We know from the Bible and the cuneiform records of the very ancient city of Ur, where the early Hebrew Patriarch Abram/Abraham came from, that it was a typical polytheistic community that traditionally worshiped a pantheon of deities and engaged in both animal and human sacrifice. When Abram decided to follow the path of monotheism, he removed his whole household from Ur and set out upon the risky existence of a nomad. This he did in order to escape the pagan influences of what had been his hometown. All of this is famously recounted in the Book of Genesis (Bereshith), including a pivotal event later in Abraham's life when God calls upon this patriarch to prove his new-found faith by offering up his son and heir Isaac as a human sacrifice. Reluctantly and aggrievedly, Abraham agrees and begins to follow through at the appointed day and time. But at the last minute, God calls out for him to stop. God then commends Abraham for his loyalty in being willing to part with his most precious living possession. But significantly, God explains that this is more than a mere test of fidelity. It is to demonstrate above all that the God Abraham worships is not like other gods -- indeed, not like all the other gods worshiped in that Age: God the Most High (El Elyon) does not and never will require human sacrifice, and in fact, it is an abomination to God that such things are done at all. This story demonstrates a break by the faith tradition of the Hebrews with the rest of religious world as it then existed, and is perhaps as pivotal as choosing to worship only one deity. It reveals that this "one god" has an entirely different set of expectations, and wants to establish an alternative sort of relationship with humankind.
Atheist critics like to point to this myth with a "glass half empty" perspective and say, "look! Abraham was willing to sacrifice his own son, conceived after decades of barren marriage, and all to please his crazy conception of the divine will! -- so do you see what evil religion can drive a person to do?!" However, if we think of this story as coming out of a psychological era when most of humankind felt that there were times when life could grow so difficult that it required desperate measures, and that human sacrifice was the final answer to win the support of a patron deity or mollify an offended deity, this prohibition on human sacrifice is a profound departure from superstitious presumptions. At the price of a human life, this divine power could restore balance and prosperity in the afflicted community, which usually was suffering some extreme crisis like famine, plague or losing a war. But the God of the Hebrews made it clear that there never would be any circumstances where he would require a human death as a form of religious donation for propitiation. In fact, harmony with God's will would have to be established in an entirely different way than by the mindset that conceived such an ultimate form of sacrifice. As the Books of the Prophets (Nevi'im) make repeatedly clear, that harmony could only be established through righteous community relationships -- what we today would call social justice.
The story of Abraham's difficult trip to the high place with his beloved son would have been well known to Jesus the Jew and his fellow Jewish disciples, a myth at the root of all the moral scripture in their faith tradition. And here is where the rub comes in between Jews and Christians today: some of his disciples decided after Jesus' death that his crucifixion was a sacrifice God demanded to spare humankind his divine wrath. For most Jews, to believe that his death had this sacramental consequence would have seemed like turning away from the Jewish tradition of monotheism and embracing a pagan idea: that the divine sphere requires an offering of human life to obtain its pervading good will. It is interesting that the Third Abrahamic Faith (Islam) makes the following ruling on the significance of Jesus' death in their holy book, the Koran: God is fundamentally just, and therefore, he would not have required the sacrifice of a human being for the redemption of humankind, and certainly not his noble prophet, Ise (Jesus).
A healthy view of Jesus' death that a spiritually-interested non-Christian could take would be the simple recognition that Jesus stood up for what he believed in, and, unfortunately, was put to death for it by those who felt he threatened both their sense of power and the stability of the society from which they derived that power. We must remember that thousands of others during the course of the Roman Empire met with the exact same fate as Jesus, brave people who stood up for the sovereignty of their subjugated native cultures, oppressed people who openly resisted the slave system. These were the twin fists of domination and exploitation upon which the Roman economy was built, and any attempt to stay those hands could lead the rebel to find him or herself braced against the cross.
Because Jesus was a person of such noble being who made people think in a fresh way about what is really morally important in this life, and then ironically (and tragically) met with such a terrible and dramatic (and for those times, ignominious though not uncommon) death at the hands of a foreign occupying power, his teachings, indeed his very personality, were perhaps saved from otherwise becoming forgotten. The Romans mockingly appended a plaque that read, "Iudorum Rex" (King of the Jews), marking him as a political criminal. From merely an historical standpoint, such a case makes evident that it is human beings who sacrifice their fellows for the cause of moral ignorance (the communally coerced suicide of Socrates being another important example of this recurrent and deplorable social phenomenon).
The edifice upon which Christianity has built its justification for a human sacrifice being at the center of its faith begins with Paul's invention of the concept of Original Sin, a grandiose interpretation of the Adam and Eve story, in which this apostle asks his fellow Christians to believe we are all stained by the primary sin of disobedience, a stain that could only be removed by the sacrifice of a god in human flesh. For the Jews, this is a story symbolizing humankind leaving a static state of animal ignorance and entering the dynamic state of sapience. As for the Islamic take on all this, the Koran states that each of us is responsible only for our individual sins and are not held accountable by God for the sins of ancestors, descendants, kinfolk or tribe.
Christian theologians would perhaps argue on the basis of exceptionalism that the rules of Judaic tradition on human sacrifice need not apply, because the soul within that perished human body and personality (i.e., Jesus) was divine, but there were pagan faiths conceived long before the emergence of Christianity that believed the same thing about sacrificial deities who could resurrect themselves (e.g., the Egyptian Osiris, the Phrygian Attis, the Romano-Persian Mithras, etc.) for the redemption of their believers. The interpretation here presented of the climactic Genesis story of Abraham's life gives Christians the means not merely to be humanistically tolerant of their fellow Abrahamic Faiths, but also to acquire moral understanding of why the idea that Jesus, god or not, died for our sins, is spiritually illogical to these related monotheistic faiths. These fellow religions have well conceived theologies and moral argumentation. They do not dismiss out of hand what Jesus sought to accomplish as a rabbi and prophet.
Jesus' life is in fact honored by any who care to familiarize themselves with the Gospels in the spirit of free thought, independent reading, and mutual respect. For Muslims and Jews, whether or not Jesus rose from the dead is immaterial to the case. For them, God does not require human sacrifice for humankind's collective or individuated salvation.
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