Mitochondrial Eve is only our matrilineal common ancestor. There were other humans around at the time who we are also descended from. Think of it as MEve being your mother’s mother; you and your siblings and cousins are all descended from her, but they’re also descended from your other grandmother, and your grandfathers (At least, this is how I understand it).
lol…I know that RT. But thanks for explaining it again. 
However, since we are all decended from this ‘Eve’ then I’d say she qualifies…just as ‘Adam’ does (since it takes 2 to propagate, ehe? 
). So…the answer to the OP’s question is…probably somewhere in the 20-40 year range as I said before, if we go for a factual answer (well, a speculative answer based on SOME facts anyway).
If we are talking about the fictitious Adam and Eve from the bible…well, they could be whatever age you want to dream they were. 900 years? No problem.
Its all in how you look at the question, ehe?
-XT
Sorry, xtisme, I didn’t mean to be redundant. 
It’s written in exactly that style as any study of myth will tell you.
So what?
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You want to talk about detail? Read Homer. The Homeric epics give a plethora of details about dozens (if not hundreds) of characters, including family histories and places of origin. Many of those places are historically verifiable. I gues it must be true, then, huh?
So what? The Greeks believed that Hercules was a real person.
A completely meaningless point, since the same can be said of countless other mythical characters.
This is really an unproven assertion but even if it’s accepted for the sake of argument, it doesn’t mean anything. For one thing, the writers of the Genesis stories did not originate them but only wrote down some local variants of oral myths which had already been in long circulation. For another thing, the claims made in the story can and have been proven ahistorical by a such a profusion of evidence from such a multiplicity of disciplines that historicity can only be asserted through ignorance or massive self-delusion.
So what? Who cares what Paul thought? My 7 year old probably knows more about natural history and than Paul did. That’s not a knock on Paul, it’s just a reflection of the tremendous quantity of new information that humans have acquired in the last 2000 years.
That’s not my problem. I don’t care if Paul’s theology holds up to science. It doesn’t hold up to some logical problems either, but it makes no sense to deny either logic or the reality of scientific discovery in order to preserve an ancient theological system. You’d actually be better served by adopting an allegorical view of Genesis (as many Christians do) so as to avoid having to expalin away the fact that there clearly was no literal Adam.
So? (Jews don’t believe in Original Sin, by the way).
A proposition long disproven beyond any credible doubt.
And those methods quite decisively disprove the historicity of Adam and Eve.
Which doesn’t matter if the methodology is followed correctly.
Yes. Quite easily.
What methodoloy are you using? I think it’s more about who is willing to accept hard, physical evidence (i.e. reality) and who isn’t.
Yes. I can empirically prove there was no Adam who was created by magic and who was the singular male ancestor of all human beings.
This I agree with. The evidence says one thing. You say another. only you don’t have any counter-evidence to refute the existing evidence.
No worries my friend. I’m totally drunk and just having some fun here.
-XT
Also, Mitochondrial Eve could have been a total skank; so, even if we’re all descended from Mitochondrial Eve, some of us could be descended from Adam #1, some from Adam #2, some from Adam #3, and some from the milkman.
I think there was also a “Y-chromosome Adam” or some such, but he would have lived at a totally different period from “Mitochondrial Eve”.
Agreed!
If someone makes the claim that Adam lived to 900 (I didn’t, right?) it is incumbent upon them to make their claim.
My point, then and now, is that the only position that is unassailable is, *"While the bible has many instances of allegory, symbolism, metaphor, poetry and even fictional characters (like the Good Samaritan) the account of Adam is not written in this style, or in a style similar to other instances of allegory. Of course, that doesn’t mean that Adam wasn’t a fictional character. However Adam’s account is rich in detail and many of those said to be his ancestors are chronicled . Further, Adam continues to figure in the NT as Jesus’s anscestry is said to be traceable to Adam, and Adam plays a central role in Paul’s explanation as to why Christ appeared as a man, and why he had to die a human death. The rich detail of his existence, heirs and the reemergence of Adam through out the bible suggest, at the very least, the Jews believed he was a real character.
However, there is a dearth of information about him outside of the bible account. This constrains the historian enough to say that Adam’s existence is can’t be verified. Further, science cannot verify Adam’ existence either, and therefore it is impossible to verify the bible writers veracity as to Adam’s age. It may be said, that within the methodology and practices common to both historians and scientists that Adam’s existence and age may be considered improbable. Nonetheless, neither his existence or age can be established."*
If someone rejects this premise, however, and makes the counter claim that he certainly did not exist, and in any event didn’t live to 900, I would say that they have made an “extra-ordinary claim” of their own, and as such have the same burden as those claiming he lived 900 years.
