In 10 principles for reading the Bible in a postmodern context, Andrew proposes that contributors to an emerging post-evangelical theology adopt Principle 2 - "Let’s pretend it’s not inerrant." He suggests that we "set aside claims to the predetermined inerrancy and sanctity of the Bible, at least insofar as such claims force upon us standards of truthfulness that conflict with criteria of thought that we are not prepared to abandon in other areas of discourse (scientific, historical, literary, social, etc.)." Adopting Principle 2 "allows us to read the Bible as the unbeliever reads it; it helps to defamiliarise the Bible for us, which will be an essential aspect of the deconstruction process…" In the Genesis 1 as True Myth post we’ve been trying to make literal sense of the Biblical creation narratives. What if instead we were to read Genesis 1-3 in light of Principle 2?
Certain features of the Biblical creation story read like a fairy tale. Snakes probably didn’t lose their legs because their crafty primal ancestor tempted Eve in the Garden. It’s unlikely that either eternal life or the knowledge of good and evil could be attained by eating fruit from specific trees. It’s implausible that the first woman was formed from a rib bone extracted from the first man. We can’t know for sure whether the original tellers of these tales believed their literal historicity. It does seem likely, though, that they would have wondered about why and how things came to be the way they were. The Scriptural cosmogonies might be regarded as thought experiments, speculations about how the present reality might have emerged out of some hypothetical past reality.
Why do people just seem to hate snakes? That’s a pretty good question, but it’s not nearly as compelling as some of the other questions implicitly posed in Genesis 1-3. Why is there something instead of nothing, and why does it seem to organize itself so conveniently into light and darkness, earth and sky and sea? We humans are impressive, nearly godlike in our ability to create things and to understand right and wrong. But we die like beasts instead of living eternally like gods — why? And knowing the good doesn’t seem to translate into doing the good, rather than the merely desirable or expedient — why not?
Other questions implicit in the text don’t come as readily to our minds. Is there one god in Genesis 1-3, or many? Do these gods transcend time and space, or are they corporeal beings who emerge out of the formless void? When Yahweh tells Adam that he will surely die on the day he eats of the tree, is this a threat or a warning? When Yahweh says that "the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil," do the gods wish they’d never acquired this knowledge either? Must the gods also eat from the tree of life in order to stay alive? Genesis 1-3 doesn’t answer any of these questions. Maybe they too were matters of speculation among early theologians, subjects of thought experiments that were subsequently either resolved or abandoned. It’s readily acknowledged that the details of Genesis 1 creation don’t easily match up with the Genesis 2-3 story. Many such stories may have been told among the ancient Semitic tribes, and for some reason only these two wound up in the Canon. Other cultures have asked many of the same questions; their thought experiments generated answers that are both similar to and different from the ones recorded in the Bible creation narratives.
It’s become nearly untenable to read Genesis 1 as a literal account of how the material universe came into existence. Whatever existed or happened prior to the formation of the current universe, astrophysicists are unlikely to discard the theory that it expanded rapidly from a Big Bang and gradually organized itself into stars, galaxies, and planets. Evolutionary theory undergoes continual revision, but it’s extremely unlikely that the theory itself - gradual genetic change across multiple generations predicated on random variation and environmental adaptability - is going to be debunked or overthrown by a radically different scientific paradigm. Ethologists and psychologists are identifying ways in which language, fabrication of tools, even morality may have evolved from more primitive related capacities in other primates. In short, the Biblical thought experimenters’ speculations about the beginning were almost surely wrong.
Suppose, in keeping with Andrew’s Principle 2, the emerging church were to acknowledge what is most likely the case; namely, that Genesis 1-3 are myths in the usual sense of the term: works of individual or collective imagination, speculative attempts to explain mysteries in the absence of adequate information. Does this acknowledgment push the post-evangelicals down the slippery slope to liberalism and agnosticism? Does it open the possibility of dialog with skeptics for whom belief in the creation narratives constitutes an unjustifiable abrogation of scientific truth?
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
I’ve been having a vigorous exchange of views with Mike Macon on his blog about John’s use of Principle 2. I’ll admit to getting rather too worked up by these conversations, but I do think that they’re important.
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
Well that’s one thing that can happen by asking the question. Here you’ve got a blog and I’ve got a blog and where does the topic end up getting discussed? On the blog of some sarcastic wise-ass fundamentalist trolling for thoughts to ridicule without even bothering to think about them.
Re: The Creation Narratives as Thought Experiments
Oops, I guess that wasn’t very Christian of me, was it? I dropped a comment on Mike Macon’s blog just to put in my $0.02 worth.
inerrancy debates
The discussion rages on at Mike Macon’s blog, to which Andrew provide a link in his first comment. Attention is focused not on the creation narratives but on inerrancy and Andrew’s Principle 2 of an emerging Biblical hermeneutic: "Let’s pretend it’s not inerrant." Mike says this:
To which Andrew replies:
Mike parries thusly:
Then after a bit of semi-tangential wrangling Andrew says:
Mike again:
'story' as thought experiments
John, in regard to your statement: “Suppose, in keeping with Andrew’s Principle 2, the emerging church were to acknowledge what is most likely the case; namely, that Genesis 1-3 are myths in the usual sense of the term: works of individual or collective imagination, speculative attempts to explain mysteries in the absence of adequate information.”
I like what you have to say, but I wonder if the emerging church perspective should even be approached as you suggest. In other words, to decipher what is factual or nonfactual in regard to Genesis 1-3 seems more of a modernist experiment, whereas the emphasis on narrative apart from ‘claim’ investigation is more post.
I suppose an example might be in hearing one of Jesus’ parables, the recipients probably didn’t question if the parable was true in a factual sense, but rather, the questions were about how the parable is to be understood. the discussion is still about truth… but the supposition derives from a different framework.
just some thoughts…
vapor
Re: 'story' as thought experiments
when discussing plato (whose writings he had spent his life studying and teaching) derrida would always say that reading him was “always before me”, a task yet to be done, never one having been accomplished.
this article gives us (for whom familiarity has bred, if not outright contempt, certainly and unshockable complacency) a way of reading the text and having the text read us. it enables us to be shocked by the loose ends we always supposed were neatly tied. to be confounded, offended, challenged, changed.
as many more eloquent have noted before: scripture is not written as propositional statements, but (to borrow from martin amis) in “the slippery language of story”.
shane magee
director: fake
w: fakerepublic.com
narrative integrity
"to decipher what is factual or nonfactual in regard to Genesis 1-3 seems more of a modernist experiment, whereas the emphasis on narrative apart from ‘claim’ investigation is more post."
