Collectanea Christiana Orientalia 21 (2024): 29-38

Chance Bonar

Tufts University

Edenic Children and Unripened Fruit: Anthropological and Botanical

Immaturity in the Ethiopic

Mystery of the Judgment of Sinners

Introduction

In the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, scribes around Lake Tana in northwestern

Ethiopia translated and disseminated an Arabic apocryphal dialogue between Jesus and Peter.

Recording exhortations and revelations meant to be passed on to Clement of Rome and other

apostolic figures, the Mystery of the Judgment of Sinners (Myst. Sinners) contains a little-explored

retelling of Genesis 2–3.

In its rendition of the Adam and Eve’s time in the Garden of Eden,

Jesus explains to Peter how commandment not to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil

was a test of their patience. In particular, Adam and Eve are marked as ‚children‛ (ደቂቅ) and

the fruit in terms of its ‚ripeness‛ or lack thereof (በሰለ). Here, I want to contextualize this

claim of a dual immaturity between both the humans and plants in the Garden of Eden in

terms of early Christian theological claims about the youth and imperfection of Adam and Eve.

In Jesus’s apocryphal retelling as portrayed in Myst. Sinners, the fall occurs because both the

first humans and the tree are too young to act as mature beings, leading to Adam and Eve o

attempt to become like God too quickly by eating a fruit that was not yet ready for them to eat.

This short article will be broken down into four sections. The first will briefly introduce

Myst. Sinners and provide context for the Edenic pericope upon which I focus. The second will

explore how early Christian theologians set the stage for treating Adam and Eve as children in

On Myst. Sinners’s likely Arabic origin and Vorlage, see Gianfrancesco Lusini, ‚Tradizione origeniana in

Etiopia,‛ in L. Perrone (ed.), Origeniana Octava: Origen and the Alexandrian Tradition. Origene e la tradizione

alessandrina. Papers of the 8

International Origen Congress. Pisa, 27–31 August 2001, vol. 2, «Bibliotheca

Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium» 164 (Leuven, 2003), p. 1181; Sylvain Grebaut, ‚Litterature

ethiopienne pseudo-clementine,‛ Revue de l’Orient Chretien 12 (1907): p. 285. On potential connections to the

Qur’an, especially in its description of hell, see Thomas O’Shaughnessy, Muhammad’s Thoughts on Death: A

Thematic Study of the Qur’anic Data (Leiden: Brill, 1969), p. 25.

For a recent summary and bibliography of Myst. Sinners, see Chance Bonar, ‚Mystery of the Judgment of

Sinners,‛ e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha, https://www.nasscal.com/e-clavis-christian-apocrypha/mystery-of-the-

judgment-of-sinners/ (accessed 29 May 2023).

Chance Bonar

the Garden of Eden, treating them as anthropologically similar to other newly-born humans in

their lack of wisdom and reprimandable decision-making. The third will very briefly introduce

a contemporary text that corroborates Myst. Sinners’s treatment of the forbidden fruit as too

ripe. Finally, I will turn to Myst. Sinners itself to analyze how it treats anthropological and

botanical infancy as the cause of Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden.

Overview of Myst. Sinners

Myst. Sinners survives in two late medieval and early modern Ge’ez manuscripts from the Lake

Tana region of Ethiopia: one is held in Paris (BnF Éthiopien d’Abbadie 51, fols. 146

–157

;

15th/16th ct.), and one remains local (Tānāsee, Kebran Gabriel Monastery 35, fols. 59

–70

;

18th ct.).

Myst. Sinners is copied alongside many other prominent early Christian texts,

including the second-century Epistle of the Apostles and Apocalypse of Peter, as well as the seventh-

century Teaching of Jacob the Newly Baptized.

Translated from Arabic into Ge’ez, Myst. Sinners is

paired in both of its extant manuscripts with the Ethiopic version of the Apocalypse of Peter and

seems to be part of a trilogy along with it and the Second Coming of Christ and the Resurrection of the

Dead.

