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 (LDS Church) to eat of the prohibited fruit. Eve yielded to temptation and ate of the fruit; when Adam learned that Eve had done so, he ate the fruit too. Because they ate of the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve underwent the "fall". As God had promised, the bodies of Adam and Eve became mortal and they became subject to physical death, as well as sickness and pain. Erastus Snow taught that the fruits of the Earth literally made Adam and Eve's bodies mortal. They also underwent "spiritual death": they were separated from the presence of God by being cast out of