Drawing on the work of James Scott, Richard Horsley ( Jesus in Context: Power, People, and Perfomance ) offers this remarkable description of first-century temple worship: “The ideology of the Temple and high priesthood, both being institutions of venerable antiquity, aimed to symbolize that these institutions ruled on behalf of the people, ensuring God’s favor and blessings. By performing rituals and symbolic ideology as grand ceremony in the awesomely constructed sacred space at the center and height of the capital city, ceremony that only they were qualified to conduct, the priestly aristocracy (in collaboration with Herodian and Roman rulers) controlled public discourse. Anything else was defined as dangerous riot by the urban rabble or pilgrim mob . . . .

“Rituals performed in such an awesome setting exclusively by those set apart by hereditary rank and special codes of purity were performed to bolster the priestly aristocracy’s own self-image as powerful and justified in their positions of dominance. They served to create the appearance of unity among themselves and of consent among the ordinary Jerusalemites who serves the hierocratic apparatus and its operation in one capacity or another, as well as among the Judean peasants who supported the whole with their tithes and offerings. Sacrifices and service at the altar and in the holy of holies vividly illustrate Scott’s comment that at points ‘the show is all actors and no audience.’ The priests were literally ‘consumers of their own performance,’ including, at the material as well as symbolic level, the choicest portions of the animals sacrificed on the altar. The purpose of all the ceremony, suggests Scott, would have been primarily for the priestly aristocracy ‘to buck up their courage, improve their cohesion, display their power, and convince themselves anew of their high moral purpose, or in this case their divinely instituted role in channeling blessings to the people and land.”

I’m no defender of the first-century priestly aristocracy, but, wow! This seems to cast suspicion on ritual as such, at least on any ritual that surpasses an undefined bar of grandeur, even if the grandeur is grandeur that God Himself instituted (which Scott surely doesn’t believe, and Horsley may not). The only sort of ritual that would pass the implicit test here is an egalitarian, democratic low-church communion, where everyone gets the same thing at the same time and where “impressiveness” and “awesome construction” are assiduously avoided.

There’s an implicit Anabaptist ritual aesthetic here, and that suggests that Horsley has not ventured as far from liberal scholarship as he claims. As HG Reventlow showed in his wonderful The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World , critical biblical scholarship arises in the more radical branches of the Reformation, and is animated by hostility to ritual.