Atonement

Jewish and Christian Origins

Max Botner, Justin Harrison Duff, Simon Dürr, Max Botner, Justin Harrison Duff, Simon Dürr

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781467459310
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

A historical survey of atonement theology through ancient Jewish and Christian sources

What is the historical basis for today's atonement theology? Where did it come from, and how has it evolved throughout time? In Atonement, a sterling collection of renowned biblical scholars investigates the early manifestations of this core concept in ancient Jewish and Christian sources. Rather than imposing a particular view of atonement upon these texts, these specialists let the texts speak for themselves so that the reader can truly understand atonement as it was variously conceived in the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Pseudepigrapha, the New Testament, and early Christian literature. The resulting diverse ideas mirror the manifold perspectives on atonement today.

Contributors to this volume—Christian A. Eberhart, Crispin Fletcher-Louis, Martha Himmelfarb, T. J. Lang, Carol A. Newsom, Deborah W. Rooke, Catrin H. Williams, David P. Wright, and N. T. Wright—attend to the linguistic elements at work in these ancient writings without limiting their scope to explicit mentions of atonement. Instead, they explore atonement as a broader phenomenon that negotiates a constellation of features—sin, sacrifice, and salvation—to capture a more accurate and holistic picture. Atonement will serve as an indispensable resource for all future dialogue on these topics within Jewish and Christian circles.

PART ONE

Critical Issues and the Development
of Atonement Legislation
in the Hebrew Bible

CHAPTER ONE

ATONEMENT

Amid Alexandria, Alamo, and Avatar

CHRISTIAN A. EBERHART

At many times and in many ways, religious communities and the academy have employed, defined, developed, explored, and criticized the topics of atonement, sin, sacrifice, and salvation. This essay will try to provide some introductory remarks on the subject matter as well as a recapitulation of previous discussions and results. It will start with reflections on what the term atonement means, proceed to study sacrificial rituals in the Hebrew Bible with specific interest in their interpretation, and conclude by looking at how these rituals and the topic of atonement have been adopted in early Christian literature, with a focus on references to the famous Suffering Servant Song in Isa 52:13–53:12 LXX. Along the way, I will advocate closer readings of biblical texts in order to highlight plausible models of reception within early Jewish and Christian contexts. I will participate in the corporate endeavor of better understanding these texts in their historical framework, and I will point out stumbling blocks as we try to explore an ever-changing and important—but certainly not the only—paradigm for reconciliation and salvation in the socioreligious continuum we call early Judaism and Christianity.

Introductory Comments

What is atonement? It is difficult to define and determine the meaning of this term as it refers to a concept that has been used in a variety of religious traditions over a long period of time. We convened for a symposium at the University of St. Andrews to study this topic, and our investigation led us into the historical depth of Israelite and early Jewish traditions as well as to dogmatic core areas of Christianity. On the one hand, this event dealt with the actual and remembered worship space of the religious, cultural, and sociopolitical epitome of Judaism: the Jerusalem Temple. On the other hand, it also dealt with key referents within the history of Christianity. Not all Christians, however, universally agree on the central place of atonement. To paint the image with broad strokes, Eastern Orthodoxy (and in a similar way, Eastern Catholicism) emphasizes the concepts of incarnation and theosis—i.e., the deification of humanity.¹ In Western Christianity, however, atonement occupies a more central place in the teachings of the church. As a result, a diverse spectrum of atonement theories has been developed throughout history.²

To approach our topic of inquiry, it is helpful to start in the year 1526 CE. At that time, William Tyndale (1494–1536), a leading personality in the English Reformation movement, coined the term atonement. For Tyndale, the term literally meant at-one-ment. It conceptually presupposes that humans and God are separated and that humans cannot directly or immediately communicate or interact with God. Religious ideas and theories that envision methods of overcoming this separation are often said to belong to the category of atonement. Conceptual equivalents are expiation and propitiation. All three terms tend to address the removal or elimination of wrath, sin, guilt, or impurities. They do not, however, cover the same spectrum of meaning. Linguistically, propitiation and atonement evoke interpersonal relations: propitiation conveys the appeasement of a person or deity, while atonement is a spatial category conveying the encounter with a person or deity. The latter spatial category is what Tyndale had in mind when he created the term. By contrast, expiation connotes cleansing, purgation, or purification; the term can refer to impersonal or personal objects. With this specific meaning, expiation can be construed as a subcategory, or the modus operandi, of atonement and propitiation. The elimination of defilement may thus lead to the restoration of relationships.

