How evil came into the world has been the most perplexing problem of the ages. Before it the most gigantic minds have been covered with confusion and paralyzed with doubt. Why sin and suffering should have been permitted, not to say created, has never been made clear to the human reason by any system of theology, Romish or Protestant. A few years ago Dr. Edward Beecher published a book entitled The Conflict of Ages. When reviewed by Dr. Charles Hodge in the Princeton Review he entitled his paper “Beecher’s Conflict;” but it was rightly called The Conflict of Ages; it was not “Beecher’s Conflict,” and the explanation given by theology only involves the question in greater doubt and difficulty.
From the first dawning of human reason, even in the mind of inquisitive childhood, questions like these have been revolved, if not formulated: Did not God know, when he made Adam and Eve, that they would fall? Why, then, did he create them? Why did he create a subtle serpent to tempt them? Why did he create a tree the fruit of which was forbidden? Why did he make the possible everlasting ruin of innumerable unborn mortals depend on such a trivial act as the eating of a certain apple? Why did he not destroy Adam and Eve after their first act of disobedience, and thus prevent them from propagating a faithless progeny, which should increase in geometrical progression until the number should be so great as to exhaust calculation with weariness, stagger reason itself, and transcend even the powers of the loftiest imagination to conceive? Why are the teeming millions of the children of Adam held virtually responsible for this single trivial act of disobedience by an unknown remote ancestor myriads of ages ago? How could all men sin in him and fall with him in the first transgression? How could the guilt of Adam’s sin be imputed to his children?
The circumstances connected with the degradation of man are so extraordinary that it is not unreasonable to inquire whether the narrative of the fall is a matter of supernatural revelation based upon an historic occurrence, or whether it is purely mythical, portraying the conceptions of the human mind as to the origin of evil at some remote period of the world’s childhood. For the support of the dogma of total depravity through the fall of Adam theologians rely primarily upon the account in the book of Genesis. It is a notable fact that Adam and Eve are not historically recognized in any other portion of the Old Testament, and their very existence was totally ignored by the Teacher of Nazareth, if the Gospels said to contain the only report of his teachings are to be credited. Nobody pretends that Moses, the doubtful author of the Pentateuch, wrote from personal knowledge; but it is claimed that he wrote under inspiration of God, though there is not a single intimation in Genesis or any other book that he was so inspired, or that God had anything more to do with his writings than he had with the writings of Homer, Herodotus, or John Milton. But the assumption that the dogma of the fall through the sin of Adam was first revealed to Moses—at most not more then eight or nine hundred years before the Christian era—is plainly exploded by the fact that this story existed among many nations centuries and centuries before Moses is said to have been born or the writing called Genesis existed.
It is not within the lines of our general purpose to here give in detail the numerous legends—substantially the same, though differing in particulars—regarding the introduction of sin into this world, found in the writings of Hindoos, Persians, Etruscans, Phœnicians, Babylonians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Thibetans, and others. Any man who would now dare to deny this statement regarding the prevalence of the story of the fall centuries before the writing of Genesis existed would justly subject himself to the charge of ignorance or dishonesty.
Dr. Inman states that Adam is the Phallus and Eve the Yoni—in other words, that Adam and Eve signify the same idea as Abraham and Sara, Jacob and Leah, man and woman; thus embodying in the Hebrew the Hindoo notion that all things sprang from Mahadeva and his Sacti, my lady Sara. This deduction enables us at once to recognize, as did the early Christians, the mythical character of the account of the fall; and we must conclude that the story means that the male and female lived happily together so long as each was without passion for the other, but that when a union took place between them the woman suffered all the miseries inseparable from pregnancy, and the man had to toil for a family, whereas he had previously only thought of himself. The serpent is the emblem of “desire,” indicated by the man and recognized by the woman. “There is a striking resemblance between the Hindoo and Hebrew myths. The first tells us that Mahadeva was the primary Being, and from him arose the ‘Sacti.’ The second makes Adam the original, and Eve the product of his right side—an idea which is readily recognizable in the word Benjamin. After the creation, the Egyptian, Vedic, and Jewish stories all place the woman beside a citron or pomegranate tree, or one bearing both fruits; near this is a cobra or asp, the emblem of male desire, because these serpents can inflate or erect themselves at will.”
