On the Ides of March of the year 44 BCE, the dictator of Rome, Julius Caesar, was assassinated. Nobody knew whether this would reconstitute the Roman Republic of old or would only usher in a new period of civil war like the one that had devastated not only Rome and Italy but also the provinces for many decades before Caesar's ascendancy to sole power.

When Peri Pascha 96–97 proclaims, “The God has been murdered; the King of Israel has been put to death by an Israelite right hand” ( θες πεϕόνευταιׁ βασιλεὺςτο ᾽Ισραλ νῄρηται ὑπ δεξις ᾽Ισραηλίτιδος), along with similar accusations, the author is said to reflect the very worst in early Christian reactions to, or jealousy of, contemporary Jews. Moreover, because this homily is commonly attributed to Melito, a second-century Quartodeciman bishop of Sardis, its anti-Jewish remarks are also frequently discussed from this perspective. In this article, I call both of these lines of interpretation into question and offer an alternative.

Sigmund Freud speaks of three offenses against the human love of self. The first blow is “cosmological” and is associated with the name Copernicus. The second blow is “biological” and conjures up the name Darwin. Freud himself performs the “psychological blow,” which is directed at human narcissism. This “psychological blow” follows from the fact that “mental processes are in themselves unconscious and only reach the ego and come under its control through incomplete and untrustworthy perceptions.” These discoveries “amount to a statement that the ego is not master in its own house.”

The preponderance of pain in human life ranks among the central problems for religious thought around the world. The problem of suffering, as it is often called, has been a compelling reason for abandoning faith. Given the depth of the dilemma that raw and inexplicable pain poses, it is surprising how pervasive voluntary pain has been among the religions of the world. Ascetics, mystics, and martyrs have sought and applied pain—in rites of passage (ordeals) and other forms of initiation—in the service of religious inquisitions (including trials by ordeal), execution of heretics and witches, and others. And of course, none of these has been limited by geographic location or historic time. What is the role of voluntary (“sacred”) pain in human religious life? Is there a single theory that can explain, for instance, the initiatory ordeals of new shamans and Sufi mystics?