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The Origin of Sin: Greece and Rome, Early Judaism and Christianity by David Konstan

by
01 July 2022

Mark Edwards reviews a study of the origins of the concept of sin

ALTHOUGH this book purports not to be a study in theology, its account of a fissiparous progress in Christian thought from sin as a state to sins as a class of actions will not be unfamiliar. In chapter 1, Konstan argues that the noun hamartia, often translated “error”, never has the biblical sense of sin in classical usage.

The gods may act in Homer as guarantors of human justice, they may be evoked in tragedy as guardians of unwritten laws more fundamental than any royal edict, and the concept of miasma may bespeak an emerging sense that the restraint of criminals is a public duty; and yet Greek has no equivalent to hata’, which Konstan finds in chapter 2 to be a recurrent term in the Hebrew Scriptures for wilful apostasy from God.

It is, therefore, characteristic, rather, of the idolatrous and polytheistic nations, and the prophetic denunciations of it are accompanied by a promise of mercy, conditional on repentance, for which the Greek appeal to the eleos (“pity”) of the gods is no true counterpart. In the New Testament, where hamartia takes the place of hata’, its antidote is not repentance, but faith in Jesus: it is best understood not so much as lack of belief in him as failure of trust in those who profess belief.

In Paul’s letter to the Romans, hamartia originates with Adam, and the pardon for all humanity is now incorporation into the death and resurrection of Jesus himself, the promised Christ. Later books of the New Testament anticipate the generic use of hamartia in the church Fathers to stigmatise any breach of the moral law.

Yet, while the frequent occurrence of the plural hamartiai in the patristic era is amply documented in the final chapter, Konstan points out that Augustine seems to remember the Pauline usage when he hints that the capital sin is unbelief. The Augustinian doctrine of original sin, however, goes beyond Paul in making all humans sinners before there is any possibility of election, so that sin is no longer for us a revolt against grace, but grace the remedy for sin.

The story is, therefore, one of semantic shifts in an unchanged vocabulary. One is in the meaning of Hebrew hata’, since the first instance quoted by Konstan, Cain’s murder of his brother, is not described explicitly at Genesis 4.7 as a falling away from God. The shift from hamartia as error to hamartia as sin is barely contested, though Paul’s proclamation that Christ died for our sins (1 Corinthians 15.3) suggests that that the use of the term to signify a particular transgression does not misrepresent his teaching. His disparagement of Gentiles as hamartôloi (sinners) at Galatians 2.15 suggests that he did not think only God’s own people capable of sin.

I am not sure that we can banish repentance from the message of Jesus without removing it also from that of his precursor, John the Baptist, when both are credited with the same exhortation to metanoia in preparation for the Kingdom (Matthew 3.2, 4.17). And, even if “mercy” supersedes “pity” as the meaning of eleos, the classical Greeks could express the concept of mercy through the verb pheidesthai, “to spare”. Refusal to spare a suppliant was, indeed, once a crime that Zeus was always expected to avenge.

Dr Mark Edwards is Professor of Early Christian Studies and Associate Professor in Patristics in the University of Oxford, and Tutor in Theology at Christ Church, Oxford.

 

The Origin of Sin: Greece and Rome, Early Judaism and Christianity
David Konstan
Bloomsbury £19.99
(978-1-3502-7859-2)
Church Times Bookshop £17.99

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