We often look at the idea of sin from the point of view of an individual’s personal shortcomings.  In light of this modern interpretation of the individual, Jesus’s sacrifice as substitutionary atonement seems to make sense.  But this is not the ancient view.  The Jews for instance taught God brought judgement on Egypt, not as individual persons, but the corporate punishment for the sins of a society and its enslavement of the Jewish people.  In fact, the biblical narrative has to answer that basic question: How can the Jews be God’s chosen people if they keep getting conquered?

The Bible provides several explanations for why the Israelites (Jews) experienced numerous conquests despite being considered God’s chosen people:

(1) Disobedience to God’s Laws:

One of the primary reasons given in the Old Testament is the Israelites’ disobedience to God’s laws and commandments. For instance, in Deuteronomy 28, there are blessings promised for obedience and curses for disobedience, including being conquered by enemies (Deuteronomy 28:15-68). Books like Judges, Kings, and Chronicles often attribute the downfall of Israel or Judah to idolatry, moral corruption, and abandonment of God’s statutes.

(2) Covenant Relationship:

The concept of covenant is crucial. God established covenants with Abraham, Moses, and later David, where blessings were promised for fidelity, and curses for infidelity. The pattern of blessing following repentance and curse following sin is seen throughout the historical books. For example, 2 Kings 17:7-23 explains the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel to Assyria as a direct result of their sins.

(3) Divine Discipline:

The idea of conquest as a form of divine discipline is also present. God is sometimes depicted as using foreign nations to punish Israel for their waywardness, with the hope that they would return to Him. This is evident in passages like 2 Chronicles 36:15-21, where the exile to Babylon is described as a consequence of their persistent unfaithfulness.

(4) Testing and Refining:

Some prophetic and wisdom literature suggest that God uses adversity to refine and purify His people. This can be seen in the prophetic writings like Jeremiah 9:7 or Zechariah 13:9, where the trials are meant to lead to repentance and spiritual growth.

(5) Free Will

The Bible also acknowledges human free will, where the choices made by the leaders and the people of Israel could lead to their downfall or restoration. This isn’t framed as a contradiction to being chosen but rather as part of the complex relationship between God and humanity.

(6) Prophetic Warnings and Redemption:

Many prophets before the actual conquests warned Israel of the impending doom if they did not repent, showing that these events were not arbitrary but part of a divine warning system. After the exile, the theme of redemption and restoration is prominent, suggesting that the purpose was not merely punitive but aimed at bringing the people back to God (e.g., Isaiah 40-55).

The Bible explains the conquests of the Jews as consequences of their actions, part of the covenantal relationship with God, a form of divine discipline, and an opportunity for redemption through repentance and return to God. These explanations are woven throughout the historical, prophetic, and wisdom literature of the Old Testament. We see, for example, unfaithful Jews wandering in the wilderness for a very long time for a trip that should have taken a few days.

What is needed to be seen is the individual participating in and grounded by society.  There was a Jewish manifestation of this societal theme, which was not unlike the Greek understanding of Polis/City State.  Walker makes the key observation that “the Greeks loved their laws, the children of their ideals, above all else. Plato and Aristotle reiterate Herodotus when they describe the ideal state as one that controls every detail of a citizen’s life. In the Greek mind, there was no distinction between the state and the citizen. (Walker, 2014, np reprinted online).”

Jesus’ time asked the question anew as to how the Jews could be God’s chosen people given the world had been absorbed into Imperial Rome?  The answer they came up with was once again that the Jewish leaders were corrupt, ignoring the spirit of God’s word to be able to manipulate the letter of the word and law to their own ends.  Hamilton shows this with the example of the corrupt trial of Jesus in the synoptics. Hamilton outlines how time after time, which due to its volume (if we go beyond Hamilton a bit) can only be satire, in the synoptics loopholes and manipulations must be found by the leaders to give surface respectability to the corrupt way Jesus’s trial is handled:

