Austin Busch, The Figure of Eve in Romans 7:5-25 (2004)

the figure of eve in romans 7:5-25 1
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 ‘fe-
male’ as essential categories of psycho-sexual identity fluctuate
wildly and eventually break down.” 1 The implications of this phe-
nomenon are extensive, for in the ancient world “male” and “fe-
male” 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 Meeks’s 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 sexes—even
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 Paul’s
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
Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1865-1935).
3
W.A. Meeks, “The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a Symbol in Ear-
liest Christianity,” History of Religions 13 (1974), pp. 165-208 (165-66).
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2004 Biblical Interpretation 12, 1

Also available online – www.brill.nl
2 austin busch
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 baptis-

mal formula, the words spoken at the Christian rite of initiation. 5
Meeks argues that “the disruption of ordinary life’s categories in
the experience of initiation” into a religious group aimed at “shap-
ing the symbolic universe by which that group distinguished itself
from the ordinary ‘world’ of the larger society.”6 Since the lan-
guage and imagery of initiation rites is necessarily disruptive, Paul
can employ Christian language of initiation to destabilize the bi-
nary oppositions that supplied categories of social and psychologi-
cal 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 sup-
pressing) the social implications of the final dichotomy that he
dissolves in Gal. 3:28.7 They often contrast this passage from Ga-
latians 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). Paul’s let-
ters occasionally reveal an attitude toward women inherently in-
consistent 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 distinc-
tion, 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 Paul’s
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.
4
All translations of ancient texts are my own unless otherwise noted.
5
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. Schüssler Fiorenza thoughtfully raises the issues involved in such a cri-
tique in In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins
(New York: Crossroad, 1983), pp. 205-41.
This paper focuses upon how Paul’s peculiar use of one femi-
nine image, the figure of Eve from Genesis 2–3, collapses a cru-
cial Hellenistic dichotomy: the gendered opposition of activity and
passivity. Paul’s 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 2:21-
22. Where the image of God is restored, there, it seems, man is
no longer divided—not even by the most fundamental division of
all, male and female.” 9 Paul’s 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 paradoxi-
cally 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 em-
ploys 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 be-
tween the self under sin and the law.
Eve in Hellenistic Exegesis of Genesis 2–3
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 discus-
sion of the connections between the baptismal liturgy that Paul quotes in Gal.
3:26-28 and Gen. 1–3.
9 W.A. Meeks, “The Image of the Androgyne,” p. 185.
4 austin busch
contemplate the association of passivity with femininity conven-

tional throughout the ancient world.10 Philo’s 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 ac-
tivity 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 percep-
tions are indeed at rest until movement from the outside comes to each
one (2.38-39).
Philo understands sense perception ( ) to be passive be-

cause it simply receives impressions generated by movement from
the outside ( ). Although God’s 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 Adam’s rib that “God
built ( ) it into a woman.” It is possible to read this as
Philo’s 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 percep-
tion 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.
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 interpre-
tation 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-pla-
tonic philosophical system. His interpretive strategy demands that
he associate elements of the text with abstract philosophical no-
tions. 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 presuppo-
sitions underlying that association as clear as Philo does. Nonethe-
less, the association of femininity with passivity was commonplace
in the Hellenistic and late antique worlds, and it underlies even
those interpretations of Genesis 2–3 that are not as self-consciously
philosophical as Philo’s. Some interpretations and retellings of the
Genesis narrative, for instance, exaggerate Eve’s passivity by pre-
senting her almost exclusively as the object of other characters’
actions. The classic gnostic myth, which usually portrays the eat-
ing 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 charac-
ter. 11 In the Apocryphon of John (which was probably the most popu-
lar 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
11
Several studies of feminine imagery in Gnosticism have explored this po-
tential. 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 Pow-
ers 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 en-
tity existing within Adam (II 20:15-28; II 21:15-22:9).
6 austin busch
acquaintance” and decides to rape his creation, the “forethought