I can see how it’s important to understand what a text means before carving it up into propositional truths. Genesis 1-3 certainly reads like narrative, with distinct characters participating in sequences of events. The straightforward meaning isn’t hard to discern. But is this narrative true, did these characters really participate in the events as described in the text? The usual mythic dodge is to de-narrativize the narrative, to say that what it "really" means is that the one true God somehow created the universe, that the details of the story aren’t really important. This move denies the narrativity of the narrative, transforming it into an underlying propositional truth.
If the events of the Biblical creation narratives really happened there’s no compelling need to turn the text into doctrinal propositions. If it didn’t really happen then we can just read it as a fictional tale. Which is it? How do you maintain the integrity of the narrative without addressing its historicity? I’m suggesting that, based on scientific evidence, the creation story is unlikely to be a historical narrative. So why not just call it a fictional story. Maybe some other meaning can emerge if we stop expecting this narrative to be a description of actual events.
Parables are a good example of the challenge in upholding narrative vis-a-vis propositional truth. Jesus tells a story, but it’s clearly a made-up tale, a fiction. Then Jesus says what the story means in terms that no longer rely on the narrative structure. I.e., he uses the narrative as an engaging context in which to embed propositional truths.
inerrancy debates
This comment has been moved here.
slippery slopes
There exists tremendous fear of sliding down slowly and surely all the way to hell. It is a very powerful fear indeed and speaks volumes for the intellectual insecurity and unbelief of the proponenets. It speaks too of what we have reduced "Christian Ministry" to.
Nonetheles, many millions of us Christians seem to have decided that it’s safer to shut off our minds than to ultimately trust God and the blood of Jesus and the advocacy and help of the Holy Spirit to get us to heaven. Indeed it is even feared that God will suddenly change His mind, get angry, and consign us to hell or worse, to whatever netherworld is reserved for the backslidden.
Given that this fear is actively propagated by those who cynically use it as the main platform of their "ministries" I don’t think that discussions will be immediately fruitful, still, I do believe that we are obligated to engage in discussion, at least from the hope that fellowship can be established and perhaps even strengthened.
Increasingly I am coming to the conclusion, in my own eccentric style, that we are never in any position to make the believer vs. nonbeliever distinction. That privilege (if it exists at all) would have to be God’s.
Then, you also bring up the fascinating question of perspective. It is ordinarily difficult for us to be aware of the structure of our own biases, worldviews, and interactive patterns, while reading any text. To be able to change ones perspective, even theoretically-temporarily, does demand a certain amount of self awareness. It also demands that we develop a sensitivity to figuring out the same sort of things about the author’s, and other’s perpective. Examining a text from various angles, seeing how others with different sets of tools may view the text, and so on, would be very valuable if we were actually able to do this.
I suggest though that it’s a tall order, even for a scholar. The best that can be hoped for with the average sam is that I would inculcate a sensitivity to the fact that there are different legitimate perspectives ‘out there’ and that dialogue is needed for there to be understanding and that I must suspend my disbelief (in the other’s genuineness) and mu innate suspiciousness, at least until I reach a better understanding of how ‘they’ got to where they are at.
I might even, in the intervening period, pehaps find that the other also has struggles that I can identify with, and perhaps without my even wanting to, we may become friends who agree to disagree, but still uphold one another as we walk towards wherever God is taking us, together.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Slippery Slope as theme park ride
So let’s take an imaginary ride down the slippery slope of errancy, like a Christian theme park ride, with simulated thrills but no danger. Here’s a start…
Maybe 200 years ago it would still have been possible to assert that the universe came into existence all at once and very recently, and that humans didn’t evolve from primates. Since then science has worked long and hard at understanding events covered in the Bible in just a couple of ancient pages. The scientific account of cosmogony diverges widely from the Biblical account, and that divergence is buttressed by an ever-increasing body of evidence.
Many emerging Christians are less wedded to a doctrine of inerrancy than their more conservative evangelical brethren, asserting that faith rests on a three-legged stool of Scripture, the internal witness of the Spirit, and the communal witness of the church. So, suppose Christians were to let the creation narratives go, rather than trying to defend their literal truth through implausible quasi-scientific distortions or asserting that their truth lies somewhere other than in their narrative historicity. What might the consequences be?
Outside of Genesis 1-3 there’s practically no information presented in the Hebrew Scriptures about how God created the material universe. Still, the Old Testament presents a consistent picture of Yahweh as Lord of heaven and earth, both creator and renewer of all things. So chopping the first three chapters off the Torah wouldn’t destroy the pervasiveness of the Biblical image of God as creator.
It’s conceivable that all subsequent Scriptural allusions to the creator-God are actually commentaries on Genesis 1-3. However, while the creation narratives are placed at the beginning of the Bible, it’s not certain that they were written first. A prior conviction that God created the universe may well have inspired the writers of Genesis 1-3 to speculate on how and when it happened.
There’s a persistent Judaic tradition upholding the belief that Yahweh created the material universe, and the pervasiveness and persistence of this communal belief colors both Old and New Testament writings. Abandoning the Genesis 1-3 description of how God created the universe wouldn’t necessarily result in abandoning the belief in a creator-God. So far the ride down the slippery slope isn’t a very bumpy one.
Creator-God in the New Testament
Continuing our imaginary ride down the Slippery Slope…
In continuity with the Hebrew Scriptures, the writers of the New Testament acknowledge God as creator of the material universe. The main elaboration on the Old Testament is to associate Christ with the creation event. The most obvious and extended illustration is the first chapter of the Gospel of John, a lyrical passage that places Christ at the beginning as mediator of the creation. In I Cor. 8:6 and Colossians 1:16-17 Paul reiterates John’s linking of Christ with the God of creation. None of these NT references to God as creator depends on the specific sequence of events laid out in the Genesis 1-3 narratives.
Other NT citations might be pertinent here, but for now the ride down the Slippery Slope remains a smooth one. The next stretch of the course takes us into scriptural passages that cite or allude explicitly to the details of the Genesis 1-3 narrative…
Christ as mediator and firstborn of creation
Before moving on to specific citations of the Genesis 1-3 narrative in the New Testament, I want to take a little closer look at ways in which the Old Testament idea of creation is modified in the New.
In my last comment I noted that Paul and John place Christ at the beginning with God as mediator of the creation. This move pulls Christ out of his incarnation in a specific place and time, making him equal or identical to Yahweh himself. It also establishes Christ as mediator not just in the specific context of the Mosaic covenant but all the way back to the beginning. Presumably, then, whenever mediation between God and the world has taken place in history, Christ-as-God has been the mediator.
