This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Let’s review: according to the Westminster Confession, “Our first parents [Adam and Eve] became dead in sin and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.  They being the root of mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed, and the same death in sin and corrupt nature conveyed, to all their posterity…whereby we are all utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil.”

We are, in a word, screwed, and all because of Original Sin.

Perhaps surprisingly, although the story of Adam and Eve is of course biblical, the doctrine of Original Sin is not; it is mentioned nowhere in either the Old or the New Testaments.  Some watered-down version of it is alluded to here and there scripturally, most explicitly by St. Paul, but the developed doctrine itself is not to be found, not even in the Genesis narrative from which it allegedly sprang.¹

The sad tale of Adam and Eve is related in Genesis, a book written some 2500 or so years ago, directly inspired (believers say) by God and written down (believers used to say) by Moses.  Modern scholars and nitpicking skeptics have cast doubt on such claims, but even so Genesis has been and continues to be one of the most influential texts in our history.  Adam and Eve’s misadventure can be read in Genesis 3; I won’t reiterate the familiar tale of the actual transgression (snake, temptation, tasting of fruit from forbidden tree, eyes opened, busted), but let me refresh your memory regarding God’s response:

“To the woman God said, ‘I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children.  Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.’  To Adam he said, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you [not to eat], cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.  It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.  By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.’”

God then provided garments for the naked hominids and banished them from the Garden of Eden, placing cherubim and a flaming sword to protect the garden from any attempts at re-entry.²

I invite anyone to find the doctrine of Original Sin in the above Bible verses.  Where in the text does God say that Adam and Eve’s sin will be transmitted to their descendants in perpetuity?  Even if you assume that God’s curses, delivered to Adam and Eve, are to apply to all their progeny from that day forward, where does it say that they will be afflicted with a new, diminished, and intrinsically sinful nature?  Painful childbirth, yes; a wife’s desire for and submission to her husband, yes; a life of toil and sweat that ends in death, yes.  But nowhere does God pronounce that a seed of evil will henceforth reside in, and rule over, the human heart; nowhere does God say that human nature and the human will are now deformed and gone irrevocably astray.  He doesn’t revoke any “grace-life” previously granted (unless that term refers simply to residing in Eden), and he doesn’t say that the gates of heaven are now closed to mankind.  He simply tells Adam and Eve that they’ve just made their lives (and, let’s assume, the lives of their children) much more difficult.

Okay, then: life is hard.  You don’t need to be a biblical exegete to know that.  And life is even harder than it needs to be because human beings inexplicably undermine themselves and each other; both Man is wolf to man and We have met the enemy and it is us accurately summarize our predicament.  But Original Sin goes further than that; as the Episcopal Articles of Religion (1801) helpfully remind us,

“Original Sin…is the fault and corruption of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the Spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God’s wrath and damnation.”

That seems like kind of a leap from “life is hard”.

So if this developed theological/anthropological doctrine of Original Sin is not elucidated in the Bible: where did it come from?  Was it made up out of whole cloth?  Was it read back into the scriptural text by persons with their own theological axes to grind and their own agendas to pursue?  Would the likes of St. Paul and St. Augustine have taken liberties with Genesis’ foundational narrative?  Would they have claimed knowledge of matters about which Genesis itself—and, so far as Genesis is concerned, God Himself—was silent?

As it happens, and as we'll see, the correct answers are: pretty much; yes; yes; and yes.

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¹ If you’re really determined to find Original Sin in the Bible, you can cite the Book of 2 Esdras, an apocryphal text contained in some Christian (but not Jewish) scriptures: “Thou [God] didst lay upon Adam one commandment of thine; but he transgressed it, and immediately thou didst appoint death for him and for his descendants.” And this: “For the first Adam transgressed and was overcome, as were also all who descended from him.”  You can also find in 2 Esdras this gloomy parody of Psalm 8 (“What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him?”):

“…what is man, that thou art angry with him; or what is a corruptible race, that thou art so bitter against it?  For in truth there is no one among those who have been born who has not acted wickedly, and among those who have existed there is no one who has not transgressed.”

Keep in mind that the Book of 2 Esdras is what is called an “intertestamental” text, part of a group of non-canonical and sometimes disputed writings (the Book of Baruch and the Book of Sirach/Ecclesiasticus are others) whose compositional dates ranged from somewhere in the century before Jesus’ birth to somewhere in the century or so after.  2 Esdras was probably written sometime between 75-100 C.E.; more relevantly, it was written after the destruction of Jerusalem (and the Jewish Temple) by the Romans (70 C.E.)—the Jewish survivors could be forgiven for wailing en masse, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  The Book of 2 Esdras is one long wail of abandonment and despair.  It is as unremittingly pessimistic, even bleak, as anything you’ll find this side of Schopenhauer, and it demonstrates (if nothing else) that the theological/anthropological ideas of St. Paul, assailed in many quarters for their supposed departure from Jewish orthodoxy, were part of the intellectual ferment of the time; they were, so to speak, in the Palestinian air, from which Paul plucked them out and elaborated them—but he did not necessarily invent them.

In any case: Judaism does not teach the doctrine of Original Sin as Christianity came to understand it, and its scriptures (as interpreted by Jewish authorities) do not support it.  As Elie Wiesel wrote: “The concept of original sin is alien to Jewish tradition…Guilt cannot be transmitted.  We are linked to Adam only by his memory [but not] by his sin.”  I'm with Elie on this one.

² Exegetes have long speculated about the location of the Garden and the possibility of rediscovering it; I recommend PARADISE LUST: Searching for the Garden of Eden, by Brook Wilensky-Lanford.