Fom my POV, this must naturally (and unsatisfactorily for both the mouthbreathers and shrieking atheists) play out to a stalemate, for the believer’s metholodogy towards believing is rejected wholesale by the atheist,(and many of the Christians here it appears) and science/history cannot conclusively establish that he didn’t exist.
You brought it up, right?
I took this position way back in post #5: we cannot verify his existence through sources outside the Bible, so one explanation for his alleged age is as good as another.
It is estimated that M-Eve lived about 150k years ago while Y-Adam lived about 75k years ago.
You would be wrong. First, there is nothing extraordinary about assuming a myth to be a myth (is it extraordinary to say that Hercules did not exist?), but more importantly, it is already a proven fact that Genesis is a myth and that there was no Adam and Eve. What part of “IT’S ALREADY PROVEN” do you not understand?
Theist and atheist have nothing to do with anything. A methodology is either valid or it isn’t. Your repeated attempts to bracket scientific methiod as “atheistic” are just attempts to poison the well and cloud the issue.
Yes it can…and HAS.
You brought it up, right?
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Not so, and it’s interesting that you’ve put extraordinary claim in quotes.
The point about the people making extraordinary claims having to back it up only works if the claim is extraordinary. Saying that Adam definetly existed and lived to 900 is extraordinary in many ways; as has been pointed out, we can’t know what happened that long ago since we weren’t there. It’s a silly claim to make. But it’s sillier than saying Adam definetly didn’t exist because we actually do have evidence for that; for a start, humans tend to fall apart at about 110+, the Earth doesn’t appear to be only thousands of years old, and an alternate explanation of evolution appears pretty plausible.
So saying “A 900 year old man definetly lived thousands of years ago; his name was Adam” is a much more extraordinary claim than saying “A 900 year old man named Adam definetly did not live thousands of years ago”. I’ll say that, of course, both retain some level of silliness, since we can’t *know * one way or the other. I’m merely pointing out that to say they are equally extraordinary claims is inaccurate.
No, it’s not. I would be perfectly willing to trust my beliefs, if I had faith-based evidence. I don’t. I do not reject the methodology; I just do see very little to test.
Which ones are the shrieking athiests, btw?
“Further, Adam continues to figure in the NT as Jesus’s anscestry is said to be traceable to Adam, and Adam plays a central role in Paul’s explanation as to why Christ appeared as a man, and why he had to die a human death.”
See, this is the part where I get confused. Jesus’s human mother was not decended from Adam’s line - his stepfather Joseph was (or at least, that was the impression I got from the “begats”) So how is Jesus’s ancestry traceable to Adam? If ancestry was recorded patrilineally, it seems to me that Adam, if he existed, had nothing to do with Jesus’s actual lineage.
Actually, in the literalist scenario, all human beings have to be descended from Adam (since he was the first human being).
Matthew and Luke give contradictory genealogies for Joseph, and both try to trace his lineage from David. That presents a problem for the necessity of the Jewish Messiah to be a direct patrilineal decsendant of David (the Gospels give no lineage for Mary but the matrilineal line is irrelevant to this criterion) since a person with no natural father cannot meet the criterion, but ALL lines still go back to Adam (if you’re a literalist).
Yeah, I am kind of a literalist, but I like for it to make sense. IF Adam existed, yes, I’d think all humans would have to be descended from him… which brings me right back to “and how does this ancestry prove anything about Jesus?” And really, since this ancestry IS traced patrilineally, how the heck could Jesus be both the son of a supernatural father AND a biological descendant of Adam’s? Or even David’s?
I’m goin’ with mythology. At least in fiction it’s OK if not everything makes sense.
What I find amazing is that I’ve heard people say stuff about how “Well, ya know how people lived for, like, centuries back a long time ago and, like, they didn’t have any, like, modern medical advances!”
:smack:
They didn’t.
And the same goes for the otherwise educated people who believe that the Earth is only only some 5,000 years old. How did they get that number? Just adding up the “and so and so beget so and so…”.
I invite you all to have the common decency to join Biblical critics in an excursion into the mind of the culture that wrote and first read this stuff, the one the author and intended audience lived in.
