Three Traditions, Three Consequences

The three traditions that inherit the narrative disagree less about what happens in it than about what it does to everyone afterward. Christian theology, working from a line in Paul about death entering the world through one man, developed the doctrine that human nature itself was damaged by the act and that the damage is transmitted, a position given its most influential form by Augustine and carried into Western Christianity through the debates over baptism and grace. Eastern Christian traditions inherited the same texts but generally emphasise inherited mortality rather than inherited guilt, which is one of the older differences between East and West.

Jewish reading has no doctrine of original sin. The rabbis treat the episode as the beginning of human moral responsibility and of the struggle between competing inclinations within each person, and hold that every individual stands or falls on their own account; the passage is not read in synagogue as an explanation of a fallen condition. Islamic tradition places the garden outside the earth rather than in it, has Iblis rather than a serpent do the tempting, and holds that both the man and his wife were addressed together, which removes the asymmetry of blame that Western Christian reading built on the order of the eating. Adam then receives words from his Lord and turns in repentance, and is forgiven, so that in Islamic theology no descendant inherits any guilt at all and each person is born in an original disposition toward God.