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Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

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Anyone even remotely familiar with Western civilization knows the story of the Garden of Eden. What we often don't know is how profoundly that story has influenced society for the past few thousand years. Elaine Pagels does a wonderul job of describing the evolution of some of our most basic social values, such as the inherent value of each soul, freedom of choice, and the sinful nature of sexual desire, all stemming from the early Christian "Church Fathers'" interpretation of the Garden story. What did God mean that "man (and woman) was created in the image of God?" What was the meaning of the forbidden fruit? And how has that influenced the politics of today? All of these and more are addressed between the covers of this book.

One of the signature's of Pagels writing is the in-depth exploration of the writings and debates of the early Christian thinkers who, by the fifth century, largely shaped Christianity into the paradigm we know today. Augustine in particular gets a great deal of ink in this book, as well as Julian (the heretic from Italy), John Chrysostom, Clement and others. In particular, the last two chapters on the Politics of Paradise and the Nature of Nature strongly portray the power of Augustine's philosophy, and Pagels analysis of the psychic attraction to Augustine's paradoxical philosophy regarding "will" is exceptional. I also very much enjoyed her description of the evolution of Christian thinking from one of ultimate free will (so powerful that it resulted in thousands of Christian martyrs in the second and third century), to one of the inherent wickedness of humans by virtue of the original sin, resulting in the need for punitive and controling church and civic governments to rule over all people. The result was the power of the Catholic Church for 1600 years, not to mention the horror of the Dark Ages of christianity.

Elaine Pagels is a delight to read, and ranks up there with Karen Armstrong as a commentator and analyst of the evolution of religion. This is a great little book!

Elaine Pagels is perhaps best known as the author of the popular text, `The Gnostic Gospels', highlighting a lesser known arena in early Christian history. Her reputation is somewhat controversial, as is her writing, but one thing is certain - she is a good writer, interesting to read, and she will make her readers think. This particular book, `Adam, Eve and the Serpent' deals with issues surrounding sexuality and gender, a hot topic in the social and cultural situations of today, but similarly of concern throughout much of Christian history. There is a tug-of-war between `traditional values' (leaving aside that there are various traditions) and `revisionist' or `modern' ideas, and few are in agreement over where the boundaries should be drawn.

Pagels explores some of the ways in which these traditional roles of gender and patterns of sexual expression arose to become so powerfully ingrained in western Christian society. To this day, most people make the appeal to the early chapters of Genesis both as the paradigm for what God intended for the world as well as the explanation, if not the actual instance, of sin and evil encroaching upon the world. Pagels begins with a copy of the first few chapters of Genesis, and traces ways in which ancient Jewish and early Christian communities interpreted these chapters.

Each chapter in Pagel's book highlights a particular theme. The first chapter looks at the understanding of Jewish culture of the early Genesis stories that would have formed the world view of Jesus, Paul, and the other apostles and church leaders, all of whom were born and raised into this Jewish culture. Jesus and Paul do not seem to see original sin as being a sexual sin or act, according to Pagels, and humanity after Adam and Eve are still called to make a moral choice out of freedom that goes beyond sexuality.

Later chapters deal with the development of interpretation in light of the political and social situation, first as an oppressed minority, then later as a significant political presence in the empire. Pagels also devotes a chapter to looking at the Gnostics and their views toward gender and sexuality, the radicality of which sowed some of the discord between their community and the greater orthodox church. Pagels then devotes considerable space to the Augustinian development of ideas of sexuality, gender and human nature in relation to Genesis, as all subsequent Christian viewpoints in the West have some relationship, pro or con, to the Augustinian foundations. The prevailing idea of original sin as being sexual derives largely from Augustine (although some of it is based upon misinterpretation).

Pagels discusses briefly the issues of exegesis (interpretation) versus eisegesis (reading into the text, or projection) - it is often said that one can find most anything one wants in the bible by interpretation; Pagels has been charged with this as well. However, as an explanation of the ways in which certain texts were understood and passed on, Pagels is a good voice to include - her scholarship and research support is sound, and her interpretations fit within reasonable limits. This is a book that introduces the reader to ideas perhaps unknown, intriguing, and certainly worthy of conversation.

"Adam, Eve, and the Serpent" is a brief, fascinating introduction to the world that shaped early Christian thought. Pagels writes that, during the first four centuries of the common era, there were many different schools of thought about religion, almost as many as there are in the contemporary American setting that she writes.

In this book, she examines how one myth -- the story of the fall of Adam and Eve-- shaped different religious thinkers. Some, like Augustine, took it as an illustration of the inherantly sinful nature of people, and used the story to flesh out his highly influential beliefs about original sin. Other religious thinkers, like Gnostics, saw the myth as an allegory about the spirit (Eve) within the flesh (Adam) and even went so far to see the serpant as an early foreshadowing to Christ. The fall wasn't a bad thing -- it was an allegory of emerging spiritual consciousness.

Readers may be surprised to discover just how influential the Adam and Eve myth really was. For many under Roman rule, it was the first introduction to a notion of human equality-- all people were equal creations of God-- and a spark that lead to contemporary American concepts that "all men are created equal." (Just to be accurate, in both of these periods it was only men who were seen as equal, and no consideration was given to women, slaves, etc...) Pagels points out that an idea like this, which the American founding fathers took to be 'self-evident' is in fact an empirically unprovable concept, and philosophers like Aristotle would have found it absurd.

