In the history of Western Christianity—and hence, to a large extent, in the history of Western Culture—the Apostle Paul has been hailed as a hero of the introspective conscience.
—KRISTER STENDAHL1
In 34 CE a Jewish tent maker, destined to exert great influence on Western civilization, began a long journey along a major trade route from Jerusalem to Damascus. He had been dispatched by Gamaliel, an expert in religious law and a member of the Pharisees, a Jewish sect.
The tent maker was Gamaliel’s celebrated student, Saul of Tarsus, known for his birthplace—the thriving capital of the Roman province of Cilicia. Mark Antony first met Cleopatra in Tarsus, and it remains an important city in modern Turkey. Tarsus was also a major academic center.
Well-educated and deeply religious, Saul had been enlisted by Gamaliel to throttle the growing popularity of a rabble-rousing Jewish preacher named Jesus. He was traveling to Damascus with documents authorizing the arrest of any disciples of Jesus. It was a journey of some 140 miles, much of it along a well-traveled thoroughfare through the Jordan River valley. Saul anticipated returning to Gamaliel with a bounty of Christians, beaten, bound, and ready for trial. Some would have been killed and left behind to remind their communities of the dangers of following false prophets.
Sometime before arriving at Damascus, perhaps as snowcapped Mount Hermon was coming into view, Saul was blinded by a light he later recalled as “brighter than the noonday sun.” A powerful voice, seemingly from heaven, challenged him, asking, “Saul, Saul, why do you continue to persecute me?” Blinded and disoriented, Saul responded to the voice: “Who are you?” His companions also heard the voice and, although they were not blinded, they saw no one.
The voice responded, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” Jesus, crucified a few years earlier, instructed the shaken Saul to “get up and go in the city, and you will be told what you must do.” Saul did exactly as commanded, with the help of his companions, who led him into Damascus. There he was rewarded with the return of his eyesight and a new commission to spread the gospel of the very Jesus whose followers he had persecuted for so long.
Saul’s reputation was widespread. The community that feared him described him as “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord.”2 After his encounter on the Damascus road, however, Saul of Tarsus was transformed into Paul the apostle of Jesus Christ, a role that would make him one of the most influential people the world has ever seen and arguably as important—or maybe even more important—than Jesus in shaping the beliefs of the world’s most influential religion. One of Paul’s biographers credits Paul with doing more than anyone to shape the concept of the person who has given Western culture its central moral intuitions:
More than anyone else, Paul created the Western individual human being, unconditionally precious to God and therefore entitled to the consideration of other human beings. . . . Broad social change did follow inevitably from the idea he spread: that God’s love was sublime and infinite, yet immediately knowable to everyone. No other intellect contributed as much to making us who we are.3
Paul is the most important interpreter of Adam. Christians continue to wrestle with the role he assigned to the first man—a role that linked Adam to Christ in a package deal, with details that would be heavily debated by millions of Christians into the present. Unfortunately, the connections Paul drew between Christ and Adam were so tightened by subsequent interpreters that their historical reality appeared to rise and fall in unison. Christian theology became so dependent on Adam that any hint he may not have been a real historical figure became an attack on Christianity.
Paul’s letters to the early church wrestle with theological questions confronted by the emerging Christianity as it struggled to understand itself. Sin and salvation from sin were primary. The first, said Paul, originates with Adam; the latter with Christ.
In places, Paul seems to suggest that all humans have actually inherited sinful natures from Adam. Shaped forcefully by Augustine in the fourth century, this notion—original sin—would become the dominant view in the Christian West, and the view that would make the historical Adam so difficult to dislodge. Prior to Augustine, however, no such consensus existed and many Christians viewed Adam simply as Everyman, the first of our species, like us in many ways, tempted by Satan as we are. Adam, however, was weak and gave in to temptation, but his failure was his, and his alone. We can do better.
