Episode Transcript
Carey Griffel: [00:00:00] Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel and I am so glad that you have joined me today. This is my second Q&A episode. I've got a list of questions and we'll see how far we get through this episode.
We'll start out with kind of a fun topic, and I hope , by the end of this we'll get around to the topic of original sin. What is it? Is it in the Bible? Is it a biblical idea? All of that kind of thing. We'll see what we can fit in in between that, but I'm just gonna go ahead and jump right on into the questions.
The first one is about dinosaurs in the Bible. We all love dinosaurs, right? I mean, if you don't, maybe you've matured a little bit too far past your seven year old self. T to some extent, I [00:01:00] think you wanna keep those youthful passions alive, and there's a certain mystery and grandness about the idea of dinosaurs.
I think that we all want to live in a world that has mystery, in a world that has something that we don't understand completely in it. So we love dinosaurs, we love dragons. We love myths and stories about monsters, particularly if they're large and very threatening to humans because in our modern understanding, we think that there's not a whole lot in nature that is truly threatening to to mankind because we're so high up on the creaturely hierarchy that I think in a sense things get boring when you don't have those major threats. Humans want that challenge and risk, and we like the idea also of nice dinosaurs of dragons that we can befriend [00:02:00] because along with threat and danger and mystery, we also want to tame that threat and danger and mystery.
As kids, at least, we all had our favorite dinosaur, right? Uh, mine has always been the triceratops and it's not because of the movie, The Land before Time. Cera in that movie was not a nice character, I think. I think she really bugged me because she misrepresented my favorite dinosaur. I did have one of those little rubber puppets from, um, from Pizza Hut, and she was so cute, even though she was such a rotten character, she was such an adorable one. Anyway, yes, I still like dinosaurs and currently we, we have a lot of love of dragons in our house right now. It seems like dragons have become like the new mythical kind of big cat or something like that.
Anyway, ever since the discovery of dinosaurs and ancient fossils and [00:03:00] all of that kind of thing, which happened really not that long ago, but a lot of Christians have struggled with this knowledge, like how do we fit that into the Bible?
The discovery of dinosaur bones and what they were coincided with a, a real rise in understanding of the Bible in a certain way, which has really culminated today in the framework of fundamentalism. There was a strong reaction against certain types of critical scholars in the 18th and 19th century. I've talked about this before in some previous episodes, referencing critical scholarship and that kind of thing. People took those things as negatives and people really doubled down on the literal interpretation of the text. It's not like literal interpretations didn't exist prior to that, of course, because they did. But it became a badge of honor , in a lot of Christian circles, to not be critical of the [00:04:00] text, to not look at it scientifically.
And this also was, of course, a reaction against the science of the day that that was really going in certain directions. There was a lot going on that scared a lot of Christians. They weren't sure what to do with all of this science and new ways of thinking. Does that sound familiar? Yes. The idea of being able to rethink and reframe your worldview when you have the addition of new information, it's such a common thing and I want to sympathize with people who are struggling with these Christians who are faced with challenging notions that they don't know what to do with.
The problem is, though, that they go certain directions with it and then it becomes even harder to switch directions because people have really dug in to certain ways of thinking that they can't quite get out of those ways of thinking because they can't [00:05:00] see any ways to dig themselves out of the pits that they have put themselves in, admittedly, not by their own fault because all of these things happen through time and we are the inheritors of ideas just as we are the inheritors of any other thing in life.
So now we have things like the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum, which are both under the purview of an organization called Answers in Genesis. Ken Ham is the founder and CEO of Answers in Genesis. He is quite a public figure. He's done a lot of debates. He's been on TV quite often, and I'm not a fan of the work he has done.
When a lot of American non-Christians think of Christianity, they tend to think of it in terms of fundamentalism. They tend to think of it as those crazies who [00:06:00] go to the Creation museum and the Ark Encounter. And I, I'm... okay, I'm not saying that all Christians who go there or who believe in young Earth creationism or any of that, or if you're any kind of a fundamentalist, I'm not saying you are crazy and that there's no reason to think that and anything like that.
But, but let's be honest, your side has not been represented well in a lot of ways, and I think that's really unfortunate. If you listen to Ken Ham speak, he has the attitude that if you're not a fundamentalist, if you're not a literalist, if you don't believe in young Earth creationism, if you don't think the Earth is 6,000 years old, then there's something fundamentally wrong with your way of interpreting the Bible, that you are not taking scripture seriously, that you don't take God seriously.
The idea that there is one way and one way only to read the text, that all other ways are wrong....I take a whole lot of [00:07:00] issue with that. And I'm not personally a fan of the Creation Museum or of the Ark Encounter because they do present the Bible in this very straightforward way that doesn't get into the context of the ancient Near East, that doesn't understand the world of the Bible, that doesn't understand the people of the Bible, that doesn't understand that they had a very different way of thinking than we do, and that the Bible is not really a science book. And they will cherry pick kinds of science that they are okay with, right? They're not flat earthers, so the cosmology that we get from studying astronomy, they're okay with that kind of stuff. But when you go into biology, when you go into paleontology, well...put on the breaks there because we can't do science unless we're viewing it through the Bible. But they don't do that with cosmology.
