Post: Week 1

Merriman Forum - Week 1

Re: Merriman Forum - Week 1

by Julia O'Brien -
Number of replies: 0

Mary, I can offer more to read about this perspective if you are interested.

The claim isn't that Jews abandoned the story while Paul kept it.

The claim instead is that Jews don't read this story as a catastrophe that ruined humanity. Rather, it is the first of a series of human failings that is met by (temporary) divine punishment and continued divine blessing.

This is pretty universally recognized: Jews and Christians have the same account but they don't weave it into their larger stories in the same way.

Paul really wants to cast Jesus as the solution to a prior problem, and he makes Jesus the second Adam undoing the actions of the first.

One thing to remember that that there are many centuries of interpretation of Genesis between our text and Paul. In the latest periods, that includes encounters with Greek thought in which the body/flesh are suspect. The Adam/Eve narrative gets read in a Graeco-Roman context by lots of Jews in new ways. We can find some of this writing in the Pseudepigrapha.