As I was working on The Bible Tells Me So<\/a> One day I was eating lunch with a Jewish classmate who grew up in Israel. We were both in our first year, and somehow the topic turned to the story of Adam and Eve.<\/p>\n Many Christians understand\u00a0this story\u2019s meaning not only to be quite obvious, but absolutely foundational to the Christian faith. Even the slightest movement one degree to the left or right threatened to shrivel the gospel like cotton candy when it hits your tongue.<\/p>\n Every Christian just \u201cknows\u201d the Adam and Eve story is about the \u201cfall\u201d of humanity from a blissful state of perfection into a state of sin subsequently passed down from parents to children, the root cause\u00a0of\u00a0every conceivable ill on earth, from tyranny to taxes to the fine print in your cell phone contract.<\/p>\n So my classmate and I were having lunch talking about this story and I mentioned casually the \u201cfall\u201d of humanity.<\/p>\n \u201cThe what?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe fall of humanity. You know, Adam and Eve\u2019s sin plunged all subsequent humanity into a state of alienation from God.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNever heard of it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cReally? That\u2019s odd, since it\u2019s so obvious.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo it\u2019s not. The story nowhere says what you just said it says.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, then what do you make of Satan tempting Eve with the forbidden fruit\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWho?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat do you mean \u2018who?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSatan? There\u2019s no Satan in the story. There\u2019s a serpent, just a serpent. He\u2019s called the most \u2018crafty\u2019 of the creatures that God had put into the garden. He\u2019s a serpent. A crafty creature. That\u2019s what the text says.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut the serpent is talking<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBecause it\u2019s a story.\u201d<\/p>\n It came as a bit of a shock to me that what I\u00a0thought I \u201cknew\u201d the story of Adam and Eve was about wasn\u2019t really \u201cin\u201d the story itself, but how I had been taught to interpret the story. The dominant Christian reading is rooted in\u00a0the apostle Paul, in the book of Romans, where Paul seems to place at Adam\u2019s feet (not Eve\u2019s, curiously) the blame for human misery.<\/p>\n Many Christians have<\/em> understood Paul this way, and by \u201cmany\u201d I mean more or less the entire tradition of western Christianity, especially as it has been steered through the influence of Augustine<\/a>, the fourth century CE Church Father and\u00a0his rather disastrous reading of Romans 5:12. (You can get the gist of Augustine\u2019s mistake\u00a0here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Augustine concluded\u00a0that all humanity sinned \u201cin\u201d Adam, and that state of sinfulness was\u00a0passed on biologically (through sex) to their children (which is why Cain killed Abel), and so on and so on.\u00a0<\/em>(See more here<\/a> This post isn\u2019t about original sin. It\u2019s just happened to be the topic of our lunch conversation. My point here is that my Jewish classmate\u2013who knew his Bible, in Hebrew, backward and forwards\u2013didn\u2019t get.<\/p>\n Rather than being born in sin because of something Adam did, humanity has an \u201cevil inclination<\/em>,\u201d meaning humans are, for whatever reason, prone to disobey God.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the first place (before there was a \u201cfall\u201d), Cain followed his father\u2019s pattern, and on and on all the way to the story of the Flood, which is where the problem is explained and the reason for the Flood is given: The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great on the earth, and that every inclination<\/span> of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil <\/span>continually<\/em>. (Gen 6:5)<\/p>\n In the years that followed, I\u2019ve come back to that moment and perceived its importance.<\/p>\n All it took to rock my certainty about what I \u201cknew\u201d the Bible \u201csays\u201d was one lunch with someone who, like me, was committed to understanding his scripture but who didn\u2019t think like me and took a moment to point out what the Bible says.<\/p>\n It got me thinking: I wonder how much else I think\u00a0I know about the Bible\u00a0might be less what I actually\u00a0read in the Bible and more what I bring\u00a0to it?<\/strong><\/p>\n A key factor in my own growth as a Christian\u00a0is something that wasn\u2019t even on my radar screen during seminary or when I began my doctoral work: hearing Jewish voices talk about their Bible.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=inspirandinca-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0062272020\")
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Jewish theology doesn\u2019t depend on Augustine (or Paul), and so they read the story differently.<\/h2>\n