This article is part of a longer thesis, “From Death to Depravity” by Grace Riverbark to be found online at http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=rs_hontheses

INTRODUCTION

In the Modern Western world, there is a loose but popular conception of “original sin.”
Found in Roman Catholicism as well as Protestantism1, this Christian belief generally relies on the belief that human sin and all of its components – death, materiality, and finitude – first occurred during the ‘Fall’ when the first man and woman disobeyed God and ate from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. As a result of their disobedience, Adam and Eve are believed in Western Christianity, from that moment on, to have been doomed to a state of sinfulness. As the descendants of Adam and Eve, humans were then doomed to inherit that sinful nature, and atone for the crime that Adam and the woman had committed. Although humans’ sinful nature would remain, Christ’s death and resurrection were believed to be the solution to this problem.

This is a familiar story and one that most Western peoples, Christian or not, have heard in
some form. Within North American Christianity, it is one of, if not the, most important tenets or
beliefs that drives evangelism and missionary efforts. Yet the popular conception of “original sin”
is grounded in an interpretation of the Genesis creation story that not all Christians have shared.
In fact, it is only one of several. However, because the story has become so engrained in Modern
Western culture, we are not encouraged to investigate the history of the development of this
particular interpretation. This thesis will aim to dispel this problem in order to illustrate how the
popular “original sin” story is not as simple as many of us have been led to believe.

This conception is rather muted in Eastern Orthodoxy where Orthodox tradition has focused on theosis and its possibility for human perfectibility. Though that fact deserves attention and investigation, this paper will focus on the Western conception. The Eastern position has often been summarized in Athanasius’ famous quote that often says to some effect, “God became man in order that men could become gods.”

Beginning in Genesis

For almost two millennia Western Christianity has associated the doctrine of “original sin”
with the book of Genesis. From early church fathers such as Irenaeus, Origen, and Augustine, to
medieval and Reformation theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther, Christianity
has utilized the first four chapters of the first book of the Hebrew Bible in order to search for the
inception and explanation of humanity’s “fallen” nature. Yet Western scholars and laypeople
alike have taken for granted this seemingly obvious connection, failing to take note of the
important subtleties and intricacies within the Genesis story. Despite the presence of two Genesis
accounts of creation, for the sake of this project I will focus primarily on the account in Genesis
3, to which the majority of Christians have looked as the point of the inception of “original sin.”2
Genesis 3 is pertinent to this inquiry because it details God’s command to Adam and Eve as well
as the infamous exchange between the serpent and the woman and its cataclysmic aftermath.
Though Genesis 3 pertains to the Fall of Adam and the woman, it begins with important
information about another one of God’s creatures: the serpent. The serpent is the first character
whom readers encounter when the chapter begins and the text quickly makes it clear that “the
serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made” (Gen 3:1).
This abruptly becomes evident when the serpent asks the woman if God actually told her not to
eat from any of the trees in the garden.

She responds that, though God told them to eat from any of the trees in the garden “God [also] said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die’” (Gen 3:3). It is interesting that God suggests death as a consequence of eating from the tree that is in the middle of the garden in light of how God later deals with Adam and the woman since they do not die at first. Yet it is also a significant aspect of the passage that there is no mention of “sin.” Though it is unclear whether Adam and the woman are immortal at this stage, death seems to be the main concern of the text.

It is this concern that the serpent latches onto when he assures the woman that “You will not surely die” (Gen 3:4), a clever half-truth that the reader can spot later when Adam’s death is recounted in Genesis 5:5. Instead of promising the woman that she will live forever if she eats from the tree, the serpent explains to her that “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes willnbe opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5).

The fact that the serpent emphasizes this last point is the most telling and troublesome for
the “original sin” interpretation of the story. By promising the woman that she will know the
difference between good and evil, the serpent insinuates that she and Adam lack any ability to
judge the difference at the time. Therefore, it is hard to argue that Adam and the woman knew
that it was evil to eat from the tree when it appears that they did not have the concept of such
knowledge, which is in addition to the fact that the serpent was a fellow creature in the garden
whom they had no reason to distrust. There is no mention of Satan in Genesis 3, and it would be
many centuries before later Christians would hold “Satan” responsible for tempting Adam and
the woman. Some rabbinical commentary before Christianity would also theorize that the devil
had played a part in the garden, but Satan would play a tantamount role for Christian
interpretation.

