Wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things. For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her. For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness.

BOOK OF WISDOM 7:24–25

POPULAR VISIONS OF Jesus’s era portray the Jewish world of his time as overrun with doomsday cults, as a desperate people awaited each new prophetic revelation. In such accounts, the main debate appears to be over which of the various messianic candidates was authentic and how occupying regimes might be overthrown. Yet alongside all the overheated talk of revolution and apocalypse, this same era also witnessed far-reaching philosophical and mystical speculations.

Parallel to the obsession with the End Times was a passionate exploration of the very beginnings of the universe and of humanity. That issue might not seem too mysterious given the explicit statements found at the very start of all Bibles, in the book of Genesis. In Hebrew that book takes its name from its opening word Bereshith, “In the beginning,” and it tells how God created Heaven and earth and all living creatures before forming humanity. The story then moves immediately to those first humans and how they were expelled from the idyllic Garden. Once we get to the story of humanity, the account is much more open to interpretation, and Jews do not accept the Christian concept of Adam’s Fall. But the basic story of “In the Beginning” was, surely, clear and consistent in its emphasis on God’s guiding role.

However straightforward that all seemed, very few aspects of that Creation story could easily withstand the intellectual challenges that arose from Greek philosophy during the Crucible era. In multiple ways, Greek assumptions made it unthinkable that a single transcendent deity could have created the material universe in anything like the way portrayed in Genesis. But if not the one true God, who or what might have performed the act of Creation? Was it possible to tell the Creation story in an intellectually credible way without hypothesizing another lesser Creator figure, who would in effect become a second God? Similarly, the biblical story told of a perfect Creation that had fallen into sin, but again such a story invited mockery in the Greek intellectual ambience. The whole idea of creating humanity had to be rethought in an age that increasingly separated material and spiritual realities and viewed matter as inferior. Surely, one good God could not really have created both aspects of humanity, the noble spirit and the defective material flesh? Must we then imagine a second Adam as well as a second God?

In order to defend their religion in a cosmopolitan world, Jews had to reimagine that Genesis story in wholly new ways, applying new intellectual categories. As elements of the biblical story were thoroughly reinterpreted, they gained a fundamental importance that they had previously never held. The once marginal mythology of Adam, his family, and the Garden of Eden moved to center stage in religious discourse. The long-popular genre of Wisdom literature, which had taught ethical precepts and practical ways of living, now evolved to give divine Wisdom an essential intermediary role in the Creation.

At first sight, these philosophical speculations seem to belong to a different intellectual universe from the apocalyptic writings, but in fact they did not. Often, the two themes were explored in nearly related works, so that wisdom and apocalyptic were often closely, and surprisingly, intertwined. Viewing matters through the new Greek philosophical lens, moreover, gave a vast additional significance to such concepts as angels, the Messiah, and Satan. Those very different concerns ultimately merged to create the worldview that survives especially in Christianity, but was once still more widespread. No later than the first century BCE, we can already trace most of the motifs and controversies that would dominate Jewish and Christian theologies and controversies over the coming centuries.1

PREVIOUS CHAPTERS HAVE stressed the role of political conflict in forcing the rapid development of End Times imagery. But other confrontations demanded the thorough revision of assumptions about the Creation, with all the theological rethinking such a task demanded. In this instance, the transformation of Jewish thought cannot solely be explained in terms of internal evolution. Encounters with Greek culture brought confrontations of philosophy and language, posing challenges that destabilized the intellectual status quo.2

The heady new doctrines and approaches to religious life grew out of the conflict between Jewish and Greek understandings, but these interactions were quite different from how they are imagined in modern stereotypes. Modern-day Christians and Jews imagine their ancient predecessors trying to take their exalted view of the one true God to ignorant polytheists and trying to rid them of their silly pagan superstitions. For the educated Greek world, though, it was rather the conventional construction of the Jewish (and later Christian) deity that was so self-evidently primitive as to be embarrassing. The problem did not lie with accepting the reality of such familiar figures of popular religion as Zeus, Dionysus, and Herakles. At this time, any learned Greek would have happily accepted that these figures were symbolic manifestations of the divine, just handy totems of vulgar faith. The real problem was more fundamental. Greek philosophy made it all but impossible to reconcile the transcendence of God, as they understood it, with a deity who created and ruled the material universe—in short, with a deity anything like that portrayed in the Hebrew Bible.

