Most pastors have a confident answer for why Jesus died, and it’s the youngest answer in the history of the religion. The first Christians couldn’t agree on one, the church fathers taught something else, and for most of a thousand years the most popular explanation involved paying off the devil. One group of early Christians found a way out of the whole argument, and the church spent centuries calling it a lie.
The confusion goes back to the day it happened. When Jesus was crucified, his followers were baffled, and by every practical measure his movement was finished. A messiah was supposed to win, and this one had died the way Rome killed slaves and rebels. What got things going again was a rumor that his tomb was empty and a handful of people claiming they’d seen him alive, which was enough for them to declare him the messiah. Nobody stopped to ask why he’d died in the first place, since the explanations came later, after the dust settled, and the one most believers hold today, in the form they hold it, is about five hundred years old.
This time, the bonus section for paid subscribers is after the sources and it’s about one way of solving the problem permanently.
A Slave Market, a Temple, and a Courtroom
Each New Testament writer uses a different way to explain it.
Mark has Jesus say he came to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45), which is slave-market language. Paul calls Jesus a sacrifice whose blood covers sin (Romans 3:25), which comes from the temple, and a few chapters later he moves to a courtroom where the guilty get declared innocent (Romans 5). The letter to the Colossians puts Jesus on a battlefield, parading defeated cosmic rulers through the streets like prisoners of war (Colossians 2:15), and Hebrews turns him into a high priest who carries his own blood into a heavenly sanctuary (Hebrews 9).
That makes a slave market, a temple, a courtroom, a battlefield, and a priest, each borrowed from a different corner of ancient life, and nobody stops to say which one is the literal account. The writers were scrambling to make sense of an execution nobody had expected, and they used whatever pictures were lying around.
If you think things are already complicated, I have news: Jesus himself further complicates the idea that forgiveness requires a payment first. In Mark 2:5, he tells a paralyzed man that his sins are forgiven before anyone has been executed for anything. In Luke 15, the father of the prodigal son runs down the road to embrace his broke, pig-stained son, and the parable contains no sacrifice, no payment, and no punishment anywhere in sight. If forgiveness required blood, Jesus spent his ministry handing out forgiveness that hadn’t been funded yet, and the Gospels don’t seem bothered by that at all.
The Ransom Question Origen Asked
Origen, the brilliant Bible scholar from Alexandria who died around 253, took Mark’s word “ransom” at face value and asked the question any kid would ask: a ransom gets paid to someone, so who got paid? God made no sense as the kidnapper. Origen’s answer was the devil, who held humanity captive and accepted the life of Jesus in exchange, and that answer dominated Christian teaching for centuries.
In the name of improving things, Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth-century bishop, added a fishhook: the devil saw a human being on the cross, grabbed the bait, and got caught on the divinity hidden inside. Augustine, the North African bishop who shaped Western Christianity more than anyone else, preferred a mousetrap, with the cross as the trap and the blood of Jesus as the bait. The Orthodox churches still teach a cousin of this idea, in which Jesus wins a victory over death and the devil and hands the prize to everyone else.
Nearly every version from that first thousand years has Jesus rescuing people from something, and almost none has God the Father waiting on his throne for somebody to suffer. One group of early Christians found an even faster fix than any of these, and it’s waiting in the bonus below.
What Anselm Did to the Devil
Around 1098 Anselm, the archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a book called Why God Became Man (Cur Deus Homo) that threw out the devil’s ransom. The devil, Anselm said, is a kidnapper with no rights over his captives, and nobody owes a kidnapper anything. The debt belongs to God. Sin insults God’s honor, and an insult to someone that high can’t be waved off or covered with a few good deeds, especially since people already owe God everything and have nothing left to pay with. Only someone who’s human (so he owes the debt) and God (so he’s big enough to cover it) can settle the account.
Anselm wrote for a world of lords, vassals, and insulted honor, where a slight against a king cost more than a slight against a peasant. His God behaves like the greatest lord in the valley, and the cross works as a payment of damages. A generation later Peter Abelard, a French philosopher and teacher, read Anselm and decided no payment was needed at all, since the cross shows how much God loves people and seeing that love changes them.