Thus this scene merely illustrates that Adam and the woman do not possess the
knowledge of good and evil, but may desire the knowledge, as well as the greater promise that
this knowledge would imply: being like God. Here once again the story is complicated, since the
serpent does not mention the attraction of disobedience or rebellion. Instead he approaches Adam
and the woman as two children who wish to be adults like their father. This scheme makes the
serpent’s proposition look good and reasonable, but also displays how innocent and childish
Adam and the woman appear to be, and that perhaps their intentions could be good, even though
they are disobedient. When the woman picks the fruit, she gets confirmation of what the serpent
told her: that the fruit was “good for food” (Gen. 3:6), and “a delight to the eyes” (Gen. 3:6), and
that “it was desired to make one wise” (Gen. 3:6). The child-like trust the woman displays in the
serpent also appears between her and Adam “who was with her… and ate” (Gen. 3:6). There is no
trace of suspicion, doubt, or even much deliberation before they eat. They listen to the serpent,
see what he tells them, and they both eat. Then the scene climatically informs the reader that “the
eyes of both were opened” (Gen. 3:7). Nowhere does the text suggest that this implies an onset
of “sin.”

The ramifications of Adam’s and the woman’s decision is initially unclear, but its
importance is underlined. The phrase “the eyes of both were opened” implies a change in seeing
that is both psychological and physical since they quickly realize that they are naked. But it also
lends support to the evidence that neither possessed the sort of rational or perfect intelligence
such as later theologians would assign to them. In fact, their reaction to eating from the tree and
having their eyes opened indicates that they are suddenly embarrassed by their nudity for “they
sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths” (Gen 3:7) as soon as they realized
that they were naked. Whether they are embarrassed because the fruit made them aware of how
little they knew or because they are actually naked is not clear, but it is interesting that they
appear to be more bothered by their nakedness than by what they have done. When God appears
in the garden and calls out to them, Adam replies that “I heard the sound of you in the garden,
and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself” (Gen 3:10). Adam does not say that he
was afraid because he ate from the tree that was forbidden; he was afraid because he was naked.

Curiously enough, God also focuses on their nakedness, but asks a strange question: “Who told
you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”
(Gen. 3: 11). God immediately connects the knowledge of their nakedness with eating from the
tree, but does not draw the conclusion that they have eaten. Instead, he asks who told them of
their nudity. By asking this, the text seems to imply that God was aware of something or
someone possessing the ability to educate Adam and the woman about their condition, and that
he places more blame on that creature than on them. It also implies that God possessed the same
type of hope as a parent who knows his or her child has done something wrong but still hopes
that the child did not. When God asks the woman what she did and she confesses that “’the
serpent deceived me, and I ate’” (Gen. 3:13), God begins doling out punishment. But he does not
begin with Adam or the woman.

The doctrine of “original sin” in the West has often focused on the consequences of
Adam’s and the woman’s decision to eat from the forbidden tree, but has often ignored the
structure of those consequences. God does not punish Adam and the woman as soon as he learns
that they disobeyed Him. Instead, He punishes the serpent, stating that “[b]ecause you have done
this, cursed are you above all livestock, and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall
go and dust you shall eat all the days of your life” (Gen. 3:14). Not only does this suggest that
God physically transformed the serpent as punishment, but he also uses the word “cursed.” He
does not use this form with the woman when He turns to her and assigns her painful childbirth
and subordination to her husband, creating a hierarchy between the two human beings. Neither
does God curse Adam. God proclaims “[b]ecause you have listened to the voice of your woman
and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it’, cursed is the
ground because of you” (Gen. 3:17).

