AN ATTORNEY DEFENDS ADAM AND EVE - RE THEIR EXPLUSION FROM THE GARDEN OF EDEN

I was brought up in a strict Catholic Church environment and was told to fully accept that the Adam and Eve story, as it is written in Genesis the first book of the Christian Bible, really happened.

Even today some fundamentalist and conservative Christians, Jews and Moslems (the "people of the book") still take the myth very seriously.

It is still central to Christian theology which states that because the first human beings, Adam and Eve, disobeyed God, mankind was cursed with "original sin" and that God had to send his only son, Jesus, to be crucified to atone for this and redeem mankind.

Let us leave aside for a moment the many arguments about evolution and that the story was simply a myth and take it at face value. And let us ignore attempts to interpret the story as a metaphor.

I will show below, that according to legal reasoning, even if the myth was true, Adam and Eve would not be guilty of the alleged transgression (crime) - and should not have been expelled from the Garden of Eden.

1. First, who is ‘God’? A very brief traditional Biblical description of God is that God is all knowing, all powerful, all loving, infallible, all forgiving. God knows events before they happen and is the creator of all things seen and unseen everywhere in the universe.

2. This means that God must have known in advance that Eve would be tempted by a talking ‘serpent’ with a human voice-box and human cunning. And God would have known that Eve would eat from the "tree of knowledge".

3. But reading Genesis, we are given the distinct impression that God was pretending not to know whether Adam and Eve were going to obey his orders. The writer of Genesis also claimed that God used to "walk in the garden" and was unable to find Adam and Eve - something ridiculous.

4. Ethically God should have related to Adam and Eve that he/she could read their thoughts and knew everything what they were going to think do and say every moment they were in the Garden of Eden.

5. Since the Garden of Eden had been created as a place of 'innocence' and perfection (it was paradise!), using a legal perspective there would have been a spiritual ‘duty’ on God to prevent the snake (evil) from entering.

6. Critical to the defence of Adam and Eve is that they were not warned by God that evil existed or that they could be confronted by a talking snake and that they could be subject to all kinds of temptations.

7. As newly created humans, Adam and Eve would have had the natural impulse for discovery by testing the environment. But given the circumstances and their stated innocence, Adam and Eve lacked any experience in exercising moral judgment. It is submitted that given the circumstances, they would have had the moral maturity of 5 year olds.

8. They were not warned that if they gave in to temptation the punishment would not only be on them but on BILLIONS of their descendants. In Equity, giving notice of true consequences is critical.

9. According to the Adam and Eve myth, variables between them and the serpent/snake were not ‘kept constant’ – i.e. there was no equal cunning, equal intelligence, equal experiences, equal intuition, equal understanding of cause-effect relationship, equal weighting of negotiating skills, equal understanding of good and evil.

10. Eve was told that she would die if she ate the fruit which was untrue. Eve was not ‘killed’ as predicted by ‘God’(Gen. 3:3-4). Did God lie about the consequences?

11. Adam did not pick anything from the tree of knowledge, Eve did. Adam just shared what Eve picked. Adam had no contact with the serpent at all. Yet Adam was given equal blame.

12. God pretended not to know that Adam ate from the tree of knowledge, “…Have you been eating from the Tree of Knowledge I forbade you to eat?’ (Gen. 3:11-12). Again this makes God behave like a human.

13. God certainly does not behave in a god-like loving way when he discovers that he has been disobeyed. He has a tantrum. He curses the snake, curses women and casts them out of the garden. What loving father would throw his three year old twins out on the street with vile curses on them and on their descendants because they had disobeyed him?

14. The huge consequence of billions of people on earth being adversely subject to ‘original sin’ is hugely out of all proportion with what Eve allegedly did.

15. In Law or Equity or in Tort they could not be held liable- without awareness, without ‘free will’ and without knowing, without being warned of the devastating global consequences of their actions and omissions.

16. God said to Eve, “Your husband … will lord over you” – (Gen. 14: 3-4). This shows the misogynistic prejudice against women by some ignorant writer of the myth thousands of years ago. This is highly unacceptable as it violates the United Nations’ International Covenant on Human Rights regarding gender equality.

17. God allegedly punishes Eve by telling her that “I will multiply your pains in childbearing.” (Gen.14: 1).This is deliberate sadism. Eve's punishment is not consistent with someone who has reached high spirituality and mastered unconditional forgiveness and unconditional love.

18. It would be regarded by all Courts of this world as being most unreasonable, unjust and most inequitable for future generations – billions of people - for thousands of years to be punished for a transgression they did not commit – for a very minor offence, ‘eating an apple’. The example is not dissimilar to a father of seven children punishing his six youngest children because the eldest was disobedient during his age of innocence at the age of three years.

19. Using human intelligence, God's alleged plan to send his only son to experience pain, torture and suffering to save mankind because Adam and Eve ate an apple, as he knew in advance they would, does not make sense at all.

20. God cursing the serpent and commanding him to crawl on his belly and eat dust (Gen.3:14) cannot be correct: since a) the serpent had always been crawling on its belly and b) serpents don't eat dust.

21. Genesis has another huge problem: half way down it starts again with a version completely different from the one given before.

CONCLUDING ARGUMENT

Close content analysis of Genesis shows that it was a story created by primitive people and NOT inspired by‘God’ – and that the level of spirituality and equity, fairness and justice exhibited by the writer of the Adam and Eve story in Genesis is much lower that of a spiritually advanced human being.

ACCORDINGLY, it is submitted that Adam and Eve had been misjudged by history- they are not guilty as charged and should not have been punished as they were.

Today 95% of educated people accept that the Adam and Eve story is just an ancient historical myth and there were no such persons. The very highly credible Mons Hugh Benson, a former Catholic priest when on earth, transmitted information directly from the afterlife stating words to the effect that the Adam and Eve myth is all nonsense.

The scientific proof that evolution has taken place on Earth shows that there was a slow evolution where several species of human-like hominids evolved over eons of time.

Accordingly, the Christian claim made by Bishop Usher that God created the earth and its contents in 4,000 B.C. cannot be accepted because it is fundamentally inconsistent with science.

There is indisputable evidence that the Adam and Eve myth existed thousands of years before the Jewish writers copied it. The Babylonians had a very similar myth 1500 years before Genesis was written. Different versions can be found in many of the older religious writings of many countries - the Persians, the ancient Etruscans, the Chaldeans, the ancient Egyptians had the Tree of Knowledge, the ancient Hindus, the Chinese, the ancient Tahitians.

Accordingly, the Genesis version is highly unreliable, a plagiarization and an insult to our intelligence.

THE IMPLICATIONS FOR CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY

1) If there was no Adam and Eve then there was no "original sin".

2) If there was no 'original sin' there was no need for a 'redeemer' and no need for God to send his 'only son' Jesus 'to suffer and die for mankind'.

3) And there is no need to baptize people to remove the stain of 'original sin'.

Victor Zammit Retired attorney