Excursus on the Fall and Original Sin, Part 1: Second Temple Judaism and the New Testament

If we were to summarize the reading of Genesis 2-3 that emerged over the course of the past few posts, it would be something like this:

It teaches that God’s intention for human beings is wholly good, but that they can be led astray by subtle temptations; and that, while disobedience to God, which is self-assertion, may bring greater self-knowledge, it leads to disaster: the intimate relationship with God is broken. Life then becomes harsh and unpleasant; however, God does not entirely abandon his creatures but makes special provisions for their preservation. (Barton & Muddiman 43)

As fair as I think this interpretation is to the spirit of the text, it touches on two awkward truths that have been circling this series so far:

1. 1. It doesn’t go nearly as far in how it talks about the consequence of sin as has been common in Christian theology, especially in the West: In this tradition, Genesis 3 forms the basis of the doctrines of the Fall and original sin, which themselves form its whole rationale for the coming of Jesus of Nazareth.
   2. The rest of the Old Testament (and, with a couple minor exceptions, the Bible as a whole) barely mentions this story, and it has carried no significant theological importance in Judaism. To put it more bluntly, Judaism knows no doctrines of either the Fall or original sin.

This means that Western Christianity believes that Jesus came to solve a problem that doesn’t exist in most of the Bible or for its Jewish readers. What’s going on here? For the next three posts, I’ll be looking at this more closely. Today, I’ll trace the interpretation of Genesis 2-3, and ideas about the nature of sin and ‘the human predicament’, throughout the Old Testament, Second Temple Judaism, and the New Testament. Then tomorrow, I’ll post an integral study of the key ‘proof text’ for these doctrines, Romans 5.12-21. Finally, I’ll explore how these ideas developed in the early Church.

The Fall and Original Sin

First, we need to define our terms. Christians today (myself included) tend to use the relevant language loosely, referring to ‘the fall’ as simply the before-and-after of peaceable life in the garden and the harsh realities of life in the world as we know it. Similarly, ‘original sin’ can simply be used to describe the primordial event that sent humanity onto this course. But, in classic Western theology, both Roman Catholic and Reformed, these terms have taken on a specific, tehcnical meaning. Ian McFarland provides a helpful twofold definition of what the Fall and original sin entail:

1. 1. “Adam and Eve’s violation of God’s primordial commandment … caused a fundamental deformation in humanity’s relationship to God, each other, and the rest of creation”
   2. “This ‘fall’ includes among its consequences that all human beings thereafter are born into a state of estrangement from God — an ‘original’ sin that condemns all individuals prior to and apart from their committing ‘actual’ sin in time and space.” (McFarland 29-30)*

Let’s break this down. First, the Fall, as classically defined, understands a “fundamental deformation” within humanity that has marred the image and likeness of God in which we were created and left us categorically unable to fulfill our vocation. So it’s more than the idea that Adam and Eve’s sin had major consequences, but a specific understanding that these consequences include an essential change in human capacity so that we cannot not sin. And second, this fundamental deformation is biologically transmitted so that we are guilty of sin before God — and therefore under a death sentence — from conception, irrespective of our actions. As one advocate puts it:

From childhood, sin pervades our souls (Gen 6:5; 8:21); indeed, we are sinful at birth (Ps 51:5). Human existence dominated by the flesh (sarx) opposes God (see Rom 7:5; 8:3, 9). Sin is innate to postlapsarian [i.e., after the fall] humanity, so we all die. The sin-death nexus also applies to infants, the mentally disabled, and others who cannot commit any actual sins, for sin is a reality that conditions us, antecedent to any thought, word, or deed (Rom 5:15, 17; 1 Cor 15:21). (Madueme 24)

These are very big claims. And proponents of these doctrines believe they are not only biblical, but the clear and obvious teaching of Scripture (Madueme 33). And it’s these claims we need to be thinking about when looking at the ancient evidence. For there is clearly a fall from grace in Genesis 3, and there is clearly an original sin, but what they mean for humanity — that is the question before us.

