the figure of eve in romans 7:5-25

THE FIGURE OF EVE IN ROMANS 7:5-25

AUSTIN BUSCH
Indiana University

Texts of the late Hellenistic era, Marilyn Skinner reminds us, are notorious for the phenomenon of gender dissonance: in virtually every literary genre, boundaries between male and female as essential categories of psycho-sexual identity fluctuate wildly and eventually break down. 1 The implications of this phenomenon are extensive, for in the ancient world male and female not only functioned as psycho-sexual categories, but had sweeping metonymic associations as well, representing the poles of a series of binary oppositions central to Hellenistic thought: the rational and the irrational, the mind and the body, the active and the passive, to name but a few. Wayne Meekss seminal essay, The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a Symbol in Earliest Christianity, suggests that references to the myth of the androgyne (the first human of Gen. 1:27, who was believed to have been created male and female 2) constitute something similar to what Skinner calls gender dissonance. Early Christians persistent use of this myth, Meeks asserts, testifies to the extent to which the unification of opposites, and especially the opposite sexes, served in early Christianity as a prime symbol of salvation.3 The idea that salvation somehow unified the opposite sexeseven if only mystically or eschatologically, and not in social reality allowed sexual categories to function in unexpected ways in early Christian literature, as they did in other Hellenistic literatures. This essay aims to examine some surprising and complex ways in which one image associated with femininity functions in Pauls epistles.
1 M.B. Skinner, Ego mulier: The Construction of Male Sexuality in Catullus, in J.P. Hallett and M.B. Skinner (eds.), Roman Sexualities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 129-50 (129). 2 Unless otherwise noted, all citations of the Hebrew Bible are from the Septuagint, the Greek translation that Hellenistic interpreters would have used. They follow the Greek text of A. Rahlfs (ed.), Septuaginta (Stuttgart: Privilegierte Wrttembergische Bibelanstalt, 1865-1935). 3 W.A. Meeks, The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a Symbol in Earliest Christianity, History of Religions 13 (1974), pp. 165-208 (165-66).

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2004 Also available online www.brill.nl

Biblical Interpretation 12, 1

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In Galatians Paul claims that male and female are no longer essential distinctions of social identity:
For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for you all are one in Christ Jesus (3:26-28).4

Most scholars believe that Paul is quoting or alluding to a baptismal formula, the words spoken at the Christian rite of initiation. 5 Meeks argues that the disruption of ordinary lifes categories in the experience of initiation into a religious group aimed at shaping the symbolic universe by which that group distinguished itself from the ordinary world of the larger society.6 Since the language and imagery of initiation rites is necessarily disruptive, Paul can employ Christian language of initiation to destabilize the binary oppositions that supplied categories of social and psychological identity to the Hellenistic world. In Galatians Paul ultimately focuses upon the opposition Jew and Gentile. Commentators and critics often fault him for never realizing (if not for actually suppressing) the social implications of the final dichotomy that he dissolves in Gal. 3:28.7 They often contrast this passage from Galatians with 1 Corinthians, where Paul seems to encourage the subordination of wives to their husbands (11:3) and denies women public leadership roles within his churches (14:34-35). Pauls letters occasionally reveal an attitude toward women inherently inconsistent with the ideal of unity embodied in Gal. 3:26-28. But we must remember that, in antiquity, the opposition between male and female represented not only a psycho-sexual/social distinction, but also a comprehensive intellectual configuration ordering a series of dichotomies with which the Hellenistic world classified and explained all sorts of phenomena. When we search Pauls writings for the implications of the view he expresses in Galatians we must look not only at how he persuades women in his churches to behave, but also at how he manipulates heuristic configurations related to the male-female dichotomy.
All translations of ancient texts are my own unless otherwise noted. See W.A. Meeks, The Image of the Androgyne, pp. 180-85 for a thorough discussion of this passage as a baptismal formula. 6 W.A. Meeks, The Image of the Androgyne, pp. 170, 182. 7 E. Schssler Fiorenza thoughtfully raises the issues involved in such a critique in In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983), pp. 205-41.
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This paper focuses upon how Pauls peculiar use of one feminine image, the figure of Eve from Genesis 23, collapses a crucial Hellenistic dichotomy: the gendered opposition of activity and passivity. Pauls understanding of this biblical figure relates directly to the affirmation of Gal. 3:26-28. The distinction between male and female that Paul claims Christ dissolves in baptism is precisely the distinction instituted with the creation of Eve in Gen. 2:22, for Gal. 3:28 ( [there is no male and female]) echoes Gen. 1:27, where God creates the androgynous protoplast ( [male and female he made them]).8 As Meeks comments, somehow the act of Christian initiation reverses the fateful division of Genesis 2:2122. Where the image of God is restored, there, it seems, man is no longer dividednot even by the most fundamental division of all, male and female. 9 Pauls treatment of Eve, like the baptismal formula that he quotes, implicitly challenges that fundamental division. While most Hellenistic biblical interpreters associated Eve with feminine passivity, Paul calls this simplistic association into question by drawing attention to an element of (masculine) activity in her experience that other interpreters either overlooked or could not satisfactorily account for in their interpretations of her story. In Rom. 7:5-13 the Eve of the scene of the primeval transgression becomes a figure of passivity and activity paradoxically conflated. In the following verses (7:14-25) Paul manipulates this conflation in order to illustrate the ego or self split under sin. Once we see the unique way in which Paul understands and employs the figure of Eve in Rom. 7:5-25, we will be able to read the passage as a meditation on the story of the primeval transgression and to discern its particular perspective on the relationship between the self under sin and the law. Eve in Hellenistic Exegesis of Genesis 23 Hellenistic writers familiar with the Genesis creation account saw in Eve, the prototypical woman, an obvious opportunity to
8 See W.A. Meeks, The Image of the Androgyne, pp. 183-89 for a discussion of the connections between the baptismal liturgy that Paul quotes in Gal. 3:26-28 and Gen. 13. 9 W.A. Meeks, The Image of the Androgyne, p. 185.

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contemplate the association of passivity with femininity conventional throughout the ancient world.10 Philos exegesis represents the limit case of this tendency, for it shows Eve entirely subsumed into the symbolic economy and presuppositions of his Hellenistic milieu. In Legum Allegoriarae , after identifying Adam with the mind ( ), the rational part of the soul, Philo discusses Gen. 2:22:
Therefore [Moses] adds He built it [ into a woman, proving through this expression that the most appropriate [ and exact name of sense perception is woman. For just as the man is observed in activity and the woman in passivity [ , so is the mind found to be in activity [ and the sense perception in passivity [ , after the manner of a woman [ . It is easy to learn this from what is manifest: the eye is affected [ by the things seen that move it, by white, by black, by other colors; the ear again by sounds; the sense of taste is determined by flavors; the sense of smell by odors; touch by hardness or softness. And all the sense perceptions are indeed at rest until movement from the outside comes to each one (2.38-39).

Philo understands sense perception ( ) to be passive because it simply receives impressions generated by movement from the outside ( ). Although Gods creation of Eve from the rib of the sleeping man underscores the creative activity of God in contrast to the passivity of both Adam and Eve, Philo nonetheless associates Eve alone with passive sense perception, basing this relationship upon a presupposition that women are essentially passive: (the sense perception is found to be in passivity, after the manner of a woman). Philo initially equates Eve with sense perception by means of a verbal link between a statement of this presupposition and the text he interprets: Moses proves ( ) that the most appropriate ( ) name for sense perception is woman when he writes about Adams rib that God built ( ) it into a woman. It is possible to read this as Philos attempt to shore up with the authority of Scripture his presupposition about the passivity of women. By manipulating a statement of the correspondence between passive sense perception and woman to make it echo and seem to become the natural implication of Gen. 2:22, Philo is able to claim that Moses, the author of the text, proves that correspondence. It is also possible
10 For a discussion of the association between femininity and passivity in the ancient world see M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure (trans. R. Hurley; New York: Vintage Books, 1986), vol. 2, pp. 46-47.

