The Last Supper and the Passover Lamb

Each year when Christians celebrate Easter week, Thursday is of particular importance because this is the day Jesus ate the Last Supper with his disciples. It was after this evening meal that Jesus was arrested and put on trial before the Jewish authorities. Depending on one’s particular theological background, this day may be called Holy Thursday or Maundy Thursday.

During the last week of his life, Jesus was in Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover. Passover was, and is, the Jewish holiday celebrating when the Angel of the Lord passed over the houses of the Jews in Egypt, sparing their children’s lives during the 10th plague, prior to the Exodus. In antiquity, Jews from all over the Jewish homeland made pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the Passover festivities. In the last year of his life, Jesus also made this pilgrimage, together with his companions.

Part of the ritual of Passover was the slaughter of a perfect, unblemished lamb. This not only hearkened back to the story of the Exodus, when the Jews used the blood of slaughtered lambs to mark their doors so the Angel of the Lord would know which houses to bypass, but it also symbolized corporate atonement for sin. The sins of the Jews were, in effect, atoned for by the blood of the lamb offered as sacrifice to God. The lamb itself was then eaten by faithful Jews as part of a ritual meal that inaugurated the Passover festivities.

According to Mosaic Law, Passover was to be celebrated on the 14th day of the 1st month of the Jewish calendar. Since the Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar, and thus different from our Western calendars, this is why Passover, and therefore Easter, falls on a different day each year.

In the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, (collectively called the “Synoptic Gospels”) Jesus’ Thursday meal with his companions was not only their last meal together, but it was also the ritual Passover meal. After the meal, Judas Iscariot leads the authorities to where Jesus is praying. Jesus is arrested, put on trial, and finally crucified the following day, Friday. Thus, Jesus’ execution and death happen during the Passover celebration. For these gospel writers, Passover began on Thursday evening and lasted until Friday evening. On Friday evening, the weekly Sabbath began, as it does every week in the Jewish calendar.

Here, it is important to understand how ancient Jews conceived of a day. In the modern world, we understand a day to be a 24-hour period beginning at 12:00 a.m. and ending at 11:59 p.m. In the ancient world, centuries before modern calendars and concepts of time had been formulated, the concept was different. For the Jews, a day simply ended at sundown. Since the “day” ended at sundown, the next day began at sundown. Thus, where we conceive of a day lasting from 12:00 a.m. to 11:59 p.m., the ancient Jews conceived of a day lasting from sundown to sundown. In modern terms, we might say the Jewish day lasts from 7:00 p.m. to 6:59 p.m. Thus, the Passover meal – a meal eaten at the beginning of Passover – is eaten in the evening at the start of the day of Passover. It is an inaugural meal, not an adjourning meal.

For the authors of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Passover began on Thursday evening. Thus, Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples was the Passover meal. Jesus was executed the following day, in the middle of Passover, and was taken down prior to sundown, before Passover ended.

This is important to note, because the Gospel of John pushes everything back a day. For the author of John’s gospel, Passover begins on Friday night, not Thursday night, meaning that Jesus is executed prior to Passover, not during Passover. This also means that for the Gospel of John, the Last Supper is not a Passover meal, but simply the evening meal on the day before Passover.

Consider the language from Mark:

On the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb is sacrificed, his disciples said to him, “Where do you want us to go and make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?” … So the disciples set out and went to the city…and they prepared the Passover meal (Mark 14:12, 16).

Luke and Matthew also call this final meal the Passover meal.

Now compare John:

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father…And during supper, Jesus…got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself (John 13:1-4).

At first glance, this passage may not seem at odds with what we find in the Synoptics. John notes simply that it is “before” Passover, and that Jesus is eating “supper” with his disciples. Couldn’t this be the Passover meal?

John’s chronology becomes clearer when you look at what he writes after this Last Supper scene (which, incidentally, takes up the next five chapters of John’s gospel). In chapter 18, after Jesus has been arrested, John writes:

Then [the Jewish authorities] took Jesus from Caiaphas to Pilate’s headquarters. It was early in the morning. They themselves did not enter the headquarters, so as to avoid ritual defilement and to be able to eat the Passover (verse 28).

It is now the following morning (Friday morning), and John tells us explicitly that the Passover meal is set to be eaten that evening. In the following chapter, John again reinforces this chronology: “Now it was the day of Preparation for the Passover; and it was about noon. [Pilate] said to the Jews, ‘Here is your King!’” (John 19:14).

The day of Preparation for the Passover was the day before Passover. It was the day, mentioned above, when the Passover lambs were slaughtered in preparation for the evening meal. For John, this preparation day was Friday (or, more specifically, sundown Thursday to sundown Friday), and the Passover itself began at sundown Friday.

All this, of course, brings up an obvious question: Why the discrepancy? Someone must be wrong; it can’t be both ways. Jesus can’t have been executed on Friday, during Passover, and on Friday, before Passover. The Last Supper can’t have been both a Passover meal and a meal on the day before Passover.

My interest here is not to focus on the discrepancy itself. Rather than arguing about which account is historically accurate, or harping on the fact that the Bible is not inerrant, I’m far more interested in why John might have altered the chronology of previous traditions.

For anyone familiar with the Gospel of John, that his chronology of Passover week differs from the other gospels should come as no surprise. Much of John’s chronology is at odds with what we find in the Synoptics. The cleansing of the Temple, for instance, happens early in Jesus’ ministry in John, but happens during the last week of his life in the Synoptic gospels. In the Synoptics, the Triumphal Entry occurs on Sunday (thus “Palm Sunday”), but in John it happens on Monday. In the Synoptics, Jesus’ anointing in Bethany occurs on Wednesday evening before his execution on Friday, but in John it happens on the previous Sunday.

What could have been John’s reason for changing the chronology of the Passover? Why was it important for John to move the festival back a day? Surely it wasn’t a decision made willy-nilly.

Over the years, historians have tended to agree that the change occurred to fit John’s particular theological purposes. More than any other gospel in the New Testament, John focuses on Jesus’ symbolic representation as the sacrificial lamb of the Passover. Most Christians are familiar with the image of Jesus as the Lamb of God. This is a phrase that is used twice in John’s Gospel to describe Jesus – with both occurrences happening on the lips of John the Baptizer. It doesn’t occur in any other gospel, or in any other text of the New Testament. Anyone familiar with what we might call Christian Theology 101 recognizes that Christians believe Jesus’ blood atoned for the sins of humanity. Thus, “Jesus died for our sins.” For Christians, Jesus was the ultimate atoning sacrifice. This is a theology that is explicit and rife throughout John’s gospel in particular. For John, Jesus became the ultimate sacrificial lamb of the Passover, spilling his blood to save humankind from its sins.

This “lamb of God” theology is fairly unique to John’s Gospel. For Matthew and Mark, Jesus’ death wasn’t necessarily about becoming the sacrificial lamb of the Passover, but was instead part of the Suffering Servant model from Isaiah. Jesus would suffer and die, and through that suffering, bring salvation to the world. For Luke, Jesus died so that human beings would have an opportunity to recognize their sinfulness (which put Jesus on the cross) and thus seek repentance. Only in John’s gospel does Jesus’ death function explicitly as atonement – a blood sacrifice to atone for the sins of humanity, like the sacrificial lamb of the Passover.