The ambitious intellectual advances of the Hellenistic era were nowhere more evident than in philosophy. The most influential thinker of the time was Plato (ca. 428–348 BCE). After his death, his Academy lasted into the first century CE. Platonism moved through various phases, as identified and named by modern scholars. Middle Platonism, which prevailed from the end of the second century BCE through the early third century CE, was an eclectic system that built on the insights of other schools of thought, including the Stoics, Pythagoreans, and Aristotelians. The greatest representative of this school was Plutarch in the first century CE.3

These schools developed core themes that stemmed from Plato’s writings. Most centrally, this meant the novel and revolutionary distinction that Plato had drawn between worldly reality, the world of the body and perception, and the nonvisible nonmaterial realm of Ideas. Humans have both a visible material body and an incorporeal soul. So fundamental has that matter-spirit distinction become to us that it seems incredible that anyone could ever have invented it at a given historical moment. Linked to this Platonic approach is the theme of the soul being imprisoned in the body, from which it needs liberation. Plato’s thought portrayed hierarchies of reality and perfection, the idea that the visible, changeable, material world is only an image of a higher and authentic reality, which does not change. Visible things are images of higher Forms. Platonic writings are suffused with the language of images and shadows, reflections and resemblances.

Greek thinkers in this era had no difficulty accepting views that to us seem like pure monotheism, imagining one transcendent deity over all things. There was an absolute One that could only be described in terms of negatives—immovable, impassible, unchangeable—and material things existed only as shadow images of ideal forms within that One. But the One was not a creator. Of its unchangeable and immovable nature, the transcendent One could have had nothing to do with the lower realms of change and motion. Plato portrayed the creation of the world through a lesser being, the Craftsman or Demiurge (demiourgos), who shaped the material world. The Demiurge also created a world-soul (psyche tou kosmou). That Demiurge was neither evil nor malicious, but because he was in motion, he was inferior to the perfect First God, and that accounted for the imperfection of his material creation. The universe was derived from these two principles: the One, God or the Monad, and the Dyad, which is matter. Such lesser figures as the Demiurge and the World-Soul were divine but not absolute, and that distinction was unavoidable.⁴

But could this be reconciled with the strict monotheism that was, and is, the absolute foundation of Judaism? The Bible made it easy to identify the Jewish God as the transcendent One who reigned above all, and Jews had no hesitation in claiming that identification. But that same Bible also declared that that same God was directly involved in creation and interfered in that worldly process, personally and repeatedly. God acted in history. From a Greek perspective, this was not merely absurd but actively scandalous. Worse, this same deity was so far from being impassible and unchangeable that he actually felt emotions. That was the behavior of a primitive tribal god, who might similarly show anger, jealousy, or affection. It was much like treating the Greek fables of Zeus or Hera as serious theology. Jews could, of course, ignore Platonism and the other Greek philosophies, but if they did, they were abandoning any claim to a place in civilized society—not in Alexandria or Antioch or in many lesser cities. And the Maccabean revolution, which rejected assimilation, assuredly did not end the appeal of Greek learning for large sections of the elites within Jerusalem itself.

