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The First Man Across the Three Faiths

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The First Man Across the Three Faiths

Judaism reads the garden narrative without the doctrine that later became central to Christianity. Adam's disobedience brings mortality and hardship into human life, and rabbinic tradition reflects at length on his stature, his naming of the animals, and his role as the ancestor of all, but classical Judaism does not teach an inherited guilt transmitted to his descendants.

Christianity made Adam a pivotal theological figure through the letters of Paul, who set him against Christ: as in Adam all die, so in Christ all are made alive, Christ being the last Adam. On this typology Augustine built the doctrine of original sin, the idea that Adam's fall corrupted human nature itself, a condition passed to all humanity and healed only in Christ, which became foundational for Western Christianity and was contested in the East and later at the Reformation over its details.

Islam honours Adam (Adam) as the first human and the first prophet. The Qur'an tells how God taught him the names of all things, commanded the angels to bow before him, and how Iblis refused and was cast out; Adam and his wife are tempted and eat, but in the Qur'anic telling they repent and are forgiven, and no doctrine of inherited sin follows. Each new life begins, in this reading, in a state of original purity.

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