I'm not entirely sure if I should be slightly worried about how often this has started to happen, but one feature of having written this blog for so long is that when I search for old posts on a topic, I'm quite often finding ones which I have forgotten about, but are still really interesting. (I'm leaning towards it being a good thing - I've been keeping these notes for more than 20 years, for goodness sake, and quite a lot has happened over those years to crowd out some memories. And, well, I quite like re-discovering the quality of some posts! 😏)
Anyway, that's a preamble to talking about the topic of atonement in religion, and Christianity in particular.
I have forgotten about this post, and this one, both specifically talking about the origins of atonement. And then I was recently re-reading this very old post about the divide between "realist" and "non-realist" views of Christianity in particular (a post of which I had some memory), but had forgotten that my old friend Geoff had turned up in comments and questioned what I thought of atonement.
The reason I'm talking about this at all is due to a podcast video I watched recently by biblical scholar Bart Erhman called "The surprising reason Luke removed atonement from his gospel". (Ehrman is quite a likeable person to listen to, and has followed the not uncommon path of being a believer when he started his formal studies, but later moving to what might be called non aggressive agnosticism/atheism - in contract to the Hitchens/Dawkins brand of atheism.)
Ehrman's argument about Luke is not one I was previously aware of: that Luke did not use clear "atonement" passages that appear in Mark, and the one passage in Luke that is taken as incorporating the atonement doctrine is probably a later addition to "fix" this problem.
I see that Ehrman has proposed this for some years, as it is discussed in a 2017 entry on his blog, which I have just visited for the first time.) This is him explaining the view that Luke had a completely different understanding of the point of Jesus' death:
....it is a striking feature of Luke’s portrayal of Jesus death — this may sound strange at first — that he never, anywhere else, indicates that the death itself is what brings salvation from sin. Nowhere in Luke’s entire two volume work (Luke and Acts), is Jesus’ death said to be “for you.” And in fact, on the two occasions in which Luke’s source Mark indicates that it was by Jesus’ death that salvation came (Mark 10:45; 15:39), Luke changed the wording of the text (or eliminated it). Luke, in other words, has a different understanding of the way Jesus death leads to salvation from Mark (and from Paul, and other early Christian writers).
It is easy to see Luke’s own distinctive view by considering what he has to say in the book of Acts, where the apostles give a number of speeches in order to convert others to the faith. What is striking is that in none of these instances (look, e.g., in chapters 3, 4, 13), do the apostles indicate that Jesus’ death brings atonement for sins. It is not that Jesus’ death is unimportant. It’s extremely important for Luke. But not as an atonement. Instead, Jesus death is what makes people realize their guilt before God (since he died even though he was innocent). Once people recognize their guilt, they turn to God in repentance, and then he forgives their sins.
Jesus’ death for Luke, in other words, drives people to repentance, and it is this repentance that brings salvation. But not according to these disputed verses which are missing from some of our early witnesses: here Jesus’ death is portrayed as an atonement “for you.”
Originally the verses appear not to have been part of Luke’s Gospel. Why then were they added? In a later dispute with Marcion, Tertullian emphasized:
Jesus declared plainly enough what he meant by the bread, when he called the bread his own body. He likewise, when mentioning the cup and making the new testament to be sealed in his blood, affirms the reality of his body. For no blood can belong to a body which is not a body of flesh. Thus from the evidence of the flesh we get a proof of the body, and a proof of the flesh from the evidence of the blood. (Against Marcion 4, 40).
It appears that the verses were added in order to stress Jesus’ real body and flesh, which he really sacrificed for the sake of others. This may not have been Luke’s own emphasis, but it certainly was the emphasis of the proto-orthodox scribes who altered their text of Luke in order to counter docetic Christologies such as that of Marcion.
Some of the comments following are interesting too:
Since Paul and ‘Luke’ seem to have contradictory ideas about the atonement–and Luke seems to contradict some of Paul’s claims about his own life–does this suggest that the writer of Luke probably wasn’t an associate of Paul’s? Does this make the traditional authorship claim less likely?
Yes, for me that’s an important argument that he was not Paul’s close companion.
Also relevant seems to be Luke’s and Paul’s different understanding of the Holy Spirit–Paul includes a kind of
“indwelling salvation” doctrine (Romans), so to speak, where Luke only ever refers to the Holy Spirit’s empowering presence (there’s not a hint of any “indwelling salvation” doctrine in Acts).Do the biographical contradictions lead you to believe Luke had not read some of Paul’s letters?
Yup!
There are quite a few other interesting comments in the thread.
I am not at all sure how more widely this has been discussed, beyond Erhman. It's perhaps something I should look into.
It's also a reminder that I still have a book about New Testament views of Jesus that was quite influential on me when I read it in my 20's, but it's been so long since then that I am struggling to remember fully the argument it made. Sounds like something to revisit on Good Friday, and perhaps to write a note here to remind myself in future...