However, in a well-known passage Paul says that there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (I Timothy 2:5). Not Christ as God, but Christ as man, is mediator. We’re entering into nuances of Christian trinitarian theology here: whenever Christ-as-God has served as mediator between God and men, or even between God and the creation, has he always done so in the form of Christ-as-man? Is the second person of the trinity, "the Word" in John’s terminology, eternally man as well as God?
This is the kind of question I suspect the early church fathers and the medievalists wrestled with at length. I don’t know what they decided. Every time God and man interact directly, God makes himself accessible on human terms: he speaks in human language that humans can either hear or read; sometimes he makes himself visible to human eyes; he causes events to happen in the material world that can be perceived by humans. Maybe this sort of mediation between divine and human is always the work of Christ as the eternally human.
Christ isn’t just the mediator of creation in the NT; he’s also the firstborn of creation.
We might hypothesize that, for Paul, God began the creation by entering into the to-be-created material world in the person of Christ. Christ the material mediator of creation is "the image of the invisible God." But Christ is also firstborn of creation: man comes into the world in the image of the firstborn, as a material manifestation of the invisible God.
None of this speculation directly contradicts the Old Testament. None of it relies directly on the Genesis 1-3 narratives. I don’t think any of it contradicts orthodox Christian teaching. Or am I mistaken?
Re: Christ as mediator and firstborn of creation
John, beginning with the beginning, what would be lost with the first three chapters of Genesis is preciseley the beginning of the story. It seems strange that you are particular about these first three chapters, why not the 4th, 5th… Seems to me that if one wants to say that it’s a fictional story, the sensible thing to do will be to declare it all fictional until proven otherwise and take the bible as primarily a story about God and His people.
The fact is that there is no proof that Moses or Joshua, or David, or Solomon existed any more than there is that Eve or Adam were historical figures.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Why only Genesis 1-3?
"It seems strange that you are particular about these first three chapters."
I suppose most theological controversies seem strange to those who aren’t much interested in them. Genesis 1-3 seems to be a narrative describing how the material universe and humankind came to be. Suppose you are persuaded — as I am — that the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution are at least pretty close approximations to what happened in the beginning. A couple of exegetical options are available: contort the Biblical creation narrative to conform to the scientific one, or regard it as a metaphorical story that doesn’t really describe the historical creation at all. You, I, and others have investigated these two options in some detail in the True Myth post here at OST. A third option is to dismiss the historicity of Genesis 1-3 in its entirety, which is what I’m exploring here.
The historicity of individual people and the migrations of groups of people have few if any general scientific implications. Instead of riding all possible slippery slopes toward discounting the Bible on more general grounds, I’m suggesting that the very top of the slide is a particularly perilous passage. So I’m looking for a bypass. It appears that so far I’m the only one who’s interested in this experiment here at OST, but I think I’ll carry on for awhile.
Is Christ eternally human?
The New Testament places Christ at the beginning as both mediator and firstborn of creation. According to orthodox theology the incarnate Christ is both God and man, eternally. What about before the historical incarnation as Jesus of Nazareth: did the second person of the Trinity always already partake of both natures, even from the beginning as "firstborn"?
John says that the Word was with God and was God in the beginning, and that the Word "became flesh and dwelt among us" This passage suggests that Christ’s "wordness" is eternal from the beginning but his "fleshness" began at a particular moment in history. The incarnation was foreknown before the foundations of the world (Eph. 1:4, I Peter 1:20), but before the actual 1st century events the person of Christ must have been something other than flesh and blood.
If Christ is inseparably both man and God, the incarnation event must have changed the eternal Christ in essence. But how could that be the case if Christ is God and God is eternally the same? Did the eternal God in effect "possess" the body of Jesus, thereby transforming and eternalizing that body and merging it with eternal God-ness? And if the incarnation permanently fused God and man in the person of Christ, is it accurate to say that God suffered in the flesh and died on the cross? These were hot topics for debate in the early church, resulting in not a few condemnations and excommunications and a lot of complicated explanations.
Rather than trying to sort it out now, I’ll leave it at this: the idea of Christ as mediator with the creation and with human beings helps resolve difficulties of how a purely spiritual, transcendent, eternal and perfect God could have any commerce with an imperfect, temporal, material world. But solving this problem opens up a different set of problems that have no easy or intuitive solution. However, this distinctly Christian theological concern is not substantively affected by the details of the creation narrative in the Hebrew scriptures.
Re: Is Christ eternally human?
Interesting questions.
I agree. I think there is a difference between the pre-incarnate logos and the flesh, the soul, that logos became in the first century, Jesus.
Was Jesus eternally inseparably both man and God? I don’t think so.
I think it is more accurate to say that God’s son, who is in effect God in the flesh, suffered on the cross.
Your questions were very complicated and thought provoking, so I’m afraid my small answers are not that great. Can anyone else add some thoughts?
Re: Is Christ eternally human?
I agree that the questions raised are interesting and thought provoking, and I assert that the thinking provoked has been mostly already been done by others.
I venture to guess that there is no question raised that can be answered on any other basis than faith.
So, pick your mental torment.
Moltmann says that God died on the Cross. It is consistent with his notion of a triune God. Does that mean that the Holy Spirit also died on the Cross? Were there three days, therefore, when the world, the universe was without God? I wonder.
Please do not read into these comments any cynicism. It is always hard to tell mental states of people posting on the internet. I offer the comments humbly and without agenda.
Re: Is Christ eternally human?
Enarchay says, "God’s son, who is in effect God in the flesh, suffered on the cross." If God suffered in the flesh, did God also die in the flesh? In Christianity God is triune, so even if God died in his incarnate form He wouldn’t have died altogether — the Father and Spirit would have carried on. And Christ was resurrected, so he didn’t stay dead.
As Shiert says, "I assert that the thinking provoked has been mostly already been done by others." I’d warrant that this statement would apply to most of the topics addressed on OST, but that doesn’t seem to stop us from doing our own thinking as well. Here I’m looking only tangentially at certain implications of the New Testament placing Christ at the scene of the creation. The historical incarnation presents its own complications. The "Ave Maria" prayer, which I memorized as a small child, contains the line "Holy Mary, Mother of God…" Is that right? Did the incarnate Christ have both a divine and a human will? Does the resurrection body of Christ participate in the divine nature, such that it can in effect be omnipresent in the Eucharist (Luther thought so)? And so on. I’m a psychologist by training and inclination, so these kinds of ideas fascinate me. In light of postmodernism’s "decentered self" as explored by Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and others, I’d think maybe an emerging theology might find it worthwhile to revisit some of these premodern controversies about the nature and selfhood of Christ.
