Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.
—GENESIS 2:7
In the fall of 2009 I visited the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. I was in the area to speak at Xavier University, where a class taught by a Jesuit theologian was using my book Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, a deeply personal account of my own—and America’s—struggle to understand Darwin’s controversial theory of our origins.
My visit to the Creation Museum was bittersweet and ironic: bittersweet because the beautiful story of creation told in the museum’s lovingly constructed dioramas had once been at the heart of my religious beliefs, growing up in a Baptist parsonage among the potato fields of New Brunswick, Canada. As a youth, uncharacteristically obsessed with theology and biblical studies, I had dreamed of one day working with organizations like Answers in Genesis that had built the Creation Museum.
My goal when I enrolled at an evangelical liberal arts college in 1975 was to train in science and join the creationist cause, an ambition soon derailed when I discovered that creationism was scientifically indefensible. But now, as I explored the museum’s deeply biblical displays of Adam and Eve, their temptation and sin, and their expulsion from Eden, I felt sadness. I wondered about my younger self, the debater forever defending creationism, convinced that the only origins story that mattered was the one in Genesis, that Adam and Eve were as historical as Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, that modern scientific theories of origins were without foundation and inspired by Satan to lead people away from God’s truth. That younger man now seemed like someone else, a stranger I once knew.
I wondered about the families exploring the museum—wholesome, loving, Christian families like mine had been. Eager mothers lifted their children so they could see better, explaining to them that God had to expel Adam and Eve from Eden because they had sinned. Middle schoolers listened attentively as their guides explained the displays. Would these young people have faith crises in college, as I did? I knew they would, because I had been teaching them for a quarter century, spending countless hours in patient conversation with younger versions of myself, trying to dismantle years of antiscience indoctrination.
My visit to the Creation Museum was also ironic. I had been invited to Xavier University to critique the ideas on display in the museum, to argue that the earth is not ten thousand years old, that dinosaurs were not contemporary with humans—and that Adam and Eve were not real historical characters.
These beliefs, once at the heart of my worldview, remain central to evangelical Christians’ understanding of their faith, their world, and themselves. “The denial of an historical Adam and Eve as the first parents of all humanity and the solitary first human pair,” warns leading Southern Baptist theologian Al Mohler, “severs the link between Adam and Christ which is so crucial to the Gospel.”1 Most evangelicals agree with Mohler. And even those persuaded by science that the earth is billions of years old and that life evolved—propositions Mohler rejects because they disagree with his literal interpretation of the Bible—agree with him that Adam and Eve must be preserved at all costs. If science drives the celebrated first couple of Genesis to extinction, a replacement couple must be created to take their place to account for the effects of their sin.
Mohler’s concern makes sense to me, although I know he is wrong. He is, after all, protecting the story with which I grew up—a story most Christians have believed ever since there were Christians, and a story that I might still believe if my college experiences had been different, although I doubt it. It’s a straightforward, logical explanation for how things got the way they are: God created a perfect world. Adam and Eve disobeyed, destroying paradise, bringing death and suffering upon everyone. Jesus—who the apostle Paul calls a second Adam—redeems humanity from Adam’s sin. And God brings it all to a glorious close at the apocalypse when Jesus returns, restoring the lost paradise of our first parents.
Like most visitors, I paid a twenty-five-dollar fee to visit the 30 million dollar Creation Museum, entering the facility under the watchful eyes of massive dinosaurs. It was a journey into the past on several levels: the story told in the museum is presented as the straightforward, uncontroversial history of our origins, from the creation of the universe through the emergence of Christianity and even to the future apocalypse; the story is part of the cultural heritage of the West, and Christianity in general; and the story is one that was mine a few decades ago.
The museum is well done, free of the tackiness often found in evangelical projects, like the dreadful movies based on the dreadful Left Behind novels. Professional dioramas guide visitors through the six-thousand-year history of the world, as understood by Answers in Genesis, the organization that runs the museum. The grounds outside are magnificent.
