Historical Genesis: Adam and Eve (S07, E04)

Greetings, and welcome to the Faith Chapel Podcast. My name is Jason,

and I am the pastor of Faith Chapel.

In the podcast, we are going through an eight-episode series looking at whether

Genesis should be taken as history or mainly as fiction.

In this seventh season of the podcast, we will look at different aspects of

what is known as primeval history, the first 11 chapters of Genesis,

and discover if the Bible's account of the origins of the human race can be trusted.

Today, we dive into the topic of the historic Adam and Eve.

Were Adam and Eve Neanderthals or Cro-Magnum humanoids, or were those creations

of God that lived before human beings were created in the image of God?

Thanks for joining us as we dive into this discussion.

We are going to be talking about the historical Adam and Eve today and looking

at some different views about what that means for,

like we would all know the name Neanderthal and what that means for us and trying

to decipher exactly what the Genesis account is saying and what we should take from that.

So to begin tonight, I have a quote from an apologist, someone who defends the

Christian faith by the name of Gavin Ortland, and he talks about the difference

between historicity and literalism.

And this is what he says.

Historicity is about whether a text is talking about historical events.

Literalism has to do with how those historical events are related.

And it's pretty obvious that the Bible is very keen on talking about historical

events in ways that are not literalistic.

So an example of this is in the book of Exodus.

After the Israelites come through the Red Sea on dry ground,

there is the account of that event, the actual historical event of them walking

through the sea on dry ground.

But in the next chapter, it's more of a poetic description of what happens.

For instance, one of the phrases in that is, by the blast of God's nostrils,

he drove back the waters of the sea.

And that is not to be taken literally, but it is something that is like a metaphor.

It's poetic language trying to describe what happened. And so there's definite

evidence in the scripture.

That some things are not meant to be taken literally, but they are symbolic

and they are poetic descriptions of what has happened.

There's the account of walking through on dry land, and there's another account

of walking through the sea on dry ground.

One of them is talking literally what happened, and the other one is not.

But both of them are telling the

story of what happened. Both of them have historical realities to them.

One of them is just literal and the other one is not.

And so there's a difference in trying to decipher what is literal and what is

historic, but may have poetic flares to it.

That's one of the things that as Bible readers, we need to comprehend and we need to understand.

Moving that into our discussion about Adam and Eve, there are some things that

some people take as historic, but not literal,

when we're looking at the story of Adam and Eve, particularly in Genesis 2,

where God formed Adam out of

the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

It's also very important and very closely tied to whether or not Adam and Eve

were actual people, but Genesis 3,

and that account of the fall where sin enters the world and the brokenness that results from it.

Both of those need to be taken together to consider who Adam and Eve were and

what that means for us as human beings.

In that same podcast, I got the quote from Gavin Ortlund from.

He goes on to say this about the historical Adam and Eve.

I think it's absolutely imperative to retain a historical Adam and Eve and a

historical fall, by which I mean is minimally that Adam and Eve were real people in history.

You can point over and look and see Adam walking around and Eve,

and that the historical fall was a real event, and that this has a universal

and ultimate explanatory significance for what it means to be human.

In other words, Genesis 2-3 is telling us about real events in history that

tell us most deeply who we are.

And I would agree wholeheartedly with that. I really think it's important that

we have a historical Adam and Eve, that we have a historical fall,

and there's biblical reasons for this.

In the New Testament, Jesus talks about Adam as a real historical person,

and I think if Adam was not a historical person, then that would undercut what

Jesus would be saying in that instance.

Paul uses the comparison between Adam and Jesus on two occasions in 1 Corinthians 15.

And then again, in the book of Romans, he uses that as a parallel as one man

fell and we die with that one man.

So we rise with the one who did not fail. There's that comparison there.

And while that can be kind of ambiguous sometimes, I heard one person use the

quote of Lady Liberty gave us this land and Hitler's trying to take it away.

Obviously, Lady Liberty did not give us the Constitution.

It did not give us the United States of America.

But there are some times where you can compare two things. One is actually like

an ideal and one is a actual person. It can be kind of twisted in that way.