However, the Synoptic chronology is not impossible, for as [Josef] Blinzler says, the prohibition of legal proceedings on feast days was less strictly enforced than that of holding courts on the Sabbath, ‘therefore it is quite thinkable that it did not seem to the Sanhedrists an infringement of an important rule to start a legal trial even on the night of the Pesach’. It is the argument of this article that all the Gospels witness to such a trial which, while viable in its date, contravened accepted practice as subsequently enshrined in the Mishnah at many points, as Blinzler shows. For example, the proceedings took place in the house of Caiaphas, not in the Temple, and though Jesus had not actually pronounced the Name of God, he was condemned as a blasphemer. He was not offered an advocate; the witnesses were not warned before being examined; nor were they called to account for false witness. The members of the Sanhedrin, although witnesses of the alleged blasphemy, took part in the passing of the sentence, though it was not legal for them to do so. As Blinzler says, one is not able ‘to spare the Sanhedrin the reproach of very serious infringement of the law’. The question is, why did they do this?‘ It will not do to suggest that the occasion was a sham—the proceedings were undoubtedly carried through before a competent bench of judges’. Nor can their contraventions of the Mishnaic code be simply dismissed by saying that it was not yet in force. It is true that it was not codified until about 200 AD, and reflects conditions which obtained then, but it certainly enshrines earlier practice to a considerable extent. For example, Segal says that in describing Temple ritual, it may be employed with confidence. May not the same apply to legal practice?… Before the Feast of the Passover Caiaphas is reported to have said in council: ‘It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish’ (Jn. 11:50). Expediency was the factor which determined his conduct. When the opportunity unexpectedly presented itself to secure Jesus’ death, he and the priests avidly took it. Spurred on by their hatred of him; persuaded that as he was a false teacher, his execution on a feast day would be appropriate; and pressurized by shortage of time, they held his trial on the paschal night. In this trial they contravened normal legal practice at many points. The fact that they could do this in the legal sphere makes it likely that they could, because of the exceptional circumstances, also contravene ritual practice. For the exigencies of the case demanded that they work through the night. Early next morning therefore, they still had not eaten their paschal meal [emphasis mine] … Certainly therefore, an execution would have been contrary to the sabbatical nature of the first paschal day. However, Deut. 17: 12-13 prescribes the death penalty for anyone who opposes the decisions of the priests, to be carried out so that ‘all the people shall hear and fear’, and the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 11:4) gives special instructions for the execution of a rebellious teacher: ‘He was kept in guard until one of the three feasts, and he was put to death on one of the three feasts’. This shows that in certain circumstances executions were permitted on feast days. Moreover, [Paul] Billerbeck says that where an example is required ‘to protect the Torah from wilfully severe transgressions, an execution may, as an exception, supersede a feast day’. (Hamilton, 1992, p. 335-336)

From a literary standpoint, the synoptic portrayal of the corrupt death of John the Baptist (which differs from Josephus’s account) is a literary pair with the corrupt death of Jesus (Pilate denies Jesus justice because it would be a nuisance to exonerate him; the Jewish high council manipulated Jewish law and tradition to get him killed; the crowd turned on him), just as Jesus’ death is a literary pair of the forgiving death of Stephen in Luke-Acts.  The argument then is against the corrupt Jewish leaders, but also Rome for being a landlord disinterested in Justice in the land. Jesus thus is the new and greater Caesar who will rule justly with the apostles in the age to come. Helms notes regarding the term “gospel,”

The syncretic flavor of Mark is at once evident from his reproduction of a piece of Augustan imperial propaganda and his setting it beside a tailored scripture quote. “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God” closely matches the formula found on a monument erected by the Provincial Assembly in Asia Minor (1st century BCE): “Whereas… Providence… has… brought our life to the peak of perfection in giving us Augustus Caesar… who, being sent to us and to our descendants as a savior…, and whereas… the birthday of the god has been for the whole world the beginning of the gospel (euaggelion) concerning him, let all reckon a new era beginning from the date of his birth.” (Helms, p. 24)