So it's a very cherry picked, kind of [00:08:00] sciencey. We, we like this science, but that's, we don't like that science because it doesn't fit with our current interpretations. So instead of thinking, hey, we might be a little bit wrong in our interpretation, let's just not do that kind of science at all. Or if we do, these are the only conclusions we're able to draw.
I'm just saying it's a slight bit inconsistent, but if you're coming from this perspective and you see, well, we do have these giant bones, what do we do with that? Well, we've gotta fit them into the Bible somehow. And how do we do that? Well, the most common way is to look at Leviathan and Behemoth. So let's go ahead and do that ourselves.
And along with that, I'm going to introduce the book by Ben Stanhope called Misinterpreting Genesis: How The Creation Museum Misunderstands the Ancient Near Eastern Context of the Bible. Yes, it is a polemic against the Creation Museum, [00:09:00] and if you really like the Creation Museum, then I suggest reading this book and seeing what it has to say. If you already don't like it or you're ambivalent about the Creation Museum, we'll go ahead and read it anyway because it's a good book.
All right, so we are going to go ahead and read Job chapter 41, as this is all about Leviathan. I am going to be reading from the ESV.
Quote:
Can you draw out Leviathan with a fish hook or press down his tongue with a cord?
Can you put a rope in his nose or pierce his jaw with the hook? Will he make many pleas to you? Will he speak to you with soft words? Will he make a covenant with you to take him for your servant forever? Will you play with him as with a bird or will you put him on a leash for your girls?
Will traders bargain over him? Will they divide him up among the merchants? Can you fill his skin with harpoons or his head with fishing spears? [00:10:00] Lay your hands on him? Remember the battle, you will not do it again. Behold, the hope of a man is fault. He is laid low even at the sight of him.
No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him up. Who then is he who can stand before me? Who has first given to me that I should repay him Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine. I will not keep silence concerning his limbs or his mighty strength or his goodly frame. Who can strip off his outer garment?
Who would come near him? With the bridal who can open the doors of his face around his teeth is terror. His back is made of rows of shields, shut up closely as with a seal. One is so near to another that no air can come between them, they are joined one to another. They clasp each other and cannot be separated.
His sneezing flash forth light and his eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn. Out of his [00:11:00] mouth go flaming torches, sparks of fire leap forth. Out of his nostrils come forth, smoke as from a boiling pot and burning rushes. His breath kindles coals and a flame comes forth from his mouth. In his neck, abides a strength and terror dances before him.
The folds of his flesh stick together, firmly cast on him and immovable His heart as hard as a stone, hard as the lower millstone. When he raises himself up, the mighty are afraid at the crashing they are beside themselves. Though the sword reaches him, it does not avail nor the spear, the dart or the javelin.
He counts iron as straw and bronze as rotten wood. The arrow cannot make him flee. For him, sling stones are turned to stubble. Clubs are counted as stubble. He laughs at the rattle of Javelins. His underparts are like sharp potshards.
He spreads [00:12:00] himself like a threshing sledge on the mire. He makes the deep boil like a pot. He makes the sea like a pot of ointment. Behind him, he leaves a shining wake. One would think the deep to be white-haired. On the earth, there is not his like, a creature without fear.
He sees everything that is high. He is king over all the sons of pride.
End quote.
All right, so that's the description of Leviathan. He's a fire breathing dragon or dinosaur, right? Dinosaurs could have breathed fire! As Answers in Genesis explains, we have electric eels, we have creatures that produce methane, so all you'd need is a way to light it up.
We have beetles that shoot boiling chemicals out of themselves, so hey, it's gotta at least be physically possible, right?
All right, well, my natural sarcasm is coming out here a bit, [00:13:00] but, um, let's look at this passage a little more closely. I talked earlier about our natural capacity to enjoy monsters, to kind of want to tame them, even though they are so very dangerous to us.
And we actually see that here in Job 41. In verse five, it even says, or will you put him on a leash for your girls? And let me tell you what little girls, they love dragons.
But the point of this is that only God is taming Leviathan. And what does that sound like to you, if you know anything about ancient near Eastern literature? God is not acting like that guy in the latest Jurassic Park movies, okay? He's not a dinosaur tamer.
We've been reading a lot from Psalm 74 lately, so let's turn there again. In, in verses 13 and 14, it says, you divided the sea by your might. You broke the heads of the sea monsters [00:14:00] on the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan. You gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.
Now, how many heads does a dinosaur have? I mean, you can always have a mutant, right? You you've seen pictures, maybe, of sheep or snakes with two heads. I don't think that's what we're talking about here, but the grammar? Leviathan is singular and heads is plural. So we're talking Hydra here. Even if we could pretty easily conceive of a fire-breathing dragon, nobody's talking about dinosaurs that commonly had multiple heads.
But here's the thing, to be honest...the young Earth creationist scientists who were initially responding to all of this, they, they knew some science, but they didn't know Hebrew. The other thing that they didn't have was all of the cultural and linguistic context that we have [00:15:00] because of all of the discoveries that have happened in the last hundred years.
