Episode Details

Our listeners … and we ourselves …. raise some questions about the previous two episodes and the whole ideological motive behind asking “who is Adam?”

Over the last two weeks, we’ve been perusing scholarly works on the subject of “Who was Adam?” [note: a pet peeve of mine … Eve is almost always left out of this question!?]. We heard from two scholars who have written their own books on the subject (Joshua Swamidass, and Denis Alexander), one of them gave us a critique of a third scholar’s book (William Lane Craig), and we made numerous references to a large and growing pile of books written by Christian scholars on this very question (Peter Enns; C. John Collins; Fuz Rana; Denis Venema and Scott McKnight; …). Collectively, their ideas cover a lot of range:

• a historical (“literal”) person, or a mythical/metaphorical (“literary”) figure;
• a Homo sapiens in the area of Iraq roughly 6,000 years ago … to a Homo heidelbergensis in Northern Europe roughly 750,000 years ago;
• a de novo creation made from dirt … to a representative plucked out of the human population that existed at the time through the process of biological evolution, and who was then rehabilitated or “upgraded”;
• created “in the image of God” … as understood by the Hellenic Greeks (and which later Christianity adopted), or as understood by the ancient Hebrews who wrote the story in the first place;
• the primal couple living in the wild open hinterland, or in a tiny protected private garden with a couple magical trees;
• that primal couple having crossed some kind of line … broken some kind of law … and thereby consigned all of humanity to an eternity in hell, or to some form of death, or at least to a never-ending dispute on the matter between Christian scholars and theologians.

And those two episodes generated enough questions, problems, and concerns from our listeners to merit a response episode. So here we deal with some of those:

• why are there two very different creation accounts in Genesis (note: that’s only part of the “problem” … there are also several more creation accounts in