A month or so ago, I heard a Christian radio show host speak with disappointment about a children's book that his young daughter had read. He was upset that the book said that the serpent's great lie was that "God doesn't love you." He went on for a while with some passion about how incorrect that was. Then he even brought his daughter on air to repeat what he had taught her was the serpent's real lie, which was that Adam & Eve would "be like God." That really surprised me! Of course the serpent did say that "you will be like God, knowing good and evil," but that's exactly what happened! So a swing and a miss on that one, I had to say. ... but I like his show and learn lots of helpful, interesting stuff from him.jriccitelli wrote:I think the clear understanding of the Genesis account comes from the contrast between the Serpents statement and Gods statement. God said they will die, and the Serpent said they would ‘not die’.
There's a commentary on Genesis from the mid-1500's in which the author discusses "what kind of death God means in [Gen 2:17]." He does not use "spiritual death" nor similar wording, but he talks a bit in ways that you often here nowadays. His main point is that alienation from God is the cause of death and so Adam made "a kind of entrance into death, till death itself entirely absorbs him" so that Adam was then "consigned to death, and death [including the the terror of it] began its reign in him." That is here: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom01.viii.i.html
I'm still guessing that the common use of the "spiritual death" metaphor to describe "the fall" (another non-Biblical metaphor, not that I object) came later than that. (I didn't read more of that commentary.)