What Exactly Is Inherited

Original sin is the doctrine that the fault of the first human beings is in some way passed to their descendants. Its sharpest questions are two: whether what is inherited is guilt or only its consequences, mortality, weakness, a disordered will, and whether the inheritance is universal and unavoidable. East and West give different answers, and Judaism gives another again.

The scriptural material is compact and much contested. Genesis 3 narrates the transgression in Eden and its penalties, but does not use the later vocabulary of inherited sin. The decisive text is Romans 5:12, where Paul writes that death spread to all "because" all sinned, or, on the reading that shaped the Latin West, "in whom [Adam] all sinned." That second rendering rests on the Latin in quo for a Greek phrase (eph' ho) that most modern scholarship takes to mean "because" rather than "in whom," and the difference did much to fix the Western sense of a guilt transmitted from Adam himself.