About the Author: Dan C. Jones, PhD
Dan is a retired Professor of English and Division Chair at Wytheville Community College in Virginia and currently lives in Jefferson City, Tennessee, his wife’s home town. His lifelong interest in issues related to religion were enhanced by reading, over many years, most of the books produced by progressive writers such as John Shelby Spong, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and others. His June 2023 Resource article for ProgressiveChristianity.org is titled “Out with the Old View of Original Sin and in with a New View of Adam and Eve.” In recent years, he also has been writing articles for community college faculty on the challenges of teaching biblical texts in the college world literature course. The article he is most proud of is titled “The Adam and Eve Story: Transition from Innocence to Experience” and was published in the Community College Humanities Review in the spring 2020 issue. In the fall 2023 issue of the same journal, his article was on helping students avoid misreading of authorial intention in Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) texts.
A Study of His Biblical Masterpiece as an Act of Rebellion
It is widely known among biblical scholars that The Book of Job is an outlier among other biblical books in that it provides overt criticism of established Ancient Hebrew beliefs and doctrines.
It would be a service to humanity for the church to discard the doctrine of original sin and, in the process, accept a different interpretation of the Adam and Eve story that emphasizes the positive content the story predominantly contains and implicitly rejects the dark and negative Augustinian interpretation that has done and is doing such damage in the world.