Bloomsbury (2022) p/b 213pp £19.99 (ISBN 9781350278592)
The word ‘sin’ can nowadays be used quite loosely, as when, for example, the manager of a charity shop, receiving the donation of a settee, said it was a sin that because it had no fire resistant label he would have to send it to the tip rather than pass it on to the needy family. ‘A sin’ seemed little more than ‘a pity’.
The dictionary definition, as David Konstan, Professor of Classics at New York University, writes in the book under review, is usually more specific, and he cites the Oxford English Dictionary definition as ‘An immoral act considered to be a transgression against divine law.’
K., however, wants to be even more specific and argues that although many acts or attitudes may be reprehensible and attract divine disapproval, they should not strictly speaking be designated as sin, a word which should be exclusively reserved in the case of the Hebrew scriptures for the turning away of God’s chosen people from the one true God to follow pagan deities, and in the case of the New Testament (especially the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles) for the refusal to acknowledge Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah.
There are, he believes, two key words which with their cognates identify in the key documents this quintessential concept of sin. These are hata in the Hebrew and hamartia in the Greek. He suggests that they were used only as more general terms of divine disapproval when the original meaning of sin was extended and thereby watered down.
After a Preface outlining his case, K. offers a chapter on the Graeco-Roman world’s view of sin, concluding that ‘Although the unwritten laws of the gods were associated with what were perceived as the universal condemnation of certain offenses (sic), they were never embedded in a coherent doctrine.’
His next two chapters expound his fundamental case. He then offers a chapter on how some parts of the New Testament, early Christian and Rabbinic writers extend, in his view, the definition of sin. He closes with a ‘Final Word’ recapitulating his central argument.
This is an engaging and at times humble book, as K. readily acknowledges that a number of his interpretations differ from those of commentators whose scholarship he admires and respects. Indeed, if one sets aside, for a moment, his central theme, this book is a rich mine of interesting and acute observations on questions of philology, moral philosophy and theology: for example, how can wrong doing be imputed in the absence of law (either divine or human), how far does free-will exist, is there such a thing as involuntary sin, etc.
Sadly there is an omission in this book, which hampers the easy following of K.’s complex arguments: there is, in a work which is brim full of quotations from Biblical and other ancient texts, no index of quotations. There is in the list of contents a section marked ‘References’, but this is in fact a bibliography. The notes refer by and large to the views of other commentators and K.’s response to them, and the subject index only goes a little way to mitigating the absence of a full list of textual references.
What then of K.’s central assertions? Does he convince, for example, that in the Gospels and Acts sin is essentially seen as a failure to turn to Jesus as Messiah?
For this reviewer the answer is ‘no’. Simply too many hurdles have to be overcome to explain the more general use of hamartia in the Gospels and K. does not always seem to achieve it. For example, take his handling of John 8:4-11, the account of the woman taken in adultery. Having shamed those who would have stoned her to death into leaving her alone, Jesus tells her to go on her way and mêketi hamartane ‘sin no more’. The sin to which he refers must be her adultery and not lack of faith in Jesus. So how does K. explain this? He notes that the episode is related only in John and does not appear in the earliest manuscripts: but K. has told us elsewhere that he accepts the Bible as it is. He then explains ‘Jesus may be cautioning the woman not to commit adultery any more, but again, there may be the latent implication that now she has known Jesus and that he saved her life against all expectations, to sin again would be to deny him.’
Sadly, this seems to come close to special pleading. Readers must of course come to their own conclusions, but even if K.’s central thesis is rejected, there is much to learn from K.’s detailed study of sin.
Ray Morris