Hero-less

The incomparable Martin Hengel begins The Atonement with a question: Did Greco-Roman culture have categories to understand Jesus’ death as an expiatory sacrifice? He answers with a dense Hengelian catalog of mythic and historical instances of the apotheosis of heroes, death for the fatherland, death for the truth, expelled pharmakoi, and he shows that these deaths “on behalf of” others were sometimes described in sacrificial terms. So, the answer is emphatically Yes. 

Indeed, Greco-Roman culture had categories for grasping Jesus’ death that were lacking in Hebrew. The very phrase “apothneskein huper,” to die on behalf of, appears within Judaism only during the Hellenistic period. It has “no parallel in the Old Testament” (49). When Paul uses the phrase, he’s not quoting the LXX.

Hengel expands the point by noting “it is striking that while we have the transportation of two living men, Enoch and Elijah, in the Old Testament, there is no transportation of anyone who has died, much less of a numinous transfiguration of death or even of a divine glorification  of the dead. In a radical way, which is unique in the ancient world, death is robbed of its religious autonomy in a way that makes the cult of the dead, widespread among mankind and particularly in the ancient world, quite impossible. One might almost say that the fact that the deceased ancestors in Israel ceased to be autonomous numinous beings was a revolutionary development. The exclusive revelation of God to his people does not allow any special cult of ‘heroes’” (6). Israelites mourned the dead, and “on death a man joined the ‘community of his fathers,’ but belief in Yahweh did not allow any kind of worship of the dead or any cultic or magical dealings with them” (6).

Instead of individual heroes, the dead form, as Hengel says, a community, awaiting final entry into life.