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"Chapter One How Blood Marks the Bounds of the Christian Body Overtures and Refrains This book has three geneses. All three came unbidden, presenting symptoms or unsought oracles of blood. In the winter of 2008, trying to get a break from theology, I found myself in a boat on the Kinabatangan in Borneo, looking for orangutans. Having heard the (misleading) statistic that humans are "98% chimpanzee," I couldn't lose the idea that the biblical word for DNA might be "blood." And that brought on questions like, "What if the blood of Christ was the blood of a primate?" And "Why did God become simian?" (See Chapters Six and Nine.) I tried to treat the questions. They weren't academic, and I had other books to write. But they wouldn't go away, and my husband told me I was writing a book despite myself. In the fall of 2008, assigned, for my sins, to write a "theology of same-sex relationships" for the Episcopal House of Bishops, I heard that "the trouble with same-sex couples is, they impugn the blood of Christ." What did that even mean? And who were these people with their strange blood-fixation? (See Chapter Five.) In the fall of 2009, I remembered Michael Wyschogrod, whom I first read twenty years earlier. I had been telling granting agencies I would figure out what Hebrews 9:22 meant by "without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin." (See Chapter Three and Seven.) I discovered that the most interesting thing about Christian commentary on that passage is how thin it is. If you look into Christian commentaries on "without the shedding of blood" you find either domestication, so that, in Aquinas, bloodshed needs no explanation at all; or you find evasion, as in Calvin, where "blood" means something entirely different from physical blood; it means "faith." This is a choice of frustrations: so blasé as to take sacrifice for granted, or so offended as to dismiss it outright. Briefly I hoped that Philoxenus of Mabbug interpreted the "labor of blood" as that of childbirth, but colleagues with Syriac said it wasn't so simple. Origen is wonderful, but everything means something else. None of the Christian commentators I read were trying to understand what Wittgenstein called the "deep and sinister" in the appeal to blood"--
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