The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) is indisputably basic to sound Christian theology. This doctrine states that the triune God exists necessarily and eternally, and everything that exists that is not God owes its existence to God.

Nevertheless, among those who hold this basic theological commitment, the question of how to interpret the opening chapters of Genesis has been a subject of debate throughout the long history of Christianity. The urgency of the question increased dramatically with the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in the mid-19th century. Since that time, some version of macro-evolution has been the consensus explanation for the biological diversity of life on our planet in the scientific academy. Therefore, the issue of the historicity (or not) of the first man and woman named in Scripture— Adam and Eve—has become an increasingly controversial subject.

This article will argue that the historical existence of Adam and Eve as the first human beings and the biological progenitors of the entire human race is a matter of great theological consequence for Christians, and that some interpretive strategies are better suited to defend belief in a historical Adam and Eve than others.

We’ll begin by demonstrating the theological significance of the historicity of Adam and Eve to show that forfeiting this belief would result in compromise to several important doctrinal convictions of the Chris- tian faith. Among Christians committed to belief in the historicity of Adam and Eve, there are many interpretive approaches to the opening chapters of Genesis. These approaches will be summarized briefly along with an assessment of the potential strengths and weaknesses of each. In the end, it will be shown that reading the opening chapters of Genesis as historical narrative is the most consistent way to maintain the tremendously important belief in a historical Adam and Eve.

Historical Adam and Eve: What’s at Stake?

Genesis 1:26–31 states that God created humanity in his image on the sixth day of creation. He made them male and female; he commanded them to reproduce, filling the earth with their progeny; he gave them dominion over the earth and all life thereon. Genesis 2 describes the creation of the very first man (named Adam, a Hebrew word mean- ing mankind) out of the dust of the ground and the very first woman (later named Eve) out of Adam’s side. The man and the woman are joined together as one flesh in what Scripture presents as the very first marriage union, which is described as paradigmatic for all future marital relations.

In Genesis 3, the story of Adam and Eve takes a tragic turn as the first man and woman rebel against God through disobedience. God subsequently rebukes them and a curse is pronounced on creation. The consequence of their sin will be the regularity of human death, pain and agony (including high mortality rates) for women and their babies in childbirth, extreme difficulty in farming the land for sustenance, and the punitive removal from the life-giving covenant presence of God as represented by the Tree of Life in the middle of the Garden of Eden.

Amid God’s declaration of judgment in the form of a curse, he also announces a promise of future salvation, stating that the seed of the woman will one day crush the head of the serpent who deceived Adam and Eve (Gen. 3:15). Indeed, the rest of the storyline of Scripture can be understood as a development of the conflict between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent in anticipation of the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ who will finally fulfill the promise of Genesis 3:15. The personal story of Adam is concluded in Genesis 5:1 where he is described as the father of Seth, his third son, whose future lineage will eventually give rise to the fulfillment of the promise.

While some may wonder whether Christians need to take the personal story of Adam and Eve as historical, attention to later Scripture confirms that a historical read- ing is the right reading of the earliest chapters of Genesis. Furthermore, forfeiting the historicity of Adam and Eve as real people undermines a number of important Christian theological commitments.

Unlike the personal story of Adam’s life, the prominence of Adam in Scripture does not end with the open- ing chapters of Genesis. Rather, the accounts given there are viewed by later biblical authors as both historical and theologically consequential.

After Genesis 5, Adam is not mentioned again until 1 Chronicles 1:1. There, his name appears at the head of a genealogy that takes readers from Adam, through Abra- ham, all the way to the kings of Israel and Judah as descended from David. Thus, for the chronicler, the historical reality of Israel’s history under the Davidic dynasty is of the same kind as the historical reality of Adam, Seth, Enosh, and so on (see the genealogy of Adam and his posterity in Genesis 5).