But for many scholars today, the concept of atonement is fraught with problems. For one, Hebrew Bible scholars tend to use the term in ways different from New Testament scholars, whose use, in turn, differs from that of systematic theologians. This has, at times, led to misunderstandings and confusion in academic debates.³ More serious than this inconsistent use of the term is a widespread dissatisfaction with the concept of atonement itself, which has led to what I would call an “identity crisis,” at least in Western Christianity.⁴ While atonement is located at the core of theories about salvation, it does not always seem to evoke positive connotations. In light of this, the organizing committee of this conference should be commended for its decision not only to commence this event at one o’clock p.m., but also to leave the term atonement in the conference title. (I wonder whether there was a discussion among the members of the organizing committee regarding the marketability of the event if it featured this term.) Elsewhere, however, a certain uneasiness about this term frequently results in strategies to avoid it altogether. This applies also to the German word Sühne, a frequent equivalent of atonement.⁵ The problem is that, for many, atonement is inevitably associated with blood, violence, gore, slaughter, and death. Books have therefore been written about Problems with Atonement.⁶

Since this book also addresses “sin” and “sacrifice,” I might add that, mutatis mutandis, similar concerns have been registered regarding these terms. And since, in Christianity, most of these terms belong to the interpretive layer that deals with the death of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross, atonement becomes all the more gloomy.⁷ Not surprisingly, an outsider to the Christian religion recently “criticized the ugliness of the crucifixion scene.”⁸ The frequent habit of wearing golden crosses on necklaces does not mitigate the historical truth that crucifixion was a cruel and shameful method of capital punishment in antiquity reserved for non-citizens and slaves in the Roman Empire.⁹ It is true, therefore, to say that “the Christian savior had died the worst of deaths, that of a slave and criminal.”¹⁰ What was Christianity to do with the particular dilemma that its charismatic leader had died in this fashion? Since it was impossible to deny the historical factuality of Jesus’s crucifixion, early Christianity soon developed atonement concepts to articulate how the message about the cross, which Paul claims was derided as “foolishness” by some, could be considered “the power of God” (1 Cor 1:18). What was rather embarrassing in the beginning quickly became a place of pride. It is an often-observed peculiarity that both the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed emphasize the death of Jesus while omitting details of his earthly life, apart from his birth. Interpretive efforts to construe this death on the cross as salvific are often considered center to atonement in early Christian discourse. Along with the cross, connections to concepts of Jewish sacrifice often infuse atonement discourse with reflections on vicarious punishment, suffering, blood, and death. For instance, after Tyndale, Anselm of Canterbury developed the popular theory of atonement as vicarious “satisfaction.”¹¹ These types of theories, however, are often debated and rejected by other Christian communities. N. T. Wright was certainly right when he noted, “To put it crudely, the Eastern Orthodox churches never had ‘an Anselm.’”¹²

The concept of atonement is neither unique to the Western Church nor even to Christianity more broadly. It was and remains an important concept within Judaism. It was a particularly important interpretive term in the context of regulations for sacrificial rituals. The corporate identity of Judaism gravitated around the First and Second Temple in Jerusalem, the site of almost continuous worship and sacrifice for a millennium. One of the key religious festivals of Judaism was and remains the Day of Atonement, celebrated on the tenth day of the month of Tishri. It featured the archaic “scapegoat” ritual and required the application of sacrificial blood to effect purification (cf. Lev 16).¹³ The destruction of the Herodian Temple in 70 CE put an end to the offering of animal sacrifices in the Jerusalem Temple. Today, Jews obtain atonement for their sins on Yom Kippur with repeated prayer services, private and public confessions of sins, and fasting.

These brief observations show that atonement was not just an ancient concern. The concept is still relevant in religious practice and remains a popular topic in academic discourse. Atonement is central to the question of how salvation is imagined and communicated and is not limited to some marginal or irrelevant aspect of Jewish and Christian dialogue. I will revisit the concept of atonement below and place it in specific relation to sin, sacrifice, and forgiveness.

General Remarks on Sacrificial Rituals in the Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew root כפר is usually translated “to atone.” This term occurs in the Hebrew Bible to capture the result of sacrificial rituals, elimination rites, and various noncultic phenomena. Atonement was a central aspect of the cultic sphere, although other aspects remain central to sacrificial discourse. For example, an important celebration in Israel’s annual calendar is the Day of Atonement (יום הכפרים / ἡμέρα ἐξιλασμοῦ, Lev 16; 23:26–32; Num 29:7–11), as previously mentioned. During this festival, atonement is obtained for the sanctuary and for the Israelites. The meaning of both sacrificial rituals and atonement itself, however, is the subject of ongoing scholarly debates. In what follows, I shall offer a short summary of recent developments in scholarship on Israel’s cult.¹⁴

First, a consensus emerged in the second half of the twentieth century that strongly associated sacrifice with killing. As a result, ritual slaughter became the key to understanding atonement. Based partially on studies in anthropology and classics, some scholars even claimed that sacrifice could be considered as collective murder.¹⁵ However, Kathryn McClymond has rightly countered that animal slaughter has been overrated in the interpretation of sacrifice. Blood application rites and sacrificial rituals consist of a variety of elements, and thus require a polythetic approach.¹⁶ This shift in perspective is necessary for properly interpreting the most comprehensive and informative description of sacrificial rituals in the Hebrew Bible: Leviticus 1–7. In the canonical sequence of the Torah, these chapters follow the construction and installation ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Critical Issues and the Development of Atonement Legislation in the Hebrew Bible
• Part 2: Anthropology, Cosmology, and Mediators in Early Jewish and Christian Atonement Theologies
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index of Modern Authors
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture and Ancient Sources