Sanders analyzes Paul’s cross of Christ not as a substitutionary atonement payment but akin to the near sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham.

Paul does indeed use the language of the priestly temple sacrifice to explain the meaning of the death of Jesus. And yet I see no sense in his writings that sacrifice has anything to do with a balance of payments. As Paul understands it, a sacrifice is offered not as payment but rather as a token of the giver’s faithful heart. Thus, for example, Abraham’s near-sacrifice in Genesis 22 was pleasing to God because of the faith with which it was offered. Explains Paul, “Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due. But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness” (Rom 4:4–5). In other words, the object of sacrifice itself is not the point; what matters is the faith of the one who offers it. Thus Paul eschews an interpretation of the death of Jesus as a kind of payment. On the contrary, he tries to show that the sacrifice of Jesus overwhelms all systems of reckoning: “For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift [dorema] following many trespasses brings justification” (Rom 5:16). The sacrifice of Jesus, as Paul understands it, is perfect not because it somehow causes God to mark humans’ account “paid in full,” but because it is offered with perfect fidelity to the cause of God. It is a gift that renders all merely human accountings null and void. Moreover, followers of Jesus can participate in his sacrifice only by joining their lives to his, by becoming, as Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians, the ongoing body of Christ (1 Cor 12:27). Thus we need not abandon the notion of sacrifice in order to come to an interpretation of Good Friday in keeping with Caputo’s vision of the kingdom of God. Rather, we can read the sacrifice of Jesus as a gift par excellence, as an offering that does not add up and that occurs outside of all reckonings. The cross as a sacrifice is Jesus’s determination to live his life in the service of God come hell or high water or, in his case, Roman executioners.  Zlomislic, Marko; DeRoo, Neal. Cross and Khôra: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo (Postmodern Ethics Book 1) (p. 42). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

I find it compelling that the Jews were intended as the object of blame by the New Testament writers.  It is present in sources as diverse as 1 Thessalonians and Matthew, and Luke even blames the destruction of the 2^nd temple on God’s punishment of those who killed Jesus.  Josephus notes an analogous situation to apocalyptic Jesus with doomsayer Jesus Ben Ananias.  Josephus explicitly frames this as the Jewish leadership collaborating with (or at least delivering the man to) Roman authority for punishment. The Jewish elite initiated the arrest and initial beating of Ananias, then transferred him to the Romans specifically so the Roman governor could deal with him—resulting in severe Roman flogging. This is the same pattern Josephus elsewhere attributes to how the Jewish aristocracy often worked with Roman officials to maintain order. 

Certain commenters (Sanders seems to disagree, though I find it compelling) see the death of Jesus like that of Socrates as seeing oneself in those who killed Jesus and so an occasion for repentance/metanoia.

The other effect of the Reproaches is to allow Christians to accuse themselves of sin, but in a derivative way. Christians are asked to recognize the sinfulness in themselves by looking at the sins of people whom God clearly (at least according to the chant) finds odious; something along the lines of, “Yes, God, I am as bad as those Jews who killed you were.” Kissing the feet of Jesus on the cross thus appears as a grovelling attempt not only to placate an infinitely offended deity, but also to re-establish Christians as the good children of God, as opposed to the wicked children who betrayed him.  Zlomislic, Marko; DeRoo, Neal. Cross and Khôra: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo (Postmodern Ethics Book 1) (p. 44). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

To see the vicious injustice done upon sinless Jesus is to have Jesus act as a catalyst for change.  Analogously with the civil rights movement,

The mourners who came to view Emmett Till did not come out of a sense of drama. They came rather with a sense of outrage at injustice, and Till’s funeral became a galvanizing force in the civil rights movement. Emmett’s mother once commented, “When people saw what had happened to my son, men stood up who had never stood up before. People became vocal who had never vocalized before. Emmett’s death was the opening of the civil rights movement. He was the sacrificial lamb of the movement.”24 A sacrificial lamb. Not a payment. Not a payback. Not remuneration. Just a boy whose battered body somehow became a sign of the Impossible, a sign that moved people to weep and stand and speak for a future that could just barely be imagined.  Zlomislic, Marko; DeRoo, Neal. Cross and Khôra: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo (Postmodern Ethics Book 1) (p. 44-45). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

I have argued elsewhere that the resurrected Jesus is seen as the mind of Christ/Christ in you that boots out the demon Sin possessing you and supercharges you in your struggle against sin.  It is also what appears in the face of the destitute like forgiving Stephen that calls Paul to responsibility.

Easter faith says that Jesus appears in the poor, the lame, the sick, and the dying, and that if we can’t see him there then we shouldn’t expect to see him anywhere else.  Zlomislic, Marko; DeRoo, Neal. Cross and Khôra: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo (Postmodern Ethics Book 1) (p. 49). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Next time I will look at Caputo’s response to Sanders