My textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings is now out in its 8^th edition, co-authored with my colleague Hugo Mendez.  One of my favorite features of the book since I first wrote it in the mid 90s is the use of side-bar “boxes” that deal with issues that are – to me – particularly interesting but not directly related to what I’m talking about in the chapter.  As a rule I use these boxes to deal with highly relevant but more “human-interest” kinds of things.

For a long time I’ve thought about the Christian idea that Jesus’s death was a “vicarious atonement” for sins.  It’s an unusual view, when you think about it.  Why does God need someone else to die for you to forgive what you’ve done?  Can’t he just forgive you?

In one of the boxes in the book I point out that Christians were not the first to come up with the idea.  Here’s what I say there in a box in my chapter 16.

******************************

The idea that someone would suffer and die to save others, a notion called vicarious suffering, was not invented by the Christians. Prior to Christianity, the notion is found, for example, in a number of stories of Jewish martyrs. Is it possible that these tales affected the ways Christians narrated their stories about Jesus?

In the account of the Maccabean revolt known as 1 Maccabees, we find a Jewish warrior named Eleazar who single-handedly attacks an elephant thought to be bearing the king of Syria, the enemy of God. Eleazar ends up beneath the beast, crushed for his efforts. In the words of the author, “so he gave his life to save his people” (1 Macc 6:44).

A later account of martyrs from the Maccabean period, known as 4 Maccabees, describes in graphic detail the tortures that faithful Jews underwent because they refused to forsake the Law of Moses. The author claims that God accepted their deaths as a sacrifice on behalf of the people of Israel: “Because of them our enemies did not rule over our nation, the tyrant was punished, and the homeland purified—they having become, as it were, a ransom for the sin of our nation. And through the blood of those devout ones and their death as an atoning sacrifice, divine Providence preserved Israel that previously had been mistreated” (4 Macc 17:20–22). In these writings, the death of the faithful martyr brings salvation to others.

Literary portrayals of vicarious suffering can be found in ancient pagan literature as well. One of the most interesting instances occurs in the moving play of Euripides entitled Alcestis. Alcestis is the beautiful wife of Admetus, who is fated to die at a young age. But the god Apollo, who earlier befriended him, has worked out a special arrangement with the Fates: someone else can voluntarily die in his stead. Admetus tries in vain to persuade his parents to undertake the task as a familial duty. As a last resort, Alcestis agrees to perform the deed. After her death, Admetus is understandably stricken by grief, although, perversely enough, he is more upset that people will think badly of him than that he has actually made his wife sacrifice her own life for his. But he is comforted by the god Heracles, who goes down into Hades to rescue Alcestis from the throes of death and brings her back alive to her stricken husband. Euripides’ story is thus about a person who voluntarily dies in someone else’s stead and is then honored by a god who conquers death by raising the victim back to life. Sound familiar?