of the entirety” promptly rescues the aeon, leaving Eve to be help-
lessly “defiled” (II 24:8-16).14
It may not be proper to make an absolute distinction between
Eve’s role in the myth and the role of Wisdom, her spiritual coun-
terpart. The Apocryphon of John calls Wisdom , the Greek trans-
lation 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 Wisdom’s 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 Wisdom’s
own act. As the complicated myth progresses she is “sent unto
Adam” by the forethought of the entirety in order to become
Adam’s helper ( … , II 20:14-17), extract-
ed 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 “de-
scent” (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 22:15-
30). 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 Hel-
lenistic 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 Ham-
madi Codices II,1; III,1; and IV,1 with BG 8502,2 (Nag Hammadi and Manichaean
Studies; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995).
a woman was the beginning of sin, and through her we all die”
(25:24). This understanding of Eve would seem to be incompat-
ible 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 ten-
sion in the Latin Vita Adam et Evae, an imaginative rewriting of
Genesis 2–4.15 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 re-
gret 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” (trans-

figuravit 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 com-
position, the Adam literature contains traces of diverse ancient interpretive tra-
ditions 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).
8 austin busch
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 peni-
tence, 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 trans-
gression (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 peni-
tence would inspire God’s 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 Eve’s 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” characteriza-
tion, for they do not represent Eve’s character in its entirety. The
writer of the Vita, creatively expanding upon Gen. 3:13 (Eve’s
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, dis-
guised 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 Satan’s schemes who feels deep regret
at her own gullibility. She may be vexatious, but she is also some-
17
J.A. Phillips, Eve: The History of an Idea (San Francisco: Harper and Row,
1984), p. 49.
one to pity. The other characters of the Vita, as well as the narra-
tive 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 Eve’s transgression and her responsibility for that
transgression. The result is an ambivalent and ultimately inconsis-
tent 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 trans-
gression. Such interpretations of the story present Eve’s 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 Eve’s pas-
sivity 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 copu-
lated to produce a son. Gen. 5:3 may have lent weight to this sug-
18
J.R. Levinson has argued that ancient readers’ dissatisfaction with this ten-
sion in Eve’s characterization is evident in the Greek manuscript tradition. Some
manuscripts attempt to resolve the tension by emphasizing Eve’s 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 support-
ing 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 Für Ernst
Haenchen (Festschrift E. Haenchen; Berlin: Verlag Alfred Töpelmann, 1964), pp.
70-84 (72-74).
10 austin busch
gestion since it introduced Seth’s birth by explaining that Adam