God curses the earth and assigns Adam to its maintenance –
“in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you
return to the ground” (Gen 3: 17-19) – but God does not explicitly “curse” Adam or the woman.
However, God does suggest that death will be a consequence of their actions, reminding Adam
that “out of it [the ground] you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:
19). It is only now that the woman finally receives her name: Hava, the Hebrew word which
connotes “breath” or “life.” In the Septuagint, this would translate as Zoe. After God punishes
them, Adam “called his woman’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. And the
Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them” (Gen. 3:20-21).3
When God expels Adam and the woman from the garden, He curiously adds the observation,
“Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his
hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever-” (Gen. 3:22), implying that
without the tree of life Adam and the woman will eventually die. Because of their decision, God
seems to doom them to mortal lives full of suffering and hardship but again, nowhere does He
mention sin.

The language of sin eventually does appear in Genesis, but not until Chapter 4. Here the
narrative introduces the term and also echoes language from Chapter 3, although in much
different circumstances. Sin comes into the conversation when God speaks to Cain, warning him,
“And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule
over it” (Gen. 4:7-8). This passage is striking for two reasons. First, it repeats the words that God
used when he punished Eve and declared that Adam “shall rule over you” (Gen. 3: 16),
indicating a hierarchical aspect between Cain and sin that proceeds the relationship between
Adam and Eve. Second and more importantly, God mentions sin as a personified notion. Not
only does this present a problem for the “original sin” doctrine that emphasized the presence of
sin in Genesis 3, but it also contrasts directly with the idea of sin as a state of being. If Cain had
inherited sin from Adam, it is hard to understand why God would describe sin as a lurking
presence that could be ignored. Instead, the Genesis narrative seems much more concerned with
death and pain, as Abel’s murder sets off a violent chain of subsequent events.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Genesis complicate the emerging concept of sin because of the
questions they present as the violence on earth escalates exponentially. Was sin unnamed in
Chapter 3 because Adam’s and the woman’s mistake was the first? Was this why God was then
able to warn Cain about it in Chapter 4? What is the connection between sin, death, and mortality?
These are the questions with which the Genesis story leaves us, and that would later obsess
Christian theologians, as the scripture tells a story of increasing corruption and violence. Though
it is unclear whether Adam and Eve brought sin into the world, the text seems to imply that their
decision, and then their son Cain’s crime, produce a cumulative effect in which sin, death, and
mortality increase exponentially. After Cain murders his brother, God punishes him much more
harshly than he did Cain’s parents. God admonishes Cain “[t]hat the voice of your brother’s blood
is crying to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its
mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand” (Gen. 4:10-11).

Echoing Chapter 3, God uses the word “curse” again, but now directs it at Cain instead of the ground, as he had done with Adam. This shift in orientation of God’s curses towards humanity becomes more explicit as God’s anger seems to grow. Two chapters later, God declares “My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years” (Gen. 6:3). After shortening man’s lifespan, the text then describes that God saw “that the wickedness of man was great on earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his [man’s] heart was only evil continually. And the Lord
regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Gen. 6:5-6). This regret at his creation is so totalising that God only spares Noah, his immediate family, and two of every animal when he decides to wipe out the rest of creation with the flood.

The flood that God uses to destroy mankind in Genesis 7 returns to the questions with
which Genesis had left us in chapters 4, 5, and 6. The text could have been implying a narrative
of decadence, that the emergence of sin had not only brought mortality and death into the world
which only increased as man sinned more and more, but also tainted the material world and
material beings. This would certainly become a popular interpretation with many later Christian
theologians such as Martin Luther, but it would also become a significant interpretation for early
Gnostic Christians, many of whom would argue that this Genesis narrative supported their belief
that the material world was corrupt and evil. Thus one needed to escape his or her decadent and
corrupt material body as well as the world in order to return to a more divine or spiritual state.
This certainly makes some sense logically, but ironically, this would not become the dominant
interpretation of what would become “orthodoxy.” The relationship between sin, materiality, and
death that puzzle us would also puzzle early Christians and would actually fuel the theological
conflicts of the early church that would eventually lead to the dominant Augustinian
interpretation of “original sin.”

In my reading, the text leaves us with six questions that Augustine and subsequent thinkers would attempt to answer: 1) why is the woman unnamed?; 2) How is the serpent convincing?; 3) When does death enter the scene?; 4) Why is nudity a marker?; 5) Why do things degenerate so rapidly?; and 6) When precisely does sin enter the story?