Genesis 2-3 in the Old Testament

To put it bluntly, there is very little (if any) evidence in the Old Testament to suggest this text has any wider importance. We have mentions of Adam in genealogies later in Genesis and 1 Chronicles, references to Eden and ‘the garden of God’ in Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 51, and, if the serpent is a reference to Leviathan, scattered references to this sea monster. And that’s it. There is no mention of Adam’s link to mortality. And, while sin is certainly a major theme of the Old Testament, there is nothing to suggest a fundamental estrangement between God and humanity (Madueme 14). In fact, in the very next chapter, Adam’s sons are shown being in relationship to God. This is to say nothing of Noah’s faithfulness, God’s covenants with Noah, Abraham, and Moses as the story goes on, and the sending of Judges and Prophets to help guide the people later on. There is nothing in the Old Testament to suggest that the Law and its sacrificial rituals are not sufficient ways of managing sin, or that humans are essentially incapable of right living.

If there is any understanding of a ‘fall’ in the Old Testament, it was far from a major theological concern; and far less is there any evidence of belief in original sin (Green 71, Carr). Sin is universal, yes, but not an insurmountable problem.

Genesis 2-3 in Second Temple Judaism

Things start to change in the Second Temple Period, that long stretch of Jewish history that lasted from the end of the exile (roughly 530 BCE) through until the destruction of the temple at the hands of the Romans in 70 CE (Carr). This period saw both the rise of fanciful reimaginings of biblical stories inspired by Judaism’s encounter with Persian thought, and a new Jewish philosophy inspired by their encounter with Greek thought.

These two broad types of literature from the Second Temple had a lasting impact on ideas about Genesis 3. First, in keeping with the period’s fascination with angels and demons, these texts were the first to associate the serpent of Genesis 3 with Satan (e.g., Wisdom 2.24; Apocalypse of Moses 16.4; 4 Maccabees 18.8). Some also talk about Satan as an envious fallen angel — often a named demon (e.g., Azazel, Satanail, Gadreel) — linked to the mysterious Nephliim or “sons of God” of Genesis 5-6 (Tennant 237, Madueme 14). While none of these ideas can be found in canonical biblical texts, they have nonetheless had a profound impact on how people have thought about the fall, Satan, and sin.

Second, these books are the first to reflect significantly on Adam and Eve and the consequences of their primordial sin. It’s impossible to summarize the ideas of such diverse texts written over such a huge swath of of history, but painting in very broad strokes, they show the emergence of some — but not all — of the ideas that would later inspire the Christian concepts of the fall and original sin. The most common interpretation of Genesis 3 over this period appears to have been that Adam’s sin was the ultimate cause of suffering and sin, but not in a way that was determinative for the rest of humanity (Tennant, Green, MacFarland 30, Carr). We might think of Adam in this view as the first in a series of dominoes (Tennant 238). As a rule, the more emphasis these books place on the devastation wrought by Adam’s sin, the more emphasis they also place on personal responsibility for one’s own sin (e.g., 4 Ezra 7; 2 Baruch 54.19; Pseudo-Philo; and Philo (per Green 66)). 2 Baruch is representative of this view when it says: ”Adam is not the cause, except only for himself, but each of us has become our own Adam” (54.19).

So then, despite the incredible diversity of belief shown in Second Temple Judaism, the standard Western Christian ideas that Adam’s sin has fundamentally altered humanity, left us unable to live righteously and, sealed for eternal damnation are nowhere to be found. What we have instead is what we might call a ‘participatory metaphysic’: All may sin “in Adam” (as Paul would later put it), but only inasmuch as we participate in and perpetuate his sin.

While Judaism would purge itself of much of the diversity that was so characteristic of the Second Temple period following the disastrous wars with Rome towards the end of the first century CE, it’s fair to say that the general summary outlined above has remained true in subsequent Jewish readings of Genesis 3. As Tennant summarized it, rabbinic Judaism ascribed “no diminished freedom of will, no permanent ascendancy of the [inclination towards evil] for all generations … to the first transgression” (Tennant 176). Instead, Adam’s sin is again seen to be representative rather than determinative of human experience, and the rabbis reaffirmed a commitment to personal responsibility to choose rightly according to God’s Law.