"I venture to guess that there is no question raised that can be answered on any other basis than faith," Shiert continues. I wonder: without the long theological tradition attempting to understand the rather sketchy New Testament passages, and without the creeds that formalized certain majority (though not consensual) positions of the early church fathers, what would a Christian by faith believe about the nature of Christ?
The New Testament augments the creation story in another way that’s worth noting at least in passing. The Old Testament offers no knowledge about what God was doing prior to the creation. But in passages like Mat. 25:34 and Eph. 1:4 God is already preparing his kingdom for the elect in Christ "before the foundations of the earth." Genesis 1 starts right off with the creation event; John 1 starts with 2 verses showing God and the Word together before the creation begins. In John 17:24 Christ prays to the Father: for Thou didst love Me before the foundation of the world.
So the New Testament implicitly answers a couple of questions: (1) Did God exist before the creation? Answer: yes, and Christ did too. (2) Was redemption through Christ a new plan tacked onto Judaism? Answer: no; Christianity in effect preceded Judaism in the foreknowledge of God.
Re: Is Christ eternally human?
John, I’ve been feeling a bit at sea with this discussion precisely because you have been revisiting premodern and modern theological speculations. Most of what was considered Christian Theology, especially anything smacking of being systematic has rightly been pulled onto the carpet for a closer look by our postmodern selves.
In fact there are large swathes of scripture (not just the creation stories) that can be happily jettisoned if what one is after is to retain an orthodox sort of theology. Such theological speculation has always been about using prooftexts as props with utter disregard for chronicity or context.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Is Christ eternally human?
I’m trying neither to prop up orthodoxy nor to kick the props out from under it, Sam. In the inerrancy discussion it was proposed that the Christian faith stood on a three-legged platform of Scripture, community, and inner conviction. Since the first century the community has tried to understand who Christ is, and the creeds, like the Scriptures themselves, came forward from within the community. Whether the tradition got it right or not isn’t the central focus of this particular thought experiment, but in passing we can recognize some of the complexities with which Christian theologians have wrestled over the centuries.
In a different experiment we might explore whether some of the prooftexts might have been inserted for polemical purposes; e.g., to add weight to Christ’s claims to divinity and his priority over the Law. We could also explore whether the orthodox creedal statements might have unjustly suppressed alternative opinions. But again, that’s not the central focus.
Re: Is Christ eternally human?
I think of the logos made flesh, the soul, Jesus, dying, but not God (independent of flesh) himself dying.
narratives and propositions
In our tentative efforts to understand how Christ’s divine and human natures combine in one self we follow in the footsteps of the earliest Christian thinkers, who attempted to convert relatively sparse Scriptural clues into systematic propositional truth statements about the Trinity and the incarnation. Alternative propositional formulations were debated in the early Church Councils, with the "winners" being formalized as communal statements of faith in the Creeds while the "losers" were consigned to perdition and neglect. One could even say that the writers of the epistles were theologians of this sort, explaining propositionally what God had been doing in humankind through the life, death and resurrection of Christ, spiritedly countering the arguments of those who disagreed with them.
The transformation of Biblical narratives into propositional truth statements thus long predates the modern era. Perhaps the postmodern call for a return to narrative is an attempt not to emulate early church praxis but to avoid the divisiveness that has from the beginning accompanied the "propositionizing" of faith.
Re: narratives and propositions
A new struggle emerges around propositionizing versus narrativizing truth. Divisiveness isn’t escapable. Contention only shifts around different topics and gives form to different readings and constructions of faith, church and God.
The Word as Creator
Would the Gospel of John begin the way it does if Genesis 1 hadn’t been part of the Torah? The structural parallel is unmistakable: both passages begin "in the beginning," both speak of God’s creation of the universe.
Does John’s reference to Christ as the Logos — the Word — rely on the Genesis creation narrative? That’s less clear. God certainly speaks words in Genesis 1, but the writer never says anything about "the word of God." Rather the creation formula is "God said… and there was." The Biblical use of "said" isn’t distinctive to God: in Genesis 3 the woman "said" to the serpent, the serpent "said" to the woman, the man "said" to God, etc. And while God’s words seem to have creative force in Genesis 1, the writer certainly never personifies God’s words the way John personifies the Logos. Neither does any other Old Testament writer, for that matter. Nor does any New Testament writer other than John.
Still, is it likely that the writer of the fourth Gospel drew his inspiration for this unique idea of Jesus as the Word from the Genesis 1 creation formula, wherein what God says comes into being? It’s hard to say for sure, but apparently not. John makes repeated references to God’s words and even Jesus’s words, without ever repeating the personification of Word from the first chapter. For John, "the Word" doesn’t just mean what God says — he seems to have a larger, more abstract concept of Logos in mind.
Long before Christ the Greeks imbued the word logos with philosophical importance. For Heraclitus (6thC BC) logos meant relation, proportion, meaning, universal law, truth. For Socrates (5thC BC) intellectual reflection through dialogue discovers the logos, the community understanding, of things. In the ancient mystery cults the lesser deities are said to have become logos, bringing form to the world, mediating between God on one side and matter/man on the other. The Hellenistic Jews of Jesus’s time associated Logos with the personified Wisdom of Proverbs 8 who existed with God before the creation. In sum, John’s applying the term Logos to Christ as God and Creator probably did not derive from his interpretation of Genesis 1.
Re: The Word as Creator
Does John’s reference to Christ as the Logos — the Word — rely on the Genesis creation narrative?
I think there is a connection other than just the word "logos" which itself is not directly equivalent to God;s sayings in the creation. Jesus is specifically linked to and made the instrumentality of the creation with the logos concept: "all things were made by him and without him was not any thing made that was made" and that certainly does ‘rely’ on Genesis 1 while at the same time reinterpreting the act of creation.
The other remarkable coincidence is the use of "light" and "life" and again, John freely reinterprets in a Targumic style both contemporising and effectively using the logos concept (whatever it is) to organically link Christ back to before the beginning of Genesis 1. There certainly are strong and deliberate echoes of Genesis in John’s Prologue and I think that a lot of the depth of meaning that is there in these few verses comes from the linkages with the creation account.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: The Word as Creator
Linking Jesus to the creation assumes that God created the universe, which is asserted in other parts of the Old Testament besides the first 3 chapters of Genesis.
