In the Book of Genesis, the first man and the first woman are offered paradise with one condition: that they not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. And yet they are tempted to do so by the serpent. God cautioned that the man and woman would die if they ate from the tree, but the serpent explained that this was not true. Instead, they would become like God.
That fateful choice to eat from the forbidden tree is the first example of sin. That one sin is considered the basis for the notion of Original Sin. The beginning of this doctrine comes not through the Hebrew Scriptures, but later through the writings of Paul. He wrote in his letter to the Romans: “[J]ust as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned – sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law.”
Paul is saying that sin was born by the choice of Adam and therefore death was made possible (note that Eve is not blamed here by Paul). And death spread to all for “all have sinned,” which declaration strangely goes unexplained. This last point is not the same as the idea that the sin of Adam is the sin of all his children.
How did that far more expansive idea come to be? Original Sin was developed through arguments within the early Christian Church. The notion of preexisting sin was considered, with each newborn tainted by corruption from long ago. The church father Athanasius claimed that Adam had forsaken a gift from God. That gift, or grace, was a human being’s conformity to the image of God. This image was indelibly marred by sin…
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