The Blood-Atonement Idea of Jesus’ Crucifixion is Pagan & Anti-Vegan. By Dr Chapman Chen
- Chapman Chen
- 8 minutes ago
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The idea that God wanted Jesus to die as a blood sacrifice is not the earliest Christian view. It is closer to pagan sacrificial religion than to Jesus’ own teachings or to the theology of the earliest Jewish-Christian communities (Ebionites, Nazarenes). It is also by definition anti-vegan. The belief that Jesus died as a necessary blood atonement was developed later, especially by Paul and then by later Gentile Christianity.
1. Jesus Himself Rejected Blood Sacrifice
Jesus twice quotes Hosea 6:6 and declares “I desire compassion, not sacrifice.” (Matthew 9:13; 12:7). Jesus liberates the sacrificial animals from the Holy Temple (John 2:14–16), an explicit anti-sacrificial, anti-animal-killing action. Indeed, based on 1 Peter 2:21-24 as an allusion to Isaiah 53 (the Suffering Servant passage), Jesus’ crucifixion is not a substitutionary sacrifice but a call upon us to follow His example, pick up His cross, and share in His righteous sufferings and resurrection (Rillera 2024:243-4, 251).
2. The Hebrew Bible Rejects Blood Sacrifice as Necessary
Jesus’ prophetic stance aligns with the five great anti-sacrifice prophets: Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, e.g.:
Amos 5:21–22 — “I hate, I despise your burnt offerings.”
Isaiah 1:11 — “I take no pleasure in the blood of bulls, lambs, and goats.”
Jeremiah 7:22 — “On the day I brought your ancestors out of Egypt, I did not command them about burnt offerings or sacrifices.”
Jeremiah 7:22 is especially devastating for sacrificial Christianity because therein God denies originating blood sacrifice at all.
These teachings contradict the idea that God needs the violent death of any innocent being—including His own Son.
3. Each Person Carries their own Cross
The Old Testament time and again tells us that everyone has free will as gifted by God and is thus supposed to be responsible for their own deeds (Deuteronomy 30:19; Joshua 24:15; Proverbs 16:9). No one can die in lieu of anybody else, as made clear in the following verses:-
“Fathers shall not be put to death for their sons, nor shall sons be put to death for their fathers; everyone shall be put to death for his own sin” (Deuteronomy 24:16; II Kings 14:6).
“But everyone will die for his own sin; each man who eats sour grapes, his teeth will be set on edge” (Jeremiah 31:30).
“No man can by any means redeem his brother, or give to God a ransom for him” (Psalms 49:7).
“The person who sins will die. The son will not bear the punishment for the father’s iniquity, nor will the father bear the punishment for the son’s iniquity; the righteousness of the righteous will be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself” (Ezekiel 18:20).
“So…no expiation can be made for the land for the blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who has shed it!” (Numbers 35:33).
4. God and Christ Forgive without Requiring Bloodshed
It is clearly indicated in the Bible that instead of demanding bloodshed, God will forgive people provided that they do righteous works, manifest compassion, and obey Him:-
“Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams…? He has told you, O man, what is good… to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:6–8)
Offer to God thanksgiving, and pay your vows to the Most High…Whoever offers praise glorifies me” [Psalm 50:7-14, 23 NKJV].
The idea of Jesus believing that God demands His blood to pardon humanity is incompatible with Jesus’ teachings about God as a merciful being (Luke 15:11-32). As asserted by Jesus Himself in Matthew 19:16-29 and John 8:11, the key for sinners to receive forgiveness and attain eternal life is to keep the Commandments, to help the poor, to confess, to repent, and to stop sinning.
No blood of someone else is required. The sins of King David (2 Samuel 12), the adulterous woman (John 8), and the prodigal son (Luke 15), which are all forgiven without bloodshed, are cases in point.
5. Earliest Jewish-Christian Groups Rejected Sacrificial Atonement
Groups closest to Jesus historically—Ebionites, Nazarenes, Jewish followers of “the Way”—did not believe Jesus died as a sacrificial atonement.
