Adam in the genealogy of Jesus

Twice in the past 48 hours someone has asked me about the genealogy of Jesus in the book of Luke – and how it traces Jesus right back to Adam.    The question is then, “If Adam was not a real, historical person, why is He in Jesus’s genealogy?”   Or, conversely, “How do you know who in Jesus’s genealogy was real and who wasn’t real?”

I have stated before that I do believe Adam is *real* in some sense, in that, possibly there really was some person back in the history of Mesopotamia who God used as the starting point for revelation about Himself, revelation that would become the lineage of the Jewish people.   This *real* person was mythologized, and honestly I don’t know that the genealogy leading back to him is historical, hardcore fact or not.    My guess would be…not.  

But to someone earnestly asking the question of “if Adam isn’t a *real* person, what do you do about him being in Christ’s genealogy in Luke?”  I guess I’d have to offer this – your problems are a lot bigger than what to do with Adam in the list of people in Luke.   Behold:
The entire genealogy found in Luke leaves itself wide open for all sorts of conjecture and concern and critique on a much broader level than the fact that it leads back to a possibly mythical or mythologized figure, because it’s completely a zillion miles apart from Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus.  The question you first have to ask is: which genealogy can be trusted at all?   Over the years people have tried to explain away the discrepancies between the two genealogies as “well, one is Mary’s genealogy, and the other is Joseph” but I think that’s really creative damage control, damage control that actually doesn’t control for the damage at all. Both genealogies SAY they are the genealogy of JOSEPH, not Mary.

And they disagree right from the start –

about who Joseph’s dad is (Matthew says “Jacob” while Luke says “Heli.”) It just gets worse from there.  Luke takes 19 people to get back to Zerubbabel, while Matthew only takes 10 people – but that is where the genealogies first agree on something, that Joseph is a direct descendant of Zerubbabel. They both say Z’s dad was Salathiel, but then they disagree on Z’s grandfather’s name (Matthew says his name was Jechonias while Luke says his name was Neri).

The real problem starts at that juncture, however – because even if someone wants to say that one of the genealogies is from Mary, and the other from Joseph, what really-really-really doesn’t make sense nor work is that while they both led back to Zerubbabel and Salathiel, neither one of them agrees on a single name after that point until David.   Luke takes 20 people to get from Neri to David, while Matthew takes 14 people to get from Jechonias to David, with not a single common person in the lists until David.   This just isn’t solved in the least by construing these genealogies as being from each of Jesus’s earthly parents.

An additional, but small problem that results from this is that Matthew’s genealogy is too short to be workable in a time frame that Luke’s geneaology takes (see http://www.errancy.org/matthew-genealogy.html)

Another problem, of particular interest to the query about who in the genealogy is real or not real, is that Luke inserts Cainan into the genealogy between Shem and Abraham, which is not present in the Hebrew Bible’s rendering of Genesis (although it is found in the Septuagint.) Is the Septuagint accurate on this point, or did Luke copy an error from the LXX? (see  http://www.errancy.org/cainan.html)

Now on what I think might be a more refreshing note, I see a parallel between how Genesis has what has often been noted as “two” creation stories (the first is Genesis 1:1-2:3, the second is Genesis 2:4-25), and the fact that Jesus is given “two” beginnings, two stories of his genealogy, in the gospels. Just as each creation account in Genesis is concerned with expressing a different angle of divine truth, so also the genealogy of Jesus in each book is concerned with Jesus’s lineage in two different facets: one is concerned with Jesus as the descendent of Abraham and David, and the other, as a descendent of both man and God. Thus one genealogy tracks back to Abraham and stops, and the other one tracks to Adam (man) and then to God. As always, the concern/question I have with the scriptures very often has little to do with “did this really happen/is this person really real” as much as it has to do with “What is the Holy Spirit inspired message in this story?” One approach ultimately runs up against the inevitable “errancy” found in the scriptures, an “errancy” I believe that was put there as a signpost from God to say, “It’s not the letter of this that matters, but what’s hiding in the message underneath the letters.”

(End note: This of course can take us right back to an earlier posting about what the Bible means when it talks about being descended from someone to begin with, and the allegorical language employed there: Adam and Eve, and Original Sin )

Non-historical Adam and Eve, and original sin

I got in an unplanned discussion with a friend today about Adam and Eve and not taking Genesis 1 and 2 literally.   I’ve written about my views on that before but there are some rubber-meets-the-road questions about how the gospel segues with that viewpoint, that I am asked pretty routinely.   The difference is that today I took the time to write out some replies, which I thought I would share here.

