In a few days, my new book "From Paul to Saul" is going to be published, first in German, by Herder (Freiburg).
Here is a small part that deals with the two different readings of "Adam" (and Eve) in the 10-letter collection that was part of Marcion's New Testament - the translation of which is given in the book - next to the 14-letter collection as we know it from the canonical New Testament:
1. Adam
The sole
occurrence of Ἀδάμ (Adam) within the *10-letter collection is found in *1 Cor 15, where we read:
|
*1 Cor 15:22 |
1 Cor 15:22-23 |
|
22For just as in Adam they die, so also in Christ will all be made
alive. |
22For
as in Adam all die, so also in
Christ all will be made alive. |
|
|
23But
each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then those who are Christ’s, at his coming. |
In *1 Cor 15:22,
Adam appears not as a
historical figure for moral reflection, nor as a genealogical reference, but as
a typological counterpart to Christ, the second Adam. The contrast
is stark and theological: death through
the first, life through the
second. It is not the person of Adam but the condition he signifies—mortality, transgression, and universality—that
defines his function in this single appearance. There is no narrative
development, no elaboration of Eden, temptation, or expulsion. Adam serves here not as story but as synecdoche: a name that contains an
anthropology.
The temporal aspect of the Adam–Christ antithesis in *1 Cor 15:22 is reinforced by the verb
tenses employed: a contrast is drawn not merely between two figures, but
between two ages—between present experience and future transformation,[1]
between now and the new. As noted in passing above, A.
Lindemann aptly, though perhaps too cautiously, speaks of an “incongruence”
between the present tense ἀποθνῄσκουσιν
(they die) and the future ζῳοποιηθήσονται (will be made alive),[2] it
is more than that, an antithesis.
As verse 23—which is unattested for the *10-letter collection and also absent in terms of
vocabulary—makes clear, the canonical redaction, as so often elsewhere when
dealing with antitheses in the *10-letter
collection as its source, sought to soften the sharpness of the
pre-canonical text. This shift in verbal aspect marks not merely a
chronological distinction but undermines the eschatological edge of the *Pauline
vision. It dissolves the juxtaposition of Adam and Christ, and it attenuates
the temporal contrast inherent in the antithesis of the Vorlage—namely, the
opposition between present time and future—by speaking in verse 23 of an order,
whether simultaneous[3] or
sequential. The term ἔπειτα (“then”) serves not simply as a
sequence marker, but as a redirection. The phrase ἀπαρχὴ Χριστός (“Christ
the first fruits”) no longer refers only to a future, eschatological
event. It is now read retroactively—as an indicator that resurrection has already begun in Christ’s own rising.
The canonical redaction thereby reconfigures the earlier *Pauline antithesis of
“now” and “not yet” into a unified
salvific continuum, stretching from Adam through Christ to the eschaton.
This softening of the temporal opposition was not lost on Origen,
who, reading verse 23 in light of Rom
5:12, interpreted the redemptive work of Christ not as an isolated
eschatological intervention but as the unfolding of a single divine economy. He
parallels Paul’s statement on sin’s entry through one man with his own
extension: “Just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death
through sin, so death passed to all men, because all sinned...” (Rom 5:12), Origen continues: “...so
also through one man righteousness came into this world, and through
righteousness life, and thus life passed to all men, in him in whom all were
made alive.”[4]
In Origen’s reading, as in the canonical redaction, the decisive act
of redemption is not postponed to a future parousia, but is already inaugurated—a movement not
from present to future, but from past
through present into the fullness of time. Thus, Christ and Adam are not
separated by eschatological distance but are aligned within a single salvific time frame, a προκαταβολὴ τοῦ κόσμου kind of
continuity, in which redemption is the fulfillment of a history that began not
at Golgotha but in Eden.
The earlier *Pauline dichotomy between revelation “from faith for
faith” (*Rom 1:17), “through faith in Christ” and living “in” and listening to “the
Law” (*Rom 3:19,22) is thereby absorbed into a redemptive process wherein righteousness
and life are not merely proclaimed but ordered—hierarchically and historically.
