Ambrosiaster’s work on Rom 5:12 strongly influenced later theologians,
especially Augustine, vis-à-vis the nature of the Fall and Original Sin. For
this reason, people might appreciate the following translation and commentary
by Ambrosiaster on this passage to understand his argumentation (and the argumentation
later used by Augustine et al.):
12Therefore as sin came into the world through
one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men
sinned—
Having already shown how the grace of God has been
given to us through Christ according to the pattern of truth, Paul now expounds
what that pattern of the one God and Father [working] through his one Son
Christ actually is. Because the one Adam (that is, Eve, for she too is Adam)
sinned and affected everyone, so the one Christ, the Son of God, has conquered
sin in everyone. Because he declares the offer of God’s grace toward the human
race in order to reveal these origins of sin, he starts with Adam, who was the
first man to sin, in order to teach us how the providence of the one God has
turned everything around by one [other] man, since it was by one man that the
human race had fallen and been drawn into death. Therefore it is also one man
through whom we have been saved. We owe him the same reverence that we give to
God the Father, which the Father himself desires, as he says elsewhere: He who thus serves Christ is acceptable to
God. For it is written: You shall
worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve.3 So if
Scripture says that we are to serve God alone and also commands us to serve
Christ, [it is clear that] Christ belongs to the unity of God and is not an
inferior or different deity, for although the law admonishes us to serve God
alone, it also says that serving Christ is pleasing to God. Therefore, just as
sin entered into the world through one man and death through sin, so the
condemnation of sin and eternal life has come into the world through the one
Christ, as he goes on to explain.
Paul says that all have sinned in Adam, even
though he really meant the woman, because he was not referring to the
particular person but to the universal human race. For it is clear that all
have sinned in Adam as though in a lump. For being corrupted by sin himself,
all those whom he fathered were born under sin. For that reason we are all
sinners, because we all descend from him. He lost God’s blessing because he
transgressed, and was made unworthy to eat of the tree of life. For that reason
he had to die. Death is the separation of body and soul. There is another death
as well, called the second death, which takes place in hell. We do not suffer
this death as a result of Adam’s sin, but his fall makes it possible for us to
get it by our own sins. Good men were protected from this, as they were only in
hell, but they were still not free, because they could not ascend to heaven.
They were still bound by the sentence meted out in Adam, the seal of which was
broken by the death of Christ. The sentence passed on Adam was that the human
body would decompose on earth, but the soul would be bound by the chains of
hell until it was released. (Ambrosiaster, Commentaries on Romans and 1-2 Corinthians [ed. Thomas C. Oden and
Gerald L. Bray; trans. Gerald L. Bray; Ancient Christian Texts; Downers Grove,
IL: IVP Academic: An Imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2009], 40–41)
Further Reading on Rom 5:12 and the meaning of