Visitors are invited to “Prepare to Believe,” but I am sure that most of them already do. The museum promises to “[bring] the pages of the Bible to life, casting its characters and animals in dynamic form and placing them in familiar settings. Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden. Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden’s Rivers. The serpent coils cunningly in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Majestic murals brimming with pulsating colors and details provide a backdrop for many of the settings.”2
I stood for some time at the Adam and Eve displays. The innocent couple stands naked in the Garden of Eden, enjoying the paradise that God made for them, tactfully covered. They know nothing of sickness, disease, or mortality. They live happily with peaceful herbivores who live happily with each other. God walks and talks with Adam and Eve like a loving parent. Friendly dinosaurs look over their shoulders, no more threatening than household pets. I so wished that this story could still be true for me.
An Edenic paradise redolent with beauty and purpose seems the only world that God would create. I could not imagine the creator saying, “Let zebras gallop across the grasslands, pursued by lions who will kill them in the most horrible way imaginable. Let humans live for a few short decades in the dark shadow of their own mortality and witness the deaths of those they love. Let the earth orbit a star for billions of years while countless species evolve, struggle, suffer, and go extinct millions of years before humans appear. And let that star grow until it incinerates all of its varied forms of life that have managed to survive.”
And yet, we don’t live in that paradise God should have created for us. We travel a vale of tears, surrounded by death, resigned one day to die ourselves, perhaps in great pain or humiliating dysfunction. But Christians have never believed that God created that world. That nightmare was summoned from hell by human sin, unanticipated by the first humans, unintended by the creator, destined for replacement by a new paradise where all that is good will be gathered for eternity. It’s a message of hope for Christians, perhaps for everyone. It is a flickering message of hope for me, holding out the possibility that I may once again see my mother, who remains daily in my thoughts despite having passed away years ago.
I stood in front of the display where Eve, eyes cast down and looking guilty, held out a handful of fruit—red berries of some sort—inviting Adam to indulge, although God had told them to avoid those berries. Adam obliges the woman God made for him from his side. This is the point in history—a few thousand years ago and probably somewhere in what is now Iraq—when sin enters the creation. The results, powerfully displayed, are sobering: the first couple clothe themselves, ashamed of their nakedness; God expels them from paradise into a hostile world; their son Cain kills his brother Abel; animals are ritually sacrificed to atone for sin. This disaster—the worst thing that ever happened—would one day be labeled, simply and poetically, the Fall.
The Fall lies near the heart of Christianity, which teaches that we have inherited sinful natures from Adam, our first parent. Most Christians are taught, as I was before I could read, that our tendencies to go astray and do wrong—to sin—came from our fallen natures. We were born with original sin. Babies, I was taught, need no instruction in crying to get their own selfish way—they are born sinful and advance their own agendas before they even know what those agendas are. Toddlers are mysteriously born knowing how to lie. My adolescent temptations arose from my original sin. My inability to choose the right path throughout my life comes from my sinful nature. But hope is found in the salvation offered by Jesus—the second Adam—who empowers us to overcome sin and choose righteousness.
Christianity’s central truth is salvation through Jesus—a salvation made essential by the devastation of the Fall. But what would Christianity look like if there were no Fall? What if our bad behavior is just the way we are? Or maybe we just evolved into sin, under evolution’s relentless promotion of self-interest?
The Creation Museum is evangelistic. I passed carefully sequenced displays highlighting the important events in history, cleverly labeled the “Seven Cs”: Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross, Consummation. The apostle Paul, who first connected Christ to Adam, is pictured writing his famous letters that eventually became part of the New Testament. After Paul, we see Martin Luther, calling the church back to the absolute authority of the Bible, launching the sola scriptura Protestant tradition that would eventually spin-off the biblically literalist branch of Protestant thought that inspired this museum. The giants of Christianity prior to Protestantism—Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi—are nowhere to be seen, for they were Catholic and, at best, wayward, misguided Christians.
The tour ends at the Last Adam Theater where a museum volunteer invites visitors to commit their lives to Christ. Converting sinners, in fact, is the “ultimate motivation for the Creation Museum” according to Ken Ham, the entrepreneurial Australian who leads Answers in Genesis.3 I passed by on the other side, wondering why this felt so strange.
