Vers. 12-21. The treatment of the righteousness of God, as a Divine gift to sinners in Jesus Christ, is now complete, and the Apostle might have passed on to his treatment of the new life (chaps. vi.-viii.). But he introduces at this point a digression in which a comparison—which in most points is rather a contrast—is made be- tween Adam and Christ. Up to this point he has spoken of Christ alone, and the truth of what he has said rests upon its own evidence; it is not affected in the least by any difficulty we may have in adapting what he says of Adam to our knowledge or ignorance of human origins. The general truth he teaches here is that there is a real unity of the human race, on the one hand in sin and
10—12.
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12. Διὰ τοῦτο ὥσπερ δι ἑνὸς ἀνθρώπου ἡ ἁμαρτία els τὸν κόσμον «εἰσῆλθε, καὶ διὰ τῆς ἁμαρτίας ὁ θάνατος, καὶ οὕτως eis πάντας
death, on the other in righteousness and life; in the former aspect the race is summed up in Adam; in the latter, in Christ. It is a distinction, apparently, between the two, that tHe unity in Adam is natural, having a physical basis in the organic connection of all men through all generations; whereas the unity in Christ is spiritual, being depen- dent upon faith. Yet this distinction is not specially in view in the passage, which rather treats Adam and Christ in an objective way, the transition (morally) from Adam’s doom to that of man being only mediated by the words πάντες ἥμαρτον in ver. 12, and the connection between Christ and the new humanity by οἱ τὴν περισσείαν τῆς χάριτος AapBa- νοντες in νετ. 17.
Ver. 12. διὰ τοῦτο refers to that whole conception of Christ’s relation to the human race which is expounded in chaps. iii. 21-v. 11. But as this is summed up in ν. 1-11, and even in the last words of v. rr (through Him we re- ceived the reconciliation) the grammati- cal reference may be to these words only. ὥσπερ: the sentence beginning thus is not finished; cf. Mt. xxv. 14. There is a virtual apodosis in the last clause of ver. 14: ὅς ἐστιν τύπος τοῦ μέλλοντος; the natural conclusion would have been, ‘so also by one man righteousness entered into the world, and life by righteousness”. Cf. Winer, p. 712 f. By the entrance of sin into the world is not meant that sin began to be, but that sin as a power entered into that sphere in which man lives. Sin, by Divine appointment, brought death in its train, also as an,objective power; the two things were inseparably con- nected, and consequently death extended over all men (for διῆλθεν, cf. Ps. Ixxxvii. 17, Ez. v. 17) ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον. The connection of sin and death was a commonplace of Jewish teaching, rest- ing apparently on a literal interpretation of Gen. iii. Cf. Sap. ii. 23 f. 6 θεὸς ἔκτισεν τὸν ἄνθρωπον ἐπ᾽ ἀφθαρσίᾳ . « + Φθόνῳ δὲ διαβόλου θάνατος εἶσ- ῆλθεν εἰς τὸν κόσμον. Cf. also Sir. xxv. 24, Rom. vi. 23, 1 Cor. xv. 56. Paul no doubt uses death to convey various shades of meaning in different places, but he does not explicitly dis- tinguish different senses of the word; and it is probably misleading rather than ‘helpful to say that in one sentence (here,
for example) ‘‘ physical’’ death is meant, and in another (chap. vii. 24, e.g.) ‘“‘spiritual” death. The analysis is foreign to his mode of thinking. All that ‘‘death”’ conveys to the mind en- tered into the world through sin. The words ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον, in which the πάντες resumes πάντας of the pre- ceding clause, give the explanation of the universality of death: it rests upon the universality of sin. ἐφ᾽ ᾧ means propterea quod as in 2 Cor. v. 4 and perhaps in Phil. iii, 12. Winer, 491. But in what sense is the universality of sin to be understood? In other words, what precisely is meant by πάντες ἥμαρτον) Many interpreters take the aorist rigorously, and render: because all sinned, i.e., in the sin of Adam. Omnes peccarunt, Adamo peccante (Ben- gel). This is supported by an appeal to 2 Cor. v. 14, els ὑπὲρ πάντων ἀπέθανεν : ἄρα οἱ πάντες ἀπέθανον: the death of one was the death of all; so here, the sin of one was the sin of all. It seems to me a final objection to this (grammatically quite sound) interpreta- tion, that it really makes the words ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον meaningless. They are evidently meant to explain how the death which came into the world through Adam’s sin obtained its universal sway, and the reason is that the sin of which death is the consequence was also uni- versally prevalent. The sense in which this was so has been already proved in chap. iii., and the aorist is therefore to be taken as in iii. 23: see note there. Because all men were, in point of fact, sinners, the death which is inseparable from sin extended over all. To drag in the case of infants to refute this, on the ground that πάντες ἥμαρτον does not apply to them (unless in the sense that they sinned in Adam) is to miscon- ceive the situation: to Paul’s mind the world consists of persons capable of sinning and of being saved. The case of those in whom the moral conscious- ness, or indeed any consciousness what- ever, has not yet awakened, is simply to be disregarded. We know, and can know, nothing about it. Nothing has been more pernicious in theology than the determination to define sin in such a way that in all its damning import the definition should be applicable to ‘“ in- fants”; it is to this we owe the moral atrocities that have disfigured most