David Bentley Hart (born 1965) is an American Orthodox Christian philosophical theologian, cultural commentator and polemicist.  An acknowledged expert in koine Greek and New Testament exegesis, Hart published his own translation of the New Testament from Greek. Hart’s Greek basis for translation is grounded in “the so-called Critical Text, which is based on earlier and different manuscript sources (such as those of the Alexandrian Text-type)… but also included a great many verses and phrases found only in the Majority Text [Byzantine Text-type] (placing them in brackets to set them off from the Critical Text).”

See The New Testament – A Translation, by David Bentley Hart, Second Edition, Yale University Press, (C) 2017, 2023.

Romans 5:12

English:  “Therefore, just as sin entered into the cosmos through one man, and death through sin, so also death pervaded all humanity, whereupon all sinned;”[1]

Greek:  Διὰ τοῦτο ὥσπερ δι᾽ ἑνος ἀνθρώπου ἡ ἁμαρτὶα εἰς τὸν κόσμον εἰσῆλθεν καὶ διὰ τῆς ἁμαρτίας ὁ θὰνατος, καὶ οὕτως εἰς πάντας ἀνθρώπους ὁ θὰνατος διῆλθεν, ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πὰντες ἥμαρτον.

 Transcription:  Dia touto ^hōsper di’ ^henos anthrōpou ^hē ^hamartias eis to kosmon eisēlthen kai dia tēs ^hamartias ^ho thanatos, kai ^houtōs eis pantas anthrōpous ^ho thanatos diēlthen, eph’ ^hōi pantes ^hēmarton.

A fairly easy verse to follow until one reaches the final four words, whose precise meaning is already obscure, and whose notoriously defective rendering in the Latin Vulgate (in quo omnes peccaverunt) constitutes one of the most consequential mistranslations in Christian history. The phrase ἐφ᾽ ᾧ (eph’ ^hōi) is not some kind of simple adverbial formula like the διὰ τοῦτο (dia touto) (“therefore”) with which the verse begins; literally, ἐφ᾽ ᾧ means “upon which,” “whereupon,” but how to understand this is a matter of some debate. Typically, as the pronoun ᾧ is dative masculine, it would be referred back to the most immediate prior masculine noun, which in this case is θάνατος (thanatos), “death,” and would be taken to mean (correctly, I believe) that the consequence of death spreading to all human beings is that all became sinners. The standard Latin version of the verse makes this reading impossible, for two reasons: first, it retains the masculine gender of the pronoun (quo) but renders θάνατος by the feminine noun mors, thus severing any connection that Paul might have intended between them; second, it uses the preposition in, which when paired with the ablative means “within.” Hence what became the standard reading of the verse in much of Western theology after the late fourth century: “in whom [i.e., Adam] all sinned.” This is the locus classicus of the Western Christian notion of original guilt—the idea that in some sense all human beings had sinned in Adam, and that therefore everyone is born already damnably guilty in the eyes of God—a logical and moral paradox that Eastern tradition was spared by its knowledge of Greek. Paul speaks of death and sin as a kind of contagion here, a disease with which all are born; and elsewhere he describes it as a condition like civil enslavement to an unjust master, from which we must be “redeemed” with a manumission fee; but never as an inherited condition of criminal culpability. It has become more or less standard to render ἐφ᾽ ᾧ as “inasmuch as” or “since,” thus suggesting that death spread to all because all sinned. But this reading seems to make little sense: not only does it evacuate the rest of the verse of its meaning, but it is contradicted just below by v. 14, where Paul makes it clear that the universal reign of death takes in both those who have sinned and those who have not. Other interpretations take the ἐφ᾽ ᾧ as referring back to Adam, not as in the Latin mistranslation but in the sense that all have sinned “because of” the first man; this, though, fails to honor the point Paul seems obviously to be making about the intimate connection between the disease of death and the contagion of sin (and vice versa). The most obvious and, I think, likely reading is that, in this verse, a parallelism (something for which Paul has such a marked predilection) is given in a chiastic form: just as sin entered into the cosmos and introduced death into all its members, so the contagion of death spread into the whole of humanity and introduced sin into all its members. This, as we see in Romans and elsewhere, is for Paul the very dynamism of death and sin that is reversed in Christ: by his triumphant righteousness he introduced eternal life into the cosmos, and so as that life spreads into the whole of humanity it makes all righteous (as in vv. 15–19 below, or as in 1 Corinthians 15:20–28).[2]

[1] Hart, David Bentley. The New Testament: A Translation (p.296). Yale University Press. 2017

[2] Op. Cit., p.319