And the corruptness of the Jewish leaders seems to be exactly the point Paul is trying to make:

14 For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews 15 who killed both the Lord Jesus and the / their own prophets and drove us out; they displease God and oppose everyone 16 by hindering us from speaking to the gentiles so that they may be saved. Thus they have constantly been filling up the measure of their sins, but wrath has overtaken them at last/or completely/ or forever. (1 Thess 2:14-16, variations included)

Pauline expert Prof Benjamin White suggests this seems to be conveying Paul writing to a gentile audience about the Jews who killed Christ.  As we see in the Dead Sea Scrolls Jews were often speaking in a nasty way about other groups of Jews in order to see who the true people of God were.  Paul seems to think the end times had begun and so the judgement of these Jews as the enemies of God had begun.  Reading this passage as a later interpolation (as the Christ myth theory does: if the Paul thought Jews were responsible for Jesus’s death Paul thought Jesus must have existed on earth) as some do is odd because, as I tried to show above, the death of Jesus would likely imply corporate Jewish responsibility as a Jewish interpretation. John the Baptist died a humiliating death because of a few corrupt Jewish leaders, and Jesus’s corrupt horrific torture and death magnified all of this tenfold. Prof Joel Marcus points out that Paul says the Jews are beloved by God because they come from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but enemies of God for rejecting Jesus and his message (Romans 11:28).

I find 1 Thess 2:14-16 quite definitive as a refutation of the Christ myth theory if we interpret it from the point of view of how the ancient Jews viewed their corporate history. There is no textual evidence from any manuscript tradition that suggests these verses were added later. They appear consistently across all known manuscripts of 1 Thessalonians. The passage fits contextually within Paul’s argument in the letter. He’s defending his ministry, which was opposed by some Jews. Paul often discusses opposition, suffering, and divine judgment in his letters. The themes here could be seen as consistent with his broader theological concerns. The notion of divine wrath could refer to other events or a general judgment rather than specifically to the fall of Jerusalem: Paul speaking of the ongoing or perceived judgment against those he sees as persecuting the church.

The death of Jesus has to be seen as the corporate sin of the Jews because it is only in seeing ourselves in those who killed Jesus can we experience conviction of our sinful nature and hence become pure so that we can accept Jesus into our heart to help us do spiritual warfare against Satan. I don’t feel responsibility for a wrongdoing unless I literally or figuratively find myself complicit in it. But this sin nature is hidden. For instance, if I was a Roman citizen thousands of years ago, I probably would have cheered the Christians being horrifically fed to the beasts in the arena with the rest of the crowd. Paul thought the end was underway and so wanted as many as possible to repent (Metanoia, an Ancient Greek word (μετάνοια) meaning “changing one’s mind”) and invite Christ into their hearts because it was ultimately the indwelling Christ’s righteousness in the believer that prompted God to find someone holy. The believer was just the vessel: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

Matthew 23:37/Luke 13:34 note the fate of Jesus has been that of the many prophets God sent to Jerusalem (Acts 7:52):

³⁷ “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! (Matthew 23:37/Luke 13:34)

The notion of wrongful death by way of the corrupt Jewish elite and bloodthirsty crowd fits nicely with the idea that the wrongful death of God’s beloved (agapetos) convicts us of our sinful disposition and thereby circumcises our hearts to reveal the law written on them – as with the unjust death of Socrates, but on a grander scale of God’s murdered beloved Jesus. Matthew thus notes: 25 Then the people as a whole answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matthew 27:25).  This is not a substitution atonement view of Jesus’ death, but a moral influence one, the soldier in Luke for instance declaring the crucified Jesus an innocent man.