With this in mind, it is easy to see why John may have changed the chronology of Passover. Recall the discussion above about the festival of the Passover. It was inaugurated by a ritual meal wherein Jews would offer a blood sacrifice from an unblemished lamb, then consume the meat of the lamb. On the day before Passover, called the Day of Preparation, ordinary Jews would purchase an unblemished lamb, take it to the Temple, and have it ritually slaughtered by the priests. The blood would be offered on the altar, and the remaining meat would be cooked in preparation for the evening meal. All of this took place during the late morning and afternoon on the day before Passover. At sundown, Passover would officially begin, and the ritual Passover meal would be eaten.

By changing the chronology of Passover and moving it to Friday evening, John is effectively having Jesus crucified on the afternoon of the Day of Preparation. In other words, while the priests in the Temple are busy slaughtering the sacrificial lambs in preparation for the evening Passover meal, Jesus is at Golgotha being crucified. Jesus, then, is functioning as a human sacrificial lamb; his blood is being spilled for the atonement of humanity’s sins.

This is why John changed the chronology we find in the Synoptic gospels. John, more than any other gospel writer, wanted to show that Jesus was the ultimate sacrificial lamb. He was crucified so that his blood could atone for the sins of humanity. For that reason, he was executed at the same time that the priests were slaughtering the ritual Passover lambs.

As a result, in the Gospel of John, the Last Supper is not a Passover meal, as it is in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Instead, it is simply an evening meal on the day before Passover. This is of particular interest in light of a recent study about depictions of the Last Supper in art over the centuries. Researchers have found that the portions depicted on the table have steadily increased over the years, reflecting the increase in our collective dietary habits (particularly in the West). Some folks have noted that the portions would likely have been large anyway, since it was a Passover meal, and thus a veritable “feast.”

In John’s gospel, however, it was not the Passover meal at all, and would instead have been a modest meal of bread, fish, and wine.

Christian Forgiveness

Recently, in an online discussion about Christian forgiveness as it relates to the Tiger Woods situation, one of my good friends, who is a pastor, made the following statement:

In my experience there is no such thing as forgive and forget – that lets people off the hook. And forgiveness is not condoning either. Forgiveness is being able to let go and move on.

I think this perspective on Christian forgiveness is a pretty common one. I also think it’s probably common in general among people whether they are Christians or not.

I agree that forgiveness does not (and should not) equate to condoning a behavior. Obviously if someone wrongs me, and I forgive them, that doesn’t mean I approve of whatever wrong they committed. Similarly, if I wrong someone, and they forgive me, I wouldn’t read that forgiveness as a suggestion that my behavior was okay after all.

The point, of course, is that receiving forgiveness is not a license for continuing hurtful behavior.

On the remaining points, I would like to write in a sort of “dialogue” with my friend about forgiveness because my perspective is somewhat different.

First, my friend notes that the idea of forgive and forget “lets people off the hook.” My view diverges here. I guess you could say that I am “big believer” in “forgive and forget.” I have always had a forgiving spirit. I don’t know if that is because of the Christian background I was raised in, or if it is simply part of my personal nature. I suspect it’s probably a little of both, but probably more nature than anything else. I simply don’t tend to hold grudges. When someone wrongs me, it is not difficult for me to forgive them if they sincerely ask for forgiveness. I’m not a robot, of course. I have certainly had experiences in my life that I had trouble letting go of – experiences where I had trouble forgiving the person who I felt had wronged me. But in many (if not most) of those cases, the person in question never actually showed any remorse or gave any kind of sincere apology.

Be that as it may, those incidents are few and far between. Throughout most of my life experiences, I have not struggled with forgiveness. To put it in the words of the apostle Paul, forgiveness is perhaps one of my “spiritual gifts.”

I recognize, however, that forgiveness does not come so easily for many Christians. This doesn’t mean they are bad people. It just means that forgiveness is not one of their spiritual gifts; it is something they frequently struggle with. They’re only human, after all. But whether one struggles or does not struggle with forgiveness, I can’t identify with the argument that forgiveness, at its core, is not about “forgive and forget.” In my opinion, that is exactly what forgiveness is about.

In the New Testament, the word used for “forgive” is aphiemi. This Greek word has many possible usages, but in general it means to “leave,” “send away,” “disregard,” or “let go.” The most frequent Biblical usage is “leave,” but it is also the word the writers of the New Testament used for “forgive.”

In the same way that our word “forgiveness” is a form of the word “forgive,” so too in the Greek. Aphesis means quite literally to release someone from captivity (such as a prisoner). It is translated as “forgiveness” in most English language Bibles.

Thus, in the Biblical sense, forgiving someone means letting go or disregarding the wrong they have done you. It means releasing them from the debt they owe you. The idea of sin being like a debt is one that is deeply entrenched in the Jewish scriptures of the Old Testament. For the ancient Hebrews, sin was equated with breaking God’s commandments handed down in the Torah – the law of Moses. When one of these laws was broken, obtaining forgiveness for the sin was not just a simple matter of asking God to forgive you. Your sin was like a debt you owed to God, and that debt could not just be “released” or forgiven. In the book of Romans, the apostle Paul makes this Jewish sentiment quite explicit: “The wages of sin is death.”

For the ancient Hebrews, the way to erase this debt was to offer blood sacrifices. The slaughtered animal atoned for the debt you owed God. God accepted the sacrificed animal in your place. The sin wasn’t actually forgiven – “forgive,” remember, means to “let go” or “release.” Atonement, on the other hand, refers to accepting one thing in payment for something else. If I run my car into your living room, you can forgive me – release me from the debt – and I will go my merry way. Or, I can atone for the “sin” and pay to have your living room fixed. For the ancient Jews, there was no forgiveness for breaking the law of Moses. Only atonement. For those of us living in the modern world, this may seem like insufferable hair-splitting, but for the ancient Jews, it was most definitely not.

Consider the story of David and Bathsheba from 2 Samuel. David commits adultery with Bathsheba, a married woman. She gets pregnant. David tries to cover it up by calling her husband – Uriah – back from his military campaign so that he will sleep with his wife and never know that her child was not actually his own. When this ruse fails to work, David arranges for Uriah’s death by ordering him to the front lines of the battle. When that deed is accomplished, David takes Bathsheba as his wife. Thus, David has broken three of the Big Ones from the Ten Commandments – he has committed adultery, lied about it, then orchestrated the death of his lover’s husband. The story ends with one of the more humorous moments of understatement in the Bible: “But the thing David had done displeased the Lord.” You can say that again.

After David has committed these sins, God sends the prophet Nathan to condemn him. David admits to his sins. God accepts this repentance, but does not simply offer forgiveness. Instead, David’s “atonement” for the sin is that the child carried by Bathsheba will die. The sins are not forgiven; they are made up for – atoned for – by the blood of David’s child. In modern language, we might call this a “punishment,” but punishment is, in fact, “atonement” for a wrongdoing. You do something wrong, you have to pay the price. If the price is paid (in the case of David, the price was the blood of his son), then forgiveness becomes a moot point, because the wrong has already been made right through atonement.

In the Jewish scriptures, atonement and forgiveness are most definitely two different things.

The New Testament brought a new perspective to this old Jewish idea. Since Jesus’ death, in the Christian view, had functioned as the ultimate blood sacrifice – the ultimate atonement for sin – Christians were no longer in “debt” to God because of their sin. Instead, forgiveness was theirs for the asking. No longer did God require a burnt offering or a blood sacrifice. The sin had been atoned for by Jesus, so Christians had only to believe in his death and resurrection and accept the gift of salvation.