The displays project scientific credibility in ways I would once have appreciated. No fairies or leprechauns peek out from behind the boulders. No cupids hover over scenes picturing Adam and Eve in love. The naked Eve is modestly presented as a normal woman, not a sexualized Barbie doll. The happy couple’s ambiguous complexion seems appropriate for the parents of all human races. The display of Noah’s flood explains how the animals would fit in the ark and where the floodwaters originated. Displays resembling—but not containing—actual science appear with regularity.
Viewers unfamiliar with modern science can only be impressed. Some of the museum staff have PhDs, a fact emphasized in the many publications of Answers in Genesis. One of them, Georgia Purdom, taught biology for years at Mount Vernon Nazarene University, a sister institution of the one where I taught for twenty-seven years. Purdom and the other PhDs on the staff lend authenticity to a message rejected long ago by the scientific community.
Most visitors to the museum are sympathetic to its message but aware that its claims are controversial. As compelling as the story of Adam and Eve may be to those who embrace it, explanation is needed for why so many scientists do not. The answer presented throughout the museum is “starting assumptions.” Visitors are told that the conclusions people draw about Adam and Eve and other contentious issues derive from different starting points, rather than evidence. If you start by rejecting God’s infallible wisdom in the Bible and instead put your faith in fallible human reason, you end up with evolution, the big bang, despair, moral relativism, and eternity in hell. And, of course, it makes no sense to reject the explanations God provided in the Bible. God created everything a few thousand years ago and told us about it in the Bible so we would not have to make irresponsible guesses about our origins.
The oft-repeated claim about starting assumptions is both wrong and offensive. It’s a cheap debating trick. Like most Christians who no longer believe in Adam and Eve, I did not come to that belief by rejecting the Bible and then forcing whatever changes followed from that as though being anti-Bible was a reliable way to generate falsehoods. I came to it by trying to reconcile science with that Bible.
Saving the Original Sinner is about Christians wrestling with questions of Adam and Eve. Most people in this conversation—like me—have explored creative modifications to the story of Adam and Eve, prior to abandoning it. We will meet some novel conceptions of the first man in the chapters that follow. Adam fades reluctantly from the canvas of one’s theology despite one’s efforts to keep him there, not because of it.
Adam’s role in Christianity is so important that many Christians—and almost all of America’s one hundred million evangelicals—believe their faith collapses like a teetering Jenga tower if Adam is removed from the foundation. Christian scholars noting the implausibility of the human race appearing suddenly ten thousand years ago are not greeted with cheers. They are more often met with inquisitions and in too many instances they lose their jobs.
I have friends who now are unemployed after decades of service at evangelical colleges. Slowly and steadily they were pushed to the margins of their academic communities until they were coerced or “persuaded” to leave. I was unemployed during much of the writing of this book after twenty-seven years of steadily growing discomfort at Eastern Nazarene College. The stories are eerily similar: A young professor gets an appointment at an evangelical college. Popular with students, effective as a scholar, his profile grows as he writes articles and books, emerging from the insular world of his college to join larger cultural conversations. These larger conversations provoke responses from people we call gatekeepers—self-appointed watchdogs, often poorly educated, often waving checkbooks—who demand that “their” institutions censure the scholar. I spent many unpleasant hours crafting responses to gatekeepers, at the request of my employer, explaining that evolution is not anti-Christian. I was scolded by my provost because Ken Ham, on his blog, was warning Christian parents not to send their children to a school where they might come “under the teaching of ardent evolutionist Karl Giberson.”4 One group of gatekeepers—the Reformed Nazarenes—rejoiced at my departure from “their” school, writing publically to me on their blog, “I pray that you never teach in another Christian school again, spreading the kind of Bible doubting evolutionary faith that you call Christian faith. However, I will continue to pray for you and that you will come to truly trust all of God’s word.”5
My story has a happy ending, as I now teach at Stonehill College, a Catholic school in the Holy Cross tradition that welcomes critical examination of its own traditions.
