Paul’s Use of Adam

[Image: “Saint Paul”, Rembrandt van Rijn (c. 1657)]

Paul was an evangelist to both Jews and Gentiles. In Rome and in Corinth, his hearers included people from both groups—communities whose worldviews often stood opposed to each other and whose relationship was frequently contentious. In Romans and in 1 Corinthians 15, when Paul joins Adam, sin, death, and Christ, he is speaking into that divided room, not into a single shared culture.

He was uniquely equipped to do so. Born in Tarsus, a major intellectual center of the Roman province of Cilicia and a noted home of Stoic philosophy, Paul grew up at the crossroads of Jewish life and Greco-Roman thought. As a Pharisee trained under Gamaliel, he knew the Scriptures and the Jewish understanding of Adam from the inside. He also understood the Gentile worldview—its philosophies, paradigms, poets, and cultural ideas—well enough to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). That double literacy is the key to his Adam language.

In the Jewish understanding of Scripture, Adam functioned as a representative figure of Israel’s and humanity’s shared failure to love God: each person is invited into God’s wisdom and Life, and each turns from it. “Death,” in that understanding, was not merely the absence of a heartbeat. It referred to broken relationship with God. That is why Paul could address living people as “dead” in their trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1). Using this Jewish metaphor, Paul proclaims that Christ’s sacrifice restores right relationship between God and sinners—turning Death into Life.

Many Gentiles, by contrast, did not share Israel’s law or the force of sin-guilt associated with the Jewish faith. What they did feel was the fear of biological death and the hope of a life beyond it. Some believed Adam was their first ancestor, and they heard that his sin was the reason they die—an interpretation shaped in part by non-canonical “fall” narratives and older Greco-Roman lost-paradise myths such as Hesiod’s Myth of the Races and Pandora’s Jar. Paul knew that Jesus had been raised bodily from the dead, and that those who belong to him will share that resurrection. He could therefore proclaim, with equal truth, that all who put their faith in Christ will share life beyond death in his kingdom.

Paul was using Adam to bring these two contentious groups into one body through the love of Christ. Jews and Gentiles could understand Paul’s Adam language differently and still be united in Christ. The later church, however, only retained the Gentile ancestral reading and lost sight of the Jewish archetypal reading of Adam. This has caused the modern division among Christians who otherwise love Jesus: whether a person must believe that every human being is biologically descended from a single human pair six thousand years ago in order to be a faithful follower of Christ.

The two genealogies of Jesus found in Matthew and Luke’s Gospels display the same pastoral logic.

Matthew writes for a Jewish audience already formed by Israel’s story. He traces Jesus to Abraham—through the royal line of David—because Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promises to both. His hearers already know they belong to that covenant story. They also know, from texts such as Ezekiel 18, that they have not inherited Adam’s guilt: each of them is judged for their own sins. Therefore, they do not need a line to Adam in order to recognize why Jesus is their Messiah and Savior, or to understand their need of him.

Luke writes with Gentile hearers in view. Gentiles have no connection to the inheritance of Abraham or to the Law, so Luke extends Jesus’ genealogy all the way to Adam for them to see their connection to Jesus through Adam. Since the Gentiles believe they are descended from an ancestral Adam who caused their mortality—and therefore their need for the risen Christ—Luke traces Jesus’ lineage to Adam. Otherwise, Gentiles would see no reason they needed to follow a “Jewish Messiah.”

The point in both Gospels, and the letters of Paul, is Christ. Paul used Adam to bring both Jews and Gentiles together as one in the body of Christ. We therefore do not honor Paul’s missionary wisdom by forgetting that he used both understandings of Adam—ancestral and archetypal—to bring unity to the church. By elevating only one of those views of Adam as the measure of genuine faith, we inadvertently bring division into the church. Instead, we need to learn from Paul’s example. To bring peoples of every culture around the globe to Christ, we must understand their cultural worldview, then “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” Paul did not require Gentiles to follow the Law or adopt Jewish ways in order to follow Jesus. Likewise, the church should not make an ancestral understanding of Adam a requirement for following Jesus today. By understanding Paul’s use of Adam and opening space for an archetypal view of him, the church can open its arms to those who believe humanity has existed for far longer than six thousand years. In this way we honor Paul’s message: salvation is in Jesus Christ alone.