Jesus lays down His life for His friends. He is a martyr, a witness to death. His death is glorious.

In his The Atonement: The Origins of the Doctrine in the New Testament , Martin Hengel wonders where that notion comes from. It doesn’t seem to come from the Old Testament, where “there are hardly any examples of dying for Israel, the Law or the sanctuary, which are stressed as heroic actions.” On the contrary, the references to dying for God’s sake in the Psalms tend to run in another direction entirely: “This is not done to celebrate those who are killed in this way, or to praise bravery, but to accuse God, who refuses to help the innocent people” (7).

Hengel finds closer analogies in Greek literature, where a special verb was invented to express “to die for” ( huperapothneskein ), and became a “stereotyped expression for the voluntary sacrifice of a man’s life in the interests of his native city, his friends, his family or - quite peripherally - also philosophical truth” (9). Eventually “among the Christian church fathers after Clement of Alexandria, the classical Greek concept of huperapothneskein was . . . transferred to the atoning death of Jesus” (15).

Assuming that this is accurate (and I have some doubts), a couple of lines of inquiry follow:

First, Jesus’ cry of dereliction connects His death with the Psalms - Jesus dies absurdly, crying out to a God who has refused to intervene to help Him against His enemies; second, He goes all the way to the grave, and then God intervenes, so it is the resurrection that makes His death glorious. Without the Father’s rescue, without His power to raise Himself up again, His death would be as pointless as the thousands of crucified Jews.

Tacking in a different direction, it is significant that the New Testament’s description of the meaning of Jesus’ death draws on both Old Testament and Hellenistic concepts, the latter mediated through the development of a second-temple Jewish theology of martyrdom. It couldn’t be more appropriate that the Savior of Jews and Gentiles should die a death recognizable to both.