The content is generally broken into five sections: (1) Peter’s exhortation to the other

apostles about God’s attributes; (2) a teaching that Peter offers to Clement about angels and

salvation; (3) revelations given by Jesus to Peter about unity with God and humanity’s

disobedience since Adam; (4) Jesus’s retelling of Genesis 2–3 and the necessity of his

incarnation in order to defeate the devil who was incarnate in the serpent, and; (5) a

concluding section on the Passover and kingship that focuses on Melchizedek.

This article

focuses on the fourth section, with some discussion of the third section’s treatment of how

both Adam and humanity more generally experienced only temporary punishment. It is worth

noting that some scholars have seen hints of late medieval Ethiopic Origenist anthropological

and soteriological concepts tucked away in Myst. Sinners—particularly its treatment of all

humanity as eventually redeemable and punishment for sin as temporarily afflicting until

The Ethiopic text itself from BNF Abaddie 51 can be found in Sylvain Grebaut, ‚Litterature ethiopienne

pseudo-clementine,‛ Revue de l’Orient Chretien 12 (1907), pp. 380-387 and 13 (1908), pp. 166-174, 314-318.

Digital images are available of the manuscripts housed at Kebran Gabriel Monastery, but no edition currently

exists (https://betamasaheft.eu/manuscripts/Tanasee35/viewer).

Francis Watson, An Apostolic Gospel: the ‘Epistula Apostolorum’ in Literary Context, Society for New Testament

Studies «Monograph Series» 179 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 30-31.

Roger W. Cowley, ‚The Ethiopic Work Which is Believed to Contain the Material of the Ancient Greek

Apocalypse of Peter,‛ Journal of Theological Studies 36.1 (1985), pp. 151-153; Richard B. Bauckham, The Fate of the

Dead: Studies on Jewish and Christian Apocalypses, NT Supp 93 (Leiden: Brill, 1998), p. 147 n50; Eric J. Beck,

‚Perceiving the Mystery of the Merciful Son of God: An Analysis of the Purpose of the Apocalypse of Peter,‛

PhD diss. (University of Edinburgh, 2018), p. 238.

A more substantial overview can be found in Grebaut, ‚Litterature ethiopienne,‛ (1907), pp. 147-151.

Edenic Children and Unripened Fruit

apokatastasis occurs.

While some hypotheses have been offered that propose Arabic Origenist

thought as the source of such concepts for Myst. Sinners, it is still unclear.

My English translation of the fourth section is given here to support the reader.

(fol. 154 va) Understand (it), scrutinize (it), ponder (it) in your heart. The leaders will

exhibit it, but (you), you will understand (it) by meditating on (it) in your bed. Then you

will know the greatness of the mercy of the Lord towards Adam, his creature. You will

know how (Adam) once wanted to become God and (how) he himself wanted to

become God, when he was seduced by the serpent, (him) and his wife. Indeed, the

serpent said to the woman: ‘Woman, why has the Lord forbidden you to eat of the fruit

of the tree?’ The woman replied, ‘It's so that we don't die.’ The serpent said to the

woman: ‘Certainly it was not (so that) you should not die, but it was so that you should

not become God, that he forbade you the tree.’

It was in the hope of becoming God that (Adam) transgressed the commandment of

the Lord. The first parents were like children walking in (fol. 154 vb) the garden. Their

Father had planted a beautiful (and) splendid (tree) in the garden, which was good for

soul and body. If (the first parents) had been patient, (the fruits) would have ripened. As

for them, they were the children of the Master of the garden. Their Father sent them to

guard the garden and commanded them to cultivate it. They ate (fruits) of every color,

which came from the garden. Their flavor was that of figs and excellent. When they saw

(the forbidden tree), that they might not be mistaken because of it, (the Lord)

immediately brought them and showed them (the tree) with fruits of excellent flavor,

which he had planted in the garden. He said: ‘Do not approach this tree, lest it bring

death upon you.’

