A RECENT ADAM AND EVE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Adam and Eve, ancestors of us all, could have been recent, living in the Middle East. There are several reasons some might find value in a recent Adam and Eve over an ancient Adam and Eve. Not least of which, an Adam and Eve this recent are within view of the archaeological record, enabling a conversation between archaeology and exegesis that is already widely embraced by scholars.9
■ A recent Adam and Eve might be consistent with dates ascertained by adding up generation times in Genesis. Taking into account gaps in genealogies, literalists date Adam and Eve between six and twelve thousand years in the past.10
■ Consistent with the narrative of Genesis, a recent Adam and Eve could be in a paleolithic setting. The narrative describes agriculture, domesticated animals, cities, and ziggurats, which only appear less than ten thousand years ago. The term “nations” in Acts 17:26 also connects Adam to a recent date; the move from tribes to “nations” takes place within the last ten thousand years.
■ A recent Adam and Eve is consistent with the rapid rise and spread of civilization, within the last ten thousand years. This may be required to make sense of theological work that connects the Fall to the rise of civilization.11
■ Oral traditions have demonstrably preserved knowledge of events for as much as ten thousand years.12 If Adam and Eve are recent, the Genesis narrative could arise out of an oral tradition transmitting direct witness of their existence, perhaps written down later in the genre of Babylonian myths.
■ The Persian Gulf Oasis seems to match the description of the Garden in Genesis.13 Till about twelve to ten thousand years ago, the seas were hundreds of feet lower. Surprisingly evocative of the Genesis account of the Garden, the Persian Gulf was dry land, irrigated by four rivers, without rain, but with fresh water springing up out of the ground.14 As seas rose globally, the Persian Gulf was submerged under the ocean, and ancient settlements appear along its current shores.
■ One new discovery in genetic data is of relevance to theology. From about seven to five thousand years ago, the number of our male ancestors precipitously drops, while the number of female ancestors stays the same. There is just one man for every seventeen women. This global event, which lasts for a couple thousand years, might indicate a sudden rise of warring tribes organizing tightly along male lineages.15 The timing of this event, moreover, is consistent with the rise and spread of civilization across the world. It could, perhaps, be a cultural marker of the Fall.
Denis Alexander, John Walton, and others have understood Adam and Eve as a real couple in a recent past.16 Genesis seems to teach a recent Adam and Eve, situated in a Neolithic context, where their story becomes interlinked with the rise of civilization. If Adam and Eve were recent, therefore, some questions of human origins, from the perspective of theology, might become methodologically accessible through archaeology.17
THE TRADITION OF UNIVERSAL ANCESTRY
Adam and Eve, if they were real people, were likely ancestors of all of us. Monophylogeny is another way of affirming the unity of all mankind. Why might some find value in understanding Adam and Eve as our universal ancestors?
■ The monogenesis tradition of the Church resisted racism rooted in polygenesis. With this history in view, pressure from scientific findings is unlikely to unsettle commitment to this doctrine.
■ Several theological systems depend on natural descent from Adam and Eve. For example, a natural headship or Augustinian model of original sin might require Adam as our universal ancestor. Likewise, many formulations of covenant theology require natural descent from Adam and Eve to explain how and why Adam is our federal head.
■ Alternatives to monogenesis often rely on what theologian C. John Collins disapprovingly calls “arbitrary representation” in Adam and Eve, raising several unanswered theological objections.18 How does Adam become our proper representative? The historical answer has been natural descent.
■ The most common historical reading of Genesis is that Adam and Eve were real people from whom we all descend. For some understandings of infallibility, recovering the traditional account is intrinsically valuable. If the traditional account is consistent with what we see in nature, Scripture could have been successful in communicating its message to the Church.
■ Denis Alexander, John Walton, and others have understood Adam and Eve as a real couple in a recent past who are not ancestors of all humans alive today.19 For this reason, their proposals are sometimes received as heterodox. Without requiring any theological modifications, a textual definition of human enables affirmation of the doctrine of monogenesis within their models.
The tradition of monogenesis looms large in theological discourse on origins. Notable for resisting racist versions of polygenesis, this doctrine is no longer bound up in a dilemma. It is, instead, a basic fact of the world. If Adam and Eve are real, we all descend from them. There is no longer reason any reason not to affirm monogenesis.
MANAGEABLE CONSTRAINTS REMAIN
If we are to remain consistent with the genetic, anthropological, geological, and archaeological evidence, there are some limits to speculation. We have focused exclusively on evolutionary science and theology of Adam and Eve. There are other details.
■ The earth looks old.20 Even if our planet is actually young, it looks billions of years old. This evidence is not explained away by being “created” mature, because it appears to tell a story of past events, including the deaths of animals and people outside the Garden.
■ The people outside the Garden appear to share ancestry with the great apes. Several precise patterns in our genomes are predicted by the mathematical theory of evolution. Even if common descent is false, our genomes still look like we share ancestry with the great apes.
