Except the Eucharist is a ceremony with a fairly peaceable tone. The narrative of the killing of Jesus, on the other hand, wd tend to rage, tho less so in the synoptic Gospels, perhaps.
Eucharist may be intended to channel concepts of blood, etc., in a peaceable direction. Tho not to equate, something similar perhaps in rumination upon the Temple service that existed before AD 70, involving dashing the blood of bulls, sheep, and chickens.
The typical, seemingly-inordinate panic that parents feel when their small children go missing is a large part of this. Today that panic is exploited routinely, tho more with regard to sexual abuse than killing, in order to curtail civil liberties in the West.
In those days this panic was directed at those bearded foreigners w/strange practices. Jews and Muslims less different in style, so less foreignness. But in creation of a-Dura et al. as secular martyrs, the PLO and al-Jazeera are similarly playing on this emotion, esp w/in the Muslim world. |
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