Somehow, Jewish thinkers had to find ways of reconciling competing views of the divine, and two solutions offered themselves: either they had to portray God in a Platonic mode yet somehow explain how he could have created the material universe, or, alternatively, they must deny God’s responsibility for that Creation. At different times, thinkers followed both courses. However radical it may sound, some did teach a denial of divine responsibility (we will return to these ideas in Chapter 11). Such theories would become the basis of outright Gnostic and dualist movements that preached a conflict between Spirit and Matter.5

IN SEEKING AN intermediary Creator, two closely related candidates readily came to mind, namely, Wisdom and the Word. The figure of Wisdom was well known in the literatures of most Near Eastern societies, usually as the source of proverbial sayings and aphorisms that to modern eyes often look conventional and staid. Egypt had its wisdom literature, as did Babylonia, and so too did the Hebrews. In each case, Wisdom usually meant the sound practical knowledge of the world acquired through lengthy experience. Over time, Wisdom (hokmah) became a much more exalted figure in the Jewish context and was moreover represented as an individual force or figure, closely associated with God himself and with the act of Creation. Sometimes the writer is using that personification as a simple metaphor, but from the fourth and third centuries BCE onward, Wisdom acquires a more substantial identity as a real being, and moreover as a feminine figure. It is rarely easy to distinguish between these varied uses and implications of the Wisdom figure, all the more so as some of the more mystical “Wisdom” texts also continue to present the old saws and aphorisms.6

This dilemma is evident in the biblical book of Proverbs, which originated in the fourth or third centuries BCE and which later writers attributed to Solomon. Most of the book consists of proverbs in our common sense of the term, many of which entered conventional language (“As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool returns to his folly” [26:11]). Unfortunately, at least a half-dozen passages from Proverbs have been cited through the centuries as justifying or demanding the corporal punishment of children, which makes the text unattractive to modern readers (“He that spareth his rod hateth his son”). Yet amid the clichés, the text gloriously proclaims, “The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath he established the heavens.” In a famous poem in the book’s eighth chapter, Wisdom declares:

The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old.

I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.…

When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth:

When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep:

When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth:

Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him. (8:22–31, KJV)

In the context, the author is using metaphor to stress the radiant and fundamental nature of divine Wisdom. It would be easy, however, to read the passage as if Wisdom were a cosmic being in her own right who was already present at the Creation. Many later Christians have read the Proverbs text as if the words were spoken by Christ himself.

The poem has many parallels in the literature of neighboring pagan societies, where the figure proclaiming his or her virtues and achievements is a deity. So common are such recitations of virtues (Greek, arete) that this genre of sacred boasting has its own name, aretalogy. At very much this same time, aretalogies were a popular genre in Ptolemaic Egypt, where the speaker was usually the goddess Isis.7

Wisdom language became a mainstay of Jewish thought from the third century onward. That was natural in an age when readers had to choose between competing and equally tempting forms of Wisdom, the debate we have seen played out in the context of 1 Enoch. From around the same date, the book of Sirach associated Wisdom with God Himself in the act of Creation. As Sirach declares, “Wisdom was created before all other things, and prudent understanding from eternity” (1:4). That certainly sounds as if the Wisdom language has moved from the realm of metaphor to that of cosmology. An aretalogy in this book describes how Wisdom made her abode among the nation of Israel, alone of all the nations of the earth, and made her home on Mount Zion. Sirach makes Wisdom at once the Creator figure and the essence of the Torah (Sirach 24). Such a view foreshadows the later rabbinic beliefs we have already encountered about the eternal, heavenly Torah that existed before the Creation. In terms of its format, a contemporary pagan would have easily read this text as a declaration by a creator goddess and would likely have assumed that the Jews venerated their own version of Isis.⁸

Wisdom is no less exalted in the book of Baruch, a puzzling text that dates to the second century BCE. Like Sirach, Baruch proclaims Wisdom’s role as the possession of Israel and emphasizes this negatively by listing the glorious and powerful beings from whom it has been withheld (3:24–28). Those groups who lacked Wisdom include princes, great merchants, and also the famous giants of old, who perished because “Those did not the Lord choose, neither gave he the way of knowledge unto them” (3:27). That reference to the giants points to the overlap of the Wisdom literature with Enochic traditions. In the Parables of Enoch, Wisdom is very close to a divine female force. Wisdom “went forth to make her dwelling among the children of men, and found no dwelling-place: Wisdom returned to her place, and took her seat among the angels” (1 Enoch 42).