Elsewhere in the book, Pagels provides an interesting window into Christian attitudes about celibacy. I was surprised to learn a life of renunciation was seen as a freedom from the responsibilities of family life -- my modern mind was more trained to see it as a purely religious concept, not a practical one.

Pagels has a succint, controlled writing style that is hypnotic. In just 154 pages, she covers a lot of ground. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and would be curious to see other treatments of the singular influence of certain Bible stories.

Elaine Pagels' knowledge of the development of Christianity during its first four centuries is very much in evidence in ADAM, EVE AND THE SERPENT as she describes the evolution of diverse interpretations of the Genesis creation stories held by succeeding generations of the new sect. In her account attitudes toward marriage, family, procreation and celibacy are shown to vary widely.

The author portrays Jesus as a man who views himself as a prophet sent to warn mankind of the coming Kingdom of God. Preparation for this event, according to Jesus, will require an allegiance that is stronger even than one's ties to family and nation.

The message of Jesus and later Paul was mostly about repentance and purification. Pagels claims that this emphasis became modified as the religion spread to Rome, Greece, Asia and Africa. A struggle then ensued between orthodox believers who sought a new ethical system and institutional structure which set them apart from the neighboring pagans and the gnostics who wished to achieve an elevated level of spiritual consciousness without the supervision of bishops and clergy.

The author points out that the lessons of the creation stories as interpreted by the first Christians allow them to validate the freedom of humans to choose between good and evil. In the fifth century Augustine looks at Genesis more as a story of human bondage. While the earlier Christians see people as being capable of self government, the prevailing attitude among believers reverses itself abruptly after the time of Constantine.

Elaine Pagels writes with clarity and she has the ability to make difficult material seem understandable to those of us who are not academics.

In this book I learned more about the incredible assortment of beliefs prevalent within the early church. The vision of a simple and unified body of beginning Christians has always apparently been just a myth.

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.

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.

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.

If you just have a chance to glance at the book, (1)read pg 150, this is the last page before the epilogue(and is a very concise summary of the book's topics), then read the (2)epilogue, then chapter 1 (3)"the kingdom of God is at hand".(these will give you the best idea of the type of writing and whether it means with your interests) The meat of the book is chapter 6 "the nature of nature" which is an extended argument against Augustine's view of original sin as 1)carried by semen 2)at odds with the radical moralfreedom that the early church taught 3)at odds with natural science. 4)is primarily a cynical justification of the power of religious and political organizations

I really don't know who to recommend the book to. It is written not for scholars, although rebuttal of her points would require at least as good a scholar as she is, but rather at an undergrad level. Educated laymen, interested scholars from associated disciplines, people following an interest in Augustine, early church history particular the gnostics(her speciality) would be the natural audience. I read it as part of a deliberate study on Gen 1-3 and interpretations and found it most interesting and provocative with regards to this interest.

She is a good and competent writer, holding your attention and making effort to explain difficult and esoteric historical points not only clear but relevant. A noble and achievable goal in this book. As to the content, there are only a few points that i am particularly competent to analyze as they cross my interests or knowledge base. In several of these she had misread orthodox thinking and comes close to strawman arguments, however i am not sure if this stems from her committments in the field or from my lack of historical depth. But it doesn't demolish the arguments only make them not-persuasive to me.

The book is an extended historical and theological introduction to the exegesis of Genesis 1-3, in particular, the relationship of Adam-Eve-the serpent to the questions of freewill or moral competence-to-choose. She is most detailed and fact-based when she talks about Augustine in chapter 6, but most interesting as she outlines the 4 or 5 centuries of intellectual history in chapter 1. As a secondary, but certainly interesting theme, there is the interpenetration of religious with political thinking. Why doctrines are not hand delivered from God above but rather are often the result of backroom manipulations and intrigue. It is this tension between ideas as independent creatures, like Plato's forms, and as nothing more than justifications of power structures and hierarchical institutions that supplies a movement, a dynamic that makes the book readable and engaging.

I am, of course, aware of Prof. Pagels by reputation, however this is the first book of hers i have had the pleasure of reading and as a result will be interesting in finding more, particularing in her field of Gnostic studies and the Nag Hammadi manuscripts.

There are already many good reviews to this book, so I will only suggest reading the following books on religion in addition to Pagels': a) "The Phenomenon of Religion: A Thematic Approach," by Moojan Momen (astonishingly encyclopedic); b) "Shamans, Sorcerers, and Saints: A Prehistory of Religion" by Brian Hayden (great overview of religion origins and development); c) "Life after Death. A History of the afterlife in Western Religion" by Alan F. Segal; d) "Alternative Tradition: A Study of Unbelief in the Ancient World (Religion and Society)" by James A. Thrower; e) "How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now" by James L. Kugel; and f) "The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason" by Charles Freeman.

This book goes a long way toward explaining from an historical viewpoint how Christianity moved from the creation-is-good view of the Hebrew Bible to the humans-are-bad, body-is-bad view of Augustine. Pagels is a scholar who knows how to make this material accessible and isn't afraid of possible "heresy."