Rom. 5.12 became a very important text for discussion of
these matters vis-à-vis the notion of original sin. The text reads “So it is
that through one human being sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and
thus death spread to all human beings, because all sinned.” Augustine famously
based his interpretation of this text on the Latin Vulgate in quo (in
whom), which was a mistranslation of the Greek εφ ω, which means “in that” and the further problem
is that in Augustine’s Latin translation, the second reference to death is “omitted”
with the result that “sin” rather than “death” becomes the subject of
the verb spread—i.e. “sin spread from Adam to all humanity by generation not by
imitation by all humanity.”
It should be remembered that Augustine is critiquing and
trying to avoid the perceived errors of Pelagius in his letter discussions of Romans.
The upshot of this mistranslation and misreading of Rom. 5.12, coupled with
Augustine’s letter conclusions that Rom. 7 (in light of the mistranslation of Rom.
5.12) must be referring to the plight even of Christians, is that “righteousness”
of any sort is impossible for the fallen human being, since original sin has
been seminally transmitted to the whole human race. Ergo, only imputed
righteousness could remedy this problem. Augustine, as it turns out, was more
nearly right in his earlier reading of Rom. 7 as referring to those outside of
Christ. Luther, the former Augustinian monk, is in fact heavily indebted to
Augustine's letter reading of Rom. 7 and basically reiterates it.
This of course makes no sense at all of Paul the Christian’s
claim, late in life, that in regard to a righteousness that comes from keeping
the Mosaic Law, he was blameless during his pre-Christian days (Phil.
3.6). Apparently, in Paul’s view, human fallenness did not create a situation
of “total depravity” but rather a situation where a person was inclined to sin
and suffered from “the heart turned in upon itself” (self-centeredness), but by
the help of God and his Word and grace could avoid breaking Mosaic Laws, for
this is what blameless means in that sense. It does not mean pure as the
driven snow, it does not mean morally perfect, it does not mean fulfilling all
the positive love commands to the degree God desires. It means avoiding
committing the “thou shalt nots.” And this brings up another problem with the Reformers’
exegesis of Paul, then and in their descendants—they assumed that the Law could
not be kept, that it was impossible to do so. Among other things, this has
never been the view of devout Jews, and is not today. Paul would not be an
advocate that one cannot avoid breaking the Law. But one must remember
that the Mosaic Law does not cover all the things that the Law of Christ does.
It does not cover anger, for example, or adultery of the heart. It allows
various things due to hardness of heart, as we have already seen earlier in
this study, things which are no longer allowed now that Jesus was bringing in God’s
saving reign and realm. (Ben Witherington III, Biblical Theology: The
Convergence of the Canon [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019], 388-89)
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