The doctrine now known as “original sin” was not part of Christianity in its earliest years, per se, but the foundations for it were laid at that time. The basic notion that humans tend to fall short of divine expectations was indeed present, from the start, and long before Christianity came along (in fact, it developed from Second Temple Judaism’s views on sin and atonement).
To start, it might help to understand that “original sin” is a very specific notion. It states that humanity is inherently flawed, or “stained” if you will, by the “original sin” committed by Adam and Eve, i.e. eating fruit from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” This is the story told in Genesis 3:1-7. Their sin is embedded within humanity, and indeed in each human being that was born ever since.
In other words, it’s a permanent — and cosmically detrimental — aspect of humanity. It’s a property of humans, just the same as we have two arms, two eyes, and one nose. Moreover, it has nothing to do with anything any human being says or does. Newborns have “original sin” and therefore are counted as having “committed ‘sin’” even before they’ve drawn their first breaths.
As such, this is an idea that’s more or less unique to Christianity, and took time to develop into this form. Judaism, especially during the Second Temple era, certainly viewed humanity as basically flawed and even prone toward evil, but it never taught any conception as dire as that.
The bottom line is this: According to Christianity’s “original sin” doctrine, by virtue of the Fall of Adam and Eve, all human beings are judged “sinners” merely by virtue of their existence. They are “sinners,” even if they have said and done nothing at all.
A corollary realization here, is that “sin” went from an act that falls outside of God’s will, to being an inherent and unavoidable property of humanity. That is, it’s no longer a verb, it’s an adjective (or perhaps a noun).
Yet another realization is that “original sin” assumes humans lack free will. They can’t make their own choices; they’re driven — by their very nature — always to “sin.” They are, in a word, robots compelled to “sin” because of it.
While Judaism realized that people often tended to be evil, it also taught that this tendency could be overcome by meticulous adherence to God’s will, mostly in the form of Mosaic Law. That was the entire stated point of the Commandments and Mosaic Law: To make the Hebrews/Jews into a truly holy people. The Pharisaic movement was an effort to promote this, on both a personal and community level. But most other Jewish philosophies and traditions taught something along these lines. The Essenes did so on a more communal level than most.
Jewish apocalypticists tended to see humanity’s sinfulness as a manifestation of profane or preternatural forces and looked for deliverance from it via the eventual triumph of YHWH over those profane forces. A way that at least some of them hoped to bring that divine victory about, was by rigidly following YHWH’s rules and purposely shying away from anything provocative.
Among the earliest of Christianity’s extant writings is a passage in Paul’s epistle to the Romans, particularly in its chapter 5. Here, Paul lays out the problem (as he understands it): “[T]hrough one man [i.e. Adam] sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned” (v. 12). He also pointed out that, although “sin was in the world,” that wasn’t apparent until a law (i.e. Mosaic Law) was put in effect: “[D]eath reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the offense of Adam” (v. 14).
Even so, within this same passage, Paul repeatedly offers the counterpoint that the sacrifice of one man, i.e. Jesus the Christ, “there resulted justification of life to all men” (v. 18). This chapter ends with yet another iteration of this same point:
For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous. The Law came in so that the transgression would increase; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, even so grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Rom 5:19-21)
Despite this being embedded in Christian literature from the mid-50s CE or so, it wasn’t enough to make the leap to what we now know as the “original sin” concept. Subsequent Christians who discussed “sin” treated it as the actual failings of people, not as a property of humanity. “Sin” remained things that people said and did; it wasn’t their own inherent human nature.
This isn’t hard to understand, given the Greco-Roman world they lived in, with its powerful Hellenic influence. The concept that humanity had free will lay at the heart of nearly all the major philosophical schools. It is perhaps understandable, due to that, that it was western Christians, such as Tertullian and St Ambrose, who started treating “sin” as an inherited condition and a basic property of humanity; that all human beings who followed Adam and Eve had “inherited” their “original sin.”
Despite this, it’s not clear that even most western Christian thinkers believed humanity no longer possessed free will. It would take time for this to change. It’s also not stated how the inheritance of sinful tendencies came about; it’s merely a principle that was alluded to, but never explained.
It was a western Christian, St Augustine, who commented on the relationship of Adam and Eve’s sin with the rest of humanity at far greater length than any Christian before him. And what he said would exert a great deal of influence on Christendom, both in the west and the east.
