Romans 5:19 - Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible

One man s; i.e. Adam s: see the notes on Romans 5:12. Many; i.e. all, as before; many is here opposed to one, or a few; the meaning is: Though Adam was but one, yet he infected many others, his sin rested not in his own person. Were made sinners; brought into a state of sin. This is more than when all the world were said to sin in him. The word is used to signify great and heinous sinners. The apostle here informs us of that which all philosophy was ignorant of, viz. the imputation of Adam's sin, and our natural pollution flowing from it. Yea, this was more than the naked history of man's fall by Moses did discover; there indeed we see the cause of death, how that came upon all mankind; but that Adam's sin was accounted to us, that by his disobedience we are involved in sin and misery, that is not clearly revealed in the books of Moses. We are beholden to the gospel, and particularly to this text and context, for the more full discovery hereof. By the obedience of one; i.e. of Christ. He leaves out the word man, either for brevity sake, or because Christ was not a mere man, as Adam was. Here the apostle concludes the collation he had made between Adam and Christ, whom he had all along represented as two public persons, or as two common roots or fountains, the one of sin and death, the other of righteousness and life. And indeed there are throughout the context (as one observes) several textual and grammatical obscurities, as also redundant and defective expressions, which are not unusual with this apostle, whose matter runneth from him like a torrent, and cannot be so well bounded by words. Another saith, upon the consideration of the difficulties in this context: We do not need Theseus's twine of thread, but the Holy Ghost, and that light by which this Epistle was wrote, to guide us into the understanding of it.