“became the father of a son in his likeness, according to his im-
age” (NRSV), for this drew attention to the fact that no similar
claim had been made about Adam’s relationship to Cain. The
eighth century Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer, certainly relying on earlier
Palestinian interpretive traditions, resolves this problem by con-
cluding that Eve became pregnant with Cain after the evil angel
Sammael seduced her. 21 The Pirqe identifies this seduction with
the serpent’s 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 re-
flecting early traditions, attests to this interpretation (4:1; cf. 3:6)
and several other rabbinic sources betray knowledge of the ser-
pent’s sexual seduction of Eve. 24
Although Paul does not link Eve’s transgression with Cain’s
birth, in 2 Corinthians he does discuss it in terms of erotic passiv-
ity. 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 ac-
cept, 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 oppor-
tunity so that in what they boast they may appear just like us. For such men
21
For a discussion of the Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer’s date and use of earlier inter-
pretive 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-Jonathan’s 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.
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 work-
ers 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 Paul’s mind, the
“deception” of the false apostles is not much of a deception at all.
Paul introduces the figure of Satan’s transformation into an an-
gel 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 de-
ception, accordingly, inspires not pity but outrage and Paul sar-
castically rebukes them: “You submit to it if someone makes slaves
of you, if someone devours you, if someone takes you in, if some-
one acts haughtily, if someone hits you in the face!” (11:20). Af-
ter 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 pre-
tenses and the Corinthians, like Eve, are the victims of a seductive
deception. Nonetheless, as the pure bride of Christ the Corin-
25
See V.P. Furnish, II Corinthians (AB; Garden City: Doubleday, 1984), pp.
486-87 and 494-95 for a discussion of Satan’s seduction of Eve in 2 Cor. 11:1-21a
that situates it, the Adam literature, and the rabbinic and Targumic interpreta-
tions of Genesis 2–3 in the same interpretive tradition. Furnish claims that Paul
knew of the traditional identification of the serpent with Satan and of Satan’s
appearance to Eve as a brilliant angel.
12 austin busch
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
Satan’s transformation into an angel of light to present Eve’s crime
as a deceptive seduction, yet at the same time stresses that Eve
tolerated and encouraged the satanic angel’s adulterous advances.
There is no hint that she is a pitiable victim here. Paul comfort-
ably 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. Paul’s allu-
sion to the Genesis episode is subtle, but it permeates almost the
entire chapter and suggests a complex interpretation of Eve’s
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 be-
tween 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 self’s 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: “L’histoire du salut selon
le chapitre VII de l’épître 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 Pa-
tristica: Eine Freundesgabe, Herrn Professor Dr. Oscar Cullman zu seinem 60. Geburtstag
überreicht (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 interpret-
ing this chapter of Romans always (as far as I can determine) conclude that the
experience of Adam has influenced Paul’s discourse. My emphasis on the role of
Eve in Romans 7 is unique.
Paul writes,
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 nega-
tive ( !). He goes on to explain his answer with an ex-
tended 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 command-
ment unto life—this very commandment—was 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. 2:16–3:24). When Paul
launches into a meditation upon the inevitable correspondence
of knowing the good law and doing evil (7:14-23) and then asso-
ciates this state of affairs with death (7:24), he clinches the allu-
sion 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 Eve’s “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 di-
rect allusion, for he uses precisely the same compound when he discusses Eve’s
deception in 2 Cor. 11:3. The compound also appears in the reference to the
Genesis episode in 1 Tim. 2:14.
14 austin busch
person here, and the most reasonable conclusion to draw from the
echo is that he is using the common Greco-Roman rhetorical de-
vice of the prosopopoiia or fictio personae (speech-in-character) and
speaking as Eve in the scene of the primeval transgression.28 Re-
markably, 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. Kümmel has argued that Paul’s “I” cannot
be autobiographical in his 1929 monograph Römer 7 und die Bekehrung des Paulus,
reprinted in Römer 7 und das Bild des Menschen im Neuen Testament (München: 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 first-
person discourse, but without meaning that discourse to be understood as an
expression of his personal experience. E. Käsemann (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 consider-
ation the exegesis of Kümmel and Käsemann but still includes an autobiographi-
cal element in the “I” of Romans 7, though without claiming that Paul’s 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 Paul’s 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 Paul’s epistle in the
context of the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition. I am convinced, however, that
the persona (prosôpon) Paul has adopted is Eve in the scene of the primeval trans-
gression and not a typical barbarian tragic êthos.
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 rhe-
torically assumed the identity of Eve (especially as opposed to Adam) because
Paul is male and Eve is female.
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 Käsemann’s 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 Ro-
mans 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 op-
posed to Adam, in the extant writings.31 I have already discussed
his treatment of Satan’s deceptive seduction of Eve in 2 Cor. 11:1-
21. 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. Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, pp. 191-98 for an example of
interpretation of Rom. 7:7-13 from this perspective. The exceptions to this inter-
pretive move prove the rule. Robert Gundry has noted that the supposed allu-
sions to Genesis 2–3 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 Conver-
sion: 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 Paul’s own past struggle with lust supposedly initiated at his
bar mitzvah! It apparently does not occur to Gundry that Paul may in fact be iden-
tifying 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 Theol-
ogy of Paul,” Trinity Journal 11 (1990), pp. 197-235 (209-10). He argues that al-
though 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 be-
tween Adam and Eve in this context since “Eve, after all, was the instigator of
her husband’s 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 Paul’s thought and interpreters are therefore correct in claiming that
Paul is writing of Adam here.
30
E. Käsemann, 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.
16 austin busch
’
(“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. 1–3) 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 God’s commandment. 32 Paul may have in mind
people like those he mentions in 2:12-16, who possess and trans-
gress a kind of natural law, as opposed to a divine law promul-
gated 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). Paul’s primary concern in this passage is to es-
tablish 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 Adam’s descendents sinned and there-
fore all, like Adam, die. Paul does implicate Adam, in some ill-
defined sense, in everyone’s 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 Adam’s sin two chapters earlier in order
to make a different point.
32
E.P. Sanders, Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 37.
Contemporary feminist literary theory helps account for the

