Acts 2:23 — God’s plan, human violence
In the Pentecost kerygma Peter makes two assertions at once: Christ was delivered up “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” — and “by the hands of lawless men” (diá cheirós anómôn) nailed to the cross and killed. Both halves must be read together. God did not demand the death as the execution of a penalty, but he incorporated the path through death and resurrection into his plan of salvation; the dying itself was an injustice committed by men. Sozzini reads the passage consistently as an act of liberation without ransom: just as Moses leads Israel out of Egypt without any ransom price (Ex 6:6), so Christ leads his own without any payment of penalty into the promised inheritance.
“This man, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.”
Acts 2:23
Context
Acts 2:23 stands at the centre of the first apostolic sermon — Peter’s Pentecost preaching (Acts 2:14-36). After the outpouring of the Spirit and the speaking in tongues, Peter interprets the event as the fulfilment of Joel 2:28-32 (Joel 3:1-5 LXX; vv. 16-21) and then turns to the proclamation of Christ (vv. 22-36). Verses 22-24 unfold the way of Christ in three short stations: Jesus’ ministry “with mighty works and wonders and signs” (v. 22), his being handed over and killed (v. 23), and his resurrection by God (v. 24).
The rhetorical structure of these three verses is programmatic. Verse 22 speaks of God’s attestation of Jesus during his lifetime. Verse 23 names two subjects in one and the same breath: God, who in his fixed counsel gives his Son out into history — and the ánomoi, who nail him to the cross. Verse 24 closes with God’s act of raising. The middle statement (v. 23) is thus framed by two statements about God’s action — but the killers themselves are expressly designated as men outside the Torah.
In the further course of Acts this same double figure recurs again and again. Acts 3:13-15 throws the death of Jesus before the assembly and at the same time calls them to repent; Acts 4:27-28 explicitly states that Herod, Pilate, Gentiles and Israel came together “to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place”; Acts 13:27-29 sets out the same logic in Paul’s sermon at Pisidian Antioch. The early Christian confession knows the twofold statement of God’s plan and human wrongdoing from the very beginning — and never blends the two.
The Old Testament background is equally clear. God often acts in salvation history through human transgressions, without justifying them. Genesis 50:20 summarises the Joseph narrative pithily: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.” What the brothers did wickedly, God turned to salvation. The deed remained guilt; the effect became salvation. It is precisely this logic that Peter applies in Acts 2:23 to the death of Christ — not a logic of penal satisfaction.
A Socinian-relevant observation: v. 23 is precisely not a hilastic statement. Peter does not use the vocabulary of Leviticus 16 (the rite of sin offering) or of Isaiah 53 (the suffering servant), but the vocabulary of providence and injustice. This is a deliberate selection. The early apostolic proclamation knows several image-worlds for interpreting the cross — in Acts 2:23 it chooses the image-world of divine providence over human injustice, not that of penal payment.
The Socinian core thesis
In Socinian terms, Acts 2:23 is a key verse against the doctrine of penal substitution. The internal logic of the text is unambiguous: if God had willed the death of Christ as a penalty, then the killers would have been God’s executors and their deed a divinely authorised execution of penalty. Peter, however, calls them expressly ánomoi — lawless, outside the law. A penalty carried out by lawless hands is not the execution of penalty, but a judicial crime. The penal-substitution reading of Acts 2:23 is thus blocked already at the level of the text itself.
God’s boulê (counsel) and prógnôsis (foreknowledge) do not mark a divine demand laid upon Christ, but a divine incorporation of the coming event into the plan of salvation. God permitted the death of Christ, knew it as the way of transition to resurrection, and embraced it within his saving plan — he did not demand it as a payment of penalty. The double pattern “God’s plan + human injustice” has long been known in the Old Testament (Gen 50:20 in the Joseph story) and is applied christologically in Acts 2:23.
The salvation-focus of the Pentecost sermon lies not on the dying, but on the resurrection. Verse 24 closes with the main verb: “God raised him up, having loosed the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.” The whole rhetorical weight of the sermon presses toward v. 24. Acts 2:32 repeats it: “This Jesus God raised up, of which we are all witnesses.” Acts 2:36 draws the consequence: God has made him Lord and Christ. The death is a passage, not a means of salvation.
Sozzini reads Acts 2:23 in this sense as a consistent companion-clause to the resurrection. In his main work “On Jesus Christ the Saviour (De Iesu Christo Servatore)” (Part One) he unfolds it by comparison with Moses: as Moses leads Israel out of Egypt without a ransom price (Ex 6:6: “I will redeem you with an outstretched arm”), so Christ leads his own without a payment of penalty into the promised inheritance. Christ’s dying was faithfulness to the very end and the precondition of the resurrection — not a payment rendered to God.