Under Saul the persecutor, it is hard to see how Christianity could ever have been more than a tenuous, shaky, and heretical sect on the margins of Judaism. Perhaps it would have disappeared like other small movements at the time, such as the Essenes or the Sadducees. With Paul the apostle as its champion, however, Christianity not only survived but became the dominant feature of Western culture and a global religion that would eventually claim the allegiance of one-third of the world’s population.4
Paul wrote a third of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament, and four or five others are misattributed to him. Most were letters to churches, such as Romans and Corinthians, or to individuals, such as Timothy and Philemon, clarifying points of doctrine and practice for a new religious movement. Paul developed most of the key ideas of Christian theology, including the divinity of Christ and the universal availability of salvation. He made ambitious missionary journeys, spreading the gospel of salvation through Jesus Christ throughout Asia Minor, Greece, Syria, and Palestine. One pundit ranks Paul the sixth most influential person who ever lived, after Mohammed, Isaac Newton, Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius.5
Paul saw his Damascus road experience as far more than a “conversion” to Christianity. He did not simply stop persecuting Christians, return to his tent-making shop, and join a local group of believers for weekly meetings. Paul understood his experience to be a commission from God. He had encountered the creator of the universe, and like Jeremiah, Isaiah, and other heroes of his tradition, he was now a part of God’s grand plan. In his letter to the church at Galatia, Paul expressed his confidence that his part in God’s great providential drama was written even before he was born:
For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.
You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. . . . But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being.6
Paul’s language is intentionally reminiscent of claims made by prophets when they established their credentials. Jeremiah writes, for example,
Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”7
His credentials established, Paul goes on to play a defining role in the story of Adam, lifting the first man from parochial obscurity in the pages of the Hebrew scriptures and placing him at the center of Christianity’s conversation about the nature of sin, free will, and what it means to be human. Paul’s enlargement of Adam became a defining feature of Christianity, perhaps going beyond what Paul might have envisioned. Even now, two millennia later, millions of Christians, to understand themselves and their world, look to a lively tradition that began—but certainly did not end—with Paul’s discussion of Adam.
Paul’s engagement with Adam, however, is far from straightforward. His tradition read their scriptures with the assumption that Adam and Eve were historical figures, as real as Moses and David. But precisely because they assumed this history uncritically, it is hard to tell how important it was to them. Our historical questions were not theirs.
Paul wanted to universalize Christianity to include non-Jews, to gather all people into one unified tribe, to make everyone Christian. And what better way than to make the story of Adam the story of every man, the singular ancestor on everyone’s family tree? Paul thus transforms the story of Adam and connects it to Christ’s sacrificial death so that both become relevant to everyone. Adam brings sin and death into the world, and Jesus takes it away.
Paul’s central concern was the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Should Jesus be understood as a new Jewish prophet, critiquing his tradition like the prophets of old and calling believers back to a more authentic practice of their faith? Or was Jesus starting something new—something post-Jewish or even non-Jewish? This is quite possibly the most serious religious question ever debated, given the history that followed.
The national identity of Israel—and its various expressions of Judaism—developed significantly during the Second Temple period, between 530 BCE and 70 CE. Israel’s first temple was built by the famously wise Solomon and destroyed by the Babylonians around 587 BCE. Many educated Jewish leaders were relocated to Babylon, where they served as slaves for decades and wrote heart-wrenching poetry about being separated from the land that God had promised them. They wept at the challenges of being Jewish so far from home:
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars we hung our harps,
for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?8
The Jews returned to their homeland around 520 BCE and began laying the foundations for the Second Temple, where the heart of a renewed Judaism beat vigorously until the Romans destroyed it in 70 CE.
Solomon’s Temple was the holy center of Judaism. One of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the legendary structure has long fascinated scholars, including Isaac Newton, who devoted an entire chapter to it in his little-known Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms.9 The destruction of the temple and scattering of the tribes of Israel created an identity crisis for Judaism. If Judaism was not the religion of these people on this land, performing these ceremonies, worshiping in that temple, led by these priests and prophets, then what was it? How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?
Wrestling with these questions of self-understanding created the religious traditions of first-century Jews, including Jesus and Paul. Israel’s scripture cataloged a critical part of the answers that developed as their leaders looked back into history and tried to figure out who they were. The resulting history was enlarged through timeless, complex, sometimes troubling, and often magnificent literature like the poetry quoted above.
Events like the exile in Babylon, the giving of the Ten Commandments, or the destruction of the temple became episodes in a narrative of national identity—a story that began with the creation of the world, ran through a purposeful present, and continued into a future when God would make everything right. Judaism was no longer the organic and unfolding experiences of the children of Abraham, rooted in the soil of present events, but became instead a grander narrative.