It's hard to overstate the impact of the Dead Sea Scrolls that most of us know about, but what a lot of us don't know about are the cashes of cuneiform tablets that were found at the city of Ugarit.
I'm going to read a quote from Ben Stanhope in his book, (Mis)interpreting Genesis, How The Creation Museum Misunderstands the Ancient Near Eastern Context of the Bible.
Quote,
The discovery of Ugaritic Hebrew cognates has been useful to biblical scholars because there are over a thousand unique Hebrew words in the Bible that only appear once or a few times, or that were accidentally split in two by a confused scribe, or that contain letters uncertainly transmitted, and so have uncertain meanings.
After the discovery of the Ugaritic material, scholars could hunt around in those texts for counterparts to [00:16:00] these difficult Hebrew words, and in so doing discover more solid understandings of their meanings that several thousand years of Christian and Jewish manuscript scholars had not previously enjoyed access.
Besides granting a better understanding of previously obscure words, the Ugaritic texts have also been useful to biblical scholars because the people of Ugarit were Baal worshipers, the primary religion that the biblical authors fought against. As modern readers, we can gain a greater appreciation for what the Bible is saying when we have a better understanding of its primary religious arch nemesis.
Finally, Ugarit and ancient Israel shared many of the same cultural idioms. That is to say, as linguistic cousins living in the same part of the world, they breathe the same cultural air. as one scholar puts it, the Hebrew Bible did not borrow from northwest Semitic culture, it is northwest Semitic culture.
End quote.
[00:17:00] One of those texts uncovered at Ugarit was The Baal Cycle. This was how Marduk created the world by splitting a dragon apart. So when we read in Psalm 74 that God divided the sea, that he broke the heads of the sea monsters, that he crushed the heads of Leviathan....What do you think the ancient people were gonna be thinking about?
I'm going to read another quote from Ben Stanhope.
Quote:
Did the Old Testament writers believe that God fought a literal dragon to create the world? The author of Genesis 1 sure didn't seem to think so. He talks directly about God piercing the chaos and separating the sea. However, there is no hint in Genesis one of any such crucial battle with the dragon that personified these in Near Eastern mythology. Therefore, unless we want to say that the author of Psalm 74 and the author of Genesis 1, held contradictory views of the means [00:18:00] through which God created the world, we must conclude that the author of Psalm 74 is using Leviathan as a figurative symbol, most likely to emphasize Yahweh's kingship over creation.
End quote.
Now, isn't it just possible that Leviathan is actually styled after a real creature? It's actually quite possible. I think people were probably thinking about crocodiles when they were talking about Leviathan. So what's the problem with it actually being a dinosaur? Right? Well, the thing is, when you're creating a symbol that is supposed to encompass something very primordial, like chaos itself, you're going to use hyperbole.
If, for instance, we decided that domestic cats were the best example of kingship and dominion, then to describe that, we're going to take their actual attributes and we're going [00:19:00] to beef them up and make them very hyperbolic, and we're probably going to invent some attributes while we're at it as well. When our cat is hungry, he's not just hungry, he is starving and he's dying. Right? We, his slaves, have just not attended to his majestic needs appropriately, right? So this description of Leviathan is just, it's super over the top and taking it in some literal fashion to say, oh, look, that's a dinosaur....It's, it's just not how figurative symbols work.
The other creature in the Bible that people look to as a possible dinosaur is Behemoth. We read about Behemoth in Job 40 verses 15th through 24, which say,
quote,
Behold Behemoth, which I made as I made you. He eats grass like an ox. Behold, his strength is in his loins and his power in the muscles of his belly.
He makes his tail stiff like a cedar. The sinews of his thighs are knit together. [00:20:00] His bones are tubes of bronze. His limbs like bars of iron. He is the first of the works of God. Let him who made him bring near his sword for the mountains yield food for him where all the wild beasts play. Under the lotus plants he lies in the shelter of the reeds and in the marsh. For his shade, the lotus trees cover him. The willows of the Brooks surround him. Behold, if the river is turbulent, he is not frightened. He is confident though Jordan rushes against his mouth. Can one take him by his eyes or pierce his nose with a snare?
End quote.
Obviously this is a sauropod like Brachiosaurus, right? Quoting Ben Stanhope again, he says,
quote,
The fact that behemoth appears adjacent to and paired with a fire-breathing, seven-headed chaos dragon should perhaps caution us against automatically presuming that he must be a natural animal.[00:21:00] Immediately, it should be apparent, there are many pieces of evidence to suggest that the Creation Museum is wrong when it claims we should identify Behemoth as something like a brachiosaur.
End quote.
Quoting again further down the page,
quote,
The name Behemoth is built on a common Hebrew word most frequently, though not exclusively used for cattle.
A little later, Stanhope says, linguistically the connotation suggests that this is sort of a super bull or super ox.
end quote.
Stanhope also asks, What is impressive about a sauropod like a brachiosaur? If you had to brag about one in a poem, what chief feature would come to mind that would be worth mentioning?
