I have been asked “how the death of Jesus (instead of the Maccabees, for example) had the effect of abolishing the law which divided Jews and Gentiles”. (It’s what the contact form is for. Feel free to use it.) 

This seems a fair question. The deaths of the Maccabean martyrs were thought to have potential atoning value for the sins of Israel (cf. 4 Macc. 17:21-22), but there is no suggestion that this put an end to the Law or that it opened the door of membership in Israel to Gentiles on the basis of faith. Why is Jesus’ death different?

I have argued in several posts recently that according to the core narrative of the New Testament Jesus’ death atoned for the sins of Israel, making a new future possible for a people that was otherwise condemned by the Law to destruction. Gentiles benefit from this secondarily and indirectly. This narrative-historical account is quite different from the traditional theological account that we are all familiar with—that God sent his Son into the world to die for the sins of humankind—though the final outcome may not be as unorthodox as appears at first sight.

The thesis I am exploring in these articles on the forgiveness of sins is that Jesus is primarily understood to have died for the redemption of Israel, as part of a corporate and political—rather than a personal and existential—narrative. The diagrams in this post illustrate the distinction.

In [amazon:978-0849947025:inline] Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola have attempted to write a different type of book about Jesus. Not a biography but a “theography”: “we are telling the story of God’s interactions, intersections, and interventions with humanity through the life of Jesus”. It runs from eternity past to the second coming. The whole of scripture, they claim, is held together by a single narrative: the story of Jesus Christ. “Every bit of Scripture is part of the same great story of that one person and that one story’s plot line of creation, revelation, redemption, and consummation.”

I am not proposing here to offer a general review of the book, other than to say that it is well worth reading as an attempt to construct a newish christological synthesis, partly, at least, on the basis of recent historical research. There are a couple of odd arguments that I may pick up on later: the claim that God will “renovate” the earth rather replace a corruptible creation with an incorruptible one, for example, and the assertion that Jesus visited hell between his death and resurrection. Here I merely want to suggest that Sweet and Viola have largely missed the historical significance of the kingdom of God.

The Letter to the Hebrews is addressed to Jewish Christians and is, therefore, thematically much closer to the Gospels and the early part of Acts, which is why I want to look at it before we come to Paul. The argument is by no means an easy one, so if you’re not interested in the sordid details of the exposition that follows, here is the executive summary:

Jesus’ death was a once-and-for-all sacrifice for the sins committed by Israel under the Law. Just as his death on a tree redeemed Jews from the curse of the Law, so Jesus’ offering of his own blood, by which he qualified to enter the heavenly sanctuary, gained for Jews forgiveness of sins committed under the Law and made possible a new sacrifice-free covenant.

This lends further weight to my cautious thesis regarding the central atonement narrative, which is that Jesus died directly for the sins of Israel, as an outworking of the Law, and only indirectly for the sins of Gentiles.

At the end of Luke the resurrected Jesus sends his disciples to proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sins to all nations (Lk. 24:47). In Matthew they are told to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19), which is presumably a baptism specifically of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus’ death, as a concrete and ultimate act of obedience to God, has sealed a new covenant with Israel, on the basis of which the sins of the people are forgiven. The disciples are to tell the world about this. In Acts we see, from Luke’s perspective, what this mission looked like in practice.

The absence of any reference to the atoning function of Jesus’ death in these passages is noticeable. The pattern is simple and consistent: people believe in the story of what God is doing for and through his people, central to which is the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus; they repent and are forgiven. The evidence of Acts suggests that modern evangelicalism has grossly overstated the personal saving significance of Jesus’ death. And conversely, understated the significance of the vindication and exaltation of Jesus.

My intention was to write a fairly straightforward piece on the connection between forgiveness of sins and the death of Jesus for my Lexicon of theological terms in narrative-historical perspective, but it’s become too unwieldy to fit into one article. In Forgiveness and the wiped out document nailed to the cross I put forward a simple overview of the argument, with crude diagrams, and a reading of Colossians 2:13-15, where Paul links the forgiveness of sins to the cross by way of the metaphor of an erased document. But I think, now, that I will also deal with forgiveness in the Gospels, Acts, Paul and Hebrews in separate posts. I’ll then put a final summary piece in the Lexicon for good measure.

To repeat, the basic contentions are: first, that in the core narrative of the New Testament Jesus’ death is viewed as a death for Israel rather than universally as a death for all people; and secondly, that forgiveness of sins is tied not to Jesus’ death as an atoning event but simply to repentance and belief in what the God of Israel was doing to transform the status of his people in relation to the nations.