With extremely remote regions like Australia…just one God-led trip (in the context of a lost voyager, or deliberate exploration), bringing just one person to Australia soon enough, would accompish the thorough 100% common descent from Adam & Eve, as well as multiple other mating pairs.
Paul would be in the clear …
Ok, I’ll bite. What do you think he’s talking about here?
I agree there are certainly other interpretations besides Augustinian original sin, but my understanding was that most interpretations involved some variation on that theme…
I see your point. Fwiw, I also feel uneasy with this interpretive approach. I’m just exploring it for the sake of discussion.
I think in my mind I had fused @Swamidass’s approach with discussions of the Great Leap Forward. In other words, into this community of 99.99%-human beings, God gifts Adam & Eve, and they become some sort of catalyst for a Great Leap Forward, which then diffuses through the nearly-human community as they intermarry and now become Adamite with all the trappings of advanced culture (and sin, too). The benefit here is that one can say that all behaviorally modern H. sapiens are descendants of Adam and Eve, everyone from Amazonian hunter-gatherers to the Sentinelese and back again. Mabel is admittedly not included, but everyone else is.
Of course, this is rather speculative and does violence to the Biblical narrative in I’m sure many ways, but at any rate this is why intuitively I was rejecting a model where the Amazonian folks of Paul’s time were excluded from original sin.
There is no reason for Paul to be speaking about people in the distant past because there is no way to share the Gospel with those in the past. This does no mean they are not saved, but they would have accountability and paths. This comes out in Jesus’ words (Matt 12:38-45) and is sometimes called different “dispensations” (without at all going into full blown dispensationalism). Those before the Resurrection cannot be preached the Resurrection. Before this time, those that followed the true God were often called “God-fearers” and included people outside the Jewish nation (e.g. Melchizedek), which Hebrews appeals to as the higher priesthood from where Aaron and Abraham derive their true authority. All these hit at God’s work to reach people outside of the explicit declarations of Jesus, before Jesus was revealed. For this reason, Paul is not talking about the distant past when he is reasoning about how to engage the Gentiles alive in his day, even the God-fears alive in his day. His message for that moment, not as a comprehensive treatise on all ages.
The whole point includes the fact that Scripture does not talk about genetic ancestry, nor does it explicitly spell out that there was no intermixing with Adam’s line (it suggests the opposite), so it was a mistake to think that ancestry in theology has meant anything other than genealogical ancestry.
One could make the case that leaving the Amazonian hunter-gatherer outside the line is acceptable because Paul did not know that the Amazonian hunter-gatherer existed. Depending on the entailments of being left outside the line, there may be no problem with this. It even might have been a good check against “westernizing” and “civilizing the natives” by some missionaries. Maybe these no-Adamites would be equally human but under a different dispensation.
This is actually a fairly common view among missionaries and theologians (the person out in the wilderness who has never heard the gospel, what of them?).
However, as we have seen, that does not seem to be what we expect from the science. Even if they are subject to a different dispensation, they are still likely descendents of Adam, especially at this time. Even if they were not, there is no harm in giving them the name of the one they worship, or calling to Jesus.
So it is possible that totally universal ancestry at AD 1 may not be a necessary claim for everyone, and there is certainly theological ways to make sense of it, even if you think descent from Adam is necessary. Essentially, one just posits another “dispensation” about which we have no or little knowledge because it does not apply to us. We can trust that God is loving, good, and just. Still, as I have shown, this is not necessary because it appears that even insisting on universal ancestry at AD 1 still leaves you with an Adam as early as 6 kya if that is desired.
Except we have to bracket “humanity” somehow, especially in light of science. There is no sharp dividing line between human and non-human line in the past, moreover, there were whole continents of people that existed of which Paul had no knowledge. He certainly meant everyone he knew existed at his moment in time, and he thought this should be preached to the “ends of the earth”. So it seems reasonable to think he was making this claim about the people on Earth he did not know existed yet. However, it does not appear relevant to those in the very distant past. He is not talking about them, it seems, as he makes his argument, as that is not where the controversies of the day he is responding to are situated.
