What to do with an atoning/non atoning Jesus?
James Boswell II
Shipmate
in Purgatory
James Boswell IIJames Boswell II Shipmate 7:13AM
There are numerous historical scholars today who agree on quite a lot.
Many, I think most of them, are convinced that there is overwhelming historical evidence that John the Baptizer, Jesus and all his earliest followers, held to the prevailing "erroneous" apocalyptic expectations of their time, believing. among other things that Daniel 2:44; 7:13-14; and 12:1-3 would be fulfilled in their lifetime.
There is, however, one thing which sharply divides even the best historical Jesus scholars of our time:
Did Jesus believe that he was going to have to die an atoning death?
Many, perhaps most of them, think that idea was not part of Jesus' original message -- it's not part of the Sermon on the Mount, after all -- but was added on later by the church to try to explain the embarrassment of his crucifixion.
What do y'all think, and why?
__________
Added thought: And Jesus' crucifixion was an embarrassment. Paul lamented that Greeks considered the message of the cross to be foolishness and Jews considered it to be scandalous.
There are numerous historical scholars today who agree on quite a lot.
Many, I think most of them, are convinced that there is overwhelming historical evidence that John the Baptizer, Jesus and all his earliest followers, held to the prevailing "erroneous" apocalyptic expectations of their time, believing. among other things that Daniel 2:44; 7:13-14; and 12:1-3 would be fulfilled in their lifetime.
There is, however, one thing which sharply divides even the best historical Jesus scholars of our time:
Did Jesus believe that he was going to have to die an atoning death?
Many, perhaps most of them, think that idea was not part of Jesus' original message -- it's not part of the Sermon on the Mount, after all -- but was added on later by the church to try to explain the embarrassment of his crucifixion.
What do y'all think, and why?
__________
Added thought: And Jesus' crucifixion was an embarrassment. Paul lamented that Greeks considered the message of the cross to be foolishness and Jews considered it to be scandalous.
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And although nothing would surprise me about late edits, I can't see how Jesus could have not known His mission for over 20 years. A mission He understood with fully human limitation and fully divine inspiration. Not a mission that was in any way necessary beyond John 3:16 - God requires no human sacrifice and we don't need just forgiveness in our benighted helplessness.
He is the only hope. What to do with Him is hope, is charity in hope via faith. Charity is the substance of faith the substance of hope.
As you said in the other thread, something highly motivating happened very early on that altered the perceptions of the disciples about Jesus. Whatever that was—and Paul and the Gospels would say it was the resurrection—it caused them to reconsider the meaning of Jesus’s death, and for that matter his life. So I would say that to the extent (if any) that the idea of an atoning death was added on later, it was to understand the meaning of that death in light of the resurrection.
That said, my read of the Gospels is that Jesus did believe he would die an atoning death. Exactly how that death would be “atoning” is, of course, a whole ‘nother question.
It's been a long time since I read Moltmann, but that resonates with me, and I think it exemplifies something:
Whatever thoughts we come up with on atonement, they should hopefully (surely?) be uplifting in some way!
** okay, it was Béziers, but alliteration
I appreciate the honesty of your first paragraph. Maybe the errant Jesus thread was not a total waste of time.
___
But I'm going to "take you on" a little re your second paragraph, and I mean this in a friendly, not really adverse way:
Many people have considerable difficulty with the traditional doctrine(s) of atonement. There was a time when I myself as an old line liberal -- if anyone mentioned Jesus' atoning death, it drove me straight up the wall.
What do you MEAN, "God requires no human sacrifice." Why then did the Markan Jesus speak of the Son of Man having to die as "a ransom for many"? Ransom? Is that payment? Is that not an atoning sacrifice for sin?
Isn't it the traditional shudder-some understanding that God had to lay all our sins on Jesus in order to forgive us? And didn't Paul even go so far as to say that God made the innocent, sinless Jesus "to be sin" in order to bring about our righteousness?
__________
Again, I do not mean any of this adversarily (sp?). I'm just trying to stir up some thinking here.
This ridiculous obsession, and the ways in which so many members of 'the church' simply do NOT care for each other, is rapidly making me think that the whole organised 'church' thing is a waste of time.
The idea of a 'loving' God condemning his creation to everlasting damnation simply because some peeps put their genitals in the 'wrong place' is stinkingly abhorrent, but there are lots of other things that we may need forgiveness for...
Oboy. I may have opened up something really explosive here.
