Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.

This is the BBC.

Hello, for the next three quarters of an hour, it's all about Eve as we hear about the rise and fall of Christianity's origin story, how it affected and possibly still affects cultural attitudes to pregnancy and childbirth, and we consider a gender equality version of Adam and Eve, as revealed in the Quran.

But first a new work by the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt.

Stephen reinvented Shakespeare in his previous book, Will in the World, and now, with the rise and fall of Adam and Eve, he presents us with a passionate and really quite personal study of the original first couple. He calls the story of Adam and Eve a long and tantalising

history, from archaic speculation to dogma, from dogma to literal truth, literal to real, real to

mortal, mortal, to fraudulent, to fiction.

When we hooked up via line from the United States, he told me how and when the tale first got

its hooks into him.

I suppose the story got into me the way it gets into everyone.

It's one of the most powerful short stories that any of us ever hear.

You are told it when you're

four or five years old and you never forget it. And one of the things that's fascinating,

magical and strange about the story is precisely that it seizes you and doesn't in that sense

let you go, whether you believe in it or not. Do you remember where

you first heard it? I don't. But that's also, I think, quite characteristic. You don't remember

where you first heard it. I must have asked. Or maybe I didn't ask. I was simply told where we came

from. But that impulse to ask where we came from is itself part of the story, part of the

motivation of the stories. At the heart of the story is the decision of Adam and Eve to eat

the forbidden fruit. And we've got the actor Philip Bretherton here to read the verses from Genesis

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