Today, we seem to have this bizarre hangup about the sperm donor being the “real” father and the ovum source being the “real” mother, ignoring all claims founded in parental/filial love or in actual caregiving and nurturing, and all court decisions, in favor of a purely genetic definition.
If I’m anxious to find out if the child is likely to come down with Wingnut’s Syndrome when he’s about 40, that’s relevant. But if I want to know what the child’s been taught to treasure and honor, what to despise and reject, how he’s been guided to respond to Somebody Different, the caregivers, the nurturers, the people he learns how to be human from, are the ones to look at.
I was cured of that odd 21st Century Western Culture delusion by the words of a scornful five-year-old a few years back. He’d been taught the truth: the man who had been with his mother since she was pregnant with him, and who had begotten his two little sisters, was not the man who had been his sperm donor, though he’d treated the boy as his son ever since. Knowing they’d explained this to him, when I asked his mother a question about his genetic father in front of him, I tossed in an aside to the boy about it being his daddy. He fixed me with the patented “grownups-can-be-so-stupid” look and said, “No, ___'s just my* father*.” [That word said with a kind of grows-under-rocks tone to it. Then, pointing to the man who had raised him, he continued with a proud grin.] “That’s my Daddy.”
“And when I die, and when I’m dead, dead and gone, there’ll be one child left in this world to carry on,” sang Blood, Sweat and Tears decades back. We all consider that we live on, in some sense, in our children. For the Jews, this was a very real thing. The Levirate marriage was not some bizarre custom like the Bongonese tribe ceremonially tattooing the forehead of the boy-turning-man after his first ejaculation, suitable for documentation in “Oddities of Cultural Anthropology” and to make younger people giggle – it meant that for the Jews, nobody’s genealogy cuts off sharp with a “d.s.p.” If you (being male) died without having fathered a child, the person with the nearest male kinship to you was obliged to give you a son. Not “father a child on your widow” in their conceptualization, though that’s how we’d look at it – his job was to accomplish for his dead brother the thing the brother had left undone that continued his line for him. He had a sort of fiduciary account in his brother’s name at the sperm bank, as it were, to be used for the perpetuation of his brother’s name and not for his own. Okay? Got that? It doesn’t matter that it was his penis penetrating the widow, or his sperm causing conception – he was doing it in his brother’s name, as a fraternal duty to him. Whether it happened to be sexually pleasurable for him or not was purely mute – it was his duty to his late brother.
Okay, I think that bit of cultural mind-shift has prepared the way for the main point.
There are, according to this thought pattern, three people involved in every conception: father, mother, and God. One provides the sperm, another the ovum, and the third the spirit, to make up the new baby. It is not, God was involved in Jesus’s birth in a way He was not involved in anyone else’s – rather, it was that He covered both roles, His usual one and the egg-activating-agent one as well. It was not “because sex is dirty” – we owe that one to the teachings of guilt-ridden misogynistic monks and the prudery of Queen Victoria’s time. God (the First Person of the Trinity) was Jesus’s Father in a rather more direct sense than His involvement in the begetting and bearing of the rest of us, but not in a different way, and not in some crude Leda-and-the-YHWH sexual connection – that particular myth is one for the Mormons and the scathing sarcasm of some Islamic writers.
OKay? Here’s the key point: A childless man adopted an heir, just as today. But for the Jews, he was reckoned as the son of the adoptive father, not merely as a legal fiction, but in full. This is why the adoption as nearly always within the clan, and as close a relative as possible. The adoptee was his son in full, as surely as if he’d knocked up Shulamith after a wild night at the Egyptian Fleshpot Nightclub and then acknowledged paternity.
By First Century Jewish interpretations, Jesus was Joseph’s son. Completely. Not stepson. Not adoptive son. Not foster child. His own son, as surely as if he and Mary had held the honeymoon before the wedding and then rushed things along to make sure the baby was born in wedlock.
Regardless of whether Joseph’s sperm had had anything to do with it, he was the earthly father who raised Jesus, fulfilled the father role for him. Legally and culturally he was conceptually in every way Jesus’s father, regardless of whether he ever ejaculated within her.
