Not Original, Not Sin

So here’s where I’m going to say something that is going to annoy an awful lot of people. You can define sin about as well as you can define what success means. It’s 100% vibes. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Oh man, I’m feeling sinful. Just absolutely sinful.

That’s kind of your baseline, isn’t it?

That’s just norm. That’s like standard. But like, also feels like it was just born there, you know what I mean?

Oh, oh, okay.

Uh, yeah, that’s me tipping off what we’re gonna be talking about, I guess. I’m very subtle. Uh, I don’t know if you guys know that about me.

But that’s, that’s also your baseline.

Subtlety is, it’s, it’s one of the great markers of my character. It’s true. So today, we’re going to be talking first, first, we’re going to do a chapter and verse. And we’re going to talk about the Garden of Eden. And we’re going to talk about Adam and Eve specifically, we’ve talked a lot about Genesis 1 , 2, little 3, little 4. We’re mostly doing 2 into 3 now. We’re going to get that creation— not the creation story, the fall.

Yes, the fall. We’re going to talk about some of the peculiarities of this story as well. Things that— the, the unanswered things where we do an awful lot to fill in the gap. There’s a lot of frog DNA that we’re just chucking in there to fill in the gaps, and that results in a weird Adam and Eve story where, you know, they can turn invisible and all this kind of stuff.

Yeah, sure. Why not?

Asexual reproduction. It’s not asexual. What do you call it? Yeah, I don’t know. Abiogenesis. Let’s call it that.

Absolutely.

As a result of that.

Rare species of frog DNA.

If anybody should have something to do with abiogenesis, it’s Adam and Eve.

You would think.

I would. So I think that’s great.

My high school daughter is reading Jurassic Park right now in in her class. And so we got her some, a couple of her own copies. And, uh, and, and it’s fun to revisit what it was like to read that book back in the ’90s.

They made a book of that? That’s interesting.

They did, they did make a book out of it. They decided the movies were so successful they might as well write a book. And, uh, and a book that was so good I ended up reading pretty much everything else that Michael Crichton wrote and, uh, and then watched some of the movies they made of those things, which were not as, not nearly as good.

So yeah, well Spielberg tends to make a fine movie anyway.

He does.

Moving on. In the second half of our show, we are going to sort of jump off from that and we’ll do a What Is That about original sin.

So that’ll be exciting and fun and weird. So right now, yeah, everything about the Bible is weird to me. Let’s dive in with Chapter and Verse. All right. You said you wanted to start in chapter 2 now. Most of chapter 2 is Adam sitting around in a garden all by himself and God trying to make him less bored.

Yeah, twiddling his ribs. And the Garden of Eden story really starts in the second half of Genesis 2:4 and then runs through the end of Genesis chapter 3. So 3:24 is the end of the Garden of Eden story. Chapter 4 is a different story altogether. But we get this, this creation account. All this is happening on one day. We’ve discussed in the past about how Genesis 1:1 through the first half of Genesis 2:4 is a separate creation account. It’s an entirely different creation account that is trying to correct a lot of the stuff that’s going on in our creation account. But we have in verse 7, then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. And, you know, reams and reams of books have been written on this passage alone. But I really like the theory that what we have is basically a divine image being made where— because in this time and place, divine images would have been made primarily of clay, but also of stone and things like that.

But we can represent it as clay and that there would usually be some kind of enlivening ritual or activation ritual where the agency of the deity would enter the statue and/or the standing stone probably.

And we’ve talked in the past about how there are some— there’s some squirrely translation going on in these passages where the translators try to turn past tense verbs into pluperfect verbs. And basically what that means is they change “God caused this to happen” to “God had caused this to happen” because the order of events in Genesis 2 is different from the order.

Yeah, is in Genesis 1 . Yes, sure. And so you’ve got God planting this garden.

And he throws in a couple trees. Yes. Very curiously, I think. I think it is so weird to throw in trees that he knows— it’s like putting a power socket into a room, into the baby’s room. Yeah. Without, you know, without any covers or anything and just being like, don’t touch that now.

Yeah. It’s like MacGuffin Central. We like— God has no use for these trees. God is— is just created this garden. It was like, bam, trees. Oh, by the way, don’t touch that one.

Like, could you—.

Could you get any more MacGuffiny? Obviously, this is Obviously this is a lesson in search of a narrative. And so in verse 9, “Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” So we’ve got these two trees, and this is one of the unanswered questions of the story of Adam and Eve, ‘cause later on at the end of the story, and spoiler alert if you haven’t read the story yet.

If you’ve never heard the Adam and Eve story, Yes. Podcast listener who’s listening to a show about the Bible.

Yes. God is going to kick them out of the Garden of Eden and then put cherubim guarding the entry so that they cannot partake of the tree of life, because if they do that, they would live forever. Again, MacGuffin alert. Why? Why this? The like? Because in Genesis, in verse 15, 16, Verse 16 and 17, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die.” So this does not say don’t partake of the tree of life. So the question is, were Adam and Eve partaking of the tree of life the entire time?

Mm, okay, that’s one I’ve never thought about before. I like that.