rather uncritical tendency among interpreters to read Rom. 7:7-
13 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 Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” as an example
of this tendency:
While the desire to avoid work, escape authority, and sleep through the ma-
jor decisions of one’s life is obviously applicable to both men and women,
in Irving’s 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 read-
ing: the act of reading androcentric literature teaches readers
uncritically to equate universal experiences with masculine ex-
periences. Readers tend to perpetuate this tendency even when
universal experiences are not so described, thereby wholly mar-
ginalizing female experience to the status of the particular or of
the perverse, against which the universal or the “normal” is de-
fined. 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 universaliz-
ing tendencies, be Adam and not Eve in Genesis 2–3. It is impor-
tant 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 origi-
33
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 Fetterley’s observations into a
somewhat different feminist theory of reading.
18 austin busch
nal woman. 36 Paul’s 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 Eve’s
perspective precisely because it allows him to dramatize the ten-
sion between activity and passivity that is inscribed into the inter-
pretive tradition surrounding Genesis 3 and that he sees as central
to this experience.
Crucial to understanding the interpretive allusion in Rom. 7:5-
13 to Genesis 2–3 is the threefold relationship between the pri-
meval 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 command-
ment with God’s 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 Sep-
tuagint version of the primeval transgression, it aptly describes
Eve’s longing for the forbidden fruit.39 In Gen. 3:6, the Septuagint
translators describe the forbidden fruit from Eve’s point of view
as (“timely” or “seasonable,” but more commonly “beauti-
36
Louise Schottroff suggests that Paul perpetuates “androcentrism” by speak-
ing as Adam in Romans 7. See “The Seduction of Eve and Adam’s Sin: Social
Historical Feminist Interpretation of Paul’s 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 Eve’s role in Paul’s thought, she does not consider the
possibility that it is Eve’s voice we hear echoed in Rom. 7:7-13. She therefore
perpetuates an androcentric misreading of Paul even while attempting to expose
Paul’s 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 [McNamara’s 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.
ful” or “comely”).40 That word evokes the same notion of sexual

desire also evoked by . Paul is conscious of an erotic
dimension to Eve’s transgression, for he emphasizes it in 2 Co-
rinthians 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 Eve’s
transgression, the word’s semantic range is not limited to the
sphere of sexuality.41 The specific Septuagint commandments ad-
dressing 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 word’s semantic range allowed
the Hellenistic mind to associate the commandment “You shall
not desire” with the Jewish law in its entirety (the Torah, the ide-
alized precepts and narratives defining Israel’s relationship with
God and governing its behavior), an association that Paul assumes
in Rom. 7:8. In fact, the association is commonplace in Hellenis-
tic biblical interpretation, attested, for instance, in 4 Macc. 2:4-
6.42 “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 command-
ment or law directly precede Rom. 7:11, the verse containing the
clearest echo of the story of Eve’s 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 command-
ment came, sin came to life” (7:9). These statements all must be
understood within the context of Paul’s 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 command-
40 , 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 Poli-
tics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 158-79.
42
See also Philo Decal. 142, 150, and 173.
20 austin busch
ment or law in the context of Eve’s 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 clus-
ter of verses from Romans 7 to Gal. 3:19-22 where, Hans Hübner
has argued, Paul entertains the idea that demonic figures had
a role in promulgating the law. There Paul argues, as Hübner
claims, that (evil) angels gave the law precisely in order to pro-
voke transgression ( ), even though the divine intention
of the law itself was to bring life.43 As Sanders summarizes Hüb-
ner’s 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 2–3. God clearly formulates the law to protect
Adam and Eve from death, but the serpent brings the command-
ment (misrepresenting both its wording and its intention) to in-
duce Eve to transgress it and die (Gen. 3:1). The analogy is
especially powerful since in the interpretive tradition surround-
ing 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 consis-
tent with his well-known tendency to present sin in the epistles as
a hypostatized power that deceives and oppresses humanity. 45 The
43
H. Hübner, Law in Paul’s 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 Hübner’s 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 serpent’s
(mis)quote of God’s commandment to Eve in Genesis 3 and so also argues against
Hübner’s 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 Paul’s 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-
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 Ro-
mans 7 the “I” victimized and deceived by the enemy power “sin.”
Passivity characterizes them both: they are utterly at the mercy of
external powers—powers 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 Paul’s understand-
ing of the relationship between sin and the sinner. In this text
Paul meditates upon the tension between the self’s 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 de-
scribes mirrors Eve’s in the scene of the primeval transgression:
Eve’s acquisition of ethical knowledge (the knowledge of good and
evil), representing the culmination of her discussion with the ser-
pent about the commandment of God that the serpent had quoted
to her, corresponds to Eve’s ethical transgression. Indeed, Rom.
7:15 and following may be interpreted as a psychological explora-
tion of Genesis 3’s 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 ma-

