Why did God require a sacrifice of Himself to Himself?

[Caecilian]

You don't seem to grasp what accepting Him means. It's like accepting the command "love your neighbor".

Stolen from the Greeks....back when they still worshiped the Olympian gods. You thus glibly repeat what is a pagan mantra. Whoever invented your 'jesus' wasn't even original!

"Do not to your neighbor what you would take ill from him." – Pittacus

No, of course not- not original at all. And furthermore: actually intended to be unoriginal.

I've started reading Thomas Thompson's The Messiah Myth. Its an interesting book, well-argued but often heavy going (lots of long scriptural quotations). Thompson's position seems to be this:

'Jesus' is essentially a literary device. The teachings attributed to 'jesus' come from a variety of sources- Hebrew, Aramaic, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek. In practice, its impossible to say which teachings originally come from where, since the entire region had a shared set of spiritual-religious tropes. Some of the sayings of 'jesus' are demonstrably identical (or nearly so) to the sayings in much older texts.

The 'jesus' figure, like 'david' and 'moses' has the literary role of repeating already well-known sayings. He isn't intended to be original, or real- and according to Thompson, early christians would not have regarded him as a historical figure.

Makes sense to me.