Adam Was A Real Historical Person
Reasons for the Historicity of Adam
There’s been much written of late about the historicity of Adam. So much so the volume of work caught my attention and caused me to ask why. Why is so much attention given to this topic? In other words, why does it matter whether Adam and Eve were real historical people?
Before I answer that question, here is a brief aside regarding hermeneutics: Imagine a man named Steve living in the pre-smartphone days of 1983. Steve wants to read about the latest news. He finds a publication with the correct date at the top, and the cover reads, “COWBOYS 10, BEARS 7”. He begins telling a nearby friend, “Jim, did you hear about this? There were ten cowboys who were surrounded by seven bears! I can’t wait to read what happened!” Jim turns and looks at Steve and asks him, “Are you reading that from a newspaper?” Steve, indignant of being asked such a silly question, answers before looking at what he’s holding, “Of course, this is the newsp…” — Looking down at the publication Steve realizes the reason for his friend’s question. Steve wasn’t holding a newspaper but a publication of Sports Illustrated. Steve had been enamored by the final score of a football game!
Context is key. As Tom Carson once said, “A text without a context is a pretext for a prooftext.” Words are equivocal, not univocal. Words do not have only one meaning but take on meaning based on their context. “God so loved the world” in John 3:16 does not mean that God so loved this green and blue sphere spinning around in orbit. It means God so loved humanity. How do I know that? From the context. The rest of the verse reads, “that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life.” Based on what translation you read, you might read so that “everyone,” “whosoever,” “whoever,” or “everyone who.” Therefore, in this verse, “world” has the meaning of people/humanity. Furthermore, these people have the ability to believe and to have eternal life. The apostle John did not intend for the reader to think of the physical planet to be endowed with the ability to believe in Christ and to escape perishing. Lastly, the broader context makes this meaning of “world” clear in Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus.
I read the Bible literarily, not literally.
The Bible contains many genres of writing: Narrative, poetry, parallelism, letters (epistles), legal (law), and apocalyptic, to name a few. In some places, the reader is supposed to read the words literally because the genre and context call for one to do so. In other places, it would be horrible to read the words literally.
Instead of providing an obvious example from the apocalyptic letter Revelation (which is full of Old Testament symbolism), let’s consider John chapter six. The context is that Jesus had just fed 5,000, and now a large crowd is following him not because they wanted to hear his message but because they wanted their stomachs filled (John 6:26). Therefore, Jesus teaches a lesson in which he states, “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35, 48) and “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves” then he concludes with, “The one who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life.” Many of those listening were taking Jesus’ words literally, so as a result, many left and no longer followed Jesus because they thought he was literally teaching cannibalism. Sometimes, we are to read texts literally, and sometimes, we’re not; it all depends on the literary genre and context.
Genesis & Science
My interpretive framework does not start with science. The field of science is wonderful, and I’m grateful for all the scientific discoveries that have been made over the past centuries. It’s interesting, though, that two scientists can observe the same thing and come to different conclusions based on the scientists’ differing worldviews. Science can tell us how things work, but science does not tell us the existential answers.
Likewise, the Bible has its limits. The Bible is not sufficient for everything; it is not sufficient to teach me long division, how to file my taxes, or how to change my car’s oil. The Bible was not written to be a science textbook or a farmer’s almanac. There is science and history in the Bible, and all the Bible teaches is accurate, but the Bible was not written to teach exhaustively science, government, or history. The Bible is sufficient to do what it intended: teach humanity about God’s redemptive plan through Jesus Christ and make one wise unto salvation.
Genesis & Mythology
It’s worth repeating: My interpretive starting point is the Bible. The Bible interprets the Bible, providing profound depth and clarity from the text. I think there’s a false dichotomy that a person will read Genesis literally or as a myth. I’m arguing that a responsible approach to interpreting Genesis would be to read it literarily. There will be some places to read literally, but literary devices such as parallelism, poetry, and chiasms are used throughout Genesis. However, no text in Genesis should be read as a myth (the reason for this is forthcoming from C.S. Lewis).
My interpretive starting place is not seeking to defend the Bible’s inerrancy and infallibility. I already assume such qualities in the Bible. Fear does not motivate my studying, either. Rather, God’s love for me in Christ is my motivation to read and know my Father better.
I don’t think Genesis was written with the purpose of answering scientific or historical questions; rather, it was written to help wondering-in-the-desert people understand where they came from and who their God is.
The Bible interprets the Bible.
As Tim Mackie of The Bible Project rightly discerns, the mental image of the earth as a sphere floating in space did not exist for the ancient Israelites. They didn’t have pictures from the 1990 Hubble Telescope yet. For them, God created “the earth and the heavens,” which were the ground under their feet and the sky above their heads. To rightly interpret the authorial intent of Genesis, it is essential to be mindful that Genesis is written to specific people who need faith in the promised seed of chapter 3, verse 15 — the one who is to crush the head of the serpent.
Of course, science and Genesis do not contradict each other, and you don’t need to change what Genesis means to get rid of this apparent contradiction. Some people don’t have the Bible as their starting point, but they start with scientific research that is pregnant with secular worldviews. After considering such evidence, they decide to change the Bible to fit into their modernized scientifically-informed worldview. Thus, a mythical interpretation of Genesis is poor hermeneutics as the interpreter eisegetes their worldview into the text, destroying any hopes of drawing out Moses’ original intent for writing Genesis.
