Category Archives: Adam

Adam and scriptural inspiration

Posted on 19/06/2018 by Jon Garvey

When I was doing a home Bible study on the Genesis creation narrative a few weeks ago, one guy asked me, “Who was there to write it down?” I’d not yet explained how to approach the text, so it was a good introduction to that, as well as a good question, and you’ll guess the answer wasn’t “God saw the whole thing,” although he certainly did.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, History, Theology | 7 Comments

Rejecting Adam

Posted on 18/06/2018 by Jon Garvey

My maternal great-grandmother was Emma Tyler, who came from a non-conformist family (Brethren, Primitive Methodists or Independents to a woman) that I can trace right back to the sixteenth century in Braintree, Essex. There it was, coincidentally, that I ran a back pain clinic for the last two years of my medical career. Many of the Tylers were bakers and confectioners in the nineteenth century, and any older readers who knew Cambridge “back in the day” may remember that the best bread came from Tylers bakery opposite St Johns College. That was started by my 3X great-grandfather’s brother English Tyler in around 1840.  

Posted in Adam, Genealogical Adam, Science | 4 Comments

Does it follow?

Posted on 11/06/2018 by Jon Garvey

Does Genesis 2 follow from Genesis 1, that is? One of the objections made to the Genealogical Adam hypothesis is that the idea that the story of the Garden follows sequentially from the Genesis 1 Creation account is wrong, and that they are actually different accounts of the same events.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, Science, Theology | 3 Comments

Sons of God

Posted on 05/06/2018 by Jon Garvey

Some things in the Bible are probably unknowable from our current state of knowledge – and conceivably, our future state, too. This may seem hard to accept since the Scriptures are God’s revelation to us, but then nature is also God’s revelation, and the limits of our comprehension themselves remind us to be humble before God. We see through a glass, darkly, but tend to forget that in our pride.

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This world is not my home…

Posted on 29/05/2018 by Jon Garvey

Basil of Caesarea is not only one of the Fathers I cite in God’s Good Earth as a supporter of the teaching of an unfallen creation, but he wrote a complete series of homilies on the days of creation, expounding Scripture in conjunction with the science of his time. In other words, he was both deeply interested in, and a great admirer of, the creation. So I was struck by reading an apparent anomaly in his other writings yesterday:

Posted in Adam, Genealogical Adam, Theology | 4 Comments

Now you see them – now you don’t

Posted on 08/05/2018 by Jon Garvey

One of my current research aims is to demonstrate that the Bible itself has an awareness of other people existing in the world at the time of Adam, despite being overtly silent about them. I approached this from the point of view of the “compositional strategy” of the Torah and Tanach here, and from the point of view of hints about people other than Adam in the text here.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, Theology | 9 Comments

Religion before Adam

Posted on 01/05/2018 by Jon Garvey

On the Genealogical Adam model – and indeed on any model dealing with an historical Adam – one has to account for the fact that humanity appears to have had some kind of religious or spiritual life almost as far back as artifacts can be found.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, Theology | 39 Comments

Is Genesis real impossibility?

Posted on 12/04/2018 by Jon Garvey

Joshua Swamidass has become involved in what appears, at first sight, a minor disagreement on a BioLogos thread puffing a new essay by several authors entitled Is Genesis Real History? His objection was especially to one sentence (bearing the marks of John Walton’s hand, I suspect), which reads: Or consider Genesis 2:7, when God forms Adam from dust and breathes into his nostrils. This could not have happened exactly as described, because we know from other passages in the Bible that God is Spirit with neither hands nor lungs.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Science, Theology | 7 Comments

Do not touch my anointed

Posted on 21/03/2018 by Jon Garvey

Once more I’ve posted a few comments on BioLogos and got into trouble. Well, that’s been the pattern since 2011, so it’s no surprise. The thread was the old and currently 827-comment-long Buggs/Venema/Swamidass conversation on the population genetics of human origins, a lull in which made me think it was timely to add the kind of cautionary note on the validation of models I’ve sounded here and here.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Science | 22 Comments

Genealogical Adam – isolated tribes

Posted on 19/03/2018 by Jon Garvey

One of the objections to the Genealogical Adam hypothesis is the case of isolated tribes who, perhaps, have never interbred with descendants of Adam in any plausible historical time-frame.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, History, Science | 8 Comments