I have said that one New Testament author does make use of these themes, and that is St John. What follows is a kind of Easter meditation on the way John uses the Eden story as a lens to focus on the fall and resurrection of humankind. Whereas St Paul openly named Jesus as the Second Adam, and declared that ‘as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made An Eden Project 2 The Tree of Life In Part 2 of his Eden Project Anthony Freeman looks at how the Passion Narrative in St John’s Gospel picks up and ‘reverses’ the theme of the Tree in the Garden of Eden.
Sofia 99 March/April 2011 8 Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden ... (Jn 19:41) The Christian Bible opens with the tree of Life growing in the midst of the garden of Eden (Gen 2) and closes with tree of Life growing in the midst of the river in the new Jerusalem (Rev). So you might expect that in the sixty-four books in between there would be regular references to this tree of life; but you would be wrong. The term nowhere appears except in Genesis and Revelation. Indeed, given the subsequent shadow they have thrown over Christian theology, it is noteworthy how seldom the themes of the tree, the garden of Eden, and even of Adam and Eve, occur in the Bible.
After two occurrences at the beginning of Genesis, Eve is never mentioned again in the Old Testament and Adam gets just three passing references. Outside the Pauline writings, Adam appears only twice in the New Testament (both in genealogical contexts) and Eve never. Even when we include Paul, Adam comes into just three passages (Rom 5; I Cor 15; I Timothy 2) and Eve two (II Cor 11; I Tim 2). These are pretty meagre pickings, and they are not much improved if we add the garden of Eden to the items searched: just three of the prophets refer to it in a proverbial way, but there no other mentions in either the Old or New Testaments.
This is all a salutary reminder of how slender is the biblical basis of much Christian theology (even the Protestant ‘Bible-based’ variety). However, in what follows I hope to show how one New Testament writer – St John – does in a subtle way provide the groundwork for the mediaeval idea that the cross of Jesus can be seen as a tree whose role in redemption mirrors and reverses that played in the fall by the earlier tree in Eden. The idea received classic expression in the sixth-century Latin hymn Pange lingua.
The refrain establishes the metaphor in which the cross is the tree and Jesus the precious fruit that it bears:
Faithful Cross! above all other, one and only noble Tree! None in foliage, none in blossom, none in fruit thy peers may be; sweetest wood and sweetest iron!
Sweetest Weight is hung on thee!
Sweetest Weight is hung on thee!
The verses then draw the parallel between the forbidden tree that brought death and the chosen tree that will bring life, as here:
God in pity saw man fallen, shamed and sunk in misery, when he fell on death by tasting fruit of the forbidden tree: then another tree was chosen which the world from death should free.
The parallelism is complicated by the fact that in the midst of the garden in Genesis there was not o one tree but t two: the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2:9). The forbidden tree is described both as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2:17) and as the tree which is in the midst of the garden (Gen 3:3).
The threatened penalty for eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was instant death (in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die); but the actual penalty suffered by humankind was expulsion from the garden, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever (Gen 3:22). So in terms of the Genesis story itself, the serpent was right; Adam and Even tasted the forbidden fruit and they did not die, at least not that day. They were prevented from eating of the tree of life, which would have gained them immortality, and the assumption must be (although it is never stated) that they were not created immortal. So when Christian theology teaches (as in the hymn quoted above) that human death was the result of eating the forbidden fruit, it is going beyond the Biblical account.
Sofia 99 March/April 2011 alive’, St John is both more subtle and more thorough in portraying the life and death of Jesus as recapitulating the life and death of Adam and reversing its dire consequences. Nowhere is this clearer than in his account of the passion and resurrection of Jesus (Jn 18–20).
All four evangelists tell us that on the night before his crucifixion Jesus had a meal with his disciples and then went out to the place where he would be arrested.
John is the only one to call that place a g garden, and that is where he starts his story: There was a garden, which Jesus and his disciples entered (18.1). For Matthew and Mark it was ‘the place called Gethsemane’; for Luke it was just ‘the place’; but for John it is a garden.
Although he gives it no name, it immediately becomes apparent that it symbolises that other garden, east of Eden, where God had placed the first Adam and also the Serpent.
The narrative cuts instantly from Jesus to Judas, the other chief protagonist at this point, of whom John has already told us that during supper Satan entered into him. So when John reports that Judas arrives with a band of men and officers to meet with Jesus, we are to understand that Satan also is present. We know from elsewhere that Johannine school of writers identified Satan with that old Serpent, called the Devil, which deceiveth the whole world (Rev 12:9), so the scene is now set for the showdown: Jesus confronts the Serpent in the Garden. This may seem a far-fetched claim, but only this interpretation makes sense of what happens next.