The sense of dealing with an objective being is evident in the Wisdom of Solomon, written in the late first century BCE, which I cited at the start of this chapter. “Solomon” describes the scope of what he has learned at the hands of Wisdom, a compendium of natural science as well as philosophy. Such an expansive list of intellectual boasts perfectly recalls the breadth of knowledge and interests that is expounded in the Enochic writings: “namely, to know how the world was made, and the operation of the elements: the beginning, ending, and midst of the times: the alterations of the turning of the sun, and the change of seasons: the circuits of years, and the positions of stars: the natures of living creatures, and the furies of wild beasts: the violence of winds, and the reasonings of men: the diversities of plants and the virtues of roots: and all such things as are either secret or manifest, them I know” (7:17–21, KJV). Beyond this, Wisdom was essential to the act of Creation. She was the one who knows God’s works, who was with him when he made the world. “Solomon” then lists the works of Wisdom through history, from watching over Adam to protecting the Israelites through the Exodus and the years in the Wilderness. At every point, Wisdom is credited with deeds that the Bible attributes to God himself. “Although she is compared with the Light, she is greater” (7:29).9

As this work survives only in Greek, Wisdom’s name appears as Sophia, and as such she sounds very much like a figure in contemporary Greek philosophy. In that context, she would be an intermediary between the unchangeable transcendent Monad, the One, and the material creation. The same text is densely packed with technical terms and concepts from contemporary Platonism. Wisdom is characterized as “a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness” (7:26; emphasis added). The altar in Solomon’s Temple is a “resemblance” (mimema) of the original Tabernacle.¹⁰

Wisdom, Sophia, was approaching divine status in Jewish thought, an angelic figure at least, and likely more than that. She was the vehicle through whom God created the world, almost his divine representative in the world.¹¹

OF THE THINKERS who tried to reconcile Jewish and Greek thought-worlds, the most celebrated was Philo of Alexandria (25 BCE–50 CE), whose life overlapped with those of Jesus and Paul. Like his Jewish contemporaries, Philo encountered the common difficulty that Platonic philosophical assumptions were so thoroughly infused into Greek culture and thought that it was impossible to separate the two. It was difficult in this era to write or speak Greek without “speaking Platonic” or absorbing Platonic insights. The process of Bible translation contributed to this intermingling of worldviews. From the third century BCE, Jews had access to their scriptures in Greek, especially the immensely popular Septuagint. As they read the sacred text, they found words and concepts that had particular resonance within the contemporary philosophical framework, not least potent words like ikon (image) or gnosis (knowledge). The Septuagint invited and provoked Greek philosophical readings, if it did not actually demand them.12

Such discoveries came from the very start of the sacred text. In Genesis 1, Philo read that God made man “according to the image of God” (eikona theou), wording that justified a whole Platonic reconstruction of the creation. Not just for Philo, such interpretations made it both easy and tempting to assimilate the biblical stories to Greek philosophical views. Septuagint translations also opened the way to imagining other divine beings. In Psalm 82, God stands in the assembly of gods, synagoge theon. I am using the lowercase g for “gods” in order to distinguish between the great God of heaven and minor deities, though the Greek implies no such difference.¹³

At first sight, Philo presents God in a way instantly recognizable to a contemporary Platonist. God is unchangeable, without name, without relation to any other being, and humanity cannot perceive him. Philo briskly rejected the Bible’s anthropomorphism, its description of a deity with hands or eyes, with a face and “back parts” (Exod. 33:23). As he argued, such words were all symbolic and metaphorical expressions used by biblical authors, and only a very simple reader would treat them seriously.