In the Socinian reading, then, Acts 2:23 is neither a Docetic spiritualisation of the cross nor a downplaying of human guilt. The guilt of the killers is expressly named within the same verse (ánomoi, prospêxantes anelete). It is not relieved by appeal to a divine counsel. But neither is it turned into a saving achievement. God acts through the injustice toward salvation, without justifying it.
God willed the way through death and resurrection; the dying was the work of human violence — expressly of lawless hands. An execution of penalty demanded by God upon Christ cannot be derived from Acts 2:23; the vocabulary of the verse rules it out.
Exegesis: key terms and word field
Five Greek key terms decide the interpretation of Acts 2:23 in linguistic and philological terms:
boulê — “counsel, plan of salvation”
Boulê in the Septuagint and in Koine designates the free resolve of the will, the deliberated plan, the gathered intent. With reference to God, boulê theou always means God’s plan of salvation, his settled purpose (cf. Luke 7:30 boulên tou theou; Acts 13:36 têi tou theou boulêi; Acts 20:27 pâsan tên boulên tou theou; Eph 1:11 katâ tên boulên tou thelêmatos autou).
God’s boulê is therefore not a juridical counsel of penalty, but the broad design of salvation, into which God includes even suffering and death without demanding them. Acts 4:28 makes this explicit for the very same event: “to do what your hand and your plan had predestined to take place” — and in the same sentence names the acting subjects (Herod, Pilate, Gentiles, Israel).
A penal-substitution reading would have to bend boulê here forcefully into the meaning of a juridical demand for payment. The word, however, nowhere carries this meaning in New Testament usage. Boulê is plan of salvation, not penal decree.
prógnôsis — “foreknowledge, foresight”
Prógnôsis (from proginôskô, to know beforehand) appears in the New Testament only twice: here in Acts 2:23 and in 1 Peter 1:2 (“chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father”). Both passages describe God’s knowledge of the course of history, bound into his plan of salvation. The word thus stands clearly in the domain of knowing and planning, not of bringing about or demanding.
A predestinarian-substitutionary reading often takes prógnôsis as a divine decreeing that something must happen. But this interpretation shifts the vocabulary: prógnôsis does not mean proorismía (predetermination in the strict sense) and still less the setting of a demand. It means God’s previous knowledge of the course of things.
The Socinian point is this: God knows of the faithlessness of men, integrates it into his plan, overcomes it through resurrection. But he does not demand it, and he does not make of injustice a salvific virtue. The foreknown event remains human guilt; its integration into the plan remains God’s action.
ékdoton — “handed over, delivered up”
The adjective ékdotos (from ekdídômi, to hand over) occurs in the New Testament only at this one place. In secular Greek it designates being delivered up to another — a daughter to marriage, a slave for examination, a prisoner for punishment. The prepositional object that follows leaves no doubt about the direction of the handing over: diá cheirós anómôn — by the hand of lawless men.
Whoever reads ékdoton here in a penal sense and makes God the one who hands over and penalty the goal of the handing over, overlooks the very next clause. The goal of the handing over is fixed within the text itself: lawless men, not legitimate executors of justice. God hands Christ over to men — to a historical scene of human violence —, not to a penal mechanism.
Sozzini emphasises this in the exaltation context of his main work: “Christ has, in the highest power and authority bestowed on him by God, … without any ransom paid to anyone, redeemed us and led us to God.” Whoever reads ékdoton as a penal payment must necessarily hold to an addressee to whom payment is made. The text names none.
diá cheirós anómôn — “by the hand of lawless men”
Ánomoi in Septuagintal usage are persons outside the Torah — in the narrowest sense Gentiles, because they do not have the law of Moses (Ps 1:1; Ezek 7:21 LXX), and in the broader sense all who act against God’s law. Peter is speaking to a Jewish-Christian assembly; the word here first refers to the Roman practice of execution (crucifixion was Roman law), and at the same time to the character of the entire procedure: a judicial murder carried out by lawless executors.
The exegetical point is sharp. If Christ’s death were a divinely demanded execution of penalty, the killers would have to be acting within the law; they would have to be called dikaiokátochoi or nómimoi kritai. Peter, however, calls them ánomoi. With this not only is their moral judgement fixed; the categorical classification of the whole killing is fixed — it is not the execution of justice.
