What is the Meaning of Christ’s death?
The glib answer, yet ironically the correct one is: “to save us from our sins”
Before exploring the subject, let us first back up and define a few terms:
God: an infinite being possessing all knowledge and all power, yet having a personality and the ability to communicate.
Sin: evil, right?
But what is good & evil? Is it possible to do either good or evil on a desert island? When one is alone, it is possible only to make foolish or intelligent acts, not good or evil ones.
Good or evil is a choice, judged on arbitrary terms based on the impact of our decisions upon others, nothing else.
Society defines good through a tripod. This tripod arbitrarily decides that an action is good only if the action benefits society ahead of the group, and the group ahead of the individual. Evil can be expressed as the inverse decision, any action which benefits the individual or small group at the expense of the larger.
If we stop here, and assume that sin = evil, the previous statement still does not make any sense. How could a death of a man 2000 years ago somehow affect the behavior of individuals today so that they conform more towards society’s desires and perform more good actions instead of evil actions?
Let us go back and and add some additional speculative background philosophy. Let us say that this infinite creative being created finite creatures with the sole purpose of growth. Absolute freedom is required for unrestricted growth. These finite creatures live in an absolute universe with absolute causality. Specific causes lead to specific results. God is greater than the universe, and can bypass and change its laws and does so.
If we accept that idea, then take another look at conventional reasoning behind why Jesus had to come to earth and die. If He came to have sins transferred to Him and die, either God the Father is a vengeful deity demanding that someone die somewhere, or else God is not omnipotent and really does not have the power to forgive sins, He only has power to transfer them to someone else and either kill them or let them die instead of the person who commits them.
The second theory is that Jesus had to die to prove how nice and loving God is. Again this idea has some logical faults. Jesus did display his character and proved that He is loving, but did so through His life and not His death. Friends rarely jump off cliffs and kill themselves to prove that they are trustworthy and loving. Neither does submission to an unfair trial and a lack of prudence in evading enemies who have many times before tried to kill Jesus through his entire ministry prove niceness.
Let us take a look at a third approach. For an unknown number of countless years God exists with his angels and an unknown number of other “unfallen worlds.” Everyone does exactly what God tells him to do and there is no death or unhappiness. Eventually Lucifer decides that he has a better way of doing things and his ideas are different then God’s way.
Since we have no direct knowledge of events or actions outside of this world let us take some guesses:
Galatians 5:22-23 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.
If Satan’s way is the opposite, than the results of those who follow his actions are conflict, divisiveness, impatience, distrust, pride, extreme measures, and cruelty.
God states that Satan’s way, ie: “sin” results in death.
Satan accuses God of weakening and crippling his creatures, preventing them from obtaining what they possibly could obtain and killing them when they refuse obey God’s rules.
The first way for God to answer this question was to let a single world in the universe, once its people chose Satan’s way with their own free will, to follow fully in the consequences of their own actions. To ensure open free choice, God worked through the history of this world to preserve or save at least a small minority of those who chose to follow Him instead and to make that minority visible to as many others as possible.
The only final answer to the question of who is right was to transfer the disease, the corruption, the sickness known as “sin” onto God himself and show the results. The disease killed Jesus and both Jesus and Satan’s character are fully revealed in their actions toward each other.
So why did Jesus have to die? To prove that sin is a sickness, a choice of stupidity, a disease which can be cured. Accepting the cure has nothing to do with following an arbitrary system of laws or any form of forced behavior or work, it is simply a choice for a change in character.
Rather than pontificating on all this, how about starting with the most fundamental question of all: "Did Jesus ever actually exist?
Christians take this for granted, never daring to ask the question to themselves, let alone outloud. The answer is, there’s no evidence outside the Christian bible that he ever did. And if you look closely at other religions over the ages (as almost no Christians ever do), Jesus’ story is plagiarized from many of them. From the "son of god" aspect, to the "virgin birth" story, right down to the "healing the sick, and raising the dead" part of the story, Jesus’ mythology is mimics much earlier stories of Dionysus, Mithras, Buddah, and many others that predate the stories in the New Testament.
So, why is no one looking into this? Well, maybe they’re put off by the failures of Israeli scientists who have reported zero success in their decades-long search for evidence of Moses? Christians might be keeping their collective heads in the sand because they’re afraid of what they might NOT find if they start looking.
Outside the four gospels of the New Testament, which are acknowledgedly biased sources as each book was written with a certain “Christian” agenda, is there any evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was a historic figure?
Admittedly there is no consistent outside evidence or record of actual New Testament events or miraculous works, but there is quite good outside evidence that a Jew named Jesus was a teacher in Palestine existed as a historic figure and had a significant number of followers after his death.
The actual historical references can be found summarized on the internet, sifting out the obviously heavily biased and non-factual ones on both sides of the issue, but an even more through and accurate study can be done by examining the references of these articles directly.
First take a look at inaccurate or refutable supports before reading the rest of the articles here:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/scott_oser/hojfaq.html
Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37 CE - circa 100 CE)
http://members.aol.com/FLJOSEPHUS/ntparallels.htm
A few articles with fairly lengthy lists of non-Christian sources:
http://www.probe.org/content/view/18/77/
http://www.westarkchurchofchrist.org/library/extrabiblical.htm
Good quick summary:
http://protestantism.suite101.com/article.cfm/evidence_for_jesus
From their conclusion:
“The late English scholar Michael Grant wrote:
[I]f we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus’ existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned.”
…
“While some may argue that Jesus’ life has been embellished, it is an absurd to deny the existence of the historical Jesus. British New Testament scholar I. Howard Marshall says it best: ‘It is not possible to explain the rise of the Christian church or the writing of the Gospels and the stream of tradition that lies behind them without accepting the fact that the Founder of Christianity actually existed.’”
ps. The lack of archaeological evidence of Moses does not even fall in any relevancy to this off-topic comment. If you follow any Biblical archaeology you would know that there is a lack of anything but circumstantial archaeological evidence before the Davidic dynasty. Ironically the current posts concerning religion in this blog were written as a reaction against “non-reasonable/non-evidence-based Christianity”