The ‘Atonement’ doctrine of paganism

 The Bible rejects the doctrine of ‘atonement’. We are responsible for our own sins:
The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin. (Deuteronomy 24:16)
The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him. (Ezekiel 18:20)
But every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge. (Jeremiah 31:30)
Give them according to their deeds, and according to the wickedness of their endeavours: give them after the work of their hands; render to them their desert. (Psalms 28:4)
According to [their] deeds, accordingly he will repay, fury to his adversaries, recompence to his enemies; to the islands he will repay recompence. (Isaiah 59:18)
For many nations and great kings shall serve themselves of them also: and I will recompense them according to their deeds, and according to the works of their own hands. (Jeremiah 25:14)
For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works. (Matthew 16:27)
7 Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
8 He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:7-8)

The doctrine of ‘atonement’ doesn’t make sense. The Church has turned Jesus into something very disgusting. The early Jewish Christians never believed in such doctrines like the ‘blood atonement’. The Bible teaches that ‘human sacrifice’ is wrong, a strictly pagan ritual, not a Jewish practice.

"God sacrificed his own son in place of humans who needed to be punished for their own sins might make some Christians love Jesus, but is an obscene picture of God. It is almost heavenly child abuse, and may infect our imagination at more earthly levels as well. I do not want to express my faith through a theology that pictures God demanding blood sacrifices in order to be reconciled to us."
(John Dominic Crossan, Who is Jesus? p. 145-146)

Perhaps I am lacking in piety or some basic instinct, but I know I am not alone in finding the idea of Jesus’ death as atonement for the sins of all humanity on one level bewildering and on the other morally repugnant. Jesus never to my knowledge said anything to indicate that forgiveness from God could only be granted after or because of the cross. (For Christ’s Sake Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1986 pg. 75, Tom Harper

This doctrine is a blasphemy against the justice of God. It is highly unjust, inhuman and ungodly, to sacrifice the life of an innocent man, for washing off the sins of sinners. God Almighty is never unjust even in least degree, how this injustice and unkindness can ever be attributed to Him. God Almighty is Absolute and Merciful enough to forgive the sins, even without sacrifices. (Dr. Roshan Enam, Follow Jesus or Follow Paul? p. 52)

This dogma is not only a denial of the mercy of God but also of His justice. To demand the price of blood in order to forgive the sins of men is to show a complete lack of mercy, and to punish a man who is not guilty for the sins of others… We fail to see how the suffering and death of one man can wipe out the sins of others. It sounds something like the physician breaking his own head to cure the headache of his patients. The idea of substitutionary or vicarious sacrifice is illogical, meaningless and unjust.
(Mrs. Ulfat Aziz- Us- Samad, Islam and Christianity, International Islamic Federation of Student Organization, pp. 50-51)

The unreliability of the gospels appears to be admitted by the Church itself. The metaphysics of Christianity today is not even based on what is in the gospels. The established church is founded on the doctrine of original sin, of atonement and redemption, of the divinity of Jesus, of the divinity of the Holy Ghost and of Trinity. None of these doctrines are to be found within the gospels. They were not taught by Jesus. They were the fruits of Paul’s innovations and the influence of Greek culture and philosophy. (Muhammad Ataur- Raheem, Jesus Prophet of Islam, 1992 edition, p. 196)

“… the idea that shedding of blood is necessary to appease the wrath of God has come into Christianity from the primitive man’s image of God as an all-powerful demon. We see no connection at all between sin and blood. What is necessary to wash away sin is not blood, but repentance, remorse persistent struggle against evil inclinations, development of greater sympathy for mankind and determination to carry out the Will of God as revealed to us through the prophets”. (IBID, Mrs. Ulfat Aziz-Us-Samad, p. 51)


“We can no longer accept the appalling theological doctrine that for some mystic reason a propitiatory sacrifice was necessary. It outrages either our conception of God as Almighty or else our conception of Him as All-Loving. The famous Dr. Cruden believed that for the purpose of this sacrifice ‘Christ suffered dreadful pains inflicted by God’, and this, of course, is a standpoint which nauseates the modern mind and which may well be termed a hideous doctrine, not unconnected with the sadistic tendencies of primitive human nature. Actually, it is of pagan origin, being, indeed, perhaps the most obvious relic of heathendom in the Faith”. (Arthur Weigall, The Paganism in Our Christianity)


'My long-time view about Christianity is that it represents an amalgam of two seemingly immiscible parts--the religion of Jesus and the religion of Paul. Thomas Jefferson attempted to excise the Pauline parts of the New Testament. There wasn't much left when he was done, but it was an inspiring document.' (Christianity Betrayed (2 Volume Set)Letter to Ken Schei,)

“The church`s God son who is supposed to have been born of the substance of God from the beginning of eternity is nowhere mentioned in the scriptures nor the God son who would be second person of the trinity descended from heaven and become flesh this is only human invention and superstition as such should be discarded.” (Francis David by W.C Gannett)

The Gospels are Unreliable!

The four Gospels are anonymous, and they were composed decades after the departure of Jesus. The early Church Fathers fail to mention them; they fail to address the miraculous events recorded in the Gospels. They never allude to the existence of the four Gospels. Non-Christian and Jewish historians never mention the Gospel events, or the resurrection of Jesus!

