To Florus 2.173

‘Therefore, just as through one man sin entered this world, and death through sin, and so death passed into all human beings, in whom all sinned’ (Romans 5:12). To tame the Jews’ pride—they thought they needed forgiveness of sins less than the Gentiles did, claiming holiness for their race through the law’s privilege—he attacks the disease of human conduct and traces the multitude of sinners backward. The authority of antiquity itself would thus reveal how great a dominion wickedness had seized in this world. He would show how many long-established crimes Christ’s grace had removed: crimes passed from the indecency of predecessors to descendants through the hands of mutual imitation. For this reason he recalls the first man, not as the one with whom sin began—it is established that the woman sinned first—but as the one who, through the privilege of his sex, had assumed leadership in wrongdoing. Through him, then, sin entered, and through sin death—undoubtedly the death foretold for sinners, namely eternal death. ‘And so,’ he says, ‘death passed into all human beings, in whom all sinned.’ He has made perfectly clear how this death passed to descendants: by imitation, not generation.