Opfer in Antiochien

The contributors to this volume illuminate the ancient discourse on sacrifice, thereby shedding light on a central facet of ancient religion and culture. With this thematic perspective, the volume combines a focus on ancient Antioch and the Syrian-Antiochian region in the period of early Christianity as well as in Late Antiquity. The contributions from ancient history, exegesis, church history, liturgical studies, and religious studies reflect the overall interdisciplinary character of the perspectives taken on the phenomenon of "sacrifice" and its very broad presence in ancient culture. With this diversity - represented by the various disciplines together with their respective methods and approaches to the topic - the intention is further to do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon, to the multifaceted nature of ancient sacrificial practice in diverse religious, cultic, and liturgical contexts, to the broad spectrum of ancient sacrificial metaphor, and to the plurality of theological and philosophical conceptualizations of sacrifice in ancient evidence. In this way, the volume also seeks to contribute to freeing the scholarly debate on sacrifice in antiquity from explanatory approaches and models that have already been criticized, particularly those that are more linear and monocausal, from whose perspective, for example, the emergence of Christianity necessarily entails an unavoidable "break" with sacrifice, or which too readily regarded the theological category of the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ - and the supposedly resulting end of the older, "traditional" sacrifice - as the apparent starting point for later historical processes and social realities.