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The Pauline Doctrine of the Second Adam1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Matthew Black
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Extract

In his recent important book, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, Professor W. D. Davies, discussing St. Paul's doctrine of the Second Adam, writes: ‘Probably … this conception played a far more important part in his thought than the scanty references to the Second Adam in I Corinthians and Romans would lead us to suppose.’2 A similar importance has been attached to the idea by Dr A. J. Rawlinson in his New Testament Doctrine of the Christ; it has provided Paul with some of his most characteristic Christology. It has also been claimed more than once that the Second Adam is St. Paul's substitute for the Gospel Son of Man, while both have been traced to a widely spread myth of the Urmensch, or primeval Man, the origins of which are obscure, but which was revived in the Gnostic Anthropos.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , June 1954 , pp. 170 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1954

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References

page 170 note 2 p. 5.

page 170 note 3 the Aramaic Origing of the Fourth Gospel, pp. 43ff. It is difficult to see whay Burney omitted St. Matthew, for it is the first evangelist who gives us the name of the ‘renewal’ of creation (19.38, Palingenesia, the ‘second Genesis’); cf. Philo, V. Mos. 2.12, de aetern. mundi 15.

page 171 note 1 The whole may be a quotation, as Burney suggested (loc. cit.), from some lost book of Testimonies. It may even derive from an unknown apocalyptic Scripture. It is difficult to believe that it is just Gen. 2.7 with St. Paul';s own midrashic comment (as Rawlinson makes out), since it is the whole ‘quotation’ (and particularly the second line) which is the Scriptural basis of the argument.

page 171 note 2 Leg. Alleg., 1.31, de opific. 69; see further the discussion in R. Reitzenstein, Das iranische Erlosungsmysterium, pp. 104 ff.

page 171 note 3 Philo's Quaestiones in Gen. g, generally overlooked in this connexion, points unmistakably to the existence of rabbinic speculations before Philo about the ‘alter(homo) qui secundum imaginem’, who is ‘intelligibiUs et invisibilis’ and of the class of ‘species incorporates’. The glorification, if not the apotheosis, of the first Adam can be traced as early as Eccles. 49.16.

page 172 note 1 Students of the Clementines and of the curious beliefs of Ebionites and Nazarenes will recognise in this conception a forerunner in Judaism of ‘Christological modalism’; Christ had been incarnate in Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Cf. H. J. Schoeps, Theologie und Geschichte des Judenchristentums, pp. 102 ff.

It would take me beyond the limits of my subject to trace the Philonic conception further, but in view of its close connexion with the Gnostic Anthropos and the identification of the latter with the Logos, it should be noted that Philo's heavenly Man is also identified with the Logos and described as the primum principium and praemetitor (or prima mensura) (almost certainly the origin of the mysterious Metatron of 3 Enoch and the Talmud), (Q,. 4), while the Logos itself, described in turn as ‘O kar’ EĺKόva áνθρωπ0s, is declared to be ‘the oldest of the angels, a kind of archangel‘, under whose direction the Israelite is to cultivate the spiritual life (de confus, ling. 146); in Q. 62, quoted in Greek by Eusebius in the Praep. Evang. VII, xiii, the Logos is a sccundus deus or δεερós (cf. John 1.1).

page 173 note 1 ‘Matthew and Paul’, in Expository Times, Vol. LVIII, II (August 1947).

page 173 note 2 Cf. Rawlinson, op. cit., p. 127.

page 174 note 1 Cf. E. Nestle, Expository Times, Vol. xi, p. 238 (on Ps. 80.15, 18) and J. Bowman, ibid., Vol. LIX, p. 294. For the common origin of ‘Son of Man’ and ‘the second man’, see further below.

page 174 note 2 op. cit., p. 132.

page 174 note 3 See Beresh. rabb. 12, and cf. L. Ginsberg, Legends of the Jews, Vol. 1, p. 86, Vol. v, p. 105; H. St. J. Thackeray, The Relation of St. Paul to Contemporary Jewish Thought, p. 43; and Sanday and Headlam, Romans (I.C.C.), p. 85.

page 175 note 1 Gf. Rawlinson, op. cit., p. 134: 'Of Adam that was true which St. Paul (without mentioning Adam) points out was not true of Christ, namely that he counted equality with God as a prize at which to snatch.’

page 176 note 1 op. cit., pp. 54. ff.

page 176 note 2 Cf. 2 Enoch, 30.13

page 176 note 3 Davies, loc. cit.

page 177 note 1 In Wisdom 7.25, which was undoubtedly known to St. Paul, the divine Wisdom is described as ‘a clear effluence’ of God's Glory and also as an ‘image’ of His goodness. Gf. Rawlinson, op. cit., p. 133.

page 177 note 2 For a full discussion consult Bultmann's recent Das Evangeliwn Johannes, pp. 8 ff. Cf. further, J. M. Creed, ‘The Heavenly Man’ (in J. T.S., Vol. xxvi, pp. 113 ff).

page 177 note 3 Hellenism and Christianity, p. 95.

page 178 note 1 Kitab al-Milal wan Nihal, ed. W. Cureton, London, 1846, Vol. i, p. 169; translated by T. Haarbrucker, Halle, 1850, Vol. 1, pp. 256 ff. For Abu Isa Muhammed b. Harun al Warrak, see Brockelmann, Supplement, Vol. 1, p. 341 and Massignon, Encyclopaedia of Islam, p. 1218.

page 178 note 2 ‘The Age of the Scrolls’, in Vetus Testanuntum, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 44 ff.

page 178 note 3 ‘Philon dans l'ancienne litterature judeo-arabe, in Rev. des Études Jfuives, Vols. XLJX-L (1904−5), pp. 10–31. The connexion with Philo is confirmed by a reference of Shahristani to a certain Benjamin of Nihawend, an influential Persian Karaite Jew of the ninth century who taught Philo's doctrine of the Logos and his allegorical interpretation of Scripture. Another Karaite of the tenth century, al-Kirkisani tells us that the most important books found in the cave of the Maghariya were those of ‘the Alexandrian’, i.e. Philo; cf. Kahle, op. cit., p. 44.

page 179 note 1 Cf. Martin Werner, Die Entstehungdeschristlichen Dogmas (Bern-Leipzig, 1941), pp. 313 ff.

page 179 note 2 That this is one clue to the Synoptic Son of Man is the thesis of J. Jeremias's Jesus als Weltvollender (Gü;tersloh, 1930); see also his article on Adam in Kittel's Th. W. Several features of 1 Enoch take on a fresh significance in this light, e.g. the trees of knowledge and life in the Messianic kingdom. If the book was even substantially in its present form in the first century, then the Similitudes supply the one figure absent from the Second Genesis eschatology of the earlier part, viz. the new Adam.