Have you read John Walton’s book on Adam and Eve? Or the Haarsma’s book Origins? It is a standard observation that Romans 5:12-14 is referring to the Adamic law. Paul says that before the “law” was given, there was wrongdoing, but it was not held against anyone. If that law is the Mosaic law, then Adam’s sin should not have been held against him. It all makes sense when we look at the Book of Enoch, as we see all sorts of wrongdoing (e.g. the Serpent) before Adam “sins”. Paul here is pointing out that there is all sorts of wrongdoing in the world before Adam (he does not care to disagree with Enoch) but there was something special about Adam’s wrongdoing (that makes it even worse than Eve’s wrongdoing). This is how he begins to define “accountability to sin”, which is different than mere wrongdoing, especially if we are not held accountable for it. Once again, given the precise context it is impossible to read this as the Mosaic law; it must be the Adamic law, because it had to be given before Adam sinned, because Adam’s sin is predicated on it.
THat is what many people are thinking. They think Paul is teaching that there was something specific about precise nature of Adam’s wrongdoing that changed the dispensation for all of us. And this specificity is what leads to specific antidote of the particulars of the Gospel we find in the NT.
Inerrantists have no problem with this (I am one of them). They care about authorial intent, use of language, cultural context, etc. At issue is, “what does Scripture intend to teach” and is it at “error”? The answer, for inerrantists, is always “no, it is not in error”, even though there is disagreement about what it might intention to teach. Though I do not specifically affirm them the Chicago statements on these matters is helpful.
At issue for them (and many like Keller) is to affirm that God did something personal in our original story beyond natural processes. They see high need to affirm this for a wide range of reasons. Some of them are instinctual, but some of them are theological and cultural. It partly a guttural instinct to proclaim the obvious fact that we are more than just animals and that scientism if false. There is a lot of “right” here, even we find they are ultimately wrong. And it is critical to emphasize they are not in violation of the science.
They are my concern. Your description of them is not accurate. Often they have been presented a false view of science that places them in conflict, so they must choose between the two. If they choose Jesus, I think they chose the better thing. The error is not with them but with those who misrepresented science to then.
I am happy to talk about all the empty chairs, including this one. In my conversations with YECs and at college students, that is exactly what I talk about. See this Veritas forum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ-l_vVo1W8 However, there is a different empty chair here at BioLogos.
Ive been focusing on an accurate account of the science, not a specific model. That is one way to look at it that I encourage alongside all other speculation, but I do not specifically endorse this model, or any other.
I am one of them too, and I am aware what they care about. What I said was that “most popular, working definitions of inerrancy” — used by preachers and folks in the pews, not academics — would have difficulty working through all this. For instance, if Adam & Eve were 60kya and pastoralism and farming are known from the archaeological record to have come about no earlier than, say, 15kya, and you see that Cain & Abel were pastoralists and farmers, and Scripture clearly says Eve gave birth to them, then many laymen and (laywomen) will really struggle with what to do with this. It’s fine to nuanced inerrantists like you and me. But frankly most American Christians these days have sort of a hard time with nuance. (I say that with sadness, not as a zinger.)
You are misreading what I wrote. It is the full context of Gen 1-4 that pushes people there, not Genesis 2, which is discussing only Adam’s creation. Taking Gen 1-4 into account, many have inferred an epoch before Adam.
The Book of Enoch (perhaps the most important), and other midrash on Genesis. The myth of Lilith is particularly important. The cosmic fall before Adam theory. The old-earth young-life theory. The gap theory. The two-seed theory. We could go on and on. I’m even leaving out the many interpretations declared heresy (e.g. variants of polygenesis). I’m not even a scholar on this, but merely a scientist, so someone with more knowledge than me can give more examples.
They key thing is that there are so many unanswered questions in the Genesis story that it invites speculation, and has for thousands of years. The “traditional” way of interpreting Genesis embraces this speculation, without dogmatizing it most cases.
That has not been my experience. The conversation with those of other beliefs is pretty fun. It is very human to speculate and imagine how to complete a story. This is part of the timeless allure of Genesis, and why I love reading it so much. I’m not being laughed at, let alone being laughed out of the room.
I agree, which is why the fact that we can place Adam as early as 6 kya is notable. They can keep quite a bit of what they think they need to, whether or not we think they need to. I have yet to come across an average joe unwilling to speculate about Adam’s line breeding with others, especially because of Genesis 6:2 and other passages. The story invites speculation, and there are ways to show things they care about are not countered by science. Still science does tell them things about things they are curious about, but do not care so much about. That reframes the conversation almost instantly into a non-combative exchange of stories.
