Commenting on Rom 5:12, a common proof-text for various theories of “Original Sin,” Frederick R. Tennant wrote:
Sin “entered into the world” (The same phrase is used in Wisdom, and was perhaps a common formula), S. Paul says, by one man and death through sin; and so,” i.e. through the sin of one and through the causal connexion just asserted to exist between sin and death, “death made its way to all men because all sin” (καὶ οὕτως εἰς πάντας ἀνθρώπους ὁ θάνατος διῆλθεν, ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον). The difficulty of the passage centres in this, its first verse; but its purport cannot be apprehended until these words be taken in connexion with verses 18 and 19, in which the thought, long delayed by parentheses, at last completes itself by means of an anacoluthon. This difficulty consists in the ambiguity of the words ‘all sinned’ their connexion with ‘so’ (οὕτως), and the relation of the whole verse to those which immediately follow. It is assumed here that ‘because’ is the only satisfactory rendering of ἐφ᾽ ᾧ; this is now very generally, though not quite universally, recognised.
The rendering of S. Augustine and the Vulgate, which would regard ἐφ᾽ ᾧ as grammatically equivalent to in quo, is abandoned. (Frederick R. Tennant, The Sources of the Doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin [New York Shocken Books, 1968], 255-56)
