This morning I wrote the first page of my Fulbright project. I started with chapter 3 to get my juices going and because I may present it here at the university. Here's the first paragraph of my project:
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In the previous chapter, we argued that it was quite natural for the
earliest Christians to draw on sacrificial metaphors to make sense of Christ’s
death. Indeed, we argued that it is
quite likely that Jesus himself gave them precedence for thinking of his death
in this way in the final hours before his arrest, if not before. The most natural way for them to interpret
the scope of his death was to see it as an atonement for the Israel of their
day, a righteous death to restore sinful Israel. At the same time, it is not clear that anyone
in this ragtag group of followers was of the sort to be deeply theological in
orientation. More likely, they very
generally saw his death in retrospect as catalyzing and effecting all the goals
of Jesus during his earthly activities, with their focal point in the land of
Israel.
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2 comments:
And one wonders how influential or significant the destruction of the Temple would have been for the early Christians in terms of the sacrificial metaphor of Jesus' death. Without the Temple cult, it seems that the early church would have seen the crucifixion as fulfilling and/or superseding the OT Judaic system of atonement. It would be interesting to see how this theology develops (if it in fact does) from the pre-70CE writings to the post-70CE writings of the NT.
This is part of my thesis, that Christian Jews did not see the temple's atonement as redundant until after the temple was destroyed.
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