The redemption is a central concept in Christianity, but it raises the question of why God cannot simply forgive the sins of people, why does someone have to be sacrificed for it. I am sure theologists have solved this problem many times, but I think I found a slightly different one and maybe a bit better.
The Book of Exodus 13:15 explains the redemption of the first born sons as a rule that followed the punishment of the Egyptians in the time of Exodus, but a sacrifice and redemption of the first born son is already in the story of Abraham and Isaac Genesis 22. Child sacrifice was practiced by people of Levant and biblical prophets tell that the custom was still alive in their times.
In Exodus 12:27 sacrificial blood of a lamb saves the first born of Israel, while the first born of Egypt die. In Exodus 24:8 sacrificial blood of animals establishes a covenant. In the book of Exodus 13:15 first born sons are not sacrificed, they are to be redeemed. I all of these cases redemption is associated with sacrificial blood and there is a direct connection to the sacrifice of the first born son.
In the Book of Numbers there is an episode 3:40-51 where the first born sons of Israelites are redeemed in a special way: the tribe of Levi is considered as dedicated to God by their priestly service and they can replace (redeem) most first born sons, while the rest are redeemed by money. Talmudic Jews still follow the practice that first born sons are redeemed by money, but this cannot be the original intention of redemption.
Indeed, Abraham is told by God to sacrifice Isaac, but God provides a ram instead of Isaac. Thus, Isaac is redeemed by blood. It is interesting to notice that there was also a different tradition: that Isaac was sacrificed but restored to life. This other tradition fits better with the Day of Atonement ritual where two goals were used: one was sacrificed, one driven to a desert, but it returned. Thus, in a way the sacrificed goat was restored to life.
The Books of Moses contain some older tradition but were basically written after the Babylonian conquest and in the Persian time. One form of redemption that is earlier than the Books of Moses is in the Book of Isaiah. The second Isaiah writes that Egypt, Ethiopia and Seba are given instead of Israel: other people are given for the lives of Israelites (43:3-4). Clearly, this is redemption: God offers salvation to Israel and takes some other lives instead. Deutero-Isaiah wrote around 540 BC. Proto-Isaiah and Deutero-Isaiah make no references to the story of the Exodus or the Book of Exodus.
This redemption in Deutero-Isaiah can be historical. When Persia conquered Babylon in 539 BC Israelites were given their freedom, but they also served in Persian army in Egypt: thus, they bought their freedom with the lives of Egyptians.
In the Book of Zechariah there is in 9:11 the blood of your covenant and 3:9 promises an act that takes away the land’s evil deeds in one day. These clearly refer to redemption by a blood sacrifice.
Redemption means being released from death by someone else paying the price. In all traditions with the exception of the Book of Numbers the price to pay is to die as a sacrifice. This must be the original meaning: one death is paid by another death. There are two reasons why there must be death. In the case of the first born sons God ordered their sacrifice. In the second case the death is the punishment of evil deeds.
In the original religion first born sons were sacrificed. Later there appear two variants: a mock sacrifice and redemption, as in the story of Abraham and Isaac, and sacrifice and mock redemption, as in the two goats of the Day of Atonement. Both are versions of dying as sacrifice being restored to life. The goal of the sacrifice is to redeem others, thus we may assume that in the original religion first born sons were sacrificed so that others could live. If they were not sacrificed, the people would die. This suggests that the sacrifice of first born sons had the purpose of avoiding some catastrophe that would have faced the population.
A good case can be made that the catastrophe was mutational overload. There is evidence that in Europe the early Neolithic populations suffered a population collapse. There is also evidence that Y-DNA diversity dropped dramatically at the beginning of the Neolithic time. These populations were most probably patriarchal and polygamic. These facts agree with a scenario where in early agricultural societies very few men controlled the right to have children with women. It lead to mutational overload in the Y-gene, which controls sperm production. The result was loss of fertility and the death of the population. By killing the first born sons, the society avoided the inheritance right of the first born sons to women and created competition between younger brothers and in this way increased the male gene pool. This is of course only a theory, but something like this can be behind the practice of the sacrifice of the first born sons. If so, then these children were indeed redeeming the population.
