HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR
Charting a New Reformation
Part XII – The Third Thesis: Original Sin “Pre-Darwinian Mythology –
Post-Darwinian Nonsense” (continued)
In the fourth century of this Common Era, when the creeds of the Christian Church were being formed, people reading the Christian Bible assumed that it was “the inerrant word of God.” They were certain that God was the author and that the Bible could not, therefore, be wrong. They also had no sense of how the Bible actually came to be written. They did not know, among many other things, that there were multiple authors of most of the books of the Bible. The Torah, the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, known as the book of Moses, was thought to have been written by Moses himself, as he received its words directly from God on Mt. Sinai. Today we know that the Torah is made up of at least four major strands of writing, produced separately over a period of some 500 years, and blended together into one continuous story only by a group of later editors. Moses did not write a single word of it. The first written part of the Torah, which we call the Yahwist document, was written about 300 years after Moses’ death. The final chapter of Deuteronomy, the last book of the Torah, contains the story of Moses’ death and burial. It is a remarkable author who can write that story about himself.
This revelation in our understanding of how the Bible came to be written and assembled was primarily the work of 18th and 19th century European scripture scholars. None of this was known at the time in the fourth century when the creeds were being formed. So a 4th century theologian like St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa and a prolific Christian author, assumed that chapter one of Genesis (actually Gen.1: 1-2:4a) preceded the rest of chapter two The fact is, however, that Genesis 1:1-2:4a was probably a piece of writing from the hand of a group of people known as the priestly writers, and it dates from the 6th century BCE when the Jews were undergoing captivity in the land of Babylon. On the other hand, Genesis 2:4b through the end of the Adam and Eve story appears to come from the hand of the Yahwist author, who is usually dated somewhere between 940-960 BCE, or some 400 plus years before the writing of Genesis 1:1-2:4a. Oblivious to this reality, Augustine built his model for understanding the Christian faith on the substance of the first chapters of Genesis, falsely assuming that it was one continuous, literally true story. The reason I belabor this point is that it was through this misunderstanding that what we now call “original sin” first entered the Christian vocabulary and then became one of its central lynchpins.
Genesis 1:1-2:4a is the account of the seven day creation. In the mind of Augustine, this was the story of God making a perfect and finished world. This text says that God had actually looked out on all that God had made and pronounced it good – all of it. There was no evil anywhere. This first part of Genesis also implied that creation was finished, for it says that when God had concluded the work of creation, God took a day off and entered into a Sabbath of rest. The seventh day was thus set aside to celebrate the completed perfection of all that God had made. This was how the Sabbath was first established. The opening part of Genesis was a picture of “original goodness.” The world began, it asserts, in a state of perfection.
Augustine, as well as everyone else, knew that this original goodness no longer existed. He knew that the world was a place of violence and savagery, selfishness and prejudice. How had God’s original perfection gotten so corrupted? How did evil enter the Garden of Eden? Those were the questions people asked and the answers to these questions, they believed, were given in the 2nd chapter of Genesis, which Augustine assumed followed directly after the seven day creation of a perfect world. Thus the narrative that began with Genesis 2:4b became known as “the story of the fall,” the account of the human plunge from the “original goodness” found in chapter 1 into the “original sin” of chapter 2. Augustine, however, read this Hebrew mythmaking as the literal account of how sin had corrupted the goodness of God’s original perfection.
God created “Adam,” chapter 2 of Genesis began, using the Hebrew word for humankind as the literal name of the first man, thus revealing the mythic quality of this story. In a patriarchal world it was not surprising that the first human being was male. This was, however, directly contrary to the creation narrative found in the much later written 1st chapter of Genesis. There on the sixth day of creation, God had created the male and the female together and instantaneously, but only after all of the other animals had been formed. In this way the author had made it clear that only the human male and female were made in God’s image. Between the male and the female in this version there was no distinction and no superiority. These facts, however, were not yet part of the human consciousness.
In the chapter 2 version, we see an older more primitive and less enlightened deity. In this version of creation the man stood alone, created by God out of the dust of the earth and into whom God had breathed the divine breath, which was known as nephesh. The man ruled the land, standing in domination over all that God had made. This was the vision of Genesis 2, at least as Augustine understood it.
The man, however, was lonely, says chapter 2, and so he complained to God about this loneliness. The ever-patient God then sought to create for Adam a creature who would assuage his loneliness. This was how all the animals came into being in this earlier version of creation. Through a trial and error process, God sought to find a “proper friend” for the lonely Adam. This helped to explain just how it had happened, these ancient people believed, that there were so many varieties of so many animals.
When each creature was finished, God brought it before Adam. “That is a very nice dog or cat, chicken or horse, cow or monkey,” Adam would say, as each specimen paraded before him. None of them, however, was exactly the kind of friend that Adam was seeking. Finally, one gets the impression from the text that God becomes exasperated with the divine inability to please Adam. No matter how many variations God introduced into the animal kingdom Adam wasn’t satisfied. God had made two-legged creatures and four-legged creatures; they had bushy tails, thin tails, curly tails or no tails at all; there were feathered creatures, hairy creatures, horned creatures, sea creatures, land creatures and amphibious creatures; some living things had both eyes looking forward, others had one eye on each side of its head. Some were vegetarian, while others were carnivorous. Nothing, however, seemed to satisfy Adam. Finally, the text suggests that in an act of desperation, God put Adam to sleep, removed one of his ribs (no mention was made of what God used for anesthesia) and from that single rib, God fashioned the first woman. One female theologian noted that this was childbirth “as only a man, who had never had a baby, could have imagined it.” Standing the newly minted woman with all of her provocative curves and feminine lines visible in front of the still asleep first man, God, we are told, proceeded to awaken Adam.
