In 57 CE, a former Pharisee named Paul sat down to dictate a letter to a fragile network of house churches in Rome. To explain why the execution of an itinerant Jewish preacher in Judea mattered to the entire Roman world, he built an elegant theological ledger: through one man, Adam, sin entered the world and brought death; through one man, Jesus, that debt was canceled. It was a brilliant, sweeping narrative designed to bridge Jew and Gentile under a single family tree.
There was only one problem: Paul was building an absolute theological necessity out of a story that his fellow Jewish thinkers viewed as an open question, and one that modern biology would eventually dismantle completely.
The DNA Doesn’t Leave Room for a First Couple
The Adam and Eve story presents one couple as the parents of all humanity and treats that as the sacred account of where we came from, and it has more holes than most believers want to count. The story didn’t start with the Israelites either, since they borrowed it and customized it for a monotheistic god (see the older Mesopotamian myths, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, for more information). Not to mention, it took shape at a time when the idea of a single couple repopulating the earth through their own children bothered no one. But we’ll leave all this for another day.
So, let’s start with human biology.
Comparing DNA across living people gives a population history, and that history says our ancestors never shrank below roughly 10,000 breeding individuals. Two people can’t hand down the amount of genetic variation we carry, because variation takes time and a lot of ancestors to build up. The headlines about “Mitochondrial Eve” and “Y-chromosomal Adam” confuse plenty of believers, since the labels sound like Genesis.
When people say “Mitochondrial Eve,” they mean the last common female ancestor we all share. Here, “last common” is key, because the maternal line of that last common female includes other women who are also our common female ancestors. The same applies to the Y-chromosomal Adam. Both maternal and paternal bloodlines go back to the emergence of sexual reproduction, and before that, our distant single-celled relatives reproduced asexually.
The labels name the one woman and the one man who happen to sit at the root of two narrow strands of inheritance, one passed down through mothers and the other through fathers, and they lived tens of thousands of years apart, each surrounded by thousands of other people whose DNA is in all of us too. Ironically, the biological Adam and Eve mark the last common ancestor of humanity, the opposite of the first couple the religion describes.
Isn’t it amazing that all this happened while every human was born to human parents, with no exception? There has never been a first male or female human.
Paul Built His Case for Jesus on a Man Who Never Lived
Most Christians figure Adam matters because Genesis is the first book in the Bible. He matters because of one apostle. Paul, writing to the church in Rome around 57 CE, says sin entered the world through one man and death followed, and that Jesus is the one man who reverses it (Romans 5:12-21). He runs the same argument for the Corinthians: death came through a man, and so does the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:21-22), with Jesus labeled “the last Adam” a few verses later. The whole structure is a ledger. Adam runs up the debt, Jesus pays it, and the payment makes sense only if somebody ran up the debt.
Almost nobody else cared that much. After Genesis 5 the Hebrew Bible barely mentions Adam again, and no prophet blames Israel’s troubles on a garden. Jewish writers in Paul’s own century disagreed about what the story meant, and the rabbis who came after him never built a doctrine of inherited guilt. Jesus doesn’t mention Adam by name anywhere in the four Gospels. Paul took a topic other Jews treated as a side issue and made it carry the weight of the entire gospel.
Death Showed Up Hundreds of Millions of Years Early
Paul says death entered through Adam’s sin. The fossil record shows animals dying, eating each other, and going extinct for hundreds of millions of years before any human walked anywhere, so a Christian who accepts evolution has to tell Paul he got the origin of death wrong. That means the apostle who supplied most of the church’s theology was working from a bad map. Eve’s curse of painful childbirth has its own explanation too, since human babies have big heads and mothers have narrow hips.
Augustine’s Original Sin Rested on a Translation Problem
This one we previously covered a few times, but for the integrity of this piece, here’s a rundown.
Original sin, the teaching that every baby arrives guilty because of what Adam did, comes from Augustine, the bishop of Hippo in North Africa, who hammered it out around 400 CE while arguing with Pelagius, a British monk who said babies are born innocent. Augustine leaned on Romans 5:12 as he read it in Latin, where Paul seems to say that all sinned “in” Adam. Most translators render the Greek as death spreading to everyone “because all sinned,” with no Adam to be inside of. Erasmus, the Dutch scholar who produced the first published Greek New Testament, pointed out the mismatch in the 1500s. The Greek-speaking churches never took on inherited guilt at all and teach inherited mortality instead.
Everything that grew from Augustine’s reading, including the panic over unbaptized infants, hung on that Latin phrasing. Rome quietly retired the idea of limbo in 2007, when a Vatican theological commission, with Pope Benedict XVI’s approval, said there were good reasons to hope such babies are saved.
Perhaps the fact that Jews didn’t believe in original sin, because the Hebrew Bible in its original language didn’t say what Augustine made it out to say, should have been the first hint. But this was at a time when everyone pretended Moses spoke fluent Latin and was kind enough to personally record the Hebrew Bible in Latin, too.
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Three Exits and What Each One Costs
Churches have settled on three responses. Young-earth ministries such as Answers in Genesis reject the scientific evidence and hold that Adam was a man who lived a few thousand years ago. The Catholic Church, in Pope Pius XII’s 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, allowed that the human body may have evolved but told believers they couldn’t treat Adam as a stand-in for many people, and the current Catechism describes the fall as a “primeval event” told in figurative language. A growing group of Protestant scholars, including Peter Enns, a Bible professor who left Westminster Theological Seminary in 2008 after a dispute over this subject, argue that Paul read Genesis as a first-century Jew would have, and that Christians can keep Jesus while setting that reading aside.
Arguably, the third response comes with the highest cost. Paul’s argument depends on Adam as the person who introduced sin and death, so treating Adam as a symbol removes the problem Jesus was said to solve. Christians then need another account of what the cross accomplished, and they disagree on which one. Some hold that Jesus demonstrated God’s love, others that he defeated evil powers, and others that he modeled a life of self-sacrifice. Each of these departs from the older doctrine that infants were baptized to cleanse them of Adam’s guilt.
That said, something matters more than whether Adam and Eve were historical and what that means for Christianity: the story turned out to be one of the most toxic scripts in recorded human history, especially for women. But that deserves its own piece.
What do you think? Did I miss anything? I’d like to hear every perspective, including the ones that don’t match mine.
The bonus section today covers where Paul found his Adam, since Jewish writers of his own era disagreed over this same story, and some of them reached conclusions that undercut his argument. Paid subscribers can read that in the bonus section below, and free subscribers can unlock it by upgrading.
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What Paul’s Jewish Contemporaries Said About Adam
Paul’s idea that Adam wrecked things wasn’t revolutionary. In fact, he merely picked a side in an argument already running among Jewish writers, and the other sides had plenty to say.
Sirach, a wisdom book from around 180 BCE, blames Eve directly, saying..