CHRISTOLOGY AS RECONSTRUCTED ADAMO LOGY
Keywords:
CHRISTOLOGY, RECONSTRUCTED ADAMO LOGYAbstract
The thesis of this article is that the Gospels were constructed in midrashical!>'
parallel continuity and contrast to the biblical history of Israel. In order to prove
the thesis the author follows certain hypothetical assumptions. the first of which is
that the biblical canonically recorded history of Israel is clearly divisible into seven
stages.corresponding to the week-long pattern of God's creation and rest according
to the Priest!ycode found in Gen 1:3 - 2:4. The opinion of the author is that the
Adamic myth. which had ended the history of Israel on a more pessimistic note.
needed its happy-ending corrective from the Christological gospels of the reconciling
and reconciled God and Father of the lord JesusChrist as also the Father of all
who believed in Jesus as the son of God. lcsudasan argues that theological
metaphors were intended ethical!y to transform socio-political and economic history.
References
Rom 5:12- 20; 1 Co 15: 21-22, 45-57. It is interesting to note Paul Ricoeur'smeaningful observation that Paul roused the Adamic theme from its lethargy.
In contrasting between the "old man" and the "new man," he set up the figure of Adam as the inverse of that of Christ, called the second Adam. Cf. The
Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).
Ignatius [esudasan, Genesis: Myth of Manifold Meanings (New Delhi: GlobalVision Publishing House, 2(08)., As Luke records it, we find Paul affirming this at Athens. Cf. Acts 17: 26. It isrelevant in this context to quote Paul Ricoeur when he writes, "every effort tosave the letter of the story (of Adam and Eve) as a true history is vain and hopeless. What we know, as men of science, about the beginnings of humankind leaves no place for such a primordial event "as to where and when Adam ate the forbidden fruit. The Symbolism of Evil, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).
Ricoeur's comment on the derivation of original sin from the Adamic myth is trenchant: "The harm that has been done to souls, during the centuries of Christianity, first by the literal interpretation of the story of Adam, and then by the confusion of this myth, treated as history, with later specu lations, principally
Augustinian, about original sin, will never be adequately told. In asking the faithful to confess belief in this rnythico-spcculative mass and to accept it as a
self-sufficient explanation, the theologians have unduly required a sacrificiumintellectus where what was needed was to awaken believers to a symbolic
superintellilgence of their actual condition." Op. cit.
The first person to take up the theme of "recapitulation" and develop it was St. Jrenaeus of Lyons, a great second-century Father of the Church. (Against any fragmentation of salvation history, against any division of the Old and New Covenants, against any dispersion of God's revelation and action, Irenaeus extols the one Lord, Jesus Christ, who in the Incarnation sums up in himself the entire history of salvation, humanity and all creation: "He, as the eternal King, recapitulates all things in himself" (Adversus Haereses, Ill, 21, 9). Assuming this primacy in himself and giving himself as head to the Church, he draws allthings to himself" (Adversus Haereses, lII, 16,6). This coming together of all being in Christ, the centre of time and space, gradually takes place in history, as the obstacles, the resistance of sin and the Evil One, are overcome. To illustrate this movement, Irenaeus refers to the difference, already presented by St Paul,between Christ and Adam (d. Rom 5: 12-21).
K While quoting from Wright (Literary Genre Midrash, 74), when he says, "Rabbinic Midrash is a literature concerned with the Bible; it is a literature about a
Ignatius [esudasan, SJ literature," Raymond Brown points with examples to the occurrence within the Bible, of what Renee Bloch and Wright have classified as Midrash, Cf. The Birth of the Messiah, (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1979).
Ricoeur asserts that Paul retrospectively reconstructed the figure of the mythical Adam into a historical person from the historical model figure of Christ. In
other words, he affirms that Christology shaped Adamology, rather than Adamology shaping Christology. Op. cit.
Basing myself on Jacob Neusner, I concede that every rnidrashic illustration sheds its re-interpretative new light on an older text or figure. But Ialso postulate an older text to inspire its later illustration as the fulfillment of a parabolically couched prophecy. In other words, Idemand from what source text Jesus was conceived as Christ, if Adam had not been conceived in that mould already. Cf. What Is Midrash?(Fortress Press: Philadelphia, 1987).
Frederic Jameson, 'Postmodernisrn and the Video Text' in Derek Attridge et al. (eds.), The Linguistics of Writing (1987), cited in Christopher Butler,
Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, Indian Edition, New Delhi 2007.
"The most plausible interpretation is that Matthew was addressed to a once strongly Jewish Christian church that had become increasingly Gentile in
composition." Cf. Raymond Brown: An Introduction to the New Testament, (Doubleday, 1997), p. 213. It is likely that the addressees of Luke's gospel were
connected with the places of Paul's proclamation of the gospel message. The way Luke's infancy gospel differs from Matthew's suggests that it could not
have been written from and for the same church location. R. Brown, Op. cit.
"Mark's was "a Gospel addressed to Gentiles." This is concluded to from the fact that this Gospel's envisioned audience consisted of Greek-speakers who did
not know Aramaic. Either the author or the audience or both lived in an area where Latin was used and had influenced Greek vocabulary. R. Brown, Op.
cit.
The ethical dualism of the Qumran sect reflected in the Dead Sea scrolls and the fourth Gospel point to its origin among Jewish Christians, who were being
expelled from the synagogue. Cf. Delbert Burkett, An Introduction to the New Testament and the Origins of Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