Calvin’s Legal Training
In the 1500s John Calvin, the Geneva reformer who’d trained as a lawyer, and other Protestant leaders turned Anselm’s debt of honor into a criminal sentence. God the judge owed sinners punishment, and Jesus stood in the dock and took it. Theologians call this penal substitution, which in plain terms means a punishment swap, and it’s the version that dominates evangelical sermons and altar calls today. Many pastors present it as if Paul had handed it down in a letter from prison.
The ransom fit a Roman world where slavery and kidnapping were daily facts of life, the honor debt fit castles and knights, and the courtroom fit a Europe busy writing law codes and trying heretics. Abelard’s love story came back in the 1800s among liberal Protestants, who had little patience for a God who needed blood.
This publication runs on your support. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber and you find value in what you read here, consider joining to help keep The Unholy Truth alive and independent.
What Pastors Pick
Someone should have settled this question, and the people with the authority to do so had the chance. The bishops who met at Nicaea in 325 and again at Constantinople in 381 wrote precise language about the Trinity, and people were exiled over the difference of a single letter in a Greek word. Yet the creed they produced says only that Jesus came down for us and for our salvation and was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate. Then it moves on. It does not explain a price, a buyer, or the exact way the cross saves.
As a result, different Christian traditions emphasized different explanations. Orthodox churches generally focus on Christ’s victory over death. Catholics have often followed Anselm’s understanding of debt and satisfaction. Evangelicals typically emphasize Jesus taking the punishment sinners deserved. Liberal Protestants often favor Abelard’s emphasis on God’s love and moral influence.
Each tradition teaches its preferred explanation with confidence and often treats the others as mistaken or less important. When a pastor says, “The Bible clearly teaches that Jesus took the punishment sinners owed,” he is presenting one interpretation among several. The Bible contains the themes that gave rise to all of these views, and the church has spent two thousand years debating them without reaching a universal agreement.
What do you think?
Not Having the Problem in the First Place
Paid subscribers get a bonus after the sources section on who those early Christians were and what they said happened on that hill. Upgrade to read it.
Sources and Further Reading
Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor (1931). The classic case that the ransom and victory story dominated the first thousand years.
Anselm of Canterbury, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), c. 1098.
Peter Abelard, Commentary on Romans (on Romans 3:19-26).
Origen, Commentary on Matthew (on Matthew 20:28, the ransom saying).
Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Oration (the fishhook image).
Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 45 (his objection to paying the devil).
Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 5 (Jesus redoing Adam’s story) and Book 1, chapter 24 (his account of Basilides).
Athanasius, On the Incarnation.
Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans.
The Apocalypse of Peter and The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, ed. Marvin Meyer (HarperOne, 2007).
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vols. 1 and 3 (University of Chicago Press).
Stephen Finlan, Problems with Atonement (Liturgical Press, 2005).
Eleonore Stump, Atonement (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities (Oxford University Press, 2003).
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, 1979).
Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Harvard University Press, 2003).
Exclusive Content
The Man Who Carried the Cross
Some early Christians saw the same problem the bishops did, a Messiah who died like a slave and no agreed explanation for why, and they picked a cleaner exit….
Excellent as ever, Tanner.
For what it's worth, I've always worked on the simple solution that he was seen as a trouble maker, which he was to the pharisees, stitched up by them, & Pontius Pilate had him executed to shut them up.
Straightforward stuff.
As for resurrection, surely the simplest explanation would be that he was taken down from the cross before he was dead, maybe in a coma (not an uncommon phenomenon. No shortage of people in the past who appeared to die but recovered. They didnt have the benefit of modern medical science, and any way who would have been checking he was actually dead?), recovered, stuck around for a few days & made himself known to the disciples, then scarpered, quite probably with Mary Magdalene, before the authorities twigged that they'd botched the execution & came looking for him.
All that is perfectly credible without having to resort to miracles, explains what could very easily have happened, and explains stories of his having survived and disappeared overseas with MM.
Why bother with all the miracles stuff & indepth arguments about why was he dying for our sins when there's a perfectly logical explanation? It never occurred to me before until reading your excellent summary that all the talk about him dying for our sins is really rather stupid