The following essay attempts to delve as deeply as is possible in this format into the problems of Christ's torture, crucifixion and his commands to eat his flesh and blood. While the essay is, essentially, literary—dealing with the topics from the point of view that they are stories and not obligatory to believe—it might be offensive to sensitive readers. Caution is advised.
My mother, a dyed-in-the-wool evangelical Christian, believed that Catholics were idolaters. This was because of all those statues of Mary, of the saints, of Christ himself, that were to be found around their places of worship. Most offensive to her was the crucifix. The image, either carved or painted, of Christ on the cross, she said, was too real. Of course, as an adult, I understand the irony of this sentiment, but as a child, I accepted this wisdom, mainly because the images of Christ that I had seen were of a kindly, benevolent man in crimson or purple and white robes, usually knocking at a door or walking on the beach, holding a lamb or cuddling some children around him. He was always alive in these images, and one of the joyously proclaimed greetings of the Easter holiday in our evangelical church was, "He lives!".
When I converted to Catholicism as an adult, I was shown a much more gruesome version of a Christ who wore thorny crowns, laid as a corpse across the lap of his mother and bowed beneath the splintered weight of his cross. Nails, hammers, whips, rods, spears and blood were everywhere. The stations of the cross, a type of litany wherein one prays upon their rosary as the crucifixion story is recounted, and often represented in twelve iconic frames around a church sanctuary, shows every stage of his torture and death often in ghastly detail.
In either half of the schism of Christianity, though, two aspects of Christ's death are essential to the lore of the faith. First, his command to his disciples to eat his flesh and drink his blood and the agony and death—sometimes called his passion—on the cross. Evangelicals and Catholics may celebrate these parts of scripture in different ways, but they are nonetheless required for the believer and questioning the essential storylines is considered heresy of the first water.
The reason that so many people on both sides believe these and many other stories is because they are told to children beginning from our earliest days. And like the tautological fallacy of the self-referencing book within which the stories are cataloged, we are expected to take them at face value. Believers are also forbidden to challenge or seek motivations. These stories are true and we are obliged to accept them as the unshakable foundations of our faith.
If, like is the case for most of us after we deconvert from religious belief, we are able to classify these claims beside the claims of other faiths and myths, we would see many parallels and perhaps understand what they mean in the larger context within the pantheon of human history and mythology. Such comparison is taboo. Christianity refers claims made in the scriptures either to other scriptures or to the clergy who take their authority, ultimately, from the Bible.
The first and probably the most incoherent example takes place the evening before the crucifixion. Before Jesus is taken into custody, a deeply weird command is issued. He is having a Passover seder dinner with his disciples and he takes some unleavened bread and makes the proclamation that the bread is his flesh and that the wine they are drinking is his blood. Catholics and evangelicals both take the request by Christ as an order, though they differ on the seriousness of the literal command. Theologians on both sides, for example, have debated whether the drink he refers to was wine or grape juice. Evangelicals tend to use grape juice. Un-ironically Catholics use kosher wine. They have also done the really serious work of constructing a mysterious means by which the Eucharist actually becomes the body and blood of Christ through the faith and dedication of the priest and his parishioners.
I have never understood this lapse into theophagy (the belief that one must eat their deity in order to gain its powers). There are plenty of examples of myth requiring the dining upon the flesh of gods, but one fails to see why Jesus took this particular tack. The most pointed question to ask seems to be whether he (or the writers of the gospels) knew about those other examples. Cannibalism is a perennial problem throughout history; anthropologists believe that humans were cannibalistic until fairly recently in our roughly 150 thousand year history. We might, if we could expect objectivity in these tales, think this would be the one really dubious part of the entire New Testament. Instead, we are encouraged to dive in and take it on faith.
Catholic belief is perhaps the most bizarrely affectionate to the idea. They take the Eucharist at least once a week and believe in the transubstantiation of the 'species' (bread and wine) into actual literal flesh and blood. Children and new converts have to go through the Rites of Christian Initiation to be able to take in the Eucharist, where all the mythological traditions are explained and defined, even if they make no more sense. By comparison, the evangelical and Protestant variant of the celebration is deeply symbolic but not so literal. To them communion is a metaphor for the obedience of Christ's last command to his followers, but it is no less an example of theophagy.
The Eucharist is assumed to be part and parcel with the crucifixion in the Easter celebration but the adults in church don't really explain it to children in a way that reveals the horror of eating Jesus' body. Likewise, the brutality of the torture and execution of Christ are, essentially, passed over until we are adults. All we know is that they are both required for our salvation. It is by these events that we are provided with remission of the sin that we are born with. Sin, it must be added, that makes us culpable in every way for the torture and death of Christ. Ignoring the mental gymnastics necessary in order to choose to believe that we are responsible for the crucifixion that happened two millennia before we were born, we must again accept all of this unquestioningly as a manifestation of our faith.
