The Genealogical Adam and Eve

The Genealogical Adam and Eve – An interview with Ben Withington

Having first read William Lane Craig's fascinating book, The Quest for the Historical Adam, that book kept mentioning a computational geneticist named Joshua Swamidass as a dialogue partner.  I’d better read his book about the genealogical Adam and Eve.  Right off the bat, as a Biblical scholar, both books are excellent, and both, in my view, have some significant exegetical deficiencies, which is not entirely surprising since Craig is a philosopher and Swamidass, is a scientist.  

Regarding the ethos of each book, Craig is more definitive and specific about his conclusions, and Swamidass is more open to a variety of possibilities though he takes a definite position on the genealogical as opposed to the genetic ancestry we all have, particularly regarding Adam and Eve. Both books affirm that yes, there was a historical Adam, with Craig thinking it must have been hundreds of thousands of years ago, and Swamidass showing that it could have been much more recently, say 6 to 12,000 thousand years ago.  Let me first share the statement on Amazon crafted, I presume, by IVP about Swamidass book—

“Evolutionary science teaches that humans arose as a population, sharing common ancestors with other animals. Most readers of the book of Genesis in the past understood all humans descended from Adam and Eve, a couple specially created by God. These two teachings seem contradictory, but is that necessarily so? In the fractured conversation of human origins, can new insight guide us to solid ground in both science and theology? 

In The Genealogical Adam and Eve, S. Joshua Swamidass tests a scientific hypothesis: 

What if the traditional account is somehow true, with the origins of Adam and Eve taking place alongside evolution? Building on well-established but overlooked science, Swamidass explains how it’s possible for Adam and Eve to be rightly identified as the ancestors of everyone. His analysis opens up new possibilities for understanding Adam and Eve, consistent both with current scientific consensus and with traditional readings of Scripture. These new possibilities open a conversation about what it means to be human."

This book, Swamidass: untangles several misunderstandings about the words human and ancestry, in both science and theology explains how genetic and genealogical ancestry are different, and how universal genealogical ancestry creates a new opportunity for rapprochement explores implications of genealogical ancestry for the theology of the image of God, the fall, and people “outside the garden”

Some think Adam and Eve are a myth. Some think evolution is a myth. Either way, the best available science opens up space to engage larger questions together. In this bold exploration, Swamidass charts a new way forward for peace between mainstream science and the Christian faith.”

That is a good summary of the book, and throughout the tone is irenic and friendly and various options of interpretation are fairly aired.   Perhaps the most crucial point the book makes is that there is a difference between genetic ancestry and genealogical ancestry, and that in assessing Adam and Eve it is the latter which needs to be focused on, not the former.  

This being the case, a book like Adam and the Genome previously discussed on this blog, is likely barking up the wrong tree and coming to the wrong conclusions.  

I will not spoil the acceptable way Swamidass carefully lays out his evidence for the difference between these two things, but the main thing to observe is that he definitely shows that all human beings by the period A.D.1 to A.D. 30 could indeed be the descendants of Adam and Eve, provided there was interbreeding between those who were outside of the garden of Eden (namely Cain and Seth) and those who already existed outside the garden of Eden.

There are two other points he necessarily makes to support this conclusion: 

1) The genetic evidence of all of humanity sharing a common ancestor with apes is real and evolution should not be denied its place in our considerations (something Craig and Swamidass agree on. 

2) none of that evidence in any way denies or refutes that God could have also created de novo Adam and Eve as well.   

In short, Swamidass argues the evolution of humans outside Eden, the supernatural creation of Adam and Eve inside Eden.  He makes an excellent case, pointing out that with interbreeding between Adam and Eve’s progeny and those outside the garden, something Genesis itself suggests, by the time we get to Jesus’ day, human beings all provide genetic evidence of a long evolution and sharing a common ancestor with the higher primates but also genealogical evidence that the human race comes from Adam of Eve.  

There is no sleight of hand or pulling a rabbit out of a hat in this argument.  The real strength of Swamidass’ book is his careful scientific discussion of genetics and genealogy, laying out the evidence in detail.

There are however some exegetical weaknesses, but none of them are fatal to his case. The first I will point out is that Gen. 2-3 not only mentions Adam and Eve’s sin, but God’s curse on both humans and creation itself in response to the sin. You cannot talk about the Fall just in terms of human sin. 

As Paul later says in Rom. 8– the whole of creation was subjected (by God) to futility and is groaning for release.  This was caused by the curse, not in the first instance by human sin, though every human sin has continued to mar, misuse, and even destroy parts of creation and many creatures along the way.  Secondly, the other part of the curse falls not just on the labour pains of Adam dealing with the soil, but also on the labour pains of Eve both in the danger of bearing children but also ‘your desire will be for your husband and he will lord it over you’ (cf. the LXX translation of this crucial verse and its use of kyrios). 

Patriarchy then is a result of not just the Fall but of God’s judgment on humanity as a result of sin. To love and to cherish degenerates into desire and to dominate. Swamidass is right to emphasize that nothing at all in Gen. 1-3 talks about human beings dominating or even destroying other human beings using violence and war.  The creation mandate was to fill the earth and subdue it— not subdue or subordinate or destroy other human beings.

The Gen. 2 creation story does indeed say Eve was created because of the deficiencies in Adam— he needed a suitable partner to be able to fulfil the creation order mandate and ‘it was not good for man to be alone’. 

Nothing in that account suggests the necessary subordination of women to men or wives to husbands.  The word ‘helper’ here is also used of God himself in the OT as the helper of Israel and certainly does not necessarily imply the subordination of Yahweh to Israel!!  The old King James’ ‘a help meet’ that is a suitable helper is an appropriate translation.  

The subordinate of wives and women comes as a result of the judgment on Adam and Eve’s sin— your desire will be for your husband and he will rule/lord it over you.  This is in no way the original blessing or the original creation order plan that is enunciated in Gen. 1-2—male and female he created them in his image and after his likeness.

Swamidass does no detailed exegesis of Gen. 1-2 paying attention to the particulars of the Hebrew. Another place where this causes some issues is in regard to the Tree of Life. There really is no reason to think that mortality was the punishment for human sin. 

The tree of life in the garden strongly suggests that positive immortality was within the grasp of Adam and Eve and they could have eaten of that tree, but alas chose the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  The death they experienced was spiritual death, and this is the death Paul later says came to us from Adam as a result of the first sins.  

