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
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