Sin, the Battle over Materiality, and Augustine’s Solution

As Christians sought to make sense of Christ’s place in human history and his connection
to the Hebrew God, the Genesis narrative within the Septuagint drove many theologians’ attempt
to understand the relationship between Christ and the combination of sin, materiality, and death.
Yet early Christians were not unanimous in their interpretations and it was out of their debates
that ‘orthodox’ theology eventually emerged. Irenaeus (130-202), the 2nd century CE bishop of
Lyons, was one of the first early Christians to summarize the implications of this debate.
Primarily concerned with refuting Gnostic interpretations of Christ’s purpose and incarnation,
especially those which denied “the whole dispensation of God, and den[ied] the salvation of the
flesh and reject[ed] its rebirth, saying that it [was] not capable of incorruption,”4

Irenaeus saw Genesis as the beginning of the story of God’s plan for the redemption of the entire material world, especially human beings.

Emphasizing Adam’s and the woman’s child-like understanding, Irenaeus argued that God
utilized the sin that they had committed as the impetus for redemption and human deification.
Believing that “the human creature was not made from the beginning in its final perfection but
were rather ‘like children,’”5

Irenaeus took into account Adam’s and the woman’s ignorance and did not fault them for being evil or willfully disobedient. Irenaeus instead argued that the woman “had been wickedly seduced… by the word of an angel to flee from God,”6 therefore, placing more blame on Satan than on Eve for the emergence of sin.

Irenaeus further argued that despite the bleak consequences of Adam’s and the woman’s
decision, God used their mistake to conquer death once and for all through Christ. Painting
Genesis 3 as an opportunity for ultimate communion rather than as the end of paradise, Irenaeus
believed that:

The enemy [Satan] would not have been justly conquered unless it had been a man [made]
of woman who conquered him. For it was by a woman that he had power over man from
the beginning, setting himself up in opposition to man. Because of this the Lord also
declares himself to be the Son of Man, so renewing in himself that primal man from
whom the formation [of man] by woman began, that as our race went down to death by a
man who was conquered we might ascend again to life by a man who overcame; and as
death won the palm of victory over us by a man, so we might by a man receive the palm
of victory over death.7

Irenaeus explicitly rejected not only the Gnostic beliefs that Christ had come in order to
save humans from materiality, but also the teachings of men such as Marcion and Cerdon who
taught that the God of the Old Testament was either evil or at least not the father of Christ.
Understandably, many were attracted to these views because it seemed to make sense. How
could the God who had destroyed mankind and displayed so much anger towards his creation be
connected to Christ? However, Irenaeus took great pains to refute this argument by drawing a
holistic picture of God’s plan for humanity that started in Genesis and culminated in Christ.
Significantly devoted to God’s plans for reconciliation with his human creation, Irenaeus’
interpretation was not only in favor of recovering the material world but would also remain the
more prevalent interpretation within Eastern Orthodoxy.8

However, despite Irenaeus’ assurance of the validity of his interpretation of Genesis, he
was not the only early Christian thinker to wrestle with the creation story. Origen of Alexandria
(184/5-253/4), a major (albeit controversial) Christian theologian who wrote in the 3rd century
CE, interpreted Genesis through a much more dualistic lens. Utilizing Platonic themes most
noticeably found in the Phaedrus, Origen believed that the two Genesis accounts of creation
actually described two creations. Genesis 1 recalled God’s creation of spiritual beings who had
sinned and then fallen to earth, embodied as material beings in a sort of solid creation. These
material beings were those in Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 who retained their immortal souls but
were trapped in material bodies. Origen emphasized “’that the life of the soul did not begin when
the soul was joined to the body’ but that the soul had preexisted and had fallen in that earlier state
[Genesis 1].”9

Christ, on the other hand, was the only soul that had not fallen and therefore, it was that much more significant that he had voluntarily taken on a material body. Origen did not necessarily see materiality as evil but he did see it as inferior to the spiritual and rational essence of the soul. Whereas Irenaeus had stressed the redemption of the material body, Origen believed that the eventual physical resurrection of humans was simply “an allegory for the teaching that ‘in the body there lies a certain principle which is not corrupted from which the body is raised in corruption’ – not the same body that died, but a body appropriate to the new and immortal life.”10