Having all but excluded God from the world, Philo used a Stoic concept to bring him back, and he often ran into serious contradictions in doing so. God was transcendent, argued Philo, but also thoroughly immanent, a constant creative force in all things. As a Platonist, Philo explained creation as the work not of a God separated from the world but of divine powers or attributes. The most important of these powers that lay between perfect Form and imperfect matter was the Logos, Reason, God’s firstborn, which is equivalent to Plato’s creative Demiurge. The Logos concept stemmed from Stoic thought and was also current in other Greek schools. In the Hebrew tradition, it corresponds to the Word of God that is so frequently mentioned throughout the Bible, as in the revelations to prophets. Beyond argument, the biblical God had spoken, and used words, and that fact now gave warrant to philosophical doctrines. As Sirach had observed, “By the word of the Lord, his works are made” (42:15). The book of Wisdom praised God, who made all things with his logos, “and ordained man through thy wisdom [sophia]” (9:1–2).14

Seeking to integrate ideas from multiple traditions, Philo is none too specific about how his Logos relates to the divine Wisdom or which emanates from which. He understands the Logos as “the image of God,” as mentioned in the Septuagint translation of Genesis, almost as the shadow of God’s perfection. Following the angelic theorizing of his time, he identifies the Logos with the Angel of the Lord, who is mentioned periodically throughout the Bible. Philo presents the Logos as the archetype of things, including the human mind, and the creator of all. As he wrote, “The Logos of the living God is the bond of everything, holding all things together and binding all the parts, and prevents them from being dissolved and separated.” It is difficult to read such words without invoking later Christian theology and especially the prologue to John’s gospel, which proclaimed, “In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.” (The first words here explicitly recall the opening of Genesis as they appeared in the Septuagint Greek, En arche.) Scholar James H. Charlesworth remarked acutely that “God’s word is seen first as the word of God, then the word from God, and finally, perhaps in only a very few circles, as ‘the Word.’” Philo demonstrates the near impossibility of merging Judaism and Platonism without creating another figure who is, more or less, another manifestation of God. In the Christian tradition, that Word became identified with the Son of God, who became incarnate as Jesus Christ.¹⁵

Just how firmly thinkers of this age held to pure monotheism is controversial. Studying the views of some heterodox and “sectarian” Jewish thinkers early in the Common Era, a number of scholars have proposed that some Jews at least taught the existence of two Powers in heaven. That idea was quite independent of Christian theories about the divine nature of Jesus Christ. If that is correct, then perhaps Christian Trinitarianism was not a departure from strict monotheism but rather an evolution from Jewish precedent. What we can say confidently is that a Creator or intermediary figures who stood even higher than the angels were proliferating around the start of the Common Era. Apart from Wisdom and the Logos, there were hints of other such individuals in the Qumran texts and elsewhere. Despite all the qualms about compromising God’s absolute unity, cultural and intellectual pressures were demanding more flexible solutions. Those efforts would have an incalculable impact on the making of Christianity and on Christian theology.16

WHETHER BY MEANS of Word or Wisdom, God created the world. But the presence of sin and evil in that world still demanded explanation. The Jewish interaction with newer philosophical ideas made the issue of theodicy—that is, the question of why God allows evil—still more intense and troubling. The evolving ideas and debates demonstrate a common concern with ideas of perfection, perfectibility, and the relationship between spiritual and material realities. Whether or not they explicitly cite Greek philosophers, Jewish thinkers were at every stage responding to the challenges those foreign sages had posed. And as in the case of Creation itself, the resulting controversies left a deep imprint on Christianity.