And then is God kicking them out to stop them from continuing to eat from the tree? Or are they not even eating from the tree to begin with, and then God is like, because of these new circumstances, “Oh, we don’t want them to suddenly eat from the tree,” because it raises— and this is something that a lot of Christians will say— this, God, or Adam’s transgression and Eve’s transgression brings death into the world. Prior to that, there’s no death. In order to conclude that, you have to conclude that they were eating from that tree the whole time.

Well, you don’t have to conclude it. Well, certainly one of the— that seems like the way that you would do it.

But although if you, if you conclude that, then it makes one wonder, is the way that God is immortal just that he keeps eating that? Like, you know what I mean?

Like, it raises more questions than it answers because, because let’s see, if they are eating from it already, then they should already be immortal. Yeah, right. So stopping them from eating from the tree would not suddenly end their immortality unless eating from the tree just keeps you alive temporarily.

It’s, it’s not permanent immortality, right? It’s just current immortality.

Yeah, yeah, like that. And that’s, that’s not really what we think of when we think of this. And, and God’s warning in, in chapter 3, if they take and eat from it, they will live forever.

So what’s going on here?

It’s all very confusing.

Yeah. And then that brings us to verse 17, in the day you eat of it, you shall die. We’ve talked about this before as well.

The consensus view is that this means if you eat from that tree, you will be put to death relatively immediately on that, on that day, within that 24-hour period, you are executed. That is what the Hebrew demands we understand it to be saying. And that doesn’t happen. So God’s, God’s threat doesn’t happen. And then when we get to the curses and, and we’ll get to them in a moment, there’s no indication that they were anything other than mortal the entire time.

Right.

So this—but this is one of the unanswered questions. This is something that people—if this is how the story, how we have it, if that’s how the story was originally read and originally, whether it’s performed, read out loud, whatever, how it was originally consumed, either the audience is not paying attention to these questions because the story is serving some other function or they already have a background in this. They’re bringing the correct knowledge to this story that we don’t have access to.

Right.

Or there’s something going on that’s missing. They have additional texts, additional stories that we don’t have. But I digress. Immediately God is like, hmm, something’s missing. It is not good that the man should be alone. And this is one of the big distinctions between this creation account and the creation account in chapter 1, because here God creates something and then goes, oh, my creation is not good. Chapter 1, God creates everything. God creates. God goes, damn, that’s good.

Nailed it. Yeah, again, man, I am 6 for 6 on this.

So he says, I will make him, uh, uh, the NRSV, he says, a helper as his partner. This is, this is a phrase that has taken on increased significance these days, particularly as the Oklahoma State Department of Education has decided that it is not in the business of educating people anymore. Um, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t look it up. You will just get depressed.

Or if you do look it up, you have to read the essay and then read the essay that the essay was supposed to be about. You have to read it. You can’t just get mad because of the headline.

And then, uh, so God’s like, I’m going to make a hel—literally, it’s helper equal to, equivalent to, sufficient for, something like that. A suitable helper.

So God’s like, let’s make some animals. Starts making animals out of the ground, just like the human was made, and brings them to Adam. And Adam’s like, not for me, not for me. Ew. What are you thinking here?

This thing doesn’t even—I mean, presumably, actually, they do talk because we’re going to learn later at least one of them has a full grasp of speech.

So I’m going to presume that they all do.

They could. Yeah. Again, it’s something that’s not in the narrative, like the fact that the snake is just like, what’s up, dude? And he’s like chilling.

I think it is in the narrative because these are the things that God is creating to keep Adam company. So I feel like it makes sense to assume that if that is the point of these animals and then later on in the narrative, one of the animals talks, I think it is reasonable to say these animals talk: cattle, birds, all the things that they’re—he’s having conversations. They’re just not that interesting.

Well, and he’s giving them names. He’s naming everything again. So we’re very—it’s very Aesop-y. Yeah. At this point in the story. Yeah. All the cattle, all the birds of the air, every animal of the field. But for the man, there was not found a helper as his partner. Whether he just wanted, you know, I need something with a little more cake on it. I need—whatever he was looking for, the animals were not providing it. So God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept. Then he took one of his ribs, is how we’ve translated it. The word there literally means sides. Yeah, one of his sides. And this word is never used to refer to human anatomy anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible. It’s used to refer to like architectural sides or sometimes the sides of a ship. And people think, well, you know, you’ve got these pieces of wood that kind of go up the sides of a ship.

So maybe this is supposed to be metaphorical reference to ribs, but it could also mean just a hunk of his side. Yeah.

I mean, the first time you and I talked about this on the show, I became and remain relatively convinced that it’s supposed to just mean he just split the dude in half and made half him and half her. Like, yes, it’s one side is him, one side is her. This rib thing is just astounding. So, I mean, and probably just comes from like a need for the patriarchy to have the man be the progenitor of the thing and be—and the woman be less than the man in some way.

