Pete,
You have said in your podcast and likely your books that Paul was interpreting the OT with the understanding that Jesus was the Christ and therefore applying OT writings as a prophecy of Jesus. Bart D. Ehrman in his book Jesus Before the Gospels discusses how the Gospels were written by people that were not firsthand witnesses but by those that heard from those that heard, from those that heard. His argument is that the Gospels were written with a bias towards what their beliefs were and not necessarily actual events. That being said, do you think that the Gospels and other writings in the NT were written in the same way with bias making Jesus the atoning sacrifice? I have also heard other authors discuss the sacrifice of Jesus was not to atone but to show us that you don’t need a sacrifice to appease God, therefore He was the end of sacrifices. Is Jesus as the “High Priest” a continuation of Judaism’s religious system? If the “Curtain of the Temple” was torn eliminating the separation of God and man, why do we need a mediator?