Philo Judaeus, the Jewish philosopher, who lived during the mid-1st century, does not mention the ‘darkness’ or the ‘earthquake’ which allegedly occurred when Christ was crucified (Matthew 27:45, 28:2)

Lloyd Graham writes:

“… We have here a good example of the credulity of Western man. For two thousand years he has been reading about this convulsion and “darkness over all the earth” without ever questioning it or demanding proof of it. Yet had it happened, would not some of those able historians have recorded it? Why did they not?” (Deceptions & Myths of the Bible, Lloyd Graham p. 349)

“I wish all fundamentalists would take special note that while these quite public, literally stupendous events are alleged to have taken place, not a single other contemporary source can be found to corroborate or confirm them --- even though this was at a time and in a place where capable observers, recorders of remarkable happenings, historians, and others were in no way lacking. There is not a smidgeon of a trace of historicity to be found”. (Tom Harper, The Pagan Christ, p. 149)

The non-Christians historians fail to mention the resurrection prove that it was a HOAX. Surely, if the resurrection of Jesus occurred, the writer Philo Judaeus (50 C.E.) and others would have recorded it.

The Gospels are unreliable because they were written very late; decades after the 12 apostles were martyred. Read the quotations below:

"The gospels are all priestly forgeries over a century after their pretended dates."
(Joseph Wheless, The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Acharya S)

The books [canonical gospels] are not heard of till 150 A.D., that is, till Jesus had been dead nearly a hundred and twenty years. No writer before 150 A.D. makes the slightest mention of them." (Bronson, C. Keeler, A Short History of the Bible)

"The Four Gospels were unknown to the early Christian Fathers. Justin Martyr, the most eminent of the early Fathers, wrote about the middle of the second century. His writings in proof of the divinity of Christ demanded the use of these Gospels had they existed in his time. He makes more than 300 quotations from the books of the Old Testament, and nearly one hundred from the Apocryphal books of the New Testament; but none from the four Gospels. (The Book Your Church Doesn’t Want You to Read, Tim C. Leedom

“Not a single Gospel was written down at the time of Jesus, they were all written long after his earthly mission had come to an end” (Maurice Bucaille, The Bible, the Quran, and Science p. 127),

“Each of the four canonical Gospels is religious proclamation in the form of a largely fictional narrative. Christians have never been reluctant to write fiction about Jesus, and we must remember that our four canonical Gospels are only the cream of a large and varied literature” (Rendal Helms, Gospel Fictions p.11)


The earliest documents of the New Testament are the epistles of Paul, allegedly written in 55-64 C.E. There is no evidence that Paul had written 1 and 2 Timothy.

The first thing we need to force into our minds is that when Paul wrote these words, there were no such things as written Gospels. This means that the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection so familiar to us, as told by these Gospel writers, were by and large unknown to Paul and to Paul’s readers(Resurrection: Myth or Reality?, p. 48)

What does this mean? The resurrection accounts in the four Gospels contradict the testimony of Paul. Hence, Paul contradicts the Gospels on a simple event which is supposed to be the foundation of Christian religion. We have five conflicting versions of the resurrection in the New Testament.

If Paul is the first writer, then he must be relaying the earliest tradition, yet the Gospels, written many decades later, record an entirely different story. This certainly proves that the resurrection was fabricated in the oral tradition, because there’s not a single reference to the resurrection by historians like Philo Judaeus, and the testimony of Josephus is wholly agreed to be a forgery.

The earth-shattering statement:

There is no reference to Jesus’ death as a crucifixion in the pre-Markan Jesus material
(Mack Burton, Who Wrote the New Testament, The Making of the Christian Myth, p. 87)

Since the Gospel of Mark was written very late, the crucifixion story did not exist before its composition. Scholars’ conjecture that Mark was written after the Jewish War (66-70 C.E.) yet this assertion based on the tradition of Papias is wholly unreliable. The Church historian Eusebius of Caesarea (died. 340 CE) said that Papias is untrustworthy, a man of limited knowledge.

The epistles of Paul do not record the crucifixion story, the Q gospel falls into the same category of silence, and the Didache. We have no choice to believe that the crucifixion story was invented by the oral traditions.

The scholar Rendal Helms describes the unreliability of ‘oral tradition’

This literature was oral before it was written and began with the memories of those who knew Jesus personally...

But oral tradition is by definition unstable, notoriously open to mythical, legendary, and fictional embellishment (Gospel Fictions Randal Helms, p. 12)

The oral tradition circulated amongst the early followers of Jesus, who knew him personally. Paul, the corrupter of the Gospel, had never met Jesus. He failed to derive any traditions from the apostles; instead Paul hibernated in Arabia for three years, fabricating his own “traditions” about Jesus. The alleged ‘darkness’ and ‘earthquake’, and Matthew’s ‘rising of the saints’ (Matthew 27:52) were probably Gospel embellishments. No historian refers to them.

The Gospel of Mark was the first to document the “passion” narrative:

“Mark was the first author to attach the passion narratives in written form to the story of the life of Jesus of Nazareth” (Rendal Helms, p. 57)

The writer of Mark was dictating false information relayed to him by oral tradition. He was the first writer to mention the “passion” story. Paul never appealed to the sayings of Jesus, so how can he possibly record any crucifixion? He did not.

Paul did not know anything about Jesus and his teachings. The stories recorded in the four Gospels are never related by him, or even alluded to. Paul did not know the fictional ‘empty tomb’ story. He recorded a spiritual resurrection whereas the Gospels say it was ‘physical’.

The ultra-conservatives keep insisting on a “physical” resurrection of Jesus. Paul, whose work pre-dates the first Gospel, insists on the exact opposite. His fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians could not possibly be clearer. I invite you to read to reread that passage for yourself. This passage is almost pure Platonism. Paul knows only a spiritual resurrection.
(Tom Harper, The Pagan Christ, p. 174)
Continue on with Part 4.
The ‘Atonement’ doctrine of paganism