Many of the stories, however, do not have happy endings. My friend Howard Van Till was pushed out of his institution after thirty-one years for writing a book about the big bang theory. My friend Richard Colling was terminated in his midfifties after almost thirty years of service at his alma mater for writing a book suggesting that God could have created through the process of evolution. My friend Peter Enns was terminated for his book arguing that evangelicals cannot keep reading the Old Testament literally. Bruce Waltke, one of America’s leading Hebrew scholars, was terminated for an offhand—and incredibly benign—comment in an interview: “If the data is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult, . . . some odd group that is not really interacting with the world.”6 Such casualties illustrate a sobering reality: contemporary evangelical Christianity is so threatened by the onward march of scholarship that critical voices are discouraged, censured, silenced, and expelled. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the case of John Schneider, a theologian who lost his job at Calvin College after writing a paper arguing that the Genesis creation story could be read in a way that did not require a literal Adam and Eve.
Schneider’s career as a tenured full professor was derailed by a paper titled “Recent Genetic Science and Christian Theology on Human Origins.”7 The paper asks, “What sort of genuinely Protestant theology could be compatible with the narrative of human evolution?” Schneider suggested that there were authentically Christian readings of the creation story, faithful to the Bible, that interpreted Adam and Eve as literary rather than historical figures. He noted, in particular, that his own tradition had been too heavily influenced by Augustine, who promoted an excessively literal approach to the Eden story in Genesis.
Schneider’s approach was motivated by science. He was aware that advances in genetics had established that the human race could not be descended from two people who lived a few thousand years ago. This unwelcome revelation has been a bombshell for evangelicals, and most simply reject it out of hand. But Schneider could see, as he told me, that “genomics will be a game-changer,” and he wanted to help evangelicals—starting with his own community—get started on a long and difficult conversation.8 Noting that evidence pointed to the nonhistoricity of the Genesis story, he sought to motivate reconsideration of the theological and biblical issues. His paper offered a helpful perspective to the evangelical struggle to make peace with evolution—a struggle in which his institution, Calvin College, had long been a leader. He argued—as I have—that Adam and Eve are not theologically necessary, noting that some leading Christian thinkers centuries ago held this view, even before science made it expedient to do so.9
The response to Schneider could not have been more hostile than if he had showed up on Fox & Friends waving bones he claimed were those of Jesus. The problem for the branch of Protestantism that supports Calvin College comes from its founding—and defining—creeds and confessions. Protestantism’s many divisions under the leadership of its many Reformers forced each faction to define itself over against other, often similar, traditions. These definitions were often articulated in creeds, catechisms, and confessions with little flexibility.
Such faith statements keep traditions on theological leashes, preventing dramatic changes or steady slippage. The theological leash at Calvin was contractually enforced by specifying that faculty members were “required to subscribe to three historic Reformed forms of unity—The Belgic Confession, The Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort—and pledge to teach, speak, and write in harmony with the confessions.”10
Gatekeepers call for the heads of those—like Schneider—who pull too hard on their theological leashes. The Reformed journal Christian Renewal warned that tolerance of Schneider’s ideas would put Calvin on a “tragic trajectory” that would ultimately secularize the college. Those who campaigned to “save Christianity by liberalizing it,” said the journal, “only helped to establish an atmosphere congenial to secularism and relativism.” History, they argued, showed that “acceptance of evolution inevitably led to a decline in the belief that the Bible was divinely inspired.” The article concluded with the concern that Christians were “to let the Bible speak for itself and to let its teachings set the bounds for our science—rather than vice versa.”11
Schneider’s dismissal made national news. Secular academics scolded Calvin, wondering what “academic freedom” meant there, but many evangelicals were strongly supportive.12 Al Mohler, the leading Southern Baptist theologian and fundamentalism’s most enthusiastic gatekeeper—he had fired several “liberal” faculty while he was president of Southern Seminary—called on all Christians to reject any science that threatened the story of Adam and Eve. “The denial of an historical Adam and Eve as the first parents of all humanity and the solitary first human pair,” he wrote on his blog, “severs the link between Adam and Christ which is so crucial to the Gospel.”13 Mohler’s concern is the primary reason for the controversy that swirls about the first man.
