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man and God: Christian View
Ugo Bianchi

 

Introduction
God-man relationship in Greek thought

Religious thought and experience in late antiquity concentrated mainly on three realities: God, man and the world. Yet the way in which these elements of a religious Weltanschauung were understood separately, as well as the way in which they were combined, varied greatly. Greek mystical thought, for one, was characterized by a very close interconnection of these three levels — divine, cosmic and human; its basic concept was that of a god (Dionysus or Kore) experiencing a recurring seasonal cycle of presence-absence in the world (as in the mystery cults). From this concept could evolve — in the Greek religious conceptions we call mysteriosophy — the idea of the fall and reintegration of the human soul, conceived of as divine or heavenly in origin and in essence.

But there were other, non-mystic Greek conceptions about man and his relation to the divine. These other conceptions we label -Olympian-. For them, as expressed for instance by a Hesiod, humanity as a specific form of existence in the world is only a late product, something like a by-product of a theogony and a cosmogony. As the epic poets put it, man is a being whose essence and destiny are the reverse of those of the gods, the Olympians. The latter are happy, eternal, exercising power; man is unhappy, very limited in power, mortal; there is no soteriological perspective for him. As death approaches, human beings, even if they are the favorites of the gods or their offspring, have to die; and the gods have to abandon them. Only a very limited number — more precisely, only a few mythological personages —are "transferred" alive to the Elysium, or else they are accepted in the Olympian court. But these are exceptions which cannot but confirm the general rule. Nor couldthat opposition between the divine and the human status be attenuated, in the Olympian conception, by the action of a mediator. The personage of Prometheus, a typical hero of the Olympian anthropology, is far from a mediator whose aim would be to promote unity between the gods and humanity. On the contrary! Acting as a true mythological trickster, during the very process of the constitution of mankind in the primordial times, Prometheus — not a man but a god, though a very particular one — eventually causes mankind to be separated radically and irretrievably not only from that divine condition which was not its destiny from the very beginning, but also from a more limited happiness. On the contrary, as a consequence of the treacherous endeavors of the Titan against the Olympians, mankind is destined for ever to a painful existence.

At the other extreme, as we have seen, Greek mystical thought aims at intimately unifying the divine and the human realms. In the case of the mystery cults, a god connected with fertility is conceived of as experiencing a cyclical, seasonal fate of fall, debasement, absence, alternating with periods of presence and reintegration. The faithful, the initiates, participating in the fortunes of the god, can obtain those "sweet hopes" that characterize their status in this life and assign them, when dead, to a blessed life close to the gods of the underworld. But it is particularly in the case of what we label "mysteriosophy" (see above) that the intimate link and the mutual exchange between the human and the divine attain their peak. We have here the dramatic story of a divine element, the heavenly soul, which is destined for a fall in this world and in this body, in order eventually to be liberated from the painful cycle of rebirths and reintegrated into that divine realm and that primordial integrity from which it had fallen as a consequence of a sin or incident previous to its actually entering a body. This conception is characteristic of the Greek religious trend we call "Orphism", from its first appreciable manifestations in the Athens of the sixth century B.C. and in Sicily and southern Italy of the fifth, down to Plato, who inherited a good deal of Orphic and Pythagorean thought and sense of life, down to (in late antiquity) neo-Orphic, neo-Pythagorean and neo-Platonic doctrines. To these we can add those gnostic speculations of the second and the third to fourth centuries, where the concept of the fall of a divine soul or pneuma can be found, though intertwined with and even expressed through Jewish or Christian scriptural and theological elements.