This narrative became enshrined in sacred texts. The final production of the particular texts we call the Hebrew scriptures—Christians’ Old Testament—was largely an editorial process, based on existing materials. Oral traditions from preliterate centuries were written down; related accounts—like the creation stories in Genesis—were stitched together with bits of editorial thread. A final form for the collection of texts emerged in the centuries after the Jews returned to their homeland in the sixth century BCE and was completed by the third century BCE. Once the Hebrew scriptures were completed, the important, challenging, idiosyncratic, and often infuriating task of interpretation emerged, a task at which Paul proved quite ingenious.
By the time Jesus began preaching in the synagogues of first-century Palestine, those places of worship had seen centuries of teaching and reflecting on the stories in the Hebrew scriptures. These reflections had given rise to a substantial body of extrabiblical texts, the authorship, veracity, and significance of which have been hotly debated. But we cannot understand Paul apart from the interpretive context in which he worked, and this literature was an important part of that tradition. Christians today often naively assume that their first-century counterparts read the same Bible they do.
Paul’s tradition explored their scriptures with a creativity that permitted fanciful extrapolations that went way beyond what the text could possibly have meant. Modern cautions about minding the original intent of authors are absent in this tradition, and all other first-century traditions for that matter. Novelties are constantly—and without controversy—being read into the scriptures to make them speak to new questions. In particular, the Hebrew scriptures were reread—some would say twisted—to make them speak repeatedly of a future Messiah who would be Jesus of Nazareth.10 These texts also enlarged the story of Adam and Eve, adding details and interpretations, always rooting Judaism in its past, even when that meant inventing new historical episodes or embellishing and changing existing ones.
One collection of writings is known as the Pseudepigrapha, so called for its strategy of claiming authorship by famous people from the past, like Moses. The celebrity-author ploy was possibly a publicity strategy, to generate interest rather than deceive.11 Another collection of writings is the Apocrypha. Fourteen or fifteen of the most well-known Apocryphal books are found in the Bibles used by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, often sandwiched between the Old and New Testaments. Apocrypha literally means “things hidden away,” but there is nothing especially “hidden” about apocryphal literature.12
The Pseudepigrapha, Apocrypha, and other writings provided a substantial exploration of the Hebrew scriptures. This constant engagement kept breathing new life into the stories. Different Jewish factions produced different literatures, reflecting their idiosyncratic self-understandings. The New Testament springs from this literary cornucopia, as first-century Christians wrestled with their identity. New Testament writers cited the Hebrew scriptures hundreds of times and made more than one thousand allusions to it. They also cited apocryphal and unknown sources.
This literature shaped subsequent reflection on the scriptures, including the meaning of the story of Adam and Eve. The Jews were becoming “people of the book,” increasingly defined by the social, moral, and theological blueprints provided by God in their scriptures, rather than by the organic and evolving social structures of their community. In the centuries to come, their tradition will, in fact, spend much of its energy reflecting on how the ongoing community can remain faithful to its scriptural roots.
Great tensions attend the evolution of any community, corporation, or activity that is anchored to a written charter. No matter how prescient or brilliantly conceived, texts never anticipate all the questions they will need to answer. Balancing faithfulness to a defining text and meaningful engagement with a changing world is at the heart of the story being told in this book, embodying the tension that makes the story of Adam and Eve so controversial.
As people of the book, their evolving religious life was anchored in ancient texts that increasingly came to define them. Defeated, their temple destroyed, relocated to a foreign land, they were decoupled from their own history. Their identity became uncertain in a time when few people could read and oral traditions carried much of the culture. When the Jews returned to their sacred homeland they looked to their history to recover an understanding of who they were. Getting their sacred texts in order was an important part of this task. Commentary, gloss, expansion, and clarification would keep the texts alive and relevant.
The Judeo-Christian tradition came to be shaped by three interwoven sources of authority. The first was the Hebrew scriptures, to which the New Testament was eventually added. The second was the more controversial collection of texts discussed above with their uncertain authority—the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. And the third strand in the weave was the ongoing discussion, generally in print, by influential thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and their present-day counterparts, of how to make the scriptures speak to new issues like democracy, capitalism, health care, and homosexuality. Such writings were not treated as divinely inspired, but exerted and continue to exert great influence on how the developing tradition understood its sacred texts.
