Texts in conversation

Compare Romans 5:12 and 2 Baruch 23:4

New Testament · Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses

Summary

In Romans, Paul explains that sin and death entered the world through Adam and spread to all people. 2 Baruch describes a similar Jewish tradition that presents Adam’s disobedience bringing death to his descendants.

Passages

Romans 5:12

New Testament

10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, how much more, since we have been reconciled, will we be saved by his life? 11 Not only this, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received this reconciliation. 12 So then, just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all people because all sinned— 13 for before the law was given, sin was in the world, but there is no accounting for sin when there is no law. 14 Yet death reigned from Adam until Moses even over those who did not sin in the same way that Adam (who is a type of the coming one) transgressed.

55–58 CE (scholarly estimate) Read in Romans

2 Baruch 23:4

Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses · Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch

3 For as you have not forgotten the people who now are and those who have passed away, so I remember those who are appointed to come. 4 Because when Adam sinned and death was decreed against those who would be born, then the multitude of those who would be born was numbered, and for that number a place was prepared where the living might dwell and the dead might be guarded. 5 Before therefore the number mentioned is fulfilled, the creature will not live again for My spirit is the creator of life, and Sheol will receive the dead.

70–135 CE (scholarly estimate) Read in 2 Baruch

References

"... Punishment is the most significant to this study as it directly relates to the eventual “undoing” that Christ does in Paul’s Adam Christology. Furthermore, the relationship between death and sin are thoroughly explored by later writers but seemingly absent of any treatment within Genesis itself. The punishment of eventual death begs the question: would Adam and Eve have lived forever before eating the forbidden fruit? Kugel suggests one possible explanation for this by interpreting the consequence for eating that God warns about in Genesis 2:17 - namely that “as soon as you eat of it you will surely die” - as “gaining mortality” or the “stripping of immortality,” which would suggest that Adam was essentially immortal before. He then offers a convenient summary of a series of Jewish materials from the late 2nd Temple period on this issue which I will survey briefly here. The Wisdom of Solomon (1st c. BCE) suggests that man was made immortal, whereas it was through the “devil’s envy death entered the world” (Wisdom of Solomon 1:13; 2:23-24). Similarly, the collection of writings known as 1 Enoch suggests that humans were made no different from angels and that death as a condition came about to humans only through knowledge (1 Enoch 69:11). Philo (20 BCE - 40 or 50 CE), outright makes the claim that Adam gave up immortality for death. In the first book of the Sibylline Oracles, it is written that God expelled them from the place of the immortals (Sibylline Oracles 1:39-41, 50-51). 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch (late 1st Century CE), both agree that Adam’s violation of his commandment caused the death of all of his descendants (4 Ezra 3:7 and 2 Baruch 17:2-3; 23:4) ..."

Jacob William Ferrier, “Paul's Adam Christology, the Eden Myth and Augustine's Idea of Original Sin” (diss., University of North Carolina Charlotte, 2021), 7.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

2 Baruch87 chapters

Compare Romans 5:12 and 2 Baruch 23:4

Summary

Passages

Romans 5:12

2 Baruch 23:4

References

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