nipulating 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 Sünde und die Befreiung durch Christus nach dem Römerbrief des
Paulus,” EvT 39 (1979), pp. 497-510. See E. Käsemann, Commentary on Romans,
p.198 for an application of this concept to Rom. 7:7-13.
22 austin busch
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 intro-
ducing 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 sim-
ply 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 sin-
ning 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 Stendahl’s 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 Paul’s purpose in this chapter is simply to make the
“rather trivial observation that every man knows that there is a difference be-
tween what he ought to do and what he does” (p. 432). While I do not uncritically
accept Bultmann’s 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
Paul’s description of the “split self” can be interpreted fruitfully in modern philo-
sophical and psychological categories. To suggest that Paul presents Eve’s di-
lemma 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 “mod-
ern” troubled conscience à 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 sub-
jects that simply stand there in their separateness, any more than it is a relation-
ship 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]).
When Paul echoes the Genesis account by writing “Sin … de-

ceived me,” then, he cannot only be reading his own straightfor-
ward 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 re-
flect a single vision of sin, has conflated an understanding of sin
as a hypostatized, oppressive power with an alternate understand-
ing 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 interpre-
tive 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 Eve’s 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 Eve’s 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. 7:15-
23 in 7:11, which contains an echo of Eve’s 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 Eve’s sin. It is, by definition, what Eve does, her consumption
of the forbidden fruit, initiated by her interpretation of God’s
commandment. In this sense it is an extension of Eve’s self and
Eve is responsible for it. In Rom. 7:15 and following Paul locates
these two understandings of sin within the subject’s self, suggest-
ing 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.
24 austin busch
Sin, the (Split) Self, and the Law in Genesis 3 and Romans 7
Understanding Rom. 7:5-25 and especially the split self describ-

ed there with reference to Eve’s 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 Paul’s 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 God’s 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 re-
jects the serpent’s particular understanding of the commandment,
but not the general approach to God’s words that its interpreta-
tion presupposed: “We eat from the fruit of the trees of the para-
dise. 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 serpent’s, but it
still adds information to God’s commandment in order to clarify
it as an expression of God’s will (“and do not touch it”). In fact,
Eve’s interpretation implies an ethical evaluation of God’s com-
mandment. 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 God’s commandment is not
as prohibitive as the serpent insinuates. She and her husband may,
in fact, eat from all but one of the garden’s trees. When she adds
the interpretive comment “and do not touch it, lest you die,” she
is suggesting that God’s words are actually protective, keeping her
and Adam safe from a tree so dangerous that it causes death
through physical contact alone. Eve’s particular interpretation,
therefore, asserts that God’s commandment is good because it
expresses God’s concern for his creation. But Eve’s response to
the serpent marks a significant change in the status of God’s 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.
between what God says and the effects of God’s 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. 1:1–2:4a). God’s words are
the perfect realization of God’s will. Eve’s response to the serpent,
however, indicates that she understands God’s declaration as some-
thing independent of its intended effect, for she accepts the ser-
pent’s 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 God’s command-
ment is something to debate. After the serpent’s question, Eve
does not see God’s commandment as an expression of God’s 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. God’s commandment has become a mediator be-
tween God’s will and Eve, in need of interpretation and evalua-
tion. To use the dichotomy that Paul introduces in Rom. 7:6, Eve
has embraced God’s commandment as letter ( ) instead of
as spirit ( ), as a mediator between God’s will and a subject
radically independent of that will instead of as an expression of
God’s 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. Kelber’s reading of Paul’s letter-spirit dichotomy as an opposi-
tion 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 one’s 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 empow-
ers obedience so radical that one can speak of the community of believers em-
bodying or incarnating the word of God. Paul’s problem with the old covenant
is that “it is (only) written, lacking the power to effect the obedience that it
demands” (p. 131).
26 austin busch
in Romans 7 allude to the deceptive serpent’s question, which