As for the conception of man in the Greek and the Greco-Roman world, we have two mutually opposed conceptions. In the Olympian-Promethean Weltanschauung, man is fundamentally an unhappy being, though a being, so to say, in the full rights of his individuality (a very poor individuality indeed from the point of view of ontology, an individuality comparable to that of the ephemeral leaves, as Homer put it). In the mystic, particularly in the mysteriosophic Weltanschauung, on the contrary, that intimate link between the divine and the human realms, with the concept of an earthly, human existence originating in the unfortunate fall of a divine particle into a material body, results eventually in the ontological abolition of a being called man. In this conception man is only a temporal epiphenomenon, an episode in a much vaster plot starting from a kind of prologue in heaven. The idea of a consubstantiality of the human soul with the divine results in a dichotomy of man. There is only one essence, ousia, that of the divine (or, in gnosticism, of the divine pneuma).

On the other hand, these different, even opposed Greek conceptions of man, the Olympian and the mystical, have one particularity in common, very important for our consideration. They do not imply a religious conception of human history, that is, a history conceived of not as a limited series of actions and reactions in the socio-political field accessible to an intelligent writer, but as a collective-corporate whole, extending itself to the universality of human earthly experience. Such an endeavor, clearly not a scientific one, but linked to a religious message and to a religious interpretation, remained external to Greek thought. True, the Works and Days of Hesiod narrated how five human races succeeded each other on the earth, from the golden one down to the actual one made of iron. There is also in some Greek sources the concept of one or more floods, and of a man, Deukalion, who started humanity anew by casting stones as well as by engendering sons who also fathered sons — who became the progenitors of some segments of the Greek people. But in the Greek conceptions of man the emphasis is never on a history conceived of as a process having meaning in itself, one sole meaning for both its origin and its conclusion. In the Olympian-Promethean view there is no eschatology, no soteriology. In the Greek mystic conception, there is only a vertical and individual soteriology and, so to say, a vertical-individual eschatology concerning those divine or heavenly elements, the fallen souls, who will be reintegrated as the conclusion of a cycle of reincarnations. Otherwise, considered from inside the world and according to Plato, humankind as well as the cosmos is eternal. Even those conceptions of Plato in the Politicus or in other Greek and Roman authors, concerning a new epoch announced by some significant events manifesting themselves in the life of the humanity of today, cannot be properly conceived as eschatological, since they are embedded in cosmic, repetitive cycles whose basic meaning is cosmological and metaphysical, rather than properly anthropological. Views in ancient Near East.

Turning to the regions East of Greece, in the Mediterranean basin, it is difficult to find there that vast scope of conceptions which could correspond to those found in Greece, for the period preceding the spread of Hellenism. If we consider the Mesopotamian area, we find theogonic-cosmogonical speculations of an "Olympian" type, where mankind is more properly a by-product or a mere consequence of a mythical story concerning the gods, as in the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian poem of creation. In other mythical narratives, such as those concerning Adapa or Gilgamesh, we find conceptions which do not concern mankind in general, but only particular heroes whose destiny is peculiar and even contradictory in relation to the destiny of man in general (cf. the Greek Elysium etc.). There is of course the possibility to read in them — in reverse, as it were — the relevant Babylonian conceptions about man and his destiny. Thus, contrary to Enkidu, man is a social being; contrary to Utnapishtim, man is mortal; contrary to Adapa, man was never offered the possibility of becoming immortal and divine. There are also, of course, in Mesopotamia conceptions of a "wisdom" character speaking about the relations between man and his god, a god conceived of as the goal of a beatifying ascension through contemplation in a sanctuary. But it is also true that a real insertion of mankind into a history which, starting with the creation of man, has a soteriological-eschatological meaning, is extraneous to the Mesopotamian cultures, no less than to that of Greece. As a being which is an epiphenomenon of a "history" that properly concerns the gods, or (in Greece) as a being which belongs to that divine element which is the proper subject of a recurring cycle of fall and reintegration, man cannot be envisaged, as far as Mesopotamia and Greece are concerned, as the real center of the cosmos and of history — not even where, as in Platonic speculation, man was conceived of as occupying the borderline between the two worlds of the divine and of matter.

