This post contains the conversation at BSA titled “Jesus sacrifice” started on 2/23/26 by Kimberly Callaway
OP, Kimberly Callaway – Help! I don’t understand first century jewish theology that lead to deciding human sacrifice was needed for god to forgive sin. I’ve read some of Bart ehrman posts. And all his popular books. I think my total lack of background in academic theology isn’t helping. I’m working thru the Old Testament but I still don’t see the connection. I’ve read mark smith book on ugharitic texts to familiarize myself with polytheism in ancient times and sacrifice of humans by ancient Canaanite’s. I know the Isaac story which seems to present that god didn’t want human sacrifice anymore? I’m quite confused as to the conclusion that a crucified man even if he rose from the dead was necessary for atonement? And Bart has explained some of this but I’m just more confused. lol. Thanks. Kim
Joseph Nobles
As I’m understanding it now, this was an example of reconning Jesus’s death and resurrection after it happened. His followers were left grasping for some way to understand it and “sacrifice for sins” eventually made it all make sense.
Kimberly Callaway
Thankyou for your prompt reply! So why this conclusion? Why would first century apostles come to this idea? Is it referred to in the septuagiant? Why not decide jesus was unjustly killed and God rose him because he was so good. And then the apocalypse and gods kingdom was at hand because Jesus rose first from death. So righteous behavior got one eternal life? Why did apostles believe God needed to kill someone or himself? To give humans eternal life? They obviously came to this conclusion? Or someone did early on. So why this conclusion? what lead them down this pathway? Lol. Does this make any sense?
Joseph Nobles
Kimberly Callaway Dr Ehrman has explained his view of this in last year’s NINT, and he promoted that NINT with this appearance at History Valley where he also went into his reasoning. I hope that answers a few of your questions!
Kimberly Callaway
Thank you! Excellent interview. I checked Isaiah 53. And I know Bart has said its about isreal which makes sense. But Isaiah does mention sin and piercing and dying. I can imagine how distraught apostles reinterpreted this part. And then developed their newish Jesus theology from judiasm. Interesting point bart made about Luke and no atonement. I knew BSA would be worth the price of admission!!! And I appreciate your effort to help me gain knowledge on this topic.
Keith P. Myers
I believe that the early John the Baptist/Jesus movement opposed sacrifice. They taught a message of repentance, asking God directly for forgiveness and being Baptized as an outer sign of this. They completely bypassed the Temple system and its sacrifices as a way to be “right with God.” When Jesus turned over the tables of the moneychangers, he did not call the Temple a “den of robbers.” That is a mistranslation. He called the Temple a “Lair of Rippers/Shredders”, ie “killers”, referring to the sacrifices, not the moneychangers. I think it is therefore inconceivable that the followers of Jesus would propose that his death was a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. That is NOT what Jesus himself taught while he was alive! The whole idea of atonement Theology comes from Paul. Not from Jesus and the Jerusalem church.
Schaun Wheeler
Keith P. Myers Jesus’s phrase in Mark 11:17 is quoting Jeremiah 7:11 directly. The Greek is spēlaion lēstōn, and the underlying Hebrew in Jeremiah is me’arat paritzim. The root p-r-tz means to break through or breach, not to rip or shred animal flesh. And the context in Jeremiah 7 is unambiguous: Jeremiah is condemning people who commit injustice and then retreat to the Temple thinking it protects them. The “den” is a hideout for bad actors, not a slaughterhouse metaphor. A “lair of rippers” reading is working from a fringe etymology that ignores the source text Jeremiah is drawing on.
In When Christians Were Jews, Paul Fredriksen argues that positive orientation toward the Temple and its cult was a near-universal feature of Jewish piety before the revolt – the Dead Sea sectarians rejected the Temple priesthood, not sacrifice itself. Jesus’s Temple action is better read as a prophetic symbolic enactment of the Temple’s coming eschatological destruction and replacement by God’s final Temple, not as a protest against the practice of animal offerings. Sacrifice was what temples were for in antiquity, Jewish and otherwise. The idea that Jesus was running an anti-sacrifice reform movement reads modern ethical sensibilities back into a first-century Jewish context where they don’t fit.