But how does all this relate to the question of “forgive and forget”? Going with the Biblical model, it is clear that “forgiveness” means just that – to forgive and forget. If my bank forgives my debt, that means I don’t have to pay it anymore. It has been “forgiven and forgotten.” “Forgive and forget,” in that sense, is a redundancy. To forgive means to forget. To release. To let go. If I forgive someone in the Biblical sense, I have let it go. I have freed my “debtor” from their debt. I have made it as if it never existed. Atonement, on the other hand, does not imply forgetting. Atonement, in fact, implies that the debt is not forgiven and must be repaid in some form or fashion. Thus, if I forgive someone, I am not requiring atonement for the debt, and therefore I have forgotten it – I have made it so that it doesn’t exist.

This is why I disagree that “forgiveness” is not about “forgive and forget.” In the Biblical model – the model Christians follow – forgiveness is forgetting. It is making it as if the sin never happened. Of course we are not robots. The event may remain in your memory. But if you have truly forgiven someone, the event remains just that – a memory. If the event continues to hold a special place in your heart – if you hold a grudge, as it were – then you have not actually engaged in forgiveness.

For that reason, I believe Christian forgiveness involves completely releasing someone. In his comment, my friend said that forgiveness is about “being able to let go and move on.” I agree with that to some extent, but I disagree with the general implication that forgiveness is primarily about the person doing the forgiving. Forgiveness, in the Biblical model, is about the person receiving forgiveness, not the person giving it. Yes, it’s about letting go. But it’s primarily about letting go for the sake of the person being released. When you truly forgive someone, it is a selfless act of love done for the sake of the person being forgiven, not necessarily a self-centered act of moving on with life so you don’t have to fret over it anymore. That’s part of it too, but that should be the result of releasing the other person, not the motivation for releasing the other person.

In the Lord’s Prayer, which is given to us in Matthew and Luke – meaning it comes from the now lost document scholars call the Q source – Jesus tells us to ask God to “forgive our debts” in the same way that we have forgiven our debtors. We are told to release others just as God releases us. In Luke’s version, in fact, we are told to ask forgiveness (release) from God for our sins because we also forgive (release) those indebted to us. In other words, in Luke’s version, forgiveness for sin comes from God if and only when we also release others from their sins against us.

If we aren’t forgiving (which means releasing and thus “forgetting”) other people’s sins against us, how can we expect God to do the same for us for our sins against him?

This may sound nice, some readers may think, but what about situations in which a person continually wrongs us? I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of people, Christian or otherwise, would agree that forgiveness only goes so far. If someone engages in hurtful behavior, apologizes, receives forgiveness, then continues to do the same thing over and over, surely there comes a time when forgiveness is no longer an option?

As hard as it is to swallow, Jesus seems to suggest otherwise in Luke chapter 17. There, he says: “And if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, ‘I repent’, you must forgive.”

This material also comes from Q, and Matthew gives a slightly different version of it, one that is even more radical than Luke’s (and seems, in fact, to contradict Luke’s version):

Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”

Jesus’ vision of forgiveness is far more radical than what most people practice (especially in the Gospel of Matthew!). His entire message, of course, was far more radical than what most people practice. This is what makes his message so appealing but also so difficult to follow. This is also why Jesus constantly talked about the dichotomy between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of “this world.” “This world” says that forgiveness only goes so far. Jesus says that forgiveness never goes far enough.

I believe that fostering a forgiving spirit is vital to the Christian lifestyle. It is one of the very core philosophies of Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels. For those who like numbers, Jesus uses some form of the word “forgive” no fewer than 36 times in the four Gospels of the New Testament. By way of comparison, he uses the word “hell” about 12 times (and he never uses it in the Gospel of John).

In the Biblical model, forgiveness is about releasing someone from their debts, which is the same as making it so that the debt no longer exists. Forgiving and forgetting are one and the same.

Also in the Biblical model, forgiveness is a selfless act of love which results in an ability for the forgiver to not only receive divine forgiveness themselves, but also to move on with a life of purity.

Despite that “give and take” nature of forgiveness, it is foremost and primarily an act done for the sake of others, just as God forgives us for our sakes and not for his own.

Christianity is a Verb

The title of this essay is a phrase I have been using recently in discussions about religion and the nature of Christianity. I have frequently said that I would like to write a book by that title. More than anything, however, I’d like to live my life in conjunction with it.

Christianity isn’t a title and most certainly isn’t an entitlement. “Christian” isn’t something you are; it’s something you do. Christianity isn’t the group you align yourself with; it’s the lifestyle you lead each and every day. Church isn’t an activity center; it’s a community outreach center.

In our earliest Christian writings, texts found both within the New Testament and outside the New Testament, we find that discussions like this – discussions about the very nature of Christianity and what it means to call one’s self a Christian – go back to the earliest days of Christianity. In New Testament theology, this discussion is one that goes by the more familiar theme of “faith vs. works.”

Faith was an integral part of early church life, much as it is today. For modern Christians, “faith” generally means trusting that God exists, that Jesus was his divine son, that he died for our sins, and that he rose again after three days.

For the earliest generation of Christians, however, “faith” was somewhat different. First, the question of God’s existence wasn’t one that generally concerned people. “Atheist” in the first century typically referred to someone who believed in a different god, not someone who had no faith in any gods. Someone who believed in no gods at all would likely have been called insane, rather than atheist.

Second, the earliest Christians didn’t think of Jesus as “divine,” the way that we do today. The idea that Jesus was literally God in the flesh did not come about in Christian circles until well after the first generations of Christians. The Trinity doctrine, for instance, wasn’t formulated and adopted until the 4th century C.E. For the earliest Christians, faith in Jesus meant faith that Jesus was a uniquely “God-inspired” person; a teacher and prophet through whom God worked directly; a human being through whom one could meet and engage the spirit of God. For a Jewish Christian in the 1st century, the very suggestion that Jesus had been God himself would have been seen as the worst kind of blasphemy. It would never have even crossed their minds. For Jews, God was so completely “other” that they didn’t even write his name. They used code words – abbreviations, essentially – to refer to God.

Third, while the idea of Jesus’ atonement and resurrection was an early development in Christian history, “resurrection” had a different meaning for those earliest Christians than it has for us today. Jewish tradition had conceived of resurrection as a physical event that happens to the body; you die, you are buried, and then your body comes back to life and you rise up out of your tomb. In Jewish theology, this was an event that was expected at the end of time, when God would finally reconcile the broken world to himself.

Jewish Christians, however, came to understand resurrection quite differently. Faced with the stark reality that their teacher had been brutally and unceremoniously executed by the Romans, they came to understand that, in death, Jesus had been exalted to the right hand of God. He had died for their sins, like the Passover lamb, and had been raised up to the heavenly realms. For these earliest Christians, Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension happened simultaneously. It wasn’t until later that Jesus’ resurrection and ascension was separated from his death. So when those early Christian texts talk about resurrection, they are talking about spiritual resurrection, not bodily resurrection. When they talk about the risen Jesus appearing to people, they are talking about spiritual apparitions and religious ecstasy, not a literally dead person literally coming back to life and re-entering society. That sort of literalistic understanding of early Jewish Christian scripture is a product of later centuries and later Christians unfamiliar with the unique religious worldview of 1st century Jewish Christians.

