Rhetoric: Amulek begins at the point of commonality: a shared understanding about the relationship between sacrifice and atonement—not the Messiah’s atonement but communal atonement. This principle was certainly part of the Mosaic law, where animal sacrifices were not only part of worship but would effect the communal atonement (Ex. 29:36, Lev. 23:27, Num. 6:10–11). Mesoamerican cultural also offered parallel examples of animal sacrifices as part of their worship and even human sacrifice.
Amulek explicitly states that the Messiah’s great atonement “shall not be a human sacrifice.” Human sacrifice was known and accepted in the general culture. In Aztec worship, some of their human sacrifices posed as gods when they were sacrificed. These humans-as-gods reenacted primal myths where the sacrifices of the gods established the known world. Anthropologist David Carrasco describes the impersonator of the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca:
The captive who best approximated this negative description of perfection was chosen and carefully trained in several Aztec arts, including music, smoking, and flower holding. But he was not just a stationary, imprisoned paragon of beauty and culture for “very great care was taken that he talk graciously, that he greet people agreeably on the road if he met anyone.… There was an assigning of lordship; he was importuned; he was sighed for; there was bowing before him.”
At an appointed time during his year-long public displays and contact with the populace, Tezcatlipoca was taken before the tlatoani (overlord or king) Moctezuma, who ceremonially “repeatedly adorned him; he gave him gifts; he arrayed him; he arrayed him with great pomp. He had all costly things placed on him, for verily he took him to be his beloved god.”
Amulek is teaching that the earthly Messiah was not a deity impersonator, a human who died for a god. Jesus was “God himself… come down among the children of men” (Mosiah 15:1). The atonement was not effected through a human sacrifice, but a divine sacrifice.