As a way of working out and consolidating one's religious identity, the whole-sale slaughter of people (whether in herem, crusade, or jihad) is exactly what it seems to be, no more and no less. The pressure that builds up naturally in the idea of election is here unleashed, and the idea is given its fullest expression. The Conquest tradition is the primary expression and fulfillment of the idea—the Urtext. The biblical idea of election is the ultimate anti-humanistic idea.Jeremy Cott, “The Biblical Problem of Election,” JES 21 (Spring 1984) 199–228, at 204. Thus did Jeremy Cott, in an article published nearly two decades ago, starkly pose the dilemma faced by anyone who seeks to use the Bible as a moral and spiritual guide today. How can one possibly maintain that the conquest tradition, which relates that God called for the annihilation of every Canaanite man, woman, and child, is an authoritative part of Scripture on a par with other items such as the Ten Commandments or the story of the exodus? The logic behind Cott's statement, at first blush, seems quite compelling. Its central premise, which almost all contemporary theologians and biblical scholars would endorse, is that genocide is morally wrong and could not be a practice decreed by God. Furthermore, the command to commit genocide appears to conflict with other basic biblical concepts, innocent along with the guilty.

The Mashafa dorho, or Book of the Cock, is an apocryphal passion narrative that survives in an Ethiopic () version, which in turn has clearly been translated from an Arabic Vorlage. The anonymous author describes it as an oral teaching (the terms are dersān, “homily, discourse,” and temhert, “doctrine, instruction”) that he or she received from the apostles themselves. One of the author's main concerns is to relate “in detail” (4:18) “all that has happened” to Jesus (4:8). At the end of the narrative, the author acknowledges his or her debt to John the Evangelist, who was—“in tension with, yet finally in harmony with Peter”—one of the foremost eyewitnesses to the events of the passion. Although a fragment of the Book of the Cock has long been known to Western scholars, and the entire work enjoys to this day a privileged place in the liturgy of the Ethiopian church, the antiquity of the traditions that it preserves has not been recognized; hence the claim to have “newly discovered” an apocryphal text, the origins of which lie in the fifth or sixth century C.E.

Although few Christians were likely to suffer the most violent consequences of persecution under the Roman Empire, the experiences of those imprisoned, tortured, or killed were significant far beyond the lives of the individuals concerned. These living martyrs took on a significance that was important for the whole of Christian identity, becoming spiritual patrons dispensing grace, or exemplars of an alternative mode of life.

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, several ethnologists became interested in the phenomenon of fasting. They found, in the words of one study, that “the custom of fasting is wide-spread among peoples at very different stages of civilization, and is practiced for a variety of purposes.” The impulse to order such multifarious data led later scholars to construct systems of classification. One such attempt describes the motivations for fasting as follows: “it may be an act of penitence or of propitiation; a preparatory rite before some act of sacramental eating or an initiation; a mourning ceremony; one of a series of purification rites; a means of inducing dreams and visions; a method of adding force to magical rites.”