Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Elaine Pagels on Romans 5:12 and “Original Sin”

The Greek text reads, "Through one man [or 'because of one man,'] sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came upon all men, in that all sinned." John Chrysostom, like most Christians, took this to mean that Adam's sin brought death into the world, and death came upon all because "all sinned." But Augustine read the passage in Latin, and so either ignored or was unaware of the connotations of the Greek original; thus he misread the last phrase as referring to Adam. Augustine insisted that it meant that "death came upon all men, in whom all sinned" - that the sin of "one man," Adam, brought upon humanity not only universal death, but also universal, and inevitable, sin. Augustine uses the passage to deny that human beings have free moral choice, which Jews and Christians had traditionally regarded as the birthright of humanity made "in God's image." Augustine decrees, on the contrary, that the whole human race inherited from Adam a nature irreversibly damaged by sin...."
Augustine attempts to rest his case concerning original sin ... upon the evidence of one prepositional phrase in Romans 5:12, insisting that Paul said that death came upon all humanity because of Adam, "in whom all sinned. But Augustine misreads and mistranslates this phrase (which others translate "in that [i.e., because] all sinned") and then proceeds to defend his errors ad infinitum.... Augustine's argument has persuaded the majority of western Catholic and Protestant theologians to agree with him;... But, ... when we actually compare Augustine's interpretation with those of theologians as diverse as Origen, John Chrysostom, and Pelagius, we can see that Augustine found in Romans ... what others had not seen there. (Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, New York: Random House, 1988, pp. 109 and 143 pp. 187-188.)


Less anyone charge that Pagels is a liberal and dismiss her comments above, this is also the position of many other New Testament scholars, such as Joseph Fitzmyer in his commentary on Romans.