All that you said, NOprophet, I may have endorsed in my earlier college life. And in some ways I still do. At this point, I am not going to try to answer you fully, but I just want to say one thing about this:
When the Markan Jesus says what he does at 10:45 , he does it because his disciples are arguing with one another about which of them is going to be the greatest when he Kingdom of God arrives on earth.
He tells them they are totally off base, because "Whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all. For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."
My only point is this: If we were to 'buy into" this, would we not be called on in the present to be amazingly "loving, kind, and decent" toward one another?
And, of course, many Christians, and their churches, do indeed buy into it. Alas, they're not the ones the Meeja buy into...
But that is not the only way to understand atonement, and it is a relatively recent understanding. Your “Christ was demonstrating the power of love by living, dying and rising in it” sounds a lot like the moral influence theory of atonement.
I sincerely hope the Hosts will not ban me for quoting once more briefly from my novel:
_____________
"But Professor Chase, if you once considered the doctrine of atonement to be abhorrent, how did you come to believe that it was not abhorrent to Jesus?"
"Oh, but Mr. Walker, I'm convinced that it was abhorrent to Jesus. As I was just saying, I feel certain that the first time he read the suffering servant passage in Isaiah, it greatly upset him, and it continued to upset him for the rest of his short life "
In my opinion, there are six really exceptional historical Jesus scholars in America today:
E. P. Sanders (who is agnostic), Paula Fredriksen (who is Jewish), Bart Ehrman (now an atheist), Reza Aslan (who has returned to Islam, John P. Meier (a Catholic Christian), and Dale C. Allison (a Presbyterian Christian).
All these scholars employ excellent historical methodologies in their research, and all are convinced that Jesus was expecting an imminent cataclysmic ending of the present world to be followed by the establishment of God's Kingdom throughout the earth.
I am in basic agreement with most of what these scholars say, with one exception: Four of them do not believe that Jesus expected to dies some sort of sacrificial death.
I am not a big fan of PSA, not because I believe it to be wrong, but because I believe it to be incomplete. I am more a fan of the Christus Victor theory as expounded by Gustaf Aulen.
John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. 1991-2016 (five volumes so far, with a sixth yet to come!)
E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus. 1993.
---Also, his Jesus and Judaism, 1985.
Dale C. Allison, Jr., Jesus: Millenarian Prophet. 1998.
---[See also his Constructing Jesus... below.]
Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity. 1999.
Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Prophet of the New Millenium. 1999.
Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. 2013.
I can't wait for Meier's final volume, in which he will deal with the really big questions: What was Jesus' view of himself, and how did he regard his death?
Meanwhile, I consider Allison's Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History, 2010, to be a work of major significance, for in it he already deals effectively with those big questions.
Along with the deceased German Lutheran scholar Joachim Jeremias (New Testament Theology, Volume One: The Proclamation of Jesus. 1971), these two scholars, Allison and Meier, have been among the strongest scholarly influences in my life.
A quick Google using those words will bring up lots of links.
After meticulously examining the New Testament evidence, Dale C. Allison (Constructing Jesus) concludes that Jesus did expect to be put to death, believing it was God's will that he die in order to bring about some great good for Israel and the world.
Allison finds abundant NT evidence that "Jesus did not run from his death or otherwise resist it. On the contrary, anticipating his cruel end, he submitted to it, trusting that his unhappy fate was somehow for the good.... Jesus ' decision to die, whenever made and whatever the motivation and whatever his precise interpretation, left a vivid impression [in the memory of his disciples]. Indeed, next to the fact that Jesus was crucified by order of Pontius Pilate, his acquiescence to his fate is probably the best-attested fact about his last days. At some point, he determined to assent to his miserable end, accepting it as the will of God" (pp. 432,433).
Those are strong assertions, and Allison as a historian is careful to point out that although Christians may feel encouraged by his scholarly finding that Jesus "did not run from death," such a conclusion, Allison cautions, "hardly constitutes a theory of the atonement. To do history is not to do theology" (p. 462).
Those questions and more I have tried to answer -- yes, in my novel.
What I stated above is excerpted not from my novel, but from the INFO page of my website www.TheDeadSeaGospel.com. Again, I hope the Hosts will allow it.
In any case, the principal poster is you!