Again, he instructed them and said to them: ‘Take care not to touch it, lest (fol. 155

ra) I strike you in my anger.’ Again he spoke to them, instructing them and telling them

not to touch it or go near it: ‘When you lift up your hands on this tree, before I myself

have given (of its fruit) to your teeth to eat, since it is green fruit, your belly will be

tortured and (this green fruit) will corrupt your eyes, break your bones, break your limbs,

make your body ashes and your vigor a corruption, which will harm you from the hairs

of your head to the nails of your toes. Until (the fruits) have developed and ripened, I

myself will come to you. I will pick them; I will clean (the tree); I will remove it away

from up to every being, so that your tongue does not become ulcerated up to your throat

and that the brokenness does not occur (fol. 155 rb) for your teeth. (Be) in (all) the

Paolo Marrassini, ‚Gli apocrifi etiopici: alcune osservazioni,‛ in N. del Gatto (ed.), Corso di perfezionamento in

Storia del Cristianesimo Antico diretto da Luigi Cirillo e Giancarlo Rinaldi. Atti. Napoli marzo-giugno 1996. «Serie

Didattica» 2 (Naples, 1999), pp. 238-266, esp. 249-251; Gianfrancesco Lusini, ‚Tradizione origeniana in

Etiopia,‛ pp. 1177-1184.

English translation my own, building upon Grebaut’s French translation and following his emendations added

to clarify the subjects and objects of many sentences.

Chance Bonar

strength of your vigilance. Be careful not to covet (the forbidden fruit) and taste it, for it

is green fruit.’

This is what he taught them. He allowed them to feed on the other fruits that were in

the garden. Now it came to pass, when they were hungry, they ate of the tree. But (it

was) in the hope of becoming God that they transgressed their Father's command.

When they ate the fruit of the tree, when it was green fruit, they had not waited for it to

develop and ripen. The unripe fruit corrupts (them). The children's teeth were blunted.

They brought upon themselves (punishment) in the hope of becoming God. Indeed, the

Enemy had driven them mad. Their Father knew that the unripe fruit had corrupted

(them), and how they had eaten (the fruit) harmful to them, before the time of maturity,

harvest, and goodness (of the fruit, when) it would have given them (fol. 155 va)

pleasure. He drove them to a land of thorns and briars, that they might cultivate in the

heat, in the sweat, (during their) existence.

The Father of these children knew that the Enemy had led them astray. He himself

knew the temptation of the Adversary, how he had deceived the children by stealth,

hiding himself in the body of a serpent (and) whispering in their ears. The Father of the

children, who knew no evil, acts the same towards the Adversary, for he ravished him

who had ravished the children. He participated in the flesh and blood of these children.

Moreover, he participated in their own death, in order to give them his own life.

Through mysterious wisdom, their own flesh, which he took, he united (fol. 155 vb) to

his own divinity. Moreover, as for his own beauty, he unites it with our own corruption

and with death. The weight of our own corruption was absorbed by the beauty of the

divinity, by the glorious divinity. Our own death was absorbed by his own sublime life.

Indeed, he became similar to humans, except for sin alone.

He bore our burden, our sufferings, and our weakness, in order to ravish the Enemy

who had ravished the children whom the green fruit had corrupted. As (the Adversary)

hid himself in the body of a serpent, so our Savior hid himself in the body of Adam. It

was not immediately that he kidnapped (the Adversary) and put on our flesh, but it was

after having delayed, until the one who had kidnapped the children had forgotten, so

that he did not know him. When (the Adversary) approached him, (the Savior) killed him

with the staff of his cross. When (the Adversary) had ravished (the children), the unripe

fruit (corrupted them). He when he had taken away the Bold One, (fol. 156 ra)

corrupted (him) entirely and bound him in frightful Sheol in outer darkness, in weeping

and gnashing of teeth. Being risen, (our Savior) raised up his children, made them gods

like himself, bestowed upon them his own life, and made them equal to himself, for he

gave them his flesh and blood, so that they become equal to him.