And so I don't use the evidence of Paul using Adam and Jesus and that comparison

as evidence, but for biblical evidence of an actual Adam and Eve,

we do have some interesting and I think persuasive arguments.

So to argue that Adam is an actual person, we have Adam mentioned in multiple genealogies.

You would not mention Lady Liberty in a genealogy.

Like it just wouldn't make sense. But Adam is mentioned in Genesis 5,

1 through 5. It says this, This is the book of the generations of Adam.

When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God.

Male and female, he created them and he blessed them. and named them man when they were created.

When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness after his

image and named him Seth.

The days of Adam after he fathered Seth were 800 years and he had other sons and daughters.

Thus, all the days that Adam lived were 930 years and he died.

And to put that in the Bible, in a genealogical record, that's the first one,

then it goes into Seth and his son and then his son.

To put that in there when he wasn't an actual person would be quite strange and quite weird.

And so I think this is very persuasive evidence that Adam, at least the author

of Genesis, believed that Adam was truly a human being that would walk around

and talk and that sort of thing.

From Augustine. This is an early church father.

So he lived, I believe it was in the 300s AD, so a long time ago.

And he says this about this evidence.

If he, Adam too, is to be understood figuratively, who was it who begot Cain and Abel and Seth?

Or did they also exist in figure and not as real human beings.

And the concept there is clearly about how Adam is a real person,

and if we can't take Adam as a real person, we can't take the rest of the stories

of Seth and Cain and Abel and all those people.

They would all be figurative. They would not all be literal people.

But the Bible clearly talks about this being a real person.

That's kind of the biblical evidence that we have.

I do think it's good evidence about Paul talking and comparing Jesus and Adam.

I do think it is legitimate evidence, but it can be debunked because there have

been issues of that in the past,

where people have compared a non-historic figure with a historic figure.

And so I don't really use that, but I do think the concept here is very clear,

that Adam was a real person.

So again, Ortlund, in that podcast that I watched, he talks about the necessity,

again, for having Adam and Eve as real people.

He says this, How do you explain human uniqueness apart from a punctiliar starting point to humanity?

And by human uniqueness, you can just include all the things that you are qualitatively

unique about human beings.

And what you get to very quickly is you see a historical Adam and Eve and a

historical fall is an incredibly useful and I would say necessary explanatory

mechanism for that qualitative uniqueness.

So again, he's just reiterating the idea that it is an important concept that

Adam and Eve started at a point.

That's where humanity started. And in God's words, that's where the image of

God was imputed on human beings.

That's where it was gifted to human beings.

And from that starting point, you get the very important, especially in today's

idea, the very important notion that we are special to God.

We are set apart from creation, which is something that evolution does not describe.

Evolution describes us as just basically animals who are on a hierarchy higher

than those who are below us. And so we're just simply animals.

But the Bible describes us and Adam and Eve's story is really important to this

fact that we are in God's image and likeness. We are unique. We are special.

We are God's representatives here on this planet.

And so that's interesting for me and something, again, that I truly agree with.

He also says in that podcast, we need to see evil and sinfulness as an alien

intrusion into God's good creation.

And that applies to all of human nature. And this points to the fall of humanity.

And so in the Garden of Eden, when the serpent tempted Adam and Eve,

that's the beginning point of the brokenness and rebellion of this world.

Biblically speaking, it is so important to the biblical story that it doesn't

make sense for it not to be a historical event.

And again, so Genesis 2 and Genesis 3, with the creation of Adam and Eve and

the fall and all the repercussions that are tied to that, it has to be,

biblically speaking, an actual historical event.

But what gets in the way of people believing this and trusting in scripture is the fossil record.

Neanderthal, Cro-Magnum, these different types of people that scientists have

given different names other than what we have, which is Homo sapien.

How do we really reconcile how close these people were from who God created

in his image and likeness.

This is a really fascinating look at what it means to be made in the image of

God, what it means when did sin enter the world,

when did Adam and Eve live, and what can we glean from these different types of people.