To be less incomplete, I would like to mention here Iran, the Zoroastrian scriptures of the Avesta, as well as the Pahlavi treatises owing so much to lost Avestan speculation. Here the framework of human-divine relations is properly creationistic and eschatological: there are saushyants, "helpers" and saviors of mankind, sons of Zarathustra, the prophet of Ahura Mazda, the Iranian High God. These saviors will come to mankind, each in one of the last three millennia, in order to liberate mankind and to do battle with Ahriman, the evil spirit opposing God from eternity. But we must add that this soteriological-ontological concept of the Zoroastrian religion is embedded in the wider framework of the ontological, dualistic drama. On the other hand, the conception of a final resurrection of mankind gives to the Zoroastrian speculation that at least partially man-centered character which, unlike Greek speculation, renders it partially comparable to the biblical view of man and the cosmos, and their relation to God.

The Jewish specificity as to man's creation, primordial history and its culmination in the privileged history of the Abrahamic lineage is too well known to be resumed here. Along with the concept of a covenant which directly concerns the lineage of Abraham, though extending its saving influence to the whole of mankind, there is also in the Judaic tradition — particularly in late-Judaic tradition — a trend to speculate on human destiny as such. This is found in the Wisdom literature, though not without connections with the narratives concerning the origins and the primordial fall of man. What is striking however is that nowhere in the Judaic tradition is this speculation concerning the primordial fall of man connected to the sacred history of Israel; nor did it evolve in the direction of a doctrine comparable to the Christian doctrine of original sin and of a Redeemer who should pay the ransom for that primordial failure.

But this statement needs qualification if we are not to limit our field of observation to the biblical texts or to the trend prevailing in Judaism after the destruction of the Temple. This leads us to dwell on some Jewish apocryphal-apocalyptic literature of the centuries around the beginnings of the Christian era — a speculation which, as we shall see, can also be considered in comparison with the Pauline doctrine of the first Adam and the last one, who is Christ. In particular, we will concentrate on some concepts concerning history and concerning salvation which are characteristic both of late-Judaic speculation and fo Christian soteriology and eschatology. These considerations will be useful in order to try to identify some specific aspects of the Christian conception of the relations between God and man, as well as in order to try to identify the possiblereligio-historical presuppositions and the Christian novelty of the doctrine of Paul concerning the two Adams.

Adam and Christ in Paul and the Apocrypha

Though the variety of the Christological themes in Paul does not permit schematization, there is no doubt that two pairs of conceptual opposites have a particular importance in his thought. I mean the conceptual opposition between Adam and Christ on the one hand, and the conceptual opposition between the heavenly condition of Christ and his earthly humiliation with his subsequent exaltation on the other. The first antithesis, that between Adam and Christ, can be defined as horizontal, extending through the entire duration of human history. The second one, on the contrary, expresses itself as vertical, connecting the different conditions, heavenly and earthly, humiliated and exalted, of the Savior. But these two lines, the vertical and the horizontal, can also variously intersect. Thus, in 1 Corinthians 15, the conceptual opposition between the first Adam and the second one, Christ, is also an opposition between the psychic and earthly "man" and the celestial and spiritual "man", where the celestial and spiritual, Christ, is chronologically "second" or "last" in relation to the other, the earthly and psychic Adam of the Genesis narrative ("second", to be sure, in the worldly manifestation and in the worldly chronology). But he is the first both in the order of dignity and in the order, so to say, of a transcendental chronology. The two lines, the horizontal and the vertical (in a sense: the heilsgeschichtlich one and the heilsmetaphysisch) are intertwined here, though integrated in a single structure. We will ask ourselves about the religio-historical presuppositions of the elements of this structure, concentrating in particular on the Adam-Christ antithesis.

