This is a great topic and I encourage reading Price’s article on it HERE.

Here are some thoughts the video occasioned on the crucifixion.

Substitutionary atonement is basically the idea that God is mad at sin and so to prevent his wrath a sacrifice must be offered, as offerings please God (e.g., the aroma of a burnt offering).  Man has incurred a fine, the fine is death, and someone needs to pay it.  That’s what the crucifixion does.

Substitutionary atonement runs afoul of common sense on a number of issues, as James McGrath notes.  The idea that God can’t forgive and so needs a death fine to balance the books runs against the grain of the entire Old Testament where the one thing God can and does do is forgive (e.g., the penitential psalms and the story of Jonah).  Generally, we see the lack of justice here because by analogy how does killing an innocent child in Toronto for the crimes of a murderer in Atlanta serve justice?

And, the ancient Jews understood this criticism.   Psalm 49:7-8 explicitly states that a person cannot offer earthly wealth or their own merit to buy forgiveness or eternal life from God: “Truly no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of their life is costly and can never suffice…”. The Wisdom literature further warns against acting as a surety for someone else’s financial debt or obligations, advising that it can lead to ruin (e.g., Proverbs 22:26-27, compare the Gethsemane plea).  There were a few exceptions like if someone was gored by your ox, but generally this held: e.g., The law did draw a hard line on premeditated murder. Numbers 35:31 explicitly states that you cannot accept a financial ransom to spare the life of a murderer; they must be executed.

Moreover, the Old Testament repeatedly emphasizes that God prefers genuine humility, repentance, and a contrite heart over the mechanical performance of animal sacrifices.  While the Torah outlines specific sacrificial laws, the Prophets and Psalms clarify that sacrifices are meaningless without a changed heart.  Key passages include:

Psalm 51:16-17: King David explicitly states, “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise”.

 Samuel 15:22: The prophet Samuel declares to King Saul, “Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.”

Hosea 6:6: God states through the prophet, “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings”.

Proverbs 21:3: “To do what is right and just is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.”

These verses show beyond the everyday sacrifice system the deeper one gets into Judaism, one needs to correct the misconception that rituals can replace morality, love, and sincere repentance. 

What we seem to have is a system that worked in encouraging the public, but held a deeper truth (similar to what Plutarch said of the Osiris cult).  Analogously, Regarding Numa Pompilius, Livy wrote:

And fearing lest relief from anxiety on the score of foreign perils might lead men who had hitherto been held back by fear of their enemies and by military discipline into extravagance and idleness, he (Numa) thought the very first thing to do, as being the most efficacious with a populace which was ignorant and, in those early days, uncivilized, was to imbue them with the fear of Heaven. As he could not instil this into their hearts without inventing some marvellous story, he pretended to have nocturnal meetings with the goddess Egeria, and that hers was the advice which guided him in the establishment of rites most approved by the gods, and in the appointment of special priests for the service of each. (Livy 1:19)

If one’s being right with God simply reduces to mechanical ritual (e.g., saying ten Hail Marys), justice is factored out of the occasion and Hitler may be in paradise right now if he repented on his deathbed, and his victims may not be in heaven if they didn’t believe God’s preferred doctrine. 

Rome and the Jewish elite were culpable in sinless Jesus’s death, though for different reasons.  Let’s first look at how Mark invented the crucifixion narrative.

The crucifixion narrative in Mark seems fictional because of us being told what Jesus said from the cross, but also what Jesus and the high priest said to each other, and what Jesus and the crowd said to each other (who would have been around to record these conversations?).

On the whole, it seems to be a creative rewrite (haggadic midrash) of Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22:

Apologists will argue likely the clearest Prophecy about Jesus is the entire 53rd chapter of Isaiah. Isaiah 53:3-7 is especially unmistakable:

“He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.”

The only thing is, Isaiah wasn’t making a prophesy about Jesus. Mark was doing a haggadic midrash on Isaiah. So, Mark depicts Jesus as one who is despised and rejected, a man of sorrow acquainted with grief. He then describes Jesus as wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. The Servant in Isaiah, like Jesus in Mark, is silent before his accusers. In Isaiah it says of the servant with his stripes we are healed, which Mark turned into the story of the scourging of Jesus. This is, in part, is where atonement theology comes from, but it would be wrong to conclude II Isaiah was clearly only talking about atonement here. The servant is numbered among the transgressors in Isaiah, so Jesus is crucified between two thieves. The Isaiah servant would make his grave with the rich, So Jesus is buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a person of means.

Then, as Dr. Robert Price says

The substructure for the crucifixion in chapter 15 is, as all recognize, Psalm 22, from which derive all the major details, including the implicit piercing of hands and feet (Mark 24//Psalm 22:16b), the dividing of his garments and casting lots for them (Mark 15:24//Psalm 22:18), the “wagging heads” of the mockers (Mark 15:20//Psalm 22:7), and of course the cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34//Psalm 22:1). Matthew adds another quote, “He trusts in God. Let God deliver him now if he desires him” (Matthew 7:43//Psalm 22:8), as well as a strong allusion (“for he said, ‘I am the son of God’” 27:43b) to Wisdom of Solomon 2:12-20, which underlies the whole story anyway (Miller, p. 362), “Let us lie in wait for the righteous man because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. We are considered by him as something base, and he avoids our ways as unclean; he calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father. Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life: for if the righteous man is God’s son he will help him and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture that we may find out how gentle he is and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected.”

