Original sin is the teaching that the sin of Ādam passed to every one of his descendants, so that every child is born guilty, or at least condemned, and can be saved only by the death of another. The missionary gospel built on it runs in four steps: all have sinned, sin earns death, Christ died in our place, and whoever receives him is saved. Every step comes from the letters of Paul. None of them is a saying of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam ʿalayhi al-salām, peace be upon him. This page sets the two side by side: what Paul wrote about sin, what the prophets and ʿĪsā himself taught about it, and what the Qurʾān says of Ādam and of every soul after him.

Where the doctrine of original sin comes from #

The doctrine rests on one sentence in Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which a single man’s sin brings death on the whole race.

12Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:¹

Two more verses from the same letter complete the missionary’s outline: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God”, and “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”.² Augustine of Hippo, reading the first of these in a Latin version that rendered “for that all have sinned” as “in whom all sinned”, made of it the doctrine the Western church has taught since: that the whole human race sinned in Ādam and inherits his guilt.³

The Gospels hold no such sentence. ʿĪsā ibn Maryam never says that a child is born condemned, never speaks of the sin of Ādam, and never says that God’s forgiveness waits on a death. He takes a little child as the pattern of the kingdom, not as its problem. The doctrine of original sin is Paul’s, and the reading of it that most churches hold is Augustine’s.

What the prophets said: the soul that sinneth #

The Torah Paul claimed to keep had already ruled on inherited guilt, and ruled against it.

16The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.⁴

Ezekiel gave a whole chapter to the question, because the exiles in Babylon were repeating a proverb that the fathers had eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth were set on edge. God’s answer through the prophet is the plainest statement of personal responsibility in the Hebrew Bible.

20The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.⁵

The same chapter says how a sinner is put right, and it names no sacrifice: “But if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die. All his transgressions that he hath committed, they shall not be mentioned unto him”.⁶ Turn, obey, live. That is the whole of it.

What ʿĪsā taught about sin and forgiveness #

ʿĪsā ibn Maryam taught the doctrine of Ezekiel, not the doctrine of Romans. Asked by a man what he must do to have eternal life, he gave no word about his own coming death:

16And, behold, one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? 17And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.⁷

His best-known story of forgiveness is the son who wastes his inheritance and comes home. The son does not offer a sacrifice and none is offered for him. He repents, and the father runs to meet him.

18I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, 19And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. 20And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.⁸

In another parable a tax collector stands at a distance in the Temple and says only “God be merciful to me a sinner”, and ʿĪsā says that he “went down to his house justified”.⁹ Justified by what? By a humble prayer, years before any cross. When the Pharisees objected to the company he kept, he sent them back to the prophet Hosea: “But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”¹⁰ And in the prayer he taught, forgiveness depends on forgiving others, not on believing in a death: “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you”.¹¹

Paul had a different answer to the same question, and he states the logic of it himself: “for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain”.¹² The argument runs backwards. Paul begins from the death and reasons that the law must therefore be unable to save, or the death would have been pointless. ʿĪsā began from God’s mercy and the commandments, and the parables show that mercy was there for the asking. The full working of Paul’s theology of the cross is set out in Suffering that atones, and the third heaven and Justification by faith, and Philo’s Logos.

Born guilty? The child in the Gospels #

If original sin were true, the newborn child would be the clearest case of it: a person who has done nothing, yet stands condemned for what Ādam did. The church drew that conclusion. Augustine held that infants who died unbaptised were lost, though he allowed them the mildest of punishments, and for centuries anxious parents carried their children to the font within days of birth for that reason. The Gospels point the other way. When the disciples asked who would be greatest in the kingdom, ʿĪsā did not point to a convert or a martyr.

2And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, 3And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.¹³

When the disciples tried to keep children away from him, he said, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven”.¹⁴ No word of guilt to be washed away, no condition of baptism or belief. The child is the model the adult has to return to. The Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ said the same of every child born into the world:

كُلُّ مَوْلُودٍ يُولَدُ عَلَى الْفِطْرَةِ، فَأَبَوَاهُ يُهَوِّدَانِهِ أَوْ يُنَصِّرَانِهِ أَوْ يُمَجِّسَانِهِ،

“Every child is born upon the fiṭrah; then his parents make him a Jew, a Christian or a Magian.”¹⁵

The fiṭrah is the nature God created people upon, the Qurʾān’s “fiṭrah of Allāh upon which He has created [all] people”.¹⁶ A child is born turned towards its Creator, not away from Him. ʿĪsā’s little child in the midst of the disciples and the Prophet’s child born upon the fiṭrah are the same child. The child of Romans 5, condemned before it draws breath, belongs to Paul alone.

Ismaʿil Raji al Faruqi, who studied Christian ethics for most of his career, put the Islamic position in a sentence: “Islam holds that man is created innocent, and plays out the drama, as it were, after his birth, not before.” Whoever a person’s parents or ancestors were, “man is born innocent. This repudiates every notion of original sin, of hereditary guilt, of vicarious responsibility”. Every person “is born with a clean slate”.¹⁷ The fiṭrah, he wrote, is “an innate endowment … which all humans share”, a faculty by which every person can recognise the one God.¹⁸ He saw where the Christian alternative led. To make the fall “something ontological, something true of all human beings”, the church had to teach that the image of God in man was damaged at birth, which “would constitute the necessary predicament from which no man can save himself by his own effort — which is the assumption of the Incarnation”. Islam, he said, could instead “regard every man at all times as embodying the divine image”.¹⁹ Original sin and the incarnation stand or fall together: the first creates the predicament the second is said to solve.

