The religious transformations that marked late antiquity represent an enigma that has challenged some of the West’s greatest thinkers. But the oppositions between paganism and Christianity that characterize prevailing theories have endured for too long. Instead of describing this epochal change as an evolution within the Greco-Roman world from polytheism to monotheism, he argues that the cause for this shift can be found not so much around the Mediterranean as in the Near East . The End of Sacrifice points to the role of Judaism, particularly its inventions of new religious life following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.. The end of animal sacrifice gave rise to new forms of worship, with a concern for personal salvation, for scriptural study, for rituals like praying and fasting, and with the rise of religious communities and monasticism. It is what Christianity learned from Judaism about texts, death, and, above all, sacrifice that allowed it to supersede Greco-Roman religions and transform religion itself.

The prominent historian Karl Bosl, who during World War II had been a high school teacher in Ansbach, Franconia, intimated that he had been critical of the Nazis and asserted that he had belonged to a small group that engaged in active resistance; one of its members, Robert Limpert, was apprehended by the Nazis and brutally put to death just hours before the Americans arrived. The present study, based on a large number of unpublished official and private documents, records Bosl’s manifold links to the Nazi regime and reveals that as late as December 1944 he delivered a stirring lecture before Ansbach’s Nazi leadership in which he extolled the struggle for the preservation of Hitler’s Greater German Reich; yet as early as September 1945 he vigorously condemned Nazism at a ceremony at Limpert’s grave. The documents attest also to how Bosl succeeded in persuading Ansbach’s Denazification Tribunal that he had risked his life opposing the Nazis. An unpublished account allows for a detailed reconstruction of the daring, little-known activities of young Limpert and his three classmates.