of man and weakened that of the beasts by allowing Noah and his sons to eat their meat: The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are deliv-ered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. (Genesis 9:2–3) Although it was presupposed that humans bore responsibilities towards animals and that they should be treated well because they were part of God’s creation, animals were more like slaves than partners to man. Normally, animals have neither personality nor human voice in the Old Testament. There are two exceptions: the serpent that talked to Adam and Eve from the Tree of Knowledge (Genesis 3:1–15), and the ass of Balaam (Numbers 22:21–35). Both were taken into Christian tradition, although while the serpent was given a prominent place in the Christian world view, Balaam’s ass remains more of a curiosity.1 By being characterized as “more crafty than any other wild animal” (Genesis 3:1), the serpent is explicitly labelled as a beast – although admit-tedly a unique one. But the serpent does not behave like an ordinary animal: it has the power of speech and an agenda of its own. Not until it is cursed by God is it finally reduced to an ordinary snake: “Because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life” (Genesis 3:14). But since the serpent, when it is cursed, is simultaneously character-ized as the eternal enemy of man, an evil quality is for ever attached to it: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel” (Genesis 3:15). The evil nature of the snake was developed in Christian tradition, and 162 THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE LAMB OF GOD this animal became theologically important because it was associated with the Devil. Either this association was viewed literally, which made the snake as such demonic, or the creature was conceived of as a demonic entity that had little or nothing to do with its zoological origin (cf. Grant 1999: 4–5). The serpent of Genesis also developed a profound “theriological” impor-tance, i.e. an importance for the concept of animals as such, because it sometimes functioned as a prototype for other animals. This is connected to the way the Paradise narrative itself was read as a key scenario in Christianity. According to this narrative, at the beginning of time there were three main types of protagonist, who represented the divine, the human and the animal respectively – God, Adam and Eve, and the serpent. Because the serpent appears as the only powerful representative of the animal world, it became a representative of all animals, which implies that its antagonistic and demonic quality had the potential to infect other animals as well. The evil nature of the archetypal snake rubbed off, as it were, on snakes, often on wild animals, and sometimes even on the animal world in general. In the New Testament, the demonic and antagonistic qual-ities of beasts were developed especially in the Revelation of John, where satanic forces are described as monstrous animals (see below). While the serpent was originally an individual in its own right, the second example of a speaking animal in the Bible, Balaam’s ass, was an instrument of God that clearly rose to the occasion (Numbers 22:21–35; cf. II Peter 2:15ff). This ass was able to perceive the angel who was sent as a messenger of God, while Balaam was not. The ass refused to proceed further when it saw the angel and was beaten three times by its owner. Then the ass was given human voice by the angel and used its voice to rebuke Balaam. Only then did Balaam see the angel of God. This story has the character of a fable – all the same, this ass bothered Jewish exegetes: what happened to it afterwards? To have a talking animal roaming about at liberty nullified the God-given distinction between animals and humans. Numbers Rabbah solves the problem by making the ass die immediately after its appearance so that it should not be made an object of reverence (Numbers Rabbah, 20:4; cf. Matthews 1999: 224). Balaam’s ass had clearly been no more than an instant device for promoting the will of God, and it was not allowed to function as a prototype for other asses or domestic animals. A significant form of animal spectacle in the Bible is placed at the end of time. This spectacle is of two kinds: eschatological and apocalyptic. Eschatological peace is characterized by friendly cohabitation between wild and tame animals: “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent – its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord” (Isaiah 65:25; cf. Isaiah 11:6–9; Hosea 2:18). In later Jewish and Christian tradition, the animals that appear at the end of time were sometimes even said to regain the power of speech. According to legend, they had lost this ability after the 163 THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE LAMB OF GOD creation because of the sin of man (The Acts of Philip, 301, note 2). These eschatological creatures belong to real animal species. Different from them were the fantastic beasts that were intended to symbolize the cataclysmic happenings at the end of time (Daniel 7; I Enoch 85–90). Such monstrous creatures were the stock-in-trade of Jewish and Christian apocalypses and part of a polarized cosmos. The serpent of Genesis, the ass of Balaam and the eschatological animals in rabbinical tradition that would eventually regain their voices at the end of time demonstrate that ordinary animals are inferior to humans because they do not have the gift of language. But as these creatures also show