The Hebrew scriptures were essentially completed by 200 BCE and collections that gathered its many books into a single document began to appear. The literature from the period after those initial compilations, roughly 200 BCE to 200 CE, relates to these scriptures in complicated ways. Stories are retold. Anonymous characters receive names. Historical episodes are fleshed out and interpreted, removing old ambiguities and creating new ones. Brief stories are expanded. We read of Eve’s fifth child, a daughter, Awan, who grew up to be Cain’s wife. Another tells of Adam, feeble and sick at the age of 930, gathering his children to pass on his wisdom. Seth takes pity on his aged father and offers to fetch some of that special paradise fruit from the Garden of Eden.
While this new literature engages the Hebrew scriptures at countless points, it is noteworthy in its expanded interest in Adam and Eve. Where Genesis was ambiguous, cryptic, abbreviated, and piecemeal, the new literature is expansive, rich in detail, and self-contradictory.
This new literature provides our first look at the evolving narrative of the first man and woman. The forgotten couple grow in significance as the Jews enlarge the importance of the events in the Garden of Eden. The nature of human beings, our relationship to God, the burden of sin, and other big questions are explored by considering how God created everything in the beginning. Social issues like the role of women—an enduring and contentious problem—are adjudicated by invoking the divine arrangements established in Eden. And all this eventually leads us into the most important Adam story of all—the one told by Paul.
The book of Jubilees from the second century BCE retells the story of the first couple, based on a revelation given by an angel to Moses. The retelling explains how Eve loses the equality she had with Adam in the first creation account. In the Jubilees, God gives “dominion over everything” only to Adam instead of both of them: “And after all this He created man, a man and a woman created He them, and gave him dominion over all that is upon the earth, and in the seas, and over everything that flies, and over beasts and over cattle, and over everything that moves on the earth, and over the whole earth, and over all this He gave him dominion.”13 The culturally exceptional equality of male and female in the first creation account was apparently too radical to endure.
The philosopher Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 BCE–50 CE) is especially hard on Eve (and women in general). Eve is not merely the first person tricked by the serpent—a detail that could be of no consequence—but is in every sense inferior to Adam, precisely because she is a woman. Philo poses the question “Why does the serpent speak to the woman and not to the man?” Answer: “Woman is more accustomed to be deceived than man.” Eve was the first to “touch the tree and eat of its fruit” because “it was fitting that man should rule over immortality and everything good, but woman over death and everything vile.” By Philo’s patriarchal lights, the secondary status of women in his day was simply the way God intended things to be.14
In contrast, the Apocalypse of Moses lets Eve explain herself. In a scene near the end of Adam’s life, written with more flair than the Genesis account, Eve summons the children to pass on the story of what happened centuries earlier, when everything went so wrong:
Then saith Eve to them: “Hear all my children and children’s children and I will relate to you how the enemy deceived us. It befell that we were guarding paradise, each of us the portion allotted to us from God. Now I guarded in my lot, the west and the south. But the devil went to Adam’s lot, where the male creatures were. (For God divided the creatures; all the males he gave to your father and all the females he gave to me.)
“And the devil spake to the serpent saying, ‘Rise up, come to me and I will tell thee a word whereby thou mayst have profit.’ And he arose and came to him. And the devil saith to him: ‘I hear that thou art wiser than all the beasts, and I have come to counsel thee. Why dost thou eat of Adam’s tares and not of paradise? Rise up and we will cause him to be cast out of paradise, even as we were cast out through him.’ The serpent saith to him, ‘I fear lest the Lord be wroth with me.’ The devil saith to him: ‘Fear not, only be my vessel and I will speak through thy mouth words to deceive him.’”15
Eve explains how the devil tempted her “through the mouth of the serpent”:
“Ye do well but ye do not eat of every plant.” And I said: “Yea, we eat of all. Save one only, which is in the midst of paradise, concerning which, God charged us not to eat of it: for, He said to us, on the day on which ye eat of it, ye shall die the death.” Then the serpent saith to me, “May God live! but I am grieved on your account, for I would not have you ignorant. But arise, (come) hither, hearken to me and eat and mind the value of that tree.”16
Eve acknowledges she was so eager to eat the evil fruit that she swore an oath to pass it along to Adam as a condition of having it: “By the throne of the Master, and by the Cherubim and the Tree of Life! I will give also to my husband to eat.”