The evidence is as follows:
5A. Epiphanius, Panarion 30 (On the Ebionites)
In the Panarion, Epiphanius preserves the most important surviving line from the Gospel of the Ebionites, where Jesus says: “I came to abolish the sacrifices,and if you do not cease sacrificing, wrath will not cease from you.”— Panarion 30.16.5.
This is absolutely pivotal, because if Jesus Himself declares that sacrifice must cease, that sacrifice brings wrath, and that His mission is to abolish sacrifice, then Jesus cannot simultaneously be the ultimate sacrifice.
5B. Clementine Homilies (2nd–3rd century Jewish-Christian text)
According to Clementine Hom. III.26, God “hates sacrifices, bloodshed, and libations; He quenches the fire of altars; He represses wars; He shows the remission of sins by works.” So blood sacrifices are unacceptable to God and true atonement is repentance and righteous living, not slaughter. https://dn790000.ca.archive.org/0/items/clementinehomili00clem/clementinehomili00clem.pdf
5C. The Didache (c. 70–120 CE)
The earliest Christian manual says nothing about Jesus’ death as atonement.Forgiveness comes through baptism, confession, righteous conduct, not blood. These communities preserve a theology much closer to Jesus than later Gentile Christianity.
6. Blood Atonement has Strong Parallels to Pagan Sacrifice
Ancient Mediterranean religions often taught that gods require blood to be appeased;
that innocent victims can absorb the guilt of the guilty; and that the death of a divine figure brings cosmic benefit (e.g., Attis, Osiris, Dionysus).
Scholars have long noted that blood-atonement Christologies resemble these patterns, especially in Paul’s writings.
Examples of parallels include dying-and-rising gods (Osiris, Adonis, Attis), blood bringing purification (Greek and Roman rites), and substitutionary death of an innocent offering (the Greek pharmakos scapegoat, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the Carthaginian child offerings to Baal Hammon).
This is why many modern theologians (e.g., Marcus Borg 1987, John Dominic Crossan 1994) argue that penal substitution is not Christian but pagan in origin.
7. Paul Introduced the Blood-Sacrifice Interpretation—Not Jesus
Jesus never said that His blood was needed for forgiveness, or that God required His death, or that His death was a substitutionary sacrifice
Paul, however, uses sacrificial metaphors heavily, e.g., “Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7); “We are justified by his blood” (Romans 5:9); “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22 — not Paul, but part of the same sacrificial system).
These appear nowhere in the teachings of Jesus himself. In this vein, Paul, who advises people to “eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience (1 Cor. 10: 25), is basically anti-vegan.
Modern Scholars like Marcus J. Borg (1987; 1994), John Dominic Crossan (1991; 1994), E. P. Sanders (1977; 1993), Geza Vermes (1993), James D. G. Dunn (1998; 2003), Gerd Lüdemann (2002), Bart D. Ehrman (1999; 2014), Paula Fredriksen (1988), Dale C. Allison (2010), and Maurice Casey (2010) have argued that Jesus did not teach atonement theology, and that Paul developed a new soteriological system, combining Christ’s death and resurrection with justification by faith.
8. Early Eastern Christianity Also Denies Sacrificial Atonement
The Nestorian/Eastern Christian text 序聽迷詩所經 (T2142) depicts Jesus as teaching a plant-based way of holiness, rejecting meat-eating and blood, and offering salvation through teaching, not bloodshed. This is a non-sacrificial Jesus tradition outside Rome and Paul.
9. Conclusion
In a word, blood-atonement theology is anti-vegan pagan in origin; Christianity’s earliest strata—Jesus, the prophets, the Ebionites, the Didache—reject animal sacrifice. The earliest Jesus movement believed that God forgives by mercy, not blood, that sacrifice is rejected by the prophets and by Jesus, that Jesus’ mission is teaching, healing, nonviolence, and vegan compassion; and that Paul’s sacrificial imagery is the innovation, not the foundation. The idea that God required His Son’s blood or any innocent being’s blood in order to forgive our sins and save us is a later Gentile reinterpretation influenced by pagan, carnist sacrificial religion.
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