John the Baptist’s practice of repentance-baptism did offer a path to forgiveness outside the Temple system, but that doesn’t mean John or Jesus opposed sacrifice. Multiple paths to forgiveness coexisted in Second Temple Judaism. Prayer, repentance, fasting, and charity were all understood as means of righting onesself with God alongside Temple offerings. The rabbis later developed extensive theology around non-sacrificial atonement after 70 CE precisely because these ideas were already in circulation. Having an alternative doesn’t require opposition to the existing system.
Paul himself, in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5, explicitly says he received the formula “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.” The language of receiving and handing on (paralambanō and paradidōmi) is technical vocabulary for tradition transmission. Most critical scholars, I think, recognize this as a pre-Pauline creedal fragment that Paul inherited from the Jerusalem community. Paul didn’t invent it. The most natural source is the apostles he visited in Jerusalem (Galatians 1:18-19).
You’re right that there’s genuine tension between what Jesus likely taught during his lifetime and what his followers concluded about his death afterward. But the timeline you’re proposing, where atonement theology is Paul’s innovation imposed on a movement that never thought in those terms, doesn’t work. The sacrificial interpretation of Jesus’s death appears to predate Paul’s involvement entirely. The earliest community, still deeply Jewish and still reading scripture, used available interpretive frameworks (Isaiah 53, Maccabean martyrology, the Psalms of the suffering righteous) to make theological sense of a death that contradicted their expectations.
Keith P. Myers
Schaun Wheeler I have heard two different scholars, including James Tabor, support the idea that “den of robbers” is a misinterpretation/mistranslation. The early Ebionites were traditionally said to be vegetarians. John the Baptist did not eat meat. The Temple Priesthood would care very little if Jesus was agitating the moneychangers. But if Jesus was encouraging the populace to NOT offer sacrifices, that would cut into the Temple’s income and reason for being. That would have certainly gotten their attention! And remember, everything that Paul believed about Jesus came from VISIONS, not from the followers of Jesus! Paul said himself that his knowledge did not come from men and purposefully distanced himself from the Jerusalem church. And Jesus never taught any atonement theology. He taught the same message that John the Baptist taught….repent (change your ways), and ask God directly for forgiveness.
Schaun Wheeler
Keith P. Myers. Some good points here. A few reactions.
On the “den of robbers” translation issue, the linguistic argument for “lair of rippers/shredders” specifically doesn’t hold up. The phrase is a quotation from Jeremiah 7:11, the underlying Hebrew root is p-r-tz (breach/break through), and the Jeremiah context is about people treating the Temple as a safe house while committing injustice. That said, the broader point, that Jesus may have been confronting the sacrificial system itself rather than just commercial abuses, doesn’t depend on that particular translation claim. There are other ways to get there.
But I think the more important issue is one that applies to all of us in this thread, including my own previous posts. We’re all building detailed reconstructions of what Jesus thought and intended, and the evidence base for doing that is much thinner than any of our arguments acknowledge. Jesus was executed by Romans on a political charge. He caused some kind of disturbance in the Temple during Passover. Beyond that, almost everything, including what he said during the Temple incident, what motivated it, how the authorities responded and why, comes through gospel accounts written 40-70 years later by authors with their own theological agendas. We don’t have direct access to the historical event. We have narratives shaped by decades of community interpretation.
So the question “did Jesus oppose sacrifice?” may not be answerable with the evidence we have. What we can say is that early communities interpreted his relationship to the Temple and sacrifice in different ways. Some traditions preserved in early Acts speeches treat his death as a wrong that God reversed through resurrection, with no sacrificial meaning attached. The pre-Pauline creed Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15:3 (“Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures”) shows that a sacrificial interpretation existed very early, within years of the crucifixion, and that Paul received it from someone before him. The author of Hebrews later developed a full-blown theology of Jesus’s death as the final sacrifice that renders the Temple system obsolete. And the Ebionites, whatever their historical connection to the Jerusalem community, preserved a tradition that rejected sacrifice entirely.
Rather than asking which of these got Jesus right, it might be more productive to recognize that we’re looking at a range of early responses to the same crisis: a messianic claimant was executed by Rome, and different communities of followers made sense of that in different ways, drawing on whatever scriptural and theological resources were available to them. The sacrificial interpretation won out in what became orthodox Christianity, but it coexisted with other readings from very early on.