My friend asked the million dollar question (or posed the million dollar objection, whichever 🙂 ) which was:

“When you remove the idea that there was a literal Adam and Eve from the picture, you set up a scenario that says Original Sin does not actually exist. In other words if there were other human beings who had been born before the Fall, then there’s still a race out there that hasn’t fallen potentially and therefore does not need a savior?”  

My first reply to my friend was thus:

“This is somewhat off the main topic of what you are bringing up, but just for the record: “original sin” is a term that is somewhat modern compared to antiquity, and postdates the break of the eastern church from Catholicism – the entire Eastern Orthodox church doesn’t believe in “original sin” but something called “ancestral sin” which is a somewhat different spin on the topic – not particularly relevant to a discussion of whether or not Adam and Eve are the first humans, but worth mentioning nonetheless. (http://www.stmaryorthodoxchurch.org/orthodoxy/articles/ancestral_versus_original_sin)

Since that has next to nothing to do with the main discussion here but is offered just as an informative freebee, I just thought I’d throw it out there, hit send, and then reply to what you’re actually writing about.   I’m not mentioning this because I believe in the Eastern Orthodox perspective per se, but simply to point out that there are a lot of unexamined ideas that we inherit as Christians about something even as seemingly straightforward as our belief in “original sin” which turns out to be not so straightforward as we’d like it to be, after all.  ”

Then I hit send, and wrote my next post, the one that everyone wants to dig into anyway: 

I personally don’t believe that removing a literal Adam and Eve from the picture sets up a scenario that original sin doesn’t not actually exist, at least, not in a way that would deny the purpose of Christ’s sacrifice – because I think the Adam and Eve story is parable, it’s meaning is to reveal truth – truth about Gods reasons for sending His son. Just as like 2 chapters later in Genesis we read stuff like, “Jubal was the father of all who play the pipe” and “Jabal; he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock” I don’t take to means that anyone who ever played the pipe, or lived in a tent and has livestock, is literally the descendants of one of these two guys (and why? because when the [literal,  proportedly worldwide]  flood came, everyone would have been wiped out except Noah’s descendants, and unless Noah was descended from all three guys…this isn’t talking about NATURAL descent, but spiritual descent. )

If we’re going to interpret scripture with scripture, then we need to look about how scripture interprets what it means to be “the father” or “the mother” of someone – and if two chapters after Adam and Eve, we see scripture speaking metaphorically about what it means to be someone’s descendent, that should give us something to chew on. Sin is transmitted through spiritual descent, just as righteousness is transmitted through spiritual descent. Sin resides in the flesh, but so also can righteousness reside in the flesh (the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.) Just as in Christ, “all are made alive” through yes, “one man” – one is not a physical descendant of Christ in order to inherit His righteousness. Neither does one have to be a literally physical descendant of the “one man Adam” to inherit his spiritual unrighteousness. This is one of the reasons that Jesus could rail at the pharisees and tell them that they weren’t children of Abraham when push came to shove:

John 8 38-39, ESV: “I speak the things which I have seen with My Father; therefore you also do the things which you heard from your father.” They answered and said to Him, “Abraham is our father.” Jesus said to them, “If you are Abraham’s children, do the deeds of Abraham. “But as it is, you are seeking to kill Me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God; this Abraham did not do.…”

Sure, they were physically literal descendants of Abraham, but what counts in the spirit realm is who one is spiritually descended from. To be a descendant of Abraham is to descend from the faith of Abraham, not from the flesh of Abraham.  Likewise, Adam *means* man, Eve means *woman*: He represents the condition of the flesh which is not choosing the tree of life (Jesus) to eat from but rather the knowledge of good and evil (earthly morality/the conscience without the Spirit of God.) – the Adam and Eve story, among other things, is revealing the condition of a human without a vital connection by the Spirit to the life of God in the Heavenlies.

So, there was my answer.   I didn’t really get into the issue of whether or not there were other people around before “Adam and Eve” although I think the age old question of “Who did Cain marry?” hints at that.   But it wasn’t important to go there, because the main idea of why it even matters is in the above material.   Of course, I find that I learn the best as I discuss my viewpoints and others viewpoints together, so feel free to add or question or tweek or say anything at all as long as it is respectful and civil, below 🙂

For more reading, I appreciated this post:
http://tamedcynic.org/do-you-have-to-believe-in-original-sin-to-be-a-christian/