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that Philo simply grants to this presupposition as much authority as he grants to the Scripture he is interpreting. Philo, like other ancient interpreters of the Bible, regularly supports his interpretation of one passage of Scripture by adducing other passages connected to it by only slight verbal similarities. Here he uses the same strategy to link Gen. 2:22 with an assumption about the passivity of women. Philo reads Genesis as an allegory representing a middle-platonic philosophical system. His interpretive strategy demands that he associate elements of the text with abstract philosophical notions. Most other Hellenistic interpreters of the Genesis narrative do not read the text in this way, and so do not associate Eve so explicitly with passivity and do not make the intellectual presuppositions underlying that association as clear as Philo does. Nonetheless, the association of femininity with passivity was commonplace in the Hellenistic and late antique worlds, and it underlies even those interpretations of Genesis 23 that are not as self-consciously philosophical as Philos. Some interpretations and retellings of the Genesis narrative, for instance, exaggerate Eves passivity by presenting her almost exclusively as the object of other characters actions. The classic gnostic myth, which usually portrays the eating of the forbidden fruit as a liberating act of rebellion against Ialdabaoth or Sabaoth or some other evil version of Yhwh, has the potential for presenting Eve as a positive and active character. 11 In the Apocryphon of John (which was probably the most popular version of the myth in ancient times),12 however, Eve is not even created until after Adam eats of the fruit of knowledge (II 22:3-9). That action belongs to Adam.13 When Ialdabaoth finally creates Eve, she is nothing more than a carnal entity housing and controlled by the aeon Wisdom ( ), also called Life ( ) (II 22:28-23:33). When Ialdabaoth becomes filled with lack of
Several studies of feminine imagery in Gnosticism have explored this potential. See, for instance, E. Pagels, Pursuing the Spiritual Eve: Imagery and Hermeneutics in the Hypostasis of the Archons and the Gospel of Philip , in K.L. King (ed.), Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), pp. 187-206. See also A. McGuire, Virginity and Subversion: Norea Against the Powers in the Hypostasis of the Archons , in that same volume, pp. 239-58. 12 The fact that four distinct versions of the work are extant suggests that gnostic teachers and scribes must have continually studied and revised it. See B. Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures: A New Translation with Annotations and Introductions (New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 26. 13 Eve only participates in the eating of the forbidden fruit as a spiritual entity existing within Adam (II 20:15-28; II 21:15-22:9).
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acquaintance and decides to rape his creation, the forethought of the entirety promptly rescues the aeon, leaving Eve to be helplessly defiled (II 24:8-16).14 It may not be proper to make an absolute distinction between Eves role in the myth and the role of Wisdom, her spiritual counterpart. The Apocryphon of John calls Wisdom , the Greek translation of the Hebrew name Eve, in II 23:23 (cf. Gen. 3:20), and clearly represents Wisdom as a spiritual manifestation of Eve. But the myth disparages and de-emphasizes even Wisdoms activity. When she attempts to show forth an image within herself she creates Ialdabaoth, who is so ugly and misshapen that she must hide him away in a luminous cloud (II 9:25-10:19). Ialdabaoth responds by taking a great power from his mother, which she must recover. This act of recovery, however, is not really Wisdoms own act. As the complicated myth progresses she is sent unto Adam by the forethought of the entirety in order to become Adams helper ( , II 20:14-17), extracted from Adam and modeled into Eve by Ialdabaoth (II 22:33-23:2), and caught up out of Eve by certain beings sent, again, from the forethought of the entirety ( , II 24:13-15). When Wisdom does not rebel against the forethought, she is simply his tool. Although she reveals to Adam his true nature and the nature of his descent (II 20:21-24), Wisdom cannot assist him in his struggles with Ialdabaoth. The author defines her relationship to Adam as one of suffering along with him ( , II 20:20), and when Ialdabaoth assaults Adam to get at Wisdom (here called the light of the afterthought, cf. II 20:17) she can only hide (II 22:1530). Material Eve and her spiritual counterpart Wisdom are both passive characters. They are more often acted upon than acting. When they do act, their independent actions are dangerous and discredited, and the legitimate sphere of their activity is severely circumscribed. A divergent understanding of Eve emerged earlier in the Hellenistic period: Eve as the originator of sin. This tradition first occurs in Sirach, a text from the early second century bce : From
14 Translation from B. Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures: A New Translation with Annotations and Introductions . Coptic quotations from Nag Hammadi Codex II,1 in M. Waldstein and F. Wisse (eds.), The Apocryphon of John: Synopsis of Nag Hammadi Codices II,1; III,1; and IV,1 with BG 8502,2 (Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995).

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a woman was the beginning of sin, and through her we all die (25:24). This understanding of Eve would seem to be incompatible with an emphasis on her passivity. If Eve is consistently acted upon, if she is the object, or even victim, of other characters actions, can she be responsible for even her own sin, let alone sin in general? When figured passively, Eve appears a manipulated victim rather than a guilty criminal. Interpreters who insisted upon representing Eve as both a passive character and as the originator of sin faced a difficult task, one they could not always effectively execute. Antithetical conceptions of Eve produce much unresolved tension in the Latin Vita Adam et Evae, an imaginative rewriting of Genesis 24.15 The Vita portrays Eve as the unwitting victim of two satanic schemes. The author describes the second scheme, foreign to the Genesis account, in the most detail. After having been driven from paradise, Adam orders a severe regime of penitence for himself and for his wife, who has already expressed much regret for her sin:
Rise and hasten to the Tigris River and take a stone and stand upon it in the water as far as your neck in the depth of the river. And let no speech come out of your mouth, because we are unworthy to entreat the Lord since our lips are unclean from the unlawful and forbidden tree. And stand in the water of the river for 37 days. But I will do 40 days in the water of the Jordan. Perhaps the Lord God will have pity on us (6.1b-2; cf. Apoc. Mos. 29:10b).16

Satan transforms himself into the brightness of angels (transfiguravit se in claritatem angelorum , 9:1; cf. Apoc. Mos. 29:12a) and comes upon Eve doing her penance in the middle of the Tigris.
15 The apocryphal stories of Adam and Eve are found in their oldest forms in a body of literature known as The Books of Adam and Eve. This literature survives in several ancient languages, with the most significant versions in Greek (Apocalypse of Moses), Latin (Vita Adam et Evae ), Armenian, Georgian, and Slavonic. Determining its original provenance presents a notoriously difficult problem. A judicious assessment would date a Greek Vorlage (probably not the extant Greek version) to sometime within the first three centuries of the Common Era, with the Latin version being produced soon after that. See M.E. Stone, A History of the Literature of Adam and Eve (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), pp. 53-58. I use the Latin Vita Adam et Evae because it is the fullest and most readable version of the text, noting parallels to the Greek where they occur. Whatever its date of composition, the Adam literature contains traces of diverse ancient interpretive traditions that were known to Paul (cf. 2 Cor. 11:14) and to other Hellenistic intellectuals. 16 I translate and refer to the Latin and Greek texts from G.A. Anderson and M.E. Stone (eds.), A Synopsis of the Books of Adam and Eve (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 2nd rev. edn, 1999).

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He went to the Tigris River to Eve. And he came to her as she was crying. And the Devil himself, as if in sympathy with her, began to cry and said to her: Come out of the river and rest and weep no more. Cease now from your sadness and sighing. Why are you troubled, you and your husband Adam? The Lord God has heard your sighing and has accepted your penitence, and all of us angels have pleaded for you, entreating the Lord, and he sent me to lead you out from the water. Hearing these things, Eve believed him and went out of the water of the river and her flesh was like grass from the cold of the water. And when she had come out, she fell to the ground and the Devil stood her up and led her to Adam. But when Adam saw her, and the Devil with her, he cried out, saying with tears, O Eve, O Eve, where is your work of penitence? How were you again seduced by our enemy, through whom we were estranged from our dwelling in paradise and from our spiritual joy? (9:1-9:4; 10:1-10:3; cf. Apoc. Mos. 29: 12a-12c)

It is difficult to take Eve as anything but a victim here. After she spends eighteen days in the Tigris as penitence for her first transgression (9:1), Satan, disguised as an angel, tells her that God has accepted her repentance and has forgiven her. There is nothing suspect about his ruse. Adam himself had hoped that their penitence would inspire Gods pity (6:2). Eve leaves the river, so weak that she can hardly walk, and is led by the Devil to Adam. Adam, apparently, can see right through the angelic disguise and with great frustration rebukes Eve for yet again being seduced. John Phillips claims that Eves characterization in the Vita Adam et Evae is seamless: Eve is consistently complaining, self-pitying, wheedling, and pathetic. 17 The attributes he assigns to her are appropriate, but they hardly add up to a seamless characterization, for they do not represent Eves character in its entirety. The writer of the Vita , creatively expanding upon Gen. 3:13 (Eves confession that the serpent deceived me), represents Eve as an incognizant character who cannot help herself as she stumbles into one satanic subterfuge after another. He goes out of his way to emphasize the passive nature of her transgressions. Satan, disguised as an angel of light, variously deceives (9:1-5; cf. Apoc. Mos. 29:12a-13), leads (9:4), seduces (10:3; 18:1), and persuades (11:1) Eve. Nonetheless, the other characters in the narrative severely condemn Eve for her transgressions (10:3; 38:1-3; cf. Apoc. Mos. 11:1-3) and Eve repeatedly condemns herself (18:1-2; 35:2; cf. Apoc. Mos. 9:2). Eve is a victim of Satans schemes who feels deep regret at her own gullibility. She may be vexatious, but she is also some17 J.A. Phillips, Eve: The History of an Idea (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 49.

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one to pity. The other characters of the Vita , as well as the narrative voice, show no sympathy for Eve. Adam ultimately declares that she is not only responsible for her own sin but for sin in all generations to come: What have you done? You have brought a great affliction upon us, fault and sin to all our progeny (44:2; cf. Apoc. Mos. 14:2). The reader, however, need not uncritically accept this perspective. 18 The narrative equally emphasizes the passive nature of Eves transgression and her responsibility for that transgression. The result is an ambivalent and ultimately inconsistent portrait of Eve, fraught with unresolved tension. In contrast to the Vita Adam et Evae , some early interpreters of Genesis effectively represent Eve as both a passive and responsible participant in her sin by reading a sexual element into the transgression. Such interpretations of the story present Eves crime as a sexual liaison with Satan or with some other demonic figure, moving the forbidden fruit of knowledge far into the narrative background, if not disregarding it altogether. 19 When Eves passivity is figured as erotic passivity she appears to be not a victim but a tramp. As Nils A. Dahl has observed in Der Erstgeborene Satans und der Vater des Teufels, certain rabbinic interpreters understood Eve in this way. 20 In Gen. 4:1, after giving birth to Cain, Eve declares I have produced a man with the help of the L ORD (NRSV), a statement that struck some rabbinic interpreters as problematic because it seemed to suggest that God and Eve copulated to produce a son. Gen. 5:3 may have lent weight to this sugJ.R. Levinson has argued that ancient readers dissatisfaction with this tension in Eves characterization is evident in the Greek manuscript tradition. Some manuscripts attempt to resolve the tension by emphasizing Eves activity, thereby degrading her character. Other manuscripts emphasize her passivity in order to moderate her guilt. See The Exoneration and Denigration of Eve in the Greek Life of Adam and Eve, in G. Anderson, M. Stone, and J. Tromp (eds.), Literature on Adam and Eve: Collected Essays (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 251-75 (especially p. 259). 19 Although this reading ultimately depends more upon the interpreters presuppositions than upon the text itself, there are some textual clues supporting it. The Greek word that the Septuagint uses for know and knowledge is , a word which could also refer to sexual intercourse. (Cf. Matt. 1:25 about Joseph and Mary: , and he did not know her until she gave birth to a son.) The serpent, moreover, is a common phallic symbol in ancient Near Eastern literature. 20 N.A. Dahl Der Erstgeborene Satans und der Vater des Teufels (Polyk. 71 und Joh 844, in W. Eltester and F.H. Kettler (eds.), Apophoreta: Festschrift Fr Ernst Haenchen (Festschrift E. Haenchen; Berlin: Verlag Alfred Tpelmann, 1964), pp. 70-84 (72-74).
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gestion since it introduced Seths birth by explaining that Adam became the father of a son in his likeness, according to his image (NRSV), for this drew attention to the fact that no similar claim had been made about Adams relationship to Cain. The eighth century Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer, certainly relying on earlier Palestinian interpretive traditions, resolves this problem by concluding that Eve became pregnant with Cain after the evil angel Sammael seduced her. 21 The Pirqe identifies this seduction with the serpents deception of Eve, stating that Sammael came to her riding on the serpent (21; cf. 13).22 When Eve gave birth to Cain she accordingly recognized him as the product of her union with Sammael: his likeness was not of the earthly beings, but of the heavenly beings, and [Eve] prophesied and said: I have gotten a man with the Lord (21).23 The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan , also reflecting early traditions, attests to this interpretation (4:1; cf. 3:6) and several other rabbinic sources betray knowledge of the serpents sexual seduction of Eve. 24 Although Paul does not link Eves transgression with Cains birth, in 2 Corinthians he does discuss it in terms of erotic passivity. He equates the Corinthians with Eve because they have been taken in by a group of itinerant charismatics to whom he refers as false apostles ( ):
I am jealous for you with a jealousy of God, for I betrothed you to present you as a pure bride [ to your one husband, Christ. And I am afraid lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve in its trickery [ , your thoughts may be led astray from single-hearted and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone coming preaches another Jesus, whom we did not preach, or if you receive another spirit, which you did not receive, or another gospel, which you did not accept, how well you submit to it! And what I do, I will also continue, in order that I may cut off the opportunity of those who would like an opportunity so that in what they boast they may appear just like us. For such men
21 For a discussion of the Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezers date and use of earlier interpretive traditions, see M.D. Herr, Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, in Encyclopaedia Judaica ( Jerusalem: Macmillan, 1971), vol. 13, pp. 558-60. 22 Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer (trans. G. Friedlander; London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1916), pp. 150 and 92. 23 Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer , p. 151. See N.A. Dahl Der Erstgeborene Satans und der Vater des Teufels (Polyk. 71 und Joh 844 ), pp. 72-73 for a discussion of the textual peculiarities of Gen. 4:1 that may have contributed to this interpretation of the verse. 24 See b. Shabb. 145b-146a, Yebam. 103b, and Abod. Zar. 22b. For a discussion of the Targum Pseudo-Jonathans date and use of early interpretive traditions, see M. Maher (ed.), Targum Pseudo-Jonathan: Genesis (trans. M. Maher; The Aramaic Bible; Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1992), vol. 1B, pp. 1-12.

