Everyone knows the basic story of Adam and Eve.
They were the first humans, created by God in the Garden of Eden.
All was well until a snake tricked Eve into eating an apple, then Eve tricked Adam, then
God kicked them both out, and it turned into a whole thing.
Well, here's the real story of Adam and Eve.
If you actually read Genesis, you'll notice God creates the universe and everything in
it twice, and the two accounts directly contradict each other in some places.
If you don't take the creation story literally, as many Christians and Jews don't, then it's
not an issue, but it's a huge problem for some Biblical scholars who believe Genesis
was one story completely written by Moses.
Some people in history have gone to great lengths to make the two versions mesh, like
when they made Adam a hermaphrodite.
In the first version of creation, it says God formed Adam and Eve at the same time,
and the story used the phrasing:
"... male and female he created them."
Some early Christian theologians decided this meant that they were made to have both sexes,
and while many church leaders were uncomfortable with that idea, it stuck around as a theory
for centuries.
The two versions of creation are also where the idea of Lilith comes from, and Jewish
mythology says she was Adam's first wife.
She later became a demon, as usually happens in these stories.
Lilith is the woman mentioned in the first creation story, while Eve is the one made
later from one of Adam's bones.
It's always important to remember that if you're reading the Bible in English, you're
reading a translation.
This becomes especially vital when you learn things like Eve was created from one of Adam's
ribs, because that's not what the original Hebrew word means.
Biblical Archaeology says the word "tsela" appears 40 times in the Bible, and the only
time it's translated as "rib" is in reference to Eve.
It usually refers to the side of something, so this leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
And interpret, people have done.
A legitimate Biblical professor put forward the idea that Eve was in fact made from Adam's
baculum, which is a penis bone that's extremely common in mammals.
Even other primates have one, and Dr. Ziony Zevit thinks Genesis holds the answer as to
why humans are missing it.
If God took a bone from Adam, then his descendants presumably wouldn't have that bone.
Men have an even number of ribs but are missing the baculum, so it stands to reason, he says,
that's the real bone God formed Eve from.
It seems like such a minor thing, and it's the question of whether or not Adam and Eve
had belly buttons.
But it's far from minor, and has been a theological nightmare for millennia.
If they had them, then they have the scar of a gestation that never occurred, so why
would God put it there?
On the other hand, if they didn't have them, how were they perfect representations of humans?
The book Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?
details just how big a deal this debate was, and includes a record of a Congressional committee
getting involved in the debate in 1944, when it objected to a pamphlet given to soldiers
that included an image of Adam and Eve with belly buttons.
The debate has been a huge problem for artists through the centuries, too.
Some just added a few convenient navel-covering leaves, but many left Adam and Eve with completely
smooth stomachs.
In a bizarre twist, the belly button debate has met the evolution debate.
An 1857 book said the fact Adam and Eve had belly buttons proved the Earth was only a
few thousand years old.
All the seemingly older stuff, like the fossil record, was just the Earth's version of an
unused belly button,
"... a past history of the earth that never existed except in the Divine Mind."
Ask anyone what fruit Adam and Eve ate to make God angry, and they'll tell you it was
an apple.
But if you actually read the Bible, it doesn't say anything at all about what specific kind
of fruit it was.
In English translations, it's just "the fruit" on "the tree."
Even if in the original language, the Hebrew word is "peri," which is equally as vague.
According to NPR, peri has been interpreted in different ways by different Jewish scholars,
who have identified it as a fig, a grape, pomegranate, an apricot, or even wheat.
Still others thought of it as an intoxicating drink, like wine.
So why is everyone so sure it's an apple?
Because of a pun.
In the fourth century A.D., Pope Damasus decided the Bible needed to be translated into Latin.
The scholar Jerome was given the job, and when he got to the mention of the "Tree of
the Knowledge of Good and Evil," he apparently decided to make a pun.
In Latin, "malus" means evil, but it also means apple.
So the fruit of the tree that introduced Adam and Eve to evil was an apple.
John Milton really cemented the image when he called the forbidden fruit an apple twice
in Paradise Lost.
The human race has big skulls and slim hips, so childbirth is extremely painful.
Even before epidurals, there were plenty of ways to make birthing a baby less horrible
for the mother, but for a long time, men said no because Eve's sin of eating the forbidden
fruit meant women had to suffer.
God does punish Eve in Genesis 3:16 when he says,
"I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth
to children."
But as pointed out by Christianity Today, there's a translation issue here.
The original word used means "labor, toil, or work" everywhere else in the Bible, and
it's only when talking about giving birth did translators decide it also included pain.
