Did Christ atone for sin?

The words “atone” and “atonement” are common in the English OT, describing Israel’s animal sacrifices.This vocabulary has been carried over into Christian theology and hymns to describe the death of Christ as an “atonement” for sin, or “atoning” for sin. But it is extremely rare in English translations of the NT. Is it really appropriate to speak of our Lord as “atoning for sin”?

The question is tricky because the OT, which uses the term abundantly, is written in Hebrew and Aramaic, while the NT is in Greek. What does it mean to claim (or deny) that the NT uses an OT word? Rarely, the NT transliterates a Hebrew term (e.g., αμην for אמן), but in general we have to establish a mapping between Hebrew and Greek vocabulary. Our main bridge is the LXX, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. For the Greek-speaking Jews who wrote the NT, it played the same role that the KJV has for generations of English believers as a source of theological vocabulary. Thus a key exegetical technique is to analyze which Greek words are used in the LXX to translate which Hebrew words.

Like most translations, the LXX does not maintain a strict one-to-one correspondence between Hebrew and Greek words. That is, it does not use only a single Greek word for each Hebrew word, and does not reserve a different Greek word for each Hebrew word. To determine whether users of a Greek word have a particular Hebrew word in mind, we must ask two questions.

1. How many of the occurrences of the Hebrew word are translated by this Greek word, compared with other Greek words? For a Greek word to become associated with a Hebrew word, it should be the dominant Greek translation of that Hebrew word. If some other Greek word is more commonly used, we would expect Greek writers to use that other word in referring to the Hebrew word in question.
2. How many of the occurrences of the Greek word are used for that Hebrew word, compared with other Hebrew words? For a Greek word to be associated with a Hebrew word, it should be devoted to that Hebrew word. If it represents one Hebrew word more often than another, its use in Greek probably reflects the first rather than the second word. If it translates many Hebrew words without focusing on one, it is unlikely to become associated with any single word.

When a Greek word is both dominant and devoted with respect to a Hebrew word in the LXX, it is reasonable to assume that Jewish users of that Greek word in the first century would have had LXX passages involving the Hebrew word in mind. The less dominant and devoted the Greek term is, the less reliably we can conclude that the Greek writer is thinking of these biblical passages.

Analyzing the dominance and devotion of a Greek word to a Hebrew word used to be a time-consuming task of poring over the Hatch-Redpath concordance and its reverse index. BibleWorks and Accordance have made the process much easier with implementations of Emmanuel Tov’s parallel MT-LXX that permit users to search for the Greek translations of specific Hebrew words, and the Hebrew originals of specific Greek words.

A paper elsewhere on this website uses data from BibleWorks to show that NT writers never use the “atonement” family of terms to refer to the death of Christ. Occurrences of the English words in some translations, such as the KJV in Rom 5:11 or the NIV in Rom 3:25 and Heb 2:17, are erroneous translations, as we shall see. If we wish to “hold fast the form of sound words” (2 Tim 1:13), we should reconsider whether it is appropriate to use these terms with reference to Christ.

The question is of more than academic importance. As the paper shows in detail, there is a fundamental difference between the OT sacrifices and the death of the Messiah. The animal sacrifices were only symbolic and prophetic. “It is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins,” Heb. 10:4. The death of the Messiah is the reality to which those symbols pointed, and it accomplished what they only adumbrated: “Now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself,” Heb. 9:26. The OT sacrifices atoned for sin, but our Lord’s sacrifice purged our sin away. To call his death an atonement is to belittle it and overlook its immense superiority to the OT shadows.