Edenic Children and Unripened Fruit

Adam and Eve as Children

The depiction of Adam and Eve as children in Myst. Sinners is not unique, but appears in some

corners of early Christian anthropological exploration. Most prominently, Irenaeus of Lyons

was the first and most systematic writer to describe Adam and Eve as infants in his Against

Heresies and Demonstration of Apostolic Teaching. As Matthew Steenberg has examined in depth,

Irenaeus’s treatment of Adam and Eve as children (infans; νήπιοσ) has often been overlooked

because scholars treated it as metaphorical or symbolic childlike ignorance or innocence.

response, he analyzed the five primary passages in which Irenaeus described the children in

Eden, since Irenaeus suggested that creation itself must experience an infantile (infantilia) stage

and temporal development (in contrast to the fully developed and uncreated God).

Eve,

likewise, is described as not yet having reached puberty while in Eden, and so needed to

develop and mature before being capable of fulfilling God’s command to multiply and fill the

earth.

For Irenaeus, all of God’s creation—humanity included—is not born into fully-

developed bodies but requires time to mature, leading to Irenaeus’s treatment of the fall as a

moment of childlike rebellion. As Steenberg puts it, ‚the doctrine of an infant creation

establishes a dynamism to the human person in its relationship to God that forms the very

heart of a developmental anthropology of salvation‛.

A few other early Christian theologians follow suit in their depiction of Eden and creation

through a developmental model. Theophilus of Antioch, for example, defends God’s

justification for forbidding Adam and Eve from eating from the tree of knowledge against

those who claim that the tree itself or knowledge itself was bad or dangerous. Instead, Theophilus

argues that humanity’s disobedience was bad because:

Adam, in his actual age, was an infant. On account of this, he was not yet able to receive

knowledge worthily. For also now, when a child is born, it is not already able to eat

bread, but is nourished first by milk and then, when advancing in age, it continues to

solid food. So too would it have been for Adam.

τῇ δὲ οὔςῃ ἡλικίᾳ ὅδε Ἀδὰμ ἔτη νήπιοσ ἦν· διὸ οὔπω ἠδύνατο τὴν γνῶςιν κατ᾽ ἀξίαν χωρεῖν. καὶ

γὰρ νῦν ἐπὰν γενηθῇ παιδίον, οὐκ ἤδη δύναται ἄρτον ἐςθίειν, ἀλλὰ πρῶτον γάλακτι

ἀνατρέφεται, ἔπειτα κατὰ πρόςβαςιν τῆσ ἡλικίασ καὶ ἐπὶ τὴν ςτερεὰν τροφὴν ἔρχεται. οὕτωσ ἂν

γεγόνει καὶ τῷ Ἀδὰμ.

Matthew C. Steenberg, ‚Children in Paradise: Adam and Eve as ‘Infants’ in Irenaeus of Lyons,‛ Journal of Early

Christian Studies 12.1 (2004), pp. 1-22.

Irenaeus, AH 4.38.1 (SC 1000: 942–948); see Steenberg, ‚Children in Paradise‛, pp. 4-6.

Irenaeus, AH 3.22.4 (SC 211:440); cf. AH 3.23.5; Demonstration 12, 14.

Steenberg, ‚Children in Paradise‛, p. 22.

Theophilus, Ad Autolycum 2.25. Greek text from Robert M. Grant, Theophilus of Antioch: Ad Autolycum (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 66.

Chance Bonar

For Theophilus, God’s relationship to Adam and Eve is the prototype of the parent-child

relationship, which justifies his punishment of the world’s first children both for their

disobedience and the attempt, as he puts it, for ‚infant children to think beyond their years‛

(τὰ παιδία τὰ νήπια ὑπὲρ ἡλικίαν φρονεῖν) and bypass the ‚order‛ (πρὸσ τάξιν) by which physical

bodies and wisdom develops.