This was the basic point behind the genealogies. They showed the descent from David and the Kings. Now, it is 100% plausible that they were made up of whole cloth. Or is it? Remember that for a Jew of the time, lineage and descent were highly significant elements of who he was. Only those of us with famous ancestors or those who have gotten interested in genealogy will know a lot about their great-great-grandfathers. But a Jew of that day would be intensely interested. He is a Son of the Covenant through his fathers. Even today, “when we came up out of slavery in Egypt” at the Passover meal is not purely a legal fiction – there is an attenuated but true cultural sense in which our Jewish members were there, in their ancestors. Certainly they don’t need to be believed whole hog (which wouldn’t be kosher anyway ;)), but one suspects that “Luke” and the Matthew editor took what information was available about the bar-Yosef family 70-odd years after the event and fleshed it out. And yeah, they’re completely contradictory – but, oddly, they make reference to the same two figures in the Exilic period: Zerubbabel and his progenitor Shealtiel. And, oddly, we know from I Chronicles that Shealtiel, which both genealogies claim to be Zerubbabel’s father, was actually the father of a Benaiah who begat Zerubbabel. In short, Z. was S.'s grandson and heir – his “son” in the Jewish legal/cultural mindset.
Now, here’s the key point: We know from Haggai and allusions in other post-Exilic books that Zerubbabel ben Shealtiel was the heir to the Davidic monarchy, and briefly set up as a puppet prince under Darius. Everything but Luke claims that he’s the descendant of Josiah’s sons and heir to the throne. But Luke traces his ancestry back through a bunch of Yochanan-Doe types to a completely different son of David, not Solomon the King. Which makes sense if you presume that the Chaldeans had tried to wipe out as much of the royal family as possible, while keeping Jehoiachin (“Jechoniah”) the legitimate king as a hostage. But Matthew agrees with the O.T. references in making Z. son of Jehoiachin.
I suggest that the Lucan genealogy is likely an attempt to reconstruct the biological parentage of Joseph, showing him to be by blood the descendant of David – which would be important to the greater Gentile world who did reckon descent that way – and therefore demonstrating the Davidic descent of the itinerant prophet from Galilee through his putative carpenter father. Matthew, on the other hand, hung up as he was on “the fulfillment of O.T. prophecy in Jesus” – Sheol’s windchimes, he even pulls in quotes that had nothing to do with a Messiah if he can torture them into fitting! – is looking at what Guinastasia and I might term “Lineage of the Legitimate Pretenders to the Davidic Throne” – his “begats” are legal fictions, not genetic tracers, like how it happens that some publican in Knockmealdown is actually the legitimate heir to the O’Sparemey line and to the petty-kingdom that is now County Killarney.
I can hardly expect you to believe a Christian’s assertion about how that number was arrived at using the best science and historiography of the day, can I? So how about a quite famous evolutionary biologist who was explicitly and emphatically atheist? Read Stephen Jay Gould’s essay, “A Fall in the House of Ussher.”
The problem is that Matthew and Luke not only have inconsistent and frequently contradictory genealogies, they don’t agree on much else about Jesus’ life before the age of thirty or so. Almost any interesting and dramatic story from Jesus’ youth–the star in the east and the Magi; the massacre of the innocents and the flight into Egypt; Mary’s visit to Elizabeth (mother of John the Baptist); the census and being born in a manger–is found in either Matthew or Luke, not both. The two gospels agree on the virgin birth and that Jesus was born in Bethlehem but grew up in Galilee (but they don’t agree on why this was so, with Matthew’s “Bethlehemite family takes refuge in Galilee to avoid the tyrant Herod” vs. Luke’s “family living in Galilee compelled to go to Bethlehem for a census”). And Mark and John don’t have anything to say about Jesus’ childhood or youth; neither Mark nor John, nor Paul, even mentions the virgin birth. John, in chapter 7, verses 40-44, completely ignores an opportunity to mention that Jesus was really from Bethlehem, as foretold by Messianic prophecy, and not just some Galilean.
All of which inclines me to believe that no one–neither Matthew nor Luke nor any of the other New Testament writers–really knew much of anything about Jesus before he began public preaching, and that, rather than being the divinely preserved royal bloodline of David, his family background was likely that of a bunch of regular folks from Galilee, not Bethlehem at all. This being a problem for anyone with Messianic claims, his followers later came to accept various somewhat contradictory “explanations” of how this non-royal Galilean was really from Bethlehem and of the royal line of David.
Grampa Simpson, is that you?
That was… An odd read… to say the least. But from what I picked up he… well… Believed in God. Though I guess I just misunderstood what you were talking about… Either that or what I read was criticism of his works? I thought I found it correctly…