Adam in apocryphal writings

In the texts of late Judaism the figure of Adam is considerably complex. Now this complexity can be studied in comparison with the formulations of Paul concerning the history of salvation. Generally speaking, the late-Judaic Adam is the figure of a sinner, and the consequences of his sin — that is, the pains of life and particularly death — are conceived of as extending to mankind in general throughout the whole of human history (only the personage of Seth is somewhat exempt from these miseries, and this gave origin later to a series of speculations in the field of the gnostic systems we label as "Sethian"). The dramatic expressions of the fourth book of Esdras and of the Syrian Apocalypse of Baruch concerning Adam, as well as those of Jesus ben Sirach, are typical here, and also the rabbinical doctrine about Adam losing, due to his sin, his former cosmic dimensions. On the other hand, the Adam of late Judaism, as well as the Adam of a particular trend in Christian tradition, even after his sin is not devoid of some grandeur and dignity, a dignity which contrasts sometimes the weakness of the woman, Eve. Moreover, in the Judeo-Christian pseudo-Clementine Homelies, Adam is exalted as the first manifestation of the "true prophet", that true prophet who, according to a conception proper to this text, manifests himself all through human history in a series of incorporations, down to the person of Christ. Thus, the same text anathematizes all those who deny that the "man (Adam) made by the hands of the Creator" may "possess the spirit of prescience".

Apart from this particular, possibly Ebionite, Judeo-Christian doctrine of the pseudo-Clementines, which is extreme in the exaltation of Adam, not considered at all as a sinner, we will concentrate now on those Jewish and Christian texts which synthesize in Adam two separate figures. The first, full of dignity, is of a person who did not cease to express in himself the image of God and could intercede for others, that is for Eve, his wife. The second is that of a sinner full of repentance and contrition, who caused all his fellow men to be destined to penance and death throughout all human history.

This complex figure of Adam can be studied particularly in some apocryphal (in the sense of pseudepigraphical) books of the beginning of the Christian era, which can be classified as the "books of Adam". Their common source is a slightly more ancient Jewish book of Adam which has been lost. These books are three: the Vita Adae et Evae, in Latin, the Apocalypse of Moses, in Greek, and a Slavonic Vita of Adam. Other apocryphal books concerning Adam remain outside the scope of our research, from the Ethiopian book Conflictus Adae to the Syriac Cave of Treasures, not to speak of the gnostic Armenian books of Adam, the Massalian Syriac Testamentum Adae and the gnostic Apocalypse of Adam in the Nag Hammadi texts.

Let us look at the apocryphal books Vita Adae and Apocalypse of Moses. According to these books, it is to Adam, not only to Eve as some scholars would maintain, that the sin in Paradise is attributed. The punishment which follows this sin, that is, death with the other pains of life, is extended to all the offspring of the first parents until the final resurrection. Only Seth enjoys a particular status. But in the books in question the figure of Adam is also characterized by other particularities. Though he is not the first to die (of course, according to the biblical narrative, Abel had been the first to die), Adam is the first to be ceremonially buried, together with Abel. The burial takes place in a kind of consecrating ceremony, we could say a kind of sacrament of the interment, which makes him fit for the final resurrection — while, on the contrary, the paradisiac oil of mercy had been denied to him during life. In a sense, taking into account this connection burial/resurrection, Adam is here a kind of "first-born from the dead". These are in him death and life, fall into death and reintegration from it, though he is not at all a redeemer or a savior in relation to mankind. Some redeeming power — if any — is attributed to the punishment (a sort of poena medicinalis) following his sin, that is to death, a death whose power lasts up to but not beyond the final resurrection.

