RT Article
T1 The Smell of Sacrifice: Scenting the Christian Story in Luke-Acts
JF The catholic biblical quarterly
VO 83
IS 2
SP 257
OP 275
A1 Wilson, Brittany E.
LA English
PB Catholic Biblical Association of America
YR 2021
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1753286697
AB This article aims to contribute to the growing body of literature on the role of smell and the senses in early Christianity by attending to the intersections of smell and sacrifice in Luke-Acts. Luke depicts people participating in the Jewish sacrificial cult at various points in his two-volume work, but there are two key occasions—first in Luke 1 and again in Acts 10—where he specifically evokes the smells of the Jewish sacrificial cult. By evoking the sense of smell, Luke heightens the connection between these two passages and enables us to perceive how Luke situates key transitions in his narrative in relation to Jewish sacrifice. At both the start of his story (Luke 1) and at the conversion of the first gentile (Acts 10), Luke walks a fine line between continuity and discontinuity with respect to how he understands the early Christian movement in relation to Jewish sacrificial praxis. He disrupts the traditional Jewish sacrificial system in various ways, but this disruption finds consonance with other depictions of sacrifice in Jewish circles. Indeed, Luke’s stimulation of our olfactory imagination relies mainly on Jewish understandings of sacrifice during the Greco-Roman period, and it grounds key elements of the Christian story in sacrificial terms.
K1 Acts 10
K1 Luke 1
K1 New Testament
K1 House
K1 Sacrifice
K1 Senses
K1 Smell
K1 Temple
DO 10.1353/cbq.2021.0048