Yeah. And the story says he took one of his whatever and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib or whatever that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman and brought her to the man. And yeah, it does sound kind of like Aristophanes. He—oh, gosh. It’s been a rough morning. Aristophanes’ myth from Plato’s Symposium, which is where all, all humans were originally part of a dual entity, right, which had either two male sets of male genitalia, two sets of female genitalia, or one male, one female. They were split in half. And then we spend our lives trying to reunite with the other half. So it sounds an awful lot like that. It could be something like that, but it’s not exactly clear. But the man then says, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

This one shall be called woman, for out of man this one was taken." So this is a folk etymology for the Hebrew word ishah. Because ish means man, ishah means woman. That must mean from man or something like that. But bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh suggests that this hunk of whatever that was taken out of Adam included bone and flesh. So when we talk about going out for ribs, we are not chomping on the bone most of the time. There’s meat on the bone that we’re actually interested in. So maybe this has reference to just a big chunk of bone and flesh. But the idea seems to be that all the other animals were created from the dust of the earth, but for a helper that is suitable, we actually need to—it needs to be created from the man. So that seems to be what the idea is, which is subordinating woman to man.

Man has a primacy of place, is the original human. This is the—I don’t know if you saw Multiplicity, but we’re not quite to Steve yet.

But I was going to say, you’re—wow, you went—that is a ’90s deep cut and not particularly relevant. Don’t go watch the movie to try and figure anything out from this.

It’s not going to have anything to do with Adam and Eve. Yeah. But then we get the famous etiology for pair bonding and independent kinship units. Therefore, a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. The idea is, look, you were torn apart from one entity, and so you become one flesh, you kind of return to the primordial state of being one entity. And, and it’s just a folk etiology for pair bonding and for independent kinship units, because your dad kicks you out of the house and says, get out of my garage, I need this, my midlife crisis is starting, I need to have a band in here. And so you have to go off and start your own household. This is not a prescription for monogamy or heterosexuality or anything like that. It’s just a folk etiology. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. And so they’re in a state of innocence. And the idea here seems to be that they are juvenile.

They have not matured yet. Just like when you have kids running around, they want naked time to run around nude. They’re not ashamed. So that’s basically what’s going on here. And then we get to—.

I’m going to push back on that just a little bit, because I think that, or the way I read it, at least now, and you can tell me if I’m wrong on this, is just that what it’s setting up is the fact that they don’t have a sense of the knowledge of good and evil. They don’t have that yet. That hasn’t been—they haven’t eaten that fruit. And so, first of all, I think it’s weird that nakedness is already being considered basically a function of evil. Like, it is like their shame over their nakedness is—when that shame rolls around, it’s because they know what good and evil are. I think that that’s weird. But I mean, it’s a norm now too. So that’s fine. But I guess my point is just that it seems to me like what it’s saying is they just don’t have that in them. They don’t have a sense of good or evil or what they should or shouldn’t be ashamed of.

And I think that that is a function of the lack of maturity, that part of the maturation process is learning the difference between good and evil, learning that you ought to be ashamed of being naked.

And whether it’s Noah, whether it’s people who want to pretend that the Bible says women have to cover up parts of their body so men don’t lust after them, nothing ever says nudity is associated with lust or anything like that. It is always about shame. And I think the story is suggesting that as you get older, as you mature, part of right and wrong is feeling shame about your body in a nude state. And what’s the— we have in the prophecy in Isaiah, uh, Isaiah 7 . Okay, so the, um, it is the, uh, a young woman has conceived and will, will, uh, bear a child. And what does it say in the next verse? Um, he shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.

So that’s saying before he grows up, before he matures. So one of the things you learn as you mature is the difference between good and evil, how to refuse the evil and choose the good. So, so I think that’s what’s going on here. They’re created like full-size, adult-sized humans, but they’re in a mental and emotional state of immaturity.

So now we’ve moved from multiplicity to immaturity. I got it.

Yeah. So wonderful, wonderful analogy there.

So, so as long as— so now we’re moving on to chapter 3.

Chapter 3 is the big one.

Now, go ahead.

Well, no, I— where it starts out with the serpent is what I was going to say.

Now it says the serpent is more— arum is the Hebrew word, which can mean crafty but also means nude. So, um, which is funny because we just got done talking about, uh, how they were, uh, the man and his wife were arumim.

And so now we’re talking about how the serpent is arum, uh, more arum than any of the other wild animals.

By the way, like, if it were— I mean, it must mean crafty, because if it meant naked, you can’t be more naked than the other wild animals. Like, well, nakedness seems to be— unless we’re talking about fur.

Yeah, which snakes don’t have no fur. And what— and here’s another unanswered question. Does this snake have legs? Yeah, because that—

Pin in that.

Pin. Because yeah, it does seem like that’s— this snake is walking around.

So, and the snake comes up to the woman and says, because snakes talk in this Aesopian primordial world, did God say you shall not eat from any tree in the garden? The woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden. But God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die. So another two unanswered questions here. How did the woman hear about this, right? Because she had not yet been created when God wagged the divine finger at Adam. And then additionally, what she says is not what God told Adam in verse 17, because she adds to it, “nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.” God’s warning was don’t eat it. Now suddenly you’re not even allowed to touch it or you shall die? So what is the audience to think here? Are we just so unconcerned with narrative congruity and integrity that we don’t care?

Are we supposed to imagine that Adam was the one who passed on the instructions to Eve and Adam elaborated on the instructions in an effort to try to make it even extra threatening to Eve? Did God come and talk to Eve about this as well and change the commandment, or did Eve hear it directly from God and then just decide she was going to riff on it herself? We have no idea. And I think that question is kind of critical to how we interpret the story in a way that allows us to answer the questions that we bring to the text.

