Sin

Fredriksen (Distinguished Visiting Professor of Comparative Religion, Hebrew Univ., Jerusalem; From Jesus to Christ) traces the concept of sin through seven "evolutionary jumps" from the teachings of Jesus and Paul in the first century C.E., to Valentinus, Marcion, and Justin Martyr in the second century, to Origen of Alexandria and Augustine of Hippo in the third to fifth centuries. Her carefully nuanced discussion emphasizes the different "worlds" or mental frameworks that influenced these thinkers, e.g., the Jewish world of Jesus as distinct from the Roman world of Paul, a diaspora Jew, and Jesus's expectation of the imminent in-breaking of God's kingdom compared with the canonical writers who knew that the kingdom was delayed. Sin as a violation of purity codes, of tables of piety toward God and justice toward "men," yielded to sin as "flesh" or an inherited condition. Origen and Augustine take decidedly different views of human natural goodness or lack thereof.