Was Adam a Historical Person?

By Pastor Bill

Recently at one of our Growth Group meetings a very significant question was raised that’s well worth delving into. It’s a question that I believe will be increasingly asked in the years ahead: Was the original man, Adam, in Genesis 1-2 an actual historical person? Certainly, this has been a live question in theological circles since the advent of Darwinism in the 19th century. But more recently even among evangelicals the historicity of Adam has been brought into question because of molecular biology’s human genome research.

I remain inquisitive and receptive to learning about the available scientific evidence for human origins but by no means is natural science infallible and exempt from error. Neither is it self-interpreting with the result that a lack of consensus surrounds today’s genomic science. Biblically, across both Testaments, the weight of evidence supports theological reasons for a historical Adam and Eve and their historical Fall into sin, which explains the human predicament and God’s redemptive plan to save.

In brief, here are 8 biblical reasons that lead me to conclude that Adam was not an archetype or mythical “everyone” but an actual historical person from whom the human race has descended:

1. On the face of it, while Genesis 1-4 is artistically stylized its basic literary genre is that of historical narrative, not case law, poetry, proverb, prophecy, gospel, letter, or apocalypse. If one sits down and reads the book of Genesis at one sitting, all 50 chapters, it reads like a seamless epic story. There’s not a wisp of indication that the author of Genesis intends the person of Adam in chapters 1-4 to be less historical than, say, Abraham in chapters 12-25.

2. Genesis 5 provides a description of Adam’s creation (5:1-2), his lifespan (5:3-5), and his family line through Seth to Noah (5:6-32). In Genesis 5:3-5 numerical dates are associated with specific events including Adam’s age when he died. One could ask, “If Adam never actually existed, why does the biblical author make precise factual statements about Adam’s age both at the time of his son Seth’s birth and his own death?” Plus, the author of Genesis records the death of Adam just as he records the death of others like Seth (5:8) or Noah (9:29) or Terah (11:32) or Sarah (23:2) or Ishmael (25:17) or Joseph (50:26) or a myriad of others. This is because the author is presenting straightforward narrative history.

3. Within Genesis there is a recurring literary device that sews together the historical sections that compose the entire book. In other words, there is no obvious shift from non-historical narrative in the earliest chapters to historical narrative in the rest of the chapters because all ten narrative sections are introduced with some variant of the formula, “These are the generations of . . .” (compare Genesis 2:4; 5:1; 6:9; 10:1; 11:10; 11:27; 25:12; 25:19; 36:1, 9; 37:2). The implication is that Adam and Eve were no metaphor; they were no less historical figures than Noah, Shem, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Esau, and Jacob. The author of Genesis presents the book as an unbroken historical account.

4. The genealogy found in 1 Chronicles 1 treats Adam as historical: “Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah…” (1 Chronicles 1:1-3). Through this chapter of 54 verses the writer provides the individual named Adam as the antecedent to a whole generation of people returning from captivity. They are listed one after another, some with a brief comment attached, but it is Adam who heads the list. There are no textual clues to suggest that the writer conceives of Adam as non-historical relative to those named in his family tree.

5. The genealogy of Jesus Christ found in Luke 3:23-38 traces Jesus’ human ancestry all the way back to Adam. Again, there is no good reason in the literary context to indicate that this family tree is not all of a piece in terms of listing historical individuals. All 75 names of individuals are consistently tied together with “son of” language, including “Seth, the son of Adam” (3:38). And if Adam’s name is the singular non-historical person wouldn’t that torpedo Luke’s point, namely, that Jesus qualifies as the saving hope for all human beings, both Jews and Gentiles? How would a partly fictional genealogy back up a factual theological point?

6. In Matthew 19:3-9 Jesus understood Adam and Eve to have been historical figures. In answer to a question about divorce, Jesus cites Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 to remind the Pharisees of the creation account of Adam and Eve. On the face of it, Jesus takes for granted that this Genesis 1-2 account describes real historical events and individuals. If the paradigmatic married couple never actually existed, wouldn’t this undermine Jesus’ argument?

7. In Romans 5:12-21, Paul uses his famous parallel between Adam and Jesus. The sin of “one man” (Adam) brought death, hence judgment, upon humans, but the obedience of “one man” (Jesus) brought life, hence justification, upon humans. If Adam never actually existed and therefore never actually sinned, Paul’s analogy, the groundwork for his theological argument, crumbles. Similarly, Paul’s use of an Adam/Jesus analogy reappears twice in 1 Corinthians 15 (vv. 21-22 and 45-49) and again, if Paul was referring to a non-historical Adam, hence Adam’s non-historical creation, originating sin, and death, wouldn’t Paul’s argument regarding the historical Christ fall flat?

8. In Acts 17:26, Luke recounts some of Paul’s sermon preached in the Areopagus of ancient Athens: “From one man [God] made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands” (Acts 17:26). Here it is noteworthy that the audience was non-believing with no biblical background. So what kind of approach did Paul use? He started from scratch teaching creation’s story line by presenting a genetic unity, namely, that all nations descended from an original man, who was Adam. I find it incredulous to believe that either Luke, the author of Acts, or Paul the reported preacher would expect Greek hearers to understand some kind of unspoken distinction between the historical nations and a non-historical Adam. Indeed elsewhere Luke refers to Adam and Eve’s son Abel as a historical personage (Luke 11:51) as do Matthew (Matthew 23:35) and the writer to the Hebrews (Hebrews 11:4 and 12:24).

For me, these 8 arguments taken together add up to a strong case for the traditional Christian view that Adam was a real historical person. The biblical evidence is far-ranging from both the Old Testament and the New Testament. By no means is the historicity of Adam “neither here nor there” because it has profound theological implications for human nature, for the origin of sin and guilt, for the role of Christ in salvation, for the role of men and women in the church, and for social ethics, to name a few areas of relevance.

Take the last aforementioned area of social ethics for instance. One of the logical outcomes of denying an actual primal pair (Adam and Eve) is that otherwise there could have been different origins for different human beings or groups of human beings, which opens the door for the possibility that some of us are not created in the image of God and that some of us are fundamentally (at the deepest level of being) superior to others – a surefire recipe for justified racism. However, biblical ethics rooted in the unity of the human race stemming from a historical Adam rejects all racism and secures the fact that all humans are created equal in God’s image as the progeny of the primal couple. Consequently, understanding ourselves rightly and the whole human story rightly is dependent on our understanding of Adam.

Most significantly, the question of Adam’s historicity informs the Bible’s entire framework of creation, fall, redemption, and new creation. Some wag has rightly suggested that “the historicity of Adam is a thread woven all the way through the Bible’s history, theology, and ethics. Pull out that thread and sooner or later the whole garment will unravel.” If Adam is dehistoricized then the entirety of the Bible’s story-line is undercut and the gospel is jeopardized. In other words, to make it personal, I know I am a guilty sinner because I am a son of Adam, and that is why I need God’s second Adam, my Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Pastor Bill

Recommended reading for the debate on the historicity of Adam:

C. John Collins, Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?

Recommended reading on the relationship of faith and science:

Vern Poythress, Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach.

C. John Collins, Science and Faith: Friend or Foe?

John Lennox, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?