At this point the penal-substitution reading has to introduce a double-game of subjects: “in legal terms the lawless were carrying out God’s execution of penalty without knowing it themselves.” This construction is ad hoc; it has no foothold in the text. Peter could quite easily have said that God had handed Christ over “so that he might bear the penalty” — he says the opposite.
prospêxantes anelete — “you crucified and killed”
The double verbal combination prospêxantes anelete (nailed to the cross and killed) has the hearers of the sermon themselves as subject: hymeis — “you have.” This is a sharp accusation, not a neutral report of events. Whoever wants to read the verse in a penal-substitutionary way would have to accept that Peter is at one and the same time describing the killing as the legitimate execution of penalty by God and as the guilty deed of his hearers — a logical contradiction.
Luke, who records the verse, holds this accusation through Acts with great consistency: 3:15 (“you killed the Author of life”); 4:10 (“whom you crucified, whom God raised”); 5:30 (“whom you killed by hanging him on a tree”); 7:52 (“whose betrayers and murderers you have now become”); 10:39; 13:28. Luke thus shows: the death of Christ, according to apostolic confession, was a human guilty deed, not a divine penal act.
In Socinian terms this is consistent with covenant and resurrection christology. Christ dies because men kill him; God leads through this death to resurrection. Guilt and saving deed remain two different subjects. The penal-substitutionary blending of the two into a single legal transaction is rejected by the verse itself.
Comparison of the readings
Reference to Fausto Sozzini
Fausto Sozzini treats the logic of Acts 2:23 extensively in Part One of his main work “On Jesus Christ the Saviour (De Iesu Christo Servatore),” in the context of his teaching on liberation from death and the Christ-as-Moses parallel. His key argument: Christ’s death was a way, not a payment; as once through Moses, so now through Christ, God leads his own — without paying a ransom to any third party.
Christ has, in the highest power and authority bestowed on him by God, … without any ransom paid to anyone, redeemed us from the slavery of sin and death and led us to God; and afterwards he himself has brought us into possession of the heaven promised to us.
Fausto Sozzini, Part One · Liberation from death / Christ as Saviour
Sozzini draws the Moses parallel through to the end. As Moses led Israel out of the slavery of Egypt without any ransom paid to Pharaoh (Ex 6:6: “I will redeem you with an outstretched arm, with great acts of judgement”), so Christ leads his own out of the slavery of sin and death — likewise without payment to any third party. Liberation is a sovereign act of God, not a transaction of exchange.
Acts 2:23 confirms this reading precisely. The passage names two realities: God’s plan and human violence. It names no addressee of a payment. It names no quantity of penalty. It names no demand laid upon Christ, but a handing over to men. The dogmatics of penal substitution must fill all three lacunae with dogmatic positings that the text precisely does not support.
Sozzini thereby also parallels the inner logic of redemption. The biblical God is not a penal judge who must be appeased, but a liberator acting out of his own faithfulness. Christ’s being delivered up “according to the definite plan” is part of the same movement of liberation as the bringing of Israel out of Egypt — not part of a juridical penal proceeding.
In the “Racovian Catechism” (1605) the same line is held with systematic consistency: the minimum of saving faith consists in believing “that on the basis of resurrection from the dead he has truly been installed by God as Lord and Christ.” The focus of salvation is therefore the resurrection as God’s enthronement of the obedient man, not the penal proceeding at the cross. Acts 2:23 functions within this architecture as a bridge: God permitted the death in order, through it, to bring about the resurrection.
Overview of the writings of Sozzini
Logical arguments
The following arguments speak against the penal-substitution reading and in favour of reading Acts 2:23 as a statement about God’s plan of salvation over against human injustice:
- The killers are ánomoi, not executors of justice. Peter explicitly calls the acting subjects lawless. A penalty carried out by lawless hands is, within the text itself, not an execution of penalty but a judicial crime. The penal-execution reading is thus already blocked by Peter’s own choice of words.
- Boulê tou theou is plan of salvation, not penal decree. In New Testament usage the word designates the wide divine intention (Luke 7:30; Acts 13:36; 20:27; Eph 1:11), never a juridical demand for penalty. Whoever narrows it here in a juridical sense overstretches the word’s usage.
- Prógnôsis is foreknowledge, not causation. The vocabulary belongs to the realm of knowing, not of demanding. God knows of the faithlessness of men and integrates it into his plan; he does not demand it.
