I hear Christians talking about Adam and Eve.
What did Jesus say about Adam and Eve?
“Adam” is not mentioned in the Gospels.
“Eve” is not mentioned in the Gospels.
The “Garden of Eden” is not mentioned in the Gospels.
Doesn’t this suggest that the Adam and Eve story is less important than many Christians think it is?
This argument is intrinsically flawed insofar as it presupposes the words attributed to Christ, our true God, the incarnate Son and Word in the Gospels, are more important than the words attributed to God (likely to the same Lord Jesus Christ in the Old Testament, for He his the Word; there are only three instances, all in the Gospels, where we specifically know it was God the Father who spoke , who is alone unoriginate but who is ever One God, together with His only begotten Son and the Holy Spirit which proceeds from Him, all three persons of the Holy, Undivided and Life Giving Trinity being of one essence with the Father, united in perfect love eternally: coequal, coeternal, consubstantial and uncreated.
Furthermore, it also presupposes that the words attributed to Christ in the Gospels are of more weight that the words attributed to Christ elsewhere in the New Testament, for example, in Acts, 1 Corinthians and the Apocalypse..
More than that, it ignores the fact that the entirety of canonical Scripture has been discerned to have been divinely inspired, that is to say, God-breathed, by God the Holy Spirit, who proceeds eternally from the Father, who came upon the Blessed Virgin Mary and caused her to conceive Christ our True God without having known a man, and who was then sent by Christ to serve as our Comforter and Paraclete, who spoke through the Prophets - the third person of the Holy Trinity, the Lord and Giver of Life we confess in the Nicene Creed, who is everywhere present and fills all things.
This underscores why I am opposed to the use of red letter Bibles - the raison d’etre for rubrication is to demarcate instructions to clergy in liturgical texts, and its use to highlight Dominical statements was an innovation, dating from 1901, which was related to the heresy known as “Jesusism” or the “Jesus Words Only” movement which rejects the teachings of the Holy Apostle Paul and erroneously supposes the Gospels were corrupted in the Middle Ages (something we know not to be the case, since we have manuscripts, indeed, even of the entire Bible, dating from the fourth century, for example, the three great Alexandrian text-type manuscripts like Codex Sinaiticus, which was stolen from the Eastern Orthodox Monastery of St. Catharine in Sinai in the 19th century by a Belgian adventurer and sold to the British, French and Russian Empire.*
What is more, it is the case that the early church consistently described Christ our True God as the New Adam, and His Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, as the new Eve, for through her obedience she enabled God to put on our human nature, restore it and glorify it, remaking it in his image on the sixth day through His passion on the cross, before resting on the seventh, as He had done in the beginning, and then rising again in glory in the Paschal Light on the Eighth.
Therefore, regarding Adam and Eve, in their sin they unwittingly brought death and destruction upon humanity, in their repentence they prefigured the experience of the Hebrew faith of the Old Covenant which in turn prefigured the Christian faith of the New Covenant, in which the moral instructions on righteousness God conveyed to the world through the people from whom the Mother of God would be chosen from the lineage of the King and Prophet St. David, author of the Psalms, which remain the definitive Christian hymns, so aptly do they engage with the Christian experience, and thus giving rise to the Christian religion, and in this respect Adam and Eve prefigured the Mother of God and her Son, our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ, the same uncreated Word of God who was with the Father in the beginning together with the Holy Spirit, by whom all things were made, in whom the image of the unseen Father was revealed to us (John 1:1-18), allowing us to behold the glory of God and be glorified as the New Adam glorified humankind, being the firstfruits of the Resurrection, showing us what it truly means to be human.
Therefore, whether one is a creationist or not, the persons of Adam and Eve are essential to understanding the Gospel narrative, for they are the antitype of Jesus Christ and his glorious Mother, for the Word of God suffered to become man and to submit to torture and death that we might be freed from the bondage of sin and death and obtain everlasting life, becoming by grace what He is by nature, and likewise in the person of the Theotokos we see a woman who obeyed God rather than allowing herself to be seduced by the temptations of the devil, and as a result, all generations shall call her blessed, according to the Gospel of St. Luke the Evangelist, in the same way that Adam and Eve have become synonymous with disobedience and becoming accursed through capitulation to diabolical temptations.
