My new article on the original meaning of the cross and resurrection just passed peer review and got published on The Secular Web. Check it out! A Critique of the Penal Substitution Interpretation of the Cross of Christ » Internet Infidels
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What is penal substitution? Ken Pulliam explains it as follows:
God’s holiness demands that sin be punished. God cannot remain just and forgive man without punishing his sin. That would ignore the seriousness of sin. Therefore, God sent his son to bear the punishment for man’s sin. Jesus vicariously bears the punishment for man’s sin. Once sin has been punished, then God can forgive man without compromising his holiness or justice. (Pulliam, 2011, p. 181)
Sounds like an insecure petty worldly Lord. It’s absolutely beyond my comprehension how anything who supposedly shepherded Earth and humanity through creation, could possible be so petty.
It defies all rational and sacred understanding.
If you could offer an explanation, I’d listen to what you had to suggest.
Okay back to your paper,
The crucifixion narrative is so much a rewrite of scripture that it’s difficult to say if there is any history behind it. And it is undisputed that the authors were in the habit of inventing events that never happened to suit their purposes.
Given that, why do so many, spill so much ink on it, so as though it were serious historical fact? When in actuality it never rises above super popular historical myth.
It’s like spending years reading and studying and then writing a learned text about the childhood of Sherlock Holmes.
Then your conclusion starting with:
This essay has attempted to reconstruct what the cross and resurrection meant to the first Christians. However, it must always be kept in mind that a strong case can be made that Jesus never taught anything related to the cross and resurrection during his lifetime, and that the followers simply rewrote his life after he died as a triumph over Satan—such rewriting being common in the Second-Temple period, as Brown has argued and as was noted above. … The “redemptive death/resurrection” material was probably a post-Jesus’-death invention, though I think that Tabor is wrong that traditional atonement is what Paul had in mind. What all of this probably means is that it was well known that the historical Jesus was terrified and pleading/screaming from the cross for someone to help him, and this was then turned into the Gethsemane prayer story, an apologetic argument claiming that Jesus knew all along that it was God’s plan that Jesus needed to die—though the historical Jesus had no such mindset.
A strong case can also be made that Jesus never existed in real life and is an amalgamation of what we perceive to be the best in mankind.
Can you summarize your conclusion in a couple sentences, the paper was rambling and I didn’t get the point of the exercise.
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