Why Did Jesus Have to Die If Forgiveness Was Already Available?

He didn’t. And the book that says he had to also shows god forgiving people who brought nothing, shows Jesus forgiving people before he died, and shows him handing the power to other men while he was still alive.

Here’s my logic, up front, so you know where this is going. The whole doctrine rests on one rule: sin requires blood. If that rule holds, the crucifixion is necessary. So I’m going to take the rule at full strength, the way it’s preached, and then hold the rest of the bible against it. It doesn’t survive.

The rule

This is the verse the entire thing is built on.

Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.

— Hebrews 9:22, NRSVue

Look at how that sentence is built. The first half hedges — almost everything is purified with blood. The writer knew there were exceptions to the purification rules and wrote the qualifier in himself.

The second half doesn’t hedge at all. No forgiveness of sins without the shedding of blood. Not little, not rarely. No. That’s an absolute, stated without a single qualifier attached to it.

So take it at its word. That’s the claim, and it’s the reason you were told a man had to be executed.

Now watch what the rest of the book does to it.

God forgave people with no blood at all

A king commits adultery and arranges a man’s death. A prophet confronts him. Watch how long it takes.

David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the LORD.” Nathan said to David, “Now the LORD has put away your sin; you shall not die.”

— 2 Samuel 12:13, NRSVue

One sentence of confession. One sentence of pardon. Nothing is brought and nothing is killed. And notice the tense — has put away, not will put away once something else happens.

That’s not a loophole in one story. It’s how the arrangement gets described:

let them return to the LORD, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.

— Isaiah 55:7, NRSVue

as far as the east is from the west, so far he removes our transgressions from us.

— Psalm 103:12, NRSVue

Return, and he pardons. There’s no blood in the procedure as stated.

And it goes past silence. In several places Adonai says outright that he doesn’t want the offerings:

For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

— Psalm 51:16–17, NRSVue

For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

— Hosea 6:6, NRSVue

And when the question is put directly — what does he actually require? — the answer comes back with nothing on the altar:

With what shall I come before the LORD and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?

— Micah 6:6–8, NRSVue

Read the escalation. Burnt offerings, then rams, then rivers of oil, then a firstborn child. The offer keeps climbing, and the answer, when it comes, is that none of it is what’s wanted.

God had already given the power to other people

This is the part that undoes the necessity argument on its own.

Israel makes an idol in the wilderness and Adonai announces he’s finished with them. A man talks him out of it — not with an offering, with a request:

“Forgive the iniquity of this people according to the greatness of your steadfast love, just as you have pardoned this people, from Egypt even until now.” Then the LORD said, “I do forgive, just as you have asked;”

— Numbers 14:19–20, NRSVue

I do forgive, just as you have asked. A human being asks and god forgives, in god’s own words, with nothing killed and nothing offered.

It isn’t unique. A prophet does the same thing twice in a row:

“O Lord GOD, forgive, I beg you!” ... The LORD relented concerning this; “It shall not be,” said the LORD.

— Amos 7:2–3, NRSVue

And Moses describes the method he used, which was not a sacrifice:

Then I lay prostrate before the LORD as before, forty days and forty nights; I neither ate bread nor drank water because of all the sin you had committed... But the LORD listened to me that time also.

— Deuteronomy 9:18–19, NRSVue

Fasting and prayer. That’s the instrument. So centuries before the crucifixion, ordinary men were already standing between sinners and god and getting sins forgiven — and none of them had to die to be able to do it.

Jesus forgave people before he died

A paralyzed man gets lowered through a roof.

When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Child, your sins are forgiven.” Now some of the scribes were sitting there questioning in their hearts, “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

— Mark 2:5–7, NRSVue

Pay attention to the order. He forgives the man first. The healing hasn’t happened yet. It arrives afterward, and Mark says plainly what it’s for:

But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins

— Mark 2:10, NRSVue

Has authority. Present tense. On earth. Not later, not once something has been paid. The miracle is evidence for a power already in use.

It happens again:

Then he said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.”

— Luke 7:48, NRSVue

And again, in a story about a man who does nothing but ask:

But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other

— Luke 18:13–14, NRSVue

Nothing dies in any of these scenes.

And he gave the power away before he died

People assume the disciples got this after the resurrection, as something the cross purchased. They didn’t.

I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

— Matthew 16:19, NRSVue

That’s said at Caesarea Philippi. The very next thing in the chapter is Jesus telling them for the first time that he’s going to be killed. The authority is handed over before the death is even announced, let alone carried out. The same formula turns up again two chapters later, spoken to all of them.

So whatever that power is, the crucifixion did not produce it. It was distributed while he was alive.

Then, after the resurrection, it’s spelled out in the plainest words in the book:

When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

— John 20:22–23, NRSVue

Sins forgiven by a person, and heaven follows.

And it doesn’t stop with the disciples. The letters put the same thing in the hands of church elders, and then of anybody at all:

Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up, and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven.

