Eve’s Defense in Bringing the Fall of Man

PROMPTS FOR THE FIRST PAPER Due: via Brightspace by October 12th at 11:59 p.m. Choose 1 of the following 4 options: 1. The case for Eve Adam said to God, "The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate." (Genesis 3:12) In the Christian tradition Eve is portrayed as weak and gullible, the temptress who by offering the forbidden fruit to Adam brings about the “Fall of Man” along with all its dire consequences —shame, expulsion from the garden of Eden, and the curse she brings down not only on herself and Adam, but on the entire human race. In this view, Eve is the source of a long and vehement history of anti-feminism in the Christian world. But if we go back to the story itself, might we ask whether she deserves this reputation? Your assignment is to take on the role of Eve’s defense attorney. First, go back and carefully review the evidence from Genesis 2:15 through Genesis 3. To be thorough, read the story in at least two versions of the Bible other than the one you are using to see whether the decisions of other translators make a difference. I would recommend, for comparison, the Complete Jewish Bible and the Contemporary English Version, both available (among many other translations) at biblegateway.com. Then write a defense of Eve, considering her motives, the extent of her responsibility for the disaster, and any extenuating circumstances that might mitigate her guilt. You will ask the court to consider Adam’s role in the story as part of your defense. Do you see Adam as a victim or an accomplice? A good attorney will consider both sides of these issues in balanced argument. Once the brief has been filed, a panel of four distinguished judges will rule as to how persuasive an argument you have put before them. For the judges, it’s not a matter of right or wrong. Rather, they will assess whether the argument is plausible and based on the evidence. Note that “outside” sources are neither required or expected for this paper. To be frank, you can easily find stuff on the web (so can we) but most of it is pretty lame, and it would be a mistake to rely on it. You can do a better job on your own. By the way, if you know another language you might use that in your comparison. There is a Chinese version at https://www.o-bible.com/ And, for Chinese speakers, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSGNeelbHHg 2. Conversion The most important of the early apostles of the Jesus movement is St. Paul, who travelled widely preaching the new faith. His “epistles,” letters of instruction and encouragement to nascent Christian communities in Rome, Corinth, Ephesus and elsewhere, appear as ten books of the New Testament. His ministry is thus credited with the dissemination (remember that the parable would call this the “spreading of the seed”) of the Gospel from its local origins in the holy land to its taking root across the ancient world. Paul is said to have died.as a martyr in Rome around 62CE. Most of what we know about his career comes from the account of his deeds in the Acts of the Apostles, the centerpiece of which is his conversion on the road to Damascus. The relevant passages are Acts 9:1-9 and Acts 26:1-25. Before, he was known as Saul, a Jew and a ferocious persecutor of Christians. Afterwards he proved just as energetic in promoting the new faith. His name was changed, we learn elsewhere in Acts, from Saul to Paul—just as Abram became Abraham when he answered the call from God and entered into the covenant. This is the background information. Your assignment is, first, to read and analyze the passages noted above in order to describe the way the conversion is effected in this encounter between the human and the divine (i.e. does Jesus try to persuade Saul to become his follower by rational argument?). What message does this story seem to convey to the Jews? What could be the symbolized by the name change? Why is Saul’s blindness important to the message, as we are told that he “was three days without sight (9:9)? Can you connect this s to the verse in the Gospel of Matthew (12:40) by which we learn the following allegory: “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so shall the Son of Man [i.e. Jesus, after his crucifixion] be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” until he emerges alive from his tomb? In this light, consider Jesus’s reply to a rabbi who had come to question him: ““Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (Gospel of John 3:3). What does this mean, and how is the need to be “born again” central to some varieties of Evangelical Christianity today? As the gospel writer John says, Our first birth gave us physical life; the new birth gives us spiritual life and membership in God’s family (John 1:13). Like the inquisitive Rabbi, the Jews can’t understand the importance of this experience. Can you bring on your own conversion by an act of will or by some kind of prayer or meditative practice? And if not, then how, and under what circumstances, might it happen to you? Note that the questions above are intended to guide your thinking; In other words, you are not to tick off your answers one by one; rather, use use these questions and the Biblical text as the evidence for a coherent essay on the power and value of the conversion experience understood as the turning point in a person’s life and thus a a model for the nature of identity —or, an” identity crisis.” Here I am wondering whether you would finish off by telling me whether you can think of instances of conversion and renewal as the pivot point in the course of one’s life, apart from a specifically religious event. You don’t have to answer this one following question if you don’t want to: do you believe that you have been affected, for better or worse, by some chance or unforeseen event so that from that moment changed the course of your own life? 3. Compare these two English translations of The Odyssey: the one we are reading for class by Emily Wilson, from the beginning to line 65 (“since how could I forget Odysseus?”) With this one, from the beginning up to the same question by Zeus: Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools, they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. 