That's kind of what we're going to be discussing here the rest of the time.

One of the theories, and I'm using the framework that these are all Christian theories.

I am not throwing in here secular theories about that.

There are definitely places you can go and you can look and you can see what

they get out of the fossil record, what they understand about how old these

people are and when they first came on the earth.

But I'm looking at mainly Christian perspectives of when were Adam and Eve in

this chain of all of these different peoples that came in our fossil record.

So the first one I'm going to be discussing is that of ancient Adam.

And the idea here is, I've seen it in two different places.

One just looks at it in terms of when is it most likely to have happened?

And then another way of looking at it is when did personhood come upon these

people in this chain of different fossils that we have found?

And so one is the ancient Adam and the other one uses the idea of tool making.

When did tools first appear on this planet and when did humans or humanoids start using tools?

So one of them is really old. This one is between 750,000 years ago to 2 million

years ago is the idea of this is when Adam and Eve were there.

And the concept here is that the ability to conceive, fashion,

and utilize tools is what distinguishes humans from subhuman creatures.

If this is the criterion, then the human race's origin is to be dated quite

early, perhaps 500,000 to 2 million years ago.

The idea here is looking at when humanity or when these humanoid beings first

show up in the fossil record and saying that must be when Adam and Eve came into existence.

There are pros and cons for all of the ones that I am going to share with you tonight.

And the pro for this is that in ancient Adam, it protects the unity of humankind more.

And because of the fewer number of people who were around at that time,

it's easier to see how the sin of Adam was spread to all humans.

So an early Adam is going to give us the ability to say,

all right, this is when sin entered the world, and this, because they were all

in one location, in one physical area, and this is how sin,

if there were other people around at that time, which is what scientists are

thinking at this moment,

it's easy to see how sin spread to them.

And the corruption of the human being, the sin nature that we have,

came upon everyone at that time.

So it protects the unity of humankind, all of the descendants of whatever that

first humanoid was, all the way down to us. We are all in the same lineage.

We are all in the same genetics.

We all are in the same humankind being made in the image and likeness of God and having a sin nature.

And so that's a pro for this view, but it does have difficulties as well.

So a couple of those difficulties are that chimpanzees have been observed stripping

leaves off of twigs and using them in termite hills to look for them.

So they're actually using tools as well.

And so if they're using the concept of personhood to be one who can fashion

and make their own tools, then chimpanzees would have to be included in that as well.

Another challenge that is happening in this view is that humanity is thought

to have started in Africa.

But when you look at the origin story of Adam and Eve, it seems to be taking

place in the Near East because it mentions the Tigris and the Euphrates River, which aren't in Africa.

And it also, when you get to the next chapter, chapter four,

and talks about the descendants of Adam and Eve, we have Cain being described in Neolithic concepts.

Which again, and the scientists are saying these, the practices of farming,

precious metal, and music, these started about 12,000 years ago in that Neolithic period.

And so chapter four talks about these specific things, farming,

and we see even farming in the Garden of Eden.

The concept of that makes it some challenges. It doesn't automatically throw it out or debunk it.

It just gives it a challenge that this is, while it has the pro of seeing easily

how everyone descended from Adam has the same genetics,

it has the same likeness and image of God and the same sin nature,

there are some difficulties with this view.

And so this is the idea of the ancient Adam, that Adam lived 500,000 to 2 million

years ago with the first humanoids.

That is the idea and concept of the ancient Adam.

There's also a concept of a recent Adam.

And when I mean recent, I mean probably 40,000 years ago or so, or a little bit closer.

And so what this looks like is that Adam and Eve were created uniquely at a

time when there were other humanoids that were erect.

So humanoids existed in this view from when the 500,000 to 2 million years ago.

But it wasn't until rather recently in that chain, 30,000 to 40,000 years ago.

That Adam and Eve actually came on the scene, and that's when the image and

likeness of God was here.

And there are two different dates in this recent Adam that look at human characteristics,

one being the burial of the dead and the other one being language,

to help describe the two different ways of looking at a recent Adam here.

