Why I Think Adam was a Real Person in History

[bluebird (Robin)]

Hey Christie…Thanks for being a moderator. BTW----Does that mean you work for Biologos? or are you a volunteer?

“This invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to do it, because they will not practice their memory…You can offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things … but only appear wise” — a quote from Plato’s play Phaedrus found in Rosalind Thomas’s book "Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens…

I think my original statement (somewhere along the trail of blurbs here) was that people have been seen to have the capacity to hand stories down through the generations. And you responded somewhere here that you believe that for something to have been transmitted “hundreds of thousands of years” it would require generational and/or cultural continuity…

Possibly true, although how do we define that anyway? When I did some family history, I found a detail that one of my parents had once mentioned — and this detail was encased in a larger history of that family name — done by 20th cousins (or thereabouts). This represented some piece of history that dated back 500 years.

True, 500 years is a hiccup compared to 200,000. But I am not sure how much generational or cultural continuity the memory represents.

But in my original remark, I was not originally (at least) thinking “hundreds of thousands of years” But we are talking about the Garden of Eden pericope and so I suppose that we ARE talking that long ago.

However that works out, it IS known that oral culture passed along stories of events that happened millennia earlier — in some well-known cases – and also that states (such as the Incas, just for example) controlled the passing along of stories that were beneficial to the states — and religious traditions especially were closely guarded and maintained.

See, for example, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historic Methodology by Jan Vansina (pub 1961) on that and other things.

I am not going to quote all this. It is an interesting subject. Barber and Barber in their book When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth (pub 2002) is a good one, and it does include “the Klamath Story” — something I think I mentioned earlier — and which Native American activists also love to cite — as an example of an account of the eruption of Mt Mazama ( which led subsequently to Crater Lake in Oregon) and noted that the story, while mythical in the form recorded in 1865, recounts an event “ice-dated to 7,675 years ago.” The book has other data on other cultures—New Zealand cultures where word for word accuracy in repetition was demanded in public performances, or death was the result…and Hawaiian and African cultures as well .

These may be more recent than 200,000 years ago — but they at least cast doubt on the idea that it is impossible for something to have been carried about for that length of time. As I said (I think), I have not settled on a lot of the details of this pericope, but I do think it represents an account of something that happened long ago and has been passed down in some form.

OK…Thanks for your thoughts, though.

[bluebird (Robin)]

what do you base your “inclination” on…??

[pevaquark (Matthew Pevarnik)]

@gbrooks9

Which seems more reasonable to you? That Exodus uses a plural text for a single calf, because the scribe wanted to focus attention on the future theme of Rehoboam’s golden calves?

Or that the Exodus text is the original (despite not making much sense), and that Rehoboam wanted to
draw attention to the heresy of the Exodus days and all the rebellious Hebrew who lost their lives doing so?

It almost seems like whoever was recording the text was willing to just change it to whatever they were inspired to change it to. Obviously it wasn’t really ‘both’ which goes to show us that even the OT narratives or ‘historical’ books always tended to serve greater purposes.

Tying it back to this Adam discussion, then it seems that perhaps the inspiration of ‘Adam’ served more of a theological purpose than be concerned with recording specifically what happened.

[Christy (Christy Hemphill)]

@bluebird

Does that mean you work for Biologos? or are you a volunteer?

I’m a volunteer.

Total side note, but I just read up a bunch on Klamath verbs for a paper I was writing.

I’m still skeptical. I think Genesis records the much more recent oral history of the Israelite people. But, that’s the whole point of this site is people get to throw out their favorite views and toss them around a little.

[pevaquark (Matthew Pevarnik)]

@bluebird

and also that states (such as the Incas, just for example) controlled the passing along of stories that were beneficial to the states — and religious traditions especially were closely guarded and maintained.

That sounds similar to @gbrooks9 and his hypothesis about why there are two golden calves told in one version compared to one in the other though he may not be saying that necessarily.

In all this though, I’m assuming you are thinking along the lines that the Bible as we have it was perfectly passed around in oral tradition for a very long time so we get all the specific details going back how far might you suggest? Is that correct?

[bluebird (Robin)]

Well…I will have to read up on gbrooks remarks. The reference about the Incas was a brief illustration of how various ethnic groups sought to maintain their stories – even groups with written alphabets as well as those who relied on orality for passing information along. It was just an example There are many — even the Aztecs who did have writing still nonetheless had schools for teaching classical traditions to everyone — there were systems of sanctions and rewards “meted out to those whose duty it is to know the tradition accoridng to whether they do or do not succeed in reciting it without making any mistakes” — see the book by Vansina mentioned elsewhere.

That was the context of my remark. And my assumption is that it seems possible for people to have passed along a story or series of them – whether “perfectly” or not is a matter for another discussion — for quite a long time…