SOURCE: "The Mysterious Stranger: Mark Twain's New Myth of the Fall," in Mark Twain Journal 17, No. 4, Summer, 1975, pp. 20-1.

In the following essay, Scrivner presents The Mysterious Stranger as Twain's attempt to rewrite the Biblical myth of the fall of humanity .

To understand the pattern of organization and thematic concern which operate together to make a unified work of Twain's Mysterious Stranger, one must see the events of the story in relation to a Christian world view according to which temporal history begins with the fall from innocence. The Mysterious Stranger is the working out of a kind of restoration, or anti-fall, which reverses the baneful consequences of the fall of man by negating altogether the Christian world view which established and sustains such a belief.

It was the proffered knowledge of good and evil with which the serpent tempted Eve, the disobedience necessary to obtain that knowledge...