Unleavened Jesus

Why is it that the blood sacrifice of the innocent was thought to remove the sins of the guilty?

Nero's Boot

Because BibleGod demands pain before he'll forgive anyone of anything. He's a sadist, pure and simple. Why a simple "I forgive you" wouldn't suffice is because of this inherent need in BibleGod for torture, bloodshed, and submissive misery.

--BibleGod loves to inflict pain NB

Unleavened Jesus

Right, but shouldn't I receive the pain? If I commited a murder and they gave Mother Theresa a lethal injection to cleanse me of sin, 1) I would be totally stoked and 2) it would make absolutely no sense.

I'm sure it has its roots in greek sacrifice or something with all the self-selection and whatnot, but at least they were giving up a good goat.

Solo

It was and still is, an appeal to human conscience !

In the wisdom that Paul received and preached, the appearance of sin may not be sin, and therefore Christians should leave the judging to God.

God convinced Paul that, absurd as it may seem, Jesus was really innocent of any wrongdoing, that his actions were compulsions directly coming from God. Obviously, even in his own time, such scenarios came from someone who struggled with serious mental challenges. Paul was to decide whether the uncanny ecstasies of glory that were morphing into catastrophic feelings of self-annihilation he lived with were irreducibly madness or whether they had some meaning, some purpose that graced his existence. Undoubtedly, the mad Saul believed that God was destroying him through madness for questioning his will in that he chose to send his "only" Son to earth as an obscure Galilean peasant preacher who ran afoul of the law. Paul, under the stresses of his condition reasoned that God found blame in him and made him mad simply for passing judgment on an inconsequential man he never knew. It is also evident from Paul's writing that he believed God visited on him the same mental tortures as on his dying Son, whom he sent in flesh.

The mystery of Paul's Christ is simply in his brain somehow finding a way out of this existential impasse and madness by creating a scheme which stabilized him mentally. In that scheme, God crucified Saul mystically alongside Jesus, and commissioned Paul to spread the word of Jesus Christ, the foolish, powerless, despised man who would have changed how things were on Earth, as the embodiment of Isaiah's suffering servant of the Lord, who lives gloriously in heaven and who will come back to judge himself.

No matter what you think of Paul's ideas, they became the groundwork of the world's most successful religion, which imprinted itself on the most civilized civilization that the world has ever known. When one of the most advanced examples of that civilization became a colonial oppressor in India, Mahatma Ghandi, could answer an arrogant British envoy: "Yes, you will leave India, because your conscience will not allow you to rule over us if we don't want it". And the British left India, because they knew the difference between "might" and "right" and which makes which. That, I contend, could not have happened without Paul's overheating brain.

Jiri

Unleavened Jesus

Mkay that was way over my head. Now I know why I hang out in the lounge. Any lay explanations?

Toto

You are asking a question that involves complex anthropological issues, so there is no simple answer that everyone agrees on.

Blood sacrifices are part of early human religious practice in many cultures. The Hebrews practiced blood sacrifice of animals at the Temple, and it was important that the animals be free of blemish. Blood was identified with life, so blood could not be eaten, but blood had to be spilled to purify someone who was ritually impure.

You can find one explanation of it in The Ten Commandments by Joseph Lewis, especially in the section on the second commandment. You can find an almost infinite variety of other, more post modern interpretations by googling some key terms.

Modern liberal Christians tend to see Jesus as supplanting and ending the earlier primitive blood sacrifices, by making the one last sacrifice that is needed. This is often a good selling point when missionaries are trying to convert tribes that still cling to human or animal sacrifice. There does seem to be some deep cultural inclination for blood sacrifices, whether innocent blood or not.

flyspray

Why? Well, people are told that once they accept Christ they will be free from sin so that they will convert. For example, the following scripture could be used:

2 Corinthians 5:17 Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.

On the other hand, once converted, they can then be controlled by the following:

Romans 3:23 For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;

Then later, if those in power do something that can be considered sin, they can defend themselves thusly:

Ecclesiastes 7:20 For there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not.

Personally, I think the answer to the question "Why?", is obvious.

John Kesler

According to some OT passages, no blood sacrifice of Jesus was needed.

If forgiveness of sins could be obtained without blood atonement, and if God really ceased to remember sins, why was Jesus' "sacrifice" needed? To claim that sin could be forgiven before Jesus' death, but that this still didn't pay for sins, is to suggest that God didn't really mean what he said when he stated that a sinner's sins would cease to be "remembered against him."

Solo

I am somewhat baffled by the analogy, which is misconstruing the proposition Paul put in front of his congregations, about "Jesus Christ" dying for "the sins of the world".

What "pain", may I ask do you feel, considering the proposition that "you" are a sinner and that some Spirit of a wandering preacher who was killed a long time ago only because he denied "he" was a sinner, might be able to help you with that ?

Do you understand the question ?

If it is a ludicrous proposition, why don't you just ignore it ?

Think about it..... Jesus, is it ?

Jiri

fatpie42

What's all this nonsense about it being a difficult question to answer. It's simple really.

No one believes in the power of sacrifice anymore. Back then they did. You recognised that your God is unhappy with you as a community, so you make a sacrifice as a community and God is appeased. Makes sense to them, we can get the gist of what it involves, but we wouldn't really take it seriously today.

Now imagine that God's method of doing away with this system is to say I will become human, and in this human form I will sacrifice myself to you! Now this is pretty impressive. It was a radical idea and people were inspired by it. Unfortunately there was a short period of time when what people were inspired to do was confess their Christianity to Roman persecutors and then be executed themselves. But nevertheless, if you believe in sacrifice, it is a pretty radical idea that Christianity was putting forward.

Like I said, the problem today is that we don't believe in sacrifice. So it only makes sense to people in modern times if they try to overcomplicate it or make it out to be some kind ineffable mystery....