Luke Timothy Johnson (The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditonal Gospels, 1996) agrees with you. For him the "real" Jesus is the Resurrected Lord of the church. Johnson severely attacks the Jesus Seminar scholars for their poor scholarship (I agree), but he also takes on John P. Meier as being wrong in doing this kind of thinking (I do not agree). Johnson does, however, admit that "Meier's achievement ... is to show against theories that pretend to be critical but are not, and against the attempts to press the pieces [of the Jesus tradition] into any number of dubious shapes, that several pieces of the Jesus tradition that the Gospel narratives themselves emphasize as important to the understanding of Jesus have a strong claim to historical probability. This is not a meager accomplishment" (emphasis added).
From his tone Paul regarded this as a badge of honor, not an embarrassment.
True, but at least I am in dialogue this time. Is that not some improvement?
I shall now take a rest.
The atonement is kinda like paying a ransom.
The atonement is kinda like dying in our place to fulfill righteousness.
The atonement is kinda like a victory over personified powers of evil.
The atonement is ..... and so forth.
But it's not any one of those things. They are metaphors only, trying to describe a great and, if you'll excuse me, weird thing that happened.
Heheheh...it's not for me to say if this thread's an improvement or not, but I'm still interested to know why it worries you that no women appear to be contributing...
...as I implied earlier, it's not always possible to discern a Shipmate's gender (even if that should be an important issue for you) from their username.
Some of us may have Good Reasons™ for keeping our Real Life™ identity secret.
Enjoy your rest, and keep up the dialogue!
If nothing else, as the only record we have for most of the New Testament is the New Testament, arguing that what really happened was something different strikes me as being founded in what has been described on these boards as a 'hermeneutic of doubt'.
This is where I am as well. I don’t think it means we need to leave this thread alone, though. It means we bring a different perspective. Nothing wrong with that.
This. They are attempts to describe what is in essence a mystery.
(Did you really trhink I could stay away?)
Well, I know that Lamb Chopped, and Lyda, and one or two others here are women (for that became clear in how they self referenced) and they have not yet showed up.
That worries me a little because some women, especially the more strongly committed feminist types -- of whom, by the way, I approve -- FERVENTLY object to any sense of being told that they ore anyone should be self sacrificial. And I understand that.
I remember having difficulty repeating Jesus' "Do not resist one who is evil" teaching to a congregation in which there sat a wife and mother whose husband had abused her verbally for many long years by telling her she was a worthless piece of nothing, but when he finally left her for another woman, she got herself a female lawyer who told her 'under no circumstances leave the house, and get a job.' So she got a job as a kind of office manager and was so well liked that young men gathered all around her desk, treating her as if she were some kind of favorite aunt, joking and appreciating her -- i.e., she was a popular, successful, much appreciated and much affirmed addition to the business!
Sometime later her husband came back and told her to leave the house and she told him to see her lawyer --and wow, did that guy get fleeced!
So I ain't into tellin' women not to resist one who is evil
I didn't realize that you're a woman.
A woman in Bishop's clothing? ... Hmmm... I almost think that could sorta turn me on...
I made no statement. You may think what you will - I couldn't possibly comment.
But I do apologise for introducing a potentially offensive tangent.
@Enoch
@PDR
@others
Why, when I was young, and started reading the gospels, I'm glad nobody told me, Don't question anything; it's all there exactly as it happened and you must believe it all equally.
It's all equally historically true.
FOR me, it has been a long, sometimes difficult process, a process of “growing up,” a process that began when I was a young teenager. In those days I was not much of a Christian. Then one Easter I saw two films on television that caused me to become intrigued by Jesus. I began attending church and reading the gospels, and was particularly impressed by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. In a strange and wonderful way, it grasped me.
Carefully, studiously, I read on through the rest of Matthew, and then I read the gospels of Mark and Luke. As I read, I noticed some differences among those gospels, but the differences didn’t seem all that important. To me, Matthew, Mark, and Luke seemed fairly similar (“synoptic” or “alike in viewpoint” as the scholars say).
Along the way, I learned that the Gospel of Mark was probably the first gospel to be written, so I paid particular attention to that gospel.
Finally I began reading what was probably the last gospel to have been written, the Gospel of John – and immediately I encountered difficulties.
The picture of Jesus in that gospel is so different.
In the Gospel of Mark, the disciples of Jesus have trouble recognizing who Jesus is. Only slowly and with difficulty do they come to believe, late in Jesus’ ministry, that he is the expected Messiah. This is partly because Mark’s Jesus is usually reticent, even secretive, about his messianic identity. But in the Gospel of John, from the first moment Jesus appears he is quite open and explicit about his identity, and his disciples begin calling him the Messiah (“the Christ”) almost as soon as they meet him!