Because if you want to ask questions about you know, how did Eve hear about it? What was the precise threat? Is— why is Eve being punished the way she’s being punished? All these things, you— we don’t have the data to answer those questions. But the serpent said to the woman, you will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be open and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

And as much as people don’t like that, as much as people get angry with me for pointing that out, like, the text itself acknowledges that the serpent was right, because in verse 22, “Then the Lord God said, ‘See, the humans have become like one of us. ‘” Yeah. Which is precisely what the serpent said would happen. According to the text, what the serpent said would happen is what happened, right?

So the first liar in the book is God, not the serpent.

Yeah, whether you want to take the fact that what God said would happen didn’t happen to be a lie, to be kind of that parental, oh, I don’t want to do this to my kid, my boy, look what they did to my boy. Um, I, you know, I’m gonna ease up a little bit. I’m just gonna make him, you know, sweat a lot. Whether you want to interpret it like that or you want to interpret it as a lie, what we can say is that the serpent was not the first liar.

Right.

Because the serpent’s telling the truth. Now, there’s another thing. The serpent just says, “You will not die. " Does that mean ever?

Right.

Does it mean what God said about dying on the day you eat of it, you won’t die that day, but you might get hit by a bus the next day, you might die? Is he saying this will make you immortal? More questions we can’t answer with the available data.

Yeah. So yeah, and there’s a lot. I mean, we didn’t even get to questions like, why did God put that tree there? Just don’t put the tree.

Yeah. Well, that’s the MacGuffin part of it. As much as people would like this to be like a verbatim transcript of the dialogue that actually historically happened. It’s a story that people told in the middle of the first millennium BCE.

So I think you’re right to call it a fable too. It has all of the trappings of a fable. It’s not meant— I don’t— you know, you and I have talked about this before, but I don’t think that— I mean, and you said this too, it’s unreasonable to think that they thought of this as telling a true story. Yeah. As opposed to telling a legend of how things started.

Or, yeah, because you can just look at the middle 4 or 5 verses of chapter 3. And you can imagine that this story is a result of somebody coming to their parents and saying, hey, why do women give— why are they in pain giving birth to children? Why do men have to work so hard to make food? And why do snakes not have legs?

Right?

Well, sit on my knee, young whippersnapper, and let me tell you a tale. It starts off in the day that God made the earth and the heavens. Like, it’s just an etiology. It’s a folk story that tells you how the world got to be the way it was when the story was told. And when the story was told, the men went out and worked hard to get food. The women had pain in childbirth, and the snakes had no legs. Yeah, and even the part that is known as the Protoevangelium, the proto-gospel, in verse 15, “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers. He will strike your head and you will strike his heel. " That’s been held up as this prophecy about Jesus. No, it’s not. It’s an etiology for why people don’t like snakes. It’s very basic. Don’t make this into more than what it was.

Yeah, yeah. And also, yeah, it’s funny because I got into a thing on Threads just yesterday. I got into a little, a little spat, a little argument, a row. Yeah, because a guy was— a guy posted just a thing that was just like— what he said was, why didn’t God ever tell Adam and Eve that Satan was in the garden with them? So I wrote, because Satan wasn’t in the garden with them. There was a snake.

And, and then another guy got into this whole thing with me and was just so mad. And was like, no, no, the snake is Satan. And I was like, okay, well, show me the verse then. And he’s like, he goes into all of these things. And I’m like, yeah, but none of that is related to the verse that— yeah, we’re talking about in Genesis.

So yeah, probably went to Ezekiel 28 and Revelation 12 and 20. Like, that’s the best they got. Yeah. And, and none of that works.

So yeah, they didn’t even have a concept of Satan as, as the name of a figure.

Right yet.

But, um, anyway, we got to get through this story.

We got to get through this.

Yeah, we got to get through the story. So, um, yada yada yada, uh, and, uh, I mentioned the bisque. Um, so the woman, uh, saw that the tree was good for food, it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise. She took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Now, I, I emphasize who was with her because historically, translations have sometimes left that out for no actual reason. There is no manuscript that lacks it. Why would they leave it out unless they don’t want to acknowledge that when Eve ate the fruit, Adam was standing right beside her? Yeah. Going, “How’s it taste?” “It tastes all right. What’s it like?”

“Hey, you didn’t die. I’m going to try some of that.”

Yeah. Like he was there. And if you decide that, you know, Adam—and we’re later going to see that Paul blames everything on the woman, even though it is the sin of Adam that is responsible for bringing death into the world. Paul blames it on the woman. The woman was deceived, not the man. It’s like, well, the man was sitting there with his finger up his nose right next to her the entire time. I think that makes some people uncomfortable, and some translators in the past have been like, just pull it out, just leave it out.

He was, he was off tending to the garden. He was talking to the orangutan and, uh, and she just showed up with some fruit and said, “Try this.”

He was like, “Have you seen these lemurs? They’re like mini ones of us with big tails.” Orangutan means, uh, means “jungle man.” Yeah, yeah, in, um, in Malay. Um, so anyway, sorry, that was, that was irrelevant.