I agree that John 1 was influenced by Genesis 1. The main issue is whether any crucial truths of John 1 rely on Genesis 1. So in John 1:4-5 —
— we see, as you point out, a parallel to the creation of light in Genesis 1. But in Genesis 1 the light is created by God; in John 1 the light is the life of God. I don’t think John meant for his readers to reinterpret the creation narrative more pantheistically based on this lyrical passage he has written. John says that "the darkness did not comprehend" the light, implying a metaphorical interpretation of light (life, truth, etc.) and darkness (sin, ignorance, etc.) that certainly isn’t evident in Genesis 1. Is John suggesting that his readers interpret Genesis 1 metaphorically rather than literally? I don’t think so, since he already asserted that "all things came into being through Him." I suppose it’s just possible that John is reflecting a common understanding that, while God did create everything, the Genesis 1 story isn’t a literal account of the creation event. That would be interesting.
My sense of it is that John 1 is, as you say, a reinterpretation and contemporization of Genesis 1. His main interest isn’t to elaborate on the creation but to introduce the incarnation. The incarnation is continuous with the creation in the sense of God repeatedly intervening in the world of men through the mediation of Christ.
Re: The Word as Creator
A few more thoughts about the beginning of John’s gospel before we move on. Many can recite the first verse by heart:
In direct translation from the Greek it reads more like this:
Why "toward"? One might think that, in the context of creation established in the first few verses of John, the Word would be facing outward from God toward the world. Maybe, as mediator between God and man, the Word stands on the side of man looking toward God. Toward may also imply movement: the Word as mediator brings man toward God.
"The God" is the usual Greek expression for God in John as elsewhere in the NT. E.g. John 3:16: For the God so loved the world; John 4:24: The God is spirit… So in John 1:1, should the reader infer anything from the omission of the definite article in equating the Word with God? John doesn’t use an indefinite article here — "the Word was a God;" rather, there is no article at all. Some commentators suggest that, without the article, a noun carries adjectival meaning: "the Word was divine." But there is an adjectival form in Greek, so why didn’t John just use that?
It should be recognized that in Greek "god" is a title or category, like lord or father. Yahweh is the name of the Jewish god, THE god. But again, if John meant that the Word was A god, why not use the indefinite article?
Another possibility is to regard "god" as a category of being. The word "man" is used this way: with either a definite or indefinite article — A man or THE man — this word refers to an individual representative of the species. But "man" without an article refers to the entire category of mankind. So perhaps John is saying that Jesus is god in the same sense that he is man: he participates in the nature of god-ness just as he participates in human nature.
On the other hand, the absence of the definite article might mean nothing in particular. Maybe it was just a stylistic nicety John inserted in his rather lyrcial introduction to his gospel. As Sam pointed out a few comments ago, prooftexting in order to justify or refute doctrines can be a dicey proposition. It is on exegetical nuances like this one that the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses diverge from the orthodox trinitarian doctrine of Christianity.
John 1:1c - "a god."
Dear Mr. Doyle,
With respect to your comment:
“John doesn’t use an indefinite article here — ‘the Word was a God;’…again, if John meant that the Word was A god, why not use the indefinite article?”
The answer to this is simple: Within the Greek of this period (Koine), there was no such thing as an “indefinite article.” Therefore, John could have never utilized any “indefinite article” because there was none.
You then say:
“Some commentators suggest that, without the article, a noun carries adjectival meaning: ‘the Word was divine.’ But there is an adjectival form in Greek, so why didn’t John just use that?”
Perhaps one of the most important things to keep in mind is this: Because most all scholars recognize John’s opening word’s there as poetry, when considering the phrasing of a poet - how they may choose their words and the ways is which they express poetic ideas - is never considered to be governed by the common laws of language. Therefore, whether John had, at his disposal, any other Greek word to utilize is, in my view (and most any language teacher), irrelevant. Furthermore, simple nouns can be use as adjectives.
As for you statement:
“On the other hand, the absence of the definite article might mean nothing in particular.”
Actually, if we did not have some specific examples of the exact same Greek syntax, that is, as is found in John 1:1c (‘a singular anarthrous predicate noun preceding the verb and subject noun, implied or stated,’ and not just that the noun theos in the third clause lacks the Greek definite article), your point would be valid. The fact is, we do.
For other examples of the very same Greek construction I would invite your examination of the few following verses, that is, within your own preferred translation of the Bible and see whether, in order to complete the proper sense of the phrase, the translators had inserted the English indefinite article (either an “a” or “an”) there:
Mark 6:49 Mark 11:32 John 4:19 John 6:70 John 8:44a John 8:44b John 9:17 John 10:1 John 10:13 John 10:33 John 12:6
At each of the above verses, it should be noticed that identity of the one being discussed was not at issue; no, but rather, the class of the individual was. Therefore, you are likely to find that, within most English language Bible translations, scholars do typically reflect their appreciation of the use of such nouns by either inserting an “a” or “an” there.
But now, when it comes to John 1:1, rather than let God’s Word speak for itself, Trinitarian influenced scholars seem to forget their own guidelines in such sentence constructions and allow their preconceived theological bias to guide them in their translation of this verse - thus, in fitting with their own ideology, we more commonly read, “and the Word was God.”
Perhaps it would interest you (and others here) to know that, when translating John 1:1c during the first few centuries after Christianity had begun, two of the earliest Christian translations of the Greek ‘New Testament’ into a foreign language had utilized their indefinite article there as well; and again, all in order to complete the proper sense of the phrase - thus, with both reading, “and the Word was a god.”
For this, please examine the contents of the following link:
http://nwtandcoptic.blogspot.com/2006/09/john-11c-word-was-god.html
Furthermore, as even you had pointed out, “Maybe, as mediator between God and man, the Word [Jesus] stands on the side of man looking toward God. Toward may also imply movement: the Word [Jesus] as mediator brings man toward God.” Yes, because we had already been told that Jesus “stands on the side of man looking toward God,” and that, “as mediator [Jesus] brings man toward God,” we should naturally conclude that Jesus cannot be the same person he was just said to be “with”; or, in your words, “toward.”
Now, concerning your use of the term “orthodox,” perhaps this might be of interest:
“It is only assumption,…that universality and ubiquity are made the tests of religious doctrine. No universality or ubiquity can make that divine which never was such. It is mere prejudice of veneration for antiquity, and the imposing aspect of an unanimous acquiescence (if unanimous it really be) which makes us regard that as truth which comes so recommended to us. Truth is rather the attribute of the few than the many. The real church of God may be the small remnant, scarcely visible amidst the mass of surrounding professors. Who, then, shall pronounce any thing to be divine truth, simply because it has the marks of having been generally or universally received among men?”
