RE: Are there guidelines for accommodational interpretation?

Hi Paul you wrote:

>>I agree that Paul thought of Adam as a historical figure, and his
readers
would think of the Adam in the Garden of Eden. The scientific problem
here
is that if this is literal history, Adam's culture dates him to c. 5000
BC,
which is at least some 30 to 50,000 years after homo sapiens sapiens
appeared on earth, and lots of these humans existed around the earth at
that
time. Fischer and McIntyre recognize this problem and have devised
concordist explanations as to how Adam could still be literal in spite
of
the Pre-Adamites.<<

No scientific problem at all. It's strictly a problem of
interpretation. And I didn't "devise" anything. All I did was read
Genesis and read a few hundred books on the ANE.

Somewhere around the first century AD, Christian apologetics took a
wrong turn. What had been handed down to the children of Israel as the
history of their people beginning with Adam and Noah and Abraham in
southern Mesopotamia was misinterpreted by the early church fathers as
the story of the creation of the first human beings. Here we are nearly
two thousand years later and the church still hasn't dealt with this
obvious mistake.

Cuneiform inscribed clay tablets discovered in Mesopotamian excavations
have given archaeologists a picture of a region almost totally unknown
only a century ago. These inscriptions have provided insights into the
history, religion, and even the racial characteristics of the people who
lived there. And some of these writings appear to pertain to Adam
himself. Adam, in all likelihood, was a historical personality who
lived roughly 6,800 years ago.

In short, traditional Christian apologetics is totally fowled up from
the second chapter of Genesis through the eleventh chapter. The entire
creation versus evolution debacle has been based primarily on this
flawed interpretation. As the argument goes, if the entire human race
descended from a pair of specially created individuals, how could
mankind have evolved?

And the answer is that Genesis is silent on the beginning of mankind in
general, although adamant about the beginning of God's chosen race. The
pair of individuals described in Genesis lived less than 7,000 years
ago. Human beings have been around for many tens of thousands of years,
and our bipedal ancestors commenced millions of years ago. This, of
course, precludes Adam from being ancestral to all humanity as it is
presently misunderstood.

You would think that Christians would have found the flaw in that
argument by now. That they haven't, simply highlights our persistent
state of theological ignorance in an age of scientific enlightenment.

Dick Fischer, Genesis Proclaimed Association
Finding Harmony in Bible, Science, and History
www.genesisproclaimed.org
 
Received on Tue Jun 13 01:14:32 2006