It is a theological move well attuned to the thought-world of Irenaeus, who
likewise framed salvation history as a
divinely orchestrated sequence of recapitulations.[5] In
this light, it is little wonder that a tradition raised exclusively on the
canonical text ceased to perceive the temporal antithesis altogether.[6]
The canonical tradition draws Adam remarkably close to God—a proximity rendered with almost
liturgical brevity in the Lukan genealogy of Jesus. At the conclusion of that
solemn procession of names, the Evangelist ends not with Abraham or Moses, but
with “Ἀδάμ, τοῦ Θεοῦ”—“Adam, who
was of God” (Lk 3:38). It is
the only mention of Adam in any of the canonical Gospels, and its placement at
the culmination of the genealogy lends him a peculiar dignity: he is not merely
first in human sequence, but, by implication, progeny of the divine. Here, Adam is not typologically
subordinate, but theophorically exalted.
This elevation of Adam corresponds with what we have already noted:
the canonical redaction of 1 Cor 15:23
and Rom 5:14–15 tempers the
stark eschatological antithesis of 1
Cor 15:22. As observed by Origen and others, the future is now pulled
back into the present, not annihilating but recontextualizing the earlier time-dualism. The progression is no
longer from Adam to Christ, death to life, old to new—but from one phase of a single salvific history to the
next.
This redirection finds its most explicit outworking in 1 Timothy 2, where the canonical
editorial tendency toward hierarchical ordering reaches beyond eschatology into
gendered anthropology:
13For Adam was first formed, then Eve. 14Adam
wasn’t deceived, but the woman, being deceived, has fallen into disobedience. 15But
she will be saved through her childbearing (σωθήσεται δὲ διὰ τῆς τεκνογονίας),
if they continue in faith, love, and sanctification with sobriety. (1 Tim 2:13–15)
What a terrible
statement![7] It
is a ghastly travesty of *Pauline teaching and of his appreciation of women.[8] Here,
the narrative hierarchy derived from Genesis
2 becomes theological norm: creation order implies a chauvinist moral
order that connects the salvation of women—married women, others do not seem to
be thought of[9]—with childbearing and the
implied pregnancy, labor, pain and motherhood, understood as “penal suffering.”[10] The
woman is not merely created second, she is made culpable, while Adam is exonerated by priority. It is the
Christian beginning of an unending story of female temptation and seduction, as
we can see, for example, in Marcion’s commentator Tertullian.
On Eve as pars pro toto of women Tertullian states with reference to
the same story from Genesis:
“Do you not know that you are Eve? The
sentence of God on this sex of yours lives on in this age: the guilt must of
necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway. You are the one who unsealed
the forbidden tree. You are the first deserter of the divine law. You are she
who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack.”[11]
Tertullian blames
Eve, and by extension all women, for the fall of man, portraying women as the origin of male seduction into sin. A
little later in the same book, he adds:
“First, know that the desire to please by
adorning oneself does not spring from a clear conscience, but from decor
designed to entice lust. Why, then, do you stir up that evil in yourself? Why
do you invite someone foreign to you whom you claim to be? Moreover, we must
not open the way to temptations that sometimes accomplish by pressure what
God’s calls would seem to fail to; indeed, they at least move the spirit to
stumble.”[12]
Women’s use of
beautification, so his male gaze throughout this text, he accuses to be a form of seduction, recalling Eve’s
role in leading Adam astray. Adornment is portrayed as an invitation to lust, and thus morally
dangerous. How persistently this message of 1 Timothy resonated with the
fathers can be seen from the influential John Chrysostom who in his homilies on
this text preaches to his congregation: “You have crushed the head of your
husband… it was you who expelled him from paradise! It was you who made him a
subject of death… Do you not know that you are Eve?”[13]
The Pauline argument is no longer about the universal condition of
sin and mortality—ἐφ’ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον
(“because all sinned,” Rom 5:12)—but
has been refracted through ecclesial
order and household virtue.
Thus, a typology originally rooted in universal anthropology becomes
embedded in a gendered ecclesiology.
The theological weight of Adam shifts: once figure of mortality, he becomes
archetype of unfallen order; once universal ancestor, now model of untouched
obedience.
The final canonical reference to Adam occurs in a most fleeting and
symbolic fashion in Jude 14:
“About these
also Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied...” (Jude 1:14)
Here Ἀδάμ appears not
as agent, nor as type, nor as theological foil, but merely as a chronological marker. His name is
invoked only to lend apocalyptic gravitas to Enoch’s prophecy. Adam is the root of a genealogical sequence
that now leads not to Christ but to judgment—a
reminder, perhaps, of the interpretive pliability of biblical figures once they
enter into the editorial economy of canon.
Across these layers, then, Adam is progressively transposed: from figure of fall to vessel of typology, from contrast partner to continuity bearer, from dead in sin to of God. In this, the canonical redaction achieves not merely a
harmonization of sources, but a transvaluation
of theological symbols, suited to the present-tense male dominated church rather than to the apocalyptic
horizon of the earlier *Paul.
