Posted on by Jack Kilcrease

Did Jesus Intend to Die For You?

One major challenge for post-Enlightenment Christian dogmatics has been New Testament scholars’ doubt that Jesus prophesied his death or intended it to atone for human sin.1 These same scholars suggest that the post-Easter Church pondered Jesus’s death after the fact and concluded that God must have intended it for some good purpose. Early Christians then developed the idea (found as early as the proto-creedal formulas of Paul, 1 Cor 15:3-4) that Christ died to pay for human sin. Contrary to these claims, a significant amount of evidence demonstrates that Jesus, our High Priest, did believe his mission was to die and that his death would be an atoning sacrifice for sin.  

Jesus Was Not A Stoic

Confessional Lutheran theologians can make several responses to the critical scholarly consensus. First, the Gospel authors do not depict Jesus’s passion predictions in a stoic or disinterested manner. The Gospel traditions hand down statements of Jesus that suggest genuine pathos and anxiety about his coming sufferings: “I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled! I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how great is my distress until it is accomplished!” (Lk 12:49-50). 

In this vein, the Synoptic Tradition witnesses to the distressed prayers of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matt 26:36-46; Mark 14:32-42; Luke 22:39-46). In these prayers, Jesus repeatedly asks the Father to change his mission and withdraw the cup that he must drink. The “cup” Jesus speaks of is very clearly a reference to the “cup of wrath” mentioned in a number of Old Testament passages (Isa. 51:17, v.22, Jer. 25:15). Therefore, this “cup” refers to his sacrificial death on the cross.2 

Many scholars have noted that it would have been extremely unlikely for the early Church to invent either Jesus’s distress over his imminent death or his attempts to avoid it. The Gospels’ portrayal of Jesus is very much at odds with the moral ideals of first-century Jewish and Hellenistic culture. In the first centuries after Christ’s birth, both Jews and Greeks highly prized stoic acts of martyrdom. Both cultures depicted stoicism in the face of death as extremely praiseworthy. Examples of this in both Christianity and Judaism abound.

Prominent examples include Christian martyr stories (notably the account of St. Polycarp’s martyrdom) and Josephus’ account of the binding of Isaac.3 In this vein, Roman Catholic New Testament scholar Raymond Brown highlighted the role of stoic resignation in the portrayal of the martyr brothers of 2 Maccabees 7.4 In the Gospels, the fear and anxiety that Jesus displayed concerning his impending death do not seem to cohere with these other literary images of heroic death. This suggests that they are, in fact, authentic, since both Jews and Greeks would have viewed Jesus’s fear as embarrassing. 

Indeed, had the authors of the Gospel invented Jesus’ passion predictions they would have undoubtedly shaped them in accordance with the surrounding culture’s ideals. As a result, they would have portrayed Jesus as stoically indifferent to his impending death. Since the Gospels do not do this, we must conclude on the basis of the criteria of embarrassment that Gethsemane and the other Passion predictions are actually authentic.5 

Jesus Predicts His Sacrificial Death at the Last Supper

Secondly, the earliest New Testament author, St. Paul, gives evidence for Jesus’s understanding of his death by citing the words of institution to the Corinthian Church (1 Cor. 11:23-26). The Synoptic Gospels corroborate the tradition regarding the Last Supper quoted by Paul (Mt. 26:17–30, Mk. 14:12–26, Lk. 22:7–39). Jesus’s understanding of his death, therefore, fulfills the criteria of authenticity of multiple attestation. 

Moreover, when Paul wrote or spoke the statements recorded in 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, Galatians 1-2, and Acts, he was in communication with Jesus’s original Disciples. These men were present when the words of institution were first spoken. Therefore, Paul was not merely corroborating a tradition handed down by the Church and attested to in the Synoptic Gospels. He was also in direct contact with people who were present when Jesus originally spoke these words. To persistently claim the words of institution are inauthentic, one would have to charge either Paul or those present with a blatant lie. Of course, there is absolutely no evidence of any such untruth.