Are all sins equal? #

Missionary tracts add a claim that the Bible does not make: that a small lie and a murder are the same before God, because any sin at all is infinite rebellion. ʿĪsā graded sins. He spoke of “the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith”, and told Pilate that the one who had handed him over “hath the greater sin”.²⁰ A greater sin implies a lesser one. The flat scale, on which every fault deserves endless death and only a divine death can pay, is not found in his teaching. It is the scale Paul’s system needs: if the debt were not infinite, no ordinary repentance could fail to meet it.

The Qurʾān on Ādam and on every soul #

The Qurʾān tells the story of Ādam’s lapse, and ends it with his forgiveness.

فَتَلَقَّىٰٓ ءَادَمُ مِن رَّبِّهِۦ كَلِمَـٰتٍ فَتَابَ عَلَيۡهِ ۚ إِنَّهُۥ هُوَ ٱلتَّوَّابُ ٱلرَّحِيمُ

“Then Adam received from his Lord [some] words, and He accepted his repentance. Indeed, it is He who is the Accepting of Repentance, the Merciful.”²¹

Elsewhere: “And Adam disobeyed his Lord and erred. Then his Lord chose him and turned to him in forgiveness and guided [him].”²² The sin was real, the repentance was real, and the forgiveness was complete. Nothing was left over to pass to his children. Every soul after him answers for itself, as Ezekiel was told:

أَلَّا تَزِرُ وَازِرَةٌ وِزۡرَ أُخۡرَىٰ

“That no bearer of burdens will bear the burden of another.”²³

The same rule that frees the child from the sin of Ādam rules out the transfer of sin to a substitute. No soul carries another’s load, in either direction. In its place the Qurʾān sets an open door: “And whoever does a wrong or wrongs himself but then seeks forgiveness of Allāh will find Allāh Forgiving and Merciful.”²⁴

قُلۡ يَـٰعِبَادِىَ ٱلَّذِينَ أَسۡرَفُواْ عَلَىٰٓ أَنفُسِهِمۡ لَا تَقۡنَطُواْ مِن رَّحۡمَةِ ٱللَّهِ ۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ يَغۡفِرُ ٱلذُّنُوبَ جَمِيعًا ۚ إِنَّهُۥ هُوَ ٱلۡغَفُورُ ٱلرَّحِيمُ

“Say, ‘O My servants who have transgressed against themselves [by sinning], do not despair of the mercy of Allāh. Indeed, Allāh forgives all sins. Indeed, it is He who is the Forgiving, the Merciful.’”²⁵

This is the father of the parable, running out to meet the son who comes home. It is Ezekiel’s “he shall surely live”. The Qurʾān did not bring a new doctrine of sin to the Christians. It brought back the one their own prophets and their own Messiah had taught, before Paul replaced it with a debt that only a death could settle.

In short #

Original sin rests on Romans 5:12, as Augustine read it. ʿĪsā ibn Maryam never taught it.
The Torah and Ezekiel teach that no one bears another’s sin (Deuteronomy 24:16; Ezekiel 18:20).
ʿĪsā taught forgiveness through repentance, mercy and keeping the commandments (Matthew 19:17; Luke 15; Luke 18:13–14).
ʿĪsā set the little child before his disciples as the pattern of the kingdom; the Prophet ﷺ said every child is born upon the fiṭrah (Matthew 18:3; al-Bukhārī 1385).
He graded sins, as the doctrine of an infinite debt does not (Matthew 23:23; John 19:11).
The Qurʾān says Ādam repented and was forgiven, and that no soul bears another’s burden (al-Baqarah 2:37; al-Najm 53:38).

What ʿĪsā said about himself, set beside what Paul said about him, is on Who is Christ? ʿĪsā ibn Maryam in his own words. Paul’s other doctrines, and where each departs from the teaching of ʿĪsā, are gathered in Seven doctrines: God, the cross and faith.

Romans 5:12 (KJV). ↩
Romans 3:23; 6:23 (KJV). ↩
The Old Latin and the Vulgate render ἐφʼ ᾧ (ephʼ hō, “because”) as in quo, “in whom”. Augustine builds on the reading in On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins 1.10–11 and Against Two Letters of the Pelagians 4.4.7. ↩
Deuteronomy 24:16 (KJV). ↩
Ezekiel 18:20 (KJV). The proverb of the sour grapes is at Ezekiel 18:2. ↩
Ezekiel 18:21–22 (KJV). ↩
Matthew 19:16–17 (KJV). ↩
Luke 15:18–20 (KJV). ↩
Luke 18:13–14 (KJV). ↩
Matthew 9:13 (KJV), quoting Hosea 6:6: “For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.” ↩
Matthew 6:14 (KJV). ↩
Galatians 2:21 (KJV). ↩
Matthew 18:2–3 (KJV). ↩
Matthew 19:14 (KJV). ↩
Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, no. 1385, from Abū Hurayrah; also no. 1359, after which Abū Hurayrah recites al-Rūm 30:30. ↩
Sūrah al-Rūm 30:30. ↩
Isma’il Raji al Faruqi, Al Tawhid: Its Implications for Thought and Life, 2nd ed. (Herndon, Virginia: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1992), p. 67. ↩
Al Faruqi, Al Tawhid, p. 23. ↩
Al Faruqi, Al Tawhid, p. 70. ↩
Matthew 23:23; John 19:11 (KJV). ↩
Sūrah al-Baqarah 2:37. Qurʾānic verses are rendered after Saheeh International. ↩
Sūrah Ṭā Hā 20:121–122. ↩
Sūrah al-Najm 53:38; the same words are at al-Anʿām 6:164. ↩
Sūrah al-Nisāʾ 4:110. ↩
Sūrah al-Zumar 39:53. ↩