What Did the Cross Accomplish?: A Conversation about the Atonement

by N.T. Wright

It is astonishing to see the extent to which the four Gospels have been marginalized in discussions of atonement. Generations of readers have found it hard, however much (as in my earlier illustration) they have folded them up, to fit them into the suitcase they have called “atonement.” They have therefore salvaged only such small fragments as will fit into hand luggage, such as Mark 10:45, “The Son of Man came . . . to give his life a ransom for many.” Gospel scholarship has followed and produced experimental methods and theories. There has been an implicit theological consensus that the Gospels are about Jesus’ life, his teaching, and about the circumstances surrounding his death, but not primarily about the meaning of that awesome event. The Gospels may be, from one point of view (as people have said), “passion narratives with extended introductions”; but even those who have said that have not usually seen the theological point. Even my dear friend Richard Hays, in his wonderful recent book Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels,2 focuses almost entirely on the question of who the writers of the four Gospels think Jesus was and is, rather than on the meaning of his death. (No blame attaches to that comment: the book was produced under extraordinary circumstances and is already long enough. But there is urgent need for a subsequent volume that would tease out what the evangelists, in their use of Scripture, were saying about the meaning of Jesus’ death.)