There is a time and place to read literature as myth when literature is mythology! The following are just a few wonderful stories to be read as what they truly are — Myth:
🍎 Theogony: The Clash of the Titans
🍎 The Three Sisters of Fate
🍎 Prometheus and the Theft of Fire
🍎 Pandora’s Box
🍎 Theseus and the Minotaur
🍎 Perseus and the Gorgon Medusa
🍎 The Great Trojan War
🍎 The Myth of Icarus
There are vital lessons to be learned from mythology while packaged in an adventurous wrapper. The late author, literary scholar, and theologian C.S. Lewis observed the following regarding the good purpose of myths,
“The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story… by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.”[1]
However, to quickly assume just the first couple chapters of Genesis, or even the first eleven chapters, are a myth doesn’t make sense. First, the original readers would have no reason to assume Genesis should be understood mythologically. Second, the original readers would have no reason to assume that the mythological-reading approach should end after chapter three or eleven — no literary indicators exist.
This is why Lewis wrote the following,
“Whatever these men may be as Biblical critics, I distrust them as critics. They seem to lack literary judgment, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading… If he tells me something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the flavour.”
Then Lewis concludes when talking about the Scriptures,
“I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this.”[2]
10 Reasons for a Literal Historical Adam
1. Since God created the heavens and earth, it reasons that the creation of humans was not mythical. Here’s what God created on each day (days 1–3 are locations for days 4–6 inhabitants):
· Day 1: Light and Dark
· Day 2: Sea and Sky
· Day 3: Fertile Earth
· Day 4: Lights of Day and Night
· Day 5: Fish and Birds
· Day 6: Land Animals and Mankind
My point is that within the Christian worldview, it’s not debatable that God actually created on days 1–6a. So why would it be reasonable to interpret God’s last act of creation as mythical? According to the creation account, Adam was a real historical person.
2. Cain, Able, and Seth came from someone. If Adam and Eve were not real people, are we to assume their children are not real? If so, then do we assume that every person named in the Bible is not real? Cain, Able, and Seth were born by Eve according to Genesis 4:1- 2, 25. Real Eve conceived real Cain, Able, and Seth.[3]
3. A record was kept of Adam’s genealogy. We read in Genesis 5:1, “This is the book of the generations of Adam.” This introductory phrase sets the focus for the rest of chapter five, which traces the genealogy from Adam to Noah. To compile a book cataloging the generations that came from Adam is another significant proof that Adam was a real historical person. Another genealogy tracks Abraham from Adam in 1 Chronicles, chapter one. According to both genealogy authors, Moses and Ezra, Adam was a real historical person.
4. God’s prophetic voice through Hosea compared Judah’s covenant-breaking ways to Adam’s disobedience in Hosea 6:7. Not only is the real historical tribe of Judah compared with Adam, but we also learn in this verse that God had made a covenant with Adam. I find it unconvincing to think that God would initiate a covenant with an imaginary figure. God spoke through His prophet Hosea. According to God (through Hosea), Adam was a real historical person.
5. Similar to #3, Luke 3 details the genealogy of Jesus, which concludes with “the son of Adam, the son of God.” Again, if Adam was not a real historical person, then who is Luke linking Jesus with here? Are the readers of Luke supposed to understand that all the genealogy names are real people except for the second to last one? According to Luke, Adam was a real historical person.
6. Paul explains that humans die because Adam sinned (Romans 5:12, 14). The sheer existence of death is proof of a real historical Adam. Even people who sin in ways that are not like Adam’s sin, all people still die thanks to Adam’s sin. Adam functions as a representative (federal head) of all humanity. According to the real existence of death, Adam was a real historical person.
7. Adam was a type of Christ (Romans 5:14). If Adam were not real, then the real Jesus Christ would be linked with an imaginary character. Christ is the second Adam, the perfect one. Romans 5:15–19 provides ample comparisons between Adam and Christ (offense/grace, condemnation/justification, sin/righteousness, disobedience/obedience, and death/life). According to the apostle Paul, Adam was a real historical person.
8. Paul references Genesis 2:7 in 1 Corinthians 15:45, “Thus it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being.’” Paul uses this reference to contrast natural and spiritual beings. Paul concludes, “The last Adam was a life-giving spirit” in that Christ’s resurrection gave him an imperishable body. For Paul to identify Jesus Christ as “the last Adam” is ridiculous if Adam was not real. It would be like one of Christ’s aliases was “the last Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.” A few verses later, Paul continues comparing with Adam by writing, “The first man is from the earth, earthly; the second Man is from heaven.” Paul clearly believes Adam was a real historical person who was the first man on earth. Jesus is compared to a real historical Adam.
9. In Paul’s argument for male headship in 1 Timothy 2, his basis for his argument is rooted in a real historical Adam, “For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve” (1 Timothy 2:13). Paul’s argument completely falls apart if Adam was not a real person. Again, according to the apostle Paul, Adam was a real historical person.
10. Jude references Adam, “In the seventh generation from Adam,” to put a time stamp on Enoch’s people in Jude’s letter. It’s a known historical fact in Jude’s mind that Adam existed, allowing Jude to compare a time for Enoch. According to Jude, Adam was a real historical person.
Conclusion
I don’t think some well-intended Christians understand the organic connection between the Old and New Testaments. The entire Bible is like a tall, completed Jenga tower. When people want to remove the Adam of history, then it’s like they grab the block on the very bottom first row. In short, if you take out the real historical Adam, you lose the credibility of Moses, Hosea, Luke, Paul, and Jude while causing the comparisons with Christ to be nonsensical and the Bible’s veracity to come crashing down.
People don’t have to believe in the teachings of the Bible. Many don’t, and that’s life. But what you can’t do is believe in portions of the Bible but think other sections are made-up or mythical. You can’t do this because the Bible doesn’t allow you to. There are very important connections between the Old to New Testament. Passages of the Bible are not individual branches on a tree but links of a chain.
According to God (the author of the Bible), Adam was a real historical person.
