One more interesting strand. If the Fall narrative is mythical, what is it mythical about?
I’ve just fortuitously come across a piece I wrote long ago based on N T Wright’s discussion on Romans 8.
In it, I dispute the likelihood that the doctrine of original sin only came into being in Judaism with the writing of 4 Esdras, after the fall of the Temple in 70AD, which Wright suggests was as climactic a motive for the Jews as the death of Christ was for Paul.
Nevertheless, despite my arguments, the fact remains that Wright is correct to say that 4 Esdras is the first recorded Jewish statement of the doctrine. So if Genesis 2-3 were an aetiological myth about evil in the world, the point seems to have escaped many, or most, Jews.
The alternative, I suppose, is that it is only intended as an aetiological myth to explain human death, a fact which hardly seems to require explanation.
Personally, I go with what Wright said elsewhere, that at the first fall of Jerusalem under the Babylonians, the Jews saw the parallels with their own situation. But if they didn’t (as at least appears to be the case) draw the conclusion that their experience was the result of Adam’s sin continuing in the world, then the Genesis account still wasn’t being taken as being about the mythological or even allegorical origin of either sin or death, but just a parallel set of earlier circumstances.
So which is more likely: that a divininely inspired account of events would not be fully understood by the Jews; or that a story with no particular reference to universals should become interpreted, in the New Testament, as the source of human evil?