greyline

You haven't shown that it does. Is there a reason I should believe a Christian or any non-Jew about what Jews believe over educated Jews and respected Jewish authorities?

Gamera

This simply doesn't correspond to what Genesis says.

God says that if they ate from the tree of good and evil, that day they would die.

Gen 2: "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17 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."

Adam and Eve do eat, but of course don't die physically that day. So the curse cannot be physical death, but rather a metaphorical death, involving some spiritual relationship with God, the exact nature of which isn't disclosed.

Genesis is highly poetic, highly symbolic in nature. Deriving a precise theological concept of original sin from Genesis makes no sense, especially since no other author of the Hebrew or Christian scriptures even mentions the concept.

It is an artifact of mediaeval Christian clerics and is unrelated to the gospel message. It's just more useless derivative theology that gunked up the gospel message after Paul.

Solo

whose is standard Christian viewpoint ?

...what God meant (in 2:17) was 'you will become aware of your mortality'.

....they died presumably of natural causes. Adam was 930 years old when he gave up the ghost.

Not really an 'ability', they received death as something of an existential challenge.

I prefer 'sin' to 'crime' but If you want to see death as punishment, visited on the innocent, sure, that is your call. :huh:

Jiri

greyline

Your interpretation doesn't make sense either. God says they'll die, and after they eat the fruit he reiterates that they'll die. The death he's talking about in the latter case is physical death ("for dust thou [art], and unto dust shalt thou return.") so why assume that he's talking about spiritual death in the first case? That just makes him even more of a liar regarding the consequences of eating the fruit (he's already lied or misled them about the consequences, as he said nothing beforehand about weeds and pain in childbirth, let alone - from the Christian perspective - inherited sin).

greyline

The regular stuff that we all get taught: A&E disobeyed God and the consequence was eternal damnation for all mankind.


Since that's nothing like what God said, I don't accept this as a reasonable interpretation.

dug_down_deep

I briefly held a membership in a Reform synagogue. As someone raised in the protestant cloud that is middle america, it was very refreshing to be in an environment where diverse views were encouraged, rather than squelched. And the treatment of the Torah is really like loving a great book. People just read it, think about it, try to see what value it has to modern life, then put it down and eat.

In other words, there are probably many answers to your question.

BTW, what Solo has said about original sin is nonsense, in my experience. If anything, most Jews are repulsed by that concept.

greyline

This is also the impression I've been getting when I read Jewish writing on the subject, especially since trying to convince Jews they do believe in Original Sin has been used as an evangelical tool in the past. ("You really do already believe in Original Sin, you just don't know it! And once you accept it, you'll see why you need Jesus in your life!")

Solo

If you followed the discussion, you would have understood what I argued and why I wrote it that way.


But the "curse" (technically only the serpent was cursed by God) on Adam in 3:19 says he will return to dust from whence he was taken. So, it cannot be argued intelligently that physical death (and/or the awareness of it) was not part of the deal.

The doctrine of original sin is a later coin. However, Paul uses the symbology to very clear theological ends.

That is beside the point. The question here is: Does the idea of original sin derive from, or is it traceable to, Judaism ?

Jiri

Gamera

Because he didn't just say, you'll die. He said you'll die the very day you do it. And they didn't. So either God's a liar (which would be an odd thing for a Hebrew author to relate) or he didn't mean physical death.

Given the highly poetic nature of Genesis, the latter is clearly what is intended.

As to returning to dust, that itself is a highly figurative statement that means something other than just physical death, since the Hebrew scripture and the Christian scriptures even more so, emphasize that the spirit is eternal. Adam and Eve in fact do not die, but live on spiritually. So something else is going on here, the exact nature of which is obscure and probably unretreivable, but in any case, the clockwork corrolation of original sin causing physical death can't be it. Indeed, Paul's notions of sin and death clearly transcend the notion of physical death.

In any case, none of this is related to the gospel, which works quite well without this odd theological doctrine. Which is why nowhere in the Old Testament or New is the phrase "original sin" mentioned

greyline

As I pointed out, he already lied about other stuff so I don't see a problem here. (Except of course that God's breaking his own moral code, but he does that all the time as well.)

The OP is what Jews believe, not what the gospels say. My impression is that the Jews and the gospels have no notion of original sin. Paul vaguely refers to something along those lines, and the early church fathers made it up the rest - they invented the disease in order to sell the cure.