On the Paul question: the claim that Paul’s gospel came entirely from visions and had no connection to the Jerusalem community is hard to sustain from Paul’s own letters. Galatians 1 makes the independence claim, but 1 Corinthians 15:3 uses technical vocabulary for tradition transmission (“received,” “handed on”), and Galatians 1:18-19 has Paul spending fifteen days with Peter and meeting James. These sit in the same letters. Paul is claiming authority independent of Jerusalem, but the content of his preaching overlaps with tradition he received from others. That doesn’t mean atonement theology originated in Jerusalem specifically. It could have developed among Greek-speaking Jewish believers in Antioch or Damascus. But the “Paul invented it all from visions” reading requires ignoring what Paul himself says about receiving tradition.
Where I think this line of argument is strongest is in insisting that Jesus himself almost certainly did not teach his own atoning death. That’s close to a consensus position in critical scholarship. The atonement interpretation was a post-crucifixion development. The remaining question, which probably can’t be definitively settled with existing evidence, is exactly where and how quickly it emerged.
Schaun Wheeler
You’re right to find the logic strange. The key thing is that “Jesus died for our sins” wasn’t the starting point. It was a solution to a problem, the problem being that the messiah wasn’t supposed to die.
Once Jesus was crucified, his followers had to explain why God let that happen. Some of them did basically say what you suggested: evil people killed him, God raised him because he was righteous, and now the kingdom is coming. You can see versions of that in the early Acts speeches. The death has no saving function there. It’s just a wrong that God reversed.
But other early followers went searching through the Septuagint for ways to make the death itself purposeful, and they found passages like Isaiah 53, which describes a figure who suffers “for our transgressions”, and 4 Maccabees 17, which calls martyrs’ blood “a ransom for the sin of our nation.” So the raw materials were already in the Jewish tradition. The early Jesus-followers assembled it from stuff that was already floating around in Second Temple Judaism.
Paul’s letters in the 50s already treat “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3) as something he received, not invented. So the interpretive move probably happened within the first decade, but it was one interpretation among several, and it won out over time.
A couple books that might be helpful:
Paula Fredriksen’s When Christians Were Jews covers the earliest community’s thinking in the immediate aftermath and is grounded in Second Temple Jewish context rather than reading backward from later Christian theology.
Raymond Brown’s The Death of the Messiah is a much larger and more dense treatment of the passion narratives. Brown was a Catholic priest but also a rigorous historical-critical scholar, and the book is two volumes of detailed source analysis. Brown does presume there’s a historical core to the passion narratives and works outward from there, but he’s known for an even-handed treatment despite his faith commitments.
Both authors work from primary sources and treat the tradition as something that developed historically rather than arrived fully formed.
Keith P. Myers
The death of Jesus likely came as a great surprise to his followers. Despite all the mentions in the New Testament of Jesus dying and being resurrected after 3 days, his closest followers seemed to have no knowledge at all of this prophesy! All 4 Gospels portray them as being completely surprised by an empty tomb, and completely amazed by the resurrection appearances! If Jesus had been teaching them that he had to die for the sins of man and be resurrected on the 3rd day, why would they have been so surprised when it actually happened?? No. His death was completely unexpected. They thought he was the predicted Messiah and had come to establish the Kingdom of God on earth. Dying wasn’t part of that! So when he died, they had to make sense of it all. The resurrection appearances convinced them that all was not lost. If Jesus did not usher in the Kingdom of God with his first coming, it must mean that it would require a second coming! So they readjusted their timeline, and expected that Jesus would be coming back again to usher in the Kingdom of God soon! But it never happened. The Gospel of Thomas suggests that at least some early Christian groups then stepped out of the Apocalyptic mindset and taught both that the Kingdom of God was an inner state, and that it was a way of being in world…maybe a “social justice” approach where you personally work towards making the world a better place. “The Kingdom of God is within you, and the Kingdom of God is all around you.”
Manny5
Kim. We had a discussion on “Atonement or Forgiveness” some time ago.
https://biblical-studies-academy.circle.so/c/god-theology/atonement-of-forgiveness
https://biblical-studies-academy.circle.so/c/general-discussion-a52be5/atonement-or-forgiveness-cont
You might have answers to your questions.