Thus we can see expressed in the Adam of these apocryphal books that first, horizontal line or structure we were speaking about above, a line connecting the beginnings with the conclusion of human history, through the whole of human time, between the primordial sin and the final resurrection. But the same books have also something in common with the other line, that of verticality, expressed in the conceptual opposition between a situation of exaltation and one of debasement. True, this vertical opposition does not concern a being conceived of as divine, because Adam is merely human; but he was a being originally destined to a paradisiacal status, as opposed to an earthly one. Moreover, we may observe that the Vita is characterized by a very specific particular: the occasion of the temptation of Adam was given by the envy of Satan who had been expelled from heaven because of Adam, for having refused to worship the image of God present in him. Thus, the foundation of the greatness of Adam, a greatness which imposes itself even on heavenly creatures, lies in the fact that he is the image of God. Although after the first sin this dignity is manifested par excellence in Seth, it does not completely abandon Adam even after the fall. As we have seen, he is constituted somewhat in the figure of a savior in relation to Eve, though in an indirect way. In fact, it will be propter Adam, "because of Adam", says the Vita, that Eve will be liberated from the existential, depressing anguish of her unhappy conscience and her first maternity. Moreover, it is said that Adam, at the end of time and after the final resurrection, will succeed Satan in the glory originally belonging to the fallen angel.

A first observation: there were surely oscillations in the evaluation of the figure of Adam in the Jewish and the Christian literature of the first centuries of the Christian era. In the relevant texts Adam was frequently quoted ad hoc, in the context of argumentations with a particular doctrinal purpose, rather than with hermeneutical explications of the episode in Genesis. (As far as Christians are concerned, suffice it to mention — after Paul — the conflicting doctrines of Irenaeus and Tatian concerning the salvation or the damnation of Adam, in the broader context of the respective soteriological conceptions.) Thus, as far as that complex yet balanced figure of the first man in our apocryphal books is concerned, we cannot fail to notice a connection with the soteriological conceptions proper to these books. Here the first parent is conceived of as a thread, so to speak, which links the origins with the conclusion of that sacred history of which mankind is both the subject and the object on earth. Now if this history is said to result in a final resurrection, if — owing to God's mercy —death is a poena medicinalis to an Adam full of contrition, then it is inevitable for him that he should and could persist in a condition of fundamentally inalienable dignity, though in a condition of decay from his former glory.

Similarly, when writing the first letter to the Corinthians and the letter to the Romans, Paul could find it natural to connect his interpretation of the figure of Adam to the main themes of these letters. Thus in 1 Corinthians he mentions the figure of Adam in order to affirm and to qualify the doctrine of the resurrection in Christ. In Romans, through the conceptual and the axiological opposition between Adam and Christ, he is able to account for both the universality of sin and of death, and the universality of the redeeming efficacy of Christ. This efficacy of Christ goes beyond the limited efficacy (or rather, the ineptitude) of the Law to stop sin as a constituent and self-perpetuating element of human history, that is, to be the proper agent of salvation.

Now we ask ourselves whether a character so complex and rich, that of the Adam of that inter-testamental, apocryphal speculation, could be considered as a religiohistorical presupposition of the Pauline argumentation concerning Adam as a conceptual opposite to Christ. What is important to us here is that that apocryphal Adam was explicitly connected with a vision of the whole history of mankind, which is at the same time oriented to salvation and an articulated whole. This view of history is beyond any reductive interpretation, that is, an interpretation which might be understood either in the sense of individualism (we mean the rabbinic doctrine of the yetzer ha-ra, the "evil inclination" which is present in everybody and to which the Law gives an individual remedy), or in the sense of a Law which discriminates among men, though conceived of as a kind of universal sacrament of salvation.

There is no time here to enter into a discussion of all the particularities, according to our apocryphal books, of the sacred history in which all the figures of the first man take part. What is important in this context is the central theme, that Adam has to die, and that his redemption will be achieved beyond his death, beyond all human history. One would even say: it will be achieved through his death, through all human history,death being here a kind of poena medicinalis aimed at the abolition of the effects of sin, or better, at the elimination of sin in its effects, aimed — as it were —at its own abolition, according to the merciful will of God.