suggests to Eve an innovative way of approaching God’s command-
ment, which, in turn, will lead to sin. For God’s commandment
prohibits precisely what is required to obey it once it is under-
stood 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
serpent’s deceit lies in presenting God’s 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, chal-
lenging, 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 desir-
able for understanding [ ” (3:6). In
a sense, Eve must eat of the fruit once she embraces the serpent’s
approach to God’s words, for her decision to eat is determined
not by how she evaluates God’s 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).
to interpret and evaluate in order to explain and defend her obe-

dience to it, Eve claims possession of the knowledge that the for-
bidden fruit represents.
But this does not mean that Eve’s understanding of God’s words
as law is itself sin. As Paul writes: !
(7:7). Although the Genesis story suggests that Eve’s adoption of
the Serpent’s approach to God’s declaration somehow distorts it
(they both misquote God’s commandment), and although this
approach clearly instigates her expulsion from the ideal existence
of paradise, it nonetheless does not prevent God’s declaration
from gesturing towards or representing an ideal. Genesis main-
tains the validity of God’s words, even when they are understood
as law, by ultimately connecting Eve and Adam’s expulsion from
paradise to the consumption of the fruit that they prohibited and
not simply to Eve’s 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 rep-
resents an ideal and forbids its attainment. In fact, Eve’s accep-
tance of God’s words as law involves both the assertion that God’s
words do indeed represent an ideal (contra the serpent) and the
initiation of the alienation from the ideal which the law repre-
sents. 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.
Paul’s 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 Hellenis-
tic 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
53
See especially Gen. 3:17.
54
See W.A. Meeks, “The Image of the Androgyne,” pp. 185-86 on how Plato’s
Symposium influenced ancient Jewish interpretations of Genesis 1–3.
28 austin busch
the concept of longing, and in philosophical discourse it often

referred to a yearning for some ideal form of existence: the Beau-
tiful, 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 terminat-
ing 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 appe-
tites (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 identi-
fied with God himself, whom he often referred to as “the One.”59
This is similar to Paul’s 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 (Lon-
don: 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 philo-
sophical understanding of divinity among Hellenistic Jewish intellectuals. See R.
Williamson, Jews in the Hellenistic World: Philo (Cambridge Commentaries on Writ-
ings 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 Philo’s ethics.
57
My translation is indebted to F.H. Colson’s rendition in Philo (Loeb Clas-
sical Library; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), vol. 7, p. 31.
58 Cf. R. Williamson’s discussion of Philo’s 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 Pla-
tonism 80 B.C. to A.D. 220, pp. 155-56.
60 See P. von der Osten-Sacken, Römer 8 als Beispiel paulinischer Soteriologie
(Göttigen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1975), pp. 197-220 for a related discus-
sion of desiring in the context of Romans 7.
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 incon-
sistent 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 Sophia’s (i.e., Wisdom’s) desire to
contemplate the greatness of the Father without her consort as a
passion originating in the realm of intellect and truth, but none-
theless disordered and adulterous (Iren. Adv. haer. 1.2.2). Daniel
Boyarin discusses a range of Talmudic and other post-biblical Jew-
ish 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 pro-
hibit 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 rep-
resents. Just as the particular commandment of Genesis 3 occa-
sioned 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 com-
mandment came, sin came to life” (7:8b-9). Karl Barth, a reader
of Romans 7 quite sensitive to Paul’s invocations of the Genesis
narrative, in a comment on Rom. 7:10 astutely identifies the para-
dox that Paul is getting at: the necessary correlation of recogniz-
ing God’s 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.

