I do think it helps my case. As I suppose you know, Galatians 3:16 throws that collective noun thing out the window and says that because it says “seed” instead of “seeds” in Genesis 22 that it is referring to Christ and not all the physical offspring of Abraham. And that’s fine too because we know that the true sons of Abraham are those who have the faith of Abraham- the body of Christ is a collective even if Christ is singular. The spiritual reality of what is happening goes to the edge of what human language is able to convey, and perhaps beyond it.
Genesis 3:15 helps my case too, for the same reasons. And as a bonus, it negates the claim that 3:20 is evidence against an adamic race before the man Adam. “Mother of all the living” is a strange thing to say about someone who had just gotten them both killed. But it makes sense if Yahweh-Elohim told them that the 2nd Adam would come, God’s only begotten son, through the seed of a woman and redeem mankind. All “in Christ” are the living. The Christ-centered model makes sense of what otherwise does not, either in context of the passage or bounced against the evidence from the natural world that there were people before the time period Adam must have lived in if the text is accurate.
So we do see a pattern here in Genesis where the ambiguity in nouns being collective or singular are later discovered to point to Christ and Christ is both singular as the man and collective as in the believers which comprise His body. This is of course like the idea of the person of a king standing in to represent his nation. So really 1:26-27 fits into the same pattern.
Have you a link? I’d like to read it, both for itself but especially to figure out if it says anything about the Christ-centered model.
Isn’t the real traditional reading the way that the Jewish rabbis would see it over thousands of years? I should think they would not have a problem with what I am saying about “the man” and the verbs and pronouns. They would be fine with the idea that “man” in 26 is a plural thinking ahead to the race as a concept while 27a and 27b were singular (Adam). That’s what they believed anyway. Of course where I take it from there is not something they would approve of, but I just mean structurally and what the words are saying. The “traditional” reading from 1611 to today may be different but I suspect if one goes before that it would not be. You are in a much better position to say than I of course.
No need to get side-tracked by these jewels hidden in the word here and it takes a long time to build the case where it all fits beautifully together, but I do think I have been shown the significance of these things and write about it in the book.
I am. And whatever it meant in the day, it was also pointing to Christ. And that’s the theme. It all points to Him no matter what people thought it was talking about back in the day.
Well, it was used that way by Homer in the 8th c. BC, but that doesn’t mean that was the dominant idea that came to mind to 1st. c. Jews & Christians, who had a Greek OT to shape their vocabulary. (Even outside the LXX inflence, the word had developed beyond a simple archery term.) This is a classical example of a fallacy taught to intro Greek students (I mean harmatano = “miss the mark”; I believe it’s used in Carson’s Exegetical Fallacies). Regardless, a word technically only means something in context, and authors use terms often with nuance distinctions. It is well known Paul takes the concept of sin beyond its Jewish conception, so it must be examined within his usage (Paul even sounds different than other NT writers).
That’s a cheeky thing Paul does there He took advantage of the difference between Hebrew and Greek grammar to make his theological point (since Greek sperma can take a plural form). His point about Christ as the ultimate seed is a good Christological reading (already nestled in the ambiguity of the Hebrew text). This does not discount the original meaning, which also includes a plural referent.
This helps me see better how you’re arriving at your position on 1:26-27. I’m OK with a sound Christological reading (especially when a NT author employs it!), but I myself am a bit cautious to start finding things in a text without warrant, nor do I want a Christological reading to dismiss/discount earlier layers. Perhaps we have different hermeneutical grids at play here. I prefer Christotelic to Christological, though I’ve shifted in the past couple of years to think more Christologically.
The issue then I suppose is the metric one uses to decide how many dots have to line up before something is “warranted”. I don’t discount the earlier layers. I am one of those here that does NOT ascribe to a straight-up sequential reading of Genesis. I am thus keeping more of the original layer and view than most here. There was an historical Adam and Eve and that is a part of what this text is talking about here. But Christ is also there in the text, as are the adamites outside the garden which makes the parallels between Christ and Adam stronger than it would be were his role the father of humanity.
As for the different grids, we are many members but one body. I think we can each emphasize the thing that we do while still seeing and proclaiming value in the part that the other emphasizes.
Well it is an indication that he valued the Septuagint relative to what would be the Masoretic text more than we do today. It is useful to consider both. This is the kind of thing I think an apostle can do that I can’t! That and the Gal. 4 comparison of the two women as two covenants being “what the law really says.” Still, if those are authoritative examples of how far the text can be stretched to insert Christ (while not denying the reality of the underlying events) then what I am doing is well within the bounds of sound handling of the word. Indeed it explains things that even an expert like you have some difficulty coming up with a better explanation for.
I thought you might know offhand of a link but I’ll give it a look. Thanks for your link.