You can see the evidence of this spiritual death in the ‘heart turned in upon itself’— Adam and Eve become narcissists, self-conscious about even their lack of clothing and afraid of the God who made them— in short very self-centred and self-protective, hiding from God. 

They did not physically die after eating the fruit. Indeed, they lived a good long time thereafter.  Probably one reason Adam and Eve are cast out of the garden is so they won’t eat of the tree life, and be everlasting fallen creatures who cannot die (much like the famous story in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels of the Man who asked for everlasting life but not everlasting youth… and so he kept getting older without the ability to die).

In any case, these sorts of exegetical possibilities are not pursued in Swamidass’ book.  He is however correct that the ethos and social setting of the story in Gen. 2-3 favours the conclusion that we are not talking about what Craig insists on— Adam and Eve living hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture or tools or religious sacrifices show up on earth.  

Swamidass shows this conclusion is not necessary either scientifically or historically.   We will probe more about this in our dialogue with Swamidass which follows this post.

One last thing to ponder, which Swamidass points out— if we don’t have a problem with the virginal conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary as a miracle, which is clearly a de novo sort of creation, we should have no problems with a de novo miraculous creation of Adam and Eve in the garden. He is right about this.  

Consider me convinced by the scientific part of Swamidass’ arguments. In short, we don’t need a young earth theology, we don’t need an anti-evolution polemic, and we don’t need an Adam that was like Heidelberg man. Instead, Adam and Eve showed up hundreds and thousands of years later than such humanoids or homo sapiens, or whatever you want to call them.  

Also, we don’t need to deny that the people outside the garden were created in God’s image, just as Adam and Eve were.  Indeed, I would say that Genesis 1 is the universal account of the creation of all human beings, and Gen. 2 is more specifically the account of the creation of the direct ancestors of God’s people. After all, the Bible is overwhelmingly just the story of God’s people and salvation history, not primarily the story of everyone.   

Q. First of all, kudos to you for writing an exciting and very interesting book on a topic that usually produces far more heat than light on the subject. What prompted you to write this book in particular and why did you take the approach you did?

A. Thank you for reading my book and inviting this conversation. My primary goal, in this book, is to address the scientific questions about Adam and Eve with empathy, honesty, and rigour. Does evolution really rule out the de novo creation of Adam and Eve? Does evolution really demonstrate that we do not all descend from them? These questions are where much deep and historic conflict lies.

This book required professional courage. When I first went public, I was a professor at a secular institution without tenure. Because of the risk, I still went public out of growing concern about how evolutionary creationists were misrepresenting scientific findings to the Church. I also am aligned with mainstream science, including evolutionary science. From my view of science, we share common ancestors with the great apes.

About Adam and Eve, however, evolutionary creationists overreached and made untruthful claims. In response, theology was welcomed only to accommodate, adapt, and revise. This book is a pushback on their overreach.

I am pushing back on Dennis Venema’s chapters in Adam and the Genome. He recounts a journalist’s question, “How likely it is that we all descend from Adam and Eve?” Venema replied, “That would be against all the genomic evidence that we’ve assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all.”

This is just not true. If Adam and Eve were real people in a real past, most likely all of us descend from them.

I am pushing back on BioLogos’s insistence that “the de novo creation of Adam and Eve is not compatible with what scientists have found in God’s creation.” 

Aligned with this insistence, Deborah Haarsma confronted pastor Tim Keller for his confession that Adam and Eve were specially created. She still warns he “risks driving away those who might otherwise be drawn to the faith.”

This also is not true. The de novo creation of Adam and Eve is compatible with what scientists have found in God’s creation. Even if common descent is actual, Adam and Eve could have been created without their parents.

I am pushing back on the overreach itself, and also the resistance to correction. Haarsma still insists that Adam and Eve as “recent sole progenitors is inconsistent with scientific evidence.” 

This is not true either. 

Here, they overreach by forcing narrow scientific meanings on theological terms. As my book clarifies, depending on the theological meaning of “sole-progenitors” and “human,” Adam and Eve as recent sole-progenitors can be consistent with the scientific evidence.

In this overreach, they are not acting as secular scientists. Indeed, some understandings of Adam and Eve conflict with evolutionary science. Some versions, though, are not in conflict.

This is the good news my book brings. For the last 160 years, evolution has been complex for the Church. But, with a better understanding of science, there may not be as much conflict as we once believed.

Q. Let’s talk about evolution for a bit. While it may seem redundant, the truth is that evolutionary science has itself evolved over time. Darwin’s early reflections on Origins morphed into some different reflections in later iterations of his work, especially in the way he reflected on God’s role in the whole process, and it is true as well that evolutionary science continues to develop. 

It seems to me that for most conservative Christians whether Protestant, Orthodox, or Catholic, micro-evolution within a specific genus or species isn’t really the issue. You don’t hear a lot of debates or arguments about whether a fish could crawl on land and adapt and become some sort of land creature. 

You also don’t hear objections to the notion that caterpillars can become butterflies to use an even more obvious example. Change, adaptation to the environment to survive among all creatures great and small that are not human is neither here nor there for most Christians. Obviously, the flash point is human beings and human origins.

A. You are right to put the focus on human evolution. No one really cares, in the end, about evolution among animals and plants. The real difficulty is squaring human evolution with Genesis and theological anthropology. What do I mean by “evolution”? 

As a scientist, I understand evolution as a good and valuable scientific explanation of how the complexity and diversity of life arose. But it is not the whole story. We do not know or understand all the whys and whats. Evolution is not a total explanation of the world and never will be.

As a Christian, I understand evolution as God’s providentially governed process of creating us all. I don’t need scientific evidence to prove God’s involvement. 

The testimony of Scripture is good enough for me. So, evolution is legitimate, but it does account for everything. Most scientists will agree with this account of evolution. It is against this backdrop, that my book argues for the unique and miraculous creation of a single couple in our past, without parents of their own.

Q. On human evolution is where your contribution to the discussion is helpful in various ways. But you seem to be saying that evolution applies to ‘humans’ outside the garden of Eden, but not to those inside it, not to Adam and Eve about whom you use the phrase de novo creation. I would suspect that your fellow scientists who are not Christians would call this special pleading. How would you respond to that critique?

A. My colleagues, to their credit, were largely positive and even enthusiastic. They do not usually call it special pleading. The reason why is that the scientific argument I make is unassailable. The science is solid, and I didn’t twist or overstate the scientific case. The quality of our scientific argument matters to secular scientists, in the end, far more than our specific conclusions.

