Adam and Eve As Historical People, And Why It Matters (Report)

Throughout most of the church's history, Christians, like the Jews from whom they sprang, have believed that the biblical Adam and Eve were actual persons, from whom all other human beings are descended, and whose disobedience to God brought sin into human experience. Educated western Christians today probably do not grant much weight to this historical consensus. After all, they reason, for much of the church's history, most Christians thought that creation took place in the recent past over the course of six calendar days, and even that the earth was the physical center of the universe. We are right to argue that we do not change the basic content of Christianity if we revise these views, even drastically. Effective revisions are the ones that result from a closer reading of the Bible itself--when, after further review, we no longer think that the Bible "teaches" such things. Well, then, may we not study the Bible more closely and revise the traditional understanding of Adam and Eve as well, without a threat to the faith? Some of the factors that lead to questioning a real Adam and Eve include the perceived impossibility that we could be affected at our deepest level by anything done long ago; the parallels between the themes in Genesis and what we find in stories from other Ancient Near Eastern cultures (which lead some to conclude that Genesis is just as "mythical" as these other stories are); and advances in biology that seem to push us further away from any idea of an original human couple through whom sin and death came into the world. Evolutionary history shows that death and struggle have been part of existence on Earth from the earliest moments. Most recently, discoveries about the features of human DNA seem to imply that the human population has always had at least as many as a thousand members. Prominent among the Christian biologists is Francis Collins and his "Biologos" perspective, which agrees that traditional beliefs about Adam and Eve are no longer viable. (1)