The problem is not only, as Irenaeus argued, that Adam and

Eve’s immaturity led to their poor decision-making, but that their attempt to acquire the

knowledge of good and evil is itself a challenge to the limitations of creation’s natural

developmental progression. Clement of Alexandria, similarly, conceptualized the creation of

Adam as requiring further maturation. In his Stromata, Clement suggests that Adam ‚was

perfect in regard to his formation‛ (τέλιον μὲν ὡσ πρὸσ τὴν πλάςιν) —specifically ‚the distinctive

characteristics of the idea and form of the human‛ (τῶν χαρακτηριζόντων τὴν ἀνθρώπου ἰδέαν τε

καὶ μορφὴν).

Against opponents that he labelled as heretics, who questioned whether a perfect

God could make an imperfect Adam, Clement suggested that Adam ‚was not perfect in his

creation, but adapted to the reception of virtue‛ (τέλειοσ κατὰ τὴν καταςκευὴν οὐκ ἐγένετο, πρὸσ

δὲ τὸ ἀναδέξαςθαι τὴν ἀρετὴν ἐπιτήδειοσ).

The form of Adam’s body, according to Clement, was

created perfectly by God, but others of Adam’s qualities required time for adaptation and

reception. While Clement does not say explicitly that Adam and Eve were children in Eden, he

contributes to a late-second-century trend toward viewing the first humans as developmentally

infantile and lacking some qualities that made the fall possible.

While we are unable to trace any clear lineage between the early Christian writers who first

proposed Edenic children and Myst. Sinners, the Ethiopic text participates in a broader

Christian anthropological landscape in which the first humans experience the embodied

progression of time like all other humans.

The Forbidden Fruit as Unripened

Along with presenting Adam and Eve as children, Myst. Sinners treats the Garden itself in a

corresponding way: the tree of knowledge of good and evil produces fruit that is not yet ripe.

This image is not as common as the trope of Edenic children in Christian literary history. One

of the few examples of this idea can be found in a contemporaneous text to Myst. Sinners: the

14th-century poetry of Yovhannēs T'lkuranc'i. From a text known as a ‚Commentary on

Genesis‛ or ‚Rhymed History of Yovhannēs concerning the Creation of the World,‛

T'lkuranc'i presents the tree of knowledge as equivalent to a tree of death and immortality, and

Theophilus, Ad Autolycum 2.25 (Grant, Theophilus, p. 66).

Clement, Strom. 4.23.150.3. Greek text from Annewies van den Hoek and Claude Mondésert, eds., Clément

d'Alexandrie: Les Stromates: Stromae IV, «Sources Chrétiennes» 463 (Paris: Cerf, 2001), p. 308.

Clement, Strom. 6.12; Greek text from Patrick Descourtieux, ed., Clément d'Alexandrie: Les Stromates: Stromate

VI, «Sources Chrétiennes» 446 (Paris: Cerf, 1999), p. 254.

Edenic Children and Unripened Fruit

claims that ‚it was planted because of man (i.e., Adam) as a test of his love of God‛.

Much

like Irenaeus’s earlier claim, the tree itself does not cause death per se but reveals whether or not

the first humans are developmentally prepared to obey God as their father. T'lkuranc'i goes on

to describe that because ‚the fruit of knowledge is unripe, it is a cause of death for you‛.

Knowledge itself is not presented as a danger to the Edenic inhabitants, but rather that the

fruit was not at a graspable and edible developmental stage; a rush to consume knowledge is

offered as the cause of the fall.

While this is just one rare example of Eden’s fruit as unripened, Myst. Sinners uses this image

alongside the Edenic children to portray the Garden as a place of immaturity and

unpreparedness.