Here we see an answer to the question why God cannot forgive the sins. It is simply that originally these are not any sins committed by some individuals but behavior of a population. The result is not a punishment in the normal sense: it is the outcome of the deeds. You let your population grow higher than the carrying capacity, there has to be a collapse. You allow practices leading to mutation overload, you will have infertility. There is no possibility of forgiving anything. The sins are practices of a people and the punishment is collective.
Much later there came individualism: evil deeds were deeds of a person against the society. This was when law codes were crafted. You were not any more allowed to kill your enemy, or cheat them any way you wanted. Then you could break the law and the punishment was not always the death. Then, in principle, the society could forgive the sins, but they do not do it: try breaking laws and see if the police and the court system forgives crimes. Of course, it is only for your good and for the good of the society, in principle, such crimes could be forgiven. Crimes against the natural order/nature cannot be forgiven since the punishment is just the outcome of the deeds: destroy the nature and you will have what you did.
Redemption does not mean forgiving evil deeds. It means paying them for a small number of elected. This concept would have been valid even in the proposed scenario of mutational overload. Most of the population would have been sterile or otherwise incapable, but a small group of elected might have a survival chance. They could have been collected and a new population might have grown out of them.
This is essentially the concept of redemption and a new covenant. There are only few elected, like only some thousands of Jews joined the Jesus-movement. They are the seed of the new covenant, which again is given the command of multiplying, either naturally like in the story of Noah, or by conversion like in Christianity.
The savior is just a person, who has a solution to the current problem causing the population collapse. The elected are the followers, but why are they redeemed? That is, redeemed refers to a sacrifice. Why, in the time of a catastrophe, like a population catastrophe, does there need to be a sacrifice? We know that this was often the case. When Mayas experienced a drought that ended their civilization, they resorted to human sacrifices: they sacrificed their own children and nobility. That is a natural human reaction.
Behind most human reactions there must be some evolutionary reason. Perhaps we have a behavior pattern that allows leaving everything and selecting only one (like in the parable by Jesus of a wise fisherman, who discards all small fish and selects a big one, no normal fisherman would do so, or not in a normal time). This pattern would include facing death if needed. It might have been one of the ways humans coped with difficult times. Be ready to move on, to leave everything, to face the dangers.
This is possible. There may even be such a mechanism of conversion that has a major psychological effect on us and helps the population to survive in the time of catastrophes.
Today we are not in the time of a catastrophe. In Jesus’ time people waited for the end of the times. Those times came in the First Jewish War. Everything in the message told of Jesus fitted those times. He was the first born son of Mary. He was sacrificed but returned to life, so he was himself redeemed and by his sacrifice he redeemed others, as sacrificial blood redeems evil deeds. His sacrificial blood made a new covenant and the people of the new covenant were the redeemed who had many children from the converts.
He told the disciples to drink his blood. They drank it symbolically as wine, but did they really? In the Gospel of Thomas Jesus tells two sayings of drinking blood. In one (logion 60) Jesus points to a Samaritan carrying a sheep and asks what the man is going to do with the sheep. The disciples answer that he will eat the animal, to which Jesus answers that he will not eat the sheep. He will kill it and eat the corpse, but if you eat alive, what do you do? Clearly, this is about eating blood: the soul was believed to be in blood.
In the other saying (logion 7) Jesus says that blessed is a lion that is eaten by a human and in this way becomes a human, and cursed is the human who is eaten by a lion and in this way becomes a human. The lack of symmetry is for sure intentional (though some have tried to correct it). The meaning of this saying is rather easy to find. If a human is eaten by a lion, the lion eats the blood of a human and gets a human soul. Thus, the lion becomes a human in the second sentence. Why then in the first sentence a human who eats a lion does not become a lion? It is because this lion is a human. It is the king pf Israel, the Messiah. If it would be an animal then certainly the human eating a lion would get the lion’s soul and become a lion. Eating blood of the lion, that is the Messiah, is considered good: the lion is blessed. Eating blood from another human, like the animal lion does, is bad: it is forbidden to eat blood because the soul is in the blood and the lion gets the soul of a human, to say, a human gets trapped in a wrong body. Weird stuff, isn’t it? Yet this is how it is.