- Ékdoton has no penal addressee. The handing over is expressly to men (lawless), not to a penal mechanism. The text names no recipient of a payment — the penal-substitution reading has to invent one.
- Direct accusation of the hearers (hymeis). Peter accuses those present of the killing. If the execution had been a legitimate execution of penalty by God, the accusation would be logically incoherent. But Peter accuses without hesitation — because the deed was without hesitation a guilty deed.
- The salvation-focus lies on v. 24 (the resurrection). The rhetorical climax of the three verses 22-24 is God’s act of raising. Verse 24 names the main verb (anéstêsen) and the theological ground (“it was not possible for him to be held by it”). The death is a passage; life is the goal.
- The parallel Acts 4:27-28. The same preaching pattern there sets out the logic explicitly: God’s predetermination extends to what men did (Herod, Pilate, Gentiles, Israel) — not to a divine demand laid upon Christ. Luke applies the schema consistently.
- Joseph-logic (Gen 50:20). God works through evil toward good without justifying the evil. “You meant evil; but God meant it for good.” This Old Testament logic of salvation Peter applies to the cross — not the Lev-16 logic of the sin offering.
- No addressee of payment named. A juridical payment of penalty requires a recipient. Acts 2:23 names none. A penal-substitution reading must make God the recipient of his own payment — logically circular, as already shown for Mark 10:45.
- Consistency with the early apostolic kerygma. Acts 3:15; 4:10; 5:30; 7:52; 10:39; 13:28 all repeat the same schema: guilt of the killers and God’s act of raising. Not one of these verses speaks of penal execution at the cross. Acts 2:23 is the initial formulation; it stands in an unambiguous Lukan line.
Biblical cross-references
The following passages carry the Socinian interpretation of Acts 2:23 and deepen it in the light of the whole biblical witness:
Genesis 50:20 — “But God meant it for good”
Joseph to his brothers: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” The Old Testament basic logic of God’s saving turn through human injustice. Guilt remains guilt; salvation remains God’s working. It is precisely this logic that Peter transfers in Acts 2:23 to the cross.
Acts 4:27-28 — the explicit explanatory formula
“For truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.” Luke himself explicates the logic of Acts 2:23: God’s predetermination encompasses what men did. It is a plan of salvation that incorporates human injustice — not a demand for penalty laid upon Christ.
Acts 2:24 — the resurrection as salvation-focus
“God raised him up, having loosed the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.” Verse 24 follows directly upon v. 23 and provides the theological key: the dying is the birth-pangs through which God works toward resurrection. The rhetorical climax of the Pentecost sermon lies on the resurrection, not on the death taken in isolation.
Acts 3:15 — “you killed the Author of life”
Peter in the second sermon: “But you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead, of which we are witnesses.” The same double pattern as in Acts 2:23: accusation of the injustice and proclamation of the resurrection. No penal-execution logic is to be found anywhere; the guilt of the killers is not transmuted into a saving achievement.
Exodus 6:6 — “I will redeem you with an outstretched arm”
God to Moses: “I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from slavery to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgement.” The Old Testament figure of redemption which Sozzini applies to Christ. Redemption is a sovereign act of God, no transaction of exchange — neither with Pharaoh nor with a juridical penal mechanism.
Romans 4:25 — “delivered up for our trespasses, raised for our justification”
Paul’s compressed double saying. Death and resurrection together form the saving event; neither is in isolation the bearer of salvation. The delivering up takes place on account of our trespasses (diá with the accusative) — that is the formula of cause for the action, not the formula of penal payment. The parallel construction with the resurrection shows that diá here is a word of reference, not a juridical word of causation.
Acts 13:27-30 — the Pauline variant of the schema
Paul at Pisidian Antioch: “The inhabitants of Jerusalem and their rulers, because they did not recognise him …, fulfilled the words of the prophets by condemning him. And though they found in him no ground for a death sentence, they asked Pilate to have him put to death … But God raised him from the dead.” Here also: injustice of the condemnation (no ground for death!) and God’s act of raising. Guilt and salvation remain two subjects.
Luke 22:22 — the double pattern anticipated
Jesus himself: “For the Son of Man goes as it has been determined, but woe to that man by whom he is betrayed!” The same double pattern as in Acts 2:23: divine determination and human woe. If Christ’s death were a divinely demanded execution of penalty, the betrayer would be performing a saving deed — and would not deserve woe. The logic blocks the penal-substitution reading.
Objections and Socinian answers
Objection 1: “God’s definite plan implies a divine intention to punish.”
