Paula Fredriksen's Sin comprises three essays, plus prologue and epilogue, that she gave as public lectures (the Spencer Trask Lectures) at Princeton in 2007. The audience was, this reviewer assumes, educated but not professional scholars in the field. The writing is clear and lively. The book highlights some important moments in changed understandings of sin from the time of Jesus to that of Augustine. Fredriksen sets her question, “what accounts for this great variety in ancient Christian teachings?” and answers, “dramatic mutations in Christian ideas about sin” (1). She aims to show the cultural construction of these ancient ideas of sin, how “historical context arbitrates meaning” (150).
Chapter 1 deals with Jesus and Paul. Along with other modern scholars, Fredriksen sets these two squarely in their Jewish backgrounds, while emphasizing important differences in their respective Jewish settings. Jesus' message of repentance was not new, but the expected imminence of the Kingdom added a note of urgency. In keeping with Fredriksen's stress on Jewish background, she emphasizes how themes of blood sacrifice and atonement became transformed in the early decades of the new movement. Paul, reaching out to a wider Gentile world, develops a theology with a larger, indeed a cosmic, reach: Paul “thinks big,” Fredriksen writes (35). For Paul, idolatry and fornication are two quintessential pagan sins; the message of the imminent (but not yet arrived) Kingdom gains validation from the Gentiles turning away from devotion to “idols.” Fredriksen sketches how Paul varies in his accounts of precisely how Jesus serves as a sacrifice for human sin. Focusing on Romans 9–11, Fredriksen shows how, even at this early date, Paul formulate two comings of the Messiah, with the present election of some Israelites and some Gentiles, and then, at the eschaton, the rest of the Israel and the rest of the Gentiles will be brought in. This “cosmic happy ending,” “a divine comedy” (49), was Paul's gift to the next generations. But they, too, had to reinterpret it in terms of the non-event of the Kingdom's arrival.
Chapter 2 deals with second-century figures, Valentinus, Marcion, and Justin in particular. Now moving to a more clearly “Gentile” setting, Fredriksen sketches the heavenly architecture presupposed by these figures. All second-century theology had to adjust to the delay (or failure) of the eschaton. With “Gnostic” figures, the notion of Jesus as a “sacrifice” was re-interpreted, since a de-emphasis on Jesus' human flesh had implications for the notion of Jesus as “sacrifice.” Thus for Valentinus, Jesus is not a sacrifice but “the fruit of the knowledge of the Father” (70). Here, the concept of “flesh” was rapidly becoming shorthand for sin and ignorance. With the proto-orthodox Justin, Paul's denunciation of idolatry as a Gentile sin is recast as a primordial Jewish sin: when have the Jews not worshipped idols, he asks? A harsher anti-Jewish line emerges with Justin: it is Jews who killed the prophets and Jesus. Justin envisions a restored Jerusalem on earth, into which flesh and blood will enter; what Christ will save humans from is the pollution caused by sin.
Chapter 3, on Origen and Augustine, gives Fredriksen a wider opportunity to contrast the positions of two central theologians of later antiquity, while noting all they held in common (for example, God's radical transcendence, changelessness, and goodness). Origen, building on the larger cosmic vision of Paul, sees the entire universe involved in the process of “fall” and salvation. When the minds, all created alike, got bored and let their attention drift from God, a pre-cosmic fall was set in place; in Origen's scheme, the material universe, including bodies, was created by God as a testing and training arena in which the minds—celestial, human, demonic—could all return to God. God's justice is not punitive but propaedeutic. In Origen's optimistic vision, God cannot fail in the divine purpose to bring all back to him. God is absolutely fair, and all creatures have freedom of choice. In this scheme, Jesus has a largely pedagogical role.
For Augustine, bodies were brought into being at the first creation, not as an afterthought when a primordial sin had occurred. The human sin in Eden plunged all of Adam and Eve's descendants into wickedness, overcome by their corrupted wills and unruly desires. Flesh, for Augustine, is his “premier synecdoche for sin” (129), a concept at the very center of his theology. For Origen, embracing Paul's hopeful vision of universal salvation, God wills to save everyone, including stars, planets, demons, as well as humans; for Augustine, the sphere of salvation is much narrower: only some humans will be saved, the rest eternally damned. Why? God's judgments are inscrutable, Augustine replies.
Fredriksen ends with some reflections on how far people of our day have veered from the concept of sin: they speak of blunders, errors, “mistakes have been made.” Although such phrases deeply diminish the sense of human responsibility, they accord well with the present era, for “‘sin’ suits its times,” Fredriksen concludes.
As always, one could quibble. In keeping with Fredriksen's line of scholarship in recent years, she emphasizes the overwhelming importance of Judaism for early Christianity's development, well into the second century, a point that is at least debatable. She tends to take materials presented in the Book of Acts as historically factual. She makes much of Augustine's defense of Old Testament sacrifices—without explaining that his justification appears in his anti-Manichean writings (especially in Against Faustus), in which he is desperate to rehabilitate every line of the Old Testament in the face of Manicheans' propensity to discard the whole lot as “unworthy” of their true Christianity.
All said, this lively and intelligent book, with its clear argument and many felicitous turns of phrase, would be excellent reading for undergraduates and others whose field is not primarily early Christian studies. And for those for whom it is, Sin offers a good romp.
