I’m all in for option 3! @Djordje, @Randy, @AllenWitmerMiller, are you with me?
I think such a reading is by far, the most sensible reading. The problem with it, I feel, only comes when you get to the NT, and if you accept the deuterocanonical books, The Wisdom of Solomon.
I suppose that I see scripture as more like a community, and so some biblical writers (the compilers of Geneis 1-3 most likely), as well as others around that time, saw Genesis 1-3 as giving a very rough sketch of God’s creation of the world and human beings. God is creator of everything, humans are male and female in God’s image, and we blew it from the beginning. Somewhere down the line, Jews began to read the story as a historical description of how humanity was ACTUALLY created. Although they drew the right theology from the stories, they took it too literally. Paul inherited this tradition. He got his theology right, but probably took the story more literally than the compliers of Genesis took it.
Or then again, maybe he didn’t. It’s hard to know for sure, since he allegorizes the story of Sarah and Hagar, says Christ was the rock in the wilderness, that rules about oxen treading out grain were written “for our sake,” etc.
It seems safe to say Genesis 1-3 is the culmination of two theologically complimentary stories and Paul uses them, just like everything else in the OT to explain the significance of Christ’s life giving death and resurrection that saves both Jews and gentiles. If we asked him today whether he thought Adam was a literal person, I personally think he might say something like,
“well sure I did, but that wasn’t really my point. He could very well be symbolic but my point would still stand. Just as death came through this one man in the story in Genesis, life comes through the one man that I met on the Damascus road. Whether the death man was literal or not is sort of inconsequential. My point was that Christ brings life to all. Using Adam just seemed like the best foil to Christ I could find in the Old Testament. I mean, Adam seems to stand for all people, both Jews and Gentiles, so using Adam this way seemed like a rhetorical slam dunk. And from the Gentiles I spoke with after writing the letter, I’m glad I used this analogy. It helped them really ‘get’ what Christ did for them.”
I guess I took us off subject. I should start a thread on Paul’s interpretation of Adam