Some of my readers may find this last point particularly difficult to accept. I recognize that and am sensitive to it. My opinion is that it doesn’t matter whether one conceives of resurrection as spiritual or physical – it might have been either one. Ultimately, it is a faith proclamation in either case, because it’s also possible that it didn’t happen at all, that Jesus just died and was dead. What is far more important is what that faith proclamation means for us as Christians.

And that ultimate meaning brings us back to faith vs. works. The apostle Paul, in his many writings now extant in the New Testament, talks a lot about faith. In a cursory examination of the NIV translation, I counted exactly 100 repetitions of some form of the word “faith” within Paul’s letters. And that was only counting the 7 letters scholars widely agree came from Paul. There are 6 or 7 others that have traditionally been attributed to him as well. Clearly faith was important for Paul.

Paul’s words about faith – particularly in Romans – have led to what I see as a major problem in modern Christianity. This is the idea that we are saved by “faith alone.” Paul argues, throughout Romans and elsewhere, that Christians are saved by faith, and not “works of the law.” This has been misunderstood in mainstream Christianity to mean that the “profession of faith” in God and Jesus is all that really matters. If you profess your faith and mean it, and if you “ask Jesus into your heart,” then you have attained salvation. Of course, there is plenty of lip service given to leading a good life, being kind to others, “living like Jesus,” and so on. But all of that is just icing on the cake. Salvation is actually attained by the profession of faith. It’s good to do the other stuff too, but it’s not required.

For me, this is a quite depressing misunderstanding of Paul, and it’s one that is unfortunately extremely common among Christians. When Paul spoke about “works of the law,” he wasn’t talking about “good deeds.” He was talking about Mosaic Law – Old Testament commandments about how Jews should live their lives. He was talking about things like dietary restrictions, lifestyle codes, circumcision, honoring the Sabbath, appropriately celebrating the various Jewish holy days, and so on. He was saying that these things don’t provide salvation because they are ultimately impossible to follow perfectly. Instead, salvation comes from God’s grace, through faith. And that isn’t just plain old faith. Paul makes it clear that the kind of faith he is talking about is “faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6). In other words, faith is an action, not a mere profession.

That this was misunderstood even in the earliest generations of Christianity is apparent within the New Testament itself. People came to understand that all they had to do was profess faith in Jesus, and they were set. They had their “get out of death free” card. Much of the book of James is a response to misunderstandings Christians had over Paul’s direction about faith. James attacks those who think that mere professions of faith are good enough for salvation. What good is it, James asks, if you wish someone well, but don’t actually do anything to help them? In 2:17, he says: “Faith, by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” The word “works” in that passage is not referring to Mosaic Law. It is referring to good deeds. James is attacking the platitudes and religious stagnation he saw around him. People had their profession of faith, their conversion to Christianity, and they were content to sit on it, offering lip service at best. James says no. James says that’s wrong. James says you have misunderstood Paul. Paul was talking about Mosaic Law as it related to faith, not good deeds or lovingkindness in relation to faith. James makes clear what Paul frequently left ambiguous – that faith without good deeds and loving actions was a dead faith. It was meaningless. It served no purpose. It was, as I have said elsewhere, a windmill with no wind.

Unfortunately, not a lot has changed since the time of James. Many Christians still think a profession of faith is all they need to attain salvation. Like the Christians of James’ era, they have their “get out of death free” card, and they are content to sit on it. It’s too challenging to actually follow Jesus in the lifestyle he taught. It’s too challenging to actually give ourselves away to others. And more than that, it’s not at all convenient to our modern way of life in this materialistic, individualistic western society.

Jesus showed his followers how to live for others. He showed his followers how to love one another and work together for the common good. He demonstrated how the kingdom of God is a present reality that we all can take part in. He taught that the kingdom of God is our responsibility, not some future event that we have no control over. Early Christians textualized this teaching and asserted the importance of faith working through acts of love and compassion. For Jesus and the earliest Christians, salvation was never about the future. It was about the here and now, and it was attained through acts of love.

As a Christian, I don’t engage much in absolutes. I recognize that what we know about Jesus comes from ancient texts that are wide open to interpretation. I recognize that we can’t know anything about God other than what we discern from those texts that we consider authoritative, and from our own personal religious practice – prayer, meditation, etc. I believe that God can be approached from many different religious traditions and I do not believe in claims of theological exclusivity. I feel a high level of contempt for those religious persons who claim to have the exclusive pathway to heaven, and anyone who doesn’t follow them has an exclusive pathway to hell.

For me, salvation is about life in the here and now. I have hope for an afterlife, but religion, for me, is about how we act and live together here on earth, in the present. So when I talk of “being saved” or “not being saved,” I am not talking about eschatology – that is, ideas about the ultimate destiny of humanity and the world. I am not talking about the end of the world and what will happen to humans after they die. I don’t know what happens to people after they die. Instead, I am talking about life in the present. Salvation for me, then, is expressing love for God through acts of love for others. Those two things cannot be separated. I cannot express love for God unless I am living for others, and I cannot live for others without expressing love for God. I approach this salvation through the teachings of Jesus and the earliest Christians who taught in his name. If someone approaches God from a different religious tradition, but one with ultimately the same ends, then I consider them a brother or sister in God.

For me, if a Christian is not expressing love for God through acts of love for others – that is, if they are not living for others rather than for themselves – then they are not taking part in the kingdom of God promised by Jesus. They are Christians in name only – which means they aren’t Christians at all. As James said, their faith is as good as a corpse.

Even though those words come without any underlying threat of eternal damnation and ultimate eschatological absolutes, I realize they may seem harsh. And lest I appear as a monstrous hypocrite, I will be the first to admit that I frequently fall short.

There is nothing more difficult in modern western society than to actually live like Jesus taught us to live. Our culture teaches us to pursue wealth, pursue material and personal gain, pursue power and influence and authority and status, and live for ourselves even at the expense of others. It teaches us that individualism is the ultimate expression of humanity, and reinforces the idea that if someone fails or falls on hard times, they probably have only themselves to blame. We promote charity, but we expect to get a tax write-off for doing it. We promote living Godly lives, but we expect divine blessings in the form of material gain for doing it – the age old Gospel of Prosperity. We toss a few bucks in the offering plate, give some money to the Santa Claus at the Salvation Army bucket every Christmas, and give our old, worn-out clothes to Goodwill – and we think it’s enough. We’re nice to people, we try not to be hateful, and we generally attempt to be contributing members of society – and we think it’s enough. We say our prayers, we attend worship services, and we don’t take the Lord’s name in vain – and we think it’s enough.

My argument is that it’s not enough. My argument is that the life of Christ is a life of service to others. Not service just when it’s convenient. Not service in the form of platitudes. But a real, living, active lifestyle of service for others. Living for others and not for ourselves. Putting the needs of others ahead of the needs of ourselves.

That’s salvation. That’s living as part of the kingdom of God. That’s true faith. And even if we frequently fail to live to those standards, the least we can do is try. Make the attempt. When we fail, try again. And never stop trying.

If we do that, we are following the life of Christ. We are living Christianity as a verb. If not, we are just silent windmills in a vacuum.

Was Jesus Without Sin?

A common refrain within Christianity is that Jesus lived a sinless life. Belief in this doctrine has long been a necessity in Christianity, as it forms the basis for the atonement of Jesus’ death. Jesus had to be sinless in order to act as the sacrificial lamb for all people.