I believe that rather than innovating, Paul has the same understanding of Adam as can be found in earlier Second Temple Period Judaism, and was preserved in mainstream first century Jewish writings, that although Adam’s sin brought eternal death into the world as a punishment for sin (being the first time that anyone had known and transgressed God’s law), Adam’s descendants were not punished with mortality and sinfulness as a result of his sin. Paul says “death spread to all people because all sinned” (New English Translation), just as 2 Baruch does at the end of the first century.
2 Baruch 54:
15 For, although Adam sinned first and has brought death upon all who were not in his own time, yet each of them who has been born from him has prepared for himself the coming torment. And further, each of them has chosen for himself the coming glory
19 Adam is, therefore, not the cause, except only for himself, but each of us has become our own Adam.
James H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (vol. 1; New York; London: Yale University Press, 1983), 640.
@Jonathan_Burke, I believe this is how many communities in the Eastern Orthodox tradition would characterize the situation.
But I’m a little fuzzy on how we get from one part of 2 Baruch to the other part:
Verse 15: “… although Adam sinned first and has brought death [aka, “mortality”] upon all who were not in [Paul’s] time…”
Verse 19: Adam is, therefore, not the cause, except only for himself."
Is this just sloppy theological thinking? Or is there something I’m missing? Based on 19, if Adam had never sinned, any one of his offspring still had the possibility of sinning.
If this is so, how does Verse 15 mean anything at all?
That is why there are books written on texts such as 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra. This is not soundbite material, you need to understand the writer’s entire theology. That’s not something I can articulate for you in a paragraph.
I know you are doing your very best. But frankly, all you really mean here is that there is a corpus of rhetoric where the commentor takes a bag of convoluted statements, some definitely contradicting the other, and tries to explain that the writer of Baruch was being coherent when, in no uncertain words, completely contradicts himself by the light of any conventional logic equation.
it’s one of the reasons I gave up theology. I love grays. I love colors that are really just grays. But I don’t love a pile of sticks lying on the ground and having someone tell me that it is really a house.
Would it really require live cover (like Thoroughbreds) ? This is getting convoluted.
No that is not what I mean. There’s a well defined tradition of anthropological etiology of evil in Second Temple Period Judaism. This view holds that moral evil originates from humans, not from evil supernatural beings (belief in a devil and demons is rejected). This is also accompanied by a belief in anthropological dualism, the idea that humans have both good and evil impulses, and that these impulses are the cause of human action, and result in moral judgment by God. In Second Temple Judaism and later rabbinic Judaism these came to be known as the yetzer ra and the yetzer tov. In Qumran texts and some early Jewish-Christian literature these impulses are sometimes represented figuratively as two spirits or angels. Importantly, another common strand of this anthropological understanding, is that Adam was created mortal. This means that they didn’t think Adam’s sin resulted in mortality and innate sinfulness for Adam and every human being (the original sin view).
If you can show me that when early Jewish writers said Adam was created mortal they really meant he actually only became mortal when he sinned, and if you can show me that the Greek and Hebrew words for “death” actually mean “mortality” and not “death”, then please go right ahead. Alternatively you can just submit a paper to a journal, explaining why the last 20 years of Second Temple Period study has gone horribly astray.
Well… why not? One, mathematically speaking, it really only takes one here and one there, to cover the whole world. And if God can make 2 fertile humans from dust … I think he can arrange a couple of lost sailing vessles to get where they should go…
This 20 year body of Second Temple Period study … this is by Christian writers, yes?
The Jewish writers I’ve read don’t think Adam “became mortal when he sinned”. They think he lost access to the Tree of Life, and so - - being mortal all along - - he wasn’t going to last much more than 800 or 900 years… .poor fellow…
Shipped frozen semen would be more efficient. Though, as noted, that’s not allowed in the Thoroughbred race horse industry.
Christian and Jewish writers.
Now you’re agreeing with me. Now you can see how Baruch isn’t contradicting himself.
That’s always been my position about Adam and his status as mortal vs. immortal.
As to Verse 15 from Baruch? Totally worthless in the English form. I feel like I’m reading a page from the Breeches Bible…
In seeking the sources of human nature, scientists have for some time appreciated it would involve both “evo-devo”, and that we are more ignorant in the mechanisms of development of a given genome than in its formation throughout history. (Am I wrong in claiming this, @Swamidass ?) At any rate, as the wide variety of views expressed in the thread indicates, there is no agreement on an approach attractive to both scientists and theologians. IMHO @AMWolfe has expressed the approach that offers the most promise.
