Original Sin: Christianity's Biggest Lie
Why Believing We're 'Born Broken' Is Tearing Our World Apart
The vicar stood ready to wet his finger and paint the sign of the cross on my newborn son’s forehead. And I was fuming.
This baby's life was a miracle. Born six weeks early, struggling to breathe, he’d spent the first ten days in an incubator, stuck with needles and pocked with sensors, a ventilation tube threaded down his tiny throat. Now he squirmed, in a Christening gown my mother had made, in the arms of a Christian minister. Who had just delivered a poisonous little sermon telling me, and the whole congregation, that my tiny son was full of sin.
The doctrine of Original Sin claims that humans are born fundamentally corrupted. That every human on earth, from birth, is damned by default. That our salvation is only possible through the Church.
But this is garbage. And it isn’t part of Christ’s teachings.
What Jesus taught is radically different. With "the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21), he signalled our inherent connection to the divine. He pointed to kids as innately free of sin.
"Let the little children come to me... for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these" (Matthew 19:14)
"Unless you become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 18:3)
He understood our inherent divinity. Connecting to the kingdom of God within you requires only that we remove the barriers that knocking around on Earth has put in our way: those less-than-divine thoughts and actions called “sin”.
So why is Christianity misrepresenting what Jesus taught? It’s a feature, not a bug.
In the earliest years of Christianity, a gospel existed that faithfully embodied Christ’s teachings. The Gospel According to Mary Magdalene taught that sin is a learned behaviour that disrupts our natural harmony. This text, rediscovered in 1896,1 speaks of a metaphysical interconnectedness that has long been understood by the Eastern religions (including Buddhism). One that aligns with our understanding of a quantum universe.2
"The Saviour said, All nature, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another." (Mary 4:22)3
In this gospel, Jesus confirms that sin is not part of our fundamental nature:
"The Savior said, There is no sin, but it is you who make sin when you do the things that are like the nature of adultery, which is called sin." (Mary, 4:26)
Things that are “like the nature of adultery.” Betrayal, lying, acting in bad faith. Our actions and behaviours. Not anything we inherit automatically. Before departing, Jesus warns,
“Do not lay down any rules beyond what I appointed you, and do not give a law like the lawgiver lest you be constrained by it.” (Mary, 4:38).
Yet that is exactly what men did when they formalised the New Testament. And the rules they laid down were the rules of the patriarchy. Male superiority literally taken as gospel. A hierarchy of power—access to resources, wealth and knowledge—that centres men.
The first twist in the message comes from Paul. Paul wasn’t writing in enlightened times, but 50-60 CE. Can you imagine how much misogyny this Middle-Eastern religious leader was swimming in?4
In his Letter to the Ephesians, Paul tells women, “submit to your husband”— a passage outrageously read at my first wedding. Layering a note of control and hierarchy over Jesus’s egalitarianism, Paul says that “the husband is the head of the wife.” (Ephesians 5:23). And in Romans 5:2, he gives a sense that sin is inherited, stemming from Adam’s transgression.
Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.
Through a centuries-later mistranslation, this became Original Sin.
It was Augustine who mistranslated the Greek phrase 'eph' ho' (ἐφ᾽ ᾧ) — 'because all sinned' — as 'in whom all sinned.' In Paul’s text, we follow Adam’s example; in Augustine’s, we inherit Adam's guilt. Since this mistranslation serves institutional control, we might consider it deliberate.
Because in Augustine's era (393-420 CE), the Christian Church was consolidating its power. This included religious councils formalising the structure of the Bible. This was when Mary Magdalene’s gospel was definitively excluded as heretical. This text is heretical, not to God or to Christ, but to the Church. Because if we can achieve spiritual transformation by shedding the barriers of our sins and seeking inner wisdom (as Christ states, and which is clearer in Mary’s Gospel than in any other), the Christian Church becomes an optional resource, not a necessity.
The exclusion of Mary’s Gospel has misled us for centuries, to the benefit of the Church and the detriment of humanity. She was the clearest conduit of the truth about human nature as received by Christ. Both canonical and non-canonical sources testify that she was his closest and most trusted disciple.
Canonical Gospel Evidence:
She was “first witness to Jesus' resurrection, the cornerstone of Christianity" and "remains at the cross during the crucifixion while the other disciples hide"5
In the Gospel of John, Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene alone after his Resurrection, and instructs her to tell his disciples of his return
All four Gospels affirm her presence at pivotal moments
Non-Canonical Evidence:
In the Gospel of Mary, "Mary Magdalene is framed as the only disciple who truly understands Jesus' spiritual message, which puts her in direct conflict with the apostle Peter"6 Peter can’t believe that Christ would impart his most important teachings to a woman. Levi, defending Mary’s authority, says, “Surely the Saviour knows her very well. That is why he loved her more than us." (Mary, 9:8-9)
The Gospel of Philip provides additional evidence of Mary’s closeness to Christ, saying. "There were three who always walked with the Lord: Mary, his mother, and her sister, and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion."7 Though a missing piece of text about him kissing her has been distorted (not least by Dan Brown) to make her Christ’s wife or lover, Philip’s Gospel clarifies that Mary had exceptional spiritual insight when he describes how
The rest of the disciples … said to him 'Why do you love her more than all of us?' The Saviour answered and said to them, 'Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness.'
Mary Magdalene could see where other apostles were “blind.” She was trusted by Christ above all others to convey his message clearly. But in a culture where women were subordinate and treated as chattels, her high status couldn’t be allowed. So the authorised Bible depicts her as a prostitute— a charge with zero evidence — in order to discredit her.