Ironically, primary arguments against a de novo creation of Adam and Eve are pushed by Christians, not secular scientists, based on theology and exegesis. I address this in my book. In the end, the de novo creation of Adam and Eve becomes much like the Virginal conception of Jesus.

Do we trust Scripture? What does it teach? Science isn’t the source of the challenge on this point any more.

This is an important finding also because it challenges the reasoning of just about everyone in the conversation. The Intelligent Design community explains their lack of progress in the scientific community due to an impenetrable anti-supernatural bias. But even several atheist scientists endorsed or gave positive reviews of my book.

Many creationists reject evolution because it conflicts with de novo creation. They can still reject evolution, but this is no longer a good reason to do so. Both evolution and the de novo creation of Adam and Eve can be true at the same time. Again, most objections to de novo creation seem to be coming from Christians, not secular scientists.

For example, William Lane Craig asserts in his book that the unique creation of Adam and Eve is not scientifically plausible, so therefore, it is obviously a myth. 

We can be sure that this is an invalid argument. Science doesn’t tell us that de novo creation isn’t plausible. There is an argument to make that Scripture does not require us to affirm the de novo creation of Adam and Eve. 

But de novo creation has been the traditional reading of Genesis, in that it is how just about everyone read Genesis for most of history. For this reason, de novo creation enjoys the benefits of being the “default” position. So it cannot be ad hoc, nor a special pleading. It is just how most Christians read Genesis, and it does not conflict with evolutionary science. 

So why exactly would we reject it? What is pushing us from the traditional position? I’m puzzled I have not yet found a good answer to this question. Perhaps rejecting de novo creation is just one of those historical “wrong-turns?”

I am familiar with exegesis that does away with de novo creation. These can be faithful readings of Scripture, and many faithful Christians understand Scripture this way now. But historically, the only reason these alternate readings arose was a profound misunderstanding about what evolutionary science demanded.

Knowing what we know now, why do we need these new readings? Why not just stick with the traditional view? I am still waiting to hear a serious or coherent response to these questions.

Q. One of the things you do not discuss in your book is that the vast majority of the Bible is not about all human beings and all of history for that matter. It is about the origins of God’s people and their history, including salvation history. 

People such as the Philistines or Hittites of the OT or, in the NT, the Greeks or Romans only come into the picture insofar as they come into contact with God’s people. Obviously, the scope of intentional contact with people not of the Biblical tradition becomes more direct due to the Great Commission and evangelism in the NT era. 

Then, a universalism by the inclusion of more and more people groups into the people of God becomes part of the raison d’etre of being God’s people. 

And yes, there is a universalism in Gen. 1 regarding the Biblical God being the creator of everything and everyone, whatever means he uses. I wondered why you didn’t stress more that the Bible tells a particular human story about a particular group of people. It is not everyone's story, for the most part.

A. I stressed that Genesis tells a particular human story about a particular group of people. On one level, this is just how all stories work. Most of Scripture is narrative stories. 

Good stories don’t bog us down with too many details. They are efficient, drawing our attention to critical aspects of the characters, setting, and backstory. We do not expect them to tell us everything. 

It would be silly, for example, to watch a movie set in the Wild West and conclude that the writer rejects the existence of people living in China. 

Even though China is never mentioned, that silence tells us nothing about whether people live there or even what the author thinks of these things. Instead, China is not mentioned because it is irrelevant to the story and setting. It is silly to reason about a John Wayne movie this way. It is also silly to reason about Scriptural narratives in this way.

It should be no surprise that those strong claims of universality are complex to derive from Genesis alone. The particularity of Genesis, however, is in tension with the universality of the full Scripture. 

The New Testament's claims of universality must be addressed.  For example, much is made of Romans 5:12-14, implicating universal descent from Adam and Eve in Paul’s teaching. Let’s set aside commitment to some of the more narrow definitions of original sin. It is just mere Christianity to hold that somehow Adam’s sin comes to affect us all. Indeed, that is how Augustine read Romans, the Council of Orange, and several Church traditions.

Less discussed, but just as important, is Jesus’s commission to the early Church to take the Gospel to the “ends of the Earth” in Acts 1:8. In his glorified state, Jesus surely knew that the Earth was a globe, with antipodeans living on the other side. Whatever the Gospel is doing for us, it is intended for people that the Church would know nothing of till the “discovery” of the Americas. 

So, the tension between Genesis and the New Testament is valuable. It forces us to work through a scandalous particularity. Somehow, the God of the universe is making himself known in one corner of the Earth. That’s true of both the Garden and the Empty Tomb. This message in one cultural setting, truly foreign to all of us now, is meant for all of us in all cultures.

I resolve this tension with attention to the temporal cues. The teaching of Scripture is that Adam and Eve became the ancestors of all of us. In Genesis, they are not universal ancestors. By the time Paul writes Romans, however, they are ancestors of us all.

Q. One of the issues I have with Bill Craig’s fine book The Quest for the Historical Adam is the willingness to take a text like Gen. 2 as a basic myth, except there is a real historical Adam and Eve at some point in antiquity. 

He’s willing to basically dismiss the social ethos of the text, which suggests a relatively recent Adam and Eve during an era where religious sacrifices were offered and crops were grown, to place Adam and Eve with Heidelberg man some hundreds of thousands of years B.C. It seems this doesn’t work with either Gen. 2-3 or what follows it. I gather you also favour Adam and Eve, who are not from hundreds of thousands of years B.C. Why do you see this as the more viable view?

A. The good news is that both an ancient and a recent Adam and Eve can be consistent with mainstream science. Which one makes more sense?  That’s the debate we are rejoining anew. Craig’s book makes the best case he can for an ancient Adam and Eve. For him and other scholars like C. John Collins, placing Adam and Eve at the ancient headwaters of “humanness” is worth the cost of reading much of Genesis 1-11 as mythology.

My book, however, gravitates to a recent Adam and Eve.  Until The Genealogical Adam and Eve, scholars that saw Adam and Eve as more recent had to pay a heavy tax to science. They had to let go of monogenesis and come up with creative readings of Romans 5:12-14. 

They also had to reject the 'de novo' creation of Adam and Eve. The Genealogical Adam and Eve is necessary, in part, because it shows that these two revisions were unnecessary. Rejecting these doctrines is not what evolutionary science requires of us.

This reconfigures the calculation. 