■ Noah’s flood did not destroy the people outside the Garden. Our ancestors, it seems, never dip down in the last hundred thousand years to five people. According to Genesis, the genomes of five people were on the ark: Noah, his wife, and the wives of his three sons.21 A unique regional flood might have destroyed all of Adam and Eve’s world in a large region, but not the whole globe.
All of these constraints have already been grappled with by others. They are ancillary to our focus on Adam and Eve. I do, however, emphasize that there are many ways to work within these constraints, including within a literalistic and inerrant reading of Genesis.
THE TRADITION OF MYSTERY
If Adam and Eve were recent, there were people outside the Garden. What do we know about them? What were they like? There is opportunity here for a sustained conversation with archaeology, anthropology, and genetics. The answers here depend on what precise dates we think Adam and Eve may have lived.
If Adam lived less than ten thousand years ago, people outside the Garden were anatomically and behaviorally modern humans. They would be Homo sapiens just like us. There were many of them, perhaps millions, spread across the globe. They had language, emotions, and minds just like ours. They wore clothes and jewelry. They made complicated weapons for hunting and might have constructed boats for traveling. They lived and died like us. They buried their dead. They kept dogs as hunting companions and pets. Some experimented with agriculture.
Until less than ten thousand years ago, most of them still lived as hunters and gatherers. Written language did not yet exist. Neither did nations, countries, or cities. Occasionally there was violence. Most likely there were murders. Weapons, however, were largely tools for hunting. The large-scale violence of war was unknown to the world. Our species survived and thrived by cooperation. They took care of their sick and elderly.22
Theological questions arise. What then was the difference between Adam and Eve? Why are they so important to the Genesis narrative? How should we think about those outside the Garden? These questions become more pressing when we remember that all these people outside the Garden were biological humans. What are the implications of understanding textual humans as a subset of biological humans? Were they i
n the image of God? Did they have human worth and dignity?
It will take time to fully explore these questions. The range of scientifically and theologically valid answers might be much broader than we first suspect. Remember, we are understanding human as a multivalent term. The image of God, universal rights, human dignity, moral worth, and “rational souls” might arise much earlier than Adam. Biological humans, however we define them, seem to arise long before Adam too.
Scripture does not tell us their story. Science gives new information about the mystery, but many details are left unfilled. This is the mystery of the traditional account, and we return to it with new eyes.
A BETTER WAY
In place of difficult tradeoffs and unending conflicts, we are invited into the wonder of an ancient mystery. Here, we can engage the question of Adam and Eve anew. An edited volume was recently published by a group of scholars, Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. These scholars explained why current approaches that engage with evolutionary science in the Church were not acceptable to them. I found the theological section most salient. The theologian Wayne Grudem’s critique of evolution focused solidly on Adam and Eve.23 This echoed and expanded the doctrines of creation emphasized by Timothy Keller and the Gospel Coalition.24 With this in mind, my review of the volume offered an olive branch:
We find that Adam and Eve could be genealogical ancestors of us all, less than 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, de novo created, without parents. As surprising as this may sound, these confessions are entirely consistent with evolutionary science. With this correction in mind, it is not clear if any of the theological claims Grudem lays out are in conflict with evolutionary science.25
This review was published in Themelios, a conservative theological journal published by the Gospel Coalition. I ended with an invitation:
As a scientist in the Church and a Christian in science, I see firsthand the strength of evolutionary science. What version of theistic evolution could be theologically sound? This question, I hope, can be received with empathy by a new generation of theologians. Help us find a better way.26
This is the same invitation I offer now. Help us find a better way.
In these final chapters, I will synthesize the discussion so far into a theological experiment. This experiment is a recovery, not a revision, of the traditional account of human origins. It is a speculative narrative of human origins, consistent with evolutionary science and several traditions in the Church. The narrative contains within it the traditional de novo account of Adam and Eve. Within this narrative, the Fall can be understood as exile, where Adam’s ancient sin affects us in three different ways. Genealogical descent might be understood as a causal connection to Adam, through which we inherit certain consequences because we are caused by him. This narrative experiment is no more a challenge to theology than human origins understood without evolutionary science, and the narrative might be a crossroads for theological questions of many sorts.
Some see Adam and Eve as a myth. Some see evolution as a myth. Even if we disagree about which parts are fact or fiction, we can engage the grand questions within a common narrative together. I am not a theologian. I entirely expect that my speculation requires further development, perhaps even correction. I still hope this experiment is received with empathy. Take what works. Reject what does not work. Fill in the gaps in ways that make most sense. Let us find that better way together.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A NARRATIVE EXPERIMENT
EVOLUTION FRACTURED THE ORIGIN STORY of Adam and Eve, but we can recover it now. From a scientific point of view, all that is required is people outside the Garden, with whom Adam and Eve’s offspring eventually interbreed. Perhaps science merely expands and expounds the ancient mystery outside the Garden, leaving the traditional account intact.