It is in seeing ourselves in those who killed Jesus that is the reason that the death and resurrection is seen as apocalyptic in Paul because it realizes the eschatological prophecy in Jeremiah 31 as it speaks of a “new covenant” which is often interpreted as a future, ultimate restoration of God’s people, signifying a time of renewal and redemption that is seen as having end-times implications. Paul thus is interpretively engaged with Jer 31:31-4 when he says of the gentiles: “15 They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, as their own conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them (Rom 2:15).” The death of Jesus circumcises the fleshly (in Paul’s sense) from the heart to let the law written on it fully shine through:

31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more. (Jer 31:31-4)

The connection to the above passage from Jeremiah 31:31-4 and the corrupt religious elite is clear in Hebrews. Hebrews speaks extensively about the new covenant which Jesus Christ established (Hebrews 8:6-13; 10:16-17). This new covenant is directly linked to Jeremiah’s prophecy in Jeremiah 31:31-34, where Jeremiah speaks about the coming of a new covenant. Hebrews quotes this passage in Hebrews 8:8-12, emphasizing the superiority and fulfillment of this new covenant in Christ. The discussion in Hebrews about the priesthood and the sacrifices (Hebrews 7-10) can be seen as a fulfillment of Jeremiah’s laments over the corruption of the priesthood during his time, though this is more of a theological connection rather than a direct citation.

“Circumcising the heart” is a phrase from the Bible that refers to a spiritual cleansing and dedication to God. The phrase appears in the Bible in Deuteronomy 30:6, which says, “The Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, in order that you may live.” The idea is thus re-interpreted by Paul that Jesus’ death was predicted from the beginning of scripture – elsewhere that the lamb was slain from the foundation of the world. The idea of “circumcision of the heart” is found in Romans 2:29. It refers to having a pure heart, separated unto God. Paul writes, “A Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter.” Some may think a sacrifice brings redemption but is to no avail because if there is no change of heart the person will just keep on sinning. This is why interpreting Jesus’ sacrifice as a payment for sin is silly. According to the Bible, particularly in 1 Samuel 15:22, the idea is that “God does not want sacrifice but obedience,” meaning that following God’s commands and living according to His will is more important than performing ritual sacrifices; essentially, a sincere and obedient heart is more valued than outward acts of worship alone. Such an act, like physical circumcision, is sentimental of tradition such as Abraham but ultimately useless. We read from one commentary:

Paul is discussing the role of the Old Testament Law as it relates to Christianity. He argues that Jewish circumcision is only an outward sign of being set apart to God. However, if the heart is sinful, then physical circumcision is of no avail. A circumcised body and a sinful heart are at odds with each other. Rather than focus on external rites, Paul focuses on the condition of the heart. Using circumcision as a metaphor, he says that only the Holy Spirit can purify a heart and set us apart to God. Ultimately, circumcision cannot make a person right with God; the Law is not enough. A person’s heart must change. Paul calls this change “circumcision of the heart.”

This concept was not original with the apostle Paul. As a Jew trained in the Law of Moses, he was certainly aware of this discussion from Deuteronomy 30. There, the Lord used the same metaphor to communicate His desire for a holy people: “And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live” (Deuteronomy 30:6). Physical circumcision was a sign of Israel’s covenant with God; circumcision of the heart, therefore, would indicate Israel’s being set apart to love God fully, inside and out.

God has always wanted more from His people than just external conformity to a set of rules. He has always wanted them to possess a heart to love, know, and follow Him. That’s why God is not concerned with a circumcision of the flesh. Even in the Old Testament, God’s priority was a spiritual circumcision of the heart: “Circumcise yourselves to the LORD, circumcise your hearts, you men of Judah and people of Jerusalem, or my wrath will break out and burn like fire because of the evil you have done” (Jeremiah 4:4).

The message is that the world turning on God’s beloved Jesus opens our eyes to our sinful nature/disposition and by circumcising the fleshly (in Paul’s sense) away from our hearts we are now pure shown by our desire to invite Christ into us as an angelic possession so as to have his righteousness imputed to us and have him as a power boost against the Tempter.