Here we can see a partial, material affinity with the doctrine of Paul: death is destroyed by death, sin is extinguished through the assumption of the punishment relating to it, death. Of course, all this is the work not of guilty man, but of the Innocent One who descended from the glory of his preexistence in forma Dei to take the form of a slave and bear the ignominy of the cross. As for the "books of Adam", if we abstract from the privileges of Seth and some Christian interpolations, no heavenly redeemer is to be found in them. Nevertheless, the line we called heilsgeschichtlich, implying that the history of mankind is a whole, and that Adam is structurally inserted in this whole, from the very beginnings of his sin and his contrition (and his prophecy) down to the final resurrection, that line of thought may have been significant for the Pauline argumentation. According to the Apocalypse of Moses, death has for Adam, the father of all humanity, both a medicinal and a pedagogical character, while in the other book, the Vita, God tells Michael that Adam will be "in custodia tua usque in diem dispensationis in suppliciis ad annos novissimos, quando convertam luctum eius in gaudium" [let him be in thy charge till the day of Judgment in punishment, till the last years when I will convert his sorrow into joy . . 1 (Vita Adae et Evae 48.2).

"Adam" in Pauline literature

Let us dwell now on this Pauline (and generally Christian) novelty, this new oikonomia of salvation. In a fundamental sense, this is an upsetting of the old situation. As we have seen, while in our apocryphal books it seems that death is destroyed by death, and that sin is extinguished in its consequences simultaneously with the extinction of the punishment inflicted for it, we find in Paul that the entire process is concentrated in the figure of the suffering Redeemer, who is also the resurrected Redeemer, a figure completely lacking in the apocryphal books, if we exclude some Christian interpolations. According to those books, the whole history of mankind will culminate in the resurrection of Adam and his offspring at the end of time, when death will cease to exercise its power and the consequences of sin will be eliminated. In the Pauline as well as in the general Christian view, however, the resurrection of Christ has already taken place, as an anticipation of the resurrection that will take place at the end of time. Thus, the newness is radical, but an essential element persists, the historical setting of the salvation process. All of human history will run its course before eschatology is realized. The eschatology of the apocryphal books can be compared with the Pauline eschatology, in the sense of the unity and the orientation of the history of mankind, taken as a whole. As for Paul, he clearly rejected the conception of some of the Corinthians that the resurrection of the faithful, their resurrection, had already taken place — a conception very different both from the contrition and the humility of the Adam of the apocryphal books, and from that living dialectic of the "already" and the "not yet" which is typical of Christian soteriology and eschatology.

But at the same time this partial coincidence does not exclude (on the contrary, it implies) in Paul a reversal in the evaluation of the figure of Adam. There is in Paul a radical choice between the positive and the negative aspects of that personage. He does away with the positive features, insofar as Adam is contrasted with Christ. Obviously, the conception of Christ as the unique and universal Savior is typically Christian; it is not a Pauline novelty. Paul was not the founder of Christianity, conceived of as the faith in Christ as the Savior, and the universal Savior. But Paul undoubtedly contributed greatly to the systematization of that basic Christian concept, on a line which is hedsgeschichtlich as well as heilsmetaphysisch. Thus Christ is to him the "last Adam" (1 Cor 15:45) who existed prior to the "first" one, but manifested himself at the very center of history (the "fullness of times"), being at the same time the "firstborn from among the dead" (prototokos ek ton nekron, Col 1:18, cf. 1 Cor 15:20: "the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep", aparche ton kekoimemenon) and the "firstborn over all creation" (prototokos pases ktiseos, Col. 1:15).