So, one of the things that I did want to mention, just a brief little sort of issue that I had when I was thinking about this earlier today, was just, how can God be mad at them for this when he knows they did not yet have a knowledge of good and evil? How can anyone be mad at them? How can it be considered wrong for people who can’t—who can’t have had knowledge of good and evil to have done a thing?

Yeah. And interestingly, within the LDS tradition, there’s a part where Adam is told to do something. He doesn’t know why he’s supposed to do it, but he says, “I don’t know. I was just told to do it.” And that’s supposed to be held up as the paragon of virtue. You don’t ask questions. You just do what you’re told. So there will be people who be like, “Well, she can follow orders. They can follow orders. They don’t have to know whether it’s right or wrong.” Well, deciding to follow orders requires some kind of cognizance of good and bad, right and wrong.

So you’re making a choice there.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, it is. That’s part of the story that is just inconvenient for the questions that we’re bringing to the story. Now, if this is just a folk etiology, it doesn’t matter. Why did God get them in trouble for doing something that they didn’t know they weren’t really supposed to do, that that would be bad? Doesn’t matter. This is why snakes don’t have legs, right, Junior? That’s the point of the story. That’s what you asked me. “Why don’t those snakes have legs?” It’s because of this story.

“Why was Mommy screaming when she had my little sister?” Well, I don’t know. She ate a fruit one time. Yeah, there’s a whole thing. Yeah.

Mommy’s got her own issues to deal with. But it’s—if you look at the rhetorical goals of the story, if you try to figure out what’s the genre here, what are the authors trying to accomplish? If it has—if it’s a folk etiology, then these questions are irrelevant. We’re bringing questions to the text that it was never intended to answer. And so we probably shouldn’t be asking these questions that were never intended to be a part of the story. Like, if we could resurrect the author of this text and ask him, “Hey, what’s going on with this?” I imagine the answer would be, “I wasn’t thinking about that because that has nothing to do with why I told this story.” “Sir, this is a Wendy’s.” Yes, exactly.

It would be, “Why are you asking the moral implications of Hop On Pop?” Yeah, it doesn’t matter what Pop’s job was.

The story is just about getting you to learn to rhyme words. So yeah, I think all those questions, as critical as they are for so many of the ways that we try to understand the implications of these stories, and maybe there is part of that going on in the background.

Yeah, but I’m going to cut you off because the grand question is our second segment.

Second segment.

Is it not?

It is our second segment.

All right. So we’re going to leave that there with now the snake is crawling on the ground. You can read it for yourself. You can go to Genesis 3 if you want to learn.

It’s out. It’s free online.

Yeah. You can see how it all came to be. But now we’re going to move on to the biggest, you know, if, if asking our questions about how this story is playing out is a mistake, Well, wait until we get to Augustine, because things are about to get nutty.

So let’s move on to What Is That? And this week’s What Is That is the grand What Is That? The thing that plagues and haunts us all. The original sin. Now I’m going to start. I’m going to throw this out. The original sin is neither original nor sin. Discuss.

Now, talk amongst yourselves.

Talk amongst yourselves.

All right. So let’s, let’s get into this. Because yes, original— I think we all understand that original sin originated, like, is attributed to the characters of Adam and Eve, specifically Adam, usually. You mentioned the, the the Mormon tradition, the LDS tradition, which I think it’s the second article of their faith, which says, we believe that men shall be punished for their own sin and not for Adam’s transgression. It was a big, bold stand against the concept of original sin. So let’s, I guess, start with the question of like, is original sin in the Bible?

Well, the concept of original sin, uh, obviously isn’t. It is something that was— is triangulated after the Bible is, is completed by theologians who are— and, and my argument has long been that the, the apologists of the second century and on through the early church fathers, their primary goal was to systematize, create a systematic and philosophically satisfying and defensible articulation of the gospel. And so part of that means finding a way to make all these various pieces fit. I’ve talked a lot about the analogy of the Bible as a toy chest or a box full of Lego bricks. Yeah, from a variety of different sets. And we just dump that box over and then we go to work. And so in my opinion, the grand project of the apologists and the church fathers was try to use all as many of the Legos as we can and build who can build the best whatever.

Right.

And so part of that includes recognizing that we’ve got this story about Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden. And that is, that is the pivot from we don’t know the difference between good and evil. We know the difference between good and evil. Humanity is kicked out of paradise. And, you know, one of the, one of the main themes of so many of the, the moral and ethical and wisdom stories from this ancient time period was, why do we suffer? Why are we mortal? Why do bad things happen? And there are a lot of different answers to this question. But, you know, you can look at Gilgamesh, you can look in Adapa, you can look in all kinds of different myths. And that’s just a central lament of humanity, the human condition in this time period. So the Garden of Eden seems like it is the Bible’s way of accounting for that and where bad things come from. However, it’s not the— it’s not the only player.

It’s not the only option. Not the only kid on the block. Right. We also have 1 Enoch and the Enochic tradition, which tries to use the story from Genesis 6 where the sons of God, in the Hellenistic reading, these are angels. In Genesis 6 , they’re gods.

Oh, right.

They come down and they have human, they have children with human women. And in the Enochic tradition, they also teach humanity how to do all the bad stuff, like eyeshadow. Which is literally on the list if you read the book of 1 Enoch. Shameful.