Hampden, Renn Dickson (b.1763-d.1868), D.D., Regis Professor of Divinity at Oxford. “Bampton Lectures.” Annual. (Oxford, England: Oxford University, 1833), p. 356. BR45 .B3 / sv87-025507.
I thank you and all for your consideration.
Agape, Alan. http://www.goodcompanionbooks.com
Re: John 1:1c - "a god."
An informative and helpful comment, Alan. You bring up the important grammatical point that Greek had no indefinite article, so if someone wanted to refer to A god rather than THE god s/he would simply omit the definite article. Alternatively, the omission could also be emphasizing the essential godliness of the Christ. As Zerwick puts it:
Zerwick’s book on NT Greek usage was the "bible" in evangelical seminaries in my day — maybe it still is. Zerwick was a scholar at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in the Vatican, so his work spans both the Catholic and the Protestant theological worlds.
I wondered whether the insistence on Christ as THE God in trinitarian theology might have reflected linguistic confusion among early Church scholars. At the time the NT was written Greek rather than Latin was in effect the "lingua franca" of the Empire. Greek was also the language of scholarship, such that even in Rome the educated classes could speak Greek. However, as the Empire expanded Latin became the primary language spoken in the new Western provinces. The Church, always divided to an extent between east and west, split more decisively when the Roman center of the western branch moved decisively to Latin. The western churchmen began relying more heavily on various Latin translations of Greek NT fragments, culminating in Jerome’s consolidated Vulgate in the 5th century. Whereas Greek used a definite article but not the indefinite article, Latin had neither. Imagine the confusion of the early Latinate theologians trying to arrive at a determinative interpretation of John 1:1 having neither "a" nor "the" at their disposal!
However, the eastern branch of the Church, reading the NT in their native Greek, also asserted a trinitarian understanding of God. So even though they probably didn’t read John 1:1 as Biblical proof that Jesus is one in being with Yahweh, they nonetheless asserted the equivalence of three persons in the one God in the same way as the Western church.
Presumably the early Christian theologians were trying to reconcile two seemingly irreconcilable points: there is only THE God, but Christ is ALSO God. In the doctrine of the Trinity they arrived at a synthesis. That they could formulate such a complex understanding of the nature of God testifies either to the intrinsic complexity of the Godhead who reveals Himself in the threefold witness of Scripture, community, and sensus divinitatis, or to the intrinsic complexity of the human mind that through detailed investigation of the Biblical texts, sophisticated reason, and unbridled imaginion could arrive at such a remarkable reconciliation. It remains to be seen whether the emerging church will reconsider the traditional trinitarian understanding, and also whether it will continue to insist on trinitarian belief as one indicator of being a "true" Christian. I supsect that if one were to ask ordinary Catholic or Protestant churchgoers about the Trinity they wouldn’t "get it right" anyway.
Re: John 1:1c - "a god."
Dear Mr. Doyle,
The following observation may prove quite interesting:
“The formulation ‘one God in three Persons’ was not solidly established, certainly not fully assimilated into Christian life and its profession of faith, prior to the end of the 4th century. But it is precisely this formulation that has first claim to the title the Trinitarian dogma. Among the Apostolic Fathers, there had been nothing even remotely approaching such a mentality or perspective.…it is not directly and immediately the word of God.”
Taken from: “The New Catholic Encyclopedia.” Prepared by an Editorial Staff at the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. (New York, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967-c1989), vol. XIV [14], p. 299 (italics theirs). BX841 .N44 1967 / 66-022292.
In my view, the import of this statement becomes all the more significant when we appreciate the fact that “the Apostolic Fathers” are those who were said to have lived during or close to the same time period as the Apostles themselves – perhaps, with even some of them having been taught by them as well.
Therefore, if among the writings of “the Apostolic Fathers” “there had been nothing even remotely approaching such a mentality or perspective,” and, especially, for this teaching to not have ever been a part of the Christian “profession of faith,” that is, as expressed within any Christian ‘declaration of belief’ until the end of the 4th century, then, surely, this would, in my view, unequivocally substantiate the fact that neither the Apostles nor any of the earliest of Christians had ever believed and/or been taught any such radically new concept about God.
In line with the above, might I also suggest consideration of the contents within the following two links:
“Some Interesting Observations About the Trinity, Perhaps Not So Commonly Known”
http://www.geocities.com/goodcompanionbooks/Some_Interesting_Observations.html
Some Powerful Reasoning’s About the Trinity, Not So Easily Dismissed”
http://www.geocities.com/goodcompanionbooks/Some_Powerful_Reasonings.html
~~~~~~~~~~~
Agape, Alan. http://www.goodcompanionbooks.com
Re: John 1:1c - "a god."
Dear Mr. Doyle,
With regard to your quote of Zerwick, it may interest you to know that, within "Appendix 6A Jesus-A Godlike One; Divine," of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ New World Translation, 1984 Edition, they explain much the same as Zerwick above:
~~~~~
John 1:1 – "and the Word was a god (godlike; divine)"
Gr[eek], kai the ·os’ en ho lo’gos
"…the Greek word the ·os’ is a singular predicate noun occurring before the verb and is not preceded by the definite article. This is an anarthrous the ·os’. The God with whom the Word, or Logos, was originally is designated here by the Greek expression ho the ·os’, that is, the ·os’ preceded by the definite article ho. This is an articular the ·os’. Careful translators recognize that the articular construction of the noun points to an identity, a personality, whereas a singular anarthrous predicate noun preceding the verb points to a quality about someone. Therefore, John’s statement that the Word or Logos was "a god" or "divine" or "godlike" does not mean that he was the God with whom he was. It merely expresses a certain quality about the Word, or Logos, but it does not identify him as one and the same as God himself."
Taken from: The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures. Revised Edition, 1984. (Brooklyn, New York: Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, Brooklyn, 1984), p. 1519. BS195 .N4 1984 / 84-191013. 1984.
The same point is made within their "Reasoning" book:
"The definitive article (the) appears before the first occurrence of theos (God) but not before the second. The articular (when the article appears) construction of the noun points to an identity, a personaltiy, whereas a singular anarthrous (without the article) predicate noun before the verb (as the sentence is constructed in the Greek [of John 1:1]) points to a quality about someone. So the text is not saying that the Word (Jesus) was the same as the God with whom he was but, rather, that the Word was godlike, divine, a god."
Taken from: Reasoning from the Scriptures. 1st Edition. (Brooklyn, New York: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, International Bible Students Association, c1985, 1989), pp. 212, 213. BS612 .R43 1985 / 85198803.
Agape, Alan.
john1one@earthlink.net
http://www.goodcompanionbooks.com
Re: John 1:1c - "a god."
