Free Forgiveness for Repentant Sinners: The Hebrew Scriptures and the Historical Jesus

This radical book seeks to retrieve for Christians and all other gentiles the belief, always held in Judaism, that God freely forgives the past misdeeds of sinners who repent, that is, turn from their ways. This applies universally, to all Jews and all gentiles, and needs no sacrifice of any kind. The book sets out the considerable passages in the Hebrew Scriptures that found and evidence the belief in God’s free forgiveness, and also later literature showing that it continued to Jesus’s time on earth.
Passages from contemporary writers show that the Romans often crucified the leaders of revolts and let followers go free. Jesus went to the cross to save his followers from suffering a similar fate. This preserved his followers to become the beginnings of the church, which has ever since brought sinners to repentance, thereby gaining forgiveness from the merciful God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In this way, salvation comes to repentant Christians through the cross after all.
Incidentally, the book gives the very word in Aramaic that Jesus used when calling on people to repent.

John Mowbray is an independent scholar and an ordained elder of the Church of Scotland. He is the author of Discovering the Understanding of the Historical Jesus About Judgement and Forgiveness: A Scriptural Theology (2016) and "Why Did Jesus Surrender to the Cross?" (2020).