JESUS: A LAMB WITHOUT DEFECT

Ancient Jews symbolized the need for this atonement – this reconciliation between humankind and God – in the celebration of Yom Kippur. Among other things, Yom Kippur included the ritual slaughter of a physically flawless lamb, whose shed blood served as atonement for the sins of the Jews. The lamb was required to be young (a year old), male, and “without defect.” It was required, then, to be “perfect,” otherwise it could not adequately serve as a sacrifice to God.

For ancient Jews, any sacrificial animal was to be physically flawless. The need for sacrificial animals to be “without defect” is repeated dozens of times in the Torah. One example is Deuteronomy 15:21 – “If an animal has a defect, is lame or blind, or has any serious flaw, you must not sacrifice it to the Lord your God.” Furthermore, in the first chapter of Malachi, God condemns the Jews for offering sacrifices that were “blemished” with diseases and other physical maladies. In Malachi, God even goes so far as to say that anyone who has a good lamb, but offers a blemished lamb instead, is “cursed.”

This, then, is the theological and historical basis for the idea that Jesus – whose death was seen as the ultimate sacrifice to God for human sin – was by necessity “perfect” and sinless. The Doctrine of the Atonement simply would not work if Jesus had been a regular sinner like you and me. God cannot accept blemished sacrifices. Thus, you have 1 Peter 1:19 which states that Christ was “a lamb without blemish or defect.”

However, is there any textual evidence in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life to suggest that Jesus, in fact, may have committed sins? I believe that a literal reading of the stories of the Gospels must lead one to suppose that Jesus may not have been quite so perfect and “without defect” as some folks like to imagine.

DEFINING “SIN”

First, it is necessary to point out that the very word “sin” means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Most people would consider the mass slaughter of men, women, children, and infants the worst kind of sin – yet God is responsible for doing just that many times in the Old Testament. Furthermore, while many people believe that “breaking the law” is a sin, most do not think it is sinful to break a law if the law is unjust.

Additionally, many Christians suppose that breaking God’s commandments, as laid out in the Bible, is sinful, but most Christians routinely break Biblical commandments without supposing they are committing a sin. For instance, in Acts chapter 5, Peter is described as condemning two members of the Christian population who withheld some of their own money from the community. Not only does Peter condemn them, he actually strikes them dead for this grievous sin! Christians were expected to give all they had to the community, and failing to do this had dire consequences. This passage, then, preaches a very difficult lesson, one which is universally ignored by modern Americans. No one supposes they are sinning when they give only ten percent of their income to the offering plate on Sunday morning. Another example involves corporal punishment of children. Most parents refrain from beating their children with rods to punish them, even though the Bible commands parents to do this. This one is especially ironic, because most Christians would not only not beat their children with rods, but would consider such an act to be child abuse, and therefore sinful!

For my purposes, I will stick to the sin “basics” – that is, actions that most everyone would consider sinful. Specifically, I will look at cases where Jesus seems to have engaged in intentional economic ruin, racial prejudice, verbal abuse, physical abuse, drunkenness, stealing, and lying. Since most people who believe Jesus was sinless also read and interpret the Bible’s stories literally, I will be approaching this subject from a direct and literal reading of the stories. In other words, for the purposes of this essay, I will be assuming that all the Gospel stories attributed to Jesus represent literal historical actions by Jesus.

INTENTIONAL ECONOMIC RUIN

Most people would consider an intentional act that ruins someone economically to be quintessentially sinful. Purposely burning down a private business owner’s store, for instance, would not only be a terrible crime, but most certainly a “sin” by most people’s standards. Another example might be bilking an elderly person out of their retirement savings through mail fraud – not only a serious legal crime, but a moral crime as well.

Mark chapter 5 describes a relatively famous scene in which Jesus heals a demon-possessed man by casting his “legion” of demons into a herd of pigs. The 2000-strong herd of pigs subsequently makes a mad dash down a hillside, where the pigs drown in a lake. The writer of Mark tells us that “those who were tending the pigs” ran and told everyone what had happened and later “began to plead with Jesus to leave their region.”

The story behind the story here is rather clear: Jesus has just sent these pig herders, and their master, into financial ruin. The destruction of 2000 pigs would be a major economic disaster even for a modern farmer, much less a farmer eking out a living in 1st century Galilee. In this passage, Jesus seems to have little regard for how his actions have affected the owners of the pig herd.

RACIAL PREJUDICE

Racial prejudice has been, and often continues to be, one of the banes of society. Few people disagree that judging someone by their race or nationality, or using derogatory names to refer to other races of people, is immoral and sinful. Many people, Christians and non-Christians alike, tend to do this from time to time, but most would never expect such things from Jesus.

However, the 15th chapter of Matthew describes a very curious, and often overlooked, scene in which Jesus not only discriminates against someone based on their race, but even calls them a derogatory name.

In this scene, Jesus is approached by a Gentile woman (that is, a non-Jew) who begs him to heal her demon-possessed son. Jesus’ first action is to ignore her completely. When she keeps on following and begging, the disciples get irritated and urge Jesus to send her away. Jesus then explains his perplexing actions: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” In other words, “I’m not interested in non-Jews or their problems.” He is, in effect, discriminating against this woman because of her race. The woman, however, is not to be put off. She falls at Jesus’ feet and literally begs him to heal her son. He responds with the phrase: “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.” This may seem a confusing phrase at first site. What Jesus is saying follows his previous comment. His message is for the “children” of Israel, and it is not appropriate to give that message to “dogs” – that is, non-Jews. Jesus has just called every non-Jew a “dog” who is unworthy of his message. The woman, in a great challenge to Jesus, replies that even the “dogs” eat from their masters’ tables. At this display of faith (some might say self-degradation) Jesus relents and heals her son.

VERBAL ABUSE

Most everyone agrees that verbally berating someone with name-calling and other hyperbole is mean-spirited at best and sinful at worst. We have already seen in the previous section a scene where Jesus engages in name-calling. Those of us who grew up as Christians are familiar with the famous warning from Matthew 5:22, where Jesus says that anyone who calls someone a “fool” is in “danger of hell fire.”

Apparently, Jesus meant anyone but himself.

Interestingly, in the very same Gospel where Jesus warns against calling people fools, Jesus himself refers to the Pharisees as “blind fools,” with the writer using the very same Greek word for “fool,” so that there can be no doubt that the meaning of the word was the same.

Not only is Jesus engaging in hypocrisy here by not holding himself to the same standards that he holds everyone else (which most would consider, in and of itself, sinful), Jesus is also committing the sin of name-calling (again).

“Fools,” however, is not the extent of Jesus’ verbal attack on the Pharisees. In Luke 11, Jesus is invited to dinner by a Pharisee and he accepts the invitation. But upon being questioned about not ritually washing up before eating, Jesus goes on a tirade, accusing Pharisees of being clean on the outside, but “full of greed and wickedness” on the inside. He says Pharisees are foolish, and neglect justice and God’s love. He accuses them of hypocrisy and false piety. He finishes by saying Pharisees are like “unmarked graves” that people walk past without noticing (presumably because they are so unworthy of notice).

The Pharisee, at this point, says that Jesus is insulting him by saying these things. So Jesus continues. He accuses the Pharisees of not doing anything to help people. He then blames the current generation of Pharisees for the “blood” of all the prophets that has been shed “since the beginning of the world.”

All this because the Pharisee was described as “surprised” that Jesus did not “wash before the meal” and then told Jesus his words were insulting? Wow.