So much is dependent on just exactly one means by “being human”. A materialistic scientist might well be satisfied with “anyone with the Homo sapiens genome”. Theologians may insist that any such creature must also be aware of his/her ‘creatureliness’ and seek some sort of relationship with the Creator of all things. With these requirements as ‘givens’, we can make some postulates (not wild speculations) that may suggest worthwhile investigations that may lead to testable theories. One such postulate is that the Great Leap Forward marks the extremely short time period when one or more Homo sapiens attained that degree of awareness and gave rise to the story of Adam & Eve that appears in Genesis. The speed with which this awareness spread, first thru the middle East and Europe and then globally, precludes it’s being purely genetic; i.e. a favorable mutation spread thru sexual reproduction. It was as if the Homo sapiens brain had been newly programmed. It must also have been, in a sense, epigenetic, but one that could be passed on to future generations. (Yes, Lamarkian.)
As noted above, any such postulate(s), to be worthwhile in a scientific sense, should lead us to the kind of investigations that would establish it as a testable theory. In past threads I have offered one area of promise as looking into how DNA-methylation acts uniquely in the brain. I just found another in Wikipedia:
Microglia in the developing brain
As the neural tissue matures, there is widespread apoptotic cell death of both neurons and glia, and the embryonic and postnatal microglia are involved in the phagocytosis of these apoptotic bodies, implying that embryonic microglia are involved in determining the circuitry of the developing CNS [6]. It has been proposed that microglia may actively kill some neurons during the period of cell death, but to date, this has only been convincingly demonstrated in vitro [7]. The role of microglia in sculpting nervous system circuitry during this period of development, when there is exuberant axonal and synaptic connectivity, is a subject of much interest.
I would appreciate comments from any of you experts out there, since all this is ‘above my pay grade’.
Al Leo
Apart from what Joshua said previously, the interpretation of this as pre-Mosaic law goes back at least 300 years to Isaac La Peyrère (1596-1676), who was prompted by this passage to propose the existence of humans before Adam.
I would say that scientists are very aware of the mechanisms within evo-devo, but are ignorant of the fine details. To use an analogy, if you take an exotic car to a mechanic he might know the specifics of how the engine works, but he has a pretty good idea of the mechanisms that drive an internal combustion engine. As to humans specifically, there are obvious ethical issues in studying human embryology and primate embryology in general so the specifics of human development may be a mystery for quite some time.[quote=“aleo, post:118, topic:36985”]
So much is dependent on just exactly one means by “being human”. A materialistic scientist might well be satisfied with “anyone with the Homo sapiens genome”. Theologians may insist that any such creature must also be aware of his/her ‘creatureliness’ and seek some sort of relationship with the Creator of all things. With these requirements as ‘givens’, we can make some postulates (not wild speculations) that may suggest worthwhile investigations that may lead to testable theories. One such postulate is that the Great Leap Forward marks the extremely short time period when one or more Homo sapiens attained that degree of awareness and gave rise to the story of Adam & Eve that appears in Genesis. The speed with which this awareness spread, first thru the middle East and Europe and then globally, precludes it’s being purely genetic; i.e. a favorable mutation spread thru sexual reproduction. It was as if the Homo sapiens brain had been newly programmed. It must also have been, in a sense, epigenetic, but one that could be passed on to future generations. (Yes, Lamarkian.)
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Even within science there is always going to be an arbitrary line between H. sapiens and not H. sapiens since it is a continuum. It’s a bit like drawing a line between short and tall or young and old.
We also need to keep in mind that the Great Leap Forward may have been driven more by discovery than a sudden increase in brain power. Humans 500 years ago were just as intelligent as humans today, but they didn’t have airplanes, computers, or spaceships landing on the moon. The emergence of farming and civilization may have come about the same way that modern technologies came about, through the passing down of inventions and discoveries.
Epigenetics is also a hot topic, but one that is often credited with way more than it can achieve. Nearly all epigenetic changes are wiped away during gamete formation so there is very little epigenetic information passed from one generation to the next. Obviously, changes that occur in a brain cell are not passed on to the next generation because brain cells are not used in reproduction (insert joke here). Epigenetics, for the most part, develops after fertilization, not before. As a comparison, the amount of epigenetics woo in the public sphere is about the same as the amount of quantum woo. If you aren’t getting your info on epigenetics from a scientist who does research in the field, then I would look at the info with a lot of skepticism. That isn’t to say that everything about epigenetics should just be dismissed out of hand, only that there is a lot of misinformation out there.
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