Hello Tim,

Thanks for taking the time to comment.

Yes, I've read many such interpretations of Adam and Eve. They are typically creative, insightful, and illuminating.

And yes, Scripture is certainly rich. Many have indeed appropriated meaning from it from a wide variety of different perspectives.

Yet here is where I think we differ.

If Scripture means something, then it means something. That's a bit tautological, but it's also required to understand.

If there is meaning in Scripture -- if the writers wrote it down intending to convey a specific meaning to their audiences -- then it behooves us to do our best to understand what they meant to say.

If we say that any perspective works, that you can re-interpret Scripture to mean anything, then we've emptied it of all meaning. If it can mean anything, then it means nothing. It reduces to a mirror, reflecting back what each perspective wants to see in it, but doing nothing else.

I believe that the writers meant to convey something specific when they wrote. Thus, the text means what it was meant to say -- not what we reinvent it to say.

As for Adam and Eve, Scripture places them firmly in the camp of historical narrative. Both the OT and NT establish clear lines of descendants, all the way to Jesus. There's no mythological gap.

Jesus and Paul consistently refer to Adam and Eve as real people. So do the prophets of the OT.

I can't simply set that aside and say that all these voices were wrong, but my personal interpretation can be right, because it feels more right to me. If we applied that same basis to everything else we read, communication would completely break down.

Writers expect their words to convey a specific meaning, whether we're writing a text, a Facebook post, or a legal document. The measure of how successful we are in reading a document is how closely we can apprehend the writer's original intent.