Adam Eve And The Serpent Summary
Adam Eve and the Serpent Review
In Adam, Eve and the Serpent, Professor Elaine Pagels looks at traditional roles of gender and Sexual relationships as influenced by the Genesis creation story of Adam and Eve during the first four centuries. In Adam, Eve, and the Serpent the issues on religion within the book all boils down to a goal of eventual subscription to Christianity. Predictably, the matter of original sin is at the top of the list, being the turning point of the gist in the first book of the Bible. About 500 years AD, almost every interpretation imaginable was offered by theologists, some of which were very reasonable on the matter of Adam and Eve. But it was Augustine who came up with the idea of original sin and the fact that neither …show more content…
In the process she saw that the sexual attitudes we associate with Christian tradition evolved during the first four centuries of the Common Era, when the Christian movement, which had begun as a defiant sect, transformed itself into the religion of the Roman Empire. Many Christians of the first four centuries took pride in their sexual restraint, eschewed polygamy and divorce, which Jewish tradition allowed – and they repudiated extramarital sexual practices commonly accepted by their pagan contemporaries, practices that included prostitution, abuse of slaves and homosexuality. Such views, although not completely original, soon became inseparable from Christian faith. Some even went so as to embrace celibacy, which they urged upon those capable of the angelic …show more content…
Pagels points out how promiscuity and immorality in the late Roman Empire resulted in widespread infanticide and abortion, as well as a slave trade in child prostitutes who were treated, in Justin’s phrase, "like herds of oxen, goats, or sheep." Sexual exploitation of the unborn, the new born and youth of both sexes, together with the fact that even free men and women were expected to marry (usually arranged) and bear and rear children as a duty to empire and family, meant for many Christians that the only route to personal liberty led through the "freedom" of celibacy. "Christian renunciation, of which celibacy is the paradigm, offered freedom -- freedom, in particular, from entanglement in Roman
In Adam, Eve and the Serpent, Professor Elaine Pagels looks at traditional roles of gender and Sexual relationships as influenced by the Genesis creation story of Adam and Eve during the first four centuries. In Adam, Eve, and the Serpent the issues on religion within the book all boils down to a goal of eventual subscription to Christianity. Predictably, the matter of original sin is at the top of the list, being the turning point of the gist in the first book of the Bible. About 500 years AD, almost every interpretation imaginable was offered by theologists, some of which were very reasonable on the matter of Adam and Eve. But it was Augustine who came up with the idea of original sin and the fact that neither …show more content…
In the process she saw that the sexual attitudes we associate with Christian tradition evolved during the first four centuries of the Common Era, when the Christian movement, which had begun as a defiant sect, transformed itself into the religion of the Roman Empire. Many Christians of the first four centuries took pride in their sexual restraint, eschewed polygamy and divorce, which Jewish tradition allowed – and they repudiated extramarital sexual practices commonly accepted by their pagan contemporaries, practices that included prostitution, abuse of slaves and homosexuality. Such views, although not completely original, soon became inseparable from Christian faith. Some even went so as to embrace celibacy, which they urged upon those capable of the angelic …show more content…
Pagels points out how promiscuity and immorality in the late Roman Empire resulted in widespread infanticide and abortion, as well as a slave trade in child prostitutes who were treated, in Justin’s phrase, "like herds of oxen, goats, or sheep." Sexual exploitation of the unborn, the new born and youth of both sexes, together with the fact that even free men and women were expected to marry (usually arranged) and bear and rear children as a duty to empire and family, meant for many Christians that the only route to personal liberty led through the "freedom" of celibacy. "Christian renunciation, of which celibacy is the paradigm, offered freedom -- freedom, in particular, from entanglement in Roman