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Christianity emerged in a world of sacrifice, not only in the wider context of the ancient Mediterranean, where offerings to the gods were a key part of almost all aspects of family and civic life, but also in earliest Christianity’s proximate context, Judaism of the Second Temple period. Surprisingly, dominant voices within Christianity eventually rejected animal sacrifice while simultaneously creating a theological discourse that presented Jesus’ death, the death of martyrs, the Eucharist, and a number of other things as “true” sacrifice (e.g. Heb 5–9; Ign. Rom. 2, 4; Iren. Haer. …