I think bringing up this kind of dual nature opens a whole different can of worms when it comes to the Trinity – trinitarian doctrine depends on Jesus being both fully human and fully divine simultaneously, not having different “halves” that operate independently of one another. If Jesus had a God “half” and a human “half” and it was the human half that died while the God “half” survived then it doesn’t make sense to say that God “gave his only begotten son” for the world – he didn’t give anything, just the human “half” he grafted his immortal progeny onto.

My understanding of Roman Catholic doctrine is that everything that was Jesus died and then he returned from the dead. By “death”, though, what is meant is that his immortal soul descended into the land of the dead, just as a mortal soul would. In fact, part of the apostle’s creed was that he “descended into Hell” for three days before returning from the dead on Easter. It’s an old descent into the Underworld theme – like Orpheus – and so he was dead and in Hell and then he returned to the world of the living. As a young Catholic I was taught that Jesus descended into Hell to save the souls of those who had already died – he basically dropped into Hell, kicked Satan’s ass, and threw open the gates to let the condemned souls out and into Heaven (have I mentioned that my catechism teachers were volunteers with shaky grasps on Catholic doctrine? I don’t think the Church actually teaches the “ass-kicking” part, but one of my catechism teachers taught it that way…)

The temporary nature of the sacrifice never made much sense to me – God makes no sacrifice here. He doesn’t “give his only begotten son” at all since he comes right back again three days later. The story makes more sense as part of a cosmic struggle between two equally matched powers of good and evil, where the evil power is tricked into killing the good power to release a can of whoop-ass on the evil power (a motif of Christianity that CS Lewis used in his Narnia books). But than that would be dualism, and that’s a heresy, so that explanation, even though it makes more sense, is disallowed from the start.

It’s that “second death” that they’re often talking about. It’s not without problems of its own.

According to Jayman, Jesus himself explains to the Sadducees that when God speaks of death, he may mean physically dead but there is a large component of spiritual death, or unsavedness(is it?), in there too!

Apparently this is such a nuanced point of view, it gets even more confusing and confused when we try to discuss the death and reanimation of God, the Son, himself as it slams headlong into the confusing and confused idea OF God the man(Jesus), the three ‘persons’ of God and such.

What is a good Christian left to do but hold up their hands, admit failure of reason, then look wistfully off into ‘mind-space’ and say, “One truly cannot know the MIND of God.”

Much better than admitting that the whole shebang makes absolutely no sense at all, eh?

That’s a pattern that inevitably arises when men try to tell stories that are not true: whenever someone thinks of some way to reconcile the immediate inconsistencies, the “fix” introduces new inconsistencies. That’s the nature of untruth, because if it actually were consistent with reality, then it would not be untruth.

Note that I’m not saying that this is what early Christians would believe – not all of them seemed to believe that Jesus was actually God for one thing, so they would need to have some other explanation for why his sacrifice on the cross would lead to absolution of sin (if they actually believed that to be the significance of this death – early Christianity seemed to be full of various explanations for what the crucifixion meant and atonement wasn’t the only one).