The reality of evil forces was unavoidable to anyone who experienced the oppression of the Crucible age. But the Bible made it clear that originally, humanity—Adam—possessed perfection as the image of God. How, then, had Creation thus fallen? For later Christians, that problem is resolved easily by invoking the story of the Garden of Eden and the Serpent and the fall of Adam and Eve, which left the taint of Original Sin upon all their descendants. Yet however fundamental that idea seems, it receives meager treatment in the Hebrew Bible. After its appearance in Genesis 1–3, the Fall story makes no impact in that text.17

Ancient Hebrews were thoroughly familiar with the concept of sin, which could be collective or hereditary, but the canonical Old Testament does not say that Adam’s disobedience corrupted humanity as a whole. In Psalm 51, the speaker declares his utter sinfulness, to the point that he was born in iniquity, and even conceived in sin, but this looks more like literary hyperbole than a theological or biblical statement (5). We look in vain for any reference to Adam or a Fall. Conversely, Psalm 8 celebrates the glory of humanity, of ben-’adam, the son of Man (or son of Adam): “For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels [alternatively, “little less than God”], and hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet” (5–6). The second sentence here links the human figure to Adam himself, to whom God gave dominion over the beasts, and commentators generally identified Adam as the main subject. Even so, for all we know from this joyous text, the Fall might never have occurred. (We will return to this psalm later, as it was such a critical source for doctrine and controversy during the Crucible years.) The idea of original sin never features in the words of prophets who otherwise had no problem whatever in denouncing the manifold sins of a community. And although some much later Talmudic scholars favored the original sin motif, it never became part of rabbinic Judaism. Surprisingly for many Christians, the idea makes no appearance in the gospels, and Jesus himself never cites either Adam or original sin.

The most influential exposition of the Eden story is in the New Testament letters of Saint Paul, especially as they were expanded and cultivated by the Latin church father Augustine, around 400 CE. By the 50s CE, the story of Adam and the Fall was central to Paul’s theology, which ultimately became the essential core of all Christian orthodoxy. In this view, Christ took human form so that through his sacrificial death, he might reverse the Adamic taint of sin and death. (Different churches would long debate the exact method or rationale of this transaction.) To quote Paradise Lost once again, Paul’s theology told

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

Brought death into the World, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat.

Paul, though, was no isolated spiritual entrepreneur. Rather, he was invoking ideas about Adam and the Fall that were already well known to his readers in Corinth and elsewhere (see Rom. 5:12–14; and 1 Cor. 15). He was using ideas that were under vigorous discussion during the Crucible years.

ONLY GRADUALLY AND tentatively did the image of the Garden of Eden emerge during the Second Temple era. Ezekiel (28:13) and other prophets refer to Eden as God’s garden but never in the context of the Fall. The literature of those earlier years had much to say about the origins of humanity, the sources of human sinfulness, and temptations by diabolic forces, but the biblical passage under discussion was usually the Genesis story of the Watchers. The Fall in question was thus the events preceding Noah’s Flood rather than the expulsion from Eden. The book of 1 Enoch has nothing at all to say about the Eden story, and Adam features only as a name in genealogies.18

But if the classic Christian interpretation of the Fall was not in view, individual actors in the drama certainly were. We have already observed the “rise of Satan” from the third century onward, but Adam himself was rising from near invisibility in the canonical Bible to play a critical role in Jewish thought and writing. Very much like his foe Satan, and in just the same years, Adam now entered center stage. The growth of Adam’s role follows a pattern that we have often remarked on, by which ideas first developed independently within Jewish circles but were then vastly elaborated in dialogue with outside influences, in this case Greek philosophy.¹⁹

From around 200 BCE, references to Adam begin to appear in ways that imply the existence of larger discussions on the subject that are now lost to us. Much of this new interest grew out of exegesis of Psalm 8, with its vision of a humanity created a little lower than the angels. In its Greek Septuagint translation, this short psalm abounds with words that in the context of the time had potent messianic implications. Man (or the son of man) is “crowned with glory and honor,” and all things are set under his feet. The book of Tobit lauds God: “You made Adam and gave him Eve his wife as a helper and support. From them the race of mankind has sprung” (8:6). But the theological framework is thin, and there are no references to a Fall. Yet not long afterward, and seemingly out of nowhere, Sirach declares, “No one like Enoch has been created on earth, for he was taken up from the earth.… Shem and Seth were honored among men, and Adam above every living being in the creation” (49:14–16). Within a couple of verses, the intriguing group of pre-Flood heroes who were so central to the later pseudepigraphic literature are mentioned, with Adam as the greatest among them.²⁰

