When the early Christians wrote about Jesus’s death, they used what are often seen as different models or metaphors. These include “redemption,” a metaphor from the slave market; “justification,” a metaphor from the law court; and “sacrifice,” a metaphor well known from the Temple. People often suggest that these don’t really fit together; they are simply different pictorial ways of getting at the central truth. I think this represents a failure to see what it means that Jesus’s death was in accordance with the Bible.
