Back towards the end of 2015 or so, after having translated through Romans from the Greek for the umpteenth time, a rather profound thought came to my mind as regards what the Apostle said in Romans 5 and 7 about hamartia or "sin" being passed down from Adam and located in the flesh. My thought was simply this, what if Paul meant exactly what he said? What if he wasn't talking about some spiritual reality which had no physical basis, but instead when he said "flesh," he actually meant flesh.
The word he used to locate hamartia was in the "sarx," which in constrast to "krea" which means, essentially, "cooked or uncooked meat," sarx refers to the soft tissues of a physical animal or human body. It refers to the muscle, certainly, but also the organ meat, the skin, the tendons, brain matter, etc. Knowing this, it was a matter of asking the question, which part of our flesh could possibly be the culprit. Hamartia as a concept means "error, mistake, flaw," and generally gives the idea that something happened that wasn't intended. In the context of Paul's writings, it always refers to an error or flaw in behavior. From there, it wasn't a hard leap of logic to look at the human brain as the source of human behavior, and so if there was a physically based error causing the erroneous and harmful behaviors, then it must be located in the brain. This then means that the error in question is neurological in nature.
The problem was, at that time, I didn't know enough about the brain to take it any farther than that. My training was in Bible, theology, computers and electronics, lasers, and other sundry trades, but not in neurology or anything having to do with the brain. As a result, when my wife, who had recently gone back to school at Orange Coast College asked me what major I might pursue should I follow her, as my query involved something psychological in nature, and for other personal reasons, I said, "psychology."
And so for two years and eight or nine courses, I completed all the psychology major requirements at OCC, being especially interested and attentive to the Psychobiology course, that is, the course on the biological basis of psychology dealing specifically with the brain, its regions, the neuron, and the disorders arising from neurological dysfunction. As I compared my studies with the descriptions Paul gave in his letters, I was able to narrow down the region of the brain which might be the hamartia affected culprit.
When going back through the lists of the works of the flesh, I realized that everything that Paul listed, no matter which list, could be condensed down to being motivated either by fear, aggression, bodily cravings, or the sexual drive. Another way to say this, especially for psychological purposes, is fight, flight, feeding, and sex. All of these things are governed by the hypothalmus specifically, and the limbic system in general. Interestingly, in women, the hypothalamus also governs childbirth, which should be of note to anyone who remembers the text of Genesis 3. At first, I thought I had my culprit, but another part of the limbic system kept coming up over and over again, the amygdala.
The amygdala, meaning "almond" in Greek, is so named because it is roughly the size and shape of an almond, and along with the hippocampus, the hypothalamus, thalamus, and to some extent the frontal cortex comprises a part of the aforementioned limbic system. For the purposes of this discussion, it might be small, but it's significance to this topic really can't be understated. It is associated with several different functions with memory and emotional regulation, but the one that interests me most is that it appears to act as a kind of gatekeeper for the hypothalamus regulating the fight/flight/feeding/sex responses. This alone is enough to take it into consideration. What really made it stand out for my query into hamartia though was how it responds when a person lies. Specifically, on a brain imaging scan, the amygdala lights up and goes crazy when the person being scanned lies, and it does so in a way that it just doesn't do when they tell the truth. To my understanding, the amygdala lights up with any kind of cognitive dissonance, that is, with any kind of behavior or thought of behavior the person believes to be wrong. Another really interesting fact about the human amygdala is that it is disproportionately larger than the amygdala found in our closest living genetic cousin, the chimpanzee. Added to this, a recent study performed within the last ten years discovered that it is structurally different from the amygdala of every other species of primate, yet those amygdala between different primate species are strikingly similar to one another. (There are several good resources online to research this. A quick overview can be found in Morphometrics of the Amygdala authored by Nicole Barger and Katerina Semendeferi) The implication here is that something happened to radically differentiate the human amygdala from all other primate species.
It is speculation, but given the above it isn't unwarranted, that the changes in the amygdala may have resulted in the human survival responses to become overreactive. In an unaffected animal, their survival responses activate when their physical survival becomes threatened. The threat is dealt with using one of the four responses, and then it calms down and the animal continues on its way. In human beings, our threat responses can activate for presumed physical or psychological threats. It can activate for imagined threats. It can activate when remembering a threat, or imagining a future threat. In short, it can activate and does activate with nearly anything and everything which comes our way. In comparison with other animals, this constant overreaction is clearly a disorder or malfunction from its original purpose and is the cause of most of our suffering and harm.
Taking all of this into account and applying it to my query, I believed and still believe I found my culprit in the human amygdala which regulates emotional and, in some way, moral behavior because it regulates the survival fight/flight/feeding/sex response governed by the hypothalamus. And so, my initial hypothesis, that Paul meant it when he said that hamartia was located in the flesh, was not only rendered plausible the more I studied the matter, but it was strengthened when the actual components of the human brain were looked at and compared to our genetic cousins who, according to the Scriptures, should be differentiated from human beings as human beings should have been the only ones affected if we take Genesis 3 even remotely literally.
With these things in hand, I continued to test my hypothesis against all the known features of hamartia. According to Paul, it was located "in the flesh." It was also passed down from Adam as all human beings are descended from Adam, according to Paul. The most natural conclusion from this is that it is hereditary, and thus genetic in nature. There are no human beings currently in existence, even during Paul's time, which do not possess it. According to Paul, if someone dies they are "set right" from hamartia, suggesting that the death of the physical body, and presumably the brain, negates it entirely. When set against all the ways in which Hamartia is described in Paul's letter to the Romans, and indeed in every letter, my hypothesis that it is in fact biological and therefore neurological in nature continues to hold up without fail.
Then I turned to the question of what caused this universal human neurological error of an altered amygdala. According to Scripture, it was when Adam and Eve ate a piece of fruit they were warned not to eat. Then the question became, could this make that kind of a permanent, hereditary alteration to the human brain? And the answer, surprisingly, is "yes." How? We know for a fact that there are certain compounds and chemicals which can alter human epigenetics and genetic structures. We also know that certain chemicals when introduced to the human brain can cause damage as well as changes in brain chemistry and structure. We also know that certain fruits, especially stonefruits like peaches, almonds, and so on contain cyanogens. Other plants which might be otherwise edible contain THC. Still others contain other toxins which are capable of causing both birth defects and brain alterations. Once again, it's not that much of a leap to suggest that our ancestors, at one point, consumed a fruit that contained a toxin which caused permanent alterations to their brain chemistry and genetics. And so once again, my hypothesis stands up at least for now.
Since that first "aha!" moment almost ten years ago now, I have continued to refine my hypothesis to include a basis for the human ego, the psychobiological origins of human morality, the root causes of most psychological disorders, and more. And every time, when I apply my hypothesis, based on the criteria given by Paul, it stands up and continues to stand up under scrutiny. Maybe one day it finally won't, but with every journal article I read, every data point I consume, and every new study which comes out, my hypothesis on the physical basis of hamartia as a kind of universal human brain disorder continues to align neatly.
I am well aware that many, if not most, disagree with my hypothesis, and find arguments against it, though most of them tend to be personal, theological, philosophical, or emotional in nature. To these arguments, I can only point back to what Paul said in his letters about it, and go back over what I discovered and how it lines up. I cannot help if someone's personal theological worldview does not allow for it. For me, if my theological worldview cannot allow for evidence staring me in the face, it is my worldview which must be altered, not the evidence. For now, I stand by what I teach and how I apply this understanding to what the Scriptures teach, and I hope it brings light to otherwise difficult to understand passages and concepts found therein.
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