On the one hand, it is tempting to view the question of the historical Adam as a peripheral concern, hardly at the heart of Christian theology. It has never been addressed by an ecumenical council, and the church’s insouciance cannot be written off wholly as a result of the doctrine’s being universally accepted, since church fathers like Origen and Augustine showed themselves to be open to figurative interpretations of the Genesis narratives.¹ The doctrine certainly does not have the centrality that doctrines concerning justification and sanctification do, not to speak of such core doctrines as the Trinity, incarnation, and atonement.

Many traditional theologians would think the historicity of Adam crucial for hamartiology, or the doctrine of sin. For if Adam was not a historical person, clearly there was no historical fall into sin in the traditional sense. In particular, the doctrine of original sin must go by the board if there was no historical Adam and hence no fall. For in the absence of a historical Adam, there is, or was, no sin of Adam that can be imputed to every human being. It should be obvious that we cannot be held guilty and hence deserving of punishment for an infraction that never occurred. By the same token we cannot be heirs of a corrupted human nature as a result of Adam’s sin if no such sin ever occurred. Thus, in the absence of a historical Adam the traditional doctrine of original sin cannot be maintained.

In virtue of Paul’s contrasting Adam and his sin with Christ and his atoning death, some theologians have gone so far as to assert that the denial of the historical Adam undermines in turn the doctrine of the atonement. Dyson Hague wrote in The Fundamentals, “So closely does the apostle link the fall of Adam and the death of Christ, that without Adam’s fall the science of theology is evacuated of its most salient feature, the atonement. If the first Adam was not made a living soul and fell, there was no reason for the work of the Second Man, the Lord from heaven.”² Such a consequence would eviscerate Christianity. Hence, some traditional theologians have claimed that the historicity of Adam is, in popular parlance, “a gospel issue”—that is to say, an issue on which the Christian faith stands or falls.³

The attempt to make the doctrine of original sin a necessary condition of the doctrine of the atonement is, however, an overreach. Nowhere in the New Testament (NT) is Christ said to have died for original sin. Rather, the gospel proclaimed by the apostles was, in the words of the traditional kerygmatic formulation quoted by Paul, that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3). Never mind Adam’s sin; ours alone are quite sufficient to require the atoning death of Christ for salvation! Interpreting Adam as a purely symbolic figure, a sort of Everyman, that expresses the universality of human sin and fallenness would not undercut the gospel of salvation through Christ’s atoning death. Therefore, denial of the doctrine of original sin does not undermine the doctrine of the atonement.

We may nonetheless agree that the historicity of Adam is entailed by and therefore a necessary condition of the doctrine of original sin. But this conclusion is indicative of the importance of the historical Adam only if the doctrine of original sin is itself of vital importance. It is, however, dubious that the doctrine of original sin is essential to the Christian faith.⁴ The doctrine enjoys slim scriptural support, to put it mildly; not to be found in the account of Gen 3 of the curses following the fall, the doctrine depends entirely on one biblical passage, Rom 5:12–21, and that passage is vague and open to multiple interpretations. Paul does not teach clearly that either (1) Adam’s sin is imputed to every one of his descendants or (2) Adam’s sin resulted in a corruption of human nature or a privation of original righteousness that is transmitted to all of his descendants. That Christianity can get along without (1) is evident from the example of the Orthodox Church, whose doctrine of original sin affirms only (2). Even (2) can hardly be said to be essential: not only is it not clearly taught in Rom 5, but the mere universality of sin among human beings is sufficient to require Christ’s atoning death for our salvation. “Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus” (Rom 3:23–24). The attempt to explain the universality of human sin by postulating a corruption or wounding of human nature inherited from Adam is a theological add-on to which the Christian theologian need not be committed.⁵

Thus, while the doctrine of original sin depends crucially on the fact of a historical Adam, Christianity need not embrace the traditional doctrine of original sin but may content itself with affirming the universal wrongdoing of human beings and their inability to save themselves.

Before we dismiss the question of the historical Adam as a theological sideshow, however, we must consider whether other considerations might not justify its importance to Christian faith. It seems that there are, indeed, such considerations. If the Scriptures clearly teach that there was a historical Adam at the headwaters of the human race, then the falsity of that doctrine would have a reverberatory effect on the doctrine of Scripture with regard to Scripture’s truthfulness and reliability. The Scriptures would then be convicted of teaching falsehoods. Peter Enns is right to emphasize that “Paul’s Adam in Romans is not a ‘plain reading’ of the Adam story but an interpretation of that story for theological purposes that are not rooted in Genesis.” The difficulty, however, is that, given scriptural inspiration, Paul’s interpretation is God-breathed and therefore authoritative in all that Paul means to teach. Enns insists that it is not modern science that needs to be grafted onto the Bible; rather, “the truth … is that our readings of Genesis and Romans are what need to be adjusted to allow the graft to take.”⁶ But how can they be adjusted if we are confident that we have rightly interpreted the teaching of the divinely inspired author, in this case Paul, as Enns seems to acknowledge? If such an adjustment is not possible for the honest exegete, then a major revision of the doctrine of inspiration would be required, such that the teaching of error would be consistent with Scripture’s being divinely inspired.

