If I go without eating for a day, because there is not enough food in the house and I want my wife to have food, that is a sacrifice, even if the next day I get my paycheck and have food. I have still sacrificed, regardless of whether I make up for it later.
Jesus was tortured and suffered a painful death. He did it (according to christian belief) for humanity. The suffering and death WAS a sacrifice, even if it turned out ok in the end.
Your example is of a willing sacrifice.
A political execution in the form of a crucifixion is not a willing sacrifice of any kind. It was transformed to make it appear as prophecy and sacrifice.
Yeshua was an involuntary scapegoat
*, both in the sense that he was unjustly blamed for the problems of the rest, and that he ritually carried their burdens, even though Christians try to tell us that his "sacrifice" was willing. The brutal fact of the matter is that his was a political execution for crimes against the state, then turned into a religious event by his followers. Yeshua had no choice in the matter. As Hyam Maccoby, Talmudic scholar and author of
The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity tells us:
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion. He regarded himself as the Messiah in the normal Jewish sense of the term, i.e. a human leader who would restore the Jewish monarchy, drive out the Roman invaders, set up an independent Jewish state, and inaugurate an era of peace, justice and prosperity (known as 'the kingdom of God,) for the whole world. Jesus believed himself to be the figure prophesied in the Hebrew Bible who would do all these things. He was not a militarist.... He had no intention of being crucified in order to save mankind from eternal damnation by his sacrifice. He never regarded himself as a divine being, and would have regarded such an idea as pagan and idolatrous, an infringement of the first of the Ten Commandments. [/FONT]
The Problem of Paul
The religious ideas overlayed onto Yeshua's brutal death are, namely, that a sacrificial host in the form of a scapegoat
* can take on the guilt or evil burden of the community, and that the blood shed by its execution has redeeming power. This in itself is enough to establish the religion as reflecting pagan thought, but the idea of a dying but resurrecting god-man was added, further galvanizing the idea of pagan influence.
You say that the Jews were not pagans, but animal sacrfice and the use of a scapegoat as a means of blotting out sin are superstitious ideas, based upon ignorance. That is the same basis upon which pagan ideas are founded.
Where did the idea of sacrifice to pay for mankind's sins originate?
Where did the idea of a teacher coming from the heavenly realm originate?
Where did the idea of a dying and resurrected god-man originate?
Where did the idea of flesh and blood as food that would render eternal life originate?
Certainly these themes did not originate full blown out of nowhere.
Maccoby further tells us:
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
Paul, not Jesus, was the founder of Christianity as a new religion which developed away from both normal Judaism and the Nazarene variety of Judaism. In this new religion, the Torah was abrogated as having had only temporary validity. The central myth of the new religion was that of an atoning death of a divine being. Belief in this sacrifice, and a mystical sharing of the death of the deity, formed the only path to salvation. Paul derived this religion from Hellenistic sources, chiefly by a fusion of concepts taken from Gnosticism and concepts taken from the mystery religions, particularly from that of Attis. The combination of these elements with features derived from Judaism, particularly the incorporation of the Jewish scriptures, reinterpreted to provide a background of sacred history for the new myth, was unique; and Paul alone was the creator of this amalgam. Jesus himself had no idea of it, and would have been amazed and shocked at the role assigned to him by Paul as a suffering deity.[/FONT]
The Problem of Paul
*****
*The
scapegoat was a goat that was driven off into the wilderness as part of the ceremonies of the Day of Atonement in Judaism during the times of the Temple in Jerusalem. The rite is described in
Leviticus 16.
Since this goat, carrying the sins of the people placed on it, is sent away to perish, the word "scapegoat" has come to mean a person, often innocent, who is blamed and punished for the sins, crimes, or sufferings of others, generally as a way of distracting attention from the real causes.
A concept superficially similar to the biblical scapegoat is attested in two ritual texts in archives at Ebla of the
24th century BC. They were connected with ritual [pagan] purifications on the occasion of the king's wedding. In them, a she-goat with a silver bracelet hung from her neck was driven forth into the wasteland of 'Alini'; "we" in the report of the ritual involves the whole community.
Such 'elimination rites', in which an animal, without confession of sins, is the vehicle of evils (not sins) that are chased from the community
are widely attested in the Ancient Near East.
In Christian theology, the story of the scapegoat in
Leviticus is interpreted as a symbolic prefiguration of the self-sacrifice of Jesus, who takes the sins of humanity on his own head, having been driven into the 'wilderness' outside the city by order of the high priests. Also see John 1:29 and Hebrews Chps. 9-10
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