Every single element in this (to us) increasingly complex picture is important if we are to get inside the minds of the first followers of Jesus and understand what they meant when they spoke of Jesus’s death being “in accordance with the Bible” and “for our sins.” If we fail to grasp how all this fits together, how the whole framework functions as a whole, it isn’t just that we will reduce our view of Jesus’s death to inadequate shorthands and slogans. We will put it into a different framework. And that alternate framework, invented to fill the gap left by the original one, will impart to
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How could this happen?
