Jesus' sacrifice on the cross

 Jesus' sacrifice on the cross is not what some atheists, anti-theists, unbelievers, and other assorted critics of Christianity make it out to be. They contend it had to have conveyed some sort of loss, or extended pain, or just makes no sense since Jesus knew he would come back from the dead. But those are all misunderstandings of what Jesus sacrifice was all about.

Christ’s atoning death must be seen against the background of the Old Testament sacrificial system. Before Christ’s atoning death it was necessary for sacrifices to be regularly offered to compensate for the sins that had been committed. These sacrifices were necessary, not to work a reformation in the sinner nor to deter the sinner or others from committing further sin, but to atone for the sin, which inherently deserved punishment. There had been offense against God’s law and hence against God himself, and this had to be set right.

The ‬Hebrew ‬word ‬most ‬commonly ‬used ‬in ‬the ‬Old ‬Testament ‬for ‬the ‬various ‬types ‬of ‬atonement literally means “‬to cover.‭” ‬One was delivered from punishment by the interposing of something between one’s sin and God. God then saw the atoning sacrifice rather than the sin. The covering of the sin meant that the penalty no longer had to be exacted from the sinner.

Simply put, a sacrifice was offered as a substitute for the sinner. It bore the sinner’s guilt. For the sacrifice to be effective, there had to be some connection, some point of commonality, between the victim and the sinner for whom it was offered.

The sacrificial animal had to be spotless, without blemish. The one for whom atonement was being made had to present the animal and lay his hands on it. This bringing of the animal and laying on of hands constituted a confession of guilt on the part of the sinner. The laying on of hands symbolized a transfer of the guilt from the sinner to the victim. Then the offering or sacrifice was accepted by the priest.

While the legal portions of the Old Testament typify with considerable clarity the sacrificial and substitutionary character of Christ’s death, the prophetic passages go even further. They establish the connection between the Old Testament sacrifices and Christ’s death. Isaiah 53 is the clearest of all. Having described the person of the Messiah and indicated the nature and extent of the iniquity of sinners, the prophet makes an allusion to Christ’s sacrifice: “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (v. 6). The iniquity of sinners is transferred to the suffering servant, just as in the Old Testament rites the sins were transferred to the sacrificial animal. The laying on of hands was an anticipation of the believer’s active acceptance of Christ’s atoning work.

Since Jesus is the fulfillment of the OT law his sacrifice must be understood in light of what those sacrifices were. Jesus Christ's sacrifice was that of standing in our stead, in our place, so God's wrath would be upon him and not us.

There is overwhelming evidence for the existence of Jesus of the Bible in ancient non-Christian sources

 Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Lucian, Mara Bar-Serapion, and Josephus all attest to the existence of Jesus 

Reporting on Emperor Nero's decision to blame the Christians for the fire that had destroyed Rome in A.D. 64, the Roman historian **Tacitus** wrote:

*Nero fastened the guilt ... on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of ... Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome....*

Another important source of evidence about Jesus and early Christianity can be found in the letters of **Pliny the Younger** to Emperor Trajan. Pliny was the Roman governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor. In one of his letters, dated around A.D. 112, he asks Trajan's advice about the appropriate way to conduct legal proceedings against those accused of being Christians. Pliny says that he needed to consult the emperor about this issue because a great multitude of every age, class, and sex stood accused of Christianity. At one point in his letter, Pliny relates some of the information he has learned about these Christians:

*They were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath, not to any wicked deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up; after which it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble to partake of food – but food of an ordinary and innocent kind.

*Lucian* of Samosata was a second century Greek satirist. In one of his works, he wrote of the early Christians as follows:

*The Christians ... worship a man to this day – the distinguished personage who introduced their novel rites, and was crucified on that account.... [It] was impressed on them by their original lawgiver that they are all brothers, from the moment that they are converted, and deny the gods of Greece, and worship the crucified sage, and live after his laws.*

Sometime after 70AD, a Syrian philosopher named **Mara Bar-Serapion**, writing to encourage his son, compared the life and persecution of Jesus with that of other philosophers who were persecuted for their ideas. The fact Jesus is known to be a real person with this kind of influence is important. Mara Bar-Serapion refers to Jesus as the “Wise King”:

*What benefit did the Athenians obtain by putting Socrates to death? Famine and plague came upon them as judgment for their crime. Or, the people of Samos for burning Pythagoras? In one moment their country was covered with sand. Or the Jews by murdering their wise king?…After that their kingdom was abolished. God rightly avenged these men…The wise king…Lived on in the teachings he enacted.*

We can learn quite a bit about Jesus from **Tacitus and Josephus**, two famous historians who were not Christian. Almost all the following statements about Jesus, which are asserted in the New Testament, are corroborated or confirmed by the relevant passages in Tacitus and Josephus. These independent historical sources—one a non-Christian Roman and the other Jewish—confirm what we are told in the Gospels:

He existed as a man. The historian Josephus grew up in a priestly family in first-century Palestine and wrote only decades after Jesus’ death. Jesus’ known associates, such as Jesus’ brother James, were his contemporaries. The historical and cultural context was second nature to Josephus.

*“If any Jewish writer were ever in a position to know about the non-existence of Jesus, it would have been Josephus. His implicit affirmation of the existence of Jesus has been, and still is, the most significant obstacle for those who argue that the extra-Biblical evidence is not probative on this point*,” 

Robert Van Voorst observes. 

And Tacitus was careful enough historian not to report real executions of a nonexistent people.

1) His personal name was Jesus, as Josephus informs us.

2) He was called Christos in Greek, which is a translation of the Hebrew word Messiah, both of which mean “anointed” or “(the) anointed one,” as Josephus states and Tacitus implies, unaware, by reporting, as Romans thought, that his name was Christus.

3) He had a brother named James (Jacob), as Josephus reports.

4) He won over both Jews and “Greeks” (i.e., Gentiles of Hellenistic culture), according to Josephus, although it is anachronistic to say that they were “many” at the end of his life. Large growth in the number of Jesus’ actual followers came only after his death.

5) Jewish leaders of the day expressed unfavorable opinions about him, Josephus records.

6) Pilate rendered the decision that he should be executed, as both Tacitus and Josephus state.

7) His execution was specifically by crucifixion, according to Josephus.

8) He was executed during Pontius Pilate’s governorship over Judea (26–36 C.E.), as Josephus implies and Tacitus states, adding that it was during Tiberius’s reign

Note: Criticism like this doesn't prove Jesus was divine, or that He performed miracles, or fulfilled prophecies, etc are all irrelevant since those are not germane to my topic, which is: there is evidence for the existence of the man named Jesus in the 1st century who did some of the things attributed to him in the Bible.

Also, some dispute parts of the quotes of Tacitus and Josephus, not all of it. 

Question: How many ancient persons are attested to in 5 different ancient sources?

For more details, see here

Edit: The criticism that these sources/documents were "not contemporary" and therefore are not reliable is a non-sequitur. It doesn't necessarily follow. The "it must be contemporary" rule is not used by any credentialed historian of today. 

Such sources are preferable, but most documents in the ancient world were **not** contemporary to the events recorded in them. Such people or events were the exceptions, not the rule. For example, the first written source attesting to the existence of king Archelaus of Cappadocia is Josephus in his book Jewish War, around 60 years after his death. 

Another example: only six sources attest to Spartacus within 150 years of his life, the earliest of which doesn't explicitly name Spartacus by name (Cicero), and another of which is lost (Varro), with the rest being short passages written decades or a century after the events. None of the sources to Spartacus were witnesses, nor were they written during Spartacus' life. Yet no historian questions the existence of  Archelaus or Spartacus .