Encyclopedia of animal rights and animal 526

Religion, History, and the Animal Protection Movement | 483 appetite triumphed And so when the prophets condemned sacrifice, they were also condemning meat eating, as their contemporaries would have understood perfectly well Animal welfare, the belief that we may enslave and slaughter animals for our own benefit as long as we spare them any suffering that is not inherent in their use, was a compromise between unrestricted animal exploitation and abuse and the call of the Latter Prophets for an end to animal abuse and slaughter Over time, this compromise became the normative view of Judaism, and is enshrined in the Hebrew Scriptures, for example, in Proverbs 12:10, Deuteronomy 5:14, and Exodus 23:12 This Biblical compromise holds that we may exploit and slaughter animals for our own benefit, including for food and sacrifice, as long as we spare them any suffering that is not essential to the purpose for which they are being exploited and killed It establishes two levels of morality: one to guide our treatment of human beings, and another, lower level to guide our treatment of animals In recent years, Jewish animal advocates, notably Dr Richard Schwartz and Dr Roberta Kalechofsky, have sought to move beyond the compromise and reclaim the original call of the Latter Prophets for a single standard of treatment for both human beings and animals Christianity and Islam Jesus appears to have endorsed the tradition of the Latter Prophets which condemned animal sacrifice and meat eating There is no record that he ever sponsored a sacrifice at the Temple; twice he quoted with approval the passage above from the prophet Hosea denouncing sacrifice (Matthew 9:13, 12:7), and in history’s first recorded animal liberation, he freed animals being held in the Temple precincts to be killed as sacrifices (John 2:14–16) The only animal product that Jesus is said to have consumed is fish, and that only once, following the crucifixion, when he ate a small morsel of fish to prove to his disciples that he had been resurrected in the flesh, leading some scholars to suspect that this story was a legend added to the gospel for theological reasons (Luke 24:36–43) The gospels describe bread, not lamb, as the main course at the Last Supper According to ancient Christian sources, Jesus’ brother James and several of the other Apostles appear to have been vegan, and the original Jewish Christians, who learned their traditions directly from Jesus and his immediate disciples, remained vegan until their movement died out sometime around the fourth century Christianity never practiced animal sacrifice, but rather taught that Jesus’s sacrifice of himself for the sins of humankind rendered it obsolete And when Christianity triumphed in the Roman world, the Empire’s pagan religions were forcibly abolished, bringing animal sacrifice to a permanent end in the West Christianity as a gentile religion owes much of its theology and practice to Paul of Tarsus, a Greek-speaking Jew who spread the new faith to the gentile populations of the eastern Mediterranean in the decades following Jesus’ crucifixion Paul rejected the Biblical Compromise, as well as the single morality taught by the Latter Prophets, in favor of a Greek philosophical tradition derived from Aristotle and the Stoics which held that animals exist solely for human benefit and we may exploit and slaughter them as we like (I Corinthians 9:9–14; 10:25–31) In this he was followed by the leading