In this retelling, the evil comes not from simple disobedience, as Genesis suggests, but from a lustful wickedness that the devil placed on the fruit:
And when he had received the oath from me, he went and poured upon the fruit the poison of his wickedness, which is lust, the root and beginning of every sin, and he bent the branch on the earth and I took of the fruit and I ate. And in that very hour my eyes were opened, and forthwith I knew that I was bare of the righteousness with which I had been clothed (upon), and I wept and said to him: “Why hast thou done this to me in that thou hast deprived me of the glory with which I was clothed?” But I wept also about the oath, which I had sworn.17
By far the strangest treatment of Eve—and the one making her secondary status most explicit—is the fascinating tale of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, the demanding and rebellious spouse provided for Adam in the first creation account.
Stories of a woman named Lilith appear in the same ancient Near Eastern myths that scholars believe inspired the accounts in Genesis, but it takes several centuries until this shadowy character evolves into Adam’s wife.18 She is mentioned once in the Old Testament and does not appear in all translations.19 The prophet Isaiah warns, in a widely accepted translation, that “the Lord is enraged against all the nations”20 and is wreaking his wrath on the land: “Thorns shall grow over its strongholds, nettles and thistles in its fortresses. . . . Wildcats shall meet with hyenas, goat-demons shall call to each other; there too Lilith shall repose, and find a place to rest.” 21 In context the most likely meaning is that Lilith was some sort of demonic creature, unrelated to Adam and Eve at the time this account was penned, probably 800–700 BCE.
By the eighth century CE, however, the pseudepigraphical Alphabet of Ben Sira was juxtaposing Eve and Lilith as Adam’s two wives—one evil and one good, one a role model for Jewish women, the other a warning about what happens when you don’t play the role God assigned to you—which was submission, of course.
Lilith’s evil nature was revealed when she insisted she was equal to Adam. After all, she had been created at the same time and in the same way. On what basis did Adam insist she was subordinate? The ensuing disagreement, according to the Alphabet, got Lilith expelled from Eden, or perhaps she left on her own in a fit of pique. She is said to have sprouted wings after refusing to be subservient to Adam—especially during sexual intercourse—and is often drawn as a woman with long hair and wings.22 In Jewish folklore the demon Lilith came to be feared as a sinister force interfering with family life. One legend says she killed poor Job’s sons. She seduces men, corrupts children created through impure sex, steals men’s semen through wet dreams, torments women during childbirth, and kills babies.23
The Lilith mythology took on a life of its own. Medieval Jewish women hung amulets in their birthing rooms to keep Lilith away from their newborns. Nineteenth-century Scottish writer George MacDonald recast Lilith as a vampire. Twentieth-century television screenwriters named Dr. Frasier Crane’s frosty, meddling ex-wife Lilith. Feminists and Wiccans continue to invoke her as a symbol of their demands for equality.
The Jewish tradition that generated the myth of Lilith was once shared by Christianity but eventually separated to run its own course. But—and here we return to the New Testament—it was this literary milieu that nurtured Saul of Tarsus and liberated him to develop the understanding of Adam that became the centerpiece of the Christian understanding of the first man.
Much of the contemporary conversation about the historicity of Adam is muddled because Paul’s presentation of the Adam story is read in isolation from his literary tradition. This tradition licensed theological creativity and, as the above examples make clear, paid little attention to historical accuracy. We should thus conclude, in opposition to many conservative contemporary readers of Paul, that the apostle would certainly have felt free to use the Adam story in any way he wanted, without necessarily implying that his creative claims were rooted in history.
The Jesus that Paul encountered on the Damascus road was Jewish. We need periodic reminders of this, in light of Christian anti-Semitism that became so pervasive. Jesus was born into a Jewish family and was circumcised when he was eight days old, as was the custom of his family’s religion. He was raised a Jew and visited the synagogue regularly. He did not eat pork or work on the Sabbath. He studied the Torah and referenced it often.
Much of Jesus’s message was familiar to his Jewish audiences. Their sacred literature encouraged care for the poor, widows, and orphans and a welcome to the foreign enemy. Appearing before a congregation in Nazareth Jesus read a familiar passage from Isaiah that he said applied to him:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.24
Jesus preached consistently and powerfully, if often ambiguously, of the coming “kingdom of God,” a familiar theme in Judaism. The kingdom of which he spoke seems to have been understood by both Jesus and his followers—at least initially—to be an earthly kingdom about to appear. He taught his followers to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” Later Jesus would say, “My kingdom is not of this world.” Similar vagueness attended Jesus’s comments about himself. On some occasions he scolded his disciples for referring to him as the promised Messiah of Israel; on others he seems to have accepted the label. The Gospel of John reports that crowds hailed Jesus as “King of Israel,” suggesting they thought he was a political Messiah.
