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In the second century A.D., astronomers were troubled by the retrograde motion of Mars. At a particular time, such as midnight, on a string of successive evenings, they would chart the planet’s location at a particular azimuth and degree of elevation. Things would go well for a time, with the week’s sightings nicely marching from left to right. But then something strange happened. The progression halted and reversed itself into an elliptical loop before resuming its original pattern. I don’t mean you could see the loop de loop or zigzag with a single glance. Rather, it just showed up when they plotted the readings over a span of time.

Ptolemy offered an explanation, consistent with two false presuppositions—that the earth was at the center of the solar system (indeed, the universe) and that celestial objects and motions were unfailingly circular and spherical. So how does one accommodate an elliptical motion in the heavens? By postulating “eccentrics” (which displaced the earth slightly from the center of planetary revolution), “epicycles on deferents” (which sent the planets on little revolutions around points on the larger revolutionary track), and “equants” (whose off-centered, uneven, but equi-angular pie slices of the revolution’s circumference meant speed-ups and slow-downs to accommodate the varying trip-segment sizes).

What!?

Exactly.

It was incredibly complex, a tribute to human will and ingenuity, a testimony to the way in which we can engineer explanations to cover just about anything if we don’t mind looking absurd. Fortunately, Copernicus and Kepler came along to sort things out. For one thing, the Earth, along with Mars, revolves around the Sun, and the apparent retrograde motion is just a parallax illusion as we pass the red planet on our swing around the Sun. Besides, elliptical motion is commonplace in the solar system as the planets slingshot around the Sun.

Which brings us to theological liberalism, which hates talk of the historical Adam. Just when they think they’ve evaporated him in the “myths” of Genesis, he crops up in New Testament texts as a real man. There he is in Romans 5, as in “by one man sin entered into the world” and as in “death reigned from Adam to Moses.” Then he appears in 1 Corinthians 15: “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive”; and again, “The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.” Not to mention the genealogy in Luke 3 and the talk of Eve’s and his problems in 1 Timothy 2. It’s enough to make a Tübingen adept long for Martian loops.

Thus begins the hermeneutical epicycling. In the Anchor Bible commentary on Romans, Joseph Fitzmyer writes: “According to Bultmann . . . Paul is using in this paragraph a Gnostic myth about the original man. . . . This is hardly an accurate description of Paul’s teaching in this paragraph. If there is a myth behind the discussion, it is not the Gnostic myth of the Urmensch, but that of Gen. 2:4b-3:24, to which Paul alludes . . .” He concludes that “Paul has historicized the symbolic Adam of Genesis.”

At the risk, indeed the certainty, of sounding like a total rustic, I ask how one successfully historicizes a symbolic figure? I assume it’s more than embellishment, as with Parson Weems’s story of George Washington and the cherry tree. Or a bit of humor, as in the origin of the “adam’s apple.” It would seem to require a straight-faced assertion of detailed accomplishment, as for biographers. Like claiming that Uncle Sam swam ashore at Normandy the night before D-Day and softened up the German defenses? Like insisting that Redcoats were intimidated by a flesh-and-blood fellow named Yankee Doodle who stuck a feather in his cap and called it “macaroni”? Like reporting that Lady Liberty actually averted her eyes on 9/11?

Ingenious But False

Let’s go back to science for a moment, and take a look at phlogiston. Scientists used to believe in it before Antoine Lavoisier discovered oxygen in the 18th century. In the century before this discovery, they thought that combustible items contained a substance called phlogiston, which was released by fire. When they saw the flame flicker and die in a bell jar, they theorized that the ambient air had become so phlogisticated that it couldn’t take any more. (They didn’t understand that the oxygen had just played out.)

But then they had a problem. Magnesium ribbon got heavier when it burned, when it was reduced to ash. How could this be when the phlogiston had been released? Undeterred, the phlogistonites stipulated that their fictitious element had negative weight, somewhat like helium, and it lent buoyancy to an object. Release it and the residue is heavier. Ingenious, but false. Magnesium ribbon gets heavier when burned because it weds itself to another element with weight, oxygen, and becomes magnesium oxide.

Theologians are chemists of a sort, some working with hermeneutical phlogiston’s of their own devising, whether JEDP, deutero-Isaiah, or the Petrine-school who authored 1 Peter. Barth seems to have concocted a purely conceptual Adam who vitiates the real Adam. In his commentary on Romans, we read:

Who then is this one man? Adam? Yes! Adam is the one through whom death entered the world. For he committed the invisible sin, and fell from God. But the Adam who did this is not Adam in his historical unrelatedness, but Adam in his non-historical relation to Christ.

[But why not both? Why two Adams when one will do quite nicely? Can’t he can “walk and chew gum,” i.e. eat real forbidden fruit and lead mankind into ruin at the same time?]

Barth continues:

How could we recognize the invisible sin of the disobedient Adam, unless we perceived the invisible righteousness of Christ obedient unto death? Whence have we the competence to understand what “fall-from God” means? And how could we form any conception of Adam’s fall, unless we had in mind the exaltation of Christ from death to Life?

[Easy. God said, “Don’t do it.” Adam did it. Bang! No reference to Jesus there.]

More Barth:

Adam has no existence on the plane of history and of psychological analysis. He exists as the first Adam, as the type of the second Adam who is to come, as the shadow cast by His light. He exists as the “Moment” which forms the background from which Christ advances to victory, the scene where the world and mankind are transformed from fall to righteousness, from death to life, and from old to new. Adam has no separate, positive existence. He does not revolve around his own pole; he is not a second factor. He exists only when he is dissolved, and he is affirmed only when in Christ he is brought to nought. It is evident that neither he nor the Christ risen and appointed to the life of God, the Christ of whom he is the projection, can be “historical” figures.

[Oops. Did we just lose the historical Jesus too? And what’s this dissolving? Is that like Henry VIII’s being absorbed into Thomas Cranmer who succumbed to the history-destroying solvent of the 39 (or 42) articles? I know I’m not exhibiting the gravitas and deference due those adept at parsing Geschicten, but it’s hard to not laugh out loud when the atmosphere is getting so phlogisticated.]

Foraging for Adam

As I continue to forage through the stacks at the Vanderbilt Divinity School library, I come across C.K. Barrett’s Harper’s commentary, where Adam becomes a literary device. We read of “the proper name Adam (added because Paul needs another name to balance Christ, whom in any case he intends to describe as the last Adam.)”

And then there is Robert Jewett in the Hermeneia Romans, who asserts “the likelihood that Paul derived this [Adam-Jesus] comparison from Gnostic or proto-gnostic sources close to early Christianity.” In the same series, writing on I Corinthians, Hans Conzelmann serves up dog’s breakfast of primalities, into which we may confidently place Adam: “The one concept primal man is applied to heterogeneous things: the macrocosmos, the protoplast, the prototype, the redeemer (“redeemed redeemer”), to the God “Man” in Gnosticism . . .”

Sigh.

If Paul and Luke had just had the decency to put their references to Adam in scare quotes, we would be fine. But the modernists pretty much agree that they believed in an actual man Adam whose life was momentous. Bless these biblical writers’ primitive hearts.

So sophisticates lead us to believe that these texts are no better than, “Just as the Lady of the Lake gave Arthur Excalibur from the stone, so does Christ give us the Sword of the Spirit,” or, “As Romulus and Remus drew sustenance from the wolf on the banks of the Tiber, we gain spiritual nutrients from the Jesus.”

As my daughter has taught me to say, I say to them, “Knock yourselves out.”

As for me and my house, we’ll stick with the literal, historical, uneccentric Adam, as taught in the Testaments Old and New.

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.

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