Augustine’s impetus for his discussion of something that hadn’t been addressed to the extent he did, was his opposition to the monk Pelagius and his doctrines. Among Pelagius’s views was the idea that all humans were basically “good” by nature, with no inherent drive toward sin, at least not any greater than the first two humans had (i.e. Adam and Eve). People were capable of obeying God faithfully and acting morally; they simply needed to choose to do so, according to Pelagius.
In turn, it might help to understand the impetus behind Pelagius’s teachings. They came about in the wake of Rome’s fall to the Visigoths in 410. It had been a demoralizing blow to the Roman Empire, one which many had explained away by citing the Roman regime’s presumed morally laxity.
This in turn was considered by Christians to have been almost a natural consequence of humanity’s propensity toward sin. The answer for many was to pray for divine grace to help humans (and the Roman regime) do better in the future. Pelagius considered this a cop-out or excuse for why people weren’t doing what he believed they were capable of; i.e. to be morally upstanding and follow God faithfully. In turn, the way for Christians to do that was to do as Pelagius himself had done, and adopt an ascetic lifestyle.
Augustine opposed Pelagius’s teachings and composed a treatise to explain exactly why the monk was so desperately wrong; it’s called De gratia Christi et de peccato originali or On the Grace of Christ and on Original Sin. He also penned other correspondence concerning the matter. He certainly wasn’t the only Christian leader or thinker to oppose Pelagius, but he went further than any other in terms of spelling out precisely what made the monk so hideously wrong, and developing a doctrinal point specifically designed to counter him.
Augustine started by acknowledging that Adam and Eve had originally been created with full free will along with full capability of being sinless. It was only after they’d sinned that the problem arose. And because they’d sinned, their children (i.e. Abel, Cain, Seth, and others) all were born with something of a sinful nature. In other words, it was passed on from parents to children via the sexual act and resulting childbirth.
This concept was one Augustine could, and did, develop further with added ramifications and corollaries. For instance, he asserted that it was through the father’s sperm that a sinful nature was imposed on children, at the moment of conception. This trope conveniently explained why Jesus of Nazareth could be truly human yet not subject to this sinful nature: Since Jesus hadn’t been conceived via human sperm, he alone of all humanity was spared “original sin.”
Augustine also averred that newborn infants were “sinners” even though they couldn’t possibly have committed any actual “sin.” Prior to his time, infant baptism hadn’t been unheard of (among others, Tertullian mentions it), but it was — as far as we know — uncommon.
After Augustine’s time, infant baptism became common, and in fact is the default for a very large number of Christian sects (Roman Catholicism, nearly all the Orthodox churches, the Anglican Church, a number of Protestant sects, etc.) although some accept only adult baptism. The various Anabaptist sects were established solely for this reason: They opposed baptism by anyone incapable of professing belief in Jesus the Christ (which, obviously, infants are incapable of).
Augustine’s model influenced continued thought about “original sin.” Most of the accepted (i.e. not heretical) conceptions of “original sin” have his model as their foundation, even if they’ve been elaborated upon subsequently. It is from Augustine’s model that most Christians now have their understanding of the specific “original sin” doctrine, as I’d laid out near the start of this essay.
That’s not to say that it remains a universal Christian doctrine. A number of sects either have overtly rejected this doctrine or they pay it lip service, embracing in its place the much-older notion that humans have a tendency to “sin” but they aren’t “doomed” to sin; they retain free will; and aren’t automatically counted as having already “sinned” for no reason other than they exist.
Finally, I note this is yet another example of a doctrine that’s established and further developed specifically to counter a “heresy” that arose. In this case it was St Augustine who was triggered by Pelagius’s teachings, so he cooked up a rationale for why Pelagius was wrong.
The reason the majority of Christian sects now harbor such a dire doctrine — one that calls newborns “sinners” at the moment of their birth, before they could possibly have said or done anything that counts as an actual “sin” — is, largely, because St Augustine was infuriated by Pelagius’s teachings and desperately needed to cook up a justification for why the monk must be wrong. Consider this the next time you hear about a Christian doctrine or dogma. The world of Christendom is extremely vindictive and prone to coming up with horrific ideas in the name of dispensing with other ideas it finds offensive.
Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation.
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