From these sayings we see that Jesus thought that if one drinks blood one gets the soul that is in the blood. That is why it is normally forbidden to drink blood, but one must drink the blood of the Messiah in order to get the everlasting life: that is, the Messiah will be the everlasting and his soul will get your body. Resurrection could simply be made by soul reincarnation. The disciples only needed to drink his blood, but not symbolically. This may well be the only logical solution to all words of redemption in the Old Testament.
Of course it has to be the sacrifice of the first born. It was the first born of Egypt, it was Isaac. The firstborn must be redeemed, but also sacrificed in order to redeem the people. Thus, he has to be restored to life. Drinking blood should be impossible because the Books of Moses forbid it, but looking at these sayings in the Gospel of Thomas makes it quite probable that the group that used the gospel did experiment in drinking blood. It is even likely that early Christians did so because the blood of Jesus is drunken in a symbolic way in the communication and there is no stress on the prohibition of eating blood. Like the Christians would know that drinking blood does not have any visible effect. I think they didb know that and that means that it is very possible they tried drinking blood and saw no effect. Thus, drinking the blood of Jesus become symbolic, and it is just as effective as a symbolic deed: you can take Jesus inside, whatever that means to you, and be a better person.
I very much like this blood allusion. See, it the Messiah could have an eternal life if his disciples drank his blood, then he would live forever. But there is the rule that whatever has a beginning has an end. Meaning that what does not have an end, i.e., lives forever, cannot have a beginning. Thus, the Messiah had to be in existence before Adam. In fact, the Messiah be there before the creation, thus the Messiah is the God.
Sorry, if I confuse you. It is just that there was some logic Christians had to follow. Actually I fully agree with this logic. I spent some time thinking how to create a soul in a computer (call it self-consciousness or whatever, to make a computer like you and me). So, it cannot be made. Something is missing, even if I interpolate the computing power much higher. Something is simply missing. So, being a professional on this business, I put all these missing functionalities to a module, you may say a package. So, fine, we are missing a package and none of our smart guys know how to make one. We will buy one, but they are not on sale. At this point I say, it is magic. We need a magic box.
Fine. If nobody else cannot figure it out and I cannot figure it out, it is not possible. I quite well can accept that there is the package containing a soul, but we cannot make it. Does it mean it is noty from this world? Pretty much, if we cannot do it. This is it. It can be so. There can be another world, what do I know? And it can be that there is only one soul: well. That is the easiest. Then if the Messiah is this soul, as there is only one, I am the same soul, so are you, and so is my dog, but not the flies, which behave as automatons. Probably so. We get this theory of one soul and another more real world. I do not have any strong feelings of it, either against or for.
So it could be like that. The redemption was only for saving the Jews. Nobody else had the law, so they could not break the law. Even Saint Paul says so. And those who believed that they are under the law and have broken it, were released from the waterless cave by the belief that the Messiah can redeem the sins. But the non-Jews had not sinned, as they had no law, and did not need to be redeemed.
It is all very logical. It is also very logical that what a Christian is expected to do is written in the old prophets, like Zechariah 6:9-10 (that is, just be a good person), while what Jesus told his followers to do (leave up everything, die as martyrs) was only for the end of the time for the redemption of the Jewish people (which they rejected, as was foreseen).
What then does redemption mean to us? Originally there are practices which, if continued long enough, will destroy the population. These are the evil deeds. There is no way God can forgive these deeds because the punishment (the death of the population) is a logical result of these practices. This is the real meaning. Not everybody will perish in the following catastrophe, only most will, but a reminder will survive. They will follow another way, to avoid the disaster. They will have a leader, the Messiah. There will be few, they will be the new covenant.
All of this is true. It only has to be understood.