In modern terms, no retelling quite captures the real brutality of what is supposed to have happened at the crucifixion than Mel Gibson's cinematic nightmare gore fest, The Passion of the Christ. In this gut-churning, sanguinary rendition, no matter is skipped over. We are shown a very white Anglo-Saxon Jesus being beaten and tortured and then, at length, dying on the cross. A film of this nature might be quietly ignored—relegated to the awful file of other such gore-for-gore's sake horror movies—save that both Catholic and Evangelical churches effused over this celebration of masochism and encouraged all believers to watch it. I assume the motivation was to make people feel dirtied up with our own supposed complicity, but in reality, I think it was to show solidarity with the arresting antisemitism of Gibson's own variant of Catholicism, which is on full display throughout the film.
Nevertheless, the movie captures nicely (a term I use advisedly) just how intensely sadistic the main story of Christianity actually is. I totally get my mother's revulsion with the crucifix. It is incredibly hard to take when one fully considers the awfulness of death by crucifixion after torture. Yet, even evangelicals keep crosses on their necks, and have them adorning their church buildings. A commentator once pointed out that, had Christ existed and been killed in the time of the French Revolution (overlooking the existence of seas of valuable historical data there would be that we currently lack for the actual existence of Christ outside the Bible) we would adorn our places of worship and our necks with the guillotine rather than the cross.
All of this is not so unusual when one considers other parts of religious mythology. The Mayans sacrificed a human daily because they feared the sun wouldn't rise otherwise. The pages of Germanic and Celtic mythology are spattered with blood. The Parthenon in Athens shows relief carvings of what may very well be human sacrifice to Athena. The darkness of human history is drowning in the blood of the innocent. It is likely, however, that only Christianity insists that one believe fully the disjointed representations provided to us in the Gospels now while in the full light of modernity.
It is a mistake to look for consistency in belief systems. Literary consistency is achieved by a willing suspension of disbelief and, one assumes, revulsion. The robust and arrestingly detailed theologies of both sides of the Christian coin encourage the participation in digesting real or metaphorical flesh and blood, as well as the violent lurch into pornographic torture and murder via crucifixion. It might be somewhat understandable, accepting as we must, our blood soaked history, but that we must pretend to be complicit and then partake in the meantime of the body and blood of Christ to pay for sin laid on us from before we were born ought to be enough to make the whole story grounds for disgust and subsequent disregard. The entire story is a series of more and more unbelievable and insupportable hoops we must jump through; the less actual thought put to these requirements for belief the easier they are to believe.
At the climax of JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, when Frodo is about to destroy the One Ring, he suddenly and defiantly puts it on and disappears. Gollum springs from the shadows and jumps on Frodo, biting off his finger. Gollum spits out the finger and cavorts with his precious ring for a moment before plunging into the magma in the heart of Mount Doom and ending the Ring and the rule of evil forever. After the Ring is destroyed, Frodo recognizes his folly and, relieved of the burden of it and mortally wounded, prepares to die. It is a lovely literary moment of weakness and redemption and we might understand if some people take Tolkien's tales as literal history (the proof that these things actually happened is no more reasonable or forthcoming than the claims in the Bible, excepting perhaps, actual real life places in the latter). If the beliefs required those followers of the story to bite off a finger of their friend and throw a golden ring into molten stone once a year before sacrificing themselves in fire, we might look askance.
People can believe what they choose. We might even accept it when two branches debate the merits between literal and metaphorical finger biting and ring destroying. Believers would wear rings hung on chains about their neck, proudly displaying their missing finger. If all these Frodoites used their motivations to torture and kill those who didn't adopt their beliefs, we would be sure to put the belief system down quickly, not that any serious people would allow things to get that far. Teaching these ideas as real to children, however, would be completely unacceptable and it would be prevented.
And yet, Christianity has done this. For two-thousand years, it has used the stories of Christ's Eucharist and crucifixion to justify slavery, torture, murder, martyrdom and alarming bigotry and has done it by foisting these horrid myths on children with promises of fiery torture after death if one refuses to accept and believe. We tend to ignore this, preferring to believe that Christ's sacrifice is the ultimate act of love, but the burden of the expectations of otherwise unconscionable violence and bleak cannibalistic requirements are too high for a reasonable and rational person to accept, even if those requirements are couched as metaphorical.
Christianity in its modern forms can be totally rational. We may overlook the dark and bizarre tales from ancient times and apply the Sermon on the Mount, the Golden Rule to our own lives. But, again, for true believers, one cannot pick and choose. The Bible makes clear—and so do those that believe it—that, unless you believe the entire thing, it isn't a real belief. Ignoring for the moment the pervasive example of thoughtcrime here (religious belief shares deeply with the totalitarian impulse) we could be happy to allow grown ups to believe whatever they want.
We're constantly at war with ideologies that seek to divide, to harm, to corrupt. Christianity could reasonably align itself with the humanistic and noble motivations and in some cases it has, but in those cases it has had to try to reconcile the worst parts of itself and its long and bloody history with a more beneficent experience in the modern world. One cannot remove the mainspring of the story of salvation and still demand belief in a morally dubious tale. It might be a worthy conversation to have to rescue the best and most benevolent parts of the Bible even despite the total lack of historical evidence for Jesus and almost all aspects of his story arc. As is put so well in the lyrics to the song "Heaven on Their Minds" from the stage show opera Jesus Christ Superstar, "if you strip the myth away from the man," but until all of Christendom stops its addiction to strange, disturbing and horrifying obligations to cannibalism and torture in the myths, it fully deserves our criticism and our derision.
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