Worse still, if, as seems plausible, Jesus himself believed in the historicity of Adam and Eve (Matt 19:4–6), then even if Jesus were not guilty of teaching doctrinal error, he still would have held false beliefs concerning Adam and Eve, if there were no historical Adam, which is incompatible with his omniscience. Notice that the concern here is quite different from Jesus’s having limited knowledge. Traditional Christology recognizes that Christ had a human mind or consciousness that was limited in knowledge and that developed throughout his lifetime.⁷ That is why we are not committed to the monstrosity of the baby Jesus lying in the manger contemplating the infinitesimal calculus or quantum mechanics. Rather, Jesus possessed at every point during his lifetime a typical human consciousness. But it is a very different thing to say that Jesus possessed false beliefs. Even if in his human mind or consciousness Jesus was not aware of or did not have access to the full contents of the mind of the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, still the person who Christ is had the full knowledge proper to an omniscient being with respect to his divine nature. Since there is according to orthodox Christological confession but one person who is Christ and since that person is divine, that person is omniscient.

But by definition an omniscient person cannot possess false beliefs. According to the standard definition, a person S is omniscient iff for any proposition p, if p, then S knows that p and does not believe not-p.⁸ Kenotic theologians notwithstanding, it is plausible to think that omniscience is an essential attribute of God, entailed by his being the greatest conceivable being.⁹ Therefore, Jesus must have been and is omniscient. It does no good to say that a typical human consciousness is error-prone and therefore Jesus could have held false beliefs according to his human nature during his so-called state of humiliation (his state from conception through his burial). For beliefs are held by a person, not by a nature, and the only person in Christ is a divine person, who therefore could not hold false beliefs, period.¹⁰ The person Christ is is divine and therefore is omniscient and therefore believes every truth and no falsehoods. Thus, as crazy as it sounds, denial of the historical Adam threatens to undo the deity of Christ and thus to destroy orthodox Christian faith.

We might try to avert the disastrous consequences mentioned above by arguing that the existence of the historical Adam is in fact compatible with the scientific evidence, properly interpreted, concerning human origins, as indicated on the right-hand side of our diagram. But it is often useful in weighing challenges to Christian faith to consider first a worst-case scenario and to ask what our options are in such a case. Assuming, then, that the scientific evidence is incompatible with the existence of the historical Adam, as depicted on the left-hand side of the diagram, how might the orthodox Christian theologian respond, short of embracing the consequences mentioned above?

Assuming that we want the Scriptures still to be in some way authoritative, even though the historical Adam did not exist, one option is to affirm that the Scriptures do teach, however erroneously, the existence of a historical Adam but—on the assumption that inspiration guarantees truth—to restrict inspiration and hence the guarantee of truthfulness to the spiritual or theological content of Scripture. A good many revisionist theologians have taken this option. Ironically, perhaps, they are thus hermeneutical bedfellows with traditional literalists, who argue that the plain interpretation of Scripture is that the world is a recent creation by God in six consecutive days, that there was an original human pair living in the Garden of Eden who sinned by eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that there was a worldwide flood that destroyed all terrestrial life save that aboard the ark built by Noah, that the world’s languages resulted from the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel, and so on. The revisionist agrees with the young earth creationist that the Scriptures teach all these things, but unlike the young earth creationist, the revisionist regards all these teachings as falsehoods. They are therefore not part of divine revelation, for God has accommodated himself to speaking through the often erroneous thought forms of a culture, embedding theological truths within the husks of scientific and historical errors taught by Scripture. This option will involve an overhaul of the doctrine of inspiration and biblical authority, forcing us in some way to discriminate between inspired theological truths and uninspired cultural husks.

Alternatively, we might maintain that while the authors of Scripture may well have believed in a six-day creation, a historical Adam, a worldwide flood, and so on, they did not teach such facts. Since inspiration’s guarantee of truthfulness attaches only to what the Scriptures teach, we are not committed to the truthfulness of the authors’ personal beliefs. A good many contemporary scholars have embraced this option in order to deal with such elements in the Genesis narrative as the three-decker cosmos, the firmament, and the waters above it, and some have extended this approach to include be...