Though some praised Origen for noticing the differences between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2-3,
many criticized these beliefs as too Platonic and dualistic by placing too much emphasis on an
immortal soul in contrast to the soul in relation to the body. Once again, the issues over the
creation account in Genesis and its relation to the spiritual value of the material world caused
serious conflict. Though Origen was a skillful reader of the Bible, they were interpretations such
as these that would continue fueling the theological battle over what constituted “orthodox”
Christianity.

While some Christians debated what sin, redemption, and materiality meant through
Genesis, others battled over this concern in relation to Christ’s birth and baptism. In his survey of
Christian anthropology, scholar Jaroslav Pelikan highlights the problems of Christ’s birth and
infant baptism for early Christians. If sin, death, and materiality affected all human beings, then
how did sin spread and why had it not infected Christ? Church fathers such as Cyprian (200-258),
the 3rd century bishop of Carthage, argued that the baptism of infants proved that even children
had to atone for some inherited sin if they were baptized, implying that sin somehow passed
from generation to generation and thus, affected even babies. Later, Ambrose (340-397), the 4th
century bishop of Milan, emphasized that Christ had to be born to a virgin in order to remain free
from sin because it passed through sexual relations.11

These connections between birth, sex, and sin tipped the scales against materiality and led some to embrace Neo-Platonism, arguing that man was made in God’s image not in regard to his body but to his rational mind which was immaterial, or Manichaeism, which “taught that the begetting of men took place in the ‘madness and intemperance’ of sexual lust and that therefore it was blasphemous to suppose that ‘God form[ed] us according to his own image’ through the madness and lust of our parents.”12

Yet these debates caused concerns not only for the understanding of Christ’s incarnation but also the
church itself. These theological conflicts had been going on long before Augustine converted and
indubitably had an effect on him as he began writing and preaching. Yet although these debates
had affected Augustine and he himself had been seriously involved in both Neo-Platonist and
Manichaean groups, his solution to these questions would produce a creative explanation of
Genesis that would inspire the “original sin” doctrine so distinct from that of his predecessors.

Amid his own experiences as a young man, later a bishop in the midst of constant
theological conflict, and an unstable political environment in 5th century Carthage, Augustine
developed his “original sin” formulation. All of these aspects – his life, the contemporary
theological debates, and the environment in North Africa – had a tremendous effect on how
Augustine would conceive of sin and its origins, and we must investigate each to understand how
he came to his conclusions, as well as what his conclusions actually were. By now it is no secret,
partially because of his own Confessions, that Augustine had been a typical upwardly aspiring
Roman man prior to becoming a Christian. His previous relationships as a young man,
particularly with his long-time mistress and highly educated male friends, colored some of his
attitudes towards women and sex.

Like many of his mentors, conversion was problematic when it meant that Augustine could no longer live as he once had. As a bishop, “[h]e imposed strict codes of sexual avoidance on himself and his own clergy… [and he] would never visit a womanunchaperoned, and did not allow even his own female relatives to enter the bishop’s palace.”13

Like the debate over materiality, sexuality was a source of confusion, given its relationship to women. The question of sexuality and its place or purpose for Christians, complicated these debates, and Augustine was certainly not immune. His own participation in the Manichean and Neo-Platonist groups prior to becoming a more “orthodox” Christian certainly attest to the fact that Augustine had complex feelings concerning human sexuality. But the part sex would play in
his doctrine of “original sin” and the long-standing debate over materiality was not as simple as the issue has often been characterized.