If Peter explicitly says that Christ was delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, then God willed the death — and if he willed it, then as a penalty for our sins.
The chain of inference “willed = willed as penalty” is not compelling. God may have willed the death as a passage, as a way to resurrection, as an act of preserving his own faithfulness — without demanding it as a juridical execution of penalty. Genesis 50:20 makes precisely this differentiation paradigmatically: God willed the result (salvation), not the deed of guilt (the evil) as such.
Whoever reads God’s plan narrowly as penal must explain why Peter in the same sentence calls the killers ánomoi. A divine penal counsel that is carried out by lawless men is linguistically inconsistent. The designation ánomoi blocks the penal reading of the counsel.
Sozzini argues here consistently: God did not demand the death as a penalty, but incorporated it as a way to exaltation into his plan. The salvific effect arises from the resurrection (v. 24) and the enthronement (v. 36), not from the dying in isolation. That is the line of all the Pentecost sermons in Acts.
Moreover: also in the Joseph narrative, God’s plan was carried out through the evil deed of the brothers, without that evil deed thereby becoming an executive act of God. The brothers remain guilty; God remains the bringer of salvation. It is precisely this structure that Peter applies to the cross. It is exegetically untenable to read into Acts 2:23 a juridical-penal counsel that the text does not say.
Objection 2: “Ékdoton unambiguously means delivery for punishment.”
The verb sounds like delivery to a penal judge; the Latin translation tradition traditus is regularly used within the framework of penal substitution in scholastic theology.
Ékdotos simply means “handed over, given out of one’s hand.” The direction of the handing over is fixed by the text itself: diá cheirós anómôn. God hands Christ over to men — to a concrete historical constellation of Jewish high-priesthood and Roman occupying power —, not to an abstract penal mechanism.
In Septuagintal language, ekdídômi is regularly used for handings over to human adversaries, without any juridical idea of penal payment being implied (cf. Dan 7:25 LXX; 2 Macc 5:8). A penal-payment meaning is borne by the word neither in secular Greek nor in the Greek language of the Bible.
The scholastic tradition often reads traditus in penal-substitutionary fashion, but this is a dogmatic overlay upon the Vulgate’s rendering, not a philological necessity. Jerome himself does not comment on the passage in the sense of a juridical penal payment.
Sozzini insists: whoever asserts a penal payment must name a recipient. The text names no recipient of penalty; it names only the killers (men) and their character (lawless). The handing over is therefore a giving up to the historical situation, not a payment to a juridical instance.
Objection 3: “Precisely because the killers were lawless, a legitimate execution of penalty in their place was necessary.”
The designation of the killers as lawless shows precisely that all of us are lawless, and one had to bear the legitimate penalty in our stead. Acts 2:23 thus indirectly confirms the doctrine of penal substitution.
This reading is a double step: first the statement of guilt in the verse (“you have”) is generalised to all men — which is not in the text —, and then from this is deduced the necessity of a substitutionary penalty — which is likewise not in the text. Both steps are dogmatic constructions, not philological takings from the text.
Acts 2:23 accuses concretely the Pentecost pilgrims present in Jerusalem and through them the Israel of that time and the Roman authorities. In v. 38 Peter does not expand this accusation into a universal penal necessity, but into a universal call to repentance and baptism “in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins.” Forgiveness comes through repentance and faith, not through the execution of penalty upon a substitute.
Even if one concedes the anthropological universalisation (all men are lawless before God), no necessity of penal substitution follows from it. Luke 15 (the prodigal son), Micah 7:18-19 (God forgives out of pure grace), 1 John 1:9 (God forgives the one who confesses) — biblical forgiveness is broadly attested without any requirement of penal satisfaction.
In Socinian terms, the consequence is: the requirement of penal substitution is not derived from Scripture, but read into Scripture. Acts 2:23 is precisely a counter-witness: here the guilty are expressly named, and Peter responds not with a penal proceeding but with a call to repentance.
Objection 4: “1 Peter 1:20 (‘foreknown before the foundation of the world’) teaches a pre-temporal penal counsel.”
If Christ was “foreknown before the foundation of the world,” then the penal event at the cross was, from all eternity, part of the divine plan of salvation — and therewith a genuine divine demand for penalty.
1 Peter 1:20 speaks of Christ himself (his saving action) as foreknown before time, not specifically of the execution of penalty. The same applies to Eph 1:4 (election in Christ before the foundation of the world) and 2 Tim 1:9 (grace in Christ before eternal times). The pre-temporal saving intention of God concerns the way of salvation as a whole, not a particular penal proceeding.