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are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles of Christ. And no wonder! For even Satan transforms himself into an angel of light . So it is no great wonder then if his workers also transform themselves into workers of righteousness (2 Cor. 11:2-4, 12-15).

Paul is concerned that the false apostles, servants of Satan who, like their master, disguise their wickedness as righteousness, have deceived his Corinthians, figured as Eve. He suggests that the false apostles deception amounts to sexual seduction by calling the Corinthians a pure bride ( ) betrothed to Christ, her one husband (11:2), and then expressing concern for the Corinthians single-hearted and pure devotion to Christ (11:3). Yet Paul makes it clear that the Corinthians willingly participated in the scandalous liaison, for he explicitly (and sarcastically) states that they submitted to the false apostles seductive advances: (How well you submit!, 11:4). In Pauls mind, the deception of the false apostles is not much of a deception at all. Paul introduces the figure of Satans transformation into an angel of light to emphasize not the subtlety of the false apostles schemes (in contrast to the Vita Adam et Evae), but their audacity in claiming to be apostles of Christ like himself and his missionary partners (11:14-15).25 The Corinthians susceptibility to that deception, accordingly, inspires not pity but outrage and Paul sarcastically rebukes them: You submit to it if someone makes slaves of you, if someone devours you, if someone takes you in, if someone acts haughtily, if someone hits you in the face! (11:20). After a long digression involving a paradoxical boast about his own apostolic credentials, Paul rounds out the figure of seduction by suggesting that the Corinthians acceptance of the false apostles amounts to impurity, sexual immorality, and licentiousness ( , 12:21). The false apostles, just like Satan in the Vita Adam et Evae and other interpretations of Genesis story, operate under false pretenses and the Corinthians, like Eve, are the victims of a seductive deception. Nonetheless, as the pure bride of Christ the Corin25 See V.P. Furnish, II Corinthians (AB; Garden City: Doubleday, 1984), pp. 486-87 and 494-95 for a discussion of Satans seduction of Eve in 2 Cor. 11:1-21a that situates it, the Adam literature, and the rabbinic and Targumic interpretations of Genesis 23 in the same interpretive tradition. Furnish claims that Paul knew of the traditional identification of the serpent with Satan and of Satans appearance to Eve as a brilliant angel.

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thians should not have been so easy a target. The false apostles preached Jesus, but it was a Jesus recognizably other than the Christ whom Paul preached and to whom the Corinthians ought to have been faithfully devoted (11:4). Paul invokes the figure of Satans transformation into an angel of light to present Eves crime as a deceptive seduction, yet at the same time stresses that Eve tolerated and encouraged the satanic angels adulterous advances. There is no hint that she is a pitiable victim here. Paul comfortably maintains her responsibility for the sin alongside the passive nature of her transgression.

Eve in Romans 7:5-25 In Romans 7 Paul again uses the symbolic economy associated with Eve in the scene of the primeval transgression. Pauls allusion to the Genesis episode is subtle, but it permeates almost the entire chapter and suggests a complex interpretation of Eves temptation and sin. 26 The opposition between her activity and passivity is again at issue in Romans 7, but Paul does not treat it here, as he does in 2 Corinthians 11, as a conflict to resolve by means of traditional imaginative expansion of the Genesis text. Instead Paul thematizes the opposition itself, internalizing it and transforming it into the subject (quite literally, as I shall show below) of his discourse. Paul ultimately employs the tension between the activity and passivity of Eve, a tension prominent in the exegetical tradition surrounding her character, in order to explain a fundamental conflict that he sees within the selfs identity.

26 Viewing Genesis 3 as the model for Rom. 7:7-13 does not represent a novel approach to the passage. Stanislas Lyonnet established the relationship between the two texts in a pair of essays published in the 1960s: Lhistoire du salut selon le chapitre VII de lptre aux Romains, Bib. 43 (1962), pp. 117-51 and Tu ne con-voiteras pas (Rom. vii, 7), in W.C. van Unnik (ed.), Neotestamentica et Patristica: Eine Freundesgabe, Herrn Professor Dr. Oscar Cullman zu seinem 60. Geburtstag berreicht (Festschrift O. Cullman; Supplements to NovT 6; Leiden: Brill, 1962), pp. 157-65. Interpreters regularly invoke the obvious intertextual relationship between the two texts to solve the often-debated question of the identity of the I in Rom. 7:7ff. Those who view Genesis 3 as the proper context for interpreting this chapter of Romans always (as far as I can determine) conclude that the experience of Adam has influenced Pauls discourse. My emphasis on the role of Eve in Romans 7 is unique.

the figure of eve in romans 7:5-25 Paul writes,

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When we were in the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died in that in which we were held captive, so that we are slaves in the newness of spirit and not the oldness of letter (Rom. 7:5-6).

This prompts him to ask whether the law is sin in v. 7 ( ), a question that he answers emphatically in the negative ( !). He goes on to explain his answer with an extended allusion to Genesis 3:
But I would not have come to know sin unless through law. For I would not have known desire unless the law had said You shall not desire. [ ] Having taken an opportunity in the commandment, sin worked in me every desire. For apart from law, sin is dead. At one time I was alive apart from law, but after the commandment came, sin came to life. I died and the commandment unto lifethis very commandmentwas found to be unto death for me. For sin, having taken an opportunity in the commandment, deceived me [ and through it killed me. So the law is holy and the commandment is holy and just and good (7:7b-12).

The association of the law with fruit for death ( 7:5) and mention of a commandment unto life that proved to be unto death (7:10) suggest that Paul is invoking the scene of the primeval transgression, in which Adam and Eve taste the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil that God commanded them not to eat lest they die (Gen. 2:163:24). When Paul launches into a meditation upon the inevitable correspondence of knowing the good law and doing evil (7:14-23) and then associates this state of affairs with death (7:24), he clinches the allusion to the Genesis episode. The interpretive allusion is subtle, but indisputable, especially since Paul has recently established a connection between the two texts by discussing the entry of sin into the world through Adam in Rom. 5:12-21. The clearest allusion to the Genesis narrative appears in 7:11, where Paul writes (sin deceived me), clearly echoing Eves confession of Gen. 3:13: (the serpent deceived me).27 Paul writes in the first
27 Although Paul uses the compound in Rom. 7:11, in contrast to the simplex of Gen. 3:13, this does not decrease the likelihood of a direct allusion, for he uses precisely the same compound when he discusses Eves deception in 2 Cor. 11:3. The compound also appears in the reference to the Genesis episode in 1 Tim. 2:14.