Women in the throes of labor pains might not care about the deep theological implications,
but religious men through the centuries sure have.
Martin Luther once wrote that women should be thrilled they got to "gloriously suffer"
to bring forth babies, and a New England pastor once volunteered the opinion that alleviating
the pain of women in childbirth would,
"... deprive God of the pleasure of their deep, earnest cries of help."
This theological argument resulted in a huge backlash when pain medication started being
used during labor in the 1800s.
Since God allegedly demanded that there be pain, taking it away was sacrilegious.
In the 1800s, scholars started to understand more about the Ancient Egyptian civilization.
Texts were being deciphered, monuments were dated, and a lot of the stuff was really old.
But it also caused a crisis in religion, forcing people to ask how, if the Bible is literal
and Adam and Eve were only created a few thousand years ago, could this Egyptian stuff be older
than that?
The pre-Adamite theory held the answer.
Pre-Adamite is a 17th-century idea that simply suggests there were people alive before Adam.
In Genesis, only Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel have been mentioned by the time Cain murders
his brother, and the pre-Adamite theory explains where his wife came from, along with all the
other cities that suddenly appeared.
Some Christians also liked this idea because it meant some people on Earth were descended
from people who weren't Adam and Eve, and it allowed for the argument that those people
were not as important.
Shocking no one, that idea was used to justify slavery and explain just how some people's
lives could be worth more than others.
There were lots of people throughout history who believed the Garden of Eden was a real
place, and some of them set out to find it.
This was complicated, since Genesis says it's where one river splits into four, and that's
it.
That's not a lot to go on, and it's safe to say even Indiana Jones wouldn't be able to
follow that map.
Christopher Columbus was just one explorer who was invested in finding the Garden of
Eden, and he thought he was close when he landed on Hispaniola and even closer in Venezuela.
David Livingstone declared once it was at the source of the Nile (although he was mad
with malaria at the time), and the Methodist minister William Warren wrote a book in 1881
explaining how he figured out Eden was located at the North Pole.
The 20th century saw "proof" it was in Ohio, Florida, and Mongolia, while The New York
Times reported some residents of the Seychelles were hoping to rediscover Eden on one of their
islands.
Other theories include Azerbaijan, Armenia, Bahrain, South Carolina, Somalia, or submerged
in the Persian Gulf.
The most commonly accepted location over the years has been Iraq, but that's not even clear-cut,
either.
If you go to that country wanting to visit Paradise, there are two competing places that
both claim to be the real Garden of Eden.
There is often an assumption that Christians believe the creation story in Genesis is absolutely
literal and that Adam and Eve actually existed.
There definitely are people who believe that, but in America, at least, they're dwindling.
According to a Gallup poll in 2017, only 38 percent of adult American Christians surveyed
believed God created Adam and Eve as fully human individuals about 10,000 years ago.
An equal amount believed evolution happened but with God's guidance in some way, and 19
percent of the group believed in a God-free evolution process, with Protestants more likely
to believe in some version of evolution than Catholics.
Even evangelicals are starting to break from a strict interpretation, along with many Christian
scholars who are finding new ways to merge faith and science.
In this, they are just following what the original writers of Genesis probably had in
mind.
Christian scholars have long believed it was originally written as allegory and poetry
more than history.
So where did the idea of a literal interpretation come from?
It wasn't until St. Augustine started thinking deep theological thoughts about creation in
the fourth century A.D. that anyone said it should be taken literally.
In 2018, tabloids and other less reputable news sources reported on a study published
in the journal Human Evolution.
If you believed the headlines, scientists had proven the existence of Adam and Eve.
They traced our genetics back and discovered we all come from one couple who lived tens
of thousands of years ago.
Of course, that's not how anything works, and the story was largely mis-reported.
The study was only looking at mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA, which leaves a whole
lot more chromosomal DNA that could and almost certainly did come from other people.
Despite her misleading nickname, Mitochondrial Eve was supposed to represent,
"... the most recent common mitochondrial ancestor of all living humans… not the first
human woman ever."
But so many news stories got it wrong that the researchers had to release a statement
saying they believed in evolution and were not saying there was a single Adam and Eve,
and they definitely weren't a couple.
Scientists narrowed the time Mitochondrial Eve was on earth to 100,000-230,000 years
ago, and a Y-chromosomal Adam that probably lived about 75,000 years before her.
And scientists were definitely not saying these two people were the first people on
Earth, either.
It was strange this was reported on at all, considering it wasn't even a new idea.
A 2013 study in the journal Science made headlines for coming to the same basic conclusion, and
it just goes to show that it's very, very important to read the fine print.
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