Haven’t really followed this thread in a while, but saw this.
“The focus was not on appeasing, atoning, paying off some angry, insulted, God, or satisfying Divine Justice, but on the belief that by dying and resurrecting Christ cheated and defeated death.”
My understanding of this mysterious issue is that of satisfying Divine Justice, illustrating the holiness of God and destructiveness of sin, in which sin is such the antithesis of life that an atonement corresponding to its effects must be made for the sin to be put away, by means of innocent life-blood, And thus “cheat” death of its just prey.
While sins were forgiven before there was the sacrificial system was instituted, and Jesus forgave sins before He died and rose, this was enabled under the rubric of the atonement. And it is an “everlasting statute” for Israel “to make an atonement for the children of Israel for all their sins once a year.” In which not only were sins symbolically transferred to a scapegoat, which would be led away into the wilderness by the hand of a fit man (you don’t want that goat coming back), but the HP was “to kill the goat of the sin offering, that is for the people,” “to make an atonement in the holy place,..an atonement for himself, and for his household, and for all the congregation of Israel.” (Lv. 16:15-22,34)
In the NT this is referred to as a ransom in the person of Christ, and as must you know, it was not Paul who first referred to His word as that, but Mt. 20:28 and Mk10:45, but which i think you say was added later.
How it all works i know not, but what matter is that it works, thanks be to God.
My understanding is that the early Church saw it as an act of extreme mercy, not justice, that Christ would die for our sins. As St. Isaac the Syrian observed, mercy is an antithesis to justice. God was under no obligation of any higher necessity to undergo the extreme condescension of becoming a human, suffering and being murdered, but made that choice out of love.
The Gospels compare Christ to the Passover Lamb. If you recall, the Passover Lamb is not about atonement for the sins and therefore cannot be equated with the Temple sin sacrifice.
Rather, the Passover Lamb was killed so that those kept in slavery could be freed. By analogy, Christ dies so that those held in bondage by death due to ancestral sin of Adam and Eve could be freed (i.e. saved). Hence Easter is called Pascha in the East, meaning Passover.
James reminds that mercy triumphs over judgment. The early Church simply did not hold a juridical view of Christ's sacrifice, some individual fathers notwithstanding. In the west, the juridical view predominates after the 11th century, focusing on the satisfaction of the Divine Justice, which is about as off target (namely the Passover Lamb) as it gets.
In the NT this is referred to as a ransom in the person of Christ, and as must you know, it was not Paul who first referred to His word as that, but Mt. 20:28 and Mk10:45, but which i think you say was added later.
I don't remember, but it doesn't sound right. The early Church held that Christ offered himself as ransom to the devil (Origen, 2nd century) so all the OT righteous could be released from hell. Death agrees to the exchange and then realizes it cannot hold Christ because he is God. This renders death effectively powerless, and Christ comes back to life, leaving death trampled down and defeated.
IIRC, the NT writers seem to agree that Christ was ransom, but they don't agree if it was for some or for all.