Who laid the blame of "original sin" upon Adam?

[iskander]

There may be some sort of Zen in all of this, but doesn't one need to know where they are at in order to know how to get where they want to be? If it took until Augustine to determine where Adam was initially at, then how did Adam know where he was at?

This makes Romans 5:13 look like babbling nonsense. If sin is not counted (or accounted) when there is no law, then Adam could not possibly inherently transmute to subsequent generations "initial sin" in the Augustinian (and Pauline?) sense. And the need for a last (second) Adam is negated. And Paul's entire theology (and thereby all of NT theology, at least) collapses...

Does this citation from Kaufmann suggests an answer to your question?

" sin and evil
The legends of Genesis 1-11 contains an ancient non-Israelite substratum... the legacy inherited from a pre-Israelite civilization .. The legends of Genesis 1-11 tell how all the evils that beset men began : natural ( death, pain , etc. ), moral ( murder, violence, etc.), and religious ( idolatry).The narrative is couched not in philosophical language, but in picturesque, naive imagery.

Both JE and P represent the world as a product of God's benign will . Genesis 1 ( P) pronounces each act of creation good. The high point is reached in the creation of man in God's image. JE's story ( Gen2:4-4:26 ) portrays man as a unique creature. the darling of God, set in God's garden to cultivate and enjoy it... only one restriction was placed upon him : he must not , on pain of death. eat of the fruit of the " tree of knowledge of good and evil." --

But what is the meaning of this? "

The Religion of Israel Yehazkel Kaufmann,
translated and abridged by Moshe Greenberg.
Sefer Ve Sefel Publishing, Jerusalem, 2003
ISBN 9657287022
pages 292-93

[lsayre]

I realize that this is where it all points back to (for us looking at it today, given that we posses the OT and the NT), but if originally the Hebrews, and later the Israelites and Judah, and still later the Samaritans and the Jews did not see in this (the Genesis story) a curse which eventually came to be called "original sin", did Paul make this leap? Did anyone before Paul believe that a Messiah would (via his death) absolve mankind of the sin/curse of death that mankind inherited through Adam?

When did the first/last Adam conception originate, and who originated it? Do (for example) the texts of the DSS show that their authors had a concept of a first Adam and a (coming, or already having come) last Adam/Messiah?

[iskander]

I realize that this is where it all points back to (for us looking at it today, given that we posses the OT and the NT), but if originally the Hebrews, and later the Israelites and Judah, and still later the Samaritans and the Jews did not see in this (the Genesis story) a curse which eventually came to be called "original sin", did Paul make this leap? Did anyone before Paul believe that a Messiah would (via his death) absolve mankind of the sin/curse of death that mankind inherited through Adam?

When did the first/last Adam conception originate, and who originated it? Do (for example) the texts of the DSS show that their authors had a concept of a first Adam and a (coming, or already having come) last Adam/Messiah?

You are asking someone to explain why Christianity is different from other religions?

[lsayre]

You are asking someone to explain why Christianity is different from other religions?

Only indirectly perhaps, if "original sin" is definitively that unique concept which separates Christians from those who came before them.

[iskander]

You are asking someone to explain why Christianity is different from other religions?

Only indirectly perhaps, if "original sin" is definitively that unique concept which separates Christians from those who came before them.

The original sin is also called the ancestral sin and it means only that it was the first one , it meant nothing more than that until Augustine of Hippo. The Jewish Genesis describes the ancestral, original, etc, sin of Adam which resulted in the expulsion from Eden and that was very bad news for the their children. This was also how Paul was interpreted by the Holy Fathers until Augustine.

The Eastern Catholic Apostolic Christian Church of the Greek Fathers paid no attention to the heresy of Augustine .

The posts I have posted explain the position of the Roman Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, the arguments of Augustine and a glimpse of the some Jewish comments...

[iskander]

The sin of Adam and dead souls , Philo on Adam' s fall .


allegorical interpretation 1

XXXIII. (105) Accordingly God says, "In the day in which ye eat of it ye shall die the death." And yet, though they have eaten of it, they not only do not die, but they even beget children, and are the causes of life to other beings besides themselves. What, then, are we to say? Surely that death is of two kinds; the one being the death of the man, the other the peculiar death of the soul--now the death of the man is the separation of his soul from his body, but the death of the soul is the destruction of virtue and the admission of vice;

(106) and consequently God calls that not merely "to die," but "to die the death;" showing that he is speaking not of common death, but of that peculiar and especial death which is the death of the soul, buried in its passions and in all kinds of evil

(107) When, therefore, God says, "to die the death," you must remark that he is speaking of that death which is inflicted as punishment, and not of that which exists by the original ordinance of nature. The natural death is that one by which the soul is separated from the body. But the one which is inflicted as a punishment, is when the soul dies according to the life of virtue, and lives only according to the life of vice.

The Roman Catholic Doctrine of the Original Sin : ,CCC 403. ' we are conceived with a dead soul : even a foetus is afflicted '

CCC 403
403 Following St. Paul [note], the Church has always taught that the overwhelming misery which oppresses men and their inclination towards evil and death cannot be understood apart from their connection with Adam's sin and the fact that he has transmitted to us a sin with which we are all born afflicted, a sin which is the "death of the soul".291 Because of this certainty of faith, the Church baptizes for the remission of sins even tiny infants who have not committed personal sin.292


[note] added by me . They really mean, Augustine of Hippo of the 5th century CE, but they hide this embarrassing information in CCC 403.
http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s2c1p7.htm

[iskander]

The bottom line is... No God can do anything for you or to you without "Belief" in that God. In the meantime humans continue to kill in the name (nature) of their God. Hate and fear causes more people to go to church then Love.

God can't do anything without believers, and he is nothing more than how those believers describe him.

Augustine believes every pregnant woman carries in her womb a dead soul who will remain a dead soul eternally if the woman does not give birth to a live child. When the child is born it has to be baptized in the Catholic Church to be eligible for salvation and so on and on. In Christianity every man and woman is born to suffer eternally unless god dies to redeem humanity. Redemption is ugly and it is also a fraud. Humanity is not redeemed by this ugly death of a man-god, but churches get wealth and power as the owners of the business of Redemption.

Christianity , like any other religion, is a literary fiction about gods, karmas..., that control the assumed existence of life after death. The history of any religion is the history of the first people who invented that one divine character and the content of these stories is the theology of that religion .