The concept of sin or death as inherited is not mentioned at all by
Paul (84). Of sin he says that it came into the world (eiselthen) and reached
(dielthen) all men. Sin came into the world (Heb. 10:5, eiserchomenos; John
1:9, erchomenon eis ton cosmon). Its power of expansion reached all men, and so
death came to all men. Physical death cannot be the primary meaning of the
universal death which is the consequence of sin Paul uses it in its meaning,
for contemporary Jewish views, as a sign of loss of a life of communion with
God. In verse 21, eternal life (zoe
aionios) is explicitly opposed to death (thanatos). “Death” might be taken in
the whole section as a paraphrase of “sin.” Thus Paul can say at one time that
the sine of Adam had as its consequence the sinfulness (hamartia) of all (v.
12); at another time the death of all (vv. 15, 17); at another time the
judgment (katakrina) of all (v. 18); and the opposite of judgment is “life-giving
justification” (diakaiosis zoes: v. 18). If we were to understand death here as
physical death the Adam-Christ antithesis would lose its points because Christ did not remove physical death from the
world. Moreover, we should not overlook the fact that Paul, in Romans 5:12,
refers to Wisdom 2:24 where as we have seen death means “eschatological death”
(In I. Cor. 15:21f., Paul sees death in the light of the final victory of God’s
kingdom [cf. v. 28])).
The last phrase of verse 12, “eph ho pantes hemarton,”
has played a decisive role in the traditional teaching on original sin. Its
role was determined by the Latin translation “in quo omnes peccaverunt,” “in
whom all have sinned.” “In quo” can only be understood to refer to Adam and
this resulted in the doctrine that in
Adam all men have sinned. From Augustine to humanism, about a thousand years,
this reading was uncontested in the Latin church. Today, Erasmus’ realization
that the Greek “eph ho” has the sense of “because” or “considering that” is generally
accepted. Therefore we should translate this phrase: “Through one man sin entered
in the world and through sin, death, and thus death has passed to all men because all men have sinned.”
Through the sin of Adam death and sin began to
rule in the world. Their power truly brought men under their rule. And because
all men were sinners all became liable to death. Nothing justifies us in
understanding “sin” in the phrase “since all have sinned” other than the way we
have understood it in the first phrase “sin entered the world,” namely, sin as
an evil deed wilfully committed. Even in the rushing torrent of sin the
personal decision of each man was maintained. In reality, the idea of the
passive participation of all Adam’s descendants in the sin of Adam is far from
Paul’s mind, and it is not permissible to read this idea into verse 12 by
understanding “because all have sinned” in the sense of “because all (in Adam)
have become sinful.” The verb hamartano, when used by Paul—or in the entire
Bible for that matter—always carries the sense of an action. Verses 13ff.
cannot be made to say what most exegetes read into it: Between Adam and Moses
there were no formal sins, only material sins which consequently did not count
as sins. Nevertheless, men died; that is, they were punished with Adam’s
punishment for sin, because they, although without personal guilt, shared in
Adam’s sin.
S. Lyonnet has convincingly shown that the
apostle was quite unaware of this modern problem (Recherches de Science Religieuse, 44 [1956], pp. 75-84; Dictionnaire de la Bible, VII, pp.
551-558). His thought is rather this: all men, after Adam sinned, are subject to
death because all have committed sinful deeds (v. 12cd). But we know that
between Adam and Moses there was sin in the world (13a). The objection runs:
without the law, which had then not yet been given, sin could not be imputed to
anyone according to Paul’s own teaching (4:15). We should, then, expect that
men in those times did not die; that is, were not subject to the punishment of
sin (v. 13b). But, in reality, death had power over men in the time between
Adam and Moses, even if they had not, like Adam, acted against a direct
prohibition of God (5:14a). This proves for Paul that there was no time after
Adam at which man did not commit individual, personal sins (hamartesantas).
There seems to be no teaching of original sin here. (Herbert Haag, Is Original Sin in Scripture? [trans.
Dorothy Thompson; New York: Sheed and Ward, 1969], 97-100)