The image one receives from this text reminds me of the cartoon character whose eyes popped out of his head on coiled springs and the words written in the box above his head said: “boing, boing.” Then Adam, we are told, spoke: “Beloved Lord, this is at last the bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. I shall call her name woman because she was taken out of man.” Actually, in Hebrew, an untranslatable slang expression is used. It was as if Adam said something like: “Hot diggity, Lord, you finally did it.” Adam named Eve, as he had named all of the previous animals. It was an interesting way of proclaiming the lordship of the male over all other living things. The woman was human enough to be the man’s primary companion, but she was not superior, or even equal to the man. “Helpmeet” was her name. It was still a patriarchal, male-dominant world.
The stage was now set for evil to enter the world and it could not come from God because there could be no evil that derives from God. So evil had to come from one of God’s creatures. The lordly male could not be the source of evil either. Evil must be blamed on a lesser creature, a part of the secondary creation. The weak link in creation clearly had to be the woman. So it was that Augustine interpreted the second chapter of the creation story to be the account of how evil entered God’s perfect world. In this way he explained how God’s original perfection was now distorted by original sin and how the perfection of God’s world was ruined by the fall into evil. It was a fascinating story, the kind ancient people created to explain the realities of their experience. It was, however, only an ancient Hebrew myth. It would, however, have lasting and sometimes terrifying consequences and repercussions in the way the Christian religion would develop. The concept of “original sin” was now injected into this ancient Hebrew legend, and original sin would grow to become the primary assumption against which the Christian story would be told.
We will pick up our narrative at this point next week.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Agathe Dupont from France writes:
Question:
I am French and Catholic. I agree with most all that you think, but and I do not speak good English. I have taught classics and am a Ph.D. in religious history, religious antiquity religious anthropology. I send you a text maybe you could understand it or know somebody who can help you. There is an error in the translation from Greek to Latin (and so in all the languages after) of an important verse about marriage and divorce in Matthew 5:32. Big consequences (indissolubility of marriage and so on). Even if I know myself that I can know what I do, it is important for other people to have an image less deformed of Jesus: there are many different levels and ways. I would like to meet you if you go in France, maybe with a group?
Thank you for your comments. Sorry for my bad English. I teach classics and I can read English. Tell me if you read French if I have to answer from you!
Answer:
Dear Agathe,
Thank you for your letter that I have printed as it was received. Your English is better than my French, so I appreciate it. I was in France for four days last June. Two of my books have now been translated into French and are available at bookstores from a publisher named Editions Karthala. They are Born of a Woman and Why Christianity Must Change or Die? We expect to be back in Paris this October by which time two others of my books, Resurrection: Myth or Reality? and Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, will have made their entrances into the French publishing world. At that time I will be preaching and lecturing in the American Cathedral in Paris. I would love to meet you and others in your group. If you would contact Jeanne Raymond, who is my agent and contact (at Karthala(a)orange.fr (22-24 Boulevard Arago, 75013 Paris). She can apprise you of the exact times and places.
The verse you ask about is in the Sermon on the Mount. It makes adultery the sole justification for divorce; that is a Matthaen adaptation. The point in this text is the permanence of the marriage vows. They were meant to be incapable of being dissolved. In that society, however, a woman could not divorce her husband, only the husband could divorce the wife. Equality between the sexes was not yet an idea that had been born. Making it more difficult for the man to divorce his wife was the agenda. If Matthew had his way a man could only divorce his wife if she were guilty of adultery, and anyone who would marry a divorced and adulterous woman (for there should be no other kind) was participating in her ongoing adultery.
The sacredness of the marriage vows was and is an important asset in the stability of the whole society, but there are reasons today for allowing divorce that does not impugn the integrity of the divorcing partner. Should a woman be forced to live with an abusive husband? If the relationship has placed both partners into depression, should the relationship be forced to be continued? If a man in a mid-life crisis leaves his wife for a younger woman, is the abandoned wife doomed to live a single, loveless future? Life is so much more complicated than the laws of the past seemed to understand.
I am a remarried widower. My first wife died of cancer in 1988 and I married my second wife Christine in 1990. She was a single, divorced woman, who separated from her husband in 1982 and received a “No Fault” divorce in 1986. She and her first husband remain good friends to this day and they share the love and responsibilities of their two children, now grown up. I support, as an ideal, faithful monogamy and life enduring marriages. I think we do take our partners for better or worse, in sickness and in health, ‘til death us do part. When the ideal, however, proves not to be possible, the wholeness of one’s life in my mind takes priority over the rules of one’s religious tradition. That makes me a “liberal” I suppose. I think it makes me realistic about the complexities of modern life. I adore my wife. We have now been married for over 26 years. If we use biblical standards that one knows the goodness of the tree by the goodness of the fruit it produces, then I bear witness to the fact that my life is made whole in this marriage. I am expanded, I am a more loving, more patient, more caring and more giving person today than I have ever been before. I, therefore, do not hesitate to define my marriage as “of God” and I live in gratitude for the gifts my wife gives to me. I hope that I have helped to create in her the same responses.
The ultimate law of life is love. How love is worked out in the particular circumstances of life is not by keeping the rules, but by becoming more whole. It is a lot harder to do than people think, but the results are more blessed than rigid rule-following could ever produce.
I hope we meet someday.
John Shelby Spong
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