Of course, the Fathers of the Church had none of the analytic tools that we have today.  Also, they had churches to run.

Nevertheless, we can see some of the Fathers wrestling with the nested result from the previous blog.  For example, (it seems to me that) Tertullian substituted “sex” for the “spirit-descent”.

No doubt the struggle went both ways, since the stories of Jesus could be trimmed to fit a “descent of the soul” model. (Except, of course, for the Resurrection business.)

I imagine that Genesis 1-11 became more and more important in the struggle against the appropriation of name of Jesus the Messiah by Gnostic (Pagan) thinkers.

The Story of the Fall of Adam and Eve works against the purely vertical and non-historical axis of the descent of the soul.  The Story of the Fall adds a horizontal and historical axis.  At the same time, this axis raises questions of its own.