According to here Were Adam and Eve Historical Figures? - Common Question - BioLogos theologian Henri Blocher and others have suggested that God entered into a special relationship with a pair of ancient historical representatives of humanity about 200,000 years ago in Africa. Where can I find quotes of Blocher or others saying such a thing?
There is a document available from the American Scientific Affiliation which surveys the views of many of the most well known Christian scholars and pastors about Adam and Eve. You can read/download it here.
It quotes Blocher as saying he thinks they lived around 40,000 years ago, but that was from a book published in 1997 so his view may well have changed…?
“Though we feel uncomfortable with all the uncertainties when we try to correlate scientific data and the results of a sensible interpretation of Genesis 1.4, we may maintain as plausible the hypothesis that the biblical Adam and Eve were the first parents of our race, some 40,000 years ago.”
Henri Blocher, Original Sin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 42
Close on the fantasy end of the spectrum to the awesome opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey
Also given that it mentions him and others, it means that it’s not a direct quote of one individual but a collective concept of many being merged into a sort of paraphrased quote. The others includes a wide range of people such as RJ Berry who states that it has happened sometime since human emergence 200k years ago. Page 18 on this link.
https://www.scienceandchristianbelief.org/serve_pdf_free.php?filename=SCB+23-1+Berry.pdf
Throughout that is paper he cites several others as those who believe it happened sometime after 200k but does not hammer down on a specific span. That’s possibly what influenced the articles wording.
I don’t think either of these are correct. Whether 200,000 or 40,000 ya, both would make Adam and Eve practically irrelevant to human civilization. Even the 40,000 is 4 times longer than the existence of human civilization, which would mean that for 30,000 years Adam and Eve changed nothing in how humans lived from how our ancestors lived millions of years before that. For that reason I think we should put more trust in how the Bible suggest a much later time for Adam and Eve. According the Bible the occupation of both of their children was not hunter-gatherers but agriculture – herding and farming. Thus 6,000 to 10,000 years ago is the right time frame if you believe in an historical Adam and Eve. Otherwise I don’t see a point in believing in an historical Adam and Eve at all – you might as well just make them into metaphors for humanity.
I think this 40,000 to 200,000 year ago stuff comes from forcing too much inconsistent literalism and science onto the Bible – like trying to make Adam and Eve the sole genetic progenitors of the homo sapiens species. But this doesn’t really agree with either the science or the Bible – which makes it little more than a total fantasy. It doesn’t agree with science because the genetic evidence just doesn’t match such an extreme population bottleneck. A bottle neck of 10,000 or so around that time, yes, but not 2 or even 8 (Noah’s ark). And it doesn’t agree with the Bible because the Bible describes an earth filled with people in the time when Cain lived.
Yes the homo-sapiens species arose 100,000 to 200,000 years ago in a population remnant of global glaciation surviving in southern Africa. But that doesn’t mean this is the time of Adam and Eve or the beginning of humanity, for there is no reason to equate humanity with the biological species. As important as our genetic inheritance from this remnant may be, it is not the only inheritance or the most important one. There is also an inheritance of the mind with the ideas of intangibles like love, justice, and what means to be a person – ideas which may have come from God via Adam and Eve, thus an inheritance making us literally God’s children. If we have such a thing from God then we would expect a radical transformation in how we lived as a result of it. To date Adam and Eve from 40,000 to 200,000 years ago is basically to deny the existence of any such inheritance and declare that humans are no more than primate species with delusions about talking to some great spirit father in the sky.
Speaking of which, did this mean our earliest ancestors where monotheists, or has the Urreligion been proven false?
What do you think?
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Why do you equate Ur with our earliest ancestors?
The most we can say is that if our earliest ancestors were monotheists then this is at some time before Ur and any written history.
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Oh sorry, I didn’t mean the city. I’m pretty sure it’s a German term about the first religion.
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Yeah, all German nouns are capitalized. 
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