The Judeo-Christian culture underpinning much of Western Society has two unhappy versions of God at its core. There’s the creative yet vengeful God of the Old Testament/Torah, who has a tendency towards wrath and smiting, chooses a favored people, declares women to be men's property, commands that gay men be stoned to death, and sanctions slavery (you can even beat your slaves so long as they don't die within two days).
Or there’s the contrasting “God is Love” of the New Testament, embedded in a text which seemingly fails to embrace Christ’s egalitarian teachings and was set up to disempower us, stressing that we are fundamentally sinful, and cannot be “saved” without external intervention.
Both versions of God are depicted as bearded old men somewhere “up above” who have the power to intervene, but let us suffer. It is all about the Father and Son (and genderless “Holy Ghost”).
But the original Hebrew words for God and the Spirit of God weren’t masculine. Selective translation removed the feminine aspects.8
Christ treats women as equals, while in Corinthians, Timothy and Ephesians, women are treated as subordinates.
This is patriarchy in action, so long-established that it is portrayed as “natural”.
Whether you were raised Christian or not —I was raised by atheist physicists — you’re affected. The consequences of these theological distortions extend far beyond church walls. The falsehood of Original Sin and the corruption of Christ’s egalitarian message were instrumental in shaping Western society.
Elected leaders are informed by them. So-called Christians in the US do not adopt Christ’s view of women, but Paul’s, and dismantle women’s rights, which barely existed for a generation. Our politicians support the drive towards war and the bombing of innocents. Government policies heighten inequality, informed by beliefs that we are not interconnected, and the quiet idea that those who suffer deserve it.
The false idea of Original Sin, from which we cannot be saved without the Church, can only disempower us in this fundamentally un-Christian world. Yet it permeates our culture, telling us that humans are prone to evil, and what might we do about that, except to kill them and give up on ourselves?
And if we (understandably) reject organised religion as dogmatic and backwards-looking, when we dispense with the “sky fairy” idea of a God who doesn’t intervene anyway? The world looks hopeless. Centuries of Canonical distortion have disconnected us from our innate divinity. Adrift and unsafe in a meaningless world, we turn to empty pleasures, or addictions, to fill a God-shaped hole. In short, we are a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The subordination of women and the othering and destruction of anyone who doesn’t agree with us would have no hold upon us if we understood what Jesus and his closest disciple, Mary, were trying to tell us.
A sin is anything that separates us from divinity. Any thoughts or behaviours which are less than loving to ourselves or others. We are not born in sin; we learn our sins from the patterns of the humans around us. And we can, without any external intervention but by our own efforts, unlearn them.
If you don’t believe me, believe Jesus. The kingdom of God is not up in the clouds with some bearded white dude; the kingdom of God is within you. You are innately equipped to access that kingdom without external assistance. When you clear your inner barriers, the door swings open naturally. At that point, it is effortless. Because, at our core, we are love.
More and more of us are discovering this truth. What religions refer to as “God” is, in fact, a connected consciousness. What religions call “sin” is a misaligned attunement to that signal. And once you find that the kingdom of God is within you? At this critical time in humanity’s story, you can help create Heaven on Earth.
Standing in that church, watching someone declare my innocent son inherently sinful, I knew this doctrine was poison. When a preacher at my wedding pronounced me innately subordinate to the man beside me— a man who would soon abuse me— I knew he, too, was wrong.
Jesus saw all human beings as naturally divine at birth and equal in worth.
And so should we.
I’m not done with sinning. Next week, we begin the Seven Deadly Sins Writing Challenge. Juicy essays on Greed, Pride, Envy and Lust for my beloved free subscribers. And below the payway, we’ll be using the transformative power of words to explore and release the sins that disempower us.
Related posts:
The Gospel of Mary was rediscovered in January 1896 when German scholar Dr. Carl Reinhardt purchased the Berlin Codex containing it from an antiquities dealer in Cairo, Egypt. The codex had been found, wrapped in feathers, in a wall niche at a Christian burial site. Due to various factors, including the two World Wars, full scholarly publication was delayed until 1955.
For more explanation of “Big C” Consciousness as the place where science and spirituality meet, click here.
This is part of a post-resurrection dialogue. The fuller quote is "The Saviour said, All nature, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots. For the nature of matter is resolved into the roots of its own nature alone."
Paul is something of an enigma when it comes to women. He writes about powerful women in the church as though they are his equals. But also thinks wives should submit to their husbands.
From ‘Mary Magdalene's True History: Real Reason for Controversy,’ Time Magazine, 30th March 2018. https://time.com/5210705/mary-magdalene-controversial/
Ibid if you’re a Latin-loving academic and for everyone else, “same source as footnote 5”.
The Gospel of Philip has not been divided into chapters and verses, but you can read the text here: http://gnosis.org/naghamm/gop.html. Like Mary’s Gospel, it was lost for centuries. It was rediscovered in the mid-20th century.
See ‘The Feminine Imagery of God in the Hebrew Bible’ https://www.cbeinternational.org/resource/feminine-imagery-god-hebrew-bible/
Of course you are absolutely right, there is no original sin, the kingdom of God is within us (as potential) and we can build the kingdom through love, compassion and forgiveness. It is a shame that standing up and arguing with the priest as they deliver their sermon is frowned upon, it would make churches a lot more dynamic (although I learnt early not to do so, my father was an Anglican Priest!). Thanks for the post, a good read and well argued it has helped me.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! You have well summarized in this article much of what I have learned since I began my separation from Western evangelicalism. There were so many things that I had grown up believing that, upon reflection, didn't make much sense. Once I was free from the trap that "questioning God" was heresy, I embarked on a journey to question everything—why did I believe what I believed. Where did that belief come from? It turns out that, for me at least, this is a lifelong journey of self-evaluation.
Thanks again!