ADAM, EVE AND THE SERPENT
Elaine Pagels
New York: Random House, 1988
224 pp., $17.95
When most Americans recall the words of the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...," they have little reason to dissent. Without the Declaration's "self-evident" truths, it is hardly likely that most Americans would have accepted the claims to political equality of a disenfranchised racial minority consisting largely of the descendants of emancipated slaves. Nor is it likely that the United States would have come to embrace within its fold as free citizens the heirs of practically every religious and national tradition on earth. The signatories of the Declaration understood that what they took to be self-evident was by no means universally regarded as self-evident. Flourishing at a time when the idea of equality had yet to take deep root in European society or politics, men like Jefferson, himself a slave owner, understood human inequality to be the norm rather than the exception. What distinguished the United States in its moment of creation was that biblical ideas concerning creation and human equality had a greater influence on the political consciousness of its founders than was the case in any other country with a Western Christian cultural inheritance.
Elaine Pagels, a professor of religious studies at Princeton, has written a lucid, original, and authoritative study, Adam, Eve and the Serpent, of how ideas concerning political authority, human equality, moral freedom, the relations between the sexes, labor, the worth of the individual, suffering, and mortality developed during the first four centuries of the Christian era and how these ideas continue to influence our values to this day. Pagels points out that the classical Jewish and Christian writers of the first Christian centuries seldom wrote treatises on these subjects. They did, however, effectively use the biblical story of Creation and the Fall, Genesis 1:1-3:22, as a primary vehicle for expressing their basic political and ethical attitudes. Pagels also shows that, as the situation of the young church changed from that of a bitterly persecuted minority to the official religion of the empire, the interpretation of the Creation story also changed, reflecting the response of thoughtful Christians to their transformed situation. Like Nietzsche and the young Hegel, albeit with far greater sympathy for Christianity, Pagels sees the religion as responsible for a radical transvaluation of values within the Roman Empire and, ultimately, in the Western world as a whole. In recent years most scholars have tended to stress the similarities in life-style of the early Christians and their pagan neighbors. By contrast, Pagel's principal interest is in how pagans and Christians differed and how that difference has contributed to making us what we are today.
The differences between pagan and Christian involved both sexual and political attitudes and behavior. The celibate lives of Jesus and Paul gave even those Christians who did marry a model radically at odds with the pagan norm. The early Christians rejected sexual practices pagans regarded as normal, such as prostitution, homosexuality, and extramarital promiscuity. During the first two centuries of the Christian era, this catalogue of accepted practices also included infanticide. From the perspective of those of us whose values have been shaped by the Judeo-Christian tradition, Roman
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