Just so shameful.

Weapons of war and all of this kind of stuff.

Are all taught by the angels to humanity. And this is kind of an alternative theory of the origin of sin. And it is phenomenally popular, phenomenally influential. And an awful lot of the New Testament is based on the traditions from the Enochic narratives, whether it’s found in 1 Enoch or places like Jubilees, the Book of Giants, all this kind of stuff. So you have a competition kind of between the story of Adam and Eve and the story of the fallen angels as the introduction of evil into the world. And for folks like Paul, Adam and Eve seems to win out. But one of the interesting things about the entire rest of the Hebrew Bible is the story of Adam and Eve never comes up ever again. Nobody ever talks about it, which is crazy. No way.

Like, it does. Yeah, it seems, uh, it like they, they told the, origin story, the two people, and then they’re like, okay, done. Yeah, because it referenced back to like, uh, uh, Abraham, and there are references back to lots of different characters.

But just not those guys.

Yeah. Like, it’s the kind of story where the kid’s like, well, that’s a dumb story for why snakes don’t have legs. And the parent’s like, yeah, what are you going to do? And they go on. And that story does not become an incredibly popular story. You have a mention of Eden in Ezekiel 28 , and the story is entirely different. Yeah, because there’s some guardian cherub that is in Eden that’s supposed to be the Adam, the human. There are precious stones everywhere. It’s a mountain.

None of that is in Genesis 2 and 3, right? It’s— and then you have a genealogy in Genesis 5 and then in 1 Chronicles where it mentions Adam. That’s it. There’s no other telling of the story of the Garden of Eden. And then we get to Paul and Romans 5 . Romans 5:12-21 has this kind of meditation on, on the significance of, of sin. And Paul says, as by one man sin entered into the world and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. For until the law, sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. And this seems to be suggesting that there was no death in the world until Adam and Eve’s transgression. And he blames it on the man.

Because of one man, sin entered the world. He ignores Eve. And I think probably because he’s trying to draw this parallel. What? By one man sin entered the world. By one man sin is, you know, resolved. Jesus is the second man. And so you want it to be nice and symmetrical.

I guess so.

So you say, yes, this is one dude. And or you can do what the person who was pretending to be Paul in 1 Timothy 2:14 did, where you can say Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.

So yeah, it does seem like that is a retrojection of an ideology back in, like trying to make Paul a little bit more misogynistic than even Paul was willing to be.

Or that it occurred to Paul to be.

Yeah. And as misogynistic as Paul could get, yeah, the authors of like Ephesians and 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, whether they were one author or different authors, they are incredibly more misogynistic.

But well, although I will say this, Paul in Romans 5 , it’s a form of misogyny. To be like, the woman couldn’t have been a thing.

Yeah, we’re just going to ignore the woman.

There’s no way what she did could have affected all of humanity. But, but homeboy over there, he definitely rocked the world.

Yeah. And for that reason, women shouldn’t have credit cards and shouldn’t be able to take out a mortgage until like the 1970s through ’90s. Yeah. So yeah, it’s a Yeah, it’s problematic. And so we have this idea here presented by Paul that the story of Adam and Eve is what brings sin into the world. And then we’ve got this other passage in Psalms, in the Psalms, Psalms 51 , I believe it’s verse 5. I’m just going to pull it up in the Hebrew here. So the NRSV-UE says, “Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.” The KJV says, behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. In— and, and the Hebrew is, uh, yeah, behold, in iniquity, uh, I was— I travailed, or, or I writhed.

That probably just means I was born, and in chet, which comes from chata, my mother conceived me. And so if we look at these three passages, if we look at the story of the Garden of Eden, if we look at this notion that I was conceived in sin and was born in iniquity, and we look at Paul’s idea that because of the transgression of Adam sin entered the world.

Just straight out the chute.

It’s, uh, yeah, yeah, even before you come out the chute, when you’re still on the other side of the chute, when you’re cooking.

That’s sinful, sinful sperm. That’s the problem.

Yes, they’re, they’re, yeah, they didn’t know what they looked like back then, so I’ll save that joke for another day.

Um, the homunculus that the man is depositing into the, into woman is already sinful.

And, uh, and so it’s really a result of putting together the Lego bricks in a way that, that is philosophically, um, defensible and satisfying and sophisticated. And we get this idea that, that this sin is passed on from, from parents to children, and it is something that we all inherit. And it’s a way to account for the sinful nature of all humans without having to say that at some point along the way, every single human being is corrupted by something.

Right.

It’s a way to say that’s the seed, and then the, you know, it sprouts in all humans. So everybody gets this original sin passed on.

When did this idea sort of coalesce into, like, you know, you mentioned these multiple different sort of concepts that were then triangulated to come up with this original sin idea. Do we know when that happened?

So we have this idea in the middle of the 2nd century CE with Justin Martyr, we have this idea that Adam and Eve’s sin brought death into the world. And we get from Paul the notion that the wages of sin is death. In other words, everybody who is mortal is sinful. And so there’s this idea that we all have some kind of sin that we inherit as a result of being human. I think Tertullian is, toward the end of the 2nd century, is one of the first ones to suggest that we inherit sin from parents. But it’s not until Augustine, around the end of the 4th, beginning of the 5th, 5th century, uh, CE that we get the phrase original sin. Okay, not in English, obviously, uh, but, but I think Augustine is the first one to, to actually name this idea.

