Hello again Theocrat! Just to say that there is a lot of logic in your comment, but it flows from a false premise. Your premise is that God cannot experience death - so if Jesus was God and man (which you deny) only his ‘human’ nature died; his divine nature didn’t. Therefore (according to you) the suffering of a totally human Jesus would be greater than a Jesus who was both God and man.

You also make the slightly contrary assumption that God could not experience death, on the grounds that the experience would be the same as it is for mankind - total extinction of his being. This is not necessarily the case - and in the atonement, certainly not the case.

That Jesus died, and for a brief period experienced death like mankind, I have no doubt. But he had already given up his privileges which he enjoyed with God, as God, by becoming man - and whilst living on earth as a man, he subjected himself to the same kind of limitations that we experience in our humanity, depending on God in the same way as we need to depend on him. This is the essence of Philippians 2:5-8, which corresponds with everything we read about Jesus in the gospels and the epistles.

When Jesus died, the mystery of God’s nature is such that God did not become extinct. That is why a doctrine of the trinity, or something like it, emerges naturally and necessarily from the text. But the suffering which now takes place is infinitely greater than that which would have been the case if Jesus had been wholly man. The suffering now takes place within God’s own being. God has absorbed death into himself, experiencing its pain as a personal fracture.

Jesus is more than a messenger who identifies with the attributes of the one who sent him; he came to do for man what man could not do for himself. Any other explanation falls short of the biblical account, and fails to do justice to the sin which had bound Israel, and the human race since Adam, and still binds today, except that now there is a redemptive solution. The solution is in God’s initiative, provided by God himself, through the one who shared no part in Adam’s sin - but entered voluntarily into Adam’s race, and identified with that sin on the cross.

There is not much wrong with the traditional interpretation of Jesus or his atoning sacrifice - and this is really good news for the world, which goes as deep into our lives as it lifts us high. Deeper, I would suggest, than your interpretation. It’s also the good news which needs to be incorporated into the ‘historical/contextual/narrative approach’ - the necessary understanding which brings the story from its historical context into the context of the present day - our times, our culture. As yet, this latter approach simply asks us to become part of a story and a movement, but doesn’t tell us about the transforming power which the story principally came to bring.