Jesus’ Two Vegan Replacements for Animal Sacrifice. By Dr Chapman Chen

Within early Jewish-Christian theology, Jesus did not reform the sacrificial system but decisively replaced it through two bloodless rites.

First, he instituted water baptism as a substitute for animal sacrifice in matters of purification and forgiveness, explicitly rejecting cleansing by “the blood of beasts” in favour of moral and spiritual purification:- “What was wanting in the Mosaic institutions should be supplied…He should warn them by the mercy of God to cease from sacrificing…He instituted baptism by water amongst them, in which they might be absolved from all their sins on the invocation of His name, and for the future, following a perfect life, might abide in immortality, being purified not by the blood of beasts, but by the purification of the Wisdom of God” (Recognitions of Clement, Book I, Ch. XXXIX).

Second, at the Last Supper, Jesus replaced the sacrificial meal itself by offering bread and wine as non-violent substitutes for flesh and blood. When he declared, “This is my body… this is my blood,” he was not advocating literal or symbolic consumption of flesh and blood—an act strictly prohibited by Mosaic law (Lev. 17:10–14; Deut. 12:23–24)—but was speaking in accordance with Semitic idiom, designating bread and wine as functional equivalents to what sacrificial flesh and blood had previously claimed to represent. As Bruce Chilton has argued, the Eucharist originated not as a continuation of Temple sacrifice but as a ritual transformation of Jewish table-fellowship, replacing violence with shared nourishment (The Eucharist: Origins and Contemporary Understandings, 2008).  

Thus, apart from liberating the sacrificial animals from the Second Temple and denouncing it as “a den of robbers/murderers” (Mark 11:17; cf. Matthew 21:13; Luke 19:46), Jesus decisively substituted two bloodless rites for the brutal sacrificial system, affirming His fidelity to the Torah’s ethical core and to the prophetic tradition that insists God desires mercy rather than sacrifice. Equally importantly, Jesus taught that “the Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21), that believers are “children of God” (John 1:12), and that “I and the Father are ONE” (John 10:30), thereby rendering the priesthood’s role as an intermediary between people and God fundamentally redundant. Taken together, these acts and teachings directly undermined the economic, ritual, and theological authority of the chief priests, Pharisees, and scribes, helping to explain their determination to eliminate Jesus. #VeganChrist #VeganGod #VeganTheology   

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