The Afterword does not need to be reviewed as it offers nothing to the argument, it simply cavalierly says ‘don’t worry, be happy’ it doesn’t matter if there was a historical Adam and a historical origin to human fallenness. Yes it does matter, it matters if the Biblical authors think and say it matters. It even mattered to Jesus who said that marriage is an idea that God came up with ‘from the beginning’ and involved the first couple, Adam... Read more

More helpful is Thesis 4 (p. 183) which involves the proposition that we do not have original sin understood as original guilt and damnation for the whole race on the basis of Adam’s sin in Paul. Perhaps that is deducing too much from Paul. But it is not a helpful either/or to say “the issue however is not whether the historical Adam is important to soteriology but what kind of Adam Paul has in mind in Romans 5.12-21. Does Paul... Read more

In the last main chapter of the book (pp. 171ff), Scot addresses the issue of what Paul says about Adam and Eve. He is correct that Paul does not say in Rom. 5.12-21 that all have sinned ‘in Adam’. He says all are condemned because all have sinned like Adam. But one has to ask— why would that be universally true if there was not a universal bent to sinning? And if there is such an inclination— Where did it... Read more

To begin where the last post ended— In none of this literature is Adam ‘everyman’, any more than Eve is ‘every woman’ though there are some hints in the latter direction in Sirach. What is in any case assumed in all these intertestamental reflections is that Genesis is telling a historical story about real people who affected not only themselves but their descendants in various ways. They are not merely literary figures who set bad examples for those who read... Read more

Chapter 7 which begins on p. 147 is a helpful review of the mentions of Adam (and sometimes Eve) in intertestamental Jewish literature. Scot is right that they are depicted in various ways, and the story is developed and analyzed in various ways. This is correct. The point I want to make is that in each case, so far as we can tell, the assumption that there was an historical Adam and Eve is the basis of the further development... Read more

The flood as depicted in Gen. 9-11 is not a problem if it is a description of a flooding of the then known ANE world, in other words a massive regional flood devastating that population. And in fact there are mud layers and other geological evidence in that region that something cataclysmic did happen thousands of years before Christ in that locale. The ANE writers are not making up a fairy tale in their various tales about a Noah figure,... Read more

Tom Wright’s suggestion (cited on p. 145) that maybe Adam and Eve were picked out of the 10,000 hominids and endowed with representative power as in the image of God, is certainly possible, but not necessary. As Scot says, the Genesis story leaves the impression that Adam and Eve are the only persons around. One could argue they are the only progenitors of God’s people, who are the only people about whom the story is told. Adam and Eve may... Read more

The second edition of Guardians of the Galaxy took quite some time to emerge (the first one appeared in summer of 2014). Somehow mysteriously during the interim we lost big Groot and acquired baby Groot, as well as a bunch of other characters, for example, Nebula (Karen Gillan) as the antagonistic sister of Gamora, or Kurt Russell as EGO (and boy is he appropriately named, he’s god in his own little world which he created), and Sylvester Stalone (basically playing... Read more

Boy do I have some fabulous news for all ya’ll. The brand new collection of C.K. Barrett’s sermons has launched on Kindle at a ridiculously low price. Here’s the deal…. Luminescence, Volume 1: The Sermons of C. K. and Fred Barrett Kindle Edition by C. K. Barrett (Author), Fred Barrett (Author), Ben Witherington III (Editor), & 1 more Kindle $9.99 Yep, only $9.99. Of the hoards of people who have been asking when all these juicy quotes from CKB are... Read more

On pp. 143-44 we run into more problems. Adam and Eve are not Israel, they are the progenitors of the people who became Israel. Yes, Israel’s experience mimics the experience of Adam and Eve right down to the exiling part, but the two should not be equated, any more than Christ is Israel. Christ is the last Adam, that’s clear from Paul, but it is equally clear in Paul that Israel means non-Christian Jews in Rom. 9-11, who are distinguished... Read more