I spent several months reading and writing notes on John Collins’ Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? Who They Were and Why You Should Care and Peter Enns’ The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins. It went far longer than I expected it to go! Let me emphasize that these posts are notes–nothing more, nothing less. I placed them on this blog so that readers could interact with me if desired. Reading these notes does not (1) give readers of this blog a sufficient picture of these books and (2) does not provide excuse for dismissing the arguments of these authors. What you have here are the thoughts of Brian LePort, not C. John Collins and not Peter Enns.
If you decide to read these books please feel free to come to my blog, leave your thoughts and reflections, and maybe we can discuss things further. I hope these post cause people to be interested in these books.
Pt. 5- Enns on Christianity and Science
Pt. 6- Collins on Adam and Christian Worldview
Pt. 7- Collins on the Origins of Evil
Pt. 8- Enns on Interpreting Adam and Eve
Pt. 9- Enns on Modern Scholarship and Hermeneutics
Pt. 10- Enns on Adam and Israel’s Post-Exile Identity
Pt. 11- Collins on Adam in the Book of Genesis
Pt. 12- Collins on Adam in the Hebrew Bible
Pt. 13- Collins on Adam in Jewish Literature
Pt. 14- Collins on Adam in the Gospels
Pt. 15- Collins on Adam in the Pauline Epistles and NT in General
Pt. 16- Enns on Genesis and Other Creation Narratives
Pt. 17- Enns on Genesis and Other Creation Narratives (Cont.)
Pt. 18- Enns on Israel’s Second Creation Story
Pt. 19- Enns on Israel and Primordial Time
Pt. 20- Enns’ Final Thoughts on Adam and Genesis
Pt. 21- Enns on Paul’s Ancient Context
Pt. 22- Enns on Paul’s Interpretive Culture
Pt. 23- Enns on Various Adams of Jewish Interpreters
Pt. 24- Enns on Paul and His Bible
Evolution of Adam has been on my to read pile for a couple of months. When I finally get around to it, I may look back through your posts 🙂
It’s a worthwhile read. I will be posting a short book review this week so that people can get a better view of the overall flow of the book.
To carry the conversation further, it seems Paul sees Adam as the first sinner, not necessarily the first human.
Either way, if the other people in the early narrative are not Adam&Eve’s kids and it seems unreasonable to assume they all are( even though tradition does so), even if Adam is the first human, the others could have existed close enough to him that the genome sees them all roughly the same I would think.
That and the fact Adam’s sin could have infected the others around the region w/o genetic transfer makes Paul’s theology palatable with the genome, IMO. That’s where I think Peter has missed a potential nexus for his theology and scientific views.
Again, it could be flawed tradition and not the text that teaches we all have to be Adam’s genetic sin bearers. Dr. Heiser has some different than traditional views on Romans 5:12 for example.
I struggle with this idea because Paul does seem to make Adam “the first man” in 1 Cor 15.45: ὁ πρῶτος ἄνθρωπος Ἀδὰμ. Theoretically, one could say “first of a sequence”, but the juxtaposition there seems to the first human of all humans with Jesus being the “last” or eschatological human. When he says the “first man was of the earth” (v. 48) it is hard to avoid the likelihood that Paul means to interpret Genesis 2 literally, i.e., Adam came from the earth and all humans after Adam came from the earth through him.
If Luke knows Paul’s thinking at all then this seems to be how he remembers Paul’s teaching as he presents Paul as talking about God making all nations from one person in Acts 17.26 (ἐποίησέν τε ἐξ ⸀ἑνὸς πᾶν ἔθνος ἀνθρώπων κατοικεῖν ἐπὶ ⸂παντὸς προσώπου⸃ τῆς γῆς).
In Romans 5.12-21 Adam’s main role is the introducer of death by sin, yes, but in Romans the structure of Adam to Abraham to Moses to Christ between chapter 1-8 makes it hard to avoid that he likely understood humanity as having a first man, Adam, and an eschatological man, Jesus, who came from the man Abraham (the solution of Adam in the Book of Genesis, beginning at chapter 12), but who provided a different solution that Moses (who also comes from Abraham). But you are right that in Romans 5.12-21 Paul makes a less pronounced statement about Adam being the literal first man (genetically).
Brian,
Adam can be the first fully functional human and sinner as long as the “other people” existed w/o Adam’s genetics causing it. I think it’s reasonable to view them this way.
Most people think it is inevitable all humans would sin when tempted, so Adam’s sin doesn’t have to be genetically transferred, he still brings sin into the world and over time these other people were tempted and sinned.
I may be just wanting to believe the biblical narrative is accurate( no doubt about that), but, this doesn’t seem to me to be a stretch or my cramming my views into the text.