Ehrman argues central to Jesus’s teaching was the need to repent in preparation for the coming Kingdom of God. Those who returned to God would be graciously forgiven for their transgressions, with no penalty or payment required. After Jesus’ death his followers reversed his teaching, maintaining that God did not freely forgive sins but required an atoning sacrifice.

John the Baptist practiced a baptism for the remission of sin which was needed because a day of judgment was imminent (the axe was at the tree). People needed to repent and turn back to God. Temple sacrifice was not needed. Jesus’ first message is repent because the Kingdom is near. Evil forces and people will be destroyed. The lord’s prayer suggests we will be forgiven, a debt that does not need to be paid. This is reflected in the parable of the unforgiving slave in Matthew. There is also the story of the rich young man who will be saved by giving everything to the poor, and the story of the sheep and goats. Jesus taught God forgives sins. His followers taught God required atonement. Jesus taught for sinners to repent and be forgiven. The story of the prodigal son is about God forgiving if we repent and turn back to him.

Ehrman argues Paul doesn’t talk about forgiveness, but atonement. Mark 10:45 also sees his death as an atonement. The temple curtain rips, suggesting access to God without a further atoning sacrifice. Luke does not have atonement and has the curtain tearing beforehand indicating the destruction of the temple for what they did to Jesus. Luke-Acts also has the forgiveness of sins. The followers of Jesus experienced their master crucified, but he was seen after death and so there must have been reason Jesus died.

Romans:

(A) Following Ehrman there is the judicial model in Romans 1-4. God is a law giver. He also judges criminal cases. Everybody breaks God’s laws, so there is a penalty and it’s the death penalty. Everyone sins, so everyone dies. Put differently, you’ve incurred a fine and it must be paid. Jesus pays it for you. Jesus being raised from the dead shows the penalty has been paid because he’s no longer dead. We see this kind of substitutional view in 4 Maccabees. It’s long been debated whether if Christ paid the penalty everyone is saved. For Paul, you have to believe in Christ and accept the payment because if you don’t agree with Christ to pay your fine he can’t. It would be like your mom offering to pay your fine in court but you say no. Salvation comes when you believe and trust Christ’s payment works. This fits in with the ancient notion of sacrifice satisfying a god’s wrath.

(B) Modifying Ehrman there is also a participation model in Romans 5-8. Sin brings about separation from God. Sin in this model is not a transgression but a cosmic power in the universe. It has imprisoned, trapped, and enslaved people: think of Satan entering Judas in the gospels (Luke 22:3, John 13:27). It controls people and forces them to do things against God’s will. In these blog posts I’ve tried to show how readers being implicated in the world turning on Christ / Christ’s death breaks the spell of Sin and opens people’s eye to their vileness. Sin is a power that forces you to do wrong even if you want to do right, and the power of Sin hands you over to the power of Death. Being implicated in Jesus’ death solves the problem of alienation from God here with your metanoia/renewal of mind/repentance, but not as a payment as with the judicial model. The heart is circumcised to reveal the Law written on it. It’s not that you’re breaking the law, but that you’ve been enslaved, so you have to be liberated. The reader shocked at seeing themselves in the world that brought about Christ’s unjust death interrupts the power of sin/breaks the spell, and the resurrected Christ indwells within you, uniting you with him as buried and raised when baptized, to combat Satan’s temptations. You participate in Christ’s death because when his death convicts you, your fleshly is crucified / circumcising your heart, revealing the Law written on it (Romans 2:14-15). Christ’s resurrection shows he nullified the Power of Death, which is important because the bible says if the dead are not raised we might as well be gluttons and drunks for tomorrow we die (1 Corinthians 15:32; Isaiah 22:13). By contrast, Paul urges “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31).” Paul says “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins (1 Cor 15:17).”

Paul also has the model of Christ’s death reconciling God and man as two estranged friends. Having a multitude of competing models reflects such ancient literary practices like Plato proposes the wax model and aviary model in the Theaetetus. Paul said he would approach the sin problem from whatever angle people were most comfortable with (a Jew to the Jews and a gentile to the gentiles), while all Paul thought was necessary and sufficient for salvation as he notes in Romans was confessing Jesus was lord and believing God raised him from the dead (Rom 10:9-10).

Regarding the substitution model, Jesus rebukes Peter by saying, “Get behind me, Satan!” This occurs in Mark 8:33 after Peter objects to Jesus’ prediction of his own suffering and death. However, in the Gospel of Mark, at least one of Jesus’ disciples was armed with a sword and used it to attack a member of the arresting party. This would be odd if it was known among the disciples Jesus was supposed to be arrested and killed. What seems to be the case is that the atonement theology was a post-Jesus development and Mark invented material to show he taught it all along even though the historical memory of the disciples fleeing didn’t reflect this.

There seems to be an historical core behind the idea that after Jesus’ death people were championing Jesus-faith positions that did not reflect what the historical Jesus taught. Peter and the Jerusalem bunch seem to have invented an atonement theology grounded in scriptural allusion an allusion process the Dead Sea Scrolls Sect also used to create a biography for their Teacher of Righteousness. The position of Peter, James, and John seems preserved in the pre-Pauline Corinthian creed and was at odds with others, including those who taught the historical Jesus’ message. Paul says “12 What I mean is that each of you says, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ. (1 Cor. 1:12)” Mark may satirically preserve this with Peter’s denials of Jesus.

Like the absent of a salvific cross/resurrection in the Q source, Vinzent notes that with the early church fathers no one writing about the religion mentions the resurrection of Jesus until Paul starts getting writing about it. For example, our earliest catechism, the Didache, doesn’t mention the resurrection. The same is true of The Shepherd of Hermas. We thus have traditions preserved in Mark of salvation happening apart from cross/resurrection theology as Ehrman notes. The gospel begins with a call to repentance, there is the story of the sheep and goats, the story of the rich young ruler, but also the soldier’s transformation declaring Jesus the son of God at the cross.

This makes sense historically because Paul claimed to be a pharisee of pharisees, and the pharisees were idiosyncratic among the Jews believing in a final resurrection, and the pharisees introduced this pagan-like idea following the time of Alexander when some Jews were synchronizing their beliefs with Greek, Zoroastrian, and Roman theology. These items may have been absent from the Judaism of the Jesus. The majority of tombstones in the time of Jesus do not reflect belief in an afterlife because the Torah says we only live on through our male kids. If the Christians were recruited from Jews who believed in the Torah rather than the later prophets, this makes sense of why the resurrection is missing from the Didache and the Shepard of Hermas. The Apostle’s Creed likewise in the manuscripts in the Fathers is in one tradition integrated into the baptism, but in another tradition only has he was born and suffered, not baptism/resurrection. For 200 years we only had this non-resurrection version. The resurrection of Jesus only entered into the creed in the 4th century. For us, Easter was a celebration of the resurrection, but originally it was the celebration of Christ’s suffering.