Genesis 2-3 in the New Testament

There are enough scattered references to Genesis 2-3 in the New Testament to allow us to say that by the first century CE, the Garden story had taken on a greater, more mythic importance than it had during the period when the Old Testament was being compiled. But even here, the distribution of these references is not even. Apart from the mention of Adam in Luke’s genealogy, there is only one explicit reference to the story in the Gospels: in Matthew 19, where Jesus quotes Genesis 2.24 (along with 1.27) in a teaching about marriage.

All other references are in the Epistles. These come in four general types, with varying degrees of relevance to today’s post:

1. 1. Texts which use the story as a rationale for the maintenance of patriarchy in the Church (1 Corinthians 11.3 and 14.34, 1 Timothy 2.13-14). This is interesting, but not relevant to the questions at hand. (If gender-relations in the New Testament interest you, check out my posts on the household code in Ephesians and on Christian Egalitarianism)
   2. Texts which rework the imagery of Genesis 2-3 for their own purposes (e.g,. the book of Revelation (the tree of life in 2.7 and 22.14, and the serpent in 12.9-15 and 20.2); Romans 8.20 and 16.20)
   3. Texts which compare the Christian struggle against temptation with Adam and Eve’s temptations in the Garden (2 Corinthians 11.3 and James 1.14-15).
   4. Texts which see Jesus as a recapitulation of Adam (Romans 5.12-21 and 1 Corinthians 15.21-22 & 47)

Only types 3 and 4 are relevant to the discussion of the Fall and original sin, which mean that there are really only four texts that reflect on Genesis 3 in relation to the nature of sin. While that’s far from nothing, it’s also far from a major theme!

The 2 Corinthians and James texts are easily understood within the participatory interpretive paradigm we’ve seen so far: Adam and Eve’s sin is representative of humanity as a whole, and so every time we face temptation, we are in a sense making the choice of whether to eat the forbidden fruit for ourselves (Carr). Since these verses are aimed towards people already in the Church, there is no sense here of Christian perfectionism: whatever may happen for and to us ‘in Christ’, we are still subject to the same temptations, and faced with the same choices as every other human in history.

This leaves us with the recapitulation texts. As I’ve previously described it, recapitulation is the notion that “Jesus fulfilled the Scriptures by embodying them, living them out, and, in a very real way, re-doing them. He was humanity’s and Israel’s great do-over, not erasing what had happened before, but bringing it to completion.” The meaning in recapitulation texts, therefore, is in the contrast between Christ and whoever he’s being compared to. In 1 Corinthians 15, the focus is on mortality: Adam introduced death into the world, Christ restores life; Adam came from the dust of the earth, Christ came from heaven. These references can be read in a way that supports the later ideas of the Fall and original sin, but don’t need to be, since recapitulation relies on shared themes rather than on essential, ontological connections (Carr).

But what has been by far the most important text for the later development of Christian theology is Romans 5.12-21. So influential has it been that it needs a dedicated post of its own.

Bracketing that all-important text for the time being, what can we say about all this?

The Genesis 2-3 story had very little influence over the faith and theology of the Old Testament, but grew in importance throughout the Second Temple period. Over the course of these centuries, Adam’s sin came to be thought of as an origin story for physical death, sin and suffering. But this was also coupled with a strong belief in personal responsibility. No one but Adam is condemned by Adam’s sin, but rather we are all our own Adams for ourselves: The same choice Adam and Eve faced in the Garden is before us, each and every day. In the New Testament, the early Christian theology of recapitulation reinforced these ideas: Where Adam failed, Jesus succeeded, opening to us the possibility of a new start ‘in him’. The big theological question remains, however: Are these connections allegorical and participatory, as they are in Jewish thought, or ontological/essential, as they came to be understood in classic Western Christian doctrine? In the next post, we’ll turn to Romans 5.12-21 and see what answers we may be able to glean there.

 

* Please see the series bibliography for more information.