— James 5:14–15, NRSVue

My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another, you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.

— James 5:19–20, NRSVue

One person prays, another person’s sins are forgiven. One person brings somebody back, and that person’s sins are covered.

That is exactly what Jesus is supposed to be for. He’s the one who stands in the gap, whose intervention makes forgiveness possible. And here the same job is being done by Moses in the wilderness, by a prophet begging, by elders with a bottle of oil, and by anyone who talks a friend out of a mistake.

Whose power is it, though?

Read John 20 again and notice what comes first.

Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.

The spirit is given, and then the forgiving. There’s no break between them — no and then he said, no second introduction. It’s one breath.

I’ll be straight about what the text does and doesn’t settle. It never says the spirit causes the power. There’s no therefore, no so that, no because. The two sentences are simply placed together. Anyone who tells you the text settles it is filling in a word that isn’t there.

But look at what follows either way. If the power arrived with the spirit, then it wasn’t Jesus’s to give in the first place — it was god’s, delivered through him. And god had been handing that spirit out for a very long time without anyone dying for it:

Then the LORD came down in the cloud and spoke to him and took some of the spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders, and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied.

— Numbers 11:25, NRSVue

Two men who didn’t even show up got it anyway — the next verse has the spirit resting on them out in the camp. It lands on a judge in Judges 3:10 and on a king in 1 Samuel 10:6, and in none of those cases is there a death, a sacrifice, or a cross.

So whichever way you read it, the same thing follows. Either Jesus gave the power away himself, before and after he died — or it was never his to give, and god had been distributing it for centuries by simply deciding to.

The exclusive claim

Now set all of that beside the sentence the whole religion rests on.

Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

— John 14:6, NRSVue

No one. Another absolute, no qualifier.

So which is it? If nobody reaches the Father except through him, then Moses got nothing in the wilderness, the elders in James can’t get anyone forgiven, and the men he authorized at Caesarea Philippi were holding an empty set of keys. And if any of them could — if a person’s request really does result in another person’s sins being forgiven — then the way to the Father was never his alone.

He can’t be the only route and also be one of several. The text has him claiming the first while arranging the second.

Run the excuses

“The cross applied backward. Those earlier pardons were credited against it in advance.”

Show me the verse.

There isn’t one. No text anywhere says forgiveness granted before the crucifixion was provisional, incomplete, or activated later. The two passages people reach for don’t say it either. Romans 3:25 says god “passed over the sins previously committed” — a statement defending god’s record, not a statement that the pardons were void. Hebrews 9:15 says a death “redeems them from the transgressions under the first covenant” — closer, and still not a claim that Nathan’s sentence was a placeholder.

The doctrine isn’t in the text. It’s laid over the text by people who noticed this problem and needed something to put in the gap.

And it makes the bible’s own sentences false at the moment they were spoken. Nathan didn’t say the LORD will put away your sin. He said has. Adonai didn’t tell Moses he would forgive. He said I do forgive.

“Hebrews 9:22 describes the old sacrificial system, not a universal law.”

Then it can’t do the job it’s used for. That verse is quoted to prove why a death was necessary. If it only describes an expired arrangement, it proves nothing about what god requires, and the argument for the crucifixion loses its foundation.

“Only god can forgive sins, so Jesus doing it proves he’s god.”

That’s the scribes’ objection, not the text’s answer. They say “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” and Mark’s reply isn’t because he is God. It’s that the Son of Man has authority on earth. Then that same authority goes to Peter, and to the rest of them, and to church elders, and to anybody who brings a wanderer back.

What the text will not support

It will not support the claim that forgiveness required blood. The rule is stated once, as an absolute, in a letter — and the books it claims to summarize show god pardoning people who brought nothing at all.

It will not support the claim that Jesus was necessary. He forgave before he died. He handed the authority out before the crucifixion was even announced. And long before he existed, a man in a desert asked god to forgive a nation and god said he did.

And there’s a question underneath all of it that the machinery distracts from. Go looking for where this god offers forgiveness. He didn’t offer it to Cain. Not to Adam and Eve. Not to Sodom, or to Lot’s wife, or to anyone before the flood, or at Babel, or to Pharaoh. Not to the wilderness generation — he didn’t just leave them out there, he killed every one of them who was twenty or older. Not to Ahab. Not to Judas. The stories are full of people who get punished and remarkably short of people who get offered a way out first.

Some of those names probably made you think they didn’t deserve it. Sit with that reaction for a second, because it’s the same one the god in these stories has. He sorts people into the ones worth sparing and the ones who aren’t, and he does it the way a man would do it — by who he’s angry at. That’s not what a perfect being looks like. It’s what a character written by people looks like.

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Twelve Verses Your Church Skipped — the free guide. Twelve passages, quoted in full, with the standard defenses run one at a time. Get it here.

THE WAR AGAINST THE END OF DAYS — a novel that takes Revelation seriously as imagery and follows it where it goes. Available now.