Paul’s rendition of the words at the Last Supper include the Messiah’s very clear attestation that his death will be a sacrificial death for sins. In the Old Testament, atoning sacrifice means the separation of body from blood (Lev. 17:11). By speaking of his body in tandem with his blood at the Last Supper, Jesus clearly presents his very substance as sacrificially separated to work atonement for sins.6  

The Suffering Messiah

Thirdly, as Anglican theologian N.T. Wright has shown, many Second Temple Jews believed there would be a great tribulation and suffering before the Kingdom of God dawned.7 Moreover, many Jews held that various representative figures might take Israel’s suffering on themselves. Significant amounts of intertestamental literature, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, held such a position.8 In 2 Maccabees 7:18 and 7:32, the brother martyrs seem to see their deaths as a form of representative suffering for the sins of Israel. 

According to both Brant Pitre and Ben Whitherington III, Jesus’s claim to bring and embody the kingdom was closely tied to the Jewish belief that someone needed to offer up vicarious substitutionary suffering for Israel.9 Within certain strands of the Jewish apocalyptic worldview, Jesus’s claimed identity as the agent of the kingdom made it necessary for him to suffer what New Testament scholarship often calls the “messianic woes.”10 

Many Second Temple Jews believed representative and substitutionary suffering acted as a catalyst for the eschaton. This corresponds to an interpretation of Isaiah 53 in later Judaism that identified the Suffering Servant as the Messiah.11 Indeed, it may be the case that the Messianic interpretation of Isaiah 53 has its roots in the Second Temple period. 

Moreover, in some bits of Rabbinical literature, Jewish teachers describe a glorious Messiah named “Ben David. Another suffering Messiah named “Ben Joseph” complemented the kingly Messiah.12 Thus, Jews did not reject a suffering Messiah per se. However, they were unable to reconcile ultimate glory and suffering in a single unified person. Only later did the early Christians discern the unity of glory and suffering in the person of Jesus via the theology of the cross.

  1. For example: Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 128-133; John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1993), 354-395; Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 241-259;  Robert Funk, Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium, (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco 1997), 219-241. ↩︎
  2. Scott Hahn, The Fourth Cup: Unveiling the Mystery of the Last Supper and the Cross (New York: Crown Publishing, 2018), 115. ↩︎
  3. Eusebius, The Church History 4.14-16 in in Eusebius: The Church History: A New Translation with Commentary, trans. Paul Maier (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publishing, 1999), 145-52; Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews 1.13 in The Works of Josephus, trans. William Whiston, (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995), 43-4. ↩︎
  4. Raymond Brown, The Death of the Messiah, From Gethsemane to the Grave: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels, vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 218. ↩︎
  5. Wright, Christian Origins and the Question of God, 2:606. ↩︎
  6. Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1966), 222. ↩︎
  7. Wright, Christian Origins, 1:277-279. ↩︎
  8. Ben Witherington III, The Christology of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 252.  See Wright, Christian Origins, 2:581-582. ↩︎
  9. See the aforementioned Brant Pitre, Jesus, the Tribulation and the End of Exile: Restoration Eschatology and the Origins of Atonement (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005). ↩︎
  10.  See comment in: Andrew Chester, Messiah and Exaltation: Jewish Messianic and Visionary Traditions and New Testament Christology (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 264. ↩︎
  11. Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels, 150—155. ↩︎
  12. See: Dan Cohn-Sherbok, The Jewish Messiah (Edinburg: T & T Clark, 1997), 47-48; D.C. Mitchell, Messiah ben Joseph (Newton Mearns, UK: Campbell, 2016). ↩︎

From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).

Cover image from Paolo Veronese, Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, 1570, Artsy, accessed June 30, 2024, https://www.artsy.net/artwork/paolo-veronese-christ-in-the-garden-of-gethsemane; other images from “Day 27: Good Friday ~ The Agony in the Garden,” The Corona Retreat, April 10, 2020, accessed July 3, 2024, https://coronaretreat.wordpress.com/2020/04/10/day-27-good-friday-the-agony-in-the-garden/; detail of Juan de Juanes, Jesus with the Eucharist at the Last Supper, mid-late 16th century, in “Origin of the Eucharist,” Wikipedia, accessed July 3, 2024, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Eucharist; and Kirollos Kilada, Jesus the Messiah Icon, https://kkilada.com/coptic-icon-prints/jesus-the-messiah.