And then the doctrine has to be developed from there because you have these ideas of, uh, you know, how is it passed along? Is it passed along from the mother, from the father? Do they both contribute? Is it physical? Is it spiritual? How is it getting from the parent to the child? And what exactly is the nature of this sin? And something that we get to in the Reformation is, does baptism absolve us of original sin? Does it make it go away, or is this something that we always have with us? Because if the wages of sin is death, then baptism, if it got rid of original sin, would make us all immortal. And right, to my knowledge, it does not.

So, um, not that I’ve ever seen.

Yeah. So, and in all of this, we’re basically just— we’re just chasing down the implications of the result of previous chasing down of implications from the result of previous— like, it’s a never-ending cascade of, we answered questions that don’t really have answers in the scriptures that we think have all the answers, and so now we have to deal with the fallout of the answers that we came up with.

Maybe I need to ask a question that has always— like, it just occurred to me that we need to talk about what the heck sin actually is. Oh gosh. I mean, if we’re going to talk about the original sin, and if we’re going to talk about, you know, human nature being somehow sinful or whatever, like, what is sin? What are we even talking about? Because I mean, I think we all feel like we have a floating sort of nebulous concept of it. It’s when you do something bad. But, you know, a baby can’t have done something bad yet. So it’s got to be bigger than that. But also, like, just what is it?

So here’s where I’m going to say something that is going to annoy an awful lot of people. You can define sin about as well as you can define what religion means. It’s 100% vibes. Sin is whatever somebody says it is because you can— and this goes back to my concern with just attempts to define conceptual categories. Sin is an abstraction, and as an abstraction that is not reducible to anything observable, to anything testable, it can be whatever people want it to be. And so we can look at it etymologically, and I even got on Rainn Wilson— is that his name? Yeah, I got on Rainn Wilson’s case because on his podcast, he was like, it’s an archery term, it means to miss the mark. It’s like, okay, the word is an archery term, but it was not used, you know, you didn’t say that because you were talking about missing the mark all the time.

That’s the etymological fallacy. So that’s not helpful. But we can look at like in Hebrew, chata is the word, and this has to do with some kind of in a religious sense, and I don’t like using the word religious for the ancient world, but it is certain behaviors that are religiously disqualified because of— and ultimately, I think it’s got to be rooted in ritual, because a lot of the language that we see for sin, particularly in the Hebrew Bible, but even when we get into the New Testament, has to do with uncleanness, with contamination, with things that make you impure. And that usually has reference to a kind of binary notion of you are qualified or authorized to engage in certain cultic activity, or you are prohibited from doing it.

So that usually has to do with some kind of concept of purity. And so in the Hebrew Bible, you see an awful lot of discussion where sin generates kind of a metaphysical contamination that gets on the temple. And so the— a lot of the purification rites that are described in Leviticus and elsewhere are not about— have nothing to do with cleansing the people. It has to do with cleansing conceptually the sacred space, because we’ve done this thing and suddenly splurt there’s a bunch of metaphysical contaminant on the wall of the temple, and we’ve got to do the stuff to scrub it off. So it seems to originate in the notion that there is— there are behaviors that make us unclean or impure when it comes to religious activity. And then that then kind of expands to include behaviors that are considered wrong, whether it’s about offending other people or offending God or hurting other people or doing things that are considered social no-nos.

So it is very ambiguous, but we’ve got these words.

It is interesting that that word sin isn’t always— because in my mind, I associate it almost exclusively with morality, with a commission of an act that could be considered immoral or is somehow against morality. But it’s interesting that that word doesn’t have to have anything to do with morality.

No. And I think when it comes to— because there’s a deity that is dictating what is and is not sinful in the Bible, I— it, like, divine command ethics would suggest that it’s entirely arbitrary. Sin is whatever God says sin is, right? God can change their mind whenever they want.

Because it doesn’t have to be anchored in anything that we would consider morality.

Right.

In fact, a lot of it’s shellfish and that’s that. Yeah.

But that’s not philosophically satisfying. So when we look in like the Letter of Aristeas, which is supposed to be about how the Septuagint came to be, at night the 72 scholars would dine and they would have these symposia with the leaders of Egypt, and they would wax philosophic on how it’s all systematic, and the shellfish have all these things in common, and those things are metaphorically like this immoral thing. And so we abstain from eating those things in order to perform this refusal to engage in that immoral behavior. So you’ve always got people trying to explain why, which brings us back to the Garden of Eden story. We always have to— we got questions that we’re bringing to the text and we need answers, even if the author would’ve been like, “That’s a dumb question. That has nothing to do with my story.” But yeah, I think you get a slow kind of generalizing where initially it has to do with your ability to participate in ritual, but then it spreads out to become about morality and about right and wrong as you get more systematic development of what it means for things to be right and wrong.