30 austin busch
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, con-
stitutes 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 man—this 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 as—men; 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 commandment—was 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 Paul’s understand-
ing of the law, 2 Corinthians 3–4, where one also finds the letter-spirit dichotomy,
the motif of deception, and platonizing overtones (which carry over into 2 Co-
rinthians 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 de-
ceives 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 God’s 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 God’s 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
fact that the infant, initially identifying itself in a “mirror” (which,

as Lacan notes, “should be understood as an object which re-
flects—not 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 infant’s
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 phi-
losophical 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 empha-

sizes 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
Lacan’s 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 Lacan’s appropriation, see D. Roquefort, “Romains
7/7s selon Jacques Lacan,” Études théologiques et religieuses 61 (1986), pp. 343-52.
For a distinct psychoanalytic approach to Romans 7 see P.-E. Langevin, “Exégèse
et psychanalyse: Lecture psychanalytique de Romains VII et VIII,” Laval théologique
et philosophique 36 (1980), pp. 129-37.
65
The statement may be found in J.-A. Miller’s collection of Lacan’s com-
ments at meetings of the Société psychanalytique de Paris: “Interventions de
Lacan à la Société psychanalytique de Paris,” Orinicar? 31 (1984), pp. 7-27 (21-
22). English translation quoted in J. Rose, “Introduction II,” in J. Mitchell and J.
Rose (eds.), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école 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 Re-
vealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in J. Lacan, Écrits: 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.
32 austin busch
The form of the image is an “ideal-I” (je-idéal): 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 self-
recognition, 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 self’s identity should
be understood, in Mitchell’s words, as “always only … an alien-
ated image.” The self’s identity is always other than the self in that
it is anticipated and not simply assumed in the act of self-recogni-
tion which establishes it.
The law, in a sense, describes and defines the person who rec-
ognizes 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 identifica-
tion, in the end it denies it, for it prohibits the very obedience
that this identification would require. (Within the symbolic econo-
mies of Genesis 3 and Romans 7, the law both prohibits and de-
mands 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 Lacan’s in-
fant, identifies with a “total … Gestalt,” a unified configuration in
which the self’s 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
J. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” pp. 2 and 4.
70
J. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” p. 2.
71 J. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” p. 2.
72
J. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” p. 2.
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 Paul’s discourse, like the subject of Lacan’s, 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 victim-
izes 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 di-
vided self of Rom. 7:14-25 with the commonplace Hellenistic op-
position between a potentially pure soul or mind and a body
necessarily cumbersome and defiant, characterized by vulnerabil-
ity and appetite. Paul is not claiming that this conventional di-
chotomy accounts for the self’s sin, that is, for the inconsistency
between the self and the law. The self’s decisive problem is not
that it has a body prone to sin, resisting its appropriate, passive
position and usurping the mind’s supremacy over the self. Indeed,
Paul regularly uses the term “body” to mean, in Bultmann’s defi-
nition, “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
73
Romans 8 indicates that Paul believes that the eschaton will ultimately re-
solve this crisis of identity by redeeming the body, that constituent of the self
always unable to conform to the standard of the law. Paul’s argument, therefore,
is one of those “many mystical and philosophical arguments” about which Mit-
chell 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” (Psy-
choanalysis and Feminism, p. 386).
74
R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, vol. 1, p. 196.
34 austin busch
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 humanness—i.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 ( ). More-
over, the groaning of those awaiting the redemption of their bod-
ies 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 cliché
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 body’s intractable frailty is not, accord-
ing to Rom. 7:14-25, the cause of sin, but it is one of sin’s corol-
laries, 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
believer’s struggle for self-mastery against the sinful part of the
self, the flesh or even the body, and especially with the Spirit’s
role in that struggle.77 Paul employs a different symbolic economy,
75
R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, vol. 1, p. 234.
76 R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, vol. 1, p. 201.
77
Cf. S. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles, pp. 279-80.
though significantly still a feminine one (childbirth), in order to

