I will go with the overwhelming teaching from Jesus who made the atonement over a prophetic and misunderstood passage that some twist to support the false teaching of PSA which originated with the pagans, gnostics and manicheans. The appeasing of the angry gods.
Paul’s crowning statement concerning Christ’s atoning death
(Rom 3.21–26)
comes against the backdrop of his exposition of
God’s wrath upon and condemnation of mankind for its sin.
Something in Paul’s ensuing exposition of Christ’s death must
solve this problem,
averting God’s wrath and rescuing us from the
death sentence hanging over us. The solution is found in Christ,
“whom God put forward as a hilastērion in his blood” (3.25).
6 For an overview of the debate, see Bailey (forthcoming). It is not disputed that
we find quite different meanings of hilastērion in the LXX and in extra-biblical
Greek literature, including the literature of Hellenistic Judaism. What is disputed is which is the relevant meaning of the word as used by Paul on this one
occasion. The predominant meaning in extra-biblical literature is
“propitiation”
or “propitiatory offering.”
Especially noteworthy are the deaths of the
Maccabean martyrs, which allayed God’s wrath upon Israel (2 Macc 7.38),
and thus served as “a propitiatory offering” (4 Macc 17.22 codex S; cf. Sibylline
Oracles 3.625–28, where God is propitiated by the sacrifice of hundreds of bulls
and lambs).
This case belies any claims that hilastēria had to be concrete,
inanimate objects.
The LXX, on the other hand, uses hilastērion to refer to the
kapporet or lid of the ark of the covenant, where the blood of the Yom Kippur
sacrifice was splashed, or, more widely, to altar faces where sacrificial blood was
smeared (Ezek 43.14, 17, 20; Amos 9.1). On this interpretation Christ is the locus
of atonement for sin.
Even if we take hilastērion to carry here its LXX meaning as
opposed to its extra-biblical meaning,
Paul is obviously using the
expression metaphorically – Christ is not literally a piece of Temple
furniture! Taken metaphorically rather than literally, however, the
expression could convey a rich variety of connotations associated
with sacrifice and atonement, so that the sort of dichotomistic
reading forced by literal meanings becomes inappropriate. Paul
was a Hellenistic Jew, whose writings bear the imprint of
Hellenistic Jewish thought (e.g., the natural theology of Rom 1 or
the Logos doctrine behind Rom 11.36), and he might have
expected his Roman readers to understand hilastērion in the customary sense. At the same time, by borrowing an image from
the Day of Atonement rituals, Paul also conveys to his hearers the
OT notion of expiation by blood sacrifice. Thomas Heicke comments that already in the OT, “by means of abstraction, the ritual
itself turns into a metaphor,” thus building “the basis and starting
point for multiple transformations and further abstractions as well
as metaphorical charging in Judaism ... and Christianity (Rom
3:25:
Christ as hilasterion – expiation or sacrifice of atonement,
etc.)” (Heicke 2016).
Christ’s death is thus both expiatory and propitiatory: “Since,
therefore, we are now justified by his blood, much more shall we be
saved by him from the wrath of God” (5.9). Given the manifold
effects of Christ’s blood, hilastērion is doubtlessly multivalent in
Paul’s usage,
comprising both expiation and propitiation, so that
a vague translation, for example, “an atoning sacrifice,” is about
the best one can give (cf. Heb 2.17; 1 Jn 2.2; 4.10).
1.2 Isaiah’s Servant of the Lord
Another significant NT motif concerning Christ’s death is Isaiah’s
Servant of the Lord. NT authors saw Jesus as the suffering Servant
described in Is 52.13–53.12. Ten of the twelve verses of Isaiah 53 are
quoted in the NT, which also abounds in allusions and echoes of this
passage. I have already mentioned the Synoptic Gospels’ accounts of
Jesus’s words at the Last Supper. In Acts 8.30–35, Philip, in response
to an Ethiopian official’s question concerning Isaiah 53 – “About
whom does the prophet speak?” – shares “the good news about
Jesus.” I Peter 2.22–25 is a reflection on Christ as the Servant of
Isaiah 53, who “bore our sins in his body on the tree.” Hebrews 9.28
alludes to Is 53.12 in describing Christ as “having been offered once
to bear the sins of many.” The influence of Isaiah 53 is also evident in
Romans, I and II Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, I Timothy, and
Titus. NT scholar William Farmer concludes, “This evidence indicates that there is an Isaianic soteriology deeply embedded in the
New Testament which finds its normative form and substance in
Isaiah 53” (Farmer 1998, p. 267; cf. Bailey 1998 and Watts 1998).
What is remarkable, even startling, about the Servant of Isaiah 53
is that he suffers substitutionally for the sins of others.
Some
scholars have denied this, claiming that the Servant merely shares
in the punitive suffering of the Jewish exiles. But such an interpretation does not make as good sense of the shock expressed at
what Yahweh has done in afflicting His Servant (Is 52.14–53.1,10)
and is less plausible in light of the strong contrasts, reinforced by
the Hebrew pronouns, drawn between the Servant and the persons
speaking in the first-person plural:
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
he was bruised for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that made us whole,
and with his stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned every one to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
Again, you concentrate on the "wrath of YHVH" and what men did to Messiah but wholly dismiss in what YHVH did TO Yeshua IN His boule/thelema.
