Sin: The Early History of an Idea by Paula Fredriksen (review)

The work of Paula Fredriksen has long been familiar to readers of this journal. She is that rare scholar who seems to be comfortable working both in the literature of the New Testament and Second Temple Judaism, as well as in patristic texts. Her contributions to Augustinian scholarship, for example, have ranged from her study of Augustine’s early commentaries on Romans to the more recent Augustine and the Jews. In between she has produced foundational work on the historical Jesus and on Christian anti-Judaism. The present volume, based on the Spencer Trask Lectures delivered at Princeton University in the fall of 2007, weaves together elements from several of these studies around the central theme of sin. The result is a short, but rich, set of historical reflections on a wide range of figures from Jesus to Augustine.

Fredriksen deliberately chooses to focus on diversity, emphasizing “those moments that represent evolutionary jumps—points of ‘punctuated equilibrium,’ as evolutionary biologists say” (4). She discusses seven characters in three chapters: Jesus and Paul (chapter one, though some attention is given to John the baptizer as well); Valentinus, Marcion, and Justin Martyr (chapter two); and Origen and Augustine (chapter three). Focus on these “disjunctures” has its advantages, because it enables Fredriksen to respect the very different contexts of the individual figures. She rightly stresses the thoroughly Jewish and apocalyptic outlook of Jesus and Paul, although they addressed very different audiences (Jewish and gentile). Both men had deep respect for the temple cult and used language and imagery from the temple to articulate their own notions of the mechanisms of redemption. Jesus, she argues, used “the temple, its biblically based protocols of sacrifice, and its function as a place of atonement offerings for the forgiveness of sin” in order to sum up his own mission at the last supper (22). And Paul characterized his own work among the gentiles as that of a “priest’s assistant” (leitourgos) bringing the gentiles as a sanctified offering to Jerusalem (Rom 15.16), together with Christ as priest/cohen (37–38). Fredriksen argues convincingly that neither Paul nor Jesus rejected temple worship or denied its efficacy for Jews, including Jewish believers in Jesus.

Chapter two turns to the second century and the work of Valentinus, Marcion, and Justin. Like many modern scholars, Fredriksen is more enamored of “diversity” than “orthodoxy” or “proto-orthodoxy.” Unfortunately, her discussion of these second-century figures, while not inaccurate, is presented within a framework that borders on the polemical. For example, she begins a discussion of secondcentury diversity with these remarks about Constantine and the fourth-century bishops: “He threw his prestige, his authority, and a good deal of publicly funded largesse behind one sect of the church, in effect empowering its bishops to suppress their rivals. Thus began a new stage in the empire’s persecution of Christians, this time pursued by Christians themselves” (62). By banning and burning the texts of “deviant” Christians, “the bishops got to remake the Christian past in their own image. … The record of the Christian past, in short, was effaced by the church itself” (62–63). It is not clear to me that these comments shed much light on the teachings of Marcion or Valentinus; moreover, they give the (false) impression that “deviant” forms of Christianity flourished happily in the second and third centuries until they were suppressed in the fourth century by those power-hungry bishops. It is true that the legal suppression of “heresy” begins in the (later) fourth century, but there was an extensive tradition of anti-heretical writing by pre-Constantinian Christians (Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, et al.) that goes virtually unmentioned here.

Likewise, when Fredriksen does mention the tradition of anti-heretical writing, it is only to dismiss it as historically unreliable: “Heated polemic rarely yields reliable description” (67). The stories told about Marcion and Valentinus by proto-orthodox writers are “good rhetoric” but “bad history.” It is true that polemical...