Adam and Eve

The trouble is that evolution as an explanation of the origin of life on Earth seems to be inconsistent with a Biblical worldview and a Christian view of the attributes of God and any attempt to shoe-horn it into Holy Scripture can be seen as a fudge and a compromise. To illustrate this, I ask just one question. Did Adam and Eve actually exist? The apostle Paul certainly thought so.

So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. (1 Corinthians 15:45) 

And so did Jesus.

But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ (Mark 10:6)

But what about you, what do you think? Can the Bible be trusted in every way, or do we just pick and choose what to believe in, swayed by the prejudices and cleverness of others. The Bible genealogies suggest that Adam’s grandson was a contemporary of Noah. So if Adam was not flesh and blood, then what about Noah, was he a legendary figure and the Flood just a myth or an allegory? Noah’s own son, Shem, lived at the time of Abraham, the father of our faith, so could they have actually met? Or is Abraham just another legend, in which case who exactly decides when fables give way to actual history? Or, putting it another way, when does that great gallery of faithful ones in Hebrews 11 switch from fiction to fact? And if Abraham’s existence is questionable, then that takes us into very dangerous waters indeed. If the foundations of your faith are shaky then on what basis are you secure in your salvation?

I contend that our Christian faith depends on the fact that Adam was flesh and blood. A real man had to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and bring about that curse on mankind known as the Fall, the falling away from God and the need for redemption, bought for us by the death and resurrection of another real man (of divine origin), whose existence we don’t doubt, Jesus Christ. Adam sinned and, as the Bible tells us, death came into the World.

Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned. (Romans 5:12) 

If death came into the World through Adam and Eve, then what about the dinosaurs, crocodiles and mammoths that supposedly pre-dated them in the billions of years since the first cell was created by some chemical accident? How do you explain their deaths if death hadn’t yet entered the World? How do you explain the cancers and other diseases that these animals suffered, if the Fall hadn’t yet occurred? There are a lot of questions that need to be answered. Scenarios have been put forward by Christians attempting to marry evolutionary theory with Scripture. Some put the millions of years required by the theory of evolution in between the first two days of Creation, others put them later in Creation week. They say they are being consistent with Scripture, but they still fail to explain how death had crept in before the Fall. Still others accept the full secular deal and concede a full animal ancestry! To these people we need to ask, what is your starting point, the Bible or science?

Steve Maltz
March 2014

(This is an abridged extract from Steve’s book How the Church Lost the Truth: And How it Can Find it Again

Did Adam and Eve exist?