N.T. Wright Says “Adam” and “Eve” Were ‘Primal Pair of Hominids’ Living Among Other Hominids When ‘Some Strange Force’ Called Them
Famed New Testament scholar N.T. Wright shared more about his long-standing position on the early chapters of Genesis, offering that not only is it poetry that is not to be taken literally, but that “Adam” and “Eve” were simply a primal pair of hominids (a type of primates that first appeared 5-7 million years ago) living among other hominids when “some strange force or power” called to be a part of “the human” project.
We recently wrote about Wright after he suggested abortion may be a tragic yet best allowable option in cases of rape, incest, or for the mental health of the mother who can’t deal with a child with physical and mental deformities, and after he offered that belief in the bodily resurrection of Christ is not necessary to be a Christian.
When previously commenting on Genesis 3, going back a decade, Wright, who is a Darwinian evolutionist who believes the earth is millions of years old, has said:
What happens with Genesis 3; and I do think there is a historical correlate. OK, Genesis one, two, and three is wonderful picture language, but I do think there was a primal pair in a world of emerging hominids, that’s the way I read that.
… But it seems to me that just as God called Abraham and Sarah out of a welter of wandering nations and said I’ve got a special purpose for you, the way that I see it is that God called one pair of hominids and said “OK, this place is a bit chaotic, you and I together, we’re going to have a project. We’re going to plant this garden and we’re going to go out from here and this is how it’s going to be.” So when Cain goes off he founds a city. Excuse me, who else is in the city?
… And ancient Jewish readers knew this perfectly well, they knew that this was not the first ever humans or anything like them.
In his book Surprised by Scripture, Wright previously decried Young Earth Creationism as a “false teaching.”
I wonder whether we are right even to treat the young-earth position as a kind of allowable if regrettable alternative, something we know our cousins down the road get up to but which shouldn’t stop us getting together at Christmas…And if, as I suspect, many of us don’t think of young-earthism as an allowable alternative, is this simply for the pragmatic reason that it makes it hard for us to be Christians because the wider world looks at those folks and thinks we must be like that too?
Or is it — as I suggest it ought to be — because we have glimpsed a positive point that urgently needs to be made and that the young-earth literalism is simply screening out? That’s the danger of false teaching: it isn’t just that you’re making a mess; you are using that mess to cover up something that ought to be brought urgently to light.
And that those who hold to the view give him and other Christians a bad name.
The root problem we face as Christians is that in articulating a Christian vision of the cosmos the way we want to do, we find ourselves hamstrung because it is assumed that to be Christian is to be anti-intellectual, anti-science, obscurantist, and so forth.
During a recent episode of Premiere Unbelievable?, Wright expands more on his theories.