Sacrifice dominated the religious landscape of the ancient Mediterranean world for millennia, but its role and meaning changed dramatically in the fourth and fifth centuries with the rise of Christianity. Daniel Ullucci offers a new explanation of this remarkable transformation, in the process demonstrating the complexity of the concept of sacrifice in Roman, Greek, and Jewish religion.

The Christian Rejection of Animal Sacrifice challenges the predominant scholarly model, which posits a connection between so-called critiques of sacrifice in non-Christian Greek, Latin, and Hebrew texts...