First, those who abandoned monogenesis and de novo creation due to science can reassess and reclaim that ground. 

Second, in light of what we know now, I suspect most Evangelical scholars will end up with some version of a recent Adam and Eve. There are several reasons this will be the case.

Finally, most evangelicals think a “maximal” reading of the Genesis tradition makes much more sense. In this, we are aligned with the “literalist” tradition. Of course, I do not mean a naïve and rigid reading of an English translation. Instead, I mean the sensibilities and values of B.B. Warfield, Cyrus Scofield, and even Reasons to Believe and the Chicago Statements on Hermeneutics and Inerrancy.

In contrast, and aligned with the common Catholic understanding, Craig proposes a “minimal” reading of Genesis. He discards most of early Genesis as myth, perhaps with theological meaning, but not physical reality. But he is also sifting through to find the one or two things that must be true of the physical world. 

Then, with a great deal of flexibility, he can engage with science to see if there is a model that can allow him to hold those truths alongside natural history. For Craig, placing Adam and Eve at the headwaters of “humanness” is worth the price of reading most of Genesis 1-11 as myth. And there is a price.

This price will not be worth it to most Evangelicals. With exceptions, perhaps, like C. John Collins, I don’t think most exegetes think these “minimal” readings are the proper exegesis. For all our disagreements on the particulars (and disagreements are many), most Evangelicals see intrinsic value in understanding Genesis as playing out in the physical world. 

We want to avoid eisegesis and scientific concordism. All else being equal, Evangelicals usually see intrinsic value in historical Scripture readings over mythological readings.

A recent Adam and Eve includes another big payoff here for scholars. My book moves questions about Adam and Eve from biology into archaeology, where biblical scholars have engaged productively with science for quite some time. 

There are a rich set of questions about how Genesis relates to everything from the rise of agricultural cities and civilizations to the people of the Americas, from the Gobekl Tepe to the Persian Gulf Oasis. A lot of low-hanging fruit comes to view by reorienting questions about Adam and Eve into this domain, where there is already a profound and positive exchange between biblical studies and science.

Q. So why will some scholars still see value in an ancient Adam and Eve? Why do you think they take this path?

A. Given reception history, an ancient Adam and Eve seems like a “wrong turn.” It seems to have arisen only in response to an erroneous understanding of science. The monogenesis tradition focused on original sin and Romans 5:12-14. The doctrine is not grounded in the Image of God but rather about humanness in the distant past. 

Yet, drifting from the Scriptural grounding, philosophers commonly want to understand monogenesis this way. Is this move a product of that historical wrong turn? Is it possible philosophers are reading a “philosophical” definition into Scripture, where it cannot be found? It seems so to me.

Exegetically, the ancient Adam camp has a difficult task. An ancient Adam and Eve only makes sense if the original couple must sit at the headwaters of “humanness.” 

But the doctrine of monogenesis is historically centred on Romans 5:12-14. It is about the nature of the Fall and Original Sin, not the Image of God or humanness. So why do they think Adam and Eve must sit at the headwaters of “humanness”? This question looms large.

The justifications for the ancient Adam and Eve I have seen so far seem fragile. Several links in a chain must be successfully connected simultaneously to make the case. 

For example, Genesis 1 and 2 must be read as recapitulatory accounts, even though many scholars understand them as sequential. 

• A sequential reading teaches that Adam and Eve are not the headwaters of “humanness” because, in Genesis 1, God creates humankind before he creates Adam and Eve in Genesis 2. 
• A recapitulatory reading of Genesis 1 and 2 can be consistent with a recent Adam and Eve. In contrast, even a sequential reading does not work with an ancient Adam and Eve.

Similarly, the Image of God must be understood in a rigid substantialist way so it is linked with “humanness.” 

(The term "substantialist" refers to a philosophical or theoretical perspective emphasising the existence and importance of substance or essence. It is often used in discussions about metaphysics, ontology, and the nature of reality. 

Substantialists believe that there are fundamental, unchanging substances or essences that underlie and define the nature of things. These substances or essences are seen as independent entities that exist in and of themselves, separate from their attributes or properties. 

In contrast, non-substantialist perspectives argue that reality is more fluid and relational, with no fixed substances or essences)

But most exegetes reject this understanding of the image. Substantialists commonly respond that the vocational image of God implies particular abilities, and that may be true. 

But that misses the point because particular abilities do not imply a vocation. Even if vocation implies abilities, the reverse is not valid. To me, it seems like the eisegesis of a philosophical definition of humans into scripture.

One scholar we both know recently argued that most of early Genesis was myth and then adopted a hyper-literalistic reading of Genesis 2:5. Surely, it cannot be hermeneutics alone that is driving his exegesis here, right? 

To be sure, this will all be hotly debated among biblical scholars and theologians. Knowing what we know now, is there any plausible grounding to prefer an ancient Adam and Eve? Or was that idea just another wrong turn in reception history?  

(The text "reception history" refers to the study and analysis of how a particular work of art, literature, or cultural artefact has been received and interpreted by its audience over time. It involves examining different individuals' or groups' reactions, interpretations, and critiques in different historical and cultural contexts. This field of study helps to provide insights into the changing perceptions and meanings attributed to a particular work, as well as its impact and influence on society.)

Q. If you disagreed with William Lane Craig on such a significant point, why did you endorse his book?

A.  Despite these fundamental disagreements, Craig’s work is essential. He is pushing back on overreach by theological revisionists at BioLogos. As a scientist, I helped Craig. He had good-faith questions about human origins and really wanted to understand. In response, Biologos falsely claimed that his understanding of evolutionary creation conflicted with the evidence. When the ruse was discovered, they stealth deleted several articles on their website.

Bill Craig understands Adam and Eve as everyone's ancient ancestors. He is proposing an “ancient genealogical Adam and Eve.” Whether we agree with him or not, I do not think science should be unfairly used against his position. 

For this reason, I collaborated with him on the scientific component of the book. Pushing back on the revisionists, He shows that the Catholic view of Adam and Eve is consistent with science.

So, both an ancient and a recent Adam and Eve are consistent with science. Which one makes the most sense? The disagreement between us is about theology and Scripture, not science.  Ultimately, this might be one of the most important contributions of Craig’s book. He is inviting a conversation between two critical traditions in the Church. More than any individual argument he makes, this is how the impact of his book should be judged and understood.