How about the fact that its head hung several stories in the air, that its entire biomorphology is framed around feeding from the tops of trees? If the author of Job wanted to brag about Brachiosaurus' [00:22:00] features, you would think he would've mentioned these distinctions rather than the comparatively pitiful and opposite line, he feeds on grass like an ox? For the author to omit the business about behemoths alleged 30 feet of neck seems about as unlikely as me bragging about a giraffe's features in a poem and forgetting to mention its neck.
End quote.
Well, we might ask--how could he possibly have such a long tail? Well, You might wanna be a little bit more careful when you give the kids their dinosaur coloring pictures in response to behemoth, because that's actually a euphemism for male reproductive anatomy. Stanhope goes on to show how this is the case when he looks at the Hebrew poetry and how it all lines up.
We also know that there were other divine bulls in other ancient Near Eastern mythologies. Bulls and their horns were also a stock symbol of power and [00:23:00] fertility. So I'm afraid there goes our brachiosaurus in the Bible.
I do suggest you check out Stanhope's book. He talks about false artifacts. He talks about hoaxes, he talks about misinterpretations. It's a very solidly researched book.
So ultimately, what's the question? What do we do with the science of paleontology and the fact that we have, you know, dragon myths all over the world, that that should indicate some ancient history with dinosaurs? Right?
Well, first of all, the Bible is not a science book. It does not need to explain things that we see today when the things that we see today were not even necessarily known about in the ancient world.
And if they did discover giant fossils, they had other ways of explaining what those were, usually talking about human giants. Also myths spread very quickly and interesting myths spread even more so. These are probably very old [00:24:00] stories. And stories of dragons and monsters are probably, well, they're probably essentially primordial stories. Also, wild animals were terrifying and dangerous creatures and well worth the inclusion into myths.
If pagan gods were like superhumans, then surely there would also be super animals in the heavenly realms, right?
So what about the question of, are we taking the Bible seriously? Are we honoring God and his sovereignty with explanations like this? Honestly, I'm at a loss to see how this is not honoring God.
Nobody's saying that God didn't create the dinosaurs, right? We're all admitting that God created the dinosaurs. Nobody's saying anything other than that. We're just saying that it's not necessary for the biblical authors to have included dinosaurs in the text [00:25:00] because they lived before humans. And again, there's no reason that dinosaurs couldn't have lived earlier than humans.
God's not bound by our timeline, right? God doesn't need to have things go, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. This happens. Then this happens, then this happens. Like, there can be long gaps of time. It's fine. I, I don't see what the problem is. I mean, I know what the problem is. The problem is that we have to, uh, have our work week, just like God's work week, right?
We can't have it any different. But again, this is not how symbolism and figurative narrative work. There's nothing wrong with metaphor. There's nothing wrong with using idioms and metaphors and figurative language in order to bring about a point. I would fully agree that if we say that God didn't do these things, then we're not honoring God in his, his role [00:26:00] as a sovereign creator. That's who he is. That's what he is. So anything that we say that goes actually against that, okay, I can get on board with criticizing that, but nobody's actually saying anything against this when there's a suggestion that maybe it took a little while, maybe God used a process, because God seems to use nature quite a quite a bit in order to get his goals across.
Anyway, so that's the question about if there are dinosaurs in the Bible. I think pretty clearly there are not. I'm going to move on now to our kind of second broad topic. Uh, this is going to encompass a few points. I'm gonna talk about Adam and Eve and their, their procreation and what it means that they are the first humans or were they the first humans.
Okay. So to be honest, a lot of this has [00:27:00] already been kind of explained really well in other places. So I want to try and hit on some questions and aspects of this that haven't necessarily been fully fleshed out in other places. So I'm gonna start out with giving you some resources, first of all. So if you are interested in this topic, you can kind of go down your own little rabbit trails with some of these resources.
And the most accessible one, I would say, is the podcast Answers to Giant Questions. There is also a book associated with the podcast, which I highly recommend that you get and read. It is called Answers to Giant Questions. It is by TJ Steadman, and he does a fantastic job with kind of looking at things from different angles and bringing out these explanations of looking at the text in its own context.
He does a great job on looking at the primordial history, which is Genesis [00:28:00] 1 to 11, and seeing that once again, the Bible is not a science book, but it has timeless truths for all of us that we need to be learning about. So, so highly recommend the podcast and the book.
Just a little teaser, his, his perspective is that Adam was not the first human, but that Adam was selected amongst the humans to be the, the archetype to be placed into the Garden of Eden. So he talks a lot about archetypes and that kind of thing, which is really essential. And, and I think if we understood exactly what an archetype is and how it plays out, then suddenly our problems with, oh, you're not honoring the text and you're not honoring God....Well, those vanish once you realize what an archetype is and how an archetype works.
And then if you want to get a scientist's perspective in the idea of Adam and Eve not being the first humans, [00:29:00] but humans existing prior to and alongside Adam and Eve, I highly suggest the book, The Genealogical Adam and Eve, The Surprising Science of Universal Ancestry. This is by S Joshua Swamidass, and he also has done some interviews on the Naked Bible Podcast. Uh, you can also find him on YouTube and other places. So highly recommend those works if you're interested in going down these rabbit trails.