Thus, according to Paul, there are no privileges for Adam after his sin (the mention of Adam in 1 Tim 2:11-15 being in quite another conceptual framework, more akin, in a sense, to that of our apocryphal "books of Adam"). On the contrary, Adam is the sinner (Rom 5:18). Moreover, when the vertical and the horizontal lines are combined, as in 1 Corinthians 15, the first Adam is psychicos and choicos, Christ is pneumaticos and epouranios (1 Cor 15:45-49); only the crucified and the resurrected Christ (1 Cor 15:3 f.) is the sacrament of salvation. Salvation has already taken place, though its application, so to speak, to the whole of human history (and, in a sense, through this history to every cosmic reality) is an object of hope and expectation, as with the pains of childbirth (Rom 8:22 f.). That ambivalence and those dialectics of Adam as a sinner and as the image of God (though this last characteristic manifests itself more in Seth than in him) are somewhat dissolved in the Pauline formulation. As conceptually opposed to Christ, Adam is here the sinner who intro-duced death into the world, while the Son of God, Christ, is in a new sense the image of God (Col. 1:15, cf. 1 Cor 15:49). The tension and the dialectic which were in Adam are normalized and resolved in the sense of the opposition in character and in function between the two Adams (1 Cor 15:21 f, cf. 45); perhaps the mysterious proclamation of the Son of Man had opened the way to this formulation.

In any case, Paul's audacity in calling Christ by the name of Adam should not be overlooked. This happened, of course, without any syncretism between the two figures (a syncretism, on the contrary, not unknown in the pseudo-Clementine text quoted above). But, it seems to us, this audacity appears more comprehensible if we refer to a figure of Adam which is not completely negative, a figure such as appears in our apocryphal books. At the same time the very concept of a founder of a family lineage which extends to the whole of mankind could facilitate those dialectics of the two Adams in the course of the articulated but undivided history of mankind. We may ask whether an expression like 4 Ezra 3:21, "the first Adam" (cf. 2 Bar 48:42: "the first Eve"), could be compared to Paul's "the first man Adam". But there is a fundamental difference here. By "first" Ezra means a genealogical relation to Adam of all his offspring, while the Pauline expression implies the conceptual opposition to another specific personage, the "last Adam" or the "second man". But it must also be remarked that both for our apocryphal books and for Paul there is in Adam and (as far as Paul is concerned) in Christ a primacy in relation to all those who belong to them: Adam will rise again together with his seed (Apocalypse of Moses 41:3), and the resurrection of Christ anticipates the resurrection of those who belong to him (1 Cor 15:23: "Christ the firstfruits: then, at his coming, those who belong ho him", aparche Christos, epeita hoi tou Christou en tei parousiai autou). Both texts are referring to the final vivification of resurrection (though, as we have said before, our apocryphal books do not properly mention a priority of the resurrection of Adam in relation to the resurrection of other men).

We must add that the Jewish, pre-Christian idea of resurrection was no doubt important in the primitive Christian milieu, without prejudicing the primacy and specificity of their idea of the resurrection of the Lord. The Pauline argumentation in 1 Corinthians 15:12 ff presupposes the general idea of resurrection: "if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised" (ei de anastasis nekron ouk estin, oude Christos egegertai, v. 13, cf. v. 16). On the other hand, this general concept of resurrection does not attenuate in this text the specificity and the primacy (in the causal and exemplar order, as well as in that of chronology) of the resurrection of Christ, all the more so as the argument in the quoted passage of Paul (vv. 13 and 16) is an argumentum per absurdum (as the argument of v. 29 will be ad hominem). In fact, Christ's resurrection is to Paul, no less than to the Christian community, an unconditional primum, that is, something prior to any rationalization or analogy. Equally primary and unconditional to him is the concept of Christ as a universal Savior. Yet, typically Pauline and Christian is the idea that Christ is Savior through his resurrection (1 Cor 15:17). Moreover, as the idea of resurrection is connected, in our apocryphal books, to the concept of history as a diachronical whole, a history whose conclusion is resurrection, so we have in 1 Corinthians 15 that the already realized resurrection of Christ is the first fruits, while the resurrection of those who belong to him, at his parousia, will mean the end of history (v. 24): the last enemy to be destroyed will be death (v. 26). Christ will reign when all his enemies will be at his feet (vv. 25 and 27), and the powers and the dominations will have been destroyed (v. 24). As for the Vita Adae, at the end of time Adam will sit on the throne which had belonged to Satan. Again and again, we note a radical newness in the partial continuity of a structure of thought.

