The Passion Narratives and the Apostolic Preaching

The four Gospels tell the Passion in four distinct keys, and the apostolic preaching that follows proclaims the fact of the Cross and the resurrection without supplying a theory of how the one saves. This file sets out the four narratives, the sermons of Acts, the Pauline and Hebrews images, and the significance of a New Testament which is rich in metaphors for the atonement and silent about its mechanism.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Four Narratives, Four Keys

The Passion is the one section of the Gospel that all four evangelists narrate at length and in substantially the same order, and precisely for that reason their differences of emphasis are legible. The Church reads all four in Great Week — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in sequence at the Twelve Gospels of Great Thursday evening — and does not harmonize them.

Mark gives the barest and most desolate account. The disciples flee; a young man runs away naked; Peter denies; the crowd mocks; darkness covers the land; and the only word from the Cross is the cry of Psalm 21/22:2, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani” (Mark 15:34). The confession of faith comes from a Gentile executioner: “Truly this man was the Son of God” (15:39). Mark’s Cross is the place where the Messianic secret is finally disclosed, and it is disclosed in abandonment.

Matthew follows Mark and adds the apocalyptic signs: the earthquake, the rending of the temple veil, and the tombs opened with the bodies of many saints raised (Matthew 27:51–53). The Cross is the hinge of the ages, and the cosmos registers it.

Luke narrates a Passion in which Christ is throughout the one who acts on others’ behalf: he heals the servant’s ear (22:51), looks at Peter (22:61), tells the daughters of Jerusalem to weep for themselves (23:28), prays “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (23:34), promises Paradise to the thief (23:43), and dies with a psalm of trust: “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit” (23:46, quoting Psalm 30/31:6). Luke’s Cross is the throne from which mercy is dispensed.

John presents the Passion as an enthronement. The Cross is the “lifting up” — ὑψωθῆναι, a verb that means both to be raised on a pole and to be exalted (John 3:14, 8:28, 12:32) — and the “hour” toward which the whole Gospel has moved is the hour of glorification (12:23, 17:1). Christ carries his own Cross (19:17, against the Synoptic Simon of Cyrene); the title is written in three languages and Pilate refuses to alter it (19:19–22); the Mother and the beloved disciple stand at the foot (19:26–27); and the last word is not a cry but a declaration of completion: τετέλεσται, “It is finished” (19:30). The pierced side yielding blood and water (19:34) is read by the Fathers as the origin of the Mysteries.

The Church has never chosen among these. The hymnography of Great Week draws on all four in the same service, and the most famous of its verses — “Today he who hung the earth upon the waters is hung upon the tree” (antiphon 15 of the Twelve Gospels) — is a paradox that requires the Johannine and the Markan registers at once.

What the Apostolic Preaching Says

The sermons in Acts are the earliest form of the Christian proclamation available, and their shape is uniform.

Acts 2:23–24 — “this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. But God raised him up, having loosed the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.”
Acts 3:15 — “you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead.”
Acts 4:10 — “Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead.”
Acts 10:39–40 — “they put him to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day.”

The pattern is invariable: you crucified, God raised. Forgiveness of sins is then offered in his name (2:38, 10:43). What is absent is any account of how the death effects the forgiveness. There is no doctrine of transfer, no calculation of debt, no mention of divine wrath satisfied. Acts 2:24 does give something like a reason — “it was not possible for him to be held by it” — and that reason is ontological rather than juridical: death could not keep the Author of life.

The apostolic summary Paul says he “received” and “delivered” is equally spare: “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). “For our sins” — ὑπὲρ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν — is the whole of the interpretation, and the preposition ὑπέρ means “on behalf of,” not “instead of” (ἀντί).

The Images Paul Uses

Paul supplies not one image but a crowded set, drawn from law, cult, commerce, slavery, warfare, and the family, and he moves between them without transition.

Justification and the mercy seat. “They are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a ἱλαστήριον by his blood” (Romans 3:24–25). The forensic verb δικαιόω and the cultic noun stand in a single sentence.