Later, the prophet Hosea likens the faithlessness of Israel (Ephraim) and Judah to the sin of Adam (Hosea 6:7), a likeness that is most naturally understood as historical correspondence. What Hosea makes explicit is an implicit biblical pattern of typology that many interpreters have recognized. After Adam, many others emerge like him, bearing the status of a kind of new Adam, tested as Adam was. Noah as an individual, Israel as a nation, David as representative of the nation—each of these is presented as a new Adam, given the opportunity to succeed where Adam failed. As Hosea observes, though, these all failed in the same way Adam failed—covenant unfaithfulness to the LORD. Hosea laments:

What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah? Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away. Therefore, I have hewn them by the prophets; I have slain them by the words of my mouth, and my judgment goes forth as the light. For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. But like Adam they transgressed the covenant; there they dealt faithlessly with me (Hosea 6:4– 7, emphasis added).

Fundamental to Christian theology is the happy conviction that this typological pattern of new Adam-like figures did not end with the failure of the Davidic dynasty under the administration of the Law of Moses. The Gospel of Luke shows us that Adam’s genealogical line continues past the Old Testament Davidic kings all the way to Jesus Christ (Luke 3:23–38). The eternal Son of God, the second person of the Godhead, assumed a human nature, being made like us in every way so that he could be the one to make propitiation to God (Heb. 2:14–18). Jesus was ev- erything Adam was, and he succeeded where Adam failed.

The apostle Paul makes the typological connection be- tween Adam and Jesus explicit: “Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteous- ness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righ- teous” (Rom. 5:18–19).

In another passage, Paul expounds the connection further, saying,

For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. . . . Thus it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living be- ing’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven (1 Cor. 15:21–22, 45–49).

Jesus Christ is the last Adam, the one in whom we have redemption from the consequences of Adam’s sin and from the consequences of our own personal transgressions. “The wages of sin (Adam’s and ours) is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 6:23).

At this point, some argue that the typological and theological importance of Adam in relation to Christ does not depend on the literal historicity of Adam. Adam can simply be a literary figure whose story makes a profound theological point. Just as I might instruct my children about perseverance in hard work by appealing to “The Tortoise and the Hare” without implying anything about the historicity of the fabled race, so Paul (and Hosea) can appeal to the literary story of Adam without implying that Adam is an actual historical person. This analogy, however, will not hold up to close scrutiny.

In the case of a literary fable used in moral instruction, the story is known to be merely illustrative by all who hear it. There is no history of interpretation of “The Tortoise and the Hare” that ascribes to it a literal sense. On the other hand, the vast majority of interpreters of Genesis 2–3—ancient and modern, Jewish and Christian—have understood Adam and Eve to be literal, historical people. Indeed, even those interpreters who deny the historical existence of a literal Adam (such as Peter Enns [1] and Denis O. Lamoreux [2]) have admitted that the apostle Paul and even Jesus himself (see Matthew 19:1–10) did indeed believe Adam to be historical.

Inerrancy Compromised, Original Sin Scuttled

Such Christians argue that Jesus’ and Paul’s mistaken belief about the historicity of Adam does not affect the theology of the point being made by the story of Adam concerning human sin, judgment, and redemption. However, this raises an entirely new problem. The inspiration of Scripture as the word of God (2 Tim. 3:16–17) and the trustworthiness of Jesus as God the Son who speaks the word of God (John 3:34) is dramatically undermined by this argument. If Jesus and Paul affirmed as historical that which is not historical, then the word of God communicates as true that which is false. Thus, a denial of the historicity of Adam requires a radical retooling of the traditional doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture and a denial of the inerrancy of Scripture, a fact that those who reject the historicity of Adam are willing to admit.

Another problem with denying the historicity of Adam while affirming the theological claims made in the New Testament about him has to do with the enduring effect of the sin of Adam and Eve. The theological point being made by Paul through his allusion to Adam is not only the fact that Jesus succeeds where Adam failed but that all of humanity is condemned and corrupted on account of Adam’s sin. Paul is explicit that all of humanity is under condemnation and corruption because of the sin of the first man (Rom. 5:12–19). If Adam is merely a literary figure (whether believed by Paul to be historical or not), there can be no explanation for how the sin of a literary character in a myth can have consequences for people in the real world. Thus, a denial of the historicity of Adam would completely undo the historic and very important Christian doctrine of original sin.

Christian Interpretations of the Early Chapters of Genesis

Among Christians committed to the historical existence of Adam and Eve as progenitors of the human race along with such traditional Christian doctrines as the typological link between Adam as primal covenant failure and Christ as Redeemer, the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture as the word of God, and the doctrine of original sin, there are many different interpretive strategies for the first few chapters of Genesis.