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person here, and the most reasonable conclusion to draw from the echo is that he is using the common Greco-Roman rhetorical device of the prosopopoiia or fictio personae (speech-in-character) and speaking as Eve in the scene of the primeval transgression.28 Remarkably, though, interpreters almost without exception fail to make this connection. Although they often note allusions to

28 Scholarship on the identification of the I of Romans 7 is immense and I will rehearse it only briefly here. W.G. Kmmel has argued that Pauls I cannot be autobiographical in his 1929 monograph Rmer 7 und die Bekehrung des Paulus , reprinted in Rmer 7 und das Bild des Menschen im Neuen Testament (Mnchen: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1974), pp. 1-160. He argues that the I in Romans is a so-called fictive I, a rhetorical strategy by which Paul expresses an idea in a vivid firstperson discourse, but without meaning that discourse to be understood as an expression of his personal experience. E. Ksemann (following Lyonnet) suggests that Paul has the experience of Adam in mind here, although he does not go so far as to claim that Paul has rhetorically assumed the identity of Adam. See his Commentary on Romans (trans. and ed. G.W. Bromiley; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), pp. 195-98. Gerd Theissen modifies this thesis. He takes into consideration the exegesis of Kmmel and Ksemann but still includes an autobiographical element in the I of Romans 7, though without claiming that Pauls own experience totally accounts for the discourse. He concludes that what suggests itself most readily is to think of an I that combines personal and typical traits (p. 201). See G. Theissen, Psychological Aspects of Pauline Theology (trans. J.P. Galvin; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), pp. 190-211. Recently Stanley Stowers has argued that Rom. 7:7-25 is a prosopopoiia , noting similarities between the passage and Greek tragic monologues which lead him to suggest that Pauls prosopopoiia represents a general tragic characterization. He draws comparisons between the I of Rom. 7:7ff. and tragic representations of Medea, but stops far short of asserting that Paul has rhetorically assumed the identity of Medea, claiming only that Paul has assumed the identity of a character like the barbarian Medea who struggles and suffers as a result of her lack of self-control (i.e., akrasia ). See A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 264-84 and Rom. 7.7-25 as a Speech-in-Character ( ), in T. Engberg-Pederson (ed.), Paul in his Hellenistic Context (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994), pp.180-202. Stowers analysis establishes that Paul is in fact using the rhetorical device of the prosopopoiia in Rom. 7:7-25, and my interpretation is indebted to his successful attempt to situate this section of Pauls epistle in the context of the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition. I am convinced, however, that the persona (prospon) Paul has adopted is Eve in the scene of the primeval transgression and not a typical barbarian tragic thos . Incidentally, in a study of ancient Latin and Greek rhetorical and writing exercises, W.M. Bloomer has discussed the tendency among male students of rhetoric in the ancient world to adopt feminine personae when employing the rhetorical device of the prosopopoiia . See Schooling in Persona: Imagination and Subordination in Roman Education, Classical Antiquity 16 (1997), pp. 57-78. Even if this study does not directly support my argument, it at least anticipates and refutes the vulgar assertion that it is a priori unlikely that Paul would have rhetorically assumed the identity of Eve (especially as opposed to Adam) because Paul is male and Eve is female.

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Genesis 3 in Rom. 7:7-13 (especially the resounding echo of Gen. 3:13 in Rom. 7:11), the standard interpretive move is to jump directly from observing these allusions to concluding that Paul speaks as Adam.29 Paul quotes the words of Eve and not of Adam, but interpreters regularly quote Ksemanns well-known comment on Rom. 7:7-13 with surprising approval: there is nothing in the passage which does not fit Adam, and everything fits Adam alone. 30 The clear echo of Gen. 3:13 in Rom. 7:11 should be sufficient to convince the careful reader that Paul identifies the I of Romans 7 with Eve rather than Adam in the scene of the primeval transgression. But those prone to see Adamic imagery in the passage must also come to terms with the fact that Paul always associates deception in the context of Genesis 3 with Eve, as opposed to Adam, in the extant writings.31 I have already discussed his treatment of Satans deceptive seduction of Eve in 2 Cor. 11:121. Although Paul did not write 1 Timothy, the epistle was likely composed by a faithful disciple and contains traditions that go back to the apostle himself. There the author explicitly states that
29 See E. Ksemann, Commentary on Romans , pp. 191-98 for an example of interpretation of Rom. 7:7-13 from this perspective. The exceptions to this interpretive move prove the rule. Robert Gundry has noted that the supposed allusions to Genesis 23 in Romans 7 would point to an identification of the I with Eve and not with Adam. See The Moral Frustration of Paul Before his Conversion: Sexual Lust in Romans 7:7-25, in D.A. Hagner and M.J. Harris (eds.), Pauline Studies: Essays presented to Professor F.F. Bruce on his 70th Birthday (Festschrift F.F. Bruce; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), pp. 228-45 (230-32). He then uses this observation as evidence that Romans 7 must not reflect Genesis 3 after all, but instead reflects Pauls own past struggle with lust supposedly initiated at his bar mitzvah ! It apparently does not occur to Gundry that Paul may in fact be identifying with Eve rather than Adam in the story of the primeval transgression. D.B. Garlington takes issue with Gundry in Romans 7:14-25 and the Creation Theology of Paul, Trinity Journal 11 (1990), pp. 197-235 (209-10). He argues that although Paul may be using Eve as his model in Romans 7, he regularly depicts the condition of fallen mankind in Adam-like terms and is also doing so here (p. 210). This presents, of course, an obvious contradiction, which Garlington attempts to resolve by arguing that it would be wrong to distinguish sharply between Adam and Eve in this context since Eve, after all, was the instigator of her husbands sin (p. 210). Garlington suggests that although Paul has Eve in mind in Romans 7, there ultimately is no significant difference between Adam and Eve in Pauls thought and interpreters are therefore correct in claiming that Paul is writing of Adam here. 30 E. Ksemann, Commentary on Romans, p. 196. 31 Theissen has thoughtful comments on the motif of deception in Genesis 3 and Romans 7, but is not careful to discuss deception only with reference to Eve. See Psychological Aspects of Pauline Theology , pp. 206-207, 209-10.

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(Adam was not deceived, but the woman, having been deceived, came into transgression, 2:14). Ultimately, the only legitimate argument for understanding the I of Romans 7 in reference to Adam as opposed to Eve is the superficial similarity between Rom. 7:5-25 and Rom. 5:12-21. In Romans 5, Paul identifies Adam as the one through whom sin came into the world, and through sin death, and in this way death went through all men, since all sinned (5:12). Paul is attempting to establish here that all must be under the power of sin (cf. Rom. 13) because all are under the power of death. Since death reigned from Adam to Moses all were sinners, even those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam (5:14). E.P. Sanders suggests that those whose sins are not like the transgression of Adam are those whose sin would not seem to constitute direct rebellion against Gods commandment. 32 Paul may have in mind people like those he mentions in 2:12-16, who possess and transgress a kind of natural law, as opposed to a divine law promulgated by God. Sin and death, then, were in the world even before and apart from the law, and when the Mosaic Law came it did not solve these problems, but rather the trespass multiplied (5:20). It was only through Christ that God defeated the power of sin and death (5:15-19). Pauls primary concern in this passage is to establish the universality of the problem of sin (a logical necessity for him given his belief in the universality of Christ the solution) with reference to the obviously universal problem of death. He argues, therefore, that all die because all have sinned. In the sin of the first man Adam all of Adams descendents sinned and therefore all, like Adam, die. Paul does implicate Adam, in some illdefined sense, in everyones sin and death (5:12, 15, 17-18), but he admits that Adam is not necessarily an appropriate model for the individual sinner (5:14). The orientation of ch. 5, therefore, differs markedly from that of ch. 7, for in ch. 7 Paul is no longer concerned with establishing that sin is at work in all humanity , but rather with establishing how exactly sin works in the individual human . As I shall continue to argue below, Eve and not Adam provides the appropriate figure for this discussion, despite the fact that Paul had written of Adams sin two chapters earlier in order to make a different point.
32

E.P. Sanders, Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 37.

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Contemporary feminist literary theory helps account for the rather uncritical tendency among interpreters to read Rom. 7:713 with reference to Adam instead of to Eve. Paul, by referring here to the scene of the primeval transgression, clearly intends to describe a universal experience, most likely (contra Luther) the experience of the sinner who has not encountered Christ. Judith Fetterley, in the introduction to her study of American fiction, has suggested that androcentric literature tends to present universal experiences as the experiences of men. 33 She provides a brief exposition of Washington Irvings Rip Van Winkle as an example of this tendency:
While the desire to avoid work, escape authority, and sleep through the major decisions of ones life is obviously applicable to both men and women, in Irvings story this universal desire is made specifically male. Work, authority, and decision-making are symbolized by Dame Van Winkle, and the longing for flight is defined against her. She is what one must escape from, and the one is necessarily male. 34

Fetterley formulates her observations with reference to American literature, but they readily apply to much of the Western Canon and are easily transformed into a general feminist theory of reading: the act of reading androcentric literature teaches readers uncritically to equate universal experiences with masculine experiences. Readers tend to perpetuate this tendency even when universal experiences are not so described, thereby wholly marginalizing female experience to the status of the particular or of the perverse, against which the universal or the normal is defined. 35 This is precisely what interpreters have done with Romans 7. Under the weight of accumulated experiences with androcentric literature, interpreters simply assume that the specific intertextual referent behind the I of Romans 7 must, with all its universalizing tendencies, be Adam and not Eve in Genesis 23. It is important to note that the androcentrism here belongs to interpreters and not to the text, for the passage clearly describes the universal experience of being under sin from the perspective of the origi33 J. Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. xi-xii. 34 J. Fetterley, The Resisting Reader, p. xii. 35 See P.P. Schweickart, Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading, in A. Bennett (ed.), Readers and Reading (London: Longmans, Green, 1995), pp. 66-93 (71-75) for a transformation of Fetterleys observations into a somewhat different feminist theory of reading.

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nal woman. 36 Pauls choice of Eve over Adam, moreover, is not simply a formal one. As I shall demonstrate below, he chooses to present the universal experience of being under sin from Eves perspective precisely because it allows him to dramatize the tension between activity and passivity that is inscribed into the interpretive tradition surrounding Genesis 3 and that he sees as central to this experience. Crucial to understanding the interpretive allusion in Rom. 7:513 to Genesis 23 is the threefold relationship between the primeval commandment of Genesis, the imperative You shall not desire, and the law in its entirety. 37 The commandment You shall not desire promised life but proved to bring death (7:10). This death, already associated with fruit in 7:5, links the commandment with Gods first command to Adam and Eve, that they not eat of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil lest they die. The association, as Theissen notes in his analysis of the passage, is extraordinarily appropriate to the story of the Fall.38 Although the word does not appear in the Septuagint version of the primeval transgression, it aptly describes Eves longing for the forbidden fruit.39 In Gen. 3:6, the Septuagint translators describe the forbidden fruit from Eves point of view as (timely or seasonable, but more commonly beauti36 Louise Schottroff suggests that Paul perpetuates androcentrism by speaking as Adam in Romans 7. See The Seduction of Eve and Adams Sin: Social Historical Feminist Interpretation of Pauls Understanding of Sin and Freedom, in T.W. Jennings Jr (ed.), Text and Logos: The Humanistic Interpretation of the New Testament (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), pp. 165-74. Her suggestion is based on the assumption that in the Jewish tradition Adam represents humanity and Eve is included within this. If one speaks of Eve then this concerns women only, whether this has to do with sin or any other theme (p. 166). Even though Schottroff is interested in Eves role in Pauls thought, she does not consider the possibility that it is Eves voice we hear echoed in Rom. 7:7-13. She therefore perpetuates an androcentric misreading of Paul even while attempting to expose Pauls own supposed androcentrism. 37 The targums regularly link the commandment of paradise to the law in its entirety through a meditation on Gen. 2:15. The Targum Neofiti provides one example: And the Lord God took Adam and had him dwell in the garden of Eden to toil in the law and to observe its commandments (M. McNamara [ed.], Targum Neofiti 1: Genesis [trans. M. McNamara; The Aramaic Bible; Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1992], vol. 1A, p. 58 [McNamaras emphasis]). Here, though, I am concerned with this relationship as mediated through You shall not desire. 38 G. Theissen, Psychological Aspects of Pauline Theology , p. 204. 39 G. Theissen, Psychological Aspects of Pauline Theology , p. 204.