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus seems very human. He can sometimes be surprised or uncertain; once he even admits ignorance; frequently he is agitated, angered, upset, or troubled – indeed, in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross he seems very troubled. But in the Gospel of John, Jesus never appears ignorant of anything, nor does he ever seem surprised or really troubled – not even in Gethsemane, not even on the cross, though once he does weep.
In Mark, Jesus talks primarily about the Kingdom of God, and frequently goes out of his way to direct attention away from himself by “playing down” or de-emphasizing his miracles. In John, Jesus talks about himself almost all the time and does not hesitate to center attention on himself by emphasizing his miracles and by making highly exalted “I am” claims.
In Mark, when a wealthy man kneels before Jesus and hails him “Good teacher,” Jesus says, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” In John, when one of the disciples calls Jesus “My Lord and my God,” he accepts the homage.
Then too there is Jesus’ style of speaking: In the Gospel of Mark he speaks simply and directly, but in John he speaks in a circular, exalted, rather mystical style. There are even moments in John when it is impossible to tell whether it is Jesus who is speaking or the gospel’s narrator.
IN Mark, Jesus begins his ministry after John the Baptizer has been arrested. In John, he begins his ministry before the Baptizer’s arrest.
In Mark, Jesus’ mother and brothers reject his early ministry. In John, they participate in his early ministry.
In Mark, Jesus travels to Jerusalem only once near the end of his ministry, and while there he drives the moneychangers out of the Temple, the very act that leads to his execution. In John, Jesus drives out the money-changers near the beginning of his ministry and journeys to Jerusalem several times.
In Mark, Jesus’ last supper with his disciples is a Passover meal, during which he speaks about his body and his blood. In John, the meal takes place a day before the Passover and Jesus makes long speeches and does not even mention his body and blood.
In Mark, Jesus is crucified at nine in the morning. In John, he is still standing before Pontius Pilate at noon.
–As a young teenager, I was puzzled and upset by such differences.
Now it can’t be both ways (I told myself). Either the Baptizer and Jesus’ disciples knew from the first who he was, or they didn’t. It can’t be both ways!
--I was disturbed by these gospel inconsistencies.
AND it got even worse. My initial impression that the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are fairly similar (synoptic) began to fall apart under closer examination. As I made careful comparisons, it became clear that the authors of Matthew and Luke, both of whom drew much of their information from Mark, did not hesitate to alter, change, delete, or exaggerate that information whenever it served their purpose, which was to present a more religiously satisfying portrait of Jesus and his disciples. In order to do that, they were quite willing to change or get rid of anything in the Markan text which they found unhelpful, embarrassing, or problematic. [Examples: See what Matthew's author does to Mark's story of Jesus' rejection at Nazareth, or the opening of the story of the rich young ruler, or Mark's tomb story!]
Clearly, the authors of Matthew and Luke, like the author of John, were more interested in presenting an edifying religious portrait of Jesus than in presenting an objective, historical account of what Jesus actually said and did.
“But if this is true of the authors of Matthew, Luke, and John,” I told myself, “why couldn’t it also be true of the author of Mark? Isn’t it possible that he, too, greatly altered the Jesus information he received? How can we be sure that any of the gospels gives us any information about Jesus that has even the least degree of historical accuracy?”
*I'm particularly glad nobody told me I HAD to believe it all equally! And by employing good scholarship I found much clarity that I still value.
You’re veering back into selling encyclopedias.
Don't worry. That was that. I am back to dialogue.
I meant to say I aimed it ENOCH and PDR and what THEY said. Not you.
Apologies.
Another senior moment.
"Mark you this, Bassanio,
the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
a goodly apple rotten at the heart.
Oh, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!"
(Merchant of Venice , Wm Shakespeare)
Comparing a relatively innocent teenager excitedly looking for and expecting simple consistences in scripture, to the devil looking for scriptures to use for evil purposes strikes me as somewhat of a stretch.
Thank you, @mousethief, this sums up what I’ve been struggling to verbalise!
PSA is a Western tradition since Augustine at least, Eastern since Paul and, of course, Jesus Himself. I'm alone here in saying that Jesus Himself believed in PSA, not just ransom, which itself was not necessary either. All atonement theories are stories we make up. The fact of at-one-ment with God is in the fact of the Incarnation. Orthodox recapitulation theory as a basis of kenosis is far better than traditional Western 'theories', but still seems predicated on the Fall?