So becoming a humanoid, some people argue, includes the burial of the dead,

seeing the unique personhood of that individual and then actually burying them.

And there are people who have denoted, who have studied, who have looked into

this and say that that happened with the Neanderthal man to about 50,000 years ago.

And that's when the practice of burial seems to have started in this world's

history. So about 50,000 years ago, that's when it happened.

The other one is the complex symbolism or the language that denotes personhood,

and that began about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago.

So this is what Millard Erickson says in Christian theology.

So while the making of tools and

burial of the dead point to a fairly sophisticated pattern of behavior,

It is language that makes possible the type of relationship with God that would

be experienced by a being created in God's image.

On this basis, one can correlate the beginning of the human race in the full

biblical sense with the evidence of a great cultural outburst about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago.

The first human is not to be identified with Neanderthal man,

but somewhat later, probably with Cro-Magnon man.

And the idea here is, looking at history and archaeology, when did the language

system start? Where can we trace these back to?

Whether it is a hieroglyphic language or whether it was a verbal language,

when did this happen? Because in Genesis, it does seem and it does declare that

God spoke to Adam and Eve.

What have you done? He turned and said to Eve in Genesis 3. And so there does

seem to be language there.

And according, trying to meld the ideas of archaeology and the Bible together,

this is a view that some people have adopted.

And in this view, it declares that Adam's not the biological progenitor of all

modern human beings. He's more of an archetypal human.

You think of the founding fathers of our nation, Adam and Eve,

our parents in this more representative or federal sense.

So the idea there is that we would say the founding fathers of this country

are ancestors, but we don't necessarily have their DNA running through us.

So this is kind of what they are asserting here.

A biblical way to understand this is to look at the idea of what happened to

Cain in Genesis 4 after he killed his brother.

Because a couple of these instances kind of declare, or at least allude to,

the idea that other humanoids are around.

So in Genesis 4.14, the last part of that verse, Cain says, I shall be a fugitive

and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.

This would either, A, have to be one of his brothers or sisters that would look

for him and find him, or B,

it would have to be another humanoid that is outside of the family of Adam and

Eve that have come in and would see him and would kill him.

And then also it says a little bit later in chapter 4, verse 17,

that Cain knew his wife and she conceived and bore Enoch.

When he built a city, he called the name of the city after the name of his son

Enoch. So in here, there are two things.

One is that Cain has a wife, and the question is always asked,

where did Cain find his wife?

This view would say that God does eliminate incest, so it probably would not

be one of his sisters that became his wife,

because that's where some people say that he got his wife, but other people

say it had to have been one of the other humanoids that were around at that time.

And then the second thing it says here is that he built a city.

And a city necessarily has to have people inside of it.

And so if you have a city and yet you're only in the second generation after

Adam and Eve, where are all the inhabitants coming from? Are they all your nieces and nephews?

A guess here in this theory would be that there were other humanoids that were

living in there that were outside of Cain's family.

And so this is the recent Adam connotation.

This is what it is asserting. So another proponent of this would be John Stott, and he wrote...

To assert the historicity of an original pair who sinned through disobedience is one thing.

It's quite another to deny all evolution and assert the separate and special

creation of everything, including both subhuman creatures and Adam's body.

The suggestion, for it is no more than this,

does not seem to me to be against Scripture and therefore impossible that when

God made man in his own image,

what he did was to stamp his own likeness on one of the many hominoids which

appear to be living at the time.

So again, the concept is God would select one person that is one of these hominids,

and he would put on him the mark of being in the image and likeness of God.

Then everyone after him would be part of that image of God likeness.

The pros of this approach would be to explain the perennially difficult biblical

questions such as who were the people that Cain feared who would slay him in

revenge for the murder of Abel,

who was Cain's wife, and how could Cain have built a city filled with inhabitants?

We might even ask of Genesis 2.20, hence that Adam went on a search to find

a spouse, if there were only animals around, how could he have done that?

Adam and Eve were not alone in this world, and that answers all these questions.

So again, that's the concept of this.