In the other three Gospels, Judas identified Jesus to the soldiers by greeting him with a kiss. According to John, it is Jesus himself who takes the initiative and asks the soldiers for whom they are looking. They answered Jesus of Nazareth, but when Jesus said to them, I am he (18:5), instead of arresting him, they went backward and fell to the ground (18:6). This makes no sense, until we realise that for John it is not just Judas and the soldiers in ‘Gethsemane’: it is the Serpent/Satan in ‘the Garden’, with the ancient curse ringing in his ears, Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat. And the words of Jesus, I AM, assert the presence of God walking in the garden as he did in the first days of creation.
But Jesus has a dual role in this drama. Not only, as the Word made flesh, does he uniquely incorporate ‘God’s presence and his very self, and essence all divine’, but the image of God is present also in his common humanity that he shares with us all. So having established the divine presence by the falling to the ground of the soldiers, John now describes how Jesus surrenders to his captors and allows himself to be taken to Pilate’s judgment hall, where the Governor will unwittingly underline his representative humanity, in which ‘a second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came’.
The hostile crowd are baying for blood and Jesus is displayed to them: And Pilate said unto them: Behold the Man! (19:5). The words are two-edged. At one level, Pilate is mocking both Jesus and the mob, saying:
Behold the Man!
All the Eden-pointers we have seen so far – the nameless garden, the falling to the ground, Pilate’s ‘Behold the man!’ – are unique to John’s account of the passion. Now we come to two details that he shares with the other gospels, but which in his hands reinforce the second-Adam theme. One is the name of the execution ground, called ‘the skull’. In later tradition, and quite possibly already by the time of Jesus, Golgotha was reputed to be the burial place of Adam, whose skull is commemorated in its name and which is depicted lying at the foot of the cross in many mediaeval paintings and stained glass pictures of the crucifixion.
Closer to our main theme in this article is the other detail that John shares with his fellow evangelists: the use of the cross – the tree – as the means of execution.
Here Jesus’ obedience to death won new life for humankind, a mirror-image of the tree in the garden where Adam’s disobedience had brought death to humankind. The symbolism of the tree-of-death that becomes the tree-of-life is doubly represented. First, the tree of the cross will restore the life of humankind lost through the act of disobedience brought about through the tree in Eden. And secondly, the single tree-of-the-cross is itself simultaneously the instrument of death (for the one man, Jesus) and the agent of new Sofia 99 March/April 2011 10 life (for all mankind). Once again Paul will make explicit what John tells through his narrative: For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous … That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life (Rom 5:19,21).
Back with St John, and the scene of the crucifixion, Jesus said to his mother, Woman, behold thy son (19:26). So far the common elements linking John’s account of the passion of Jesus to the story of Adam have included the garden, God’s presence within it, Satan’s confinement to the ground, the name ‘the Man’, and the tree. The glaring omission has been Eve, but her name was given to her only after she and Adam had sinned and were expelled from the garden. Up to that point in the Genesis story she was simply ‘the Woman’. And in St John’s gospel – notoriously – the mother of Jesus is never named, and is only ever addressed by Jesus (first at the Cana wedding feast and then again from the cross) as Woman. Now we know why: for John she is the second and obedient Eve who complements Jesus’ second and obedient Adam.
Again I have to say that to us this may all seem farfetched and contrived. But to John’s first readers, steeped in the Hebrew Bible and its interpretation by the rabbis, it would all have been as clear as daylight.
And just in case there remains any doubt, John has not yet finished with his theme.
Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden (19.41). Another nameless garden; and yet, of course, for John – and now that we can read his symbolism for us as well – it is not just A garden, it is t the garden.
And in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid. Of course he wasn’t. Adam had been expelled from the garden paradise before his death. And they laid Jesus there (19.42). So ‘Adam’ is lain in his rightful tomb at last.
But even now John has not finished. Here is the encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene thirtysix hours later: Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou? She supposing him to be the gardener, saith … Supposing him to be the G Gardener!
And the Lord God planted a garden east of Eden … and the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden to dress it and to keep it (Gen 2:8,15). The same truth John had put into the mouth of faithless Pilate he now puts into the heart and mind of faithful Magdalene. Jesus is indeed the Man, he is indeed the true Gardener, who restores to humankind access to the tree of Life.