Dual Immaturity in Myst. Sinners

Now to turn to Myst. Sinners itself. Even before Jesus retells Gen 2–3 in the fourth section of

the text, his dialogue with Peter in the third section clarifies the relationship between

immaturity and disobedience. Jesus describes the repentance that believers feel as causing

affliction akin to disciplining a child: ‚Such is a child (ሕፃን) who sins against his father and

against his mother (ለአቡሁ  ወለእሙ). As for this child, one does not strike him lightly in order

to correct him (and not to kill him), but so that he does not sin again‛.

Humanity en masse are

compared to children who require some light chastisement in order to return to a proper

relationship with their parents, such that Jesus claims that God acts the same toward all

descendants of Adam. Jesus presents the ‚children of humanity‛ (ደቂቀ  እጓለ) as experiencing

something similar to what Adam experienced: castigation not for castigation’s sake, but in

order to urge humans to develop ethically.

Jesus’s explanation to Peter about how God’s disciplining of humans functions like a father

treating his children leads directly into Myst. Sinners’s retelling of the Edenic narrative and its

depiction of paralleled immaturities. In this retelling of Genesis, the serpent and Eve’s

conversation revolves around how God’s commandment not to eat from the tree does not

have to do with avoiding the death of the first humans, but rather about God’s fear of

T'lkuranc'i, On the Creation of the World 61 (Michael E. Stone, ‚Selections from On the Creation of the World by

Yovhannēs T'lkuranc'i: Translation and Commentary‛, in Gary Anderson, Michael Stone, and Johannes

Tromp (eds.), Literature on Adam and Eve: Collected Essays, «Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigrapha»,

(Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 186. I am grateful to Annette Yoshiko Reed for this reference.

T'lkuranc'i, Commentary on Genesis 84 (Stone, ‚Selections from On the Creation of the World,‛ p. 194).

Myst. Sinners 153va §3 (Grebaut, ‚Litterature ethiopienne,‛ p. 13:169). Since no standard versification exists for

Myst. Sinners, I will reference it by the manuscript page of BnF d’Abbadie 51 and the page enumeration offered

in Grebaut, ‚Litterature ethiopienne,‛ Revue de l’Orient Chretien 12 (1907), pp. 380-387, and 13 (1908), pp. 166-

174, 314-318. English translation my own, building upon Grebaut’s French translation.

Myst. Sinners 154ra §1 (Grebaut, ‚Litterature ethiopienne,‛ p. 13:170).

Chance Bonar

humanity attempting to ‚become God‛ (ኢትኩኑ  አምላከ ትእዛዘ  እግዚአብሔር).

Twice after the

serpent’s attempt to trick Eve into eating from the tree and risk becoming like God, the first

humans are described ‚as children walking in the garden‛ (ከበመ  ሕፃናት  እለ  አንሶሰዉ  ውስተ 

ገነት), but also genealogically as ‚children of the master of the garden‛ (ደቂቁ  ለባዕለ  ገነት).

Throughout the rest of the narrative, Adam and Eve’s names are rarely used; rather, they are

described as God’s children who are placed in the garden for its protection and cultivation, and

who are expected to be patient as the garden co-matures alongside them.

As God’s first human children inhabit the garden, God’s description of the fruit from the

tree of knowledge clarifies the danger of unripe or immature tasting:

When you lift up your hands on this tree, before I myself have given from the tree for

your teeth to eat, since it is unripe fruit (ቆዕ), your belly will be tortured and (this fruit)

will corrupt your eyes, break your bones, break your limbs, make your body ashes and

your vigor a corruption, which will harm you from the hairs of your head to the nails of

your toes. Until (the fruit) have developed and ripened (ወበሰለት), I myself will come to

you. I will pick them; I will clean (them); I will remove it away from every being, so that

your tongue does not become ulcerated up to your throat and that brokenness does not

occur for your teeth. Be in the strength of your vigilance. Be careful not to covet (the

fruit) and taste it, for it is unripe fruit (ቆዕ).

