The Body of the Cross is a study of holy victims in Western Christian history, and how their deaths led to the idea of the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice. Since its first centuries, Christianity has traded on the suffering of victims who were substitutes for the Christian social body. They secured holiness for the church by their own sacred power, or by their reprobation and rejection. Martyrs, mystics, and heretics suffered and died for the community, which expressed the power of their tortured flesh in eucharistic, social, and christological forms. Jesus Christ was one of those holy su ... More

The Body of the Cross is a study of holy victims in Western Christian history, and how their deaths led to the idea of the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice. Since its first centuries, Christianity has traded on the suffering of victims who were substitutes for the Christian social body. They secured holiness for the church by their own sacred power, or by their reprobation and rejection. Martyrs, mystics, and heretics suffered and died for the community, which expressed the power of their tortured flesh in eucharistic, social, and christological forms. Jesus Christ was one of those holy substitutes, but it was late in Western history that his body took on the status of the exemplary victim. This book traces that story, giving special attention to popular spirituality, religious dissent, and the writing of women. It examines how the symbol of the cross functioned in key moments in this history, including the parting of the ways of Judaism and Christianity, the gnostic debates, martyr traditions, and medieval mysticism and heresy. In a Reformation era haunted by divine wrath, these themes concentrated in a new idea: Jesus Christ died on the cross to absorb divine punishment for sin, a holy body and a rejected body in one.