Each view below is quite complex and nuanced, and pro- ponents have offered extensive treatments to defend the views. The descriptions below are necessarily described broadly, focusing exclusively on the view’s handling of the historicity of Adam.

1. Genesis 1–11 as Mythical.

Some Christians take for granted the claim that biological diversity on earth is the result of a long process of macro-evolution by which all known species of life today evolved from other life forms such that all living things share a common descent. A commitment to such an understanding of bio- logical life rules out the possibility that the opening chapters of Genesis are to be interpreted as historical narrative.

Such Christians usually see the opening chapters of Genesis (often the first 11) as bearing the character of “myth” in the sense of non-historical primeval stories that function to explain why life in the world is the way that it is. Typically, such interpreters want to preserve the historical existence of Adam and Eve (and perhaps the other characters in the narrative) without affirming the details of the story. Along these lines, William Lane Craig uses the term mytho-history to describe the genre of Genesis 1–11.3 Others have used different terms to make similar points.

Such interpreters should be commended for insisting on the historical existence of Adam and Eve, but the designation of Genesis 1–11 as mytho-history is fraught with problems. Despite protests to the contrary, there is nothing in Genesis 1-11 that marks it as an entirely different genre than the rest of the book or other examples of historical narrative in the Bible. Furthermore, as noted earlier, the historical genealogies of Scripture, such as the extensive one in 1 Chronicles and the genealogy of Jesus in Luke 3 give no indication of a different mode of historical ac- count with respect to the names on the list prior to Abra- ham. As important as the affirmation of the historicity of Adam is for Christian theology, grounding one’s theology in the text of Scripture by means of a consistent hermeneutic is equally important, and it is precisely here that the mytho-history approach of Craig and others fails.

2. Genesis 1 as Non-Historical Literature.

Other interpreters affirm that the genre of the account from Adam to Abraham is not markedly different than the account from Abraham forward, but they do see a difference in genre between Genesis 1 and Gene- sis 2 and following. In other words, the historical narrative genre begins with Genesis 2:4 and is indicated using the Hebrew word tôlǝdôt (“these are the generations of ”). This expression is a key literary feature marking the historical continuity of the Genesis narrative, linking the descendants of Abraham with the rest of mankind.

Prior to the tôlǝdôt of Genesis 2:4, the text is seen as communicating in some way other than straightforward historical narrative. On this view, the six-day creation ac- count of Genesis 1 is not historical narrative, but a literary unit intended to convey theological truth about God, man, creation, and God’s redeeming purposes. Thus, the week- long structure of particular creative events occurring on sequential days is an extended metaphor rather than a literal week of history. There are multiple versions of this view, sometimes called the literary framework theory. The strength of the view with respect to the question of the historical Adam is its space for one to maintain a commitment to the historicity of the life of Adam and Eve and the other events of Genesis 2–11 about which the New Testament speaks as historical.

However, the sharp divide between the historicity of Genesis 2 and the non-historical character of Genesis 1 is not without problems. Perhaps the greatest difficulty is the fact that Jesus identifies the man and the woman who are joined together in Genesis 2:24 as the “male and female” created on day six in Genesis 1. In Matthew 19:1–10, when asked about the legitimacy of divorce, Jesus cites Genesis 1:27, which says that God made them male and female “in the beginning.” He then moves seamlessly into a quotation of Genesis 2:24, noting that God joined the two together. In other words, Jesus unhesitatingly identifies the “male and female” of chapter 1 with the “man and woman” who were united as one flesh in chapter 2.

This kind of identity seems to indicate that Jesus understood the detailed account of the creation of man and woman and their union in marriage as giving greater detail to the general creation narrative of the back half of the sixth day in Genesis 1. The upshot of all of this is that Jesus assumes the historical character of both Genesis 1 and Genesis 2.

