Adam, Eve, and the Serpent

Rating:
Summary: A Good Work About an Often Overlooked Subject
Review: I have been doing alot of thinking about the (supposedly!) inherent sinful nature of sex. This book, as no other I have found, deals with this subject.

Does humankind live in a world that has fallen due to one man's (Adam's) sin? Or is the world good (sex included) as God designed it to be from the beginning? How did people come to believe that celibacy was superior to sex (i.e., the in-built natural sex drive)?

Pagels answers these and other questions in this remarkable book. A must read for anyone concerned about the origins of the various positions of historic Christianity regarding human sexuality.

Rating:
Summary: The Village Reader Review
Review: Jesus interprets Genesis 1 to 3 in a radical new way, and the subsequent four centuries of orthodox and Gnostic Christians resulting thought process leads to modern ideas on relationships.

In first century Jerusalem there was conflict between the pagan Rome and Jewish culture and religion. There were also a struggles between Jews that had an accommodative posture toward Rome (led mostly by the upper classes and Priests that had the most to lose) and those, mostly more conservative and rural, that resisted Roman influence. In modern terms, Jesus was a resistance leader.

Pagels argues the conflict was partly due to Jesus' interpretation of Genesis. In Genesis 1:28, the basis for marriage was procreation - and by Jewish law, marriage without children was grounds for divorce. Christ turned the law upside down. When asked what the grounds for divorce were, his answer, in Matthew 19:4-6, is that there are none. "This answer shocked his Jewish listeners and, as Matthew tells it, pleased no one".

After the crucifixion, but long before the Reformation, two groups competed for the heart and soul of Christianity - the orthodox and Gnostics. The same Scriptural texts supported radically different viewpoints. Orthodox Christians read Genesis as "history with a moral" - and their viewpoint was "a proclamation of moral freedom". Pagels implies this led to the development of the rights of man, democracy and equality under the law. Gnostics believed that Genesis was a "myth with a meaning". They argued that Genesis could not be read literally because it didn't make sense. There were two different creation texts which didn't agree (Genesis 1:26, 27 and 2:7); they questioned if Adam and Eve could hear God's footsteps (Genesis 3:8) and wonder why God an omniscient God would ask "where are you?" (Genesis 3:9). They looked for a deeper meaning to scripture.

For four centuries orthodox and Gnostic waged a philosophical battle for the heart of Christianity. Orthodoxy won, and only now, nearly sixteen hundred years later, are some of the early arguments and texts being reexamined, after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts in 1945 and the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. This well written, probing, thought provoking book is a part of a reexamination of the development of religious thought.

Rating:
Summary: One passage, hundreds of interpretations.
Review: Pagels sets out the focus of her book on page 9:

"This book will explore the attitudes that Jesus and his followers took toward marriage, family, procreation, and celibacy, and thus toward "human nature" in general, and the controversies these attitudes sparked as they were variously interpreted among Christians for generations -- or for millenia, depending on how one counts."

Pagels' book assumes some primary knowledge of early Church history, as Pagels' primary focus is on the different uses of the early chapters of Genesis in reference to the political and theological challenges of the first five centuries of Christianity. Although the six chapters loosely follow the chronology, the focus of the content in each chapter is topical, rather than historical. It's a little difficult at first to read the chapters together into a whole, but the themes that emerge in the early chapters do build upon one another, up to the sixth chapter in which the interpretation of the creation and fall is discussed the most. Some of these themes are the following:

1.Is it better to be celibate or to have a family? Even as far back as the New Testament, the question isn't 100% clear. According to Luke (as Pagels reads it), Jesus' admonition against divorce is absolute, and the "marrying and giving in marriage" is a sign of commitment to the affairs of this world instead of the coming Kingdom of God. In both instances, passages from Genesis (chapters 1 and 6) are applied to make the point. However, Matthew's use of Luke's material here adds some qualifiers to the prohibition of divorce. On a similar note, the differences can't be ignored between Paul's celibacy and lukewarm approval for marriage in I Corinthians and "Paul's" outright advocacy of marriage and family in I Timothy.

2.What exactly is "liberty"? The Christians, when they were treated as second-class citizens under Roman rule, argued for the right not to worship the imperial gods, which many thought were real demons who were the impure product of the "sons of God" and "daughters of men" in the pre-flood times (Genesis chapter 6). The Roman idea of liberty was living under a good emperor, and that the criticism of their practices amounted to a form of treason. In support of this, the idea that all men were created by God "in his image" proved appealing to those in the underclass who suffered in the empire. But when Christianity became the religion of the empire, questions of religious liberty were asked in a completely different context.

3.Is the path to God, or a more intimate relationship with him, achievable through human effort? The gnostics thought so -- they took interpretations of Genesis to extraordinary lengths, some holding that mankind was governed by preexisting forces that were beyond their free will, and that it was the reintegration of the good forces within us through knowledge that made Christians complete. The ascetics also thought human effort brought them closer to God, by rejecting both sexualty and the comforts of the world. Oddly enough, the way that each of these movements were criticized went in two different directions. In repudiating the gnostics, the church fathers argued that Christianity was not about finding a cosmic ebb and flow and the acceptance of suffering, but about a moral freedom to choose a moral life. Two centuries later, the muscular efforts of the ascetic life were made dim by the emergence of Augustine's pessimism about human nature, i.e., that no effort was sufficient to escape our defective natures.

At the end of the formation process, with all of these elements in the mix, we end up with a view of humanity that to the outsider would appear to be the worst of all options: the original sin is perpetuated by the childbirth process, nature itself is defective (with disease and stillbirth cited as evidence), no one can remove the stain of the original sin -- not even converted believers. Pagels explains that this view of mankind, and of the fall, was not only well-suited to a centralized church authority, it also provided the individual with an explanation of why bad things happen in the world.

Whether intentional or not, a good deal of the book is framed in reference to how Christian orthodoxy has been formed in reaction to a crisis -- the Jewish society, the Roman empire, the gnostic subversiveness, and the Pelagian opposition to centralized church rule. While it may seem that the Catholic Church has been the same for at least 1600 years, Pagels' book provides a partial glimpse of how much in flux the first 400 years were in shaping orthodoxy.