| Summary: | This thesis aims to discover whether the historical Jesus understood his death as a means of forgiveness by comparing Paul and Matthew's treatment of these themes. Despite the strong tie between Jesus' death and forgiveness of sin in nascent Christianity, the close connection of the two themes is treated as a subsidiary issue in much historical Jesus research. This obvious attenuation of the significance of their close relationship leads us to question whether their close relationship originated with the historical Jesus: is this interpretation a true understanding of the historical Jesus, or a post-Easter theology? This central question demands an in-depth examination of their relationship in the historical Jesus' mind. The investigation will be conducted through a comparison of the earliest Christian documents written by Paul and the Gospel of Matthew. The result will then be compared against Jewish writings contemporary to Jesus, to uncover whether any martyrdom accounts attribute an expiatory effect to the deaths of the martyrs. Therefore, the aim is twofold: (1) to trace the historical Jesus' understanding of his own death, and (2) to compare Paul and Matthew's treatment of Jesus' forgiving death. Just as current scholars express a diverse range of views on the relationship between Jesus' death and the forgiveness of sins, scholarly comparisons between Paul and Matthew yield diverse results. More importantly, none deals with the connection between Jesus' death and remission in Paul and Matthew as a discussion topic. Through comparing the views of Paul and Matthew on this specific issue, this thesis aims to show that Paul and Matthew correspond to one another on the issue of the strong affinity between Jesus' death and forgiveness, and that the historical Jesus may have understood his death as a means of forgiveness, as they describe.
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