In Socinian terms, the predestination of the plan of salvation is to be read consistently with Acts 2:23: God knew the way that Christ would go — through faithfulness and death to resurrection — and integrated it into his plan of salvation. That is foresight in the strong sense, not the setting of a penal decree.
Moreover, a pre-temporal idea of a penal counsel would contradict the character of God, who according to 1 John 4:8 is himself love. A God who from all eternity decreed an execution of penalty upon his own Son would not act out of love, but out of juridical necessity. The Pauline logic of Rom 5:8 (“while we were still sinners, Christ died for us”) is the language of love, not of payment.
The Racovian Catechism formulates it clearly: the pre-temporal decision concerns the sending of Christ and the salvation offered, not a juridical penal procedure. Christ was “foreknown before the foundation of the world” as the coming bringer of salvation, not as the coming bearer of penalty.
Objection 5: “Without a penal dimension, the death of Christ would not be necessary for salvation.”
If Acts 2:23 does not describe the death as an execution of penalty, then it is salvifically superfluous. God could have granted the resurrection even without a death.
The premise already presupposes the penal-execution logic. In Socinian terms, Christ’s death is necessary for salvation in another sense: it is faithfulness to the utmost, the putting in force of the covenant (cf. Matthew 26:28), the precondition of the resurrection and enthronement (Acts 2:32-36; Phil 2:8-11). Necessity for salvation without a penal dimension is therefore perfectly conceivable and many times attested in the New Testament.
In God’s plan of salvation the way necessarily passes through death and resurrection — not because God demands a measure of penalty, but because Christ, as a true man in the world of mortality, had to meet death in order to overcome it through resurrection. Hebrews 2:14-15 formulates it thus: through death Christ was to “disarm the one who held the power of death.”
Sozzini sees the necessity for salvation consistently in the Moses parallel: Israel had to go through the sea in order to come into freedom — and Christ has to go through death in order to come into exaltation. Neither is an execution of penalty, but a way. God saves by passing through, not by paying.
The obvious alternative — a resurrection without death — would not be a saving event but a wonder of demonstration. The salvific resurrection presupposes real mortality; it can be carried out only by passing through death, as the overcoming of death. Acts 2:24 puts it: God loosed the pangs of death — which presupposes that they were there.
Theological consequences
Connected verses
The following passages support, deepen or contrast the interpretation presented here:
- apostelgeschichte-236 — Peter’s Pentecost sermon: v. 36 as concluding climax (“made Lord and Christ”) — resurrection-christology as salvation-focus.
- Mark 10:45 — ransom as image of liberation — analogous logic: handing over without a juridical addressee of payment, liberation as a sovereign act of God.
- Matthew 26:28 — blood of the covenant as the putting in force of the covenant — analogous shift of the interpretive category away from penal execution toward the language of covenant and liberation.
- Romans 4:25 — death and resurrection as a unity — diá with the accusative as a formula of cause for the action, not as the syntax of penal payment.
- John 3:16 — the handing over out of love — not a payment to a recipient, but a sovereign act of God’s love.
- Hebrews 9:22 — “almost everything in blood” — schedon breaks the universal penal-blood reading and leaves room for forgiveness without penal satisfaction.
Summary
Acts 2:23, on linguistic and literary examination, is not a text of penal substitution, but a statement about God’s plan of salvation over against human injustice. Peter expressly calls the killers ánomoi — a penalty carried out by lawless hands is, within the text itself, not the execution of penalty. The passage binds God’s boulê (plan of salvation) and prógnôsis (foreknowledge) together with human guilt — following the same Old Testament logic as Gen 50:20 (the Joseph narrative).
Sozzini reads the verse in Part One of his main work “On Jesus Christ the Saviour (De Iesu Christo Servatore)” consistently as a companion-clause to the resurrection. The Moses parallel of Exodus 6:6 carries it: as Moses leads Israel out of Egypt without a ransom, so Christ leads his own into the promised inheritance without any payment of penalty to a third party. Redemption is a sovereign act of God, not an exchange transaction with a juridical penal mechanism.
Understood in Socinian terms, Acts 2:23 is therefore a key verse against the doctrine of penal substitution and in favour of the resurrection-christology of the Pentecost sermon. The death is a passage, life is the goal; the dying is the work of human violence, the raising is the work of God. Whoever blends the two subjects together and makes God the executor of penalty bursts the vocabulary of the verse and ignores the direct accusation laid upon the Pentecost hearers.