It looks like one of the ways that the NT writers tried to humanize god. The OT presents a powerful and cruel entity with a very short fuse who acts on a whim and has no issues with the wholesale slaughter of people. The NT takes that god, then humbles him by putting him in a human skin and having him enduring suffering at the hands of lowly humans. The god of the OT is both literally and symbolically killed and reborn, and god 2.0 is a loving and caring god (who will nonetheless return to his wholesale slaughter of people at some future point, but that's a story for another time).
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