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ful or comely).40 That word evokes the same notion of sexual desire also evoked by . Paul is conscious of an erotic dimension to Eves transgression, for he emphasizes it in 2 Corinthians 11. Given the other echoes of the Genesis account in Romans 7, Paul clearly intended to link the erotically nuanced You shall not desire with the primeval commandment that Eve broke. Although his use of in Romans 7 necessarily evokes the idea of illicit desire commonly associated with Eves transgression, the words semantic range is not limited to the sphere of sexuality.41 The specific Septuagint commandments addressing desire regulate not only sexual desire, but also desire for land, livestock, servants, etc. (Exod. 20:17; Deut. 5:21). Therefore, after introducing the concept of desire in 7:7 Paul immediately expands it to include all sorts of desire, or every desire ( , 7:8). The vastness of the words semantic range allowed the Hellenistic mind to associate the commandment You shall not desire with the Jewish law in its entirety (the Torah, the idealized precepts and narratives defining Israels relationship with God and governing its behavior), an association that Paul assumes in Rom. 7:8. In fact, the association is commonplace in Hellenistic biblical interpretation, attested, for instance, in 4 Macc. 2:46.42 You shall not desire in Romans 7, therefore, serves as a nexus between the primeval commandment and the Jewish law, whose equivalence Paul seems to assume throughout Romans 7. Several statements linking sin to the coming of the commandment or law directly precede Rom. 7:11, the verse containing the clearest echo of the story of Eves temptation: I would not have come to know sin unless through law (7:7); Having taken an opportunity in the commandment, sin worked in me every desire (7:8a); Apart from law, sin is dead (7:8b); After the commandment came, sin came to life (7:9). These statements all must be understood within the context of Pauls interpretive allusions to Genesis 3, culminating, as they do, in the clear echo of Gen. 3:13 (Sin, finding opportunity in the law, deceived me). A competent interpretation must comprehend the coming of the command40 , in H.G. Liddell and R. Scott, Greek-English Lexicon , rev. and aug. by H.S. Jones et al. (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1996), p. 2036. 41 D. Boyarin emphasizes the erotic nuances of the passage to such a degree that he interprets it to be entirely about sex. See A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 158-79. 42 See also Philo Decal. 142, 150, and 173.

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ment or law in the context of Eves temptation, that is, through the voice of the serpent who brings the primeval commandment by quoting it to Eve. The connection discussed above between the primeval commandment and the law immediately links this cluster of verses from Romans 7 to Gal. 3:19-22 where, Hans Hbner has argued, Paul entertains the idea that demonic figures had a role in promulgating the law. There Paul argues, as Hbner claims, that (evil) angels gave the law precisely in order to provoke transgression ( ), even though the divine intention of the law itself was to bring life.43 As Sanders summarizes Hbners argument: the law itself intends to save those who do it (though that is impossible); the angels who actually gave the law, however, intended to provoke sin and thus vanquish humanity; God redeemed the situation by providing for the salvation of all those whom the law condemned. 44 This is analogous to what occurs in Genesis 23. God clearly formulates the law to protect Adam and Eve from death, but the serpent brings the commandment (misrepresenting both its wording and its intention) to induce Eve to transgress it and die (Gen. 3:1). The analogy is especially powerful since in the interpretive tradition surrounding Genesis 3, the serpent bringing the commandment to Eve is regularly presented precisely as a deceptive angel. In Romans 7 Paul equates sin with the mythological serpent who brings Eve the commandment in Genesis 3 and, on analogy, with the evil angels that promulgate the law in Gal. 3:19-20. This equation is consistent with his well-known tendency to present sin in the epistles as a hypostatized power that deceives and oppresses humanity. 45 The
43 H. Hbner, Law in Pauls Thought (ed. J. Riches; trans. J.C.G. Greig; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1984), pp. 24-36. 44 E.P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), p. 67. Sanders, however, refutes Hbners attempt to read Gal. 3:19 as representing a position which Paul consciously worked out and systematically held on the a priori grounds that Paul would not be prepared to deny what he had been taught and believed all his life, that God gave the law (p. 67). Sanders does not connect the coming of the law in Romans 7 with the serpents (mis)quote of Gods commandment to Eve in Genesis 3 and so also argues against Hbners reading of Galatians on the basis of supposed incoherence between the two epistles that would have to be resolved by means of a complicated theory of the development of Pauls thought. My reading of Romans 7, however, would eliminate any such incoherence and would, in fact, raise the possibility that Paul had worked out and did hold a view of the law that admitted both its divine origins and its problematic or even demonic promulgation and reception. 45 See E.P. Sanders, Paul , pp. 34-39 and L. Schottroff, Die Schreckensherr-

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entity sin, like the serpent in the Genesis narrative and like the deceptive angels in Galatians, is so crafty that it somehow uses the law, which was designed to give life, in order to destroy the one who encounters it. Eve, victimized and deceived by the serpent in Genesis 3, and even more completely by an angelic Satan in the interpretive tradition surrounding that passage, becomes in Romans 7 the I victimized and deceived by the enemy power sin. Passivity characterizes them both: they are utterly at the mercy of external powerspowers not readily identifiable with the self that act upon and even enslave them (7:14). With Rom. 7:15 and following, however, it becomes clear that this interpretation does not adequately describe Pauls understanding of the relationship between sin and the sinner. In this text Paul meditates upon the tension between the selfs knowledge of the law and its simultaneous inability to conform to the law. It is clear that he still has Genesis 3 in mind, for the dilemma he describes mirrors Eves in the scene of the primeval transgression: Eves acquisition of ethical knowledge (the knowledge of good and evil), representing the culmination of her discussion with the serpent about the commandment of God that the serpent had quoted to her, corresponds to Eves ethical transgression. Indeed, Rom. 7:15 and following may be interpreted as a psychological exploration of Genesis 3s surprising conflation of ethical knowledge and ethical transgression.
I do not know what I am doing. For it is not what I want that I do, but what I hate, this I do. If I do what I do not want, then I agree with the law that it is good. So it is no longer I who am doing it, but the sin dwelling within me. For I know that good does not dwell within me, that is, within my flesh, because the wanting of what is excellent is present, but the doing of it is not. For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil that I do not want, this I do. But if I do that which I do not want, it is no longer I who am doing it, but the sin dwelling within me. I discover, then, the law that evil is present when I want to do what is excellent. For I take pleasure in the law of God in the inner man, but I see another law in my members, working against the law of my mind and making me a captive in the law of sin within my members (7:15-23).

Paul at first seems to be arguing that an external power is manipulating the self and indicating that the self is not in control of itself when he blames sin for the fact that the self does not do
schaft der Snde und die Befreiung durch Christus nach dem Rmerbrief des Paulus, EvT 39 (1979), pp. 497-510. See E. Ksemann, Commentary on Romans, p.198 for an application of this concept to Rom. 7:7-13.

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what it wants (7:15-17a). But then he locates the sin within the self (17b-18) and so the distinction between the sin doing what the self hates and the self hating what the sin does is ambiguous.46 Paul clarifies it by adding that is, in my flesh (7:18), an id est clause that circumscribes the venue of sin and suggests that there is a discrete part of the self in which sin is located (flesh, 7:18 or the members, 7:23) that is easily distinguished from the true, willing self (the mind, 7:23). Yet Paul is clearly not advocating a slavishly dualistic understanding of the self, for even after introducing the concept of the flesh he can still write, For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil that I do not want, this I do (7:19). Accordingly Bultmann notes, while it may be that that is possibly has a limiting meaning here (so far as I am flesh) and that the true, willing self is thereby dissociating itself from this self that is fallen victim to flesh, it is, nevertheless, significant that I and my flesh can be equated. 47 Sin dramatizes, then, not simply the enslavement of the self to an outside power, and not even a division of the self into two separate selves, one responsible for sin and the other innocent of it. Sin brings about a division within the self that constitutes the self as two fragments, one actively sinning and one passively victimized by that sin, one conforming to the law and one not, but each as much the self as the other. 48
46 While heeding Krister Stendahls warning about reading Romans 7 as the record of an introspective conscious struggling with its own ever-present sin, I do not find his alternative analysis of Romans 7 convincing. See The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West, in W.A. Meeks (ed.), The Writings of St. Paul: A Norton Critical Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972), pp. 422-34. I do not believe that Pauls purpose in this chapter is simply to make the rather trivial observation that every man knows that there is a difference between what he ought to do and what he does (p. 432). While I do not uncritically accept Bultmanns analysis of Pauline anthropology, I do believe that he is correct in seeing the description of a split self in Romans 7. I also believe that Pauls description of the split self can be interpreted fruitfully in modern philosophical and psychological categories. To suggest that Paul presents Eves dilemma in terms that can be described in modern language as psychological is not the same thing as to declare that Paul is recording the struggle of a modern troubled conscience la Luther or Augustine. 47 R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament (trans. K. Grobel; New York: Scribners, 1951), vol. 1, p. 245. 48 As Bultmann notes, What is involved is not a warfare between two subjects that simply stand there in their separateness, any more than it is a relationship of tension between two forces. Man is precisely a split and a warfare (Romans 7 and the Anthropology of Paul, in Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann [trans. S.M. Ogden; Cleveland: World Publishing, 1960], pp. 147-57 [151]).