3. The Days of Creation as Long Days.

Another view sees the entirety of the opening chapters of Gene- sis as historical. However, the six “days” of creation are not 24-hour days but rather very long epochs of time. A “day” of creation may cover a time-period of hundreds of thousands to many millions of years. On this reading, the interpreter is able to maintain the historical character of Genesis 1 without being committed to a particular age of the earth. If this view is correct, no account is given in Scripture for how much time elapses between the dawn of creation and the historical Adam and Eve.

While this view is more consistent in its commitment to the historicity of Genesis, it is not without problems of its own. Many find the interpretation of the word “day” as a long period of time to be strained, at best. It is true that the Hebrew word for day can mean many things, including an undefined and long period of time. But the “days” in Genesis 1 are clearly presented as corresponding to a week (consider the sabbath command of Exodus 20:8-11, for example), whereas other examples of “day” having a meaning other than a 24-four-hour day bears that mean- ing obviously in context so that a 24-hour meaning would be nonsensical. This is clearly not the case in Genesis 1. More importantly, however, is the fact that this view pre- supposes a long history of death in the created order prior to the creation and sin of Adam.

Proponents of this view will point out that Romans 5:12 only demands that human death is a result of Adam’s sin and says nothing of animal death. However, Romans 5:12 is not the only relevant New Testament text in this regard. In Romans 8:18-23, Paul anticipates the restoration of all creation at the time of the glorification of redeemed humanity in the eschaton. He rehearses the devastating effect of mankind’s fall into sin on the rest of creation. He states that creation itself has been “subjected to futility” (v. 20) on account of human sin. Furthermore, all creation is held in “bondage to corruption” (v. 21) while awaiting the day of its freedom when the children of God are glorified. The Greek word for “corruption” is phthora, a word usually associated with the decay of death.
Peter uses a form of this word in Acts 2:27 when talking about the body of the Lord Jesus, which God will not al- low to undergo “corruption” (diaphthora). Paul’s point in Romans 8 seems to be that the futility and corruption of all creation is a result of mankind’s fall. Thus, the completion of mankind’s redemption will result in the freedom of creation from its bondage. As goes mankind, so goes creation. Thus, Paul seems to teach that death in the non-human creation is the result of Adam’s sin. The long-day interpretation of the days of creation cannot consistently maintain the view that death is entirely the result of human sin, a 4problem that plagues the other views surveyed here as well.

Genesis 1 Is Historical Narrative with 24-hour Days. To my understanding, the only view that maintains a commitment to the historical Adam and Eve while avoiding the interpretive inconsistencies and potential theological pitfalls identified above is the view that takes Genesis 1 to be a straightforward historical narrative that gives an account of God’s creation and initial formation of the material universe in six 24- hour days consisting of a literal “evening and morning.”

This view is consistent in that it does not force a distinction between the genre of Genesis 1 and 2 nor between Genesis 1–11 and 12–50. Rather, the historical character of Genesis is maintained throughout the narrative and is in historical continuity with the whole Pentateuch and the rest of the Old Testament, leading to the birth of God’s Son from the virgin Mary “in the fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4–5). This view accounts for all creaturely death and bondage as a result of human sin, a conclusion Paul seems to com- mend in Romans 8:18-23 and other places.

Conclusion

The doctrine of humanity (theological anthropology) is one of the most contentious aspects of the Christian faith in an increasingly secular age. Massively important ethical issues—questions pertaining to the life of the unborn and the elderly or infirmed, questions of societal justice and racial reconciliation, questions of gender and sexuality—all depend on one’s commitment to the doctrine of creation, namely the conviction that it is God who made us and not we ourselves (Ps. 100:3). As Creator, he alone has the right and wisdom to set and direct our ethical commitments.
If Christians are to maintain faithfulness to the Lord in this hostile age, we must be able to articulate a clear and consistent doctrine of humanity rooted in the fact that God has made mankind in his image, mankind is fallen into sin through Adam, and the only hope of redemption from our condemnation and corruption is the redemption found in the second Adam, Jesus Christ.

This kind of doctrinal clarity and fidelity requires belief in a historical Adam and Eve as non-negotiable, and the most consistent way to maintain belief in the historicity of Adam and Eve is by adopting an interpretive strategy that treats all the early chapters of Genesis as straight- forward historical narrative with Genesis 1 understood as describing God’s creative activity over the course of six 24-hour days.