This passage in Luke is pretty disturbing, but even more disturbing is a similar passage in the 23rd chapter of Matthew. This entire chapter, in fact, is one long diatribe against the Pharisees, and includes the “blind fools” quote I mentioned above. In this passage, Jesus accuses the Pharisees of vanity and hypocrisy, and says they have neglected justice, mercy, and faithfulness. He calls them “sons of hell.” He calls them “blind” on four different occasions. He says Pharisees look “beautiful on the outside” like a whitewashed tomb, but on the inside they are just “full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean.” Like the passage in Luke, Jesus says the blood of all the prophets is on the Pharisees. He calls them “snakes” and a “brood of vipers” and says they will not be able to escape “being condemned to hell.”

To someone outside of Christianity, this must surely come across as intolerant verbal degradation and abuse, and must surely be sinful by most people’s standards.

PHYSICAL ABUSE

Perhaps less “clear cut” than some of my other examples, there is some evidence of physical abuse – or perhaps more appropriately “aggravated assault” – by Jesus. I am, of course, talking about the famous “cleansing of the Temple” scene, described in all four Gospels.

Jews coming into Jerusalem from other regions often went to the Temple to sacrifice animals. Before they could purchase an animal for sacrifice, they had to exchange their foreign currency. For this reason, there were moneychangers in the Temple, giving people a convenient place to exchange their currency before purchasing an animal, and making a profit in the process.

In clearing the moneychangers out of the Temple, Jesus is described as overturning their tables and spilling their money, and driving them and their animals out of the Temple with a whip. Did Jesus actually whip the moneychangers? That is unclear from the text, but either way you slice it, Jesus had committed an act of aggravated assault with a weapon. He was, of course, attempting to make a point, but the people he attacked were no more “guilty” than anyone else and were just in the wrong place at the wrong time – as so many victims of assault are.

DRUNKENNESS

One of Jesus’ primary methods of teaching seems to have revolved around eating and drinking. The partaking of food and drink is a common and recurrent theme throughout all four Gospels. Apparently, Jesus had a reputation for this. In Matthew chapter 11, Jesus states that people call him a “glutton and a drunkard” because he has come to the people “eating and drinking.” Oddly, Jesus does not deny these accusations, but simply points out that this is one way in which he is different than John the Baptist, who ate sparingly and did not drink alcohol. Does this mean Jesus was a drunk? He probably was not, but many Christians, even to this day, believe drinking alcohol is a sin, and those people seem to bypass this passage where Jesus points out that he is frequently accused of being a drunkard because of his fondness for winebibbing.

STEALING

The very idea that Jesus “stole” anything may seem preposterous. However, a careful look at the passages that describe Jesus’ actions just prior to his final entry into Jerusalem might imply that he did just that.

Mark, Matthew, and Luke each describe a scene in which Jesus tells his disciples to go into the city to find a colt for him to ride. If anybody asks them what they are doing, he instructs, they are to simply tell them that the Lord needs it and will return it. The unspoken implication here is that if no one sees them do it, then they should just steal it and bring the colt to him. In Mark and Luke’s account, the disciples are indeed questioned about their actions, and they reply as instructed. Matthew’s account, however, implies that they did not run into any trouble in taking the colt (Matthew, curiously, has them taking not just a colt, but a donkey too).

Nit-picky semantics? Maybe, but stealing is stealing, and it appears that Jesus had no qualms about taking something that was not his in this situation. After all, he was just going to use it for a while and then return it. Try telling that to the judge when you are on trial for grand theft auto.

LYING

This is, perhaps, one of the strongest cases of Jesus “sinning” in the New Testament, and the passage in question is almost universally overlooked. Even in researching for this essay, I did not come across any other sources that mentioned the following passage or Jesus’ apparent lie.

In the opening verses of John chapter 7, Jesus is in Galilee teaching. The Feast of Tabernacles is happening soon, and his disciples encourage him to go, suggesting that he can get a lot of exposure there, and that no public figure goes around acting “in secret.” Jesus, however, tells them that it is not yet his time (a foreshadowing of his execution) and that he is not going to Jerusalem for this feast. He encourages them, however, to go to the feast by themselves.

Then comes the shocker, in verse 10: “But after his brothers had gone to the festival, then he also went, not publicly but in secret.”

So what has happened here? There is absolutely no question that Jesus has just lied to his disciples. He stated unequivocally that he was “not going to this festival” (verse 8). Yet later, after they had left, he went to the festival in secret.

Interestingly, Dark Age scribes evidently recognized this religious quandary. By telling his disciples that he was not going to Jerusalem, but then going later in secret, Jesus was clearly sinning. So what these scribes did was simply insert the simple little word “yet” into the phrase in question. So instead of Jesus saying: “I am not going to this festival,” their manuscripts read: “I am not going to this festival yet.” By slipping in that one little word, they felt like they could “correct” the obvious theological problem with John’s original text. We know this happened because the word “yet” does not appear in any of our earliest copies of the Gospel of John. It is not until one gets well into the Dark Ages that manuscripts begin to have this word included. Unfortunately – as is the case with so many other scribal variations – this variation has ended up in our modern Bibles. Most modern English versions have Jesus telling his disciples he is not “yet” going. However, the most textually-reliable English translation – the New Revised Standard Version – prints the verse the way it should read, without the word “yet” inserted. For those of you who are NIV users, the NIV prints the verse with “yet” included, but has a footnote pointing out that the earliest manuscripts do not have this word.

CONCLUSION

As I stated in the beginning of this essay, the nature of my argument has necessitated the assumption that all the stories attributed to Jesus in the Bible are true. Since Jesus’ sinless nature is primarily only asserted by those who take the stories in the Bible literally, it is necessary to present this argument with the assumption that these stories are, in fact, historically accurate.

Ultimately, I believe these arguments make a more broad general point about Bible literalism, Church doctrine, and the insistence by many Christians that Jesus was the sinless, divine, literal offspring of God. When someone reads the Bible literally, they are faced with hundreds, and even thousands, of religious quandaries. For some, this may bring an entire faith system into question. But for others, they simply begin to realize that the faith is not the problem – the literalizing of the text is the problem.

I believe the Gospels of the New Testament contain fiction and fact, myth and history, literature and reporting. I believe that many things about the life and teachings of Jesus can be gleaned from the Gospel stories, including those I have illustrated above.

For me, driving the demon into the pigs is clearly a story illustrating Jesus’ power over mental and emotional illness; the story of Jesus and the Gentile woman shows first that Jesus was a product of his 1st century Jewish culture, but also shows that when challenged (as he was by the woman’s pointed response), Jesus was able to step outside of those boundaries and demonstrate personal growth; the stories of Jesus’ harsh words for the Pharisees illustrate his deep-seated offense at the hypocritical and narrow ways of the religiously intolerant; the story of the cleansing of the Temple demonstrates Jesus’ derision for worldly pursuits and material gain; Jesus’ penchant for eating and drinking illustrates one of his primary methods of teaching, and symbolizes the heart of his message – that everyone is welcome at the table of God; the story of Jesus and the colt is a story not about stealing, but about an attempt on Jesus’ part to challenge the pomp and circumstance of the Roman empire; and the story about Jesus deceiving his disciples was clearly used by the writer of John to foreshadow Jesus’ later death and to demonstrate how Jesus knew that Jerusalem was to be the scene of his ultimate “showdown;” it also serves to show that deception is not always “black and white” and that sometimes it is better to withhold information if it serves a greater purpose.