Reconciliation. “While we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10); “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19). The direction is uniform across the corpus: God reconciles us to himself. Paul never writes that God was reconciled to us, and the Fathers make much of the asymmetry.

Redemption from slavery. “You were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:20, 7:23) — the language of the slave market, with the buyer named and the seller conspicuously not.

The curse. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13).

The sin offering. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The Greek ἁμαρτία renders the Hebrew term used in Leviticus both for sin and for the sin-offering, which is why many read the verse cultically rather than forensically.

Victory and public triumph. “He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him” (Colossians 2:15) — the Roman triumphal procession — immediately after “cancelling the bond (χειρόγραφον) which stood against us with its legal demands, nailing it to the cross” (2:14). A legal image and a military one in consecutive clauses.

Participation. “We were buried with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead… we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4); “I have been crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20). This register is not one image among others in Paul but the frame in which the others operate: the believer is not a spectator of a transaction but a participant in a death and a resurrection (see Co-Crucifixion and the Ascetic Cross; The Eastern Reading of Paul).

Hebrews, Peter, and John

Hebrews supplies the sustained priestly and sacrificial argument: Christ as high priest after the order of Melchizedek, entering once for all into the true sanctuary “not with the blood of goats and calves but with his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption” (Hebrews 9:12), and a single offering that perfects those being sanctified (10:14). It also supplies the statement of purpose that the Greek Fathers make central: he shared flesh and blood “that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage” (2:14–15). The letter that argues the sacrificial case most fully states the goal as liberation from death and its fear (see The Bondage of the Fear of Death).

1 Peter gives the substitutionary formula — “he himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (2:24), “the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (3:18) — and, uniquely, the descent: “being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison” (3:18–19; cf. 4:6), the seed of the Church’s doctrine of the harrowing of Hades (see The Descent into Hades).

1 John gives ἱλασμός twice — “he is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but for the sins of the whole world” (2:2) — and, decisively for the frame, states the direction of the initiative: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (4:10). The propitiation is not offered to a reluctant God; it is sent by a loving one.

The Silence, and What the Church Made of It

The New Testament is extravagant with images and reticent about mechanism, and this is the single most important fact about the scriptural basis of the doctrine.

Nothing in the apostolic writings sets out a procedure by which the death of one discharges the liability of many. The images are asserted and left standing, often side by side in ways that resist synthesis: a legal cancellation and a military triumph in the same sentence (Colossians 2:14–15), a mercy seat and a law court in the same sentence (Romans 3:24–25). Any theory of the atonement is therefore a construction — a proposal about what unifies the images — and not a datum of revelation.

The Church’s dogmatic definitions follow the same reticence. The Creed says “was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried; and rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures” — the fact, the purpose (“for us”), and the outcome, with no mechanism (see The Nicene Creed). Where the Church has spoken on the Cross conciliarly she has done so negatively and precisely: on who it is that suffers (the Christological councils), and on to whom the sacrifice is offered (the councils of 1156–1157).

Two conclusions follow, and they govern the rest of this collection.

No image may be promoted to the mechanism. To select one of Paul’s metaphors, make it literal, and re-describe the others as illustrations of it is to do something the New Testament does not do. This is the specific objection to systematized atonement theories — an objection to the systematizing, not to any one of the images (see The Orthodox Assessment).

The resurrection is not an appendix. In the apostolic preaching the death and the resurrection are a single announcement, and it is the resurrection that is the good news: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). Not “you have no proof” — you are still in your sins. Whatever the Cross does, it is not finished on Friday.

References

The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1978. (The services of Great Week, including the Twelve Gospels of Holy Thursday and the Royal Hours of Great Friday.)
Melito of Sardis. On Pascha. Trans. Alistair Stewart-Sykes, Popular Patristics Series 20. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001.
John Chrysostom. Homilies on 2 Corinthians; Homilies on Hebrews. Translated in NPNF I/12 and I/14.
Athanasius of Alexandria. On the Incarnation. Translated in NPNF II/4; also trans. John Behr, PPS 44a.
Behr, John. The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006. (On the priority of the paschal proclamation and the reading of the Scriptures from the Cross and resurrection.)