Paradise Lost temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Milton's purpose, stated in Book I, is to "justify the ways of God to men". In his introduction to the Penguin edition of "Paradise Lost", the Milton scholar John Leonard notes, "John Milton was nearly sixty when he published Paradise Lost in 1667. The biographer John Aubrey (1626–97) tells us that the poem was begun in about 1658 and finished in about 1663. However, parts were almost certainly written earlier, and its roots lie in Milton's earliest youth." Leonard speculates that the
Adam and Eve Some early fathers of the Christian church held Eve responsible for the Fall of man and all subsequent women to be the first sinners because Eve tempted Adam to commit the taboo. "You are the devil's gateway" Tertullian told his female readers, and went on to explain that they were responsible for the death of Christ: "On account of your desert [i.e., punishment for sin, that is, death], even the Son of God had to die." In 1486, the Dominicans Kramer and Sprengler used similar tracts in "Malleus Maleficarum" ("Hammer of Witches") to justify the persecution of "witches". Medieval Christian