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When Paul echoes the Genesis account by writing Sin deceived me, then, he cannot only be reading his own straightforward conception of sin as a hypostatized power back into that narrative by equating it with the serpent, for it is clear from Rom. 7:15-23 that his conception of sin is not that straightforward. Paul, rather than simply manipulating the Genesis story to make it reflect a single vision of sin, has conflated an understanding of sin as a hypostatized, oppressive power with an alternate understanding of sin more directly relevant to the Genesis narrative and to the interpretive tradition surrounding it. The Genesis account presents sin as what Eve does, as her eating of the forbidden fruit, rather than as a demonic power victimizing her. In the interpretive tradition surrounding the passage, no matter how crafty and powerful the serpent figure becomes and no matter how passive a figure Eve is, the sin is still Eves sin and Eve is still guilty of it. In Rom. 7:15-23 Paul maintains this understanding of Eve as actively responsible for the sin of Genesis 3. He is clearly aware, however, that this understanding of Eve stands in tension with another understanding of her available in the interpretive tradition: Eve as a helpless, passive figure, deceived and victimized by an external power. Paul takes advantage of the tension within this tradition between Eves passive victimization and active responsibility at the moment of her transgression in order to develop a double vision of sin and, correspondingly, a picture of the self split under sin. Paul first hints at the split self that he describes in Rom. 7:1523 in 7:11, which contains an echo of Eves confession in Gen. 3:13: Sin deceived me. Sin, an external entity distinct from the I linked with Eve, deceives and victimizes Eve. But the sin is still Eves sin. It is, by definition, what Eve does, her consumption of the forbidden fruit, initiated by her interpretation of Gods commandment. In this sense it is an extension of Eves self and Eve is responsible for it. In Rom. 7:15 and following Paul locates these two understandings of sin within the subjects self, suggesting that sin configures the subject as paradoxically passive with respect to itself. Paul, using Eve as a figure of the sinner, shows how sin represents a split within the self, constituting the self as a self acted upon by itself. The self enslaved by sin is deceived and helplessly victimized by an oppressive power. This oppressive power, however, is not foreign to the self but rather constitutes part of the self. The self under sin is simultaneously perpetrator and victim of that sin.

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Sin, the (Split) Self, and the Law in Genesis 3 and Romans 7 Understanding Rom. 7:5-25 and especially the split self described there with reference to Eves experience in the scene of the primeval transgression opens up new hermeneutical possibilities for comprehending the relationship between sin, the (split) self, and the law. Careful exegesis of the Genesis passage that has so influenced Pauls argument shows how law is complicit with sin in alienating persons from God and in dividing them against themselves. The deceptive serpent addresses to Eve a question (mis)quoting Gods command: Why is it that God said [ Do not eat of any tree in the paradise? (Gen. 3:1, cf. 2:16-17). The question presents a radical interpretation of what God had said: Eve and Adam were not to eat the fruit of any tree, not only of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve rejects the serpents particular understanding of the commandment, but not the general approach to Gods words that its interpretation presupposed: We eat from the fruit of the trees of the paradise. But God said, Do not eat from the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the paradise, and do not touch it, lest you die (3:2-3). Her interpretation is less radical than the serpents, but it still adds information to Gods commandment in order to clarify it as an expression of Gods will (and do not touch it). In fact, Eves interpretation implies an ethical evaluation of Gods commandment. 49 The serpent suggests that the commandment aims to keep Eve from something she should have, and that therefore she ought not to obey it (a suggestion the serpent makes explicit in 3:4-5). In response, Eve asserts that Gods commandment is not as prohibitive as the serpent insinuates. She and her husband may, in fact, eat from all but one of the gardens trees. When she adds the interpretive comment and do not touch it, lest you die, she is suggesting that Gods words are actually protective, keeping her and Adam safe from a tree so dangerous that it causes death through physical contact alone. Eves particular interpretation, therefore, asserts that Gods commandment is good because it expresses Gods concern for his creation. But Eves response to the serpent marks a significant change in the status of Gods words in the Genesis narrative. Earlier in Genesis there is no distinction
49 Cf. G. von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary (trans. J.H. Marks; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, rev. edn, 1972), p. 88.

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between what God says and the effects of Gods speech. The first creation narrative asserts an absolute correspondence between what God says, what God wills, and what is good, for God simply speaks and it is and it is good (Gen. 1:12:4a). Gods words are the perfect realization of Gods will. Eves response to the serpent, however, indicates that she understands Gods declaration as something independent of its intended effect, for she accepts the serpents invitation to ponder whether what God says is what God wills (or means) and whether what God says should be. In short, Eve engages in a subtle hermeneutical and theological debate with the serpent. 50 But this debate is a dangerous innovation in the Genesis narrative precisely in that it asserts that Gods commandment is something to debate. After the serpents question, Eve does not see Gods commandment as an expression of Gods will to be spontaneously realized in her activity. No longer are we in the realm of the creative imperative, whose utterance and effect are identical. Gods commandment has become a mediator between Gods will and Eve, in need of interpretation and evaluation. To use the dichotomy that Paul introduces in Rom. 7:6, Eve has embraced Gods commandment as letter ( ) instead of as spirit ( ), as a mediator between Gods will and a subject radically independent of that will instead of as an expression of Gods will spontaneously obeyed, indeed incarnated, by a subject radically dependent on and defined by that will.51 The coming of the commandment or law and its association with sin and death
50 See P. Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), pp. 109-11. 51 Cf. W.H. Kelbers reading of Pauls letter-spirit dichotomy as an opposition between orality and textuality: Spoken words encourage participation in the message, not reflection on it. The written word of the Law, on the other hand, has become unhinged from the oral, participatory lifeworld. It has assumed an existence as verbal artifact, an object apart from speaker and audience. It is in this posture of detachment that the Law benefits the quality of perception. Laid out before ones eyes, the Law as gramma invites scrutiny and fosters critical mental activity. Deliberation of its meaning has replaced participation in its message (The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983], p. 163). See also R.B. Hays reading of the letter-spirit dichotomy in 2 Cor. 3-4 (Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989], pp. 122-53 [129-31]). Hays emphasizes that the new spiritual covenant empowers obedience so radical that one can speak of the community of believers embodying or incarnating the word of God. Pauls problem with the old covenant is that it is (only) written, lacking the power to effect the obedience that it demands (p. 131).

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in Romans 7 allude to the deceptive serpents question, which suggests to Eve an innovative way of approaching Gods commandment, which, in turn, will lead to sin. For Gods commandment prohibits precisely what is required to obey it once it is understood as an objectified imperative to be interpreted and evaluated: knowledge of good and evil. St Ephrem draws attention to the paradox of the commandment prohibiting knowledge that obedience to it demands when he speculates about how Eve should have responded to the serpent,
If I do not know between good and evil, how can I discern whether your counsel is good or evil? How will I come to know whether the divinity is good or that having [my] eyes opened is good? And whence am I to discern that death is evil? If I already possess these things, why have you come to me? Your coming unto us is testimony that we have these things. Therefore by the ability to discern between good and evil that I have, I will examine your counsel. And if I do possess these things that you counsel me, where is all your craftiness that is unable to disguise your deceit? (2.20.2)52

The serpent, according to Ephrem, deceitfully tempts Eve with knowledge that she already possesses. I think, rather, that the serpents deceit lies in presenting Gods commandment in a way that invites her to reject the radical form but not the subtle mode of its presentation, the acceptance of which will give rise to a desire for the knowledge that the commandment prohibits. One cannot desire to distinguish between good and evil unless there is already something requiring ethical evaluation. In terms of the Genesis account, Eve cannot desire the knowledge of good and evil until she understands the commandment as law, as something to be pondered and interpreted with a view towards explaining, challenging, or defending its claim on her obedience. Hence, it is on the heels of her conversation with the serpent, during which she first understands the commandment in this way, that she finds the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil desirable: The woman saw that the tree was good for food [ , and that it was pleasing to see with her eyes, and that it was desirable for understanding [ (3:6). In a sense, Eve must eat of the fruit once she embraces the serpents approach to Gods words, for her decision to eat is determined not by how she evaluates Gods commandment, but by the very act of evaluation. In construing the commandment as something
52 Commentary on Genesis in K. McVey (ed.), St. Ephrem the Syrian: Selected Prose Works (trans. E.G. Mathews, Jr and J.P. Amar; The Fathers of the Church 91; Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), pp. 57-213 (112).

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to interpret and evaluate in order to explain and defend her obedience to it, Eve claims possession of the knowledge that the forbidden fruit represents. But this does not mean that Eves understanding of Gods words as law is itself sin. As Paul writes: ! (7:7). Although the Genesis story suggests that Eves adoption of the Serpents approach to Gods declaration somehow distorts it (they both misquote Gods commandment), and although this approach clearly instigates her expulsion from the ideal existence of paradise, it nonetheless does not prevent Gods declaration from gesturing towards or representing an ideal. Genesis maintains the validity of Gods words, even when they are understood as law, by ultimately connecting Eve and Adams expulsion from paradise to the consumption of the fruit that they prohibited and not simply to Eves objectification, evaluation, and even distortion of those words.53 The powerful tension of Genesis 3, which Paul will carry over into Romans 7, is that the law simultaneously represents an ideal and forbids its attainment. In fact, Eves acceptance of Gods words as law involves both the assertion that Gods words do indeed represent an ideal (contra the serpent) and the initiation of the alienation from the ideal which the law represents. The commandment understood as law, therefore, like the flaming sword both locating and protecting Eden, paradoxically bars the way to the very ideal toward which it points. Pauls association of the primeval commandment in Genesis 3 with the commandment You shall not desire (7:7) indicates that he sees the same paradox in this imperative and in the entire law, with which he associates the imperative in 7:8. The Hellenistic world often linked desire to the appetites for food, wine, sleep, sex, etc., and it is not difficult to see how Paul and other Hellenistic Jewish intellectuals could associate the law with a prohibition of desire understood in this sense. But desire referred not only to base, physical appetites. In the Symposium , a dialogue which enjoyed immense popularity and influence in the Greco-Roman world (especially in Jewish circles), Plato wrote (what desires desires that of which there is lack, or if there is not lack, it does not desire, 200a).54 In its most general sense, desire signified
See especially Gen. 3:17. See W.A. Meeks, The Image of the Androgyne, pp. 185-86 on how Platos Symposium influenced ancient Jewish interpretations of Genesis 13.
54 53