It does not matter whether any or all of these stories are literal; what matters is the lesson of Jesus’ life and message. Jesus was a real human being, with real human failures; but it is the basic humanity of Jesus that makes his ability to inspire confidence, compassion, love, and a changed nature in his followers all the more impressive and appealing.

It is only when one begins to literalize these stories as historical fact that one begins to be plagued with the issues of “sinfulness” that I have illustrated here, and to subsequently miss the whole point about the true greatness of Jesus’ fully human life. But those “sinful” actions absolutely must be faced if one wishes to literalize all the accounts of Jesus’ story. Too often, literalists gloss these issues over, or ignore them completely, rather than allowing them to broaden their outlook. I encourage any of my readers to allow these issues to serve as an opportunity to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” as the author of 2 Peter encouraged us to do. By doing so, you will discover a fully human Jesus who, through the power of his personality and vision, inspired his followers into the fullness of life in God, an abundant life that even death could not threaten.


* Several of the points I make in this essay were introduced to me in an article by B.A. Robinson of the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, at their website www.religioustolerance.org.

The Significance of Jesus' Death

Those of you who read my blog a lot may notice that this is the second essay I've written on this subject in the last month or so. I'm writing another one simply because I felt that I hadn't really "gotten it out" the first time. I suppose you could call this a reworking of the ideas presented in the first essay. Anyway, here it is:

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Anyone who has studied the life of Jesus must ultimately decide on one of four scenarios regarding his death:

1. That his execution was a senseless, unjustified act by a group of people who saw him as a threat to religious stability;
2. That his execution was a reasonable and justified act that put to rest someone who was stirring up rebellion;
3. That his execution was part of God’s ultimate plan to atone for human sinfulness; or
4. That his execution was and is an opportunity for humans to ask forgiveness from God for sinfulness.

The first two scenarios presuppose that Jesus’ death had no divine significance, while the last two are attempts at understanding Jesus’ death against the backdrop of some grand divine plan. In the days, weeks, and months after Jesus’ execution, those who knew of Jesus had to choose between options one and two. Most chose option two, but those who followed Jesus and believed in the lifestyle he taught clearly chose option one. For the option two crowd, that was where it ended. However, those who believed Jesus’ death was a senseless tragedy began, in the years and decades after his death, to see his death in light of options three and four. They accepted his death as seemingly senseless, and, because of this, sought ways to define his death as something that perhaps wasn’t so senseless and final after all. In this essay, I want to primarily focus on these last two options, as those are the two that have most impacted Christian theology.

It’s important to define the difference between atonement and forgiveness. Because Christian theology has for so long confused these terms, we tend to use them interchangeably, or at least as two parts of one whole. Atonement is a method of “making up” for a wrongdoing. If I cut down a tree in my neighbor’s front yard that had been planted by her grandfather and was sentimental for her and irreplaceable, I may atone for this act by paying her a thousand dollars or washing her car every day for a year. In that scenario, forgiveness is not an issue, because I am paying the debt for my mistake by doing something else in return. I don’t need forgiveness. Another example might be a bank robber doing 15 years in prison – he pays his debt for the crime he committed. He atones for the crime – that is, he makes up for the crime – by doing the time.

Forgiveness, on the other hand, involves one person absolving another from a mistake or shortcoming. In the scenarios above, the woman whose tree I cut down could simply forgive me and I wouldn’t have to do anything to make it up to her – pay her money or wash her car. For the bank robber, if his crime was forgiven, he would not have to do time in jail. The crime would be absolved through forgiveness. Forgiveness, by its very definition, does not require atonement. On the flip side, if something is atoned for, forgiveness is not necessary or relevant.

Yet, Christian theology, as I said above, has confused these two terms in a convoluted effort to understand Jesus’ death as something other than a senseless tragedy. Most Christians understand that the blood of Jesus functioned as an atoning sacrifice for human sinfulness (option three above). But most Christians also understand that they must ask God for forgiveness for their sins, and if they do so, God will be “faithful and just” to forgive them their sins (option four above). Yet, as I already illustrated, it can’t be both ways. If Jesus’ death atoned for human sinfulness, then no forgiveness is necessary. If, by Jesus’ death, my sins are atoned for, then why do I, if I am a Protestant, feel the need to daily or weekly ask God to forgive my sins? If I am a Catholic, why do I feel the need to go to confession? And, on the flip side, if forgiveness is required, then what significance did Jesus’ death really have? If I still have to ask forgiveness for my sins, then why did Jesus have to die?

This, of course, was the central question that plagued early Christians.

Our earliest Christian documents are the letters of Paul. In these letters, Paul consistently portrays Jesus’ death in light of atonement – option three. For Paul, human beings are hopelessly and irreversibly sinful. Because of this, God chose Jesus – an especially upright and moral teacher – to die for the sins of the world. Since average men and women are incapable, because of sin, of ever being right with God, God used Jesus’ death as an atonement; that is, the blood Jesus shed functioned as the ultimate sacrifice to put humanity right with God. No longer would God require the blood of animals – Jesus’ sacrifice was the end. And this was proven, for Paul, by the fact that God raised Jesus spiritually into heaven with him. In all of Paul’s authentic writings, there is never a discussion about forgiveness of sins being part of the equation. For Paul, sins are already washed away, because Jesus paid the ultimate price.

In the decades after Paul, as Christian theology continued to develop, an obvious problem was encountered with Paul’s atonement theology. If Jesus’ death, instead of being a senseless tragedy, was actually part of God’s master plan for atonement, then this must mean that all sin, past, present, and future, was automatically washed away at the moment of Jesus’ death. My sins, your sins, George Washington’s sins, and King Tut’s sins were all absolved and atoned for when Jesus’ blood was shed. Clearly this posed a problem because it meant that no religion was really necessary. Everyone is already saved! Thus, you have later New Testament writers changing this theology from one of atonement to one of forgiveness. Jesus’ execution became an opportunity for forgiveness – sinful humanity put Jesus on the cross, but if we ask God to forgive our sins, he will do it. The requirement for getting right with God is repentance.

An example of this changing theology is the book of Acts, where Paul is depicted preaching on his missionary journeys about the forgiveness of sin, and never once uttering a word about atonement – even though in Paul’s own letters, it is exactly the opposite. Which is more likely to be representative of the real Paul’s theology – Paul’s own writings, or Paul’s biographer, writing several generations later? Forgiveness theology permeates most of the remainder of the New Testament books and letters.

The Church, of course, once it had created the New Testament and once it had begun to centralize its power, had to face the problem I mentioned above – if we have to ask forgiveness for sins, then how was Jesus’ death really an atonement? And if it wasn’t really an atonement, then what purpose did it actually serve? Couldn’t God have forgiven our sins, at our request, without having Jesus put to death first? He’s making the rules, after all. So Church doctrine, and especially Church liturgy, began to be formulated in such a way as to mix Paul’s atonement theology with later New Testament forgiveness theology. Jesus was the ultimate sacrificial lamb, his blood served as the ultimate atonement between humanity and God, but one still must ask God for forgiveness in order to make the atonement “kick in” (for lack of a better phrase). In other words, the atonement doesn’t count for you if you don’t ask forgiveness.

Well, you can see the problem here. I’ve already explained how atonement doesn’t require forgiveness, and forgiveness doesn’t require atonement. But the Church, in an effort to make divine sense out of a senseless tragedy, and in an effort to mesh early Christian theologies (some of which were already quite convoluted to start with) into one, pretty package and thereby centralize its power, came up with this complicated mixture of forgiveness and atonement to explain Jesus’ death. They couldn’t throw the atonement idea out the window, because then Jesus’ death would have been pointless – God could forgive us with or without Jesus’ death. But they couldn’t throw forgiveness out the window either, because then they couldn’t lord our sinfulness over us as a means of wielding power, and they would also have to admit that everyone was automatically forgiven upon Jesus’ death, thereby rendering their own institution irrelevant. I suppose they could have come up with an entirely new theological reason for Jesus’ death, but it was too late for that.

So modern Christians are left with a confusing, contradictory, and complex theology in order to understand why Jesus had to die. This elaborate and intellectually irreconcilable theology is one of the reasons so many Christians leave the Church and leave the faith. I saw a comic strip just today that had God sitting in heaven on a throne with a newly arrived human being standing before him, pleading his case for entry into heaven. “But I’m forgiven!” the man says. “You died on the cross for the world’s sins! Jesus saves!” God’s response is: “That’s absurd. Why would I sacrifice Myself to Myself to allow me to change a rule I made Myself?”

For me, when understood without divine overtones, and when understood against the backdrop of his life, Jesus’ death has a lot more significance. His message was so powerful and revolutionary that the religious power base he threatened killed him over it. He, apparently, was willing to go to his death for his message. And his message lived on even beyond the bounds of death, because of its transcendence and relevance to life. For me, Christianity is not about atonement and blood sacrifice or forgiveness of sins, and it’s certainly not about a convoluted and irreconcilable mixture of the two; instead, it is about abundant life in the here and now, a life lived to the fullest, and a life over which the boundaries of death can hold no sway.

The Purpose of Jesus's Death: Opposing Biblical Views

Most people believe that the bible teaches that Jesus’s death functioned as an ultimate sacrifice – that Jesus took on the sins of the world and died so that we might have eternal life. Tied up in this basic belief is the idea of atonement and forgiveness of sins. Like most Christians, I have generally thought of these two things – that is, atonement and forgiveness of sins – as being more or less the same thing. Frankly, I had never given it much thought. We are forgiven because Jesus atoned for our sins, period.

Through recent readings on this subject, however, I have come to discover that a real conundrum exists, even within the bible itself, between just what Jesus’s death signified.

Paul, whose letters are the earliest Christian texts in the New Testament, abides by the theological idea that Jesus’s death was an atonement for all humans sins. However, in the book of Acts – which was written some 20 to 30 years after Paul’s death – Paul’s biographer has Paul (and Peter) preaching that Jesus’s death functions as an opportunity for repentance and forgiveness. The idea of atonement is never discussed.

And this presents a problem, because, in fact, atonement and forgiveness are fundamentally different ideas.

Microsoft Bookshelf defines the word “forgive” like this:

1. To excuse for a fault or an offense; pardon.
2. To absolve from payment of (a debt, for example).

It defines “atonement” like this:

1. Amends or reparation for an injury or wrong.

If something must be atoned for, it means that a wrongdoing must be made right through some other means. In other words, if I borrow a thousand dollars from someone and am unable to pay it back, my father might atone for my debt by paying it on my behalf. Or, if I crash my brother’s car, I might atone for that by giving him my own car.

That’s not the same as forgiveness. In the examples above, if I borrow money and can’t pay it, the debtor could choose to forgive the debt and not make me (or anyone else) come up with the money. Or, if I crash my brother’s car, he could choose to forgive it and simply buy a new one himself. Forgiveness means that you absolve someone for something they have done; atonement, on the other hand, means that a debt is satisfied some other way.

For Paul, in his own writings, Jesus’s death functioned as an atonement. When people sin, it breaks God’s commandments. God demands satisfaction for breaking his divine law, so Jesus died to pay for our sins. As New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman writes, “It was a sacrifice made for the sake of others so that they would not have to pay for their sins themselves.” In his own writings, this is how Paul interpreted the meaning of Jesus’s death. For Paul, there is no reason for repentance – our sins are already atoned for; the debt was satisfied when Jesus died.

Yet, in Acts, all the sermons of Paul and Peter focus on the forgiveness of sin. God doesn’t require a sacrifice – instead he requires repentance. Jesus didn’t die in order to atone for sins – instead, his death was a “gross miscarriage of justice” (quoting again from Bart Ehrman). Jesus should not have been put to death in the first place (in Paul’s atonement theology, on the other hand, the implication is that Jesus’s death was part of God’s plan, not a gross miscarriage of justice). But human beings unjustly killed Jesus, according to Acts, and we are all to blame, so we must all repent. If we do so, then God will forgive us.

You can see that these are two substantially different concepts. Yet, Christians tend to use them interchangeably. We think of Jesus’s death as “the Atonement,” but we also know that we are required to repent of our sins and acknowledge our guilt. If, in fact, Jesus’s death functioned as an atonement for sin – as Paul outlines – then there is no reason for repentance. Our sins are already forgiven. But if, instead, Jesus’s death was a miscarriage of justice perpetrated by sinful humans, thus requiring repentance by all, then there should be no talk of Jesus being the great sacrificial lamb, dying in order to atone for our sinfulness.

If you look deeply at this issue, you can see why Luke and other later Christian writers began changing Paul’s teachings about atonement into teachings about repentance. If Jesus’s death was an atonement, then we literally don’t have to do anything. Our sins are already forgiven, purchased and made right with God through Jesus’s death on the cross. One could extrapolate this concept further to assert that everyone is automatically saved by the very fact that Jesus died on the cross. This, of course, is theologically untenable: if you don’t have to do anything and you are already saved the moment you are born, then there would be no need for religion, religious dogma, or anything else.

This may have been the reason why Christians, studying Paul’s theology a generation or so after his death, began reinterpreting and amending Paul’s words and philosophies, ditching the idea of atonement in favor of repentance. This is evident not only in Luke’s writings, but also in the pseudo-Pauline letters – those New Testament books written in Paul’s name, but which were almost certainly not written by Paul, but rather by other Christians writing some decades later.

In the centuries since that time, the very concepts of atonement and repentance, as they relate to Christianity, have become blended such that we don’t tend to even see a difference.

It’s an interesting problem. Are we saved automatically by the atoning sacrifice of Jesus, pre-planned and set into motion by God, or does salvation come through repentance, acknowledging that Jesus’s death was a miscarriage of justice, and depending on God to forgive us? If you follow the writings of Paul, you must accept the former; if you follow Luke’s theology in the book of Acts, you must abide by the latter.

The institution of the Church, I think, deserves some credit for deftly blending these two concepts so that most people don’t even recognize that there is a theological conflict at all. We read Paul’s letters through the lens of Acts, and vice versa, and we don’t see that they are actually saying different things.

Of course, reading one New Testament book through the lens of all the others is probably the biggest theological problem facing the Christian church today, because it skews our perspective of what is really being said, and all the other problems with modern theology just snowball from that starting point. For instance, how many Christians know that among the seven New Testament books that are more or less indisputably authored by Paul (Galatians, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, and 1 Thessalonians), not a single one of them ever talks about the forgiveness of sin as part of salvation? (In fact, the only time Paul ever uses the word “forgive” at all is when he is asking his readers to forgive one another.)

Until we can learn to read each book of the New Testament as a theologically and philosophically independent text, each with its own nuances, ideas, and timeline, we will continue to blend and mix ideas and, in my opinion, continue to abide by misguided and misinformed theologies.