And so the New Testament, I think, is heavily influenced by Greek thinking on what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong. And by the time you get to the folks who are writing the Pastoral Epistles, you’re waxing philosophic on Aristotle’s notion of the household, where you’ve got the paterfamilias, you’ve got the wife, you’ve got the children, you’ve got the enslaved folks. Those are the four things. And to be a good household is to have all those things in order and all the members of each of those different classes fulfilling their duties in their specific classes. And, you know, anything outside of that becomes sin. So I don’t think you can define it. It’s kind of like the idea of the atonement. Like everybody’s got different models for the atonement and you can’t— there’s no paper that you can rub on your atonement theory that’ll turn pink. And you can be like, “Ah, I got it! This is the right one!” You know, there’s no acid you can dip it into and be like, “If it turns purple, that means we got the right one!”

So, yeah, that’s not a satisfying answer. What is sin? Whatever you want, man. It’s whatever you want.

I mean, I’m pretty sure it’s bad.

Yeah, but when we look in the Bible, you know what is not sin? Slavery.

Right. Yeah, plenty of things that— plenty of things are never labeled sin that we would find horrific.

Polygamy. Um, we taught— we had a whole episode on polygamy recently.

Um, and then, you know, every now and then you’ll get a group come along, be like, well, we kind of like that.

We want to try that.

And the rest of the country, or the rest of the world, goes, uh, no, denied.

Um, incorrect. Stairway denied. Um, so yeah, it’s really about consensus. And if, if you want to, you know, and now we’ve got folks, we’ve got our Joel Webbon and, uh, and other adult, you know, uh, juvenile minds trapped in adult bodies that are like, well, we need— women shouldn’t be voting, that’s sinful. By whose reckoning, right? Yeah, yeah. It’s really just about who you can get to agree with you. So when it comes to original sin and what sin is, when we get to the New Testament, hamartia is based on the idea of unclean or impure. Unrighteous, it’s missing of virtue or missing the desired goal because of weakness, accident, or whatever. So it’s going to be different depending on the author.

It’s not reducible to a shortlist of necessary and sufficient features. And the discussion that would need to be had to review all the different things that sin can be I think would infuriate both of us and take too many episodes.

Well, there you go. If you— yeah, well, I think what’s nice about this conversation is that we have gotten rid of the need to have a full episode about sin. But what we haven’t done, I think, is gotten all the way through the discussion of original sin, because I don’t— I guess one of the things that I wanted to know is what problem are we solving when we decide that original sin is necessary? Like, where— like, what theological— I get that, like, we’re trying to solve— we’re trying to, you know, solve for why when it comes to, you know, Romans 5 and—.

Yeah, yeah.

And stuff. But it just seems like, why can’t humans in the Pelagius style, why can’t humans be born morally neutral and just sin being a choice rather than it being human nature?

And there are going to be folks in the audience who have a lot more training in moral philosophy.

Well, and yeah, this is like theology, and that’s not either of our wheelhouse really.

Absolutely. And I know of some folks we could probably get on the show to get a better answer than what I would give. But what I would say is that in this time period, the nature of sin was considered no different from the nature of blood for people in the Enlightenment who are cutting open cadavers that they stole from the cemetery. This is just something we have to search this out and we have to figure out what this is. Because it’s very real, and we don’t even know all the implications of the answers that we develop for these questions. So I think that folks like Augustine and others were just trying to find the truth of what this was and how to think about it, because they considered this something as real as, you know, your humors that are inside your body and— and yeah, and you walk around and essential oils and suddenly you have sexual desire and you’re just like, why do I have this?

Yes. And, you know, it has a lot of implications for how we decide what’s right and wrong. You know, these were debates that were going on among the most important philosophers of the ancient world who remain some of the most important thinkers about right and wrong.

This discussion is still happening, right? Like, it is a perpetual discussion to some extent.

I mean, is it okay to like the Raiders? Of course not. But, you know, there are people who for whatever reason are born with this inclination, concupiscence, you can call it if you want, a hurtful desire. But yeah, for whatever reason, there are Raiders fans out there. But, you know, it’s the perennial question. Why do people like the Raiders?

There you go.

Yeah, there’s no answer.

There is no answer. All right.

Well, I, I, I get, I’m going to get a bunch of comments on that. As soon as I post this on, on Twitter, I’m going to get a bunch of comments.

They’re not even in Oakland anymore, man.

Come on.

They’re in— Surely they’re okay now.

They’re in Vegas enjoying the zero Michelin star restaurants for who knows how much longer. Yeah.

That was, that’s a reference to a conversation that Dan and I had before we started recording. So there you go. Well, I think that we have managed to not get to anything.

We’ve talked for an hour. We’ve circled the question a lot.

And we— yeah, boy, did we talk around about some stuff. But I don’t know if we got to anything, but it’s— I still liked it. If you would like to have an original sin, go out and have one. I think sinning in an original way.

I had two yesterday.

That’s a— it’s a fun challenge is what I think. Uh, so go, go and enjoy some Original Sin. If you would like to commit the sin of, of helping this, of encouraging us, yeah, then I encourage you to go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma, sign up, get the, uh, get access to an early and ad-free version of the show, get access to the, uh, the, the after party, the additional content that we make every week, and also, uh, be one of our favorite people. So that’s always a great thing to do. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show, and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

Not Original, Not Sin

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology