geo wrote:Harry Marks wrote:. . . As far as I know, there is no text in the OT that even seems to say sacrifice is in place of a penalty. Perhaps I am missing something.
I'm not following too closely, and there may be something I'm missing, but the very term "scapegoat" has its etymological roots in the book of Leviticus.
It is a constant problem to go back to the original social setting and try to make sense of writings which have been given particular interpretations later. For example, we use "scapegoat" to refer to someone who is abused in place of the truly guilty party, with everyone pretending it is the scapegoat's fault. Clearly that is not exactly what is going on in Leviticus 16, but it colors how we hear the passage.
Perhaps it is meant to say that killing the scapegoat takes punishment meant for the community? Well, no, that is not what is said. The scapegoat is clearly stated to "carry the sins" of the community away from them. It is a transport mechanism for cleansing (also clearly stated) the community of impurity.
Note that there is no implication that the sacrifice is in proportion to the sin, or otherwise corresponds to the penalty. The focus seems to be on impurity. With a little imagination that makes sense - sins build up a nasty atmosphere of injury, resentment and defensiveness in the community. "He got drunk and vomited on my garden!" "That man has been eyeing my wife! I saw it!" So the community has a ceremony to repent, ask forgiveness and "send away" all the sins.
geo wrote:The idea—and practice—of scapegoat goes back thousands of years. The Greeks sacrificed animals to the gods and there are many (mostly unconfirmed) reports of sacrificing a king (or stand-in),
Yes, sacrifice was a pervasive practice. At least some were human sacrifices - Moloch seems to have preferred the child of the one sacrificing, the Celts seem to have preferred burning criminals, and the Minoans probably expected the bulls to do a number on the young people from tributary cities that they put into the arena with them, although eventually bull-dancing turned the confrontation into an art form.
I am not well-enough read on the subject to categorically state that the Hebrews did not consider the sacrifice to be a substitute payment. However, I do know that we read that into early church NT texts based mainly on theologizing by later readers. If it is in the NT texts (with the possible exception of the Epistle to the Hebrews) it is implicit, being understood by everyone but not actually stated.
And I know that sacrifice to sanctify an agreement was pervasive in the Bronze Age, with many references to attest it. The equally prevalent idea that a sacrifice would "please the gods" and influence them to act favorably is surely embedded in much of the Hebrew practice, but it is surprisingly absent from the "theory" presented there. Perhaps it was edited out by the one who pulled the material together in the histories, often thought to be Ezra or his followers. Perhaps the two views of sacrifice were closely intertwined, with some sense that gods enforce oaths and so a sacrifice at a ceremony of mutual commitment made perfect sense.
geo wrote:" no man prevents him from doing just what he likes. But afterwards they strip and scourge and crucify him."
- Dio Chrysostom
The resemblance of Jesus's crucifixion to the earlier ritual sacrifices is glaringly obvious.
Not to me. I think it is much more like the case of Spartacus, whose followers were crucified in their hundreds along the roads of Italy, bodies left as a warning to slaves not to rebel. Crucifixion is mainly just a cruel death with its cruelty on display.
geo wrote:The idea that Jesus died for our sins is strangely compelling to us, even today, many centuries later.
Substitutiary death is compelling in whichever story it is found. Damon and Pythias, Horatio at the bridge, Leonidas at Thermopylae, Tale of Two Cities, the Ghanaian-American who recently died trying to rescue a fifth person from a fire after having rescued four already from the fire, well, you get the idea.
What bothers me about it is that the pathos of this compelling notion took over, in part due to the influence of the church which created a system of supernatural mechanism under its control. If you just read the early part of Acts you will see that to the early church, resurrection was the meaningful phenomenon, and the crucifixion is mainly meaningful in its light: Jesus died a horrible and humiliating death at the hands of authority, and then love won after all. Once you have seen that, the gospels never read the same again.