Both the noun for an unripened or green fruit (ቆዕ) and the verb for ripening (በሰለ) are central

to God’s commandment given to the Edenic children in this passage. Unripened fruit from the

tree of knowledge is depicted as not useful or worthwhile for Adam and Eve to pursue in its

current state. Thus, the serpent’s deception occurs through tricking them into believing that

the tree’s fruit were ready for consumption before God came to the garden to pick the fully-

matured fruit and give them to Adam and Eve after they themselves had also matured. The

retelling perhaps relies on how Eve is description as seeing the tree as ‚good for eating‛ (ከመ 

ሠናይ  ዕፅ  ለበሊዕ) in Gen 3:6, since Myst. Sinners describes both the tree as ‚good and splendid‛

(ሠናይ  ወላሕየ) and its fruit as ‚like figs and good‛ (ዘበለስ  ወሠናይ).

The goodness of the tree

and its fruit, however, make God’s children susceptible to believing that their unripened state

will benefit them and give them knowledge comparable to God’s. As the narrative progresses,

Jesus reveals to Peter that the fruit corrupted Adam and Eve because they consumed it before

‚the time of ripeness, harvest, and goodness‛ (ጊዜሁ  ለበሲል  ወቀሢም  ወሠዩ), which suggests

that the appearance of the tree and fruit’s goodness earlier in the tale does not correspond to

actual ripeness.

While Myst. Sinners does not explicitly connect the two motifs, it portrays both

Myst. Sinners 154va §12–17 (Grebaut, ‚Litterature ethiopienne,‛ p. 13:171).

Myst. Sinners 154va §17–154vb §18; 154vb §22–23 (Grebaut, ‚Litterature ethiopienne,‛ p. 13:171).

Myst. Sinners 155ra §5–155rb §25 (Grebaut, ‚Litterature ethiopienne,‛ p. 13:172); cf. Kebra Nagast 61.

Myst. Sinners 154vb §19, 24 (Grebaut, ‚Litterature ethiopienne,‛ p. 13:171).

Myst. Sinners 155rb §7 (Grebaut, ‚Litterature ethiopienne,‛ p. 13:173).

Edenic Children and Unripened Fruit

the first humans and the fruit of the tree of knowledge as immature and unprepared for their

next developmental stage.

In the case of Adam and Eve, the corruption they experience at the hands of the unripened

fruit allows for Christological and soteriological speculation by Jesus in Myst. Sinners. Jesus’s

incarnation as a second Adam is justified as undoing the corruption done to God’s first

humans by the serpent’s botanical trickery: ‚He bore our burden, our sufferings, and our

weakness, in order to ravish the Enemy who had ravished the children whom the unripe fruit

corrupted‛ (ለደቂቅ  እለ  አማሰን  ቆዕ).

The undoing of immature corruption and, for Myst.

Sinners, the eventual deification of humanity occurs through Jesus inhabiting the ‚flesh of

Adam‛ (ሥጋ  አዳም) and corrupting the devil in return by casting him into Sheol.

This Edenic scene in Myst. Sinners gives us a glimpse into how Genesis could be retold and

reframed so as to highlight childhood as a time of innocence, ignorance, and disobedience.

Unlike the idealized childhood of some saints in Ethiopian hagiography—which often portrays

them as wise beyond their years and wrestling with monastic concepts as a prepubescent

stage

—Myst. Sinners takes a less optimistic approach to the portrayal of Adam and Eve in

order to highlight the need for an undoing of the fruit’s corruption through Jesus’s incarnation.

Disobedience and punishment (albeit temporary) are central both to Myst. Sinners’s retelling of

Genesis as the failure of children to obey their father and to early Christian treatment of

children.

While the adolescent innocence of the first humans works against them in Myst.

Sinners, biblical and apocryphal Christian literature often associates childhood with heaven or

entering God’s kingdom.