A pastor cautioned, in language all too familiar to me, “If you have children studying at Calvin College, be aware that their young minds will be molded by some professors who are themselves unbelievers masquerading as Reformed Christians.”14 Calling Schneider an “unbeliever” because he doesn’t think Adam and Eve were real is, of course, uncharitable nonsense of the sort that used to be leveled at heretics whose lives were also threatened.
The controversy made the June 2011 cover of Christianity Today, the flagship publication of evangelicalism and a bit more moderate than the bombastic Mohler. Titled “The Search for the Historical Adam,” the story ranged over the controversy, noting with an arched eyebrow that some leading evangelical scholars had apparently abandoned the idea of a first man without abandoning evangelicalism. But an accompanying editorial, titled “No Adam, No Eve, No Gospel,” made it clear that Christians could hold only one position on Adam. The response is worth quoting at length:
Christians have already drawn the line: there must be an original pair of humans endowed with souls . . .
What is at stake?
First, the entire story of what is wrong with the world hinges on the disobedient exercise of the will by the first humans. . . .
Second, the entire story of salvation hinges on the obedience of the Second Adam. The apostle Paul, the earliest Christian writer to interpret Jesus’ work, called Adam “a type of the one who was to come” (Rom. 5:14, ESV), and wrote that “just as we have borne the image of the man of dust [Adam], we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven [Jesus]” (1 Cor. 15:49, ESV).15
The Christianity Today story was picked up by Inside Higher Ed, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and even National Public Radio, whose audience is typically oblivious to in-house evangelical squabbles: “Is this another Galileo moment for the Church?” an NPR reporter asked me, recalling the confrontation between the Catholic church and Europe’s most famous scientist.16 Would scientific discoveries force the church to abandon Adam, just as they had once forced the church to abandon a stationary earth at the center of the universe?
How this “Galileo moment” will play out is far from clear. Most expressions of Christianity, from Augustine to Al Mohler, have never been without a historical Adam and Eve, despite more liberal Protestant traditions moving in that direction as early as the nineteenth century. And even as evolution was tentatively embraced by sophisticated evangelicals over the course of the twentieth century, Adam and Eve were inserted somewhere. And then, as mounting evidence made that insertion ever more implausible, theological pressures were brought to bear. Wheaton College in Illinois—the preeminent and highly selective evangelical institution—drew a line in this particular sand in the 1990s, insisting in a faith statement that faculty must sign, that “God directly created Adam and Eve, the historical parents of the entire human race . . . in His own image, distinct from all other living creatures, and in a state of original righteousness.”17 The statement dealt a significant blow to evangelical acceptance of evolutionary science. Wheaton biology faculty, with PhDs from institutions like the State University of New York, Vanderbilt, the University of California, and Purdue, must agree—or at least sign a document claiming they agree—that humans did not originate through the process of evolution. (The president who produced the document bristled when I suggested to him—as is widely believed—that Wheaton faculty were signing that document with their fingers crossed.)
Christianity Today, Wheaton College, and Calvin College are not academic backwaters populated by ignoramuses who blindly reject established science. They are staffed by intellectual elites educated at top universities. Many of their scholars have great respect for scholarship. Some have reputations that reach into the larger academic community. They are reluctant to reject scientific evidence. But they are also, for the most part, specialists, like their counterparts in the larger academic world. My former evangelical colleagues in theology and biblical studies, to take one example, can’t quite imagine that geneticists have actually proven that the human race could never have numbered just two. Many academics from outside science think “science is always changing” so that one can simply wait for unwelcome scientific ideas to be replaced by congenial ones. Al Mohler assures his readers that the threatening science of today will turn into something friendlier tomorrow. My colleagues in chemistry and physics, on the other hand, don’t see why Adam and Eve can’t be fictional characters in a story about why we are sinful. They have limited interest in “systems” built to make sense of the disparate claims in the Bible. The result is a muddled conversation about the first man, the first sin, and the importance of both.
