It is to be noted that the Apostle does not advance any new theory of the first creation. He knew only what every student of Scripture could learn on that subject. He had no new revelation which enabled him either to confirm or to correct the account of the beginning of things which had come down from a remote antiquity. He no doubt regarded as literal history the account of the origin of man, sin, and death which is found in Gn 2-3. He did not imagine, like Philo, that he was read- ing a pure allegory ; he believed, like Luther, that Moses 'meldet geschehene Dinge.' It is remark- able, however, with what unerring judgment he seizes upon and retains the vital, enduring sub- stance of the legend, while he leaves out the drapery woven by the old time-spirit. He says nothing of a garden of Eden, a miraculous tree of life, a talkinj,' serpent, an anthropomorphic Deity. But he linds in the antique human document these facts : the Divine origin and organic unity of the human race ; man's aflinity with, and capacity for, the Divine ; his destiny for fellowship with God as an ideal to be realized in obedience to Divine law ; his conscious freedom and responsibility ; the mysterious physical basis of his transmitted moral characteristics ; his universally inherited tendency to sin ; his consciousness that sin is not a meie inborn weakness of nature or strength of appetite, but a disregard of the known distinction between right and wrong ; the entail of death, not as the law obeyed by all created organisms, but as the wages of his sin. The narrative which blends these elements in a form that appealed to the imagination of primitive peoples has a ' depth of moral and religious insight unsurpassed in the OT ' (Skinner, Genesis [ICC, 1910] 52).
The teaching of St. Paul with regard to sin and death does not materially differ from that of liis Je^yish contemporaries and of the Talmud, in which the same sense of a fatal heredity is con-
i"oined with a consciousness of individual responsi- (ility. *0 Adam, what hast thou done? For if thou hast sinned, thy fall has not merely been thine own, but ours who are descended from thee' (2 Es 7^). Yet ' Adam is not the cause of sin except in his own soul ; but each of us has become
the Adam of his own soul' (Bar 54'^), According to the Talmud, ' there is such a thing as trans- mission of guilt, but not such a thing as transmis- sion of sin' (Weber, System d. altsyn. paldstin. Theol., Leipzig, 1880, p. 216).
The ' immortal allegory ' of Genesis cannot now be regarded as literal history. ' The plain truth, and we have no reason to hide it, is that we do not know the beginnings of man's life, of his history, of his sin ; we do not know them histori- cally, on historical evidence ; and we should be content to let them remain in the dark till science throws what light it can upon them' (Denney, Studies in Theol., London, 1894, p. 79). Science knows nothing of a man who came directly from the hand of God, and it cannot accept the pedigree of Adam as given by Moses or by Matthew. Its working hypothesis is that man is 'a scion of a Simian stock,' and it is convinced that man did not make society but that society made man. Be- yond this it has not yet done much to enlighten theology. ' We do not know how Man arose, or whence he came, or when he began, or where his first home was ; in short we are in a deplorable state of ignorance on the whole subject ' (J. A. Thomson, The Bible of Nature, Edinburgh, 1908, p. 191).
4. Art has made it difficult to think of our first parents without adorning them with all graces and perfections. ' But when we get away from poetry and picture-painting, we find that men have drawn largely from their imaginations, without the war- rant of one syllable of Scripture to corroborate the truth of the colouring' (F. W. Robertson, Coi-- inthians, 242). To St. Paul (1 Co 15^5-49j ^he primitive man was of the earth, earthy (xoCKb%), a natural as opposed to a spiritual man, crude and rudimentary, with the innocence and inexperience of a child. ' The life of the spirit is substantially identical with holiness ; it could not therefore have been given immediately to man at the time of his creation ; for holiness is not a thing imposed, it is essentially a product of liberty, the freewill offering of the individual. God therefore required to begin with an inferior state, the characteristic of which was simply freedom, the power in man to give or withhold himself (Godet, Corinthians, ii. 424). St. Paul's conception is that, while ' the first man Adam,' as akin to God, was capable of immortality — potuit non mori — his sin made him subject to death, wliich has reigned over all his descendants. Cf. 2 Es 3'': 'And unto him (Adam) thou gavest thy one commandment : which he transgressed, and immediately thou appointedst death for him and in his generations.' Formally as a deduction from the story of Adam, but really as his own spiritual intuition, the Apostle thus teaches the unnaturalness of human death. This is apparently opposed to the doctrine of science, that death is for all organisms a natural law, which reigned in the world long before the ascent of man and the beginning of sin — a debt which, as it cannot be cancelled, man should pay as cheer- fully as possible. And yet his sense of two things — his own gi'eatness and God's goodness — convinces him that it is radically contra rei-tun naturam.