Expiation or Propitiation? The basic understanding of this word-group as “a sacrifice which turns aside God’s wrath, taking away sin” has not gone unchallenged. It was primarily the Cambridge scholar, C. H. Dodd, who led this challenge. Dodd argued in several places that the meaning conveyed by the word-group is that of expiation (the cancellation of sin), not that of propitiation (the turning away of the wrath of God).11 While he acknowledged that it had the meaning of “placating an angry person”