The controversy over Adam draws strength from main street America’s rejection of evolution. A 2014 poll revealed that 42 percent of Americans reject the claim that “humans evolved,” with or without God guiding the process, believing instead that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”18 Only Turkey ranks lower than the United States among developed nations in the acceptance of evolution.19 The grassroots energy of this antievolutionism—close to universal in the evangelical world—empowers gatekeepers who tend to be populists with no familiarity with science. The battle to uproot Adam from history is certainly being fought uphill.
Another reason why Adam maintains a hold on so many Christians, beyond his role as the source of sin, death, and evil, is his role in maintaining the social order. We see this most clearly in discussions of gay marriage where many Christians—and most conservative politicians running for office—invoke “God’s plan for marriage” by pointing to the story of Adam and Eve, where we read that “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”20 This viewpoint is often summarized with a smirk as “God made Adam and Eve—not Adam and Steve.” The story has been and is similarly invoked to assign a subordinate role for women and blacks, to authorize exploitation of nature, to condemn nudity, to maintain a holy Sabbath, and other social agendas. Notice how much of our modern Western culture is explained by this list.
The notion that God provided rules and social structures for the first humans to pass on is deeply appealing. Ken Ham calls his organization Answers in Genesis to emphasize that God created humans and their rules, and that this is laid out for all time in the Book of Beginnings. “We must start with Genesis,” Ham says, “if we are going to teach God’s people how to defend the faith in this age of unbelief and skepticism.”21
The power of this argument, which plays out quite differently than the theological one about Adam being the source of sin, draws on our tendency to root our values in historical narratives, to understand the present social order in terms of its past. We use formative stories like that of Adam and Eve mythologically—although Ham would vigorously object to this characterization—to create and maintain our social order and identity. We are exploring the anthropological blueprints of our tribe.
Few of us revere the past as people in the Middle Ages and the early modern period did. They tended to assume that the more ancient the writings, the more authoritative they were. Ancient Bible stories were especially important, they believed, because God told them to human scribes in an era when the distance between the heavens and the earth was much smaller. These stories illuminate the ways things are supposed to be—insights that guided the Christian West for many centuries.
Looking to our past to understand our present is an instinct we must acknowledge if we want to understand our long conversation about the first man and our reluctance to part with him. We are attracted to our own histories. Steven Spielberg made Schindler’s List to explore his own Jewish heritage. Brendan Fraser starred in Dudley Do-Right, a corny movie about a bumbling Canadian Mountie, because his grandfather had once been a Mountie, although probably not so bumbling. Charles Darwin’s great-great-grandson, Randal Keynes, wrote the engaging biography Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution.
Familial identities—our tribes—exist at many levels with varying levels of cohesion, all rooted in the past. My extended family was one of several sharing the village of Bath, New Brunswick, population six hundred. Bath was one of five villages in Carleton County, one of fifteen counties in the province of New Brunswick. Our province—with Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island—made up Canada’s Maritimes. We grew up proud to be Maritimers—a hearty tribe shaped by long, hard winters with school cancellations and electrical outages, well-defined seasons, and the changing personality of the Atlantic Ocean.
My American friends speak in reverential tones about their founding fathers, as if they are descended from them. Politicians invoke, embellish, and fabricate the ancestral wisdom of the founding fathers to undermine their opposition.22 Children grow up with stories of George Washington confessing to cutting down his father’s cherry tree; of Abraham Lincoln’s birth in a humble log cabin; of Ben Franklin’s courageous exploration of electricity; and Paul Revere’s midnight ride—all parts of a past that tells us about the present.
Singular individuals—Washington, Mohammed, Christ—play central roles in creating tribal identities. Some cultures worship their ancestors. And Adam, embraced by Abrahamic faiths as the ancestor of the entire human tribe, has long played a central role in creating identity in those traditions. We should not be surprised that tribes that ground their identity in Adam and believe that God set up the social order around him defend his historicity with vigor. The story of Adam speaks directly to their contemporary concerns: marriage, abortion, evolution, the big bang theory, animal rights, and more.