Now, of course, if we read the Bible in English, we're not gonna come across anything in the Bible that says that there were other humans that says suggests anything other than Adam and Eve being the first humans, right? This shouldn't surprise us because what else are the people of the ancient Near East and the the Hellenistic world, what else are they gonna believe other than God created some humans and the family line just progressed from there. [00:30:00]
Like the common argument is, well, Jesus mentioned Adam.
Okay... Jesus should have known better if, if Adam wasn't really the real human. Well, is his point going to be correcting people? Like, okay, let's sit down and have a science lesson before I can tell you about what it means to be a human. No, people already had at the time, they had an idea of history, and also understanding what an archetype is like.
This feeds into this idea of being an image of God. What does that mean? Who are we? Does sin take that away from us? We're not gonna get those questions answered by a science lesson. We're just not.
Now, on the other hand, we do need to treat the text like it is talking about a reality because if if we don't, then we're gonna be missing out on some interesting points [00:31:00] and some interesting questions we can ask.
And I don't wanna say that we can't ask the Bible any science-y questions at all, because a lot of times, guess what? Our science-y questions, they have to do with metaphysical questions. They have to do with what it means to be a human and how we can live our lives out practically. We're going to explore one of those questions right now, actually.
This question is how did or would Adam and Eve procreate before the fall? Now this sounds like one of those, "But the Bible isn't a science book!" question, right? And if the Bible isn't a science book, then we can't expect that it would have an answer for this. Well, yes, fair enough. However, what's, what's the underlying question about this?
What's the real underlying question that is being asked here? It could actually be a number of things. One thing is, [00:32:00] is sex okay? Is sex dirty? Is, is there something fundamentally wrong with sex? Did sex come about because of the fall? That's an important human question that's actually being asked here.
Another question that is fair enough for us is, are we going to continue having sex in the new heavens, in the new earth? So you see, even though it's a sciencey question, it has very practical implications.
Also, we can notice our biases that we're bringing into the text in order to answer this question.
And yes, some of you have already jumped forward to the New Testament, to Matthew 22, where Jesus is talking to the Sadducees and he says that for in the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. This is always the quote that we go to when we say, well, look, there's no sex in heaven, so if there's no sex in heaven, if there's no sex in the [00:33:00] new heavens and the new Earth, then if this is a restoration to Eden, there couldn't have actually been any sex in Genesis 1 either. And you know, fair enough, it seems fairly clear, this text in Matthew 22. But is Jesus really talking about that? Is is that his point? I mean, they came to him with a question about brothers who died and a woman kept marrying each brother.
And if you know about Sadducees, they don't believe in the resurrection. So what Jesus came back with was a point about the resurrection. I'm just not quite sure that we can bring a whole point of theology into this that has to do with marriage when it's the Sadducees that brought up the marriage question. Jesus is responding to them. And it's not so much that I really care one way or another about the answer for the new heavens and the new Earth. Either [00:34:00] way it is, it's gonna be fine. You know, it's gonna be great. We're gonna all love it and we're not gonna have any kind of problem. But you see, the problem is we take this interpretation, then we take it back to Genesis 1, and we insert it there and we say, well, look, Adam and Eve couldn't have had sex before because there's something wrong with it.
And then once we make those two connections, we muddy the waters in between and say, hey, look, sexual relations are kind of a dirty thing. They happen because of the fall. And I think that is harmful. And I don't think that's doing biblical theology well. So you see this is a sciencey, "the Bible's not a science book," but it speaks directly into application in our lives and I think that matters, and I think that this question is important and I think that it's something that we can explore from these twin perspectives of theology [00:35:00] and our practical lives.
Also, of course, if Adam and Eve weren't the first humans, then it's probably pretty likely that all of the humans we're procreating, like we would expect them to procreate.
All right, so all of that being said, there are a few options that we have here. Obviously one of those options would be that they procreated in the normal way. There was no difference, but possibly it would have been easier, maybe less pain, uh, something like that. Another option is that they would have done it entirely differently somehow, and we have no idea how that would be.
Now there's actually a number of other really strange ideas that I don't think they even really deserve much airtime here. For instance, the idea that we would just keep on splitting like Adam and Eve kept splitting, you know, something like [00:36:00] that.
The other good option is that they simply weren't capable yet in some sense. Either they were infertile or they didn't understand sexuality. They didn't see themselves as sexual beings because their eyes had not been opened yet to see their nakedness.
Another idea is that they didn't have genitals before the fall. And when the fall happened, they, that's when they had genitals, because that's when they saw themselves naked.
From the perspective that they weren't capable of having children yet, I think the most likely idea there is that they were not yet mature. Maybe Eve had not ovulated yet. Maybe they just were not in a state where this was yet possible, perhaps due to the short time that they were in the garden or because there really has to be a process of maturation that took a little bit [00:37:00] longer than they had in the garden. Biologically, I think maybe this dodges the question a bit, but, it might be fair enough to think. However, it introduces other issues in the text as well. Now, to be fair, this is actually a view of the early church fathers. Ireneaus wrote that Adam and Eve were naked and were not ashamed for their thoughts were innocent and childlike.