Throughout his short but dramatic ministry, Jesus understood his Jewish tribe to be the chosen people of God. He was often quite clear that his message was exclusively for the “lost sheep of the house of Israel”25 and not for the despised Gentiles. His audiences often interpreted Jesus as a Jewish prophet, a familiar role, comparing him to earlier prophets like Moses and Elijah. Virtually nothing suggests that Jesus had any significance beyond Judaism.
As history has made clear, however, Christianity is effective at attracting converts, and it wasn’t long until first-century Gentiles were converting to the new faith. Many early converts were women, attracted in part—perhaps in large part—to a faith that treated them more respectfully than the alternatives. Many had already embraced the monotheism and some of the rituals of Judaism. Alas, things were not so simple for male Gentiles converting to Christianity because of circumcision.
Circumcision in the Jewish tradition was not a medical procedure—it was a holy act, symbolizing an ancient covenant that the people of Israel had made with God. To become Jewish was to enter into this sacred covenant with Yahweh, and circumcision was a critical part of that, a distinctive marker one would wear for life. Adult male circumcision was, understandably, a higher price than many first-century Gentile males were willing to pay.
Circumcision raised a central question: Was Christianity a part of Judaism? Was becoming Jewish an automatic part of becoming Christian, just as becoming American would be an automatic part of becoming a New Englander? Or was Christianity something different? Circumcision was not an issue as long as the new gospel was preached only to Jews, as Jesus had specified.
Paul was the “apostle to the Gentiles.” He understood only too well that circumcision had the potential to forever keep Christianity inscribed within Judaism. And given that some had already labeled the new religion a Jewish heresy—after all, he had been working earlier to exterminate it—Christianity might not survive into the next century unless it put down roots in Gentile soil. So Paul pushed back against those first-century gatekeepers keeping uncircumcised Gentiles out of the faith. He also challenged the need to keep the oddball Jewish dietary regulations.
It would be a serious mistake, however, to suppose that Paul’s motivation for these revolutionary proposals was entirely practical, as though inviting uncircumcised males into the new faith was like having a potluck dinner to encourage church attendance. The theology that Paul developed for the embryonic Christian church transcended the parochial concerns of Jewish ritualism so thoroughly that it left Judaism behind entirely.
Paul’s central—and radical—theological intuition was that God had created all humanity and not just the Jewish people. It followed that, at least in the eyes of their creator, every person had value. God loved everyone, and God loved everyone equally, a concept that was hard to understand in a time of great, multifaceted inequality. It only made sense that God would redeem all humanity directly—as human beings created in his image, not as members of the Jewish faith. In a famous sermon to a Greek (Gentile) audience on Mars Hill in Athens, Paul spoke of God making “of one blood all nations of men.”26 In context, this was a profound statement of human unity to a culture that believed some men were naturally slaves. We must not make Paul too modern, of course, for he shared the beliefs of his century that some people were by nature slaves and that women were subordinate to men. But these were incidental differences to God, who viewed them as a father might view his different and unequal children. Paul’s emphasis on the unity of humanity—remarkable for its time—became a distinctive feature of Christianity and the heart of its theology.
In Paul’s theology, the human predicament is summed up in a widely quoted verse: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”27 Paul, however, is not entirely clear on the nature of this sin and it would be several centuries until Augustine would develop the understanding that most Christians have today. Why, exactly, do we sin? Is it because, like Adam, we give in to temptation and in so doing become sinners of our own free will? As we commit sins, do we fall from perfection as Adam did? If we were sufficiently righteous, could we refrain from sinning as Jesus implied when he said, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect”?28 Or are we born with sinful natures that make us sinners even before we have made the choice to sin? Are newborns sinful? Do they need to be baptized to cleanse them of their sin? Does hell contain a region called limbo for unbaptized infants, as Roman Catholic doctrine would eventually claim, following Augustine’s interpretation of Paul? Is every human being born deserving God’s wrath, destined for hell, because of sin?
