Sacrificial System (and Atonement)
Posted: Tue Feb 18, 2020 11:44 pm
I ran across this quote from NT Wright the other day - thought it would provoke some good discussion:
NT Wright wrote:The more I’ve puzzled away about the meaning of sacrifice in the first century and so forth, and the more I’ve read from both Christian and Jewish writers on this subject, the more it really does seem (to my surprise) - but, now, it looks as though the more no, in the Old Testament itself, in Leviticus and Numbers and so on, the sacrifices are not killed as a vicarious punishment for the sins of the person who is identifying with them — that’s not how sacrifices worked in the Levitical system, and is not how they were understood by the Rabbis and so on. The only animal that has sins confessed over its head is the scapegoat on the day of atonement. And the scapegoat is precisely the one animal that is not then given in sacrifice but is driven off into the wilderness because, of course, if it has got the sins of the people upon it, it can no longer be a pure animal, and the sacrifices had to be pure.