articulate a tension between the believer’s 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 perspec-
tive 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 be-
tween 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 Eve’s 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 sur-

rounding 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 understand-
ings 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 respon-
sible for resisting his adulterous advances (11:3). Her passive sub-
mission 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.
36 austin busch
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 con-
cerned with resolving the tension between Eve’s passivity and her
active responsibility. He manipulates the story of Eve’s 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 Eve’s
passive manipulation at the hands of the serpent into a dialectical
relationship with an alternate tradition emphasizing Eve’s active
responsibility for her own sin and for sin in general. Eve, in Ro-
mans 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 proto-
type 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 Hellenis-
tic 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 2–3) becomes a figure of passivity and
activity paradoxically conflated. In the following verses (7:14-25) Paul manipu-
lates this conflation in order to illustrate the ego or self split under sin. Observ-
ing 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 Paul’s discussion of the connection between the self, the law, and sin in
Rom. 7:5-25.

Austin Busch, The Figure of Eve in Romans 7:5-25 (2004)

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the figure of eve in romans 7:5-25 1

THE FIGURE OF EVE IN ROMANS 7:5-25

Texts of the late Hellenistic era, Marilyn Skinner reminds us,

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2004 Biblical Interpretation 12, 1

In Galatians Paul claims that male and female are no longer

Most scholars believe that Paul is quoting or alluding to a baptis-

Eve in Hellenistic Exegesis of Genesis 2–3

Hellenistic writers familiar with the Genesis creation account

contemplate the association of passivity with femininity conven-

Philo understands sense perception ( ) to be passive be-

that Philo simply grants to this presupposition as much authority

acquaintance” and decides to rape his creation, the “forethought

Satan transforms himself into the “brightness of angels” (trans-

It is difficult to take Eve as anything but a victim here. After she

gestion since it introduced Seth’s birth by explaining that Adam

Trubner, 1916), pp. 150 and 92.

are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles

Paul is concerned that the false apostles, servants of Satan who,

Eve in Romans 7:5-25

In Romans 7 Paul again uses the symbolic economy associated

This prompts him to ask whether the law is sin in v. 7 (

The association of the law with “fruit for death” (

Genesis 3 in Rom. 7:7-13 (especially the resounding echo of Gen.

Contemporary feminist literary theory helps account for the

Fetterley formulates her observations with reference to American

nal woman. 36 Paul’s choice of Eve over Adam, moreover, is not

ful” or “comely”).40 That word evokes the same notion of sexual

40 , in H.G. Liddell and R. Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, rev. and aug. by

ment or law in the context of Eve’s temptation, that is, through

Paul at first seems to be arguing that an external power is ma-

When Paul echoes the Genesis account by writing “Sin … de-

Understanding Rom. 7:5-25 and especially the split self describ-

tion between orality and textuality: “Spoken words encourage participation in

in Romans 7 allude to the deceptive serpent’s question, which

The serpent, according to Ephrem, deceitfully tempts Eve with

to interpret and evaluate in order to explain and defend her obe-

the concept of longing, and in philosophical discourse it often

don: Duckworth, 1977), p. 51.

the Pentateuch (Jews in the Hellenistic World: Philo, pp. 144-45).

examples suggest, Hellenistic intellectuals could construe the law

61 See D. Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1993), pp. 61-76.

Paul can write “Sin, taking opportunity in the commandment,

fact that the infant, initially identifying itself in a “mirror” (which,

In the crucial essay on the mirror stage, however, Lacan empha-

The form of the image is an “ideal-I” (je-idéal): it is an “orthopaedic

The body for Paul can therefore represent a neutral plane of

though significantly still a feminine one (childbirth), in order to

It is no coincidence that Eve in the exegetical tradition sur-

gospel is precisely the sin for which he is rebuking his Corinthian

Rom. 7:7-25 functions as a prosopopoiia in which Paul rhetorically assumes the

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