Paul took sin and the resultant curse from God seriously. He viewed the physical creation as cursed, and wrote that it “groaneth and travaileth in pain.”29 God did not create things in this sad state of affairs, of course; Paul saw this disaster as entirely a consequence of Adam’s sin, for which God bears absolutely no responsibility. Adam’s decision to sin was his free choice and he could have done otherwise. And, in some mysterious way, the entire creation was present with Adam and involved in his decision to sin. He was genuinely guilty. But have we inherited his guilt? Are we born in a state of sin, deserving to be punished?
Paul’s view of the consequences of Adam’s sin is the most dramatic of any of the ancient writers wrestling with this difficult question. And it becomes even more dramatic with time. Certainly many viewed Adam’s fall from perfection as catastrophic, but there was no agreement on the nature of the catastrophe. The Life of Adam and Eve lists moral corruption, change of diet, sorrow, and loss of spiritual joy as the consequences of the Fall. The Apocalypse of Moses lists loss of dominion over the creation and loss of “glory.” The Jubilees report that this was when animals lost their ability to talk directly to humans. Several accounts report that death was one of the results, either prematurely, in the sense of cutting short a long life, or the loss of immortality.30
The early Jewish tradition did not have a well-developed concept of eternal life; therefore it would have been unreasonable to expect the Fall to be interpreted in terms of eternal damnation in their writings. But most Jews of Paul’s generation believed that humans would live in eternity; therefore attending to one’s salvation is the most important part of one’s religious life.
Paul’s Adam wrecked the world. But despite the cesspool created by Adam and into which we leap by choosing to sin, Paul asserted that God still loves us with unconditional love. He loves us so much, in fact, that he sent his son Jesus to suffer and die to rescue us from this sin. In the Jewish moral calculus of first-century Palestine, suffering and bloodshed were essential to atone for sin. Jesus’s torturous death—being the undeserved suffering of God in human form—atones for all the sin of everyone who ever lived, past, present, and future, Jew and Gentile alike.
In Paul’s letter to the Romans—Christianity’s central theological document—he makes the case as follows:
God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life . . .
Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned, . . . nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. But the free gift is not like the offense. For if by the one man’s offense many died, much more the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abounded to many. And the gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned. For the judgment which came from one offense resulted in condemnation, but the free gift which came from many offenses resulted in justification. For if by the one man’s offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.
Therefore, as through one man’s offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man’s righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous.31
This passage addresses the meaning and significance of Adam’s sin and Christ’s death, both of which had been puzzling and challenging to the first Christians. Adam and Christ emerge as bookends in the drama of salvation. Christ is a second Adam, or perhaps “anti-Adam” would be a better term, undoing the damage of the first Adam. God had created a perfect world, with no death, no sin, no sickness—nothing but beauty and wonder—and gave it to us to look after and enjoy. Adam, the first of our species, was created in harmony with God. But he disobeyed.
Paul’s Adam was thus not merely the first Jew, but the first human; his sin was thus the first human sin, and not merely a Jewish transgression. We are all Adamic in some sense. In places Paul seems to suggest, as the Christian tradition would come to believe, that we are born with that same sinful nature that mysteriously came upon Adam when he chose to disobey God. In other places, however, Paul seems to suggest that we have the same choice as Adam. The ensuing debate would rage for centuries: Are we sinners because we sin? Or do we sin because we are sinners? However we answer this question, Paul asserts that God has extended his love universally to everyone through the sacrifice of his son Jesus, the only human to make it through life without once giving in to the temptation to sin. By embracing Christ’s sacrifice—a gift freely given by God—we find salvation.
Paul’s theology was revolutionary. He broke down the ancient walls separating the Jews—God’s chosen people—from the rest of the humanity, including the Gentiles that even Jesus referred to as “dogs.”32 And, like other theologians of his generation, he looked to the story of the first man for inspiration in how to accomplish this agenda. Paul’s central point was clearly the unity of all humans and their common need for salvation. He used the Adam story to make this point; he did not use the Adam story to claim that a historical Adam was an essential part of Christian theology, although belief that Adam was a real person would certainly have been a part of his worldview.
The Christians that followed Paul were a small band of underground believers practicing an illegal religion under the threat of martyrdom. Some died for their faith, often in cruel and disturbing ways. Debating theological nuance was a luxury in the face of horrific persecution that seemed inspired by Satan himself. Could it really be, as some believed Paul had taught, that the Christians and their persecutors shared a common sinful nature? Surely the Roman guards, entertaining cheering crowds by killing helpless women and children, were consumed by sin in ways the Christians were not.