This leads us finally to concentrate on some Pauline texts which seem based on a shifting from an Old Testament anthropology which is not characterized by soteriology, into a Christological and an eschatological interpretation in Paul. Thus, in the already quoted 1 Corinthians 15:25,27, Paul quotes Psalm 109:1, "until God has put all his enemies under his feet", and Psalm 8:7, "has put everything under his feet". Now as it is known, Psalm 8 is an exaltation of man, an exaltation that 1 Corinthians 15 as well as Ephesians 1:22 and Hebrews 2:8 refer to Christ. Moreover, all three New Testament texts are eschatological in character, implying a diachronical line which links the "now" to the "then". They confirm that linear, chronological perspective (a heilsgeschichtlich conception) in which Christianity interpreted Old Testament statements concerning the situation of man in a world created by God.

We conclude with a reference to the vanquished "powers" of 1 Corinthians 15:24 and to the angels of the passage quoted from Hebrews. Certainly they are not to be identified with the Satan of the Vita Adae. But it cannot be overlooked that the diabolos — he "who has the power of death" — is mentioned in Hebrews 2:14 in a text where the Savior calls thosewho are the object of salavation "brothers" (Heb 2:11), having "shared" with them (v. 14) and having been made "like his brethren in every respect" in order to become their high priest and their Savior (v. 17), "that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil" (v. 14). And then the conclusion: "For surely it is not with angels that he is concerned, but with the descendants of Abraham » (v. 16).*

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* Most of the ideas treated in this article are dealt with more fully by the author in "Adamo e la storia della Salvezza (Paolo e i `libri di Adamo')" taken from L'uomo nella Bibbia e nelle culture ad essa contemporanee, proceedings of the symposium for the twenty-fifth anniverasary of the Italian Biblical Association, Brescia, 1975, pp. 209-223. See also "La redemption dans les livres d'Adam", Numen XVIII, No. 1, 1971, pp. 1-8; "Gnostizismus und Anthropologie", Kairos, XI, No. 1, 1969, pp. 6-13; "Cristo e le `potenze' (archai ed exousiai)", Asprenas, XVI, No. 3, 1969, pp. 315-321.
For the text of the Vita in Latin, see W. Meyer, Vita Adae et Evae, Munchen 1879, aus den Abhandlungen der K. Bayer Akademie der Wiss. I, cl. XIV. Bd. III. Abth.; for "The Apocalypse of Moses", C. Tischendorf, Apocalypses Apocryphae, Lipsiae 1866. See also A.-M. Denis, Introduction aux pseudepigraphes grecs d'Ancien Testament Leiden, 1970.
For an English translation of these books, see R.H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, 2 vol., Oxford 1913 (reprinted 1973), vol. II, Pseudepigrapha, "The Books of Adam and Eve", pp. 134-154.
On the "Testamentum Adae" of gnostic inspiration (to be sharply distinguished from the books in question here), see M. Kmosko, "Testamentum Patris Nostri Adam", Patrologia Syriaca, Pars prima, Tomus secundus, Paris MCMVII, col. 1309-1360. "The Apocalypse of Adam" of Nag Hamadi is clearly gnostic; see A. Bohlig und P. Labib, Koptisch-gnostische Apokalypsen aus codex V von Nag Hammadi, Halle-Wittenberg 1963.
For a critique of more recent books on Adam and Christ: E. Brandenburger, Adam und Christus, Neukirchener 1962, P. Lengsfeld, Adam und Christus, Essen 1965, and Adam et le Christ, Paris 1970, see "Adamo e la storia della Salvezza" cited above.
As for Greek and Iranian documents and their historico-religious value, see, by the author, Prometeo, Orfeo, Adamo. Tematiche religiose sul destino, it male, la salvezza, Roma 1976, and The Greek Mysteries, section XVII, part three: "Iconography of Religions", Leiden 1976.