How Adam (and Eve) is being transformed by the canonical redaction - a passage from my new book "From Paul to Saul"

 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.

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[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.