The question is not whether there is good reason to believe (which there is) that there is a distinction between “the God” (i.e. the Father) and the Logos (i.e. Jesus), but whether the Father and Jesus are both equally divine. The normative predicate would suggest Jesus shares the quality of the Father’s divinity. The author of ntgreek.org comments, “In other words, contrary to the thought that ‘since there is no definite article used here it could belittle the fact of the Word being God’, the fact that the word ‘God’ is used first in the sentence actually shows some emphasis that this Logos (Word) was in fact God in its nature. However, since it does not have the definite article, it does indicate that this Word was not the same ‘person’ as the Father God, but has the same ‘essence’ and ‘nature’.”
On the other hand, to take the presence and lack of articles and run with them and claim Jesus is “a god” is to admit John was a polytheist. The doctrine of the Trinity makes sense of how there is one God and yet Jesus is divine. As John portrays Jesus saying, him and the Father are “one.”
N.T. Wright has said, by the time Paul starts writing, if the early Christians had not come up with the doctrine of the Trinity yet, they should have.
Re: John 1:1c - "a god."
I would think that, in the context of monotheistic first century Israel, any thoughts of Jesus being divine would have seemed exceedingly strange, if not blasphemous. That’s precisely what we see in the reactions of the Jewish leaders in the gospels. Still, the Old Testament isn’t consistently monotheistic. Yahweh is the god of the Jews, but other tribes and nations have their own gods. These other peoples build idols to honor their gods. Sometimes the idols serve as icons or portals by which gods and men can communicate, but Yahweh is the greatest of the gods. Sometimes the idols are just stone or metal and there are no gods standing behind them, and Yahweh is the only real god.
Jesus seems almost coy about declaring his own divinity, and the writers of the epistles never go into much detail about their understanding of who Jesus is. The idea of multiple persons participating in one being is a pretty abstract idea even in these postmodern times. Smart people who’ve not had extensive exposure to the "trinity theory" — e.g., Jews and Muslims — find it quite counter-intuitive. For Wright to regard the trinitarian idea as so obvious that the first century Christians should have thought of it sounds rather anachronistic to me. A lot of ideas seem obvious after the fact — that’s one sign that it might be a good idea.
Re: John 1:1c - "a god."
By the time John starts writing, if the Greeks had not come up with the indefinite article yet, they should have.
Re: John 1:1c - "a god."
Not exactly. N.T. Wright explains, “[In] second-Temple Judaism there were several quite sophisticated ways of speaking of the one God of Israel, the creator, and his close and complex relation to the world. Maintaining a firm hold on God’s transcendence and otherness on the one hand, while simultaneously wanting to express the nearness, love, and activity of this God within the world, many Jewish writings spoke of this in various ways which seemed to have been designed to safegaurd both the actuality of God’s activity and the fact that it was the same God, the creator, the transcendent one, who was acting. What we have in the New Testament, not entirely without precedent in Judaism but nowhere seen with anything like the prominence and emphasis the early Christians gave to it, is the messianic language of the king, seen as YHWH’s ‘son’, taken up and used as a vehicle in exactly the same way” (RSG, Wright 734).
Wright points to Philo, for example:
“Philo Conf. Ling. 62f., quoting Zech. 6.12, which Philo reads as ‘the man whose name is Rising [anatole’. ‘Strangest of titles,’ he comments, ‘if you suppose that a being composed of soul and body is here described. But if you suppose that it is that Incorporeal one, who differs not a whit from the divine image, you will agree that the name of ‘rising’ assigned to him quite truly describes him. For that man is the edlest son, whom the Father of all raised up [aneteile], and elsewhere calls him His first-born, and indeed the Son thus begotten followed the ways of his Father…’ (tr. Colson and Whitaker in LCL)” (Wright 734).
It was not so odd in biblical times. We are told in Genesis Adam and Eve, two separate humans, make up “one flesh.” The Wisdom Solomon describes has part in creation. Jesus says he is “one” with the Father. John describes the logos as theos. I’m pretty sure; moreover, some Jews viewed the Torah as a divine emancipation.
He lays it out, among other places, in Paul in Fresh Perspective. I’ll try to summarize the chapter I am referring to later.
In the meantime, here is a discussion between Wright and Dunn concerning Jesus’ divinity:
“[Wright:] I go back to that again and again: When we look for the self-consciousness of Jesus (and I’m aware of yards of books complaining about that phrasing), I believe, as a historian and as a Christian, that when Jesus came to Jerusalem on that last journey and told stories about a king or a master coming back to see what was going on and to judge people, what he had in mind was to explain what he was doing in coming at last to challenge Jerusalem and to explain it by means of telling stories about YHWH returning to Zion. In other words, as I think I say at one key point in the book (I’d love to know what Jimmy thinks of this), when you go back to the Exodus narratives, YHWH is there as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night with the Israelites in the wilderness. Isaiah 40:5 says:
Then the glory of the LORD will be revealed, And all flesh will see it together’ (NASB).
But it remains an open question as to what that’s going to look like. I believe, and have argued in detail, that Jesus believed that those prophecies of the return of YHWH, the glory of the Lord returning to Zion would not look like a whirlwind, a fire, Ezekiel’s dynamo picture, but would look like a young Jewish prophet riding in tears on a donkey and going off to have a last meal with his friends and die on a cross.
In other words, I think Jesus was telling stories about God coming back to explain his own return to Jerusalem. That’s where I find very deep and rich, and very, very high Christology in the mind of Jesus himself, which then gives me a bridge to understand all the other hints which have been picked up in other bits of the tradition. Jimmy himself would say, and has said, that you take a thing like Peter’s confession, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” I take it that means “You are the Messiah.” I don’t think that means “You’re the second person of the Trinity.” Now Matthew maybe already thinks that Peter said more than he knew, and by the time we get to Paul, Paul is construing it as a lot more. But just because I think that doesn’t mean that Jesus didn’t have that sense of his own identity. Jimmy, you might want to come in on this.
Dunn: Yes, there’s no doubt, I think, that from very early days, the first Christians were seeing God in Jesus, seeing Jesus as the human face of God, seeing Jesus as the one who shows them what God is like and all that. And the way in which already in Paul you have Jesus inserted into the Shema: ‘For us there is one God, the Father … and one Lord, Jesus Christ’ (1 Cor. 8:6, NRSV), and so on – that’s really very astonishing (‘An Evening Conversation on Jesus and Paul’).
Re: John 1:1c - "a god."