So the idea of of being naked was innocence and immaturity. Theophilus of Antioch described Adam and Eve as infants at the time they sinned. So their sin was that they were trying to become wise beyond their current years. They tried to grow up too fast, in other words. Clement of Alexandria called Adam a boy before his fall and said that by sinning [00:38:00] Adam became a man. From a metaphorical point of view, I really like these ideas and I think there's a lot to them because the idea in Scripture is that we are, in fact, becoming something. So it makes sense that Adam and Eve would be in a immature or or less mature state and God would expect them to mature through time. And it kind of makes sense that this was sped along by the act of the eating of the tree.
However, what I don't like about it is that this really can easily get us into the idea that, oh, the fall was meant to happen. This was part of our maturation process. God put the tree there in order for us to eat of it so that we would mature and that it, without the eating of that tree, we wouldn't mature. Now if we think, well, maybe the tree was not itself ready, maybe the tree itself needed some [00:39:00] maturation and, and maybe we were supposed to eat of it at a later time when God said it was okay, well, that's a fine idea, but it's far too easy to jump from this idea of Adam and Eve being children, being immature and jumping right into this idea of, well, the fall had to happen then.
The other problem I see with it is that Adam was said to literally join with Eve to become one flesh. Are we going to expect children to do that? And I think that gets us into some very dangerous ground as well. So this idea of immaturity, I can take it, I can accept it, but not in this strict, literal physical sense because it gets us into very dangerous waters ethically, and it still doesn't get sex off the hook of being ethically wrong or morally evil in some sense.
So now [00:40:00] here's a fair question. Am I taking my current ethics and inserting them into the text or am I allowing the text to define my ethics? I do think it's possible that I am inserting ethics into the text, and I'm not sure that that's a problem because here's the thing...the ethics of the ancient Near East are not the ethics of today.
And to some degree I'm okay with that because today we do not have slavery. We do not sell our children off to be married to other people in order to just make a family alliance. And I'm okay with those things. This is one reason why I don't actually think that we can take the Bible to be our ethics manual from start to finish, right?
I'm not saying we can't take ethics out of the Bible and use the Bible for the establishment of our ethics because we absolutely [00:41:00] have to do that. We have to establish our ethics on the sovereignty of God, on the character of God, on who God is and what he has done in creation. However, what we need to realize is that the Bible was written in a culture and in a time with vastly different ethics than what we have, and we ought to expect to see those different ethics inside the text. So from an ancient Near Eastern perspective, it's not really that big of a deal for Adam and Eve to have been married to each other as children. In our culture, that's not cool. So instead of taking these cultural distinctions and saying that these are okay and that we should just accept them, what we need to understand is the principle that underlies it.
So maybe Adam and Eve weren't mature and maybe that was okay in their time period. What we can understand [00:42:00] from that is that there's a process of maturity. There was a process of development that God expected. So by looking at it this way, we realize that sex is okay. There's nothing wrong with it.
Being immature is not where we want to be and not where we want to stay. But that also doesn't mean that we jump from, we need to mature to, we have to sin. Like sin is not part of the maturing process. Rather, I would say that the maturing process is facing the tests that we are given in life and continuing to hold allegiance to God rather than allegiance to anything else, including ourselves.
I'm going to quote Irenaus again because we need to see that what he was saying about Adam and Eve being childlike is not necessarily how we would perceive it in our culture even from his day. Here's a quote from him.
Quote,
But things which are made by [00:43:00] God in as much as they have received a beginning of their existence at a later time must fall short of the one who made them. Things which have come into existence recently, cannot be un-originated. To the extent that they are not un-originated, they fall short of being perfect for in as much as they have come into being more recently, they are infants and in as much as they are infants, they are unaccustomed to, and unpracticed in, perfect discipline. A mother can offer adult food to an infant, but the infant cannot yet digest food suitable for someone older. Similarly, God for his part could have granted perfection to humankind from the beginning, but humankind, being in its infancy, would not have been able to sustain it.
End quote.
That's from Against Heresies by Irenaeus. So you see it's less about this idea of biological sex and more about the idea that we literally need to progress through life. There is a progress that we are going to be faced [00:44:00] with in order to become who we are becoming and who God wants us to become.
This also helps us process why there's evil, why there's so much failing in the world, because we are all in the process of becoming, the world included. All right. So ultimately, I don't think that sex was invented by the fall or happened because of the fall, because they were to be fruitful from the beginning, and there's no indication that there is any other way that this would've been done.
Also suggesting that sex has anything to do with the fall, and the snake is also a no-go. I'd also point out that the outcome of the fall, which as I've said, it doesn't say that Eve was cursed.... so the outcome of the fall for Eve, it targets her fertility. It doesn't erase it, but it's adding to it discomfort and pain and struggle. Adam was to [00:45:00] keep the garden prior to the fall, and now he's going to do the same, only he's gonna do the same work, only more difficultly. So it makes sense that Eve would also do the same work that she would do before, but it's changed slightly in some way. Or even not necessarily that it's changed, that there is a literal biological change. I think that we could also see this, that the meaning is changed, which makes sense because prior to Adam and Eve, there would have been no covenant that God had with his people. And when God put Adam in the garden, now suddenly there is a covenant. So the meaning of sex would suddenly change in some way.
