What is the doctrine of original sin?
Basically, it’s the understanding that God created His human creations perfect and without sin. Then, Eve was tempted by Satan to eat the fruit from a particular tree that God had said was strictly forbidden and once she ate it, she encouraged her husband Adam to also eat it. By doing so, they both became sinful. Then every child born to them, and every child from then on born to their descendants…which is of course, all humanity, became the carriers of sin; we all carry the genetic taint of sin.
We’ve said this before, and it’s true, that sin is the most deadly thing in the entire universe, it corrupts and kills everything it touches, and we human beings are both compelled to indulge in sin even while knowing that it will destroy us, and the question is why? Why do we want to sin so much? Because it’s our fallen nature to do so, it’s in our DNA so to speak.
We know the deadly power of sin because we see the evidence of it all around the globe, it’s not a new phenomenon at all. The question that causes the unnecessary debate is whether or not every person is born already tainted with sin, or whether they become a sinner the first time they actually commit a sin.
Paul answers this question quite definitively.
Romans 5:12, ‘Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned.’
So there we see that when Adam sinned, he spread sin to the rest of humanity. It’s in us at conception whether we like it or not. Sin is like a plague that spreads to everyone it comes in contact with, and in this case, it’s in our genetics because we get it from our parents all the way back to Adam and Eve, so we can’t escape it.
After the fall in Eden, God promised that He would send a solution, the answer to the sinful condition of the human race, and that the solution would be the arrival of the Messiah. He promised that the “seed of the woman” would crush the serpent’s head, (Gen 3:15) and then after that, speaking through Moses and all the prophets, God gave more and more details about the Messiah, where He would come from, what He would do and achieve, and how He would ultimately deal with the issue of sin.
I looked up the definition of ‘original sin’ on the internet and the definition that first came up is this…
“Original sin, also called ‘ancestral sin’, is a Christian belief of the state of sin in which humanity exists since the fall of man, stemming from Adam and Eve’s rebellion in Eden, namely the sin of disobedience in consuming the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
The interesting thing is that the definition states that this belief of original sin is a ‘Christian’ belief. So the question is, is the doctrine of original sin a Christian belief or does this belief and understanding of the sinful nature go back to Jewish belief? Modern Jewish leaders and rabbis would deny belief in the doctrine of original sin because of it’s apparent ‘Christianness’ but most would be thoroughly surprised to know that the understanding of original sin is actually Jewish.
Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, an orthodox rabbi, wrote this about original sin: “The Original Sin, meaning the sin of the first man in the Garden of Eden, is the root of all sins.”
Many modern rabbis are completely opposed to the concept of original sin because they believe it’s a Christian doctrine, but rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu is alive and well in Israel today, he’s an orthodox rabbi and on the Chief Rabbinate Council and he obviously understands the heredity nature of sin as it’s presented and taught quite clearly in the Bible.
In the Babylonian Talmud, San. 99, 71, the Jewish Sages wrote that, “All the prophets which have spoken have foretold the days of the Messiah.” The context is that the Messiah must have a different kind of human nature from all other human beings; a godly nature which sin can’t affect or taint. This of course is true of Jesus because while His mother was a fallen human being, His Father is God and His conception absolutely miraculous through the agency of the Holy Spirit. Not DNA from a natural father at all. This of course is what the Bible calls the virgin birth and even the Jewish sages understood that to mean that the Messiah would have a miraculous birth without a human biological father.
So if the Messiah has a nature contrary to the human, sinful, fallen nature of man and doesn’t have a biological father…this sounds very, very ‘Christian’ and it leads far too many modern rabbis to reject it altogether. In fact, rabbi G Sigal is very anti-Messianic Jews, said emphatically, “Jews do not believe in the doctrine of the original sin!”
But they do! The Jewish Sages had very deep faith in the doctrine of original sin and they’re held in very high regard to this day. It’s mostly the modern rabbis who are opposed to this doctrine because it actually points to Jesus as the solution, and the New Covenant actually confirms the portions of the Old Covenant that also refer to original sin.
“Yalkut Shimoni” is a compilation of the Old Covenant books and corresponding commentary and one of the very interesting rabbinic discussions poses this question: “When does evil nature enter a man – at the time of birth, or at the time of creation?” Basically the Sages were asking whether the evil or sinful nature controls us from conception or after the birth of the child?
Midrash Deuteronomy Rabbah (ancient Jewish commentary, not inspired Scripture) also proves that the Sages understood that sin is inherited: “Moses said: ‘LORD of the World, there are thirty-six decrees, that if a man breaks one of them he must be put to death. I did not break any of them, why do you sentence me to death? He said to me: ‘In the sin of the first man you die, as he brought death unto the world.’”
What this midrash is saying is that Moses couldn’t understand why he was under a death penalty when he didn’t commit any of the prescribed sins given by God, until God told him that his sin was inherent in him.
Remember when we explained that part of the orthodox tradition of Yom Kippur, orthodox Jewish men offer a chicken as part of the sacrifice during the Day of Atonement and that it’s given to the impoverished. Well, in Kitzur Shulchan Aruch 131:1 (again, Jewish commentary, not inspired Scripture), in the halacha instructions for Yom Kippur Eve it says: “It is customary to carry out the ‘Kapparot’ (sacrifices) in the pre-dawn hours of the day before Yom Kippur, as then (the attribute of) mercy is greatest. One takes a non-castrated rooster for a man, and a hen for a woman. For a pregnant woman (both) a rooster and a hen.”
Why would the pregnant woman need 2 sacrifices? One for her and one for the unborn child…but the child hadn’t committed any sin yet! The obvious inference here is that because sin is passed on to the unborn, the unborn child is tainted by sin. In the same way AIDS is passed on to a fetus, so is sin.
The doctrine of original sin is not a Christian construct, it’s most definitely Biblical and Jewish, but rejected by modern rabbis because they don’t want to be connected with Christianity because of our bad history toward the Jewish people.
Shalom
Mandy
Based on an article from oneforisrael.org
The Plague of Original Sin