Thanks Enarchay. Perhaps it was the influence of Greek thought, where the relationship between individual manifestations and pure eternal essence led to various understandings of diversity within unity. Perhaps it was an ever-increasing sophistication of Jewish thought. Maybe it was a confluence of these two streams. You refer to Philo, the first century Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, who associated the personified Wisdom of Proverbs 8 with the Greek idea of Logos. It’s as if a dialectic is being worked out here, with various attempts being made at reconciling polytheism with monotheism to arrive at diversity within unity in the godhead.
It’s interesting to read the excerpted conversation between two theologians that you cite. On the one hand, it’s possible to read the New Testment as texts generated by various individuals struggling in their own ways to understand something they cannot quite grasp, which only later becomes consolidated into more systematic theological concepts like the trinity. Alternatively, one can contend that the NT writers were speaking with one voice from within a shared implicit understanding that they didn’t feel the need to explicate systematically, and the job of subsequent readers is to induce what was in the minds of these writers that informed their writings. These two hermeneutical stances also line themselves up in a kind of dialectic.
Jesus cites Gen. 1&2
We’re exploring an alternate universe that’s identical to this one except that the first 3 chapters of Genesis have been snipped off the front of the Bible. So far the differences between universes haven’t been very dramatic. Now we move on to specific citations of the Biblical creation narrative, starting with Jesus’s words as recorded in the Gospels.
As far as I can tell, only once does Jesus refer specifically to Genesis 1-3. Matthew and Mark both describe and encounter in which the Pharisees ask Jesus if it’s lawful for a man to divorce his wife:
In the first part of the citation, from Genesis 1, Jesus seems to be making a case for gender equality: men shouldn’t be able to act unilaterally in divorcing their wives inasmuch as men and women are equal in God’s creation. If we consider Jesus’s assertion apart from the creation narrative, would we have any trouble with it from a Darwinian perspective? No: ordinarily two species on the same branch of the evolutionary tree diverge from one another gradually, by small increments, rather than because a singe individual, whether male or female, being born markedly different from its parents. Conspecifics can be identified by their ability to reproduce with one another, which of course requires both male and female.
It’s notable that Jesus didn’t cite the Adam and Eve version of the creation, where man precedes woman. Jesus does, however, refer to the aftermath of the creation of Eve, where the Genesis 2 narrator observes that "for this cause" a man shall leave his parents and join himself to his wife. In the original context "for this cause" refers to the idea that man is missing something from himself (i.e., his rib), and that he cannot be complete, or "one flesh" without being (re)joined to woman. Here, however, Jesus conflates the two narratives describing the creation of man, with "for this cause" referring back to the egalitarian version of Genesis 1: because God created humanity as a two-gendered species, the two must come together. This is a biological imperative for any species that reproduces sexually — and Genesis 1 is explicit about the "be fruitful and multiply" capabilities of human males and females.
So, whereas Jesus’s argument depends on the Pharisees’ knowledge of the creation narrative, it doesn’t really depend on the historicity of that narrative.
Again, however, I can’t help but diverge a bit from the trajectory of this post. The thrust of Jesus’s argument isn’t precisely clear to me. Maybe the disciples (as usual) didn’t get it either:
Jesus is saying that the Law accepted divorce as a concession to human frailty. Interestingly, the Pharisees and Jesus refer to the Law as something Moses said, rather than as a commandment from God. The passages Jesus cites from Genesis are descriptive rather than imperative; still, he gives them precedence over the Law. I wonder if he’s saying that, apart from hard-heartedness and the Law, humans are naturally monogamous? Or is he acknowledging that the Law of Moses is a culture-specific ethical code that has no universal applicability?
Pauline sexism
Jesus cited the Genesis 1 creation narrative to assert gender equality in marriage. In contrast, Paul cites the Genesis 2 variant to justify gender inequality in church leadership. The passage is well-known:
Paul begins with a general command ("A woman must…") and ends with a general observation about women ("A woman will be preserved…"). It’s possible that in the "I do not allow" sentence Paul is merely expressing a personal preference for women not to teach or to exercise authority in his ministry. That should be indictment enough, since Paul surely knew that his example carried a lot of weight, and especially since he justifies his stance by invoking God’s creation. If there had been no Adam and Eve story in the Bible, Paul wouldn’t have been tempted to offer up this offensive bit of polemics; he’d have had to justify his predilection for men-only leadership on other grounds.
The Adam and Eve story is, one must acknowledge, rather sexist. The woman is created not for her own sake, but as a helper for the man. God creates Adam directly, whereas Eve’s creation is contingent on that of Adam, accomplished through a thoracic surgical procedure that sounds more like voodoo chicanery than divine intervention. And the fault line of sin is clearly etched in gender politics: if only the woman hadn’t listened to the tempter, if only the man hadn’t listened to the woman… Paul’s inferences from the story are consistent with the story itself.
The idea of the first male of a species preceding the first female makes no real sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Maybe if this second creation narrative had been excised from Genesis Paul might have avoided the temptation to follow its sexist trajectory.
Re: Pauline sexism
John, I haven’t read the whole of this thread, so these comments may be missing the point in some way.
A key observation with respect to both the Genesis narrative and Paul’s use of it in 1 Timothy 2:11-15 is that Eve’s transgression is attributed not to some intrinsic flaw or failing in her but to the cunning of the deceiver. I suppose you could say that both the man and the woman, in their different, ways were susceptible to being misled and both were disobedient, but it is the cunning serpent who is basically blamed for the fiasco (Gen. 3:14).
I argued in Speaking of Women: Interpreting Paul that Paul’s main concern in 1 Timothy 2:11-15 is to restrict the disruptive influence of false teachers, who, it appears (cf. 2 Tim. 3:6-7), had the habit of insinuating themselves into homes by ‘seducing’ susceptible women. In a patriarchal culture that limited their education and exposure to the world, women were much more likely to be deceived. I see this passage as a rather pragmatic measure to keep things under control. He uses the Genesis text somewhat analogically and is careful not to ground this contingent ordering of things in a universal created condition.
The problem, as so often, is that we read these passages through the lenses of our modernist perspective on things. Genesis 2 wasn’t written to address the concerns of a vociferous and over-sensitive egalitarian culture. Yes, the man was formed first, and perhaps that reflects a patriarchal perspective, but the point is not to privilege the man but to highlight the deficiency of his solitary condition. ‘Helper’ does not make the the woman subordinate: the term suggests not the status of the helper but the insufficency of the one helped. The narrative culminates in a profound image of marital union as ‘one flesh’. This is what it is intended to safeguard.
Re: Pauline sexism
"A key observation with respect to both the Genesis narrative and Paul’s use of it in 1 Ti