Augustine’s doctrine of “original sin” relied on what he perceived to be the essential
human deficiency: the corruption of the human will. In his exhaustive analysis of sexuality and
early Christians, Peter Brown’s book, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual
Renunciation in Early Christianity, illuminates how Augustine saw nothing inherently wrong with sex or reproduction but rather saw the sexual instinct as corrupt because it clashed with the will of God. For Augustine, “[t]he uncontrollable elements in sexual desire revealed the working in the human person of a concupiscentia carnis, of a permanent flaw in the soul that tilted it irrevocably towards the flesh.”14 Yet concupiscence was “such a peculiarly tragic affliction to
Augustine precisely because it had so little to do with the body… [and more to do] with a lasting
distortion of the soul itself.”15

Shockingly, unlike many of his contemporaries, Augustine’s doctrine was not anti-materialist or anti-sexual. Instead, by making a psychological connection between sex and the soul, in which sex was merely a symptom and not the problem, Augustine placed the responsibility for man’s ills on the will and not in the body. Sex merely symbolized the consequences of “original sin” as the evidence of how far the will had departed from following God. The sexual drive no longer followed the divine will but “spoke, with terrible precision, of one single, decisive event within the soul. It echoed in the body the unalterable consequence of mankind’s first sin.” 16 Augustine saw Adam’s and the woman’s decisions to eat from the tree in the garden as the moment when the human will had become corrupt because they had abused their free will. Augustine argued:

Human nature was certainly originally created blameless and without any fault (vitium);
but the human nature by which each one of us is now born of Adam requires a physician,
because it is not healthy. All the good things, which it has by its conception, life, senses,
and mind, it has from God, its creator and maker. But the weakness which darkens and
disables these good natural qualities, as a result of which that nature needs enlightenment
and healing, did not come from the blameless maker but from from original sin (ex
originali peccato), which was committed by free will (liberum arbitrium).17

What was so mournful about sexuality for Augustine, was that it was a constant reminder
of man’s departure from God, of the Fall. The body and sex were not evil but they were also not
what they had originally been when man’s will had acted in accord with God’s. In this regard,
however, though Augustine emphasized that the Fall twisted the human will and not sex,
marriage, or the body, his wariness towards human sexuality in the fallen state “opened the
sluice-gates of Latin Christian literature, quite as drastically as had Jerome… [letting] in the hard
male puritanism that Romans relished in their ancestors and in their favorite authors.”18
Augustine’s emphasis on the human will echoed the arguments of Stoic thinkers who had
elevated the human will as the center of moral decision-making and rationality. And though the
Stoics did not believe that the will was deficient, nor in “original sin,” their belief in the
capabilities of the human will made many of them suspicious of passionate emotions such as
violent anger or overwhelming sexual desire.

This partnership with Stoicism in some ways negated what Augustine had done for the discussion of materiality and sexuality since it “created a darkened humanism that linked the pre-Christian past to the Christian present in a common distrust of sexual pleasure,”19 and influenced much of the later Western Church’s views toward women and sexuality. But this application of Stoicism to Christianity by emphasizing the human will highlighted the emerging culture in which Augustine developed his ideas about “original sin.”

Augustine’s insistence that “original sin” had corrupted the will spoke of an uneasy social
climate in which Christians like Augustine were beginning to form a Christian culture that would
not merely live within the Roman Empire but adopt it. Augustine saw that the consequences of
the Fall were in full evidence as he witnessed the theological dissension and growing threat of
barbarian invasions disrupt the North African churches. He was so upset by the inner conflict
within the church and its inability to reach cohesion that he increasingly saw merit in bringing
the order and force of the Roman government to the church. Believing “that the structures of
authority that gave cohesion to profane society might be called upon to support the Catholic
church… [and could] bring them [the people] into the unity of the Catholic Church,”20 Augustine
displayed a political and social component to his thought. Before “original sin” had contaminated
the will man would have lived in a perfect society, but because of sin men and women “were all
by birth citizens of Babylon.”21 And just as the corrupted human will necessitated the Church,
the Church needed the strength and authority of the empire. “Original sin” and its corruption of
the human will required this marriage between the Church and the power structures of the
Roman Empire. As Brown summarizes:

Only by baptism and by incorporation into the Catholic Church, a church whose basilicas
were now plainly visible in every city of the Roman world, and whose hierarchy
embraced and disciplined all forms of Christian life, would human beings be enabled to
join the one city of which Glorious things might be spoken: the Heavenly Jerusalem, the
City of God.22

In this “City of God,” the corrupt human will divorced from its reliance on God could be
repaired and “the freedom of that city [would] be one single will present in everyone free from
all evil and filled with every good.”23 But in order to get to this heavenly kingdom, the people
would need the Church and the Empire working in tandem. This emphasis on the corrupted human will, its full representation in human sexuality, and the necessity of a politically
empowered church to guide it, would drive the dominant interpretation of “original sin,” and thus
of Genesis 3, in the Western church for many centuries.