Jubilees, too, stands witness to Adam’s dramatic enhancement. As a greatly augmented commentary on the book of Genesis, it naturally tells the story of the expulsion from Eden, with much noncanonical legend and lore about Adam’s children and family and their fates. Even for Jubilees, though, the Fall receives little weight as the source of later evil and sinfulness, which is instead blamed on the Watchers.21

A similar emphasis on the Watchers is found in the Qumran sect, which was obsessed with matters of sin, impurity, and evil. In its foundational Damascus Document, evil is traced no further than the fall of those guardian angels. In later documents, Adam himself becomes much more prominent, sometimes in the context of the Fall and redemption, and such discussions usually arise from readings of Psalm 8. He is commemorated in the very fragmentary liturgy known as the Words of the Luminaries. The work celebrates God’s mighty deeds, which include forming Adam “in the image of your glory.” Another text imagines the purified Jewish sanctuary that would be restored in the eschatological age, which would reverse the damage done by the Fall. The authors thus use the Adam story to shape later understanding of Jewish law in matters such as ritual purity. This text does contain one intriguing element, in terms of what exactly is to be restored or renewed. Translators differ whether a certain phrase should read “sanctuary of men” or else the “Temple of Adam”—that is, the Garden of Eden. That vision of a restored and purified Garden of Eden resonates with many later Christian and Jewish speculations.²²

From the second century onward, the linkage between Adam, Eden, and the Fall became commonplace, as did the idea of reversing that Fall and returning to primeval perfection. Some of the most significant texts derive from after the end of the Crucible period as I have defined it, but their ideas follow naturally and logically from that era. We have already seen Philo’s use of the Creation story in the first chapter of Genesis and the appearance of Adam in “the image of God.” But the opening of Genesis actually includes two originally separate Creation stories, each with its own slant on human origins. In the second story, in what is now the book’s second chapter, Philo found a “man of dust” mentioned as the first human creature (2:7). So was this being the same as the divine image in the previous section or something altogether distinct? Some passages in Philo suggest that the two Adams were identical, while others did not. The most likely interpretation suggests that a divine or supernatural Man preceded or coexisted with the material human being, standing parallel to frail humanity. That in turn offered a way of understanding the Fall and sinfulness, as the ideal Adam must somehow have been reduced to the sinful and corruptible material reality.

SIMILARLY PLATONIC IN its approach was the book of Wisdom. Unusually for Jewish writings of any period, Wisdom teaches a strict separation of mind and body, and even a conflict between the two, and that schism accounts for human frailty and failures: “A perishable body weighs down the soul, and this earthy tent burdens the thoughtful mind.” The key word here is phtharton, which means “corruptible” or “perishable.” Another passage in Wisdom describes the origin of this lamentable human state. According to this text, “God created man to be immortal [aphtharsía, not-corruptible], and made him to be an image of his own eternity. Nevertheless, through envy of the devil [phthono de diabolou] came death into the world: and they that do hold of his side do find it” (2:23–24). (Alternatively, “they who are allied with him experience it.”) The brief reference implies the existence of an already well-known mythology about Satan and the Fall.

Through the wiles of the Devil, then, humanity has lost its pristine perfection. Such a view fitted perfectly with the common dualistic ideas of the time about the warfare between the forces of good and evil. In Eden Satan had won a spectacular victory, which later humanity must seek to reverse. Such words appear familiar from a Christian perspective, but they are a massive departure from earlier Jewish views of the origins of death and sinfulness. Indeed, the Wisdom passage sounds surprisingly close to the medieval formulation of the enemies of the human soul, namely, the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. Yet Wisdom was definitely written from a strictly Jewish point of view, without any Christian influence.