that animals are not necessarily bound to be without language for ever, their presence reveals a more optimistic attitude to the abilities of animals than that which was expressed by the Stoics and later by Christians. According to rabbinical tradition, animals had an unrealized potential for language and reason. Apart from eschatological animals, apocalyptic beasts and the rare talking creatures, the most important animals in the biblical world were those that, like most animals in the Graeco-Roman world, served as sacrifice and food. Both small and large cattle were slaughtered in the Jewish sacrificial cult (Borowski 1998: 18–21), which was carried out for a number of reasons: to give thanks, to accompany prayers, and to obtain forgiveness and reconcilia-tion. In Judaism, the attitude to animals was regulated by means of cultic dietary laws (kasrut) (Leviticus 11; Deuteronomy 14). These laws were based on how animals were designed and how they behaved, and they not only pertained to which species of animals could legally be eaten but also deter-mined basically how these animals were viewed. Cultic dietary laws are not solely to do with eating – they are part of a total conception of the world. These laws impose structure on the animal world and make it reflect the human conception of the world so that it becomes visible and palpable. In Judaism, the animals that were allowed as food were those with split hooves that chew the cud. This description effectively excludes the pig, which was the archetype of an unclean animal. If sea creatures were to be eaten, they had to have fins and scales. In addition, the dietary laws included a general prohibition against blood consumption. These laws were an impor-tant part of Jewish self-definition. By keeping to them, the Jews preserved their holiness and separated themselves from all other people. The deeper meaning of the dietary laws has been debated since ancient times. Speculations have ranged from medical arguments to allegorical interpreta-tion, and the modern debate has offered symbolic as well as materialistic theories (Garnsey 1999: 91–5). Walter Houston has convincingly argued that the criteria for permitted food in Leviticus 11 should be seen as deriving from the characteristics of known and accepted food: what one already ate determined what should be eaten. It was also a general tendency to restrict people’s meat consumption to the types of animal that were sacri- 164 THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE LAMB OF GOD ficed. Intrinsic to the dietary laws was a separation between wild animals and domestic animals, and while some animals such as deer and gazelles were conceived of as a form of “honorary cattle”, domestic animals such as dogs and pigs were associated with wild animals, probably because of their diet, and therefore regarded as unclean (Houston 1998). As our subject is the attitude to animals in the New Testament, the reason why the Jews had dietary proscriptions is not as important as how Christians reacted to these proscriptions. What is especially interesting about the Christian reaction is that at the same time as the dietary proscriptions are made irrelevant, animals also fade out of focus and are less relevant in Christianity than they had been and continued to be in Judaism. The cultic dietary laws ensured that a cultural and religious focus on animals was continued. Although the Christians took over general Jewish attitudes towards animals, they split with Judaism over their attitude towards the dietary laws. Dietary laws were clearly an issue in the early relationship between representatives of the two religions and concerned the important question of giving Gentiles access to salvation (Mark 7:19; Acts 15:1–29; Galatians 2:11–14). This subject is most vividly described in Acts. The apostle Peter had been accused of eating with those who were uncircumcised and promptly received a vision to put things right: . . . he [Peter] fell into a trance. He saw the heaven opened and something like a large sheet coming down, being lowered to the ground by its four corners. In it were all kinds of four-footed crea-tures and reptiles and birds of the air. Then he heard a voice saying, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat”. But Peter said, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten any thing that is profane or unclean”. The voice said to him again, a second time, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane”. This happened three times, and the thing was suddenly taken up to heaven. (Acts 10:10–16; cf. 11:5–10) The significance of this vision is revealed by Peter being shown the animals thrice and also by the author of Acts recounting the same episode twice. The main point of the story was to show that the wiping out of differences between the animal species was parallel to the way in which the distinctions between Jews and Gentiles had been wiped out. These words are the converse of God’s words in Leviticus 20:24–5: “I have separated you from the peoples. You shall therefore make a distinction between the clean animal and the unclean, and between the unclean bird and the clean; you shall not bring abomination on yourselves by animal or by bird or by anything with which the ground teems, which I have set apart for you to hold unclean” (cf. Houston 1998: 18–19). The vision gave a simple solution to the problem of the admission of Gentiles into the Church and table fellowship with Gentiles.2 But it is also important 165 ... - tailieumienphi.vn