We enter a mystery. My thesis is that evolutionary science presents no more a challenge to theology than other understandings of human origins that do not include evolutionary science. I want to explore this with a thought experiment, a speculative narrative of human origins that contains within it the traditional account of Adam and Eve, alongside evolutionary science.
■ One speculative history of humankind envisions how Genesis can be understood alongside the findings of evolutionary science. Evolution outside the Garden; Adam and Eve outside the streetlight.
■ This brings us to a paradoxical understanding of human, holding two definitions in tension, workable for both vocationalists and structuralists.
■ In a tight parallel with Jesus, Adam ends one era and begins another.
■ How do we understand death and wrongdoing in the era before Adam?
As we embark on this experiment, remember C. S. Lewis’s essay “Religion and Rocketry,” a similar theological experiment.1 The possibility of life on other planets was thought to be a threat to Christian doctrine. Lewis responded with creative and speculative theology, imagining how he would make theological sense of intelligent aliens. He expands this experiment in the Space Trilogy novels. Just like the people outside the Garden, these aliens did not descend from Adam and Eve. He playfully speculated about what we might expect and how to make sense of them.
This is the imaginative play into which we are invited now. In the same way Lewis speculated about rational souls on other planets, we are wondering now about the people outside the Garden. Science, even when correct, gives us only part of the story. Scripture is bound to Adam, Eve, and their descendants. The aim of theology, however, is to take hold of both together. Science is a dream, but theology is the waking world.2
Figure 14.1. The speculative narrative contains both the scientific account and the traditional de novo account of Adam and Eve. The narrative itself is not these accounts, but it contains them both alongside one another as different periscopes on the same events unfolding in the same physical world. The scientific account of evolutionary science plays out in the mystery outside the Garden of the traditional account. With evidence neither for nor against them, Adam and Eve are in a blind spot of the scientific account.
GROUND RULES FOR SPECULATION
I aim to speculate about our origins, in a recovery of the traditional account of Adam and Eve. Mystery is embraced with speculation, following a multimillennia tradition among readers of Genesis. The ground rules here are simple:
■ The narrative must be assessed on its own terms. For example, objections must use the definition of human put forward here.
■ It may appear that parts of the narrative do not appear in Scripture or the traditional account, but this is not a valid objection. There is mystery outside the Garden.
■ It may appear that parts of the narrative are not demonstrated with scientific evidence, but this isn’t valid either. Adam and Eve are outside the streetlight.
■ It may appear that parts of the narrative are not demonstrated by Scripture or by science. But in every narrative, details are inferred, based on evidence, logic, or theological coherence.
■ Some will disagree with easily adjusted components of the narrative. Disagreement on details is encouraged, and the invitation is to vary this starting point as needed. This is, in fact, precisely the point of the exercise.
■ Some will object to tensions in the narrative, but many of these tensions apply to other narratives too. For example, “Why would God create Adam if he knew that Adam would fall?” This objection applies to every understanding of Genesis, and it need not be answered here.
This speculative narrative is no more a challenge to theology than several creationist accounts that do not include evolution. It is no more challenging than angels interbreeding with humans to have Nephilim offspring. It is no more challenging than “human” Homo sapiens interbreeding with “nonhuman” Neanderthals.
I do not presume to resolve every theological mystery or disagreement. I only hope to test this thesis, perhaps recovering a common starting point for many perspectives.
THE
SPECULATIVE HISTORY OF HUMANKIND
In the beginning, Elohim creates biological humans in the image of God, through a providentially governed process of common descent. Elohim grants this people an irrevocable gift of freedom.3 Elohim calls forth all humankind, male and female, created in his image and commissioned to multiply and spread across the Earth (Gen 1:26-27). Biological humans, the people outside the Garden, arise long before Adam and Eve.
Science legitimately tells us the story of how they arose and who they are. These people are much like us. They have minds and souls. Just like us, they are all biological humans. They are not subhuman, to be clear. They are not, however, the humans as we encounter them today. Unlike us, they are not yet affected by Adam’s fall. They have a sense of right and wrong, written on their hearts (Rom 2:15), but they are not morally perfect. They do wrong at times. They are subject to physical death, which prevents their wrongdoing from growing into true evil (Gen 6:3). In this way, death is part of creation, with a role to play, but the gift God plans to give is better.
These people, our ancestors, are the pinnacle of creation, exceptional creatures with a vocation. They are called to spread across the earth. They are given dominion over the beasts of the field, but not over one another.4 Living in small groups, without nations or written language. From archaeological and anthropological data, it seems that war is unknown to them. Slavery and racism are unknown to them. Their world is not defined by dominion of humans over one another.5 They come to rule the world. They live under a different dispensation, a different era than ours. This era continues for a time. God declares this era “good.”
The Genealogical Adam and Eve Page 18