Annotatio LIII
”God made for Adam tunics of skin.” — Genesis 3:21
Origen, in the Tomes on Genesis, expounding these words, is reported to have said that the tunics of skin, with which God clothed the first parents, were not truly tunics of skin, but carnal and mortal bodies1 — with which, after the offense and the ejection from paradise, Adam and Eve were clothed. This error Methodius, in the Aglaophon, attributes to Origen. Epiphanius also, in the book Anchoratus, confirms the same, saying that [Origen] thought thus for this reason: because he reckoned it a thoroughly ridiculous thing that God should, from dead animals stripped of their hide, prepare skins and sew together tunics of skin, as if he were a tanner or a stitcher of hides.2 I suspect that this passage was corrupted by the rivals of Origen; for he, in this matter, opens his mind catholicly in the 6th homily on Leviticus, where he writes thus: “God made tunics of skin, and clothed Adam and his wife. Those tunics, therefore, were of skins taken from animals: for with such [tunics] it behooved the sinner to be clothed — with skin tunics, I say, which were a token of the mortality which he had received for sin, and of his frailty, which came from the corruption of the flesh.” By which words he manifestly confesses that the tunics were truly of skin, prepared by God’s command. See the following Annotation.