Q. One of the ideas flagged as problematic throughout your book is ‘polygenesis’. Now I understand the problems with a particular view of that, which led to racist speculations about Ham, Shem, etc., as the origins of different races, but I don’t see any problem with the notion of polygenesis if by that we mean that human beings were created in his image by God in various places on earth both inside and outside Eden. 

Why is this notion inherently problematic if it is? I raise this question because, on a close reading of Genesis 1-11, there are indeed human beings outside Eden with whom the children of Eve mate, etc., as you have pointed out and Genesis 1 affirms that all created human beings are in God’s image.

A. It all depends on what we mean by the term “polygenesis,” the “image of God”, and “human.” Let me define two terms. Pre-Adamites are people created before Adam and Eve. Co-Adamites are people today who do not descend from Adam and Eve. The problem is any version of polygenesis that includes co-Adamites. 

• In linguistics, polygenesis is the view that human languages evolved as several lineages independent of one another. It is contrasted with monogenesis, which is the view that human languages all return to a common ancestor.

In contrast, the text of Scripture gives powerful hints of people outside the Garden in the distant past. From Cain’s wife to Nephilim, readers have been wondering about the possibility of pre-Adamites for thousands of years. This is part of the Genesis tradition. But the existence of co-Adamites was soundly rejected by several branches of the Church. The history of interpretation helps sort this out a great deal.

For most traditions in the Church, pre-Adamites are not an acceptable explanation for co-Adamites. These supposed Co-Adamites are rejected as a heretical myth.  Historically, polygenesis was a theory proposed to explain co-Adamites. The challenge wasn’t evolution. It was, instead, the discovery of the Americas. The early Church fathers had no difficulty with the Earth being a globe, but they unanimously rejected the possibility of people living on the other side of the globe. Then Columbus discovered that antipodeans were real. What were we to make of them?

La Peyrere proposed that the First Peoples in the Americas did not descend from Adam and Eve. They were co-Adamites. Where did they come from? God created pre-Adamites, people before Adam and Eve, and this is where co-Adamites come from. His case is distinctly exegetical, relying on the sequential reading of Genesis 1 and 2 and a remarkably straightforward reading of Romans 5:12-14. Ironically, relying on Romans 5:12-14. The Church rejected La Peyrere’s polygenesis by rejecting the first premise. The Church insisted that the first peoples were, in fact, descendants of Adam and Eve. This historical context makes clear that the monogenesis doctrine intends to reject co-Adamites in the present day. Questions about the distant past are wide open.

So, what does science tell us?  The way I see it, my book, The Genealogical Adam and Eve, shows how the Church’s rejection of co-Adamites as still extant is totally and completely vindicated. In the present day, we all descend from Adam and Eve.

Q. You are arguing that several ideas need to be reassessed by scholars. What sort of reassessments are needed?

A. That is right. If we are following the conversation in historical theology, The Genealogical Adam and Eve should provoke a reassessment of key revisions to the historical doctrine by several scholars over the last century. 

To engage with science, many scholars rejected monogenesis by openly embracing the idea of co-Adamites in the present day. Of course, our faith is grounded in Jesus and does not collapse entirely if co-Adamites are real. However, these revisions arose from a misunderstanding of science. There is no good reason to innovate with creative theology to solve a non-existent problem.  Co-Adamites really are a myth. We know this is a wrong turn now. I have not yet heard any good reason to revise monogenesis’s rejection of co-Adamites. Nonetheless, I do think that some reassessments or clarifications are needed.

First, we must reassess La Peyrere’s reading of Genesis 1 and 2 and Romans 5:12-14. Romans 5:12-14 is particularly interesting. The text says that all humanity suffers death because of Adam’s sin. But it also hedges, suggesting to the reader that there was obviously sin before the law came, too. 

But God did not hold this sin against anyone’s account. To which law are Romans referring? This was a law before which no one was held accountable. Adam was held accountable for his sin and exiled from the Garden. So were all the people destroyed in Noah’s flood. So, it can’t plausibly be the Law of Moses. All these people had God’s law written on their hearts too; consequently, they could not be the people “before” the law was given, so it couldn’t be the law of conscience either.

It looks like La Peyrere had a point here. The law of Romans 5:12-14 makes the most sense as the command given to Adam. Paul is clarifying that wrongdoing and sin were obviously in the world already, which implies the existence of pre-Adamites who sinned but were not held accountable by God. In contrast, Adam’s sin is different, the transgression of God’s sin. It also looks like the monogenesis tradition had a point, too. 

This passage, and others, implicates descent from Adam and Eve in one way or another. Romans 5:12-14 does rule out co-Adamites, even as it implies pre-Adamites.  Of course, we could discuss whether Genesis 1 and 2 are best read sequentially or in parallel. There are other passages, too.

This is a real opportunity for scholars. We have an opportunity to reassess critical revisions of the tradition. We will likely find several wrong turns to undo. The payoff is not merely academic progress but also the possibility of rebinding the way various Christians view the Genesis tradition. We can, again, understand Genesis together with one another.

I find it notable that both BioLogos and Answers in Genesis have, largely, dodged meaningful dialogue with Christian scientists that think differently than them. This is one of the ways they protect themselves from criticism and reform.  Real dialogue is risky. We do not know where the conversation might go. Our mistakes might be exposed. But dialogue is our only chance to make progress together. So, for me, dialogue is worth the risk. Being right on these particulars, however, is not enough. We also need to be trusted.

BioLogos has never pushed back on overreach by scientists. Whether it’s evolution, climate change, or COVID vaccines, why would anyone who suspects scientific overreach trust BioLogos?  This is the core question they have always faced, and it will continue to loom over them going forward.  This is why the response to these mistakes on Adam and Eve matter so much. Science is difficult to get right, even when we try our hardest. No one should harshly judge evolutionary creationists for the initial mistakes. Their response, however, matters.  Had BioLogos transparently corrected the mistakes, and apologized for them, they would be above reproach. I would, most likely, still be working with them.

In the end, evolutionary creation is not going to work for many evangelicals. it is now clear that the Church needs other ways to engage with mainstream science. That’s okay though. There are other ways to take hold of evolutionary science.

Evolution does not demand grand revisions of traditional Christian commitments and theology. Instead, it might be calling us to return to our historical roots, where we might be rewarded with a more coherent orthodoxy.