10 Find the beginning. All the other Greeks who had survived the brutal sack of Troy sailed safely home to their own wives— except this man alone. Calypso, a great goddess, had trapped him in her cave; she wanted him to be her husband. When the year rolled round in which the gods decreed he should go home to Ithaca, his troubles still went on. The man was friendless. All the gods took pity, except Poseidon’s anger never ended 20 until Odysseus was back at home. But now the distant Ethiopians, who live between the sunset and the dawn, were worshipping the Sea God with a feast, a hundred cattle and a hundred rams. There sat the god, delighting in his banquet. The other gods were gathered on Olympus, in Father Zeus’ palace. He was thinking of fine, well-born Aegisthus, who was killed by Agamemnon’s famous son Orestes. 30 He told the deathless gods, “This is absurd, that mortals blame the gods! They say we cause their suffering, but they themselves increase it by folly. So Aegisthus overstepped: he took the legal wife of Agamemnon, then killed the husband when he came back home, although he knew that it would doom them all. We gods had warned Aegisthus; we sent down perceptive Hermes, who flashed into sight and told him not to murder Agamemnon 40 or court his wife; Orestes would grow up and come back to his home to take revenge. Aegisthus would not hear that good advice. But now his death has paid all debts.” Athena looked at him steadily and answered, “Father, he did deserve to die. Bring death to all who act like him! But I am agonizing about Odysseus and his bad luck. For too long he has suffered, with no friends, sea all around him, sea on every side, 50 out on an island where a goddess lives, daughter of fearful Atlas, who holds up the pillars of the sea, and knows its depths—those pillars keep the heaven and earth apart. His daughter holds that poor unhappy man, and tries beguiling him with gentle words to cease all thoughts of Ithaca; but he longs to see even just the smoke that rises from his own homeland, and he wants to die. You do not even care, Olympian! 60 Remember how he sacrificed to you on the broad plain of Troy beside his ships? So why do you dismiss Odysseus?” “Daughter!” the Cloud God said, “You must be joking, since how could I forget Odysseus? The method would be to print out both versions and then compare them word for word. Identify the key differences between these two translations of the beginning of the poem. You might consider word choice, imagery, mood (emotion), and the level of formality of the language (style) etc. Describe how these translations shape the narrative in different ways. What are the implications of these particular choices in each translation? Conclude by answering the following question: Which translation do you prefer? Make a case for that specific translation according to your own close reading of the text. Use textual evidence (short quotations of key words, phrases, or lines) to support your argument. 4. Odysseus and the goddesses. For a poem centered on the adventures of Odysseus “the complicated man,” the “man of twists and turns,” the hero’s world as he sails around the Mediterranean for twenty years on his way home, is marked at every turn by his encounters with goddesses, starting with the key role played by his patroness Athena, but including, most importantly, Calypso and Circe. There are other female forces to be encountered, if not exactly goddesses, like the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis. The question to be addressed in this topic is: what does Odysseus’s encounter with these female figures tell us about the relation of men and women in this poem? Remember that off in Ithaca, Odysseus’s faithful wife Penelope is waiting patiently for his return. There’s a poem by A.E. Stallings, written in Penelope’s voice, that asks us to Believe what you [the reader] want to. Believe that I wove, If you wish, twenty years, and waited, while you Were knee-deep in blood and hip-deep in goddesses. In her version of the story, are we to share Penelope’s anger at the thought that her husband’s voyage is a form of sex tourism in which he willingly engages, or is forced to engage.? Is he to be considered adulterous, a moral failure when compared with his wife? Or is he under constraint? In what ways do these powerful female forces facilitate or threaten his desire to get home? *********FORMAT AND STANDARDS**********  Times Roman font, 12-point  Standard margins: one inch on each side  Double-spaced throughout  No extra space between paragraphs (just indent the first line)  No footnotes or bibliography  No title page  Stapled upper right corner  Top right on every page, your last name and the page number (i.e. Gilman-1)  All quotations from the Bible should be referenced in the text in parentheses. Thus, “God said, ‘let there be light’” (Genesis 1:3). The 1 is the chapter and the 3 is the verse, or verses if you are quoting from more than one verse, for example (Genesis 1:3-7). Note that the period or comma following such a reference goes outside the parenthesis.  Proofread carefully for spelling errors, repeated words, and other such little mistakes that are easy to overlook. Don’t trust the spell checker. This counts.  It is essential that any student whose first language is not English should have his or her paper read by a native speaker of English—like, another student—to help you fix any mechanical glitches. This counts. Please note that we are not nit-picking here. This is your work product. It reflects on you. Formatting instructions such as these are required by any press or magazine to which a person submits a piece of writing. And something like this, you should expect to be aware of as you write other papers in the future