The ideal world is envisioned as one in which God is the father

over human children who live in God’s presence, but who also learn obedience that Adam and

Eve fail to express in Myst. Sinners.

Myst. Sinners 155vb §7–8 (Grebaut, ‚Litterature ethiopienne,‛ p. 13:174).

Myst. Sinners 155vb §11 (Grebaut, ‚Litterature ethiopienne,‛ p. 13:174).

Paolo Marrassini, ‚L’infanzia del santo nel cristianesimo orientale: il caso dell’Etiopia,‛ in Bambini Santi.

Rappresentazioni dell’infanzia e modelli agiografici, ed. Anna Benvenuti Papi and Elena Giannarelli (Torino:

Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991), pp. 141-181; Steven Kaplan, ‚Seen But Not Heard: Children and Childhood in

Medieval Ethiopian Hagiographies,‛ The International Journal of African Historical Studies 30.3 (1997), pp. 539-553;

Robert Phenix, ‚The Contribution of Social Science Research to the Study of Children and Childhood in Pre-

Modern Ethiopia,‛ in Children in Late Ancient Christianity, ed. Cornelia B. Horn and Robert Phenix (Tübingen:

Mohr Siebeck, 2009), pp. 375-405, esp. 395-396.

Cornelia B. Horn and John W. Martens, ‚Let the Little Children Come to Me‛: Childhood and Children in Early

Christianity (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), esp. 213-251.

Eunyung Lim, Entering God’s Kingdom (Not) Like A Little Child: Imagine of the Child in the Gospel of Matthew, 1

Corinthians, and the Gospel of Thomas, «Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft» 243

(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), esp. pp. 6-7.

Chance Bonar

Abstract: In the late thirteenth or early

fourteenth century, scribes around Lake Tana

in northwestern Ethiopia translated and

disseminated an Arabic apocryphal dialogue

between Jesus and Peter. Recording

exhortations and revelations meant to be

passed on to Clement of Rome and other

apostolic figures, the Mystery of the Judgment of

Sinners (Myst. Sinners) contains a little-explored

retelling of Genesis 2–3. In its rendition of the

Adam and Eve’s time in the Garden of Eden,

Jesus explains to Peter how commandment

not to the tree of the knowledge of good and

evil was a test of their patience. In particular,

Adam and Eve are marked as ‚children‛ and

the fruit in terms of its ‚ripeness‛ or lack

thereof. Here, I want to contextualize this

claim of a dual immaturity between both the

humans and plants in the Garden of Eden in

terms of early Christian theological claims

about the youth and imperfection of Adam

and Eve.

Resumen: A finales del siglo XIII o

principios del XIV, los escribas de los

alrededores del lago Tana, en el noroeste de

Etiopía, tradujeron y difundieron un diálogo

árabe apócrifo entre Jesús y Pedro. El Misterio

del juicio de los pecadores (Myst. Sinners), que

registra exhortaciones y revelaciones

destinadas a ser transmitidas a Clemente de

Roma y otras figuras apostólicas, contiene una

narración poco explorada de Génesis 2–3. En

su interpretación del tiempo de Adán y Eva

en el Jardín del Edén, Jesús le explica a Pedro

cómo el mandamiento de no tomar el árbol

del conocimiento del bien y del mal fue una

prueba de su paciencia. En particular, Adán y

Eva son marcados como ‚hijos‛ y el fruto en

términos de su ‚madurez‛ o falta de ella.

Aquí, quiero contextualizar esta afirmación de

una doble inmadurez entre los humanos y las

plantas en el Jardín del Edén en términos de

las afirmaciones teológicas de los primeros

cristianos sobre la juventud y la imperfección

de Adán y Eva.

Keywords: Apocrypha; Ethiopian

Christianity; Ethiopic; Genesis 2–3; Adam;

Eve.

Palabras clave: Apócrifos; Cristianismo

etiópico; Etiópico; Génesis 2–3; Adán; Eva.