Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 32:1 (NA 1981)
Article: The Lamb Of God And Atonement Theories
Author: George L. Carey

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TynBul 32:1 (1981) p. 97

The Lamb Of God And Atonement Theories

George L. Carey

The Tyndale Biblical Theology Lecture, 1980

It is claimed by modern theologians that no atonement teaching is found in the Gospel of John. The famous passage in John 1:29, ‘Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’, is usually dismissed as untypical of the main stream teaching of the writer.

The argument of this paper is that the Gospel has a definite view of the significance of Jesus’ death and that the saying of the Baptist has an important place within its teaching.

Our approach, however, has an unusual starting point; instead of anchoring the saying in a specific OT context we argue that it must be seen in the context of John’s use of OT scripture generally.

I. Early Christian Interpretation Of The Old Testament

For the modern biblical theologian the problem of arriving at a systematic understanding of the Bible’s teaching on a given subject can no longer be limited to the understanding of the text. Twenty or thirty years ago the normal approach to doing theology was that of comparing text with text to conclude with a ‘consensus’ form of theology. Imposing theological edifices were built with texts quarried from the NT. Today, most scholars would agree, it is not so simple, because the text in itself represents not the beginning but the end of a process which began with an event. In a famous phrase Martin Dibelius signalled this revolution in NT interpretation: ‘In the beginning was the sermon’. He meant that behind the texts of the NT lay the oral traditions, the received teachings of the churches and the preached word of the catechists, evangelists and prophets of the primitive community. While Dibelius’ simple statement has since been developed considerably, to emerge as a modern redaktionsgeschichte approach to

TynBul 32:1 (1981) p. 98

the text, his revolutionary understanding that the theologian must go back behind the text has not been fundamentally challenged. The problem may be seen clearly in respect to the numerous OT quotations and images which reappear in the NT, forming the backbone of NT preaching and teaching. As long ago as 1916 J. Rendel Harris realized that there was a pattern about the way the NT used the OT material. He noticed that identical passages of the OT were used by NT writers who could not have had contact with one another. The puzzle was, however, more extensive than that; identical phrases and even identical words appeared to point to the conclusion that a common literary source was used by the first Christian writers. Harris concluded that there existed in the NT period at ...

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