Though it has been widely discussed in previous scholarship, we should not
underestimate other key aspects of Augustine’s doctrine that would become integral to the
Western Church’s understanding of sin. Just as Augustine’s “original sin” doctrine was a response
to the debate over materiality, it was also a response to the debate over grace and free will.
Arguing extensively against Pelagius (354-420), an ascetic monk from 4th century Britain,
Augustine’s emphasis on the corruption of the human will intended to combat Pelagius’ ideas that
one could be fully autonomous in one’s salvation, meaning that God had created human beings
with the ability to choose good or evil. Augustine adamantly refuted this. Not only were humans
“in possession of a will that was corrupted and tainted by sin, and which biased them toward evil
and away from God,”24 but they were also “now contaminated by sin from the moment of their
birth.”25 Augustine underlined the inevitability of a corrupt will with the emphasis that humans
inherited “original sin” from Adam and the woman, a reasoning he gained from a Latin
translation of Romans 5:12 that his opponents argued was an incorrect translation of the original
Greek, which he did not know. Like Ambrosiaster (d. 397) before him, Augustine believed that
“a reference to ‘in that all have sinned’ [meant] ‘in whom (that is, Adam) all have sinned.”26 By
utilizing this interpretation of Paul’s Greek in the letter to the Romans, Augustine persuasively
argued that humans could not claim responsibility for their salvation because they had not only
inherited death but sin as well, and thus a corrupt will, from Adam. This is significant not only
because it reveals how important translations are to theology and the emerging conception of
“original sin,” as I mentioned in the Introduction, but also because Augustine’s assurance that the
corrupted human will was inherited, and therefore impossible to overcome without divine
assistance, would dominate the Western Church’s stance toward sin as well as continue to drive
theological debate long after Augustine’s death.

For the sake of this paper, it is important that I summarize how Augustine attempted to
answer some of the questions with which we were left after reading Genesis 3. Although he did
not answer all of them, Augustine’s writings do provide enough insight to answer some questions.
Though he never seems to address the fact that the woman is unnamed in Genesis 3 until after
the Fall, Augustine’s wariness towards sexuality and women was evident in that he regarded
“how necessary woman was for the tempter.”27 The fact that the woman was unnamed was
irrelevant; what was relevant was that she was female and had tempted Adam into eating from
the tree and thus helped gender “original sin.” This would only make it more significant and
imperative that Mary had to be a virgin in order to give birth to Christ. If Christ was the new
Adam then Mary was the new Eve, a theological belief that would be important later on for
Martin Luther. As to when sin entered the scene in Genesis, Augustine felt confident that sin was
already present in Genesis 3, when Adam and the woman abused their free will and disobeyed
God. From that moment on, the human will had been corrupted and humans had no choice but to
sin. For Augustine, this could also perhaps explain why the world in Genesis degenerated so
quickly; human beings’ inability to avoid sin led them to make decisions that were completely
opposed to God’s will, and thus bad for the world overall. However, Augustine’s attempts to
answer these questions did not end the theological debates about Genesis 3 concerning themeaning of sin, materiality, and death. Though the Western Church would adopt much of Augustinian thought, thinkers like Thomas Aquinas would provide new insight and new interpretations.

