Many translations (including the ESV) render Romans 5:12 as if it consists of a complete sentence with an express conclusion: Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned. However, Paul does not here employ the usual language one would expect when introducing a conclusion in the Greek. In the original Greek and so would have been houtos kai, but instead, Paul here writes kai houtos which denotes a sentence lacking a definite conclusion: Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, so death came to each man, because all have sinned… Légasse¹ even posits that Paul himself loses the thread of his own sentence at this point, and without completing it begins to expand upon the universality of sin and death in Romans 5:13–14. Romans 5:12 therefore contains an incomplete sentence that does not, by way of a conclusion, end with a statement about the universal death of all peoples. Instead, Paul proceeds to elaborate upon the universality of sin in Romans 5:13–14. Sin and death are indeed connected here, but Paul’s focus is really on the fact that because sin is universal, reconciliation must therefore be universal too.

The incomplete sentence in Romans 5:12 begins and ends with the sin of man. Sin came into the world through one man (Romans 5:12a) and after him everyone sinned (Romans 5:12 conclusion). Paul assumes that his readers would be familiar with the book of Genesis. Apparently, they know about Adam and Eve. They either knew this because as a Godfearing congregation they loved God and as such had studied the Scriptures of Israel, or because they simply became acquainted with God’s revelation in the Old Testament once they were introduced to the gospel of Jesus (see Romans 1:1–2a). Regardless, they know that the history of sin begins with the one man, Adam. Paul personifies sin here as something that enters the world via Adam and then travels further to all people to enchant them, thereby leading them away from obedience to God.

All people share in the guilt of Adam, even if they sin in a variety of different ways. Paul, therefore, adds something to the name of Adam with which he eventually concludes the incomplete sentence of Romans 5:12 in Romans 5:14. According to several exegetes and translations, Paul here suddenly glances ahead not to the future of humanity in general but to Christ (past all sinners) in presenting Adam as a type of the One who was to come. But such a glance ahead does not really fit with the conclusion of Romans 5:14 for the following reasons:

1. The apostle is still fully concentrated on the fact that sin and death are universal, even though the law of Moses did not yet exist and even though later people did not sin in the same way as Adam did.

2. In what follows (Romans 5:15), he actually highlights the differences between Adam and Christ (Adam brings death; Christ brings life). How can the bringer of death be an example or type of the bringer of life?

3. Exegetes often regard the depiction of Adam as an example in the sense that Christ, just like Adam, is the first of a long line of other people. However, that point was not yet under discussion in Romans 5:12–14 and is raised at the earliest, and then only partly, in Romans 5:18–19. Yet even there, the differences rather than the similarities predominate.

4. The translation one who was to come assumes that Christ can easily be identified as the one to come with the Greek words ho mellon. But this expression is unknown for Christ as the one to come (ho erchomenos). It literally means the coming… (which still requires the identification of a subject). It is debatable whether this unusual term would cause readers to immediately think about the coming Christ unless the subject was specified.

5. The Greek words tou mellontos can also be regarded as the neuter form, in which case they would mean the future. This expression (to mellon) is known in Greek in the sense of the future and can be used without further addition.

6. Adam is the one who sins and dies. In that way, he is the model for the future that comes after him, from Adam to Moses and thereafter. When Paul ends Romans 5:14 with the conclusion that Adam, by his sin and death, has become the human model of the future, he gives an accurate summary of what he has said thus far in Romans 5:12–14. Elsewhere, Paul writes something comparable: For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive (1 Corinthians 15:22). In that context, he also says that we have borne the image (eikon) of Adam as the earthly (mortal) man. In 1 Corinthians 15:1–58, Adam is also not the image of Christ but of the sinning and mortal human race.

   A word for word, and therefore also a somewhat clumsy translation of Romans 5:12–14, could read as follows: Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world—and with sin also death!—and sin thus reached all people, insofar as all sinned (for there was already sin in the world before the law existed, but apart from the law no account is kept of sin; nonetheless, death reigned in the time from Adam to Moses and although they did not commit exactly the same transgression as Adam, yet he is typological of the future)… ²