Q. Let’s talk about interbreeding between Adamites and those outside the garden for a moment. You seem to assume that over time, this interbreeding is so vast and successful that by the time we get to 1 A.D. all those outside the garden who didn’t interbreed but kept to themselves died out, or am I misreading your argument? Please clarify. And speaking of interbreeding, the majority opinion not only among Biblical scholars but also apparently in the eyes of the author of Jude and 2 Peter 2 is that we are talking about naughty angels cross-breeding with human women. In other words, that event which produces the Nephilim is not about two groups of humans inter-breeding. I’ve shown in detail the connection of Gen. 6 with later reflections on that story in Jude and 2 Pet. 2 and one can probably include 1 Pet. 3 which refers to spirits in prison (again not likely humans) and notice where Satan ends up in jail in Rev. 20.1ff. What do you make of all this? [N.B. see the discussion in my Jesus the Seer].

A.  On the scientific side, the interbreeding is vast and successful. Everyone alive today is a descendent, then, of Adam and Eve. But they are also descendants of most the people outside the Garden too. On the Scriptural side, there are several passages that seem to hint at people outside the Garden. From Cain’s wife to Nephilim, to Romans and the difference between Genesis 1 and 2, I lay out all the reasons why readers of Genesis have wondered about people outside the Garden.

Now, it is possible that none of these passages ultimately teaches or indicates people outside the Garden. That is okay. None of them rule out people outside the garden either. In the end, that’s all I need. I just need space in the Genesis account for people outside the Garden.  Your question seems to reference specifically the pericope on Nephilim in Genesis 6:1-4.

About those Nephilim…I understood that the majority opinion was that nothing of confidence can be discerned. Just about every exegete I consulted emphasized that this passage is just about impossible to interpret with certainty. Some readers see a reference to “angels.” If it was angels, these angels are a reproductively compatible population that does not descend from Adam and Eve. In that sense, they are “people outside the Garden,” broadly construed. But this is not the only way the passage is understood.

My sense is that the original audience of Genesis knew exactly what was being referred to, whatever it was. If Adam and Eve were recent, the original audience probably knew that people were outside the garden. Our confusion on this passage is a symptom of our disconnect from their cultural context. In that case, perhaps the differences between Genesis 1 and 2 give us some clues to understanding the passage. What if “sons of Elohim” is a reference to the broader humanity created in Genesis 1 outside the Garden? What if “daughters of Adam” is a reference to the humanity of those who descended from Adam and Eve?

The story that seems to so clearly echo this reading of Genesis 6:1-4 is in the Epic of Gilgamesh. God creates Enkidu to influence the harsh King Gilgamesh. Enkidu is a wild man in the wilderness, but the temple prostitute Shamhat tempts him into Gilgamesh’s world. This story’s ambiguous ethics echoes the movement of hunter gatherers into the rising world of agricultural cities and civilizations. What if that is what is being referred to in Genesis 6:1-4? What if God is judging Adam and Eve’s fallen civilization for corrupting the people outside the Garden?

I like this reading because it is informed by the text of Scripture. If Adam and Eve were recent, it seems this might be how the original audience understood the passage. This reading, moreover, develops narrative themes already seen throughout Genesis. But who knows in the end, right? From our vantage point, we only see dimly into the past. If there is any value to my speculation, perhaps a real biblical scholar can pick it up and fill in the gaps for us. I’m just a mere scientist in the end, getting lost in questions much bigger than myself.

Q. One of the more interesting parts of your scientific discussion is the mention that scientists are not clear about how to define human. By “human,” scientists might mean anything from ancient homo sapiens to the homo genus. And these definitions may not line up well with how philosophers and theologians think about human. Explain for my audience what difference this sort of discussion makes and why it is important.

A. There is a great deal of uncertainty in how scientists define human.  We all descend from Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals too. But which of these were human? However, we define human, it seems that we derive from earlier precursors. But at what point do we call them “human” or not? At what point did they gain fully human minds? Or a soul? Or the image of God? These are questions that science has no good way of settling. This ambiguity and uncertainty cannot be neglected. We can’t answer any questions about human origins without have a clear and unambiguous definition of human.

Take one of the most straightforward questions of all. When do humans arise? Our answer will depend critically on whether we count Neanderthals, and every other Homo species, as human. Even once we settle on a set of species that are human, to which species should individual fossils be assigned? Ambiguity, disagreement, and multivalence in our definitions means that even on the most basic of questions, there are multiple legitimate answers.

So, we can only answer this most basic of questions with certainty. This is true for the easy questions, most simply construed, but it is also true for the hard questions. In the end, we cannot expect these scientific definitions to line up with theological definitions in the first place. Even if scientists did have a settled definition of “human,” there is no reason to think it would line up well with theological, philosophical, and scriptural definitions of the term. 

How do the humans of theology arise? Well, science knows nothing of theological definitions of humans. Theologians have legitimate autonomy to define human however they like. I recover one very old definition of human: Adam, Eve and their genealogical descendants. This is a definition that is part of the Genesis tradition, and it is also visible in Scripture. This definition of human seems most germane to the doctrine of monogenesis. In this way, my book invites us back to an ancient conversation about what it means to be human.

Q. For my money one of the most important parts of the discussion of these topics is what exactly one should make of the phrase ‘in his image and after his likeness’ something predicated of humans and no one else. I may have missed it, but if you are pressed on this issue, what do you think the author of these Genesis texts is referring to? It seems clear to me that it must have something to do with humans unique capacity for a special relationship to God, including the possibility of being God’s representative on earth, showing and leading the world on how to relate to God properly. In any case the word tselem in Hebrew is in fact the same word used for ‘idol’. We, in some sense are God’s idol on earth, his embodied living representative, and we are supposed to reflect God’s character and presumably assume some of his roles on lesser scale—being co-creators, being managers of the earth engaging in creation care and so on. When I am asked what we should look for in the fossil or archaeological record to find ancient humans I usually talk about homo religiosis, that is where we find evidence of religion, of worship, of high places and sacrifices. No other creature other than angels that I know of practice worship or religion in this sense. What do you think?

A. This is where the most interesting action might be, both now, and for quite some time to come. We are approaching a grand question. What does it mean to be human?  Here is how I frame your question. The term human is multivalent. It has many definitions that are both distinct and valid. Here are some of the definitions that seem to be at play in your proposal.

1. Humans are everyone in the image of God.  Of course, there is much debate about the meaning of this term too, each of which induces a different definition of human. You are hinting at one particular understanding in your question.

