Carl Gregg

1 Now the serpent said to the woman, “Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” 2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; 3 but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ ” 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; 5 for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

Note: This sermon is part of an ongoing series tracing “The Book of J” strand of Genesis.

In many Christian circles, conventional wisdom holds that humans were “cursed” with original sin when — approximately 6,000 years ago — the first two human beings, Adam and Eve, ate the forbidden fruit. The alleged result was the so-called “fall” of humanity from Paradise. There are places in the Apocrypha and in the New Testament that support this view, although a theology of the “Fall” and “Original Sin” did not become dominant until the writings of Augustine in the 4th century, more than three centuries after the life of Jesus and more than a thousand years after the story of Adam and Eve was first recorded. But the original authors and audience of Genesis 3 did not understand the story in this way. Also, neither Judaism nor the Eastern Orthodox strand of Christianity has a tradition of reading Genesis 3 as being about a “Fall from Grace” or about “Original Sin.”

Indeed, although we will not get to the story of Cain and Abel until next week, it is important to note that the Hebrew word for “sin” is not used at all in the first three chapters of Genesis, and eating from the tree is never declared “sinful” in the text. The word “sin” first appears in Genesis 4:7 about the first murder. Many of us in the West have inherited a way of reading the Bible that is heavily influenced by both Augustine and Martin Luther, who imposed their own issues with guilt and sin onto the Bible’s earliest chapters. So, what I want to invite us to experiment with laying aside what we think (or have been taught) that Genesis 3 is about, and closely read for ourselves what the text actually says.

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In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, 5 when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up — for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; 6 but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground — 7 then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. 8 And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed…. 18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” 19 So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. 20 The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. 21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22 And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.”

Genesis 2:4b-23

How many books are in the Bible? If you don’t know the answer to this piece of trivia, the answer is easy to
find from the table of contents in your favorite Bible. The results will vary based on if the Bible at hand includes various parts of the Apocrypha used by different branches of the Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic churches. But if you check a standard Protestant Bible, you should find 27 books in the New Testament and 39 books in the Hebrew Scriptures, for a total of 66 books in the Bible. However, as we saw in our studies of Matthew and Mark, many scholars think that there are “hidden” books in the Bible. These books are not hidden in The Da Vinci Code sense. They won’t lead you to a buried pirate treasure chest, and there is not a secret decoder ring hidden in a bank vault that will help you find the hiding place.

The ‘hidden’ books in question are the books used as source material to compile the final version of the biblical books with which we are familiar. As scholars have studied the Bible over many centuries, they began to notice clues of how the original authors and editors of the Bible stitched together the material at their disposal. As we saw with the Gospels, most scholars are now convinced that the best current explanation for how Matthew, Mark, and Luke were composed is that Matthew and Luke, writing independently, had a copy on their respective desks of both the Gospel of Mark and another written source that scholars call “Q.” The letter Q is a shorthand for the German word Quelle, which means “source.” And scholars hypothesize this source as an explanation for how to explain two facts: on one hand, Matthew and Luke share more than 200 verses almost verbatim in common that are not in Mark; but on the other hand, Matthew and Luke do not seem to be aware of one another’s books. The hypothetical existence of Q is the best current theory of Matthew and Luke’s common source, part of which is now “hidden,” so to speak, in those respective Gospels.

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