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the concept of longing, and in philosophical discourse it often referred to a yearning for some ideal form of existence: the Beautiful, the Good, etc. Commitment to such a philosophical ideal, what John Dillon calls a transcendent supreme principle or a non-material, intelligible world above and beyond this one, which stands as a paradigm for it, prevailed throughout the Hellenistic world.55 Many Jewish intellectuals shared it, some understanding the law as both the ultimate expression of the ideal and as a guide toward its ethical realization.56 Philo of Alexandria, for instance, writes that the two tables of the Ten Commandments are both fine and profitable for life, raising up broad highways terminating at a single goal [ for the stumble-free journey of the soul always longing for what is best (Decal. 50).57 The tables are broad and smooth highways in that they legislate a righteous and ordered life in which the base appetites (which, a few sentences earlier, Philo calls , the inner desires [49]) are not allowed to burn unchecked. But they also lead toward the single goal ( ) of the soul desiring the best ( ).58 The law facilitates, even inspires, this positive desire, the object of which Philo would have identified with God himself, whom he often referred to as the One.59 This is similar to Pauls presentation of the law in Romans 7. He equates the law with the commandment You shall not desire in 7:7, but in 7:15-23 he repeatedly claims that the self wants or wills the good which the law represents and requires.60 As these
55 J. Dillon, The Middle Platonists: A Study of Platonism 80 B.C. to A.D. 220 (London: Duckworth, 1977), p. 51. 56 See M. Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in their Encounter in Palestine During the Early Hellenistic Period (trans. J. Bowden; London: SCM Press, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 255-67 for a discussion of the widespread acceptance of this philosophical understanding of divinity among Hellenistic Jewish intellectuals. See R. Williamson, Jews in the Hellenistic World: Philo (Cambridge Commentaries on Writings of the Jewish and Christian World 200 BC to AD 200; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), vol. 1, pp. 201-19 for a discussion of the Mosaic Law in the context of Philos ethics. 57 My translation is indebted to F.H. Colsons rendition in Philo (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), vol. 7, p. 31. 58 Cf. R. Williamsons discussion of Philos view of the divine inspiration of the Pentateuch (Jews in the Hellenistic World: Philo , pp. 144-45). 59 Cf. Deus 11, Opif. 100. See J. Dillon, The Middle Platonists: A Study of Platonism 80 B.C. to A.D. 220, pp. 155-56. 60 See P. von der Osten-Sacken, Rmer 8 als Beispiel paulinischer Soteriologie (Gttigen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1975), pp. 197-220 for a related discussion of desiring in the context of Romans 7.

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examples suggest, Hellenistic intellectuals could construe the law as provoking desire for the ideal principle which it represents while forbidding baser manifestations of desire ultimately inconsistent with this ideal. Although I have been carefully segregating these two modes of desire, the ancient world often viewed them as continuous. Plato, in the dialogue just cited, explained erotic homosexual desire for beautiful boys as a type of desire for the Beautiful (210a-212a). The Valentinian Ptolemy, along with other gnostic intellectuals, presented Sophias (i.e., Wisdoms) desire to contemplate the greatness of the Father without her consort as a passion originating in the realm of intellect and truth, but nonetheless disordered and adulterous (Iren. Adv. haer. 1.2.2). Daniel Boyarin discusses a range of Talmudic and other post-biblical Jewish texts that thematize this same dialectical tension between good desire directed towards God and more problematic sexual desire.61 Since ancient Hellenistic discourse often linked these two forms of desire, it may be best simply to say that the law does not prohibit desire without occasioning it. For Paul this leads to the insight that the law always already assumes that the subject is alienated from the ideal which it represents. Just as the particular commandment of Genesis 3 occasioned desire for the knowledge that it forbade, the law in general, understood as You shall not desire, necessitates the desire that it prohibits. The law, understood as an ideal, demands that the subject long for the ideal existence that it promises and therefore marks a difference between the self and that ideal. But the law as an ethical decree prohibits precisely this difference and so the existential difference between the self and the ideal corresponds to the moral deficiency of sin. As Paul writes, Apart from law, sin is dead. At one time I was alive apart from law, but after the commandment came, sin came to life (7:8b-9). Karl Barth, a reader of Romans 7 quite sensitive to Pauls invocations of the Genesis narrative, in a comment on Rom. 7:10 astutely identifies the paradox that Paul is getting at: the necessary correlation of recognizing Gods law (religion) and transgressing it (sin), which suggests that the coming of the law marks an existential alienation of man from God:

61 See D. Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 61-76.

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The supreme possibility to which we can attain within the range of our concrete existence under the dominion of sin consists in our capacity to grasp the line of death, to know both good and evil, and in the consequent emergence of the distinction between God as God and men as men. Now, that this supreme and urgent necessity of our existence should be identical with that capacity by which our direct union with God was destroyed, constitutes the final paradox of the fall The necessity of the possibility of religion, the necessity of stretching out towards the tree in our midst, the desire to know good and evil, life and death, God and manthis necessity is no more than a manoeuvre, undertaken by men within the concrete reality of this world. By it they are defined as evil and passing to corruption; by it they are defined asmen; by it they are thrown into the contrast between relative and absolute, and there imprisoned. 62

Paul can write Sin, taking opportunity in the commandment, deceived me because, though recognition and understanding of the law would appear to be the first step towards the ideal which the commandment represents, that which points the way toward unity between the self and the ideal ultimately does not transcend the distinction between those two terms which its function has assumed. Therefore, Paul writes, the commandment unto life this very commandmentwas found to be unto death for me (7:10).63 This relationship of the self to the law that I am outlining with reference to Rom. 7:5-13 and Genesis 3, to which the Romans passage refers, culminates in the split-self described in Romans 7:14 and following, which bears deep structural similarities to the relationship of the infant to its reflection in what Jacques Lacan calls the mirror stage.64 Readers of Lacan are often struck by the
62 K. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (trans. E.C. Hoskyns; London: Oxford University Press, 6th edn, 1933), pp. 251-52. 63 Romans 7 may be compared to another locus classicus of Pauls understanding of the law, 2 Corinthians 34, where one also finds the letter-spirit dichotomy, the motif of deception, and platonizing overtones (which carry over into 2 Corinthians 5). There Paul critiques the law, which he associates with letter, through a revisionary reading of Exod. 34:29-35. He asserts that Moses veiled his face so that the people of Israel would not look upon the end of what was being set aside [ ] (2 Cor. 3:13). As the lawgiver Moses deceives the Israelites by preventing them from seeing, and therefore reflecting and embodying, the of the law that the Spirit reveals (cf. 2 Cor. 3:16-18), the serpent deceives Eve by offering her Gods proclamation in such a way as to invite her to objectify it by comprehending it as letter or law instead of as spirit. Eve, accordingly, becomes a subject with a problematic identity no longer radically dependent on Gods expressed will and no longer spontaneously conforming to it. 64 I am not the first to discuss Romans 7 in Lacanian psychoanalytic terms. Jacques Lacan himself uses Romans 7 to discuss the relationship between moral law and das Ding , by which he means an object of desire at the heart of a subject

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fact that the infant, initially identifying itself in a mirror (which, as Lacan notes, should be understood as an object which reflectsnot just the visible, but also what is heard, touched and willed by the child), identifies itself as an image , that is, as an object ontologically different from the subject (i.e., the infants self) which comes into being at the moment of this identification/ mis-recognition.65 Juliet Mitchell, for instance, writes,
What is crucial for our purposes is that the very self, the subject, is only created as a difference . An aspect of the self is thus in some ways always only a mirror-reflection, an alienated image from which many mystical and philosophical arguments would try to release us with the suggestion that we should return to the initial illusion of primordial unity.66

In the crucial essay on the mirror stage, however, Lacan emphasizes not the image as image, but the image as ideal . The infant, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence is shown an image that is a Gestalt, that is to say an exteriority in which this form [of his body] appears to him above all in a contrasting size (un relief de stature ) that fixes it and in a symmetry that inverts it, in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him .67 The infant, when it recognizes itself in its image, anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power. 68
that orders its subjectivity, but that is ultimately characterized by its absence. Lacan appropriates Rom. 7:7-11 to suggest an analogy between das Ding and sin. My own discussion of the passage, although in some ways complementary to Lacans appropriation, relies on different psychoanalytic concepts and takes Paul somewhat more seriously than Lacan does. See On the Moral Law, in J.-A. Miller (ed.), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960 (trans. D. Porter; New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), pp. 71-84 (83-84). In order to understand this lecture, it is necessary to read the two immediately preceding it in the volume: Das Ding and Das Ding (II). For an analysis of Romans 7 that builds on and follows closely Lacans appropriation, see D. Roquefort, Romains 7/7s selon Jacques Lacan, tudes thologiques et religieuses 61 (1986), pp. 343-52. For a distinct psychoanalytic approach to Romans 7 see P.-E. Langevin, Exgse et psychanalyse: Lecture psychanalytique de Romains VII et VIII, Laval thologique et philosophique 36 (1980), pp. 129-37. 65 The statement may be found in J.-A. Millers collection of Lacans comments at meetings of the Socit psychanalytique de Paris: Interventions de Lacan la Socit psychanalytique de Paris, Orinicar ? 31 (1984), pp. 7-27 (2122). English translation quoted in J. Rose, Introduction II, in J. Mitchell and J. Rose (eds.), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the cole freudienne (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), pp. 27-57 (30). 66 J. Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), p. 386. 67 J. Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, in J. Lacan, crits: A Selection (trans. A. Sheridan; New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), pp. 1-7 (2, emphasis added). 68 J. Lacan, The Mirror Stage, p. 2.