General Forlong thus discourses upon this subject: “Most cosmogonies relate a phallic tale of two individuals Adam and Eve, meeting in a garden of delight (Gan-Eden), and then being seduced by a serpent Ar (Ar-i-man), Hoa, Op, or Orus, to perform the generative act, which it is taught led to sin and trouble, and this long before we hear of a spiritual god or of solar deities. These cosmogonies narrate a contest between man and Nature, in which the former fell, and must ever fall, for the laws of Sol and his seasons none can resist.”... “The Jews learned most of their faith and fables from the great peoples of the East; especially did they get the two cosmogonies, and that solar fable, mixed with truth, of a serpent tempting a woman with the fruit of a tree, of course in the fading or autumnal equinox, when only fruit exists and all creation tries to save itself by shielding all the stores of nature from the fierce onslaughts of angry Typhon when entering on his dreary winter. The Gan-Eden fable was clearly an attempt by Zoroastrians to explain to outsiders the difficult philosophical problem of the origin of man and of good and evil. Mithras, they said—and the Jews followed suit—is the good God, the incarnation of God, who dwells in the beauteous orb of day; to which Christian Jews added that he was born of a virgin in a cave which he illuminated.”
“The tree of life mentioned in Gen. 3: 22 certainly appears,” says Mr. Smith (Chal. Acct, p. 88), “to correspond to the sacred grove of Anu, which a later fragment of the creation-tablets states was guarded by a sword turning to all the four points of the compass; and there too we have allusions to a thirst for knowledge, having been the cause of man’s fall; the gods curse the dragon and Adam for the transgression. This Adam was one of the Zalmat-qaqadi, or dark men, created by Hea or Nin-Si-ku, a name pointing to Hea being a Nin or Creator, while Adam is called Adami or Admi, the present Eastern term for man and the lingam, and no proper name.” The impression that I get from the legends of Izdubar, or the Flood, or even the creation-tablets, is simply that these were religious revivals. Nearly every illustration of Mr. Smith’s last volume shows the serpent as an evil influence. Now, if I am right—and all I have read elsewhere tends to the same conclusion—then all the tales as to a temptation by a serpent, a fall, are phallo-pythic transmutations of faith, and have no more connection with the first creation of man upon earth than have the flood, the ark, or mountain-worship of Jews in the desert, or the destruction of Pytho by Apollo in the early days of Delphi, etc.
“The tree and serpent,” says Fergusson, “are symbolized in every religious system which the world has known, not excepting the Hebrew and Christian, The two together are typical of the reproductive powers of vegetable and animal life. It is uncertain whether the Jewish tree of life was borrowed from the Egyptians or Chaldeans; but the meaning was in both cases the same, and we know that the Assyrian tree was a life-giving divinity. And Moses, or the writer of Genesis, has represented very much the same in his coiled serpent and love-apples, or citrons, of the tree of life.
“The writer of Genesis probably drew his idea of the two trees, that of life and that of knowledge, from Egyptian and Zoroastrian story; for criticism now assigns a comparatively late date to the writing of the first Pentateuchal book. After Genesis no further notice is taken in the Bible of the tree of knowledge. But that of life, or the tree which gives life, seems several times alluded to, especially in Rev. 2: 7. The lingam or pillar is the Eastern name for the tree which gives life. But when this tree became covered with the inscriptions of all the past ages, as in Egypt, then Toth, the Pillar, came to be called the tree of knowledge.”
But it must not be supposed that all Christian theologians of the present day hold the historical and literal truth of the legend of the fall of Adam. In several of the public libraries of Philadelphia may be found a book entitled Beginnings of History, written by a learned professor of Archaeology at the National Library of France—Professor François Lenormant. It was republished by Scribner, New York, in 1886, with an introduction by Francis Brown, associate professor of Biblical Philology in the Presbyterian Union Theological Seminary of New York. It is written from a Christian standpoint, and the writer is a firm defender of the infallibility of the Hebrew Scriptures, and can never be suspected of having any sympathy with modern rationalism. He not only admits that the Edenic story of the introduction of sin, found in Genesis, is a compilation made up from the Shemitic traditions of Babylonians, Phœnicians, and other pagan peoples, but he has covered page after page with proofs of this fact by learned and accurate quotations from their numerous legends. He puts in the common plea of lawyers, known as confession and avoidance, and takes the ground that “the writer of the Hebrew Genesis took these fables from floating tradition as he found them, and cleansed them of their impurities, altered their polytheistic tendencies, made them monotheistic, and otherwise so transformed them as to make them fit vehicles of spiritual instruction by the Divine Spirit which inspired him.”