As for other details, Crossan (p. 198) points out that the darkness at noon comes from Amos 8:9, while the vinegar and gall come from Psalm 69:21. It is remarkable that Mark does anything but call attention to the scriptural basis for the crucifixion account. There is nothing said of scripture being fulfilled here. It is all simply presented as the events of Jesus’ execution. It is we who must ferret out the real sources of the story. This is quite different, e.g., in John, where explicit scripture citations are given, e.g., for Jesus’ legs not being broken to hasten his death (John 19:36), either Exodus 12:10, Numbers 9:12, or Psalm 34:19-20 (Crossan, p. 168). Whence did Mark derive the tearing asunder of the Temple veil, from top to bottom (Mark 15:38)? Perhaps from the death of Hector in the Iliad (MacDonald, pp. 144-145). Hector dies forsaken by Zeus. The women of Troy watched from afar off (as the Galilean women do in Mark 15:40), and the whole of Troy mourned as if their city had already been destroyed “from top to bottom,” just as the ripping of the veil seems to be a portent of Jerusalem’s eventual doom.

Conservative Christians often treat Isaiah 53 as a obvious prophecy about Jesus, but this runs against the idea that Isaiah’s Suffering Servant wasn’t the Messiah but Israel as a collective people and how the nations of the world comes to terms with how they mistreated Israel. 

This corporate perspective primarily relies on reading the “Servant Songs” (Isaiah 40–53) as an unfolding narrative within its immediate historical context, often crediting the shift primarily to scholars like the 11th-century Rabbi Rashi. 

In earlier chapters, the text explicitly identifies the Servant as the nation of Israel itself (“But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen…” in Isaiah 41:8).  The “We” are the Nations: In Isaiah 53:3–6, the speakers are the Gentiles/nations of the world. They are expressing shock and coming to terms with the reality that they mistook Israel’s exile and affliction as God’s rejection, realizing instead that they were the perpetrators of injustice.  The use of the singular “he” or “my servant” throughout chapter 53 is viewed as a standard biblical literary device that personifies the collective nation as a single entity to describe its historical persecution

This reading supports the reason behind Mark rewriting Isaiah 53 as seeing the corrupt Jewish elite and uncaring Romans condemning sinless Jesus without cause so that they may come to terms and become revulsed at their actions (like Judas did) and transform their lives (This seems to be what happened to Jewish High Council member Joseph of Arimathea).  Price comments

“Whence Joseph’s epithet “of Arimathea”? Richard C. Carrier has shown that the apparent place name is wholly a pun (no historical “Arimathea” has ever been identified), meaning “Best (ari[stoV]} Disciple (maqh[thV]) Town.” Thus “the Arimathean” is equivalent to “the Beloved Disciple.” He is, accordingly, an ideal, fictive figure.”

We see, for instance, the corrupt Jewish trial of Jesus, and Pilate executing Jesus, not for cause, but because it would have been a nuisance to let him live.  In an apocalyptic world where evil forces were influencing people (e.g., Satan entering Judas), they needed to be shocked out of people who see themselves in those who wrongfully killed God’s beloved agapetos Jesus.  We have the historical case of a world transforming because of the unjust killing of Socrates, Socrates thus offering a prayer of thanks for the poison at the end of the Phaedo, and the impaled just man in Plato’s Republic.

But, as I said, the substitutionary interpretation of Isaiah 53 like 4 Maccabees seems viable too depending on how you read the evidence.

Conservative Christianity reads the passage as a prophetic anticipation of Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah.

Substitutionary Atonement: In verse 5 (“He was pierced for our transgressions…”), the Servant suffers vicariously for the sins of others. In Christian theology, the collective nation of Israel cannot bear the ultimate penalty for the sins of the whole world, but a divine Messiah can.

Innocence vs. Guilt: Isaiah emphasizes that the Servant “had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth” (Isaiah 53:9). In the context of the rest of the Hebrew Bible, the prophets frequently rebuke the nation of Israel for its sins; thus, apologists argue this refers to a perfectly righteous individual.

Voluntary Sacrifice: The text notes the Servant is led like a lamb to the slaughter and makes his soul an offering for sin.

Polysemy is deeply rooted in Jewish religious thought.  So, there seems to be a hoi polloi (the unwashed masses) level where because of Christ’s atoning death you can say ten hail marries and be wiped clean and balance the books as a reformed serial killer, but at a deeper level the wrongful death of sinless Jesus that we are all implicated in is an occasion for circumcising the fleshly from our hearts and revealing the law written on them. The thought experiment is realizing had we been in the crowd that day, no matter how offended we are at the crowd from the distance of history, we probably would have called for Jesus’ death along with everyone else.  The New Testament is like watching an animal cruelty video and being converted to veganism.

As I said in previous posts, the Jewish elite in Jesus’ time were viewed as corrupt by many Jewish sources. Paul lampoons their corrupt killing of Jesus in 1 Thessalonians. Matthew declares Jesus’ blood will be on their children. The Pilate issue seems to be that the Roman rule was not concerned with justice but treated Jewish issues like a nuisance and corruptly collaborated to punish issues where the Jewish elite themselves could not, like with the torture of Jesus ben Annanias by the Romans in Josephus. Commenters too often seem born out of a focus on Jesus and not the world who wrongfully condemned him. He was like Lot’s angels who were sent to test the people. The people failed and were destroyed. Jesus was likewise sent. The Jews failed the test and the temple was destroyed.