I was chatting with a friend about Genesis 1 and whether the earth is young or old the other day. I don’t find it a particularly interesting question, not because there isn’t an answer (there must be) and not because it’s not important (the truth is always important) but because there are so many more interesting things to say about that chapter of Scripture.
I’ve touched on some of them before, but we could include: creation ‘from the head’, the patterns of seven, the baptism of the land, the third day trees, the constraining of chaos, the ‘dragons’ on the fifth day, the sixth day trees, the ten times God speaks, creation through division, and more besides.
Even most of those are fun details we’re supposed to notice and meditate on in light of the rest of the scriptures, the narrative itself is worthy of much reflection on its own terms. God is the creator. God spoke creation. He didn’t slay a dragon and make creation from her corpse (this is a Babylonian creation myth), he spoke it into being. Creation is ordered. It’s spoken from nothing. It took a ‘week.’ He rested when he was done. It would take us a long time to reach questions that might relate to modern scientific ideas of the age of the earth.
I briefly outlined my own position with my friend, which I don’t hold that strongly, while expressing respect for those with convictions different to mine. I mostly expressed that I don’t find it that interesting a question and pointed to many of the more fun things in the text that I’ve alluded to above. There was one point I wanted to stress as important though, concerning Adam.
It is biblically and theologically necessary for Christians to believe in Adam as first, a historical person who second, fathered the entire human race.
Mike Reeves
I agree. Adam was a real man, now dead (and I assume in the presence of Jesus). More than that though, he was also the first human, and the father of all mankind. I think each of these convictions is important.
What does the Bible say
This is, in part, a matter of trusting the Bible. We should read according to genre, of course. We should read carefully to see that the text says what we think it says. My argument is that the Bible always assumes Adam was a historical man, and the first man.
We start where we always should, with Jesus. Jesus taught that the first man and woman were made by God and were married. In his discussion of divorce in Matthew 19 he turns to Genesis 1 as clearly answering their question. He doesn’t mention Adam by name, but the assumption seems to be that this married couple were made directly by God at the beginning. In itself this doesn’t get us that far but is a good place to start.
Next, we might turn to the genealogies. In Genesis 5 the whole human race is traced back to Adam. Before you think “well, Genesis 1-12 are a different genre,” we find exactly the same move in 1 Chronicles 1. Most of 1 Chronicles is genealogy and it rather undermines the point if these genealogies trace their way back into legend. We find the same move in Luke 3, tracing Jesus’ descent all the way back to Adam. Establishing Jesus lineage—which has several purposes—seems unhelpful if grounded on a legendary figure.
You might want to object now that this only establishes that the first readers of these scriptures thought Adam was real and the first human. You might even want to think of the lines of the early English kings given in the Venerable Bede’s ecclesiastical history; there we find a king was invariably able to trace his line to either the inhabitants of Troy or a British giant or the Norse god Odin. Clearly, they had different ways of using genealogies in the past.
There’s a sliver of truth there, I do suspect there are deliberately many generations missed in some of these genealogies as a feature of the genre in order to make what the writer considered more important theological points with the numbers, but that isn’t the same as saying it drifts in legend and that’s fine. This is the word of God. You have to throw away inerrancy—or at least define it away entirely—in order to make the argument that they’re just making a broader ‘mythic’ point in tracing everything back to Adam.
Or perhaps you might argue that Adam was real but only the progenitor of the Jewish people. There’s some logic there at least with the texts we’ve already looked at.
Then we could look at Paul’s use of Adam. In Luke’s account of Paul’s preaching in Acts 17 we find him declaring that God made from ‘one man’ ‘every nation.’ If we take him seriously, Paul is arguing as an important plank in his preaching on Athens’ ‘Mars Hill’ that Adam was the father of all mankind.
That one sentence is enough for me, but to go further we could look at 1 Corinthians where he summarises the creation of Adam and Eve in chapter 11 and juxtaposes Adam and Christ in chapter 15. He speaks of Eve as historical in 2 Corinthians 11 and both of them in 1 Timothy 2. These arguments he builds are complex but rely on these figures being people much like the rest of us and always rest on the assumption that the creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 are describing something that really happened. It’s reasonable to ask ‘when’ and it’s reasonable to think this gives us other questions but I don’t think we can assume it’s ‘mythic’ in the popular sense of not being true.
Of course, it is mythic in the sense of being a story that gives meaning to us, but as Lewis famously quips, these are myths that happened.
There’s one further scripture in Paul to turn to, but I’ll briefly mention Jude 14, which identifies Enoch as the seventh from Adam, deliberately identifying both of them as historical figures.
Finally, we should turn to Romans 5, which much like 1 Corinthians 15 juxtaposes Adam and Christ as the two federal heads of the world. Both arguments depend on the equal reality of both Adam and Jesus. It’s not meaningful to be told that because of one man the world is strewn with corpses and because of the other life can reign, if the first man isn’t real. Which man we’re associated with has huge implications for our lives, but for this to make sense they must be real.
For Adam to be our head he must be our ‘father.’ If he isn’t the father of all he cannot be the head of all. That’s the logic of it, that’s why genealogies matter so much in scripture: we’re bonded to one another. Federal heads are always related by lineage. It’s not divine fiat, it works on ordered rules. God comes to reshape these familial ties by making the Father our father and Christ our brother.
This is half of an argument; next week I’ll explore the other side by considering the theological problems that happen is Adam cannot be our ‘head.’
Photo by Gilly Stewart on Unsplash
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