The meaning prior to their escapade with the tree would have been a good meaning. But since they rebelled against God, now the meaning has a negative connotation. So if the restoration of all things puts us back into the state that we [00:46:00] should have been in originally after creation, then all of the consequences of the fall are erased and the bad meanings and the bad associations with sex are going to be gone.
You could of course ask Why do we need sex in heaven? Well, I don't think we're going to be living in a disembodied heaven where we're spirits floating on clouds. Rather Revelation describes a new heaven and a new earth, so we will be still living on earth. And I don't really see why procreation cannot still happen in that state.
The biggest pushback against that would be the ideas of what Matthew 22 says about Jesus saying that there's no marriage in heaven and the passages of Paul, that's which indicate that being not being married is somehow a better state of being. However, if we're gonna keep procreating, and I don't really see a reason why we shouldn't expect that when God has required us and [00:47:00] expects us to be fruitful, then we are still going to need it. We're still going to need marriage and I think the passage in Matthew 22, it does create a possible door into the idea that there is not going to be any kind of relationships between men and women. But again, I think that Jesus was addressing their concerns directly in the way that they were framing them. So I'm not sure that we should really be taking doctrine out of that and not, and kind of not even doctrine, but historical expectations of what our future is going to be looking like.
I mean, I'm not gonna press that point too much. If you really think that that's literally what we need to take it as, then that's fine. But Matthew 22 definitely is not suggesting itself that there's anything wrong with sex. So I think that at least from our mortal perspectives, there's no reason we need to take things that way.
[00:48:00] All right. I was gonna touch a little bit more on the perspective of whether or not Adam and Eve were the first or only humans, but I've already given you those resources previously in the episode. So I'm just gonna point you to those for that question. And I'm going to address the question of what about original sin, if that's the case, or what about original sin at all? Because either way, I don't see original sin being a thing.
All right. So first of all, we need to talk about why people think about original sin. Why is it a thing in many Christian circles? First of all, people assume that creation was made perfect. So there's an idea that Adam was created in this perfect state, and we no longer exist in that perfect state because Adam was Adam was uniquely capable of not sinning, unlike us.
This is described in many [00:49:00] ways. People say that we now have a sin nature, that Adam didn't have a sin nature until he sinned. But after he sinned, now we are all descendants of Adam, so we have inherited his sin nature. This, of course, becomes a problem when we get to Jesus Christ, who can't have been born with a sin, nature, or else that would mean that he innately had sin within him.
So some people say that this is why he was born of a virgin. Why he was born of a woman and, and a man had nothing to do with it because women didn't have a sin nature.... yeah. Okay. So still going down the wrong path because nobody wants to say that women don't have a sin nature if men have a sin nature.
And so this is also part of why, you know, this isn't entirely why people believe in the immaculate conception of Mary herself so that she could be born without sin. But anyway, so it gets kind of [00:50:00] complicated once you try and work that into things.
The fact is, I just, there's nothing in the Scriptures which say anything about a sin nature. Some people say that Adam didn't have an inclination to sin before, and now, this is part of the reason why Eve had to be deceived into sinning because sin had to enter into Adam's nature in a kind of a circuitous route, because if Adam was uniquely incapable of not sinning, then how did he sin, right? So Eve was deceived, therefore she persuaded Adam.
But all of these explanations are just kind of trying to explain something that's not there to begin with. This is why eisegesis, reading things into the text, is not a good way to go about things, because once you do that, you start having to find all of these ways of explaining things just to prop up your [00:51:00] theory.
All right. So the major place that people go to in order to find the concept of original sin is in the fifth chapter of Romans. This chapter talks about Christ dying for us. It talks about us being justified. And it's talking about us being reconciled to God. I'm going to read a section of it starting in verse 12 ...
Quote,
"Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given. But sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses. Even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.
End quote.
A lot of people see this passage as talking about the transmission of guilt from [00:52:00] Adam on down through humanity from Adam's sin, his guilt is transmitted all throughout humanity after that. But that's not what it says. It doesn't say anything about guilt at all.
What does it say in verse 12? Just as sin came into the world through one man. (So sin entering the world through one man, the one man being Adam) and death through sin. And so death spread to all men because all sinned.
What is being spread? Not guilt, but death. And why is death being spread? Is it because Adam sinned and therefore his sin is spreading the death? That's not what it says either. "And so death spread to all men because all sinned."
We do come up with a problem here if we don't have the idea of original sin, because then what about the babies who die? What [00:53:00] about those in the womb who, die? If they didn't get a chance to sin knowingly, if they didn't get a chance to sin, then why would they die?
But again, what is the context here? The context is justification. The context is the law. The next verse, it says, for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. So does that mean that there is no death without the law?
It is directly connecting death and the law. In verse 14, it says, yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam. Okay, so, so one way or another, it seems like death and the law are connected. Is it talking about literal death or is it talking about spiritual death?
Well, it could be both. And to some degree, why does it matter? It [00:54:00] seems to me that scripture connects these ideas together and that they are just one idea. But the philosophical problem remains. If a baby hasn't had a chance to sin, then why would it be under condemnation? Why would it die?