It's trying to look at the information and provide an explanation that fits

what we know from science and what we know from archaeology and what we know from the Bible.

There are problems with this view, though. Eve is called the mother of the living in Genesis 3.23.

And how could that be descriptive of her if she was not the first hominids that

were around? That leads to a problem of her being called the mother of the living.

It is also a challenge to find a way to give.

The human uniqueness being made in the image of God from a recent Adam and Eve

to the separate continents of Australia and the Americas from where they think

humans raised from, which is in Africa.

And so that poses a pretty substantial problem.

How do all humanity come under the umbrella of being made in the image and likeness

of God if this was a recent Adam?

Those are the cons and the pros to this sort of view. Then we have a newer view.

I think it was 2018 when Joshua Swamadas published his book,

The Genealogical Adam and Eve.

And this is kind of similar to the recent Adam theory, but he looks at the DNA

and how the DNA from the Cro-Magnum, from the Neanderthals all the way back in history.

And even from my understanding, looks at how close our DNA is with chimpanzees

and other ape-like creatures.

And then he looks at those in the fossil record and he tries to disseminate.

All right. So there seems to be a genetic connection between who we are now

and the hominids that came before us.

All right. So that doesn't though, contradict that we did come from Adam and Eve.

And so while our genetics are similar to those others, that doesn't necessitate

that we are direct descendants.

These direct descendants of Adam and Eve are in our genealogy.

And so there's a difference between the genealogy and our genetics.

The genetics can be much broader and much longer, wider, and go further past,

but our genealogy starts at a specific time and place.

So in this view, it is a pretty literal understanding of the Genesis 2.

God took the dirt and formed Adam from its dust. He breathed into him the breath of life.

God took the rib of Adam and created Eve. And while we are genetically related

to the older ones, but we are genealogically have in our ancestry,

Adam and Eve, not necessarily those that are older.

And so a pro of this one is that it kind of melds the evidence of science and the Bible.

It kind of creates a theory where both things could pan out very easily.

But again, a challenge is spreading God's image throughout the earth.

There is DNA that's related to the Neanderthals that we still find in human

beings. There is still DNA from the Cro-Magnon man that we can find in the DNA that is still today.

And so there's challenges with this. That's kind of the idea of the genealogical

and genetic ancestors, a newer theory that places Adam and Eve somewhere closer in time.

And tries to meld the ideas of the Bible, of Genesis 1 and 2 and 3, and science.

So the last one that we are going to go over today is what I have described

as the young earth creationists.

And their idea and their topic is all about following the biblical pattern.

So it's going to sound a lot like the...

The previous one, but it's going to be different in a couple of different ways.

So the young earth creationists believe in a literal understanding of Genesis

1, 2, and 3, that it happened the way that it described.

It's not just historicity, it's also literally what is described in this book.

And some of the reasons they point to this, and this is from Dr.

Georgia Purdom from Answers in Genesis, she writes, Genetics has clearly established

that Neanderthals and Denisovans were fully human.

Any physical difference should be viewed as nothing more than variations that

can occur within the human race descended from Adam and Eve.

For a time, these descendants all lived together at the Tower of Babel.

Following the post-Babel migration and late into the Ice Age.

Differing human populations began to appear in the fossil record,

such as Neanderthals and Denisovans.

And so they use these distinctions not as leading up to humanity,

but these are people of human origin.

They are human beings, and they are descended from Adam and Eve.

They say the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, the Cro-Magnon people,

these are all ancestors of us who have descended from Adam and Eve.

What they disagree with is the dating of these fossils.

They don't think that they're hundreds of thousands of years old.

They think they're all much more recently. I think the estimates are like 20,000

or so somewhere around that time frame.

And so they believe in a literal understanding of Genesis and that all the humanoid

fossils that we have are descendants of Adam and Eve.

And the pro for this is that it is easily reconcilable to the Genesis account.

You just take it as literal.

This is what it is. God created us in his image.

He formed Adam from the dust of the ground, and he breathed into him the breath

of life. Eve came from Adam's rib.