Despite Adam’s sometimes cosmic role, his story begins as a sort of parochial constitution for the ancient tribe of Israel rather than a blueprint for all humanity. The Hebrew version of the story—and there are others in adjacent cultures, as we will see—emerges around the time the Jews were regrouping after a long exile in Babylon and were looking to define themselves after this demoralizing disruption of their history. The account of Adam and Eve getting expelled from Eden was their story of losing their home—their paradise—because they had not followed God’s laws. The week with its day of rest was their religious calendar, long practiced but now being woven into the fabric of the universe as the way the world is, because that is how God decreed it. Much of the creation story—actually, there are two stories—was shared by neighboring tribes, but these first Jews converted local stories into their own, expelling the anthropomorphic deities and local concerns of their neighbors in favor of a single creator. Monotheism—perhaps the most enduring and powerful idea in any religion—appears, fitfully and ambiguously, for the first time in these stories.
The story of the first man—destined to be revered by billions of Christians as the patriarch of all human tribes—thus began as a tale undergirding the identity of one small tribe of wandering nomads in the Middle East a few thousand years ago. And Adam would have remained a bit player had Paul not created a theological model making Christ a second Adam, offered by God to undo the sinful damage of the first Adam.
Two millennia of reflection on the first man has shaped our ideas about marriage, free will, the exploitation of nature, the value of farming, the place of women in society, the nature of temptation, and the place of the black race in the world. Historian Elaine Pagels argues in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent that the interpretations of the creation story developed in the early centuries after Christ “have continued to affect our culture and everyone in it, Christian or not, ever since.”23 Classics scholar Sarah Ruden argues that Paul, as he worked out his theology of Adam and Christ, Jews and Gentiles, males and females, sin and redemption, “created the Western individual human being, unconditionally precious to God and therefore entitled to the consideration of other human beings.”24 Social theorist Glenn Tinder refers to Paul’s insight about the importance of every person as “the central moral intuition of the West,” and argues that much of the social progress in the West has been motivated by that intuition, albeit often buried under less noble agendas.25
Augustine, the most influential writer of the first millennium after Paul, looked to Adam to explain the overwhelming sexual temptations that plague humans; the greatest medieval thinker, Thomas Aquinas, defended human reason by saying it was not ruined in the Fall, and in so doing he unleashed an explosion of intellectual activity that led to science; the celebrated Italian poet Dante Alighieri explored the question of the first language by asking what was spoken in Eden; Francis Bacon promoted science in the seventeenth century as a way to recover Adam’s ancient knowledge, and thus partially restore the lost paradise. Early explorers debated the humanity of the Native Americans by asking if they were descended from Adam. Columbus wrote home from the Americas claiming to have discovered the Garden of Eden. Apologists for slavery argued that “the Negro” was not descended from Adam and thus could be owned like a horse or cow. Twentieth-century creationists argued that Adam’s sin was the origin of the second law of thermodynamics, which says that everything tends toward decay. Subordination of women has forever been justified by the curse God placed on Eve. Gay marriage is condemned as non-Edenic.
Christians since Paul have created their own new incarnations of the first man and his world, summoned to address new questions, pressed into the service of new agendas, reconfigured to match new understandings of history. When science, global exploration, or geological history raised questions about the prevailing concept of the first man, a new one was created, one who better fit the times, like a species evolving in response to an environmental challenge. British biochemist Denis Alexander, who embraces evolution as God’s method of creation, rescues Adam and Eve from a science that would destroy them by turning them into Neolithic farmers.26 Christian apologist Hugh Ross moves the Garden of Eden into Africa, where the human race was discovered to have originated, and pushed the time frame back to one that accords with science.27 Ken Ham insists that Adam and Eve had perfect genomes to explain their longevity. A different Adam is far better than no Adam at all.
These stories come to life in the pages that follow—how Adam went from the patriarch of a small tribe in the Middle East to one of the defining stories of the Western intellectual tradition—and is now at the center of a religious firestorm as millions of Christians contemplate the sober truth that he never existed.