[1] Weiß speaks of a “present beyond time”, Weiss, Der Erste
Korintherbrief at 356.
[2] Paul is not thinking “of a kind of law-like process … but of a
(future!) act of God,” Andreas Lindemann, Der
Erste Korintherbrief (Handbuch Zum Neuen Testament; Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2000) IX, 389 S. at 344.
[3] So Heinrici, Der
Erste Brief an Die Korinther at 465.
[4] Orig., Comm. in Rom. 5 (PG 14,1005A-B): Sicut enim in Adam omnes moriuntur, ita et in Christo omnes
vivificabuntur. Hic autem cum dixerit: Sicut per unum hominem peccatum
introivit in hunc mundum, et per peccatum mors, et ita in omnes homines mors
pertransiit, in quo omnes peccaverunt, non retulit ut diceret, verbi causa: Ita
et per unum hominem justitia introivit in hunc mundum, et per justitiam vita,
et sic in omnes homines vita pertransiit, in qua omnes vivificati sunt.
[5] Giorgio Agamben has perceptively denounced the domestication of the
Parousia into a merely present phenomenon, stripped of its eschatological
force; see Giorgio Agamben, Die
Zeit, Die Bleibt. Ein Kommentar Zum RöMerbrief (5. Auflage edn., Edition
Suhrkamp; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2015) 234 Seiten. On Irenaeus, see Alfred Bengsch, Heilsgeschichte
Und Heilswissen. Eine Untersuchung Zur Struktur Und Entfaltung Des
Theologischen Denkens Im Werk "Adversus Haereses" Des Hl. IrenäUs
Von Lyon (Erfurter Theologische Studien; Leipzig: St. Benno-Verlag, 1957)
XXIV, 243 S.
[6] See the list of patristic commentators in Wolfgang Schrage, Der
Erste Brief an Die Korinther Kor <1>; 15,1-16,24; [4. Teilband]
(Evangelisch-Katholischer Kommentar Zum Neuen Testament, 2001) VIII, 484 S. at
194-200. A
modern example is Paul Hoffmann, Die
Toten in Christus. Eine Religionsgeschichtliche Und Exegetische Untersuchung
Zur Paulinischen Eschatologie (2. edn.; Münster: Aschendorff, 1969) at
344-46.
[7] Brox judges: “These reflections, so utterly alien to us” (“Diese
uns völlig fremdartigen Überlegungen”), Norbert Brox, Die
Pastoralbriefe (4., völlig neu bearb. Aufl. edn., Regensburger Neues
Testament; Regensburg: Pustet, 1969) 342 S. at 136.
[8] 1 Tim 2:13-15 is read as a fighting off the Pauline teaching from 1
Cor 7 in Gustav Wohlenberg, Die
Pastoralbriefe (Der Erste Timotheus-, Der Titus- Und Der Zweite
Timotheusbrief); Mit Einem Anhang: Unechte Paulusbriefe (3. Aufl. edn.,
Kommentar Zum Neuen Testament; Leipzig u.a.: Deichert, 1923) VIII, 375 S. at
120.
According to Brox, this passage suggests that “it is hardly imaginable” that it
“derives from the hand of Paul,” Brox, Die
Pastoralbriefe at 135.
[9] See the criticism in Brox, Die Pastoralbriefe at 136.
[10] So Wohlenberg, Die
Pastoralbriefe (Der Erste Timotheus-, Der Titus- Und Der Zweite
Timotheusbrief); Mit Einem Anhang: Unechte Paulusbriefe at 121.
[11] Tert., De Cultu Feminarum 1.1: Et
nesciebas te Evam esse? Dei sententia in hanc sexum vestrum vivit in hoc
saeculo: ergo et delictum necesse est vivat. Tu es porta diaboli, tu es prima
desertrix legis divinae, tu illa es quae persuasisti eum quem diabolus aggredi
non valuit.
[12] Tert., De Cultu Feminarum 2.6: Primo
quod non de integra conscientia venit studium placendi per decorem quem
naturaliter invitator libidinis scimus. Quid igitur excitas in te malum istud?
Quid invitas cuius te profiteris extraneam? Tum quod temptationibus viam
aperire non debemus, quae nonnumquam quod Deus a suis abigat instando
perficiunt, certe vel spiritum scandalo permovent.
[13] John Chrys., Homiliae in 1
Timotheum, Hom. 9.