I am suggesting that this period saw the word translated from Greek and Hebrew to the King’s English and other European languages around this time so that the translation of the text went through the hands of a very small number of people who had only a fraction of the knowledge and documents we have available today. And these people were connected to one another in thought and culture so that if they got something a little off then it would be copied and repeated until it gained momentum as “tradition”. This would be so even if the underlying case from the text was not so strong as the tradition which supported it. This is, in my view, exactly what happened with the tradition to translate “ha-adam” as “Adam” in chapter two, as the King James and other early versions have done. It stood that way for centuries even though those with the right training knew what it literally said was “the man”. Finally, in the last 70 years or so the reality of what was in the text of chapter two overcame the tradition about how it was supposed to be interpreted. Most of the most recent translations properly translate it “the man” now. This momentum has not extended to 1:27…yet.
Regardless, the diminution of “sin” as compared with “evil” still holds, doesn’t it?
Mark, it is a principle of good interpretation to only find dots from within the developing context first to explore a text’s meaning. I see why you’re looking “retroactively” within the whole corpus, as that’s a task for systematic theology, but a bit more caution is urged by sound hermeneutical principles here, in my view.
What does “out of one humanity” even mean in that context? It is not as though Paul was discussing a variety of humanities and then said “out of one of these humanities.” Paul is clearly speaking of humanity as a whole. Look at the phrase in a slightly larger context.
“since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; 26 and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth,”
It is clear that Paul is saying "We have lots of nations now, but all of this exists because God “made from one man every nation” we see today. The collective noun idea simply doesn’t work.
I don’t know. Finding out what Paul means by “sin” (at least in Romans 5) is one my questions. As for “evil,” that’s another word that needs examination. But the Hebrew and Greek words for “evil” have broad semantic ranges. Do you have a particular text in mind, or are you just using “evil” more casually as something greater than the evaluation we give to those who sinned apart from law? (If the latter, then I do agree this is part of what Paul is doing in Rom 5:13-14, no matter what law one has in mind.)
The latter; sin as a diminutive compared with actual evil. Prior to Adam, perhaps no one was capable of even understanding whether their actions were evil, like, as in an analogy, a male grizzly that kills off all the male cubs. Ecologically, that may “make sense” for grizzly behavior, as it keeps the number of apex predators down, but among humans today, we’d recognize this as an act of evil.
This is true, so your thesis is hypothetically possible
“The translator”?..more like almost every translator (and your look at John 11:50 does not establish what a writer must say to distinguish “man” and “nation”). There is a minority position that agrees with you among scholars, as well as NEB (“from one stock”).
If you go with your thesis, though, don’t assume “one nation” since ethnos would be anachronistic for the collective adam.
I do like your point to not build a doctrine on a gap in one text.
I don’t see that this “harms” either Mark’s or my approaches, on this point, right @deuteroKJ ?.. or am I missing something?
It would seem that this passage was an extended explanation of the significance of humanity being “created in the image of God,” regardless of ethnic background.
We can expect Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, to read Genesis perhaps more inclusively than the long-established rabbinic and other traditions, can’t we?
It’s as if Paul is using this speech as his occasion to speak apologetically and inclusively to Greek culture regarding the revelation of Genesis… oh, yeah; that’s the very context of it… : )
It is true I am asking viewers to do most of the work there, but I think my point was that when the NT wants to say one man, it uses the Greek words for one and man. I gave that passage as an example of where “one man” and “ethnos” appear together. The Greek is different. It doesn’t leave blank the “one what?” It fills that blank with anthropous. So someone can’t say “well that’s just the way the Greek does it when they want you to assume one man”.
Correct. It’s not a necessary defeater (is that the right term?)
I’m not exactly sure what you’re asking/saying here, but I agree if what you mean is that Paul is reading the story in his Bible without thinking about or delving into the nitty gritty. After all, he’s preaching, and his larger purpose is to combat the Greek notion that humanity is divided between Greeks and barbarians to point to a common source of origin.
Others go further and say, while Paul believed in Adam as sole progenitor (and argues thus in Acts 17:26), he was wrong but that’s OK since he’s limited to his time & culture. This is where I start to get nervous, for this is often used by those willing to jettison an historical Adam altogether. I’m not ready to make that step…so I have sit and continue to wrestle and live in cognitive dissonance.
Again, an “imago Dei humanity well preceeding the beginning of the Adam and Eve story” interpretive view mitigates against an “Adam as sole progenitor” viewpoint, and I am suggesting that the former was Paul’s view. This is the result of a sequential reading. Paul wasn’t arguing the second view, but the one which results from a sequential reading. He was technically and conceptually correct, but the commentaries are not. No need to get nervous, because Paul didn’t get it wrong.
Have you read and digested Walton’s Proposition 17 yet?
that would need to be shown to be a consistent principle, which I doubt can be shown. Also, we can’t conflate “the NT” without recognizing different human authors that have different styles of writing.
Agreed. It’s just one way it could be done. [minor correction: the basic form is anthropos not anthropous (which is an accusative plural)]
He took advantage of the difference between Hebrew and Greek grammar to make his theological point (since Greek sperma can take a plural form). His point about Christ as the ultimate seed is a good Christological reading (already nestled in the ambiguity of the Hebrew text). This does not discount the original meaning, which also includes a plural referent.