It’s based on the old idea of offering sacrifices to atone for sins. Do bad thing, sacrifice a dove or whatever to God to make up for it.
The idea is that God decided to do away with the sacrifice system using said system, by sending and then accepting a sacrifice great and pure enough to wipe the slate clean forevermore - his own self/son.
I’ve heard that it hits people from cultures where they do still sacrifice for every sin particularly hard - we might not have the frame of reference to really get this fully anymore.
There’s one thing that still bugs me about this narrative. Jesus wasn’t a sacrifice. He wasn’t killed as an offering to God for the sins of humanity. He was killed because he was giving the peasants ideas that the ruling class didn’t like. Unless God sending him to Earth in the first place was the sacrifice, by the logic that God knew how it would turn out. But then God is the one offering the sacrifice… to God.
That is actually the Christian understanding. To make it even weirder, in a sense, Jesus is God in this scenario. So God sacrifices Himself for the sins of humanity.
Yep, this is how I understood the story. For whatever reason, God considered himself bound by the rules he laid down, and so worked the system to break everyone out of it.
To Christians, the reasons why the Romans did it are irrelevant, since they were fulfilling a prophecy and doing the thing they needed to do as part of “god’s plan”
It’s based on the old idea of offering sacrifices to atone for sins. Do bad thing, sacrifice a dove or whatever to God to make up for it.
The idea is that God decided to do away with the sacrifice system using said system, by sending and then accepting a sacrifice great and pure enough to wipe the slate clean forevermore - his own self/son.
I’ve heard that it hits people from cultures where they do still sacrifice for every sin particularly hard - we might not have the frame of reference to really get this fully anymore.
There’s one thing that still bugs me about this narrative. Jesus wasn’t a sacrifice. He wasn’t killed as an offering to God for the sins of humanity. He was killed because he was giving the peasants ideas that the ruling class didn’t like. Unless God sending him to Earth in the first place was the sacrifice, by the logic that God knew how it would turn out. But then God is the one offering the sacrifice… to God.
That is actually the Christian understanding. To make it even weirder, in a sense, Jesus is God in this scenario. So God sacrifices Himself for the sins of humanity.
Yep, this is how I understood the story. For whatever reason, God considered himself bound by the rules he laid down, and so worked the system to break everyone out of it.
To Christians, the reasons why the Romans did it are irrelevant, since they were fulfilling a prophecy and doing the thing they needed to do as part of “god’s plan”
So he’s the original “you have to work inside the system if you wanna change it!”… Seems like the gnostics were onto something!
Excellent perspective.
But what’s the sacrifice either? Jesus doesn’t even die for good. Is a few hours of suffering a grand sacrifice worth all humanity’s sins?
Off course the judge of that is God who is the definitive self-absorbed jackass so maybe he does value his own temporary inconvenience that high.
God basically ripped himself in two as Jesus/the Son was completely cut off from the Father.