2. Human are those that have a capacity to worship in a human way, as you describe Homo religiosis, and connect to the image of God. You see this arise fairly recently in history, less than 15,000 years ago, but others might see evidence of worship far more ancient.

3. Human is Adam, Eve, and their descendants. This is an old definition that derives from Scripture.

4. Human is a biological taxonomical category, such as Homo sapiens, or the Homo genus. These are several of these biological definitions of human.

5. Human is a category that includes all Homo sapiens across the globe since AD 1. This is a definition that derives from the doctrine of monogenesis, and it is minimalist criteria that we expect all definitions of human to satisfy.

6. Humans are beings that have a fully human mind, by some philosophical criteria for minds. There are many different criteria used, each of which induces a different definition. These are philosophical definitions of human.

7. Human are all those that have human worth and human dignity. Separating this out gives us a way to ask key questions about what actually grounds our worth and dignity.

We can make some observations from this list of definitions.  First, this list is not exhaustive; we can add to this list, and we can expand several items into multiple definitions too. Second, these are all valid definitions. Third, there are also distinct definitions. Fourth, they also are all “co-extensive” in present day. This means that everyone alive today that is human by one of these definitions is also human by all of these definitions. Fifth, it would be a mistake, however, to think that all these definitions must all be coextensive in the distant past. Instead, we need to think carefully here about the logical relationships between each definition.

Having laid this out, here is how I would state my understanding of your proposal. Perhaps you are proposing the image of God (1) is identifiable with religious beliefs in our ancestors, with Homo religiosis (2). Of course, biological humans (4) and philosophical humans (6) arose long before them. Similarly, Adam and Eve’s lineage (3) might have arisen long after Homo religiosis too, because the Image of God may not be unique to their lineage. So the humans of definitions 1 and 2 are coextensive in the distant past, humans by definition 4 and 6 come before, and Adam and Eve (and humans definition 3) come later.

This proposal is logically possible. There is no logical contradiction here. What about scientifically and theologically?  Scientifically, most anthropologists will define religious behavior differently than you. Rightly or wrongly, purposeful burial of the dead is associated with belief in the afterlife, ergo “religious” behavior. And this seems to arise much farther in the past than Gobekli Tepe. But you seem to be using different criteria than them, and that’s worth clarifying.  I agree with your instinct on the relationship between image of God and Adam and Eve’s lineage. I have not found good grounding for tightly linking the image of God exclusively to Adam and Eve’s lineage.

Honestly, I’m puzzled by the scholars that think otherwise. The doctrine of monogenesis is about the Fall, not the image of God. Some readings of Scripture even suggest that the people outside the Garden are in the Image of God. Could Homo religiosis have come long before Adam and Eve?  I think so.

I think of Melchizedeck, the priestly king to whom Abraham tithes a tenth of his belongings. Melchizedeck has no genealogy, and just pops into the narrative. In an important way, he is a type of religion before Abraham. We cannot say if he is a descendent of Adam and Eve or not, so he is evocative of a religion before Adam and Eve too.

I also think of dispensationalism. I don’t mean rigid forms of capital “D” Dispensationalism, but the general idea that God dispenses grace differently in different eras. This idea goes back all the way to Romans, as Paul grapples with a transition between two dispensations. The era before Jesus to the era after.

Maybe there was a dispensation of grace before Adam and Eve? I would expect that there was. There may have been false pagan religions before Adam and Eve too. Your reading of Gobekli Tepe is positive, but how do we know if they were worshiping a good god or some other darker forces?  Perhaps Adam and Eve came much later, and were the first that encountered the true God of all creation.

Jon Garvey, I suspect, would agree with me. Perhaps his book on The Genealogical Adam and Eve is worth exploring further. This is just my initial reaction. Maybe my instincts are wrong, of course. This is all still a mystery. But this is also the fun ahead. What precisely do you mean by these definitions of human? What are the principles, logic and evidence that ground linking these particular definitions together into co-extensive units?

Is there teaching in Scripture? Reasoning from ethics or philosophy? Do particular traditions constrain our answers or guide our instincts? These, it seems, are the key questions here for all of us to sort through together.

Q. In several places you mention the so-called Persian Gulf Oasis. Please explain what this is for our readers?

A.  The Persian Gulf is a sea between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. But about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, it was quite different. Sea levels were about 400 ft lower, and the Persian Gulf was not drowned by water. Instead, it was a thriving Oasis. The paper on which this is based is worth reading in full, along with the discussion at the end. To make a long story short, the Oasis matches quite closely some of the weirder geographic details of Genesis 2, a passage of text locates the Garden in the adamah. The Oasis was without rain, where four rivers flowed out, and full of freshwater springs.

This is how William Lane Craig summarizes, “So the Garden of Eden seems to be described accurately as a real place, even if it is described in figurative and symbolic imagery. Amazing!”

Of course, he goes on to understand this as an anachronistic usage of a real geography. I don’t think that is the most straightforward reading, especially in the context of ANE literature. Rather, this connection between the Persian Gulf Oasis and Genesis 2 adds some important information to the conversation, heretofore under-appreciated by biblical scholars.

First, Genesis 2 seems to be accurately conveying geographic information about a lost Edenic region, a region where much of human civilization began. Second, this is evidence of an oral tradition stretch back at least till 8,000 years ago, long before Genesis was finally composed. Christians might rather infer that this information was somehow prophetically conveyed to the Genesis author. Still, oral traditions can accurately convey information just like this for 10,000 years, so an oral tradition seems more likely to me.

Third, traditionally it has been thought that the location of Garden of Eden is no longer known because it was destroyed in the Flood. Fourth, all this information places Genesis 2 solidly in the realm of archeology, a branch of science where there is already a great deal of positive interaction with biblical scholars. We should not understand this connection with the Persian Gulf Oasis as scientific concordism. While the ancient readers know nothing of the modern technology we used to rediscover the Oasis, the concepts that is conveyed in Scripture would have been easily understood by the original audience without modern science.

It seems to me that it undermines the notion that the Garden was obviously a mythological or symbolic place to the original audience. To the contrary, it seems that the original author of Genesis is intending to teach that the Garden was a real place in the physical world of its readers.

There is much more to discuss here. The Persian Gulf Oasis seems understudied by biblical scholars. How does this new information adjust and reframe how we understand Genesis?

Q. It appears that migration of humans is an important part of your argument for interbreeding, migration that had to have happened sometime well before we got to 1 A.D. so that one can claim everyone can have Adam and Eve as their genealogical ancestors. Explain please.