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The form of the image is an ideal-I (je-idal ): it is an orthopaedic totality whose members are composed rather than turbulent. 69 The infant identifying with its reflection identifies not with what it is, but with an ideal form that it anticipates becoming. This selfrecognition, therefore, is simultaneously a mis-recognition, which situates the agency of the ego in a fictional direction in discordance with reality. 70 Lacan asserts that the maturing subject attempts to resolve as I his discordance with his own reality by means of dialectical syntheses, but the ego will only rejoin the coming-into-being (le devenir ) of the subject asymptotically. 71 The infant, therefore, matures into a person whose identity is never quite itself. It is in this sense that part of the selfs identity should be understood, in Mitchells words, as always only an alienated image. The selfs identity is always other than the self in that it is anticipated and not simply assumed in the act of self-recognition which establishes it. The law, in a sense, describes and defines the person who recognizes it. It requires that person to reflect and to identify with it, to claim that it determines and characterizes his or her actions. But although the law demands that a person make this identification, in the end it denies it, for it prohibits the very obedience that this identification would require. (Within the symbolic economies of Genesis 3 and Romans 7, the law both prohibits and demands knowledge and desire.) The relationship of the self to the law is analogous, therefore, to the relationship of the infant to its mirror image. Although the self under the law claims that the law describes who it is and what it does, Paul suggests that the law does not and cannot truly do this. The law is an ideal image. It always describes what the self should be and in so doing, marks an irreducible distinction between the self and the ideal which it represents. The person identifying with the law, like Lacans infant, identifies with a total Gestalt , a unified configuration in which the selfs identity will certainly be more constituent than constituted. 72 Viewed from this perspective, the self under the law is not only alienated from the ideal which the law represents, but also from its very self. For the self identifies with the law and (so Paul asserts) simultaneously discerns a persistent inconsistency
69 70 71 72

J. J. J. J.

Lacan, Lacan, Lacan, Lacan,

The The The The

Mirror Mirror Mirror Mirror

Stage, Stage, Stage, Stage,

pp. 2 and 4. p. 2. p. 2. p. 2.

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between itself and the standard of the law. The self claims to be something that it recognizes it is not and a crisis of identity erupts. The subject of Pauls discourse, like the subject of Lacans, must resolve this crisis dialectically. So the self splits along the line of the law, circumscribing that constituent of itself inconsistent with the law and distinguishing it, to a certain extent, from that which identifies with the law: For I do not know what I am doing. For it is not what I want that I do, but what I hate, this I do. If I do what I do not want, then I agree with the law that it is good. So it is no longer I who am doing it, but the sin dwelling within me that is, within my flesh (7:15-18a). The self-division is a move by which the self preserves its integrity as a thinking, willing being, and also defines its limitations as such a being with reference to the law. The self thus divided is neither altogether servile and unable to control its own actions, nor completely autonomous. Rather, it is something of both. It is enslaved to its own sin (7:14); it is enslaved to itself (7:23). Responsible for the sin that victimizes it, the self is passive with respect to itself.73 By labeling one part of the self the mind ( , 7:23) and the other the flesh ( , 7:14 and 18), the members ( , 7:23), or even the body ( , 7:24), Paul associates the divided self of Rom. 7:14-25 with the commonplace Hellenistic opposition between a potentially pure soul or mind and a body necessarily cumbersome and defiant, characterized by vulnerability and appetite. Paul is not claiming that this conventional dichotomy accounts for the selfs sin, that is, for the inconsistency between the self and the law. The selfs decisive problem is not that it has a body prone to sin, resisting its appropriate, passive position and usurping the minds supremacy over the self. Indeed, Paul regularly uses the term body to mean, in Bultmanns definition, the self with whom [man] can deal as the object of his own conduct, and also the self whom he can perceive as subjected to an occurrence that springs from a will other than his own.74
Romans 8 indicates that Paul believes that the eschaton will ultimately resolve this crisis of identity by redeeming the body, that constituent of the self always unable to conform to the standard of the law. Pauls argument, therefore, is one of those many mystical and philosophical arguments about which Mitchell warns us, that would try to release us [from the alienated image] with the suggestion that we should return to the initial illusion of primordial unity ( Psychoanalysis and Feminism , p. 386). 74 R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament , vol. 1, p. 196.
73

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The body for Paul can therefore represent a neutral plane of existence that may be surrendered either to God or to the flesh, which Bultmann defines as the nature of the earthly-human in its specific humannessi.e. in its weakness and transitoriness, which also means in opposition to God and His Spirit.75 But our recognition that often functions as a neutral term for Paul, in contrast to the theologically loaded concept of flesh, must not obscure the fact that in Romans 7 and 8 Paul does negatively valorize the body and its members, and not only the flesh. In 7:24 the body is the body of death ( ) and in 8:13 the deeds of the body ( ) are equated with life according to the flesh ( ). Moreover, the groaning of those awaiting the redemption of their bodies in Rom. 8:22-23 ( ) clearly echoes the groaning of 2 Cor. 5:2: For in this [tent] we groan [ , yearning to be dressed in our home from heaven. When Paul describes the body as a tent ( , 5:1) he is using a Greek philosophical clich that has its basis in body-soul dualism. In this passage Paul goes so far as to equate bodily existence with alienation from God (5:6) and so Bultmann himself concedes that Paul here comes very close to Hellenistic dualism not merely in form of expression, by speaking of the soma under the figure of the tent-dwelling and garment, but also in the thought itself.76 In contrast to the soul or the mind, the body, as Paul and other Hellenistic intellectuals understood it, is weak and defiant, often tragically submissive to its basest appetites. The bodys intractable frailty is not, according to Rom. 7:14-25, the cause of sin, but it is one of sins corollaries, and so Paul can map the body-mind dichotomy onto his picture of the self divided under sin and suggest that the division of the self into sinful and innocent constituents along the line of the law explains the opposition. The connection of the divided self to this dichotomy, with all its moralizing overtones, allows Paul to progress easily from a theological-psychological discourse to a moral or ethical one. In Romans 8, Paul is concerned with the believers struggle for self-mastery against the sinful part of the self, the flesh or even the body, and especially with the Spirits role in that struggle.77 Paul employs a different symbolic economy,
75 76 77

R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament , vol. 1, p. 234. R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament , vol. 1, p. 201. Cf. S. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles , pp. 279-80.

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though significantly still a feminine one (childbirth), in order to articulate a tension between the believers activity and passivity with respect to the Spirit (instead of sin) in that struggle.78 In Romans 7, however, Paul is concerned with the etiology and the psychological dynamics of the self divided by sin under the law. We must therefore understand Rom. 7:5-13 from the perspective of Eve, for she is the first to receive the commandment as law and the first to sin. It is in Eve that the complex relationship between law, knowledge of good and evil, and sin first comes to light. Paul first hints at the split self that he describes in Rom. 7:14-25 in v. 11, which contains an echo of Eves confession of Gen. 3:13: Sin deceived me. The fully developed portrait of the split self in the latter half of the chapter, of the self knowing the law and able to discern the difference between good and evil but ultimately unable to do the good, clinches the connection between the self and Eve, whose knowledge of good and evil coexisted with, and indeed occasioned, her own sin. Conclusion It is no coincidence that Eve in the exegetical tradition surrounding Genesis 3 shows characteristics of both constituents of this split self. Within the tradition she is passive and victimized, but she is also actively responsible not only for her own sin, but for the sin of everyone. Sometimes these conflicting understandings of Eve even coexist, for all their apparently irreconcilable tension, in the same interpretive work (the Vita Adam et Evae, for example). Paul reveals that he is aware of this exegetical tradition in 2 Corinthians 11, where he discusses how Satan appeared to Eve as an angel of light (11:14), a detail that the Genesis account does not supply but that is present in Hellenistic retellings and interpretations of that story (cf. Vita Adam et Evae 9:1-5).79 There, Paul reconciles the conflicting elements of the tradition. Satan is attractive, but Paul suggests that Eve, as a faithful wife, is responsible for resisting his adulterous advances (11:3). Her passive submission marks her as unfaithful, and infidelity to Paul and his
78 Cf. A. Busch, Eve and Travail: Images of Femininity in the Writings of Paul (MA thesis; Indiana University, 2000), pp. 35-66. 79 See Furnish, II Corinthians , pp. 486-87 and 494-95.

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gospel is precisely the sin for which he is rebuking his Corinthian congregations, linking them to Eve and their false apostles to the deceptive serpent (11:4). In Romans 7, though, Paul is not concerned with resolving the tension between Eves passivity and her active responsibility. He manipulates the story of Eves primeval transgression, substituting sin for the seductive serpent, in order to thematize a tension between the activity and passivity of the self under sin. He forces the interpretive tradition emphasizing Eves passive manipulation at the hands of the serpent into a dialectical relationship with an alternate tradition emphasizing Eves active responsibility for her own sin and for sin in general. Eve, in Romans 7, represents the dynamics of the self fragmented by sin. Both acting autonomously and passively acted upon, Eve becomes the I of Romans 7 whose own sin deceives it (7:11), the prototype of the split self under the law who can paradoxically exclaim It is no longer I who am doing it, but the sin dwelling within me (7:17).

Abstract
Rom. 7:7-25 functions as a prosopopoiia in which Paul rhetorically assumes the identity of Eve in the scene of the primeval transgression. While most Hellenistic biblical interpreters associated Eve with feminine passivity, Paul in Romans 7 (and to a lesser degree in 2 Corinthians 11) calls this simplistic association into question by drawing attention to an element of (masculine) activity in her experience that other interpreters either overlooked or could not satisfactorily account for in their interpretations of her story. In Rom. 7:7-13 Eve in the scene of the primeval transgression (Genesis 23) becomes a figure of passivity and activity paradoxically conflated. In the following verses (7:14-25) Paul manipulates this conflation in order to illustrate the ego or self split under sin. Observing the unique way in which Paul employs the figure of Eve in Rom. 7:5-25 allows us to read the passage as a meditation on the primeval transgression offering a new perspective on the relationship between the self under sin and the law. This relationship bears deep structural similarities to the relationship of the infant to its mirror image that Jacques Lacan examines in his lecture The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I and a comparison between the two will clarify Pauls discussion of the connection between the self, the law, and sin in Rom. 7:5-25.