(1) Adam

The story of the primeval couple in Gen 1-5 occupied many Jewish and Christian interpreters. Adam came to be associated with heavenly glory and a delegated divine ruler over creation. Ben Sira makes a fleeting remark about how Adam was glorified “above every other created living being” (Sir 49.16). As for the reason for such glory, we must look to other Jewish authors. It may have to do with bearing the divine image (Gen 1.27028; 4Q504 VIII 4-6), being given dominion over creation (Ps 8.3-8), being the heavenly man with a capacity for contemplation and virtue (Philo, Leg. all. 1.31-42; 2.4), having a gigantic physical form which itself is a mark of divinity (Apoc. Ab. 23.4), or his assigned position as a “second angel, honored and great and glorious” so that there was “nothing comparable to him on the earth” (2 En. 30.11-12 [J]). Or else the prelapsarian Edenic state in which Adam lived (Apoc. Adam 1.2), what the Qumran sectarians hoped to inherit as “the glory of Adam” (1QS 4.23; 1QHa 4.15; CD-A 3.20; 4Q171 3.1-2), represents an incipient participation in the glory of God.

At least one text, the Testament of Adam, probably a Jewish text given extensive Christian redaction, treats Adam’s sin as wanting to be divine, and God offering to make him divine: “Adam, Adam do not fear. You wanted to be a god; I will make you a god, not right now, but after a space of many years. I am consigning you to death, and the maggot and the worm will eat your body” (T. Adam 3.2). God, speaking as the pre-incarnate Son, tells Adam:

For your sake I will be born of the Virgin Mary. For your sake I will taste death and enter the house of the dead. For your sake I will make a new heaven, and I will be established over your posterity. And after three days, while I am in the tomb. I will raise up the body I received from you. And I will set you at the right hand of my divinity, and I will make you a god just like you wanted. And I will receive favor from God, and I will restore to you and to your posterity that which is the justice of heaven. (T. Adam 3.3-4).

Here, being made a god is most likely Christian theosis (2 Pet 1.4), given the overtly Christian scheme of salvation with Adam’s deliverance from sheol and entrance into heaven to worship God. (Ascen. Isa. 9.28).

Adam also experienced a heavenly transportation, according to some authors. In Life of Adam and Eve, Adam is taken up by the archangel Michael in a chariot of wind and fire into the paradise of the righteous. There, God sentences Adam to death, Adam in turn pleads for mercy, God promises that this seed will not be abolished. Adam worships God, Michael then returns Adam to earth and escorts him out of paradise (LAE 25-29). In the parallel Apocalypse of Moses, proximate to his death, Adam’s soul is carried up to heaven by angels, cleansed, and taken into the third paradise (Apoc. Mos. 37.1-6). Thereafter, Adam’s body is interred in a tomb in the Edenic paradise with the promise of resurrection (Apoc. Mos. 38-42). In the Testament of Abraham, Adam is found in heaven “adorned in glory” seated on a throne before the gates of heaven, where he weeps over the damned and rejoices over the saved (T. Ab. 11.7-12). The later rabbis were also interested in Adam’s redemption and heavenly exaltation as symbolized by descriptions of his being clothed in glorious garments. The garments arguably represent a heavenly parallel to his initial post-fall covering (Gen 3.21) and a priestly garment of splendor (Exod 28.2, 40; Sir 50.11). “By the first century CE,” observes Stephen Lambden, “Adam was, in certain Jewish circles, regarded as an exalted priestly figure and one initially in an elevated angelic state.”

Some of the texts cited above are either Christian or Christianized Jewish texts, but in any case, Jewish and Christian scribes depicted Adam with a pre-fall divine glory, angelic at least in the sense of being immortal, modeling a priestly and regal humanity that acted on behalf of God, and thereafter pardoned and taken up into a heavenly paradise. Importantly, these Adamic aspects were often amplified and applied to superhuman intermediary figures who recapture Adam’s former glory and rehearse Adam’s image-bearing role as the glorious priest-king of creation (see Ezek 1.26-28; Dan 7.9-14; 1 Cor 15.20-28, 45; 1 En. 62.5; 69.29). It is notable too that the label “Son of Man” in its Hebrew, Aramaic, and Ethiopic forms can mean “Son of Adam,” which means Adamic motifs are indelibly connected to certain intermediary figures in Jewish and Christian literature. Thus, Paul’s Adam Christology and the Evangelists’ account of the Son of Man did not emerge from a Gnostic Urmensch-redeemer myth, but grew from Jewish soil.

Much has been especially made of a comparison between the worship of Christ and the worship offered to Adam in LAE 12-16 (ca. 110 BCE to 200 CE). In the Latin narrative, Satan explains his expulsion from heaven as due to his refusal to worship the image of God in Adam. In the story, Satan rebuffs pressure from Michael to worship the image in Adam. In the story, Satan rebuffs pressure from Michael to worship the image in Aam, saying, “Why do you compel me? I will not worship one inferior and subsequent to me. I am prior to him in creation; before he was made, I was already made. He ought to worship me” (LAE 14.3). In the narrative, Adam and Eve are divinely manufactured idol that are fitting objects of angelic worship. Fletcher-Louis infers that “some Jews believed, in faithfulness to their reading of Gen 1, that the true humanity should be worshipped the way the pagans would worship an image (tselem) of deity.” This opens a line of questioning in relation to the origins of Jesus devotion: “If this story if a pre-Christian anticipation of the worship of Jesus then it poses an important question for the nature of Christ devotion: namely, does the early Christian worship of the Lord Jesus Christ as one who belongs within the divine identity include, in any sense, the worship of the human being Jesus of Nazareth? If Jesus was considered a true Adam who recapitulated humanity’s pre-fall identity then, at least in part, worship of him would surely be worship that reprised the angelic worship of Adam.”