A. Turns out there has been massive amounts of mixing between different populations over the last 10,000 years. Almost everywhere we look, we find evidence of mixing. Two good books I recommend on this are Who We Are and How We Got Here and Mapping Human History.

One chapter in my book gives a high-level summary of what the evidence shows, and how it impacts my thesis. I’ve written a little more about it after the book came out too.

Q. You and I both use the terminology of Adam being the federal head of the human race such that his behaviour affected the whole race. I personally am not sure this has anything to do with the idea of seminal transmission of sin, guilt or a fatal flaw to all of Adam’s descendants. I think it has to do with Adam being the representative head of the race, whatever his relationship with all other humans such that his decision affects us all, just as say the President of the U.S. making a decision to go to war with Jamaica (to use a silly example) implicates and affects all American citizens who without personal choice are necessarily at war with Jamaica. Bill Craig deals with the problems with the original sin passed down argument. I would simply say sinful actions by the head of the race have moral consequences for us all. And as Paul says in Rom. 5 Adam sinned and so did we, and in both cases our own sin caused spiritual death. Comments?

A.  Few of us are committed to a particular formulation of Original Sin. The core issue is not “guilt by biological transmission” theology, or Augustine’s misreading of Romans. Instead, the key question is of the Fall. How did Adam and Eve’s sin affect us all?

Our theology of a historic Fall is potent, and it’s just mere Christianity. Adam is our federal head. That’s true, and it is also banal.

The bigger question: how and why did his fall affect us all? How and why is Adam our rightful head? None of us ever opted into a relationship with him, nor can we disassociate from him, and some of us think he is a fiction. So how exactly are we bound to him as our federal head?

The weight of Church tradition teaches that Adam and Eve, whether we know of them or not, are our federal heads because we descend from them. If we want to depart from traditional teaching here, we need something at least as coherent as natural descent to replace it. Now, I agree that, in principle, federal headship does not require natural descent. The example of the president declaring war on Jamaica is a great example of a type of headship that does not require descent.

This example, however, is extremely dis-analogous to federal headship by Adam. The president’s representation of us is not arbitrary: we all participated in electing the president and enjoy legal privileges from citizenship, and we are aware of the president’s decisions, and participatory in them in several ways. In fact, we can also renounce our citizenship if we choose too! In this sense we are bound in a visible and volitional way to the President.

The same is not true of Adam and Eve. However, something must be offered to replace ancestry if we want to discard it. Your example of declaring war on Jamaica is a great counter example to a context where ancestry would not matter. However, that counter example is extremely disanalogous to federal headship from Adam. The atheist doesn’t believe Adam exists and none of us were around to participate in their Fall, and none of us by our volition can disassociate ourselves from Adam’s headship.

We have no visible or volitional connection to Adam, so how is he our federal head? I suggest a few answers in my book.

Adam and Eve, if they are real people in our past, they are our ancestors. That’s true whether we know it or not. We cannot out opt out of this fact of reality. For this reason, whether we like it or not, we are causally dependent on them, just as all offspring depend on their parents. When Adam and Eve fell, God exiled them instead of executing them. Had he executed them instead, none of us would have been born. Perhaps that debt of mercy has theological entailments on us now.

Perhaps this proposal works. Perhaps it doesn’t. But the proposal still engages the core question. And it is not the whole story. There seems to be a strong connection between the rise of agricultural civilization in the last 10,000 years and the narrative of Genesis. Could the way civilization rises, the world that we inherit, does it bear marks of the Fall? Whatever the case, we need to move past the simple answers. We need to move away from facile critiques of highly particular and parochial conceptions of Original Sin. There are grander questions here.

How is it that Adam and Eve’s sin impacts us all? How is it that Adam is our rightful head? What is the mechanism of the fall? Can there be justice in a world defined by inheritance?

Q. In my dialogue with Bill Craig, I pressed him with the notion of Hebrews using myths. My own study of the matter shows that they were demythologizing if anything other familiar ANE ideas and sagas. They simply weren’t a myth making people, so I had problems with the notion that about one verse of Genesis 2-3 reflected some historical kernel, and I gather you would agree and he suggests all we can know is that there was a historical Adam and Eve which he locates with Heidelberg man. I honestly think Paul and Jesus would be surprised to hear all this. They seem clearly to take Adam and Eve as historical persons, not merely literary figures, especially in Rom. 5. What do you think?

A. My understanding is aligned with yours. It does seem to me that the Bible’s conversation with ANE literature more about debunking myths than borrowing them. It seems to be saying, “you’ve heard one story, but here is what really happened.” That isn’t the sort of relationship that lends itself to dismissing most of Genesis as fictional stories with no historical truth.

Of course, we should agree with Craig that our faith doesn’t require reading Genesis as largely historical. However, it seems that something is lost if we don’t. For Craig, placing Adam and Eve at the headwaters of “humanness” 700,000 years ago is worth the price of reading most of Genesis 1-11 as mythology. This seems to be too high a price to pay, especially because the grounding for placing Adam and Eve at the headwaters of “humanness” is so weak.

Perhaps someone can make a case that Adam and Eve are the first fully human minds on the planet, but I’m sceptical. He reads most of Genesis as mythological, except he insists on a hyper-literalistic reading of Genesis 2:5, out of conversation with the surrounding context. This sort of reading seems inconsistent with, out of step with, the genre-based argument his making. On another level, both in Craig’s argument and with his critics, there seems to be a central equivocation between “genre” and “fiction vs. non-fiction.” Genre pertains primarily to the form and style of writing, not whether the subject of the text should be taken as fictional or not.

We can agree that a portion of text is poetry. But there are poems about fictional events, and others about non-fictional events. Even non-fictional poems have non-literal elements, but which is which? We can say that a book is in the genre of a “graphic novel,” which is to say it is a comic book. But there are non-fiction comic books. It would be a mistake to think a book about Dietrich Bonhoeffer is describing a fictional person, merely due to consideration of genre.

Similarly, even if Genesis is in the genre of myth, this tells us nothing about whether it is a fictional myth. For all the discussion about genre, the real question, it seems, is what specifically should be taken as figurative fiction, or not. Determining the genera as “poetry” or “comic book” or “myth” does little to answer this question.

In the end, most Evangelicals see intrinsic value in understanding Scripture as referent to some historical reality. The richer the connections to history are, the better. For that reason, I think most Evangelicals will prefer a more recent Adam and Eve.