But right now, we are like the old Adam and the old Eve, suffering the wages of sin, and if we have faith, and fear of God, we admit this, our sinfulness, with tears of compunction, yet it is our vocation to put to death the old man and to become like the New Adam and the New Eve, by rejecting all the temptations of the devil and the sinful passions, and repenting of our sins, and serving God with obedience and reverence, even where the instructions provided by God deny us fleshy pleasures we would otherwise enjoy, but like the Blessed Virgin Mary, we recognize that this world and everything in it is passing away, and what truly matters is our treasure we accumulate in Heaven, and the place we secure for ourselves in the life of the world to come. Thus, like Adam and Eve, we pray for mercy, while seeking to repent and obey that we might become like the only begotten Son and Incarnate Word of God and His obedient human mother. And this is a legitimate aspiration, for as St. Athanasius, the compiler of the New Testament canon, observed, in his book
On The Incarnation refuting the heresy of Arius (the denial of the incarnation) pointed out, God became man so that man could become god - not in the sense of being additional members of the Holy Trinity, but rather becoming by grace what Christ is by nature - sinless, ageless and a recipient of the gift of life everlasting.
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Here follow some historical and liturgical footnotes I felt moved to write:
*The Russian Empire uncanonically interfered with the operation of the Russian Orthodox Church, in the same way that some Orthodox churches at present such as the Latvian Orthodox Church are subject to uncanonical interference from their governments, from the death of Patriarch Nikon during the reign of Czar Peter “the Great” until the abdication of Czar Nicholas II, although the same Czar is now accounted together with his family as martyrs, for their refusal to renounce the Orthodox faith like the refusal of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia led to their martyrdom and subsequent glorification. But their killing was particularly horrendous given that St. Alexei was only 13 years old, suffering from an incurable hereditary blood disorder, and had furthermore been disabled and rendered unable to walk prior to the Imperial family being moved to the “House of Special Purpose” in Yektarinenburg, and furthermore, St. Anastasia was herself only 17, but St. Alexei and Anastasia are by no means the first or only child martyrs in the history of Christianity. For example, there was St. Abanoub, a Coptic boy of twelve years martyred during the Diocletian persecutions, who was miraculously spared various cruel attempts to take his life in a torturous manner before finally being beheaded, and St. Agnes of Rome, a 14 year old girl, and St. Peter the Aleut, a 15 year old Native Alaskan fisherman who was martyred by the Spanish authorities at the Roman Catholic missions in California in the 18th century, who evidently felt threatened by the presence of an Orthodox Christian teenager who merely sought to obtain sustenance.
Finally there are the Holy Innocents, who were killed by the wicked King Herod in a failed attempt to kill Christ our True God. These infants became the first to be killed by someone who felt threatened by the Incarnation, and while not martyrs in the sense of having confessed the faith and killed for it, are nonetheless worthy of veneration. Indeed the Eastern Orthodox venerate them on December 28th, the day after the Illustrious Protomartyr Saint Stephen the Deacon is commemorated in our rite (in other rites St. Stephen is commemorated on the 26th, but in our rite the 26th is reserved for the Synaxis of our Glorious Theotokos and Ever Virgin Mary, and in like manner January 7th, the day after the Feast of the Baptism of Christ (Theophany, sometimes still called Epiphany in the West, although historically Epiphany in the Western church was focused on the worship of Christ our True God by the Three Magi, which in the Eastern churches is instead commemorated on the Synaxis of the Theotokos on December 26th) and in some churches this is still the case; further in the past, prior to the fourth century, all churches celebrated the Nativity and the Baptism of Christ on January 6th, however, given that the Annunciation (when St. Gabriel the Archangel revealed to St. Mary that if she agreed she would become the Mother of God, the Ark by which the Only Begotten Son and Word became Incarnate, to which she consented, at great personal risk it should be noted, and thus the Holy Spirit caused her to conceive at that time).
Saint Abanoub, Agnes, Alexei, Anastasia and Peter the Aleut, Pray for Us! St. Stephen, the Illustrious Protomartyr, Pray for Us! Holy Innocents, Pray for Us! St. Mary, our glorious Lady Theotokos, whose virignity is perpetual and who did bear and give birth to Christ our True God, and served as His human Mother, who carried in thy womb the infinite and unbounded creator of all things, retaining thy virginity having been unburnt by the fire of God’s love, like the sacred shrub upon which the Holy Spirit appeared as a supernatural flame before Moses, and just as that shrubbery remains alive even today encased within the monastery, thy virginity remains intact, as a testament to the holiness of Christ our True God. Oh ye who love our God having won crowns of martyrdom, join with the Mother of God in pointing us to the Incarnate Truth, her Son, the only begotten of the Father, with whom He reigns, together with the Holy Spirit, one God, now and ever and unto the ages of ages.
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