This is just something that's easily reconcilable to the Genesis account.

But I think a challenge for them is that all they have in dealing with their

theories is circumstantial evidence.

So, for instance, this is from one of their magazines, The secularists tell

us that Homo sapiens appeared 300,000 years ago.

However, for 294,000 years, the best they could do was some flint knives,

spears, and animal skin clothing.

For 294,000 years, nobody had any ideas.

Nobody thought of the wheel or corralling a bison and domesticating them.

No adventurous man saw a horse and said, I'm going to ride that thing.

294,000 years of nothing. Humans walked around in an ignorant stupor,

but somehow, just a few thousand years ago, we started subduing the earth.

I don't buy it. It's circumstantial evidence.

They have taken the concept of what the secularists tell us,

that Homo sapiens appeared 300,000 years ago, and they're like,

but if we're supposed to be adapting,

if we're supposed to be evolving, Why has much of the last 6,000 to 12,000 years

been where the huge expansion of knowledge,

where the farming comes and cultivation, where the precious metals are found

and where music and that sort of thing comes on?

They want you to believe that for the majority of that 300,000 years,

that it was nothing really was developing.

Nothing was curious, even though it is our ancestors as Homo sapiens.

And so, again, it seems to me to be very circumstantial what their evidences are.

And so that's the one downside to that view.

So those are the concepts of the main views that I have found about where human

beings, in particular, where Adam and Eve come from.

Adam and Eve are either the first pair of hominids, 500,000 to 2 million years

ago, and everyone's descended from them.

Adam and Eve are a recent, 40,000 years ago isn't that recent,

but it's a more recent than the old ancient Adam.

They were people who God picked out and he put the image of God in him.

And then sin entered the world in that time.

And everyone that came from him was a part of the image and likeness of God, or it's a young Adam,

a literal translation of the Bible where Adam and Eve were the first ones created

and everything came from them.

So those are the four main views that I have found and thought they were interesting.

They all, in my opinion, have some things that make you go, yeah, that makes sense.

And some that are like, yeah, I wonder what that means.

A big part of what I wanted to show you today was that this was not something

that is new in our Christian thought.

There is a quote up here, and I don't know if I shared it, but it is from 1860.

So this was before Darwin's theory of evolution came out. And so this is Edward William Lane.

And again, this came out in 1860.

And he was wondering these same things.

He said, Cain may be supposed to have expected the great increase of Adam's

posterity, which happened during his lifetime,

and thence to have feared the vengeance of a kinsman, but this is certainly

not the obvious meaning of his words.

And moreover, he was on the day of his saying, thus driven out from the face of the earth, or land.

Evidently meaning the land of his parents and became a fugitive and a vagabond,

how then should he fear the vengeance of his own kindred if he's not in their land?

His wife is commonly supposed to have been his sister, and at least one of Adam's

sons must have married his sister if no other human race but that of Adam existed.

But this is contrary to an express law of God.

That is just showing you that it wasn't Darwin who brought about the really

contemplation of these things. It happened before them.

I mentioned Augustine earlier, and he was well before Darwin and the theory of evolution.

And so it's not a new concept in Christian thinking,

but it is something that we have been pulled by with the fossil records that

we now see and the DNA evidence,

especially that we can look at based upon the innovations of the last hundred years or so.

We have new information to contemplate and think about and to really digest.

And again, I want to reiterate that all four of these views are from a Christian

perspective that views the Adam and Eve as historical people and the fall,

sin entering the world as an actual event.

Thank you again for joining us in our discussion of the historic Adam and Eve.

It is important for us to understand in our discussion that no matter when human

beings started, God made us unique and special.

Adam and Eve were sentient, communicative, and were created to work,

which means they had the ability to utilize tools.

Fitting this in with the historic record, or even the skeletal record,

may not be black and white. But I truly believe Adam and Eve were historic people,

and we are all their descendants.

If you would like more information about Faith Chapel and its ministries,

please visit the website gofaithchapel.org.

Next week, we will survey the evidence of Noah's flood and discuss the viability

of this being a historic event. Have a great week.