References

1. The word ‘sin’ itself presents an interesting challenge. I began this project after learning
that the Greek word which is often translated as “sin” in the New Testament, hamartia, has mostly been translated in Aristotle’s Poetics as a “missing of the mark.” This investigation into
the older Greek philosophical understanding of hamartia – as seen in Aristotle’s Poetics – and its
theological implications ultimately led to the realization that many of sin’s linguistic counterparts
also presented similar challenges. ‘Sin’ does not have the same semantic range in Hebrew (chet),
Greek (hamartia), or Latin (peccatum) as it does in Modern English, and since every translation
is also an interpretation, these differences may have led to different interpretations of the Genesis
creation story. Although the most famous and influential early Christian theologian, Augustine,
receives credit for developing the interpretation of the Fall as most Western Christians conceive
of it, he was not the only thinker who attempted to make sense of the Genesis story at the time.
As the translational differences and discrepancies among these four languages suggest, there may
be many ways to read the story of Adam and the woman in the garden and thus, the very idea of
“original sin.” For the purposes of this paper, I will examine the Genesis creation story in
chapters 3-6 and trace the origins of the idea that “original sin” appeared in Chapter 3, through a
reception history involving four major thinkers who have contributed to the current popular
understanding, or aimed to dismantle and change it: Augustine of Hippo (354-430), Thomas
Aquinas (1225- 1274), Martin Luther (1483-1546), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).
Through this examination of the biblical text and these four important thinkers, I will illustrate
how “original sin” as an idea developed through Western Christian theological controversy, and
hope to display how the current understanding of “original sin” is one that has changed and may
continue to change, over time.
2. This paper is fully aware of the effects translations can have on interpretations, and for that reason, I have consulted numerous texts. Though I have primarily relied on the English Standard Version Bible for continuity, I have also consulted the Latin Vulgate and two versions of the Torah, which are listed in the bibliography.
3. The implications in this simple sentence are quite interesting since one must wonder where God procured animal skins. This could very possibly be the first instance of death in the story, since God must have killed some of his animals in order to use their skins.
4. Irenaeus. “Selections from the Work Against Heresies by Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons: ‘The Refutation and Overthrow of the Knowledge Falsely So Called.’” Early Christian Fathers. Cyril C. Richardson, ed. New York:Touchstone, 1996. 387.
5. Justo L. Gonzalez. The Story of Christianity: Volume 1: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation. San
Francisco: Harper, 1984. 69.
6. Irenaeus. “Selections from the Work Against Heresies by Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons: ‘The Refutation and
Overthrow of the Knowledge Falsely So Called.’” Early Christian Fathers. Cyril C. Richardson, ed. New York: Touchstone, 1996. 389.
7 Ibid, 391.
8 See Timothy Ware’s The Orthodox Church. London: Penguin Books, 1997. 219-224. Ware’s illustration of the Eastern Orthodox interpretation of “original sin” makes it clear that the Eastern and Western churches seriously departed in some of their views of Genesis and the definition of sin, particularly pertaining to its legal and/or genetic nature. The Orthodox Church not only retains more of the Irenaeus interpretation but also relies more closely on the original Greek word hamartia “missing the mark” in order to understand the purpose of the Christian life which is theosis.

9 Jaroslav Pelikan. The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine – 1: The Emergence of the
Catholic Tradition (100-600). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971. 48.
10Ibid
13Peter Brown. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1988. 396.
14Ibid, 418.
15Ibid.
16Ibid, 422.

17Augustine. “Augustine on Fallen Human Nature.” The Christian Theology Reader. Ed. Alister McGrath. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1995. 219.
18Peter Brown. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1988. 423.
19Ibid, 426.
20Ibid, 398.
21Ibid, 427.
22Ibid.
23 Augustine. “Augustine on Human Freedom.” The Christian Theology Reader. Ed. Alister McGrath. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1995. 220.
24 Alister McGrath. Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1998. 35.
25Ibid.
26Ambrosiaster. “Ambrosiaster on Original Sin.” The Christian Theology Reader. Ed. Alister McGrath. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1995. 216.
27Augustine. “Patience.” The Fathers of the Church: Saint Augustine – Treatises on Various Subjects (Vol. 14). Ed.
Roy J. Deferrari. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1952. 246. Online.
21
27Augustine. “Patience.” The Fathers of the Church: Saint Augustine – Treatises on Various Subjects (Vol. 14). Ed.
Roy J. Deferrari. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1952. 246. Online.
21
meaning of sin, materiality, and death. Though the Western Church would adopt much of
Augustinian thought, thinkers like Thomas Aquinas would provide new insight and new
interpretations.