Tyler Johnson, MDiv
Tyler is a pastor and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Iowa with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has pondering the mysteries of light.
That is just a huge question and one that leads to a bunch of other questions. So for the sake of your time I will just stick to the question at hand. Feel free to ask follow up questions here.
The simplest answer is: maybe. There are three main views that I have found within the Christian church and even within the Evangelical church. The first is that Adam and Eve were absolutely the first humans on earth and that every other human being is a descendant of these two. The second is that Adam and Eve were among the first humans, but they were not the only humans on earth at the time. The third is that Adam and Eve were not historically real people and that Genesis doesn’t act like they are. The arguments for each of these views get pretty detailed but I’ll try to offer an overview.
Option 1: Adam & Eve as the parents of all humanity. This is probably the most traditional view, and certainly the most common one taught in the churches I’ve been a part of. This option says that Genesis 2-3 and following are tracing the activities of the first human beings on earth and the mother and father of all humanity. The great value of this option is that there is a lot of theology that the church has done over the centuries that is rooted in this basic paradigm. The ways we talk about sin, or evil, or even what Christ accomplished on the cross often assumes that the human story began with Adam & Eve. The great challenge of this option is that it proves very difficult to square away with what we now know about human history through archaeology, biology, and genetics.
Option 2: Adam & Eve as real humans who represented humanity, but are not the only humans. As far as I can tell this is a relatively new view and I find it rather helpful. In this option Adam & Eve were real people, living in a real past, near the beginning of humanity. They are specially selected by God to be representatives of all humanity and they function in priestly roles as mediators between God and the rest of the humans. Therefore what they do has an effect on all humanity. The great value of this option is that it can be worked out to allow for a historical Adam & Eve, while also accommodating what we are learning through science about human history. It also fits well with parts of the Bible that assume a population that hasn’t derived from Adam & Eve, such as in Genesis 4:13-18. The challenge of this option is that it seems rather fragile. It tows such a careful line between the church’s tradition and the data from modern science that there are points where it seems to teeter on the edge of falling apart.
Option 3: Adam & Eve were not real people. This option views the text of Genesis 2-3 (and probably all of Genesis 1-11) as inspired and true, but not in a historical and scientific way. These texts were written to explain the state of the world (i.e. creation, humanity, sin, etc.) as a prelude to the more historical story that begins with Abraham. In this option the text is communicating theological truth, rather than historical or scientific truth. One strength of this approach is that it allows more flexibility with how the text relates to the findings of modern science. It allows more creativity in how the truths in Genesis interact with the truths in modern science. A challenge of this option is that there has not been centuries of theological reflection from this perspective, though pockets of it have appeared through the ages, and so there are questions about how we understand human sin, evil, the work of Jesus Christ, etc. from this perspective.
We will discuss these issues more on this blog as time goes on. But for now the most important thing is recognizing that faithful, Evangelical Christians disagree on how to best answer this question. You can too. Keep on wondering.