“Ritual After Ruin” is a series of essays by prominent scholars of history and religion exploring how the sacred is recovered and imagined in a time of crisis. In this first installment, Elaine Pagels, MacArthur Fellow and author of The Gnostic Gospels, uncovers what might be one of the greatest identity thefts of all time: Christianity’s appropriation of Jewish ritual and identity in the decades following Jesus’s death.

When a culture is disrupted, and a people whose very sense of who they are radically changes, how can they respond and recover a new sense of community?

Two thousand years ago, Jewish communities throughout the world suffered enormous shocks that shattered cultural patterns that had previously maintained their continuity for centuries, if not millennia. Out of war, two divergent kinds of ritual emerged, shaping both Judaism and Christianity as we now know them.

From the start of the first century CE, Roman emperors increasingly shifted their previous role as allies of the Jewish communities living within the empire to that of military overlords. Confronting this, devout Jewish militants secretly worked to ignite revolution, hoping to free the land of Judea from Roman domination.

After the death of Herod the Great in 4 BCE, the revolutionary Jewish leader called Judas the Galilean gathered a guerrilla army and led a successful surprise attack on a Roman fortress, killing soldiers stationed there and confiscating a huge arsenal of weapons and cash. The Romans quickly ordered Roman soldiers to attack in force, capturing and crucifying Judas and also some two thousand of his followers, erecting a hideous forest of men dying in agony on the hills of Galilee—a warning to deter further revolt. Yet five decades later, in 88 CE, revolutionary fervor erupted into open war throughout Judea as Jewish patriots fought “in the name of God and our common liberty.”