I do think we need to keep reading in the chapter a little bit, so I'm going to read some other verses starting at verse 15.
Quote,
"But the free gift is not like the trespass for if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin. For the judgment, following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. For if because of one man's trespass death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in [00:55:00] life through the one man Jesus Christ.
Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness 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 righteous.
End quote.
I stopped at verse 19 there. All right, so it is pretty clear that we are all affected by Adam's sin. It's not simply our own sins that lead to our deaths. So this seems to be referring directly to Genesis two and three, but once again, there is no mention of actual guilt. It mentions trespass, it mentions judgment. It mentions condemnation, and it is the condemnation that is being applied to all men.
We assume that guilt is coming along with that [00:56:00] condemnation because that's what seems fair to us. Why on earth would God condemn all men for one man's misjudgment? That seems to be what it's saying. But remember back in verse 12? Death spread to all men because all sinned. I don't think that we have to take this to the conclusion that all has to mean literally every human being.... every embryo that has ever been in existence. I mean, after all, this is an active word. It requires a mind in order to sin. And some humans don't yet have a mind and other humans have minds that are not fully capable. So some humans don't have a functioning brain. What do we do with that?
I know there's people who out there who like to say all means all, and that is all that all can mean. But it's not, that's not how we use the word. And [00:57:00] it's not how Scripture uses the word. We cherry pick that to say, well, it says all therefore everything. No, there's things called hyperbole and contextual understandings where we understand that all actually doesn't mean all.
This is why it's crucial to understand Scripture and passages within its immediate context, within its cultural context, within the intention of the actual message of the text. And what is this text really getting into? Why does it even mention Adam? What is the point? It mentions Adam because Adam was a type of the one who was to come in verse 14.
Proponents of original sin say that we have to be literally descended from Adam. We have to have DNA that comes from Adam all the way down through humanity, through all of us, because that's how we get our sin nature. Otherwise, why would we sin, right?
[00:58:00] I mean, that's a silly question. Have you looked around yourselves? Have you looked inside of yourself? We all sin that rebellious part of us is all there for every single human being who's ever had the ability to grow into normal development. And they say, well, of course we all sin because we all have a sin nature. I think we all sin because we're all not God. We're all not perfect, and this text literally calls Adam a type of Christ. So what we can say of Christ's work, we can say of Adam , in some way. Are we all literally descended from Christ? Do we need to share Christ's DNA in order to be affected by Christ's work? Nope, we don't. In fact, none of us have that. So if we don't need biological descent from Christ in order to be justified in him, [00:59:00] then why are we saying that we have to have biological descent from Adam in order to be, to have that condemnation that Adam brought?
This is where we bring in the ideas of typology and of archetypes. We have two archetypes. We have Adam and we have Christ. That means that we are like both of them, or at least those who follow Christ and have his name in us, we are like Christ, just like we are like Adam. What can be said about Adam can be said about us.
Nowhere in this chapter does it suggest we have to have Adam's DNA in order to have any kind of sin nature. It doesn't say anything about needing a biological descent in order for us to have condemnation. What it talks about is the law. It talks about sin, it talks about judgment, and these are things that we are all under if given any kind [01:00:00] of a chance to live a normal life where we have the chance and the choice to sin.
What this also says is that not only Jews are condemned, but also Gentiles. That's the point of pointing back to Adam, because Adam is a type of all humanity, not just Jewish humanity. So you see, this isn't talking about the unborn, this isn't talking about those with diminished mental capacities who do not have normal human development.
What Paul is saying is pointing to all of humanity, as in Jews and Gentiles. That was Paul's concern. That was his audience's concern. That's his point. Christ came not just for the Jews, but for all people, because all people are under the same condemnation, the same problems that need to be fixed, whether or not they are under the law.
[01:01:00] You see how dangerous it is when we import our ideas into the text and we completely ignore the point of what the author is actually saying.
All right. One more thing. I am going to highly recommend Dr. Heiser's blog posts on this. I will link it in the episode description. He talks very in depth on Romans 5:12 and why it does not talk about original sin and how we can better think about this in terms of various types of humanity.
So I highly recommend that blog series. I will post it in my show description, in my show notes. So have a look there. Also I will link all of the books that I have mentioned. So if you're interested in going down those rabbit trails, feel free, and also jump onto Facebook and come ask me questions and come start a discussion because this is really good stuff to talk about and there is [01:02:00] way more here than I have addressed.
If you wanna come and talk about that, if you wanna ask more questions, if you'd like me to address even more in another Q&A, be more than happy to do so.
Thank you so very much for listening. Uh, this was quite an interesting episode. I didn't get quite to as many questions as I wanted, but I hope I covered things that were interesting and maybe things to a point that you haven't thought about before.
I really appreciate you guys listening as always, appreciate you guys sharing the episodes. Appreciate it so much when you rate this podcast. I am also on YouTube, so anybody who subscribes and shares things from there, that's very helpful. If you comment on my YouTube videos, that's also helpful because it helps their algorithms.
Just really grateful for all of you who listen and engage with me. And thanks also to Wintergatan for the music. Wishing you all a blessed week, and we'll see you [01:03:00] next time.