We have already encountered the influential Life of Adam and Eve, which no later than the first century CE drew together the various strands of the Eden and Fall mythology, including a definitive account of Satan. Separately, in this story, Adam and Eve supply their own accounts of the Fall, emphasizing the hope that God would ultimately restore and heal the Edenic world. The book also addresses the question of the bodies that Adam and Eve had before the Fall, when they more closely resembled the angels. In both Jewish and Christian tradition, this allusion inspired mystical ideas of reversing the Fall and returning to those exalted states.23

Underlying the surging interest in Adam and the Fall were the new attitudes to resurrection and the afterlife, which were evolving so rapidly from the mid-second century BCE onward. Josephus’s account of the Pharisees and Essenes described their firm belief in the indestructible and incorruptible nature of the soul, and the language he uses echoes that of Philo and Wisdom. The Pharisees, moreover, preached resurrection. But if resurrection was such an article of faith, believers had to address the question of exactly what was to be raised from the dead. Would a corpse simply reanimate, or did resurrection mean rising in a new and glorified body? What, if anything, would be restored in the Last Times? (For Josephus, see Chapter 6.)

Understanding the different images of Adam contributed powerfully to understanding these questions. If in fact God had intended Adam to attain such a perfect and incorruptible state, only a little lower than the angels, then surely that would be the condition to which all humanity would be restored in the last days. Such a view of the nature of resurrection is the immediate cause of Paul’s profound exposition in 1 Corinthians 15, one of the most influential passages in Christian theology. Christ, he declared, was the second Adam, the new Adam, and “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” Resurrection, Paul taught, would mean rising in a body that was new, incorruptible, and immortal.

BY THE LATE first century CE, these various themes—Adam, Eden, the Fall, original sin, resurrection—were thoroughly integrated and popularized. Around this time, Adam is repeatedly mentioned in the apocalyptic pseudoscripture called 2 Esdras (or 4 Ezra), which explicitly draws a connection with the Fall. God created Adam in perfection, but he violated the commandment to love God’s way, and that inflicted death not just on the patriarch but on all his descendants. “The first Adam bearing a wicked heart transgressed, and was overcome; and so be all they that are born of him.… For the grain of evil seed hath been sown in the heart of Adam from the beginning.” Those successors pursued their sinful ways until they were wiped out in the Flood. “As death was to Adam, so was the Flood to these” (3:5–7, 21–22, 30, KJV).

That is close to the view of Paul, who told in the Epistle to the Romans how “sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned.” Yet although 2 Esdras is later than Paul, there is no suggestion that the author knew Pauline writings or ideas. By this stage, Adamic speculations were becoming almost too commonplace to be singled out. Rarely noticed by Christian readers, Luke’s gospel (ca. 100 CE) even describes Adam as “Son of God,” making him a counterpart and predecessor of Christ himself (3:38). The Paul who wrote the great Epistles may have been expressing radical views, but he was no eccentric outlier to the Jewish thought of his time. Oddly, he was even riding a fashionable wave.

Just as the Christ of early Christianity came to be seen as the manifestation of the creative Word or Wisdom, so he was also portrayed as a new and greater Adam. All those once disparate images united and assimilated in a way that seems quite natural in Christian retrospect, but they involved some daring intellectual speculations.

By the opening years of the Common Era, the religious themes that had emerged in the previous two centuries or so now became common currency in the Jewish and near-Jewish world. Just as the spiritual revolution received its greatest impetus from the political crisis of the Hellenization crisis, so another series of wars and catastrophes fundamentally reshaped the movement and brought it into the international arena.

Chapter 9

THE WORD WAS WITH GOD

Rethinking the World’s Creation