0230 In two chapters, McKnight discusses how various Jewish writers and Saint Paul treated Adam and Eve.  Adam and Eve are real characters located in the mythic past.  Adam and Eve are literary, archetypal and bear the image of God.  They founded the Jewish people, as well as other peoples in the Near East.

0231 In chapter 5 of Romans, Paul comes eerily close to articulating the historical trajectory of the first singularity.  McKnight covers the passage in detail. Razie Mah’s e-article, Comments on Original Sin and Original Death: Romans 5:12-19, examines a similar analysis by Tom Schreiner.

0232 What does this imply?

Saint Paul senses, but does not grasp, what could possibly have generated the Adam and Eve stories.

0233 At 5800 U0’ (or 0 A.D.), no one imagined that the stories of Adam and Eve associate to a fantastic traumatic event in recent human prehistory.  No one imagined that those occasional funny hills deep in the deserts of the Near East could contain the ruins of the royal libraries of long-forgotten cities.

0234 At 6200 U0’, Augustine did not know that, either.

However, Augustine had the imagination to re-stage the stories as a play on the Manichean version of the descent of the soul.  Original Sin later became Christian doctrine.  God’s hand is in that designation.

0235 Then, the modern age of science arrived, digging up the hills of southwest Asia and fashioning classical Darwinism, then Neo-Darwinism.  The first shows that the early chapters of Genesis exhibit the literary style and some of the same themes as ancient (excavated) Near East literature.  The second shows that Adam and Eve could not be the biological ancestral parents of all humans.

0236 These two facts rule out the story of the Fall staged by Augustine.

0237 At the same time, the ruling raises the question: What is Original Sin?

0238 On one hand, modern theologians, such as Piet Schoonenberg, diligently worked in order to demonstrate that Original Sin corresponds to a combination of social conditions and personal sin.

In other words, Original Sin belongs to our current living world (Lebenswelt).

0239 On the other hand, someone had to wonder, “Why is our current Lebenswelt not the same as the Lebenswelt that we evolved in?”

0240 The genetic data shows that our current Lebenswelt is not due to a speciation event (as unwittingly predicted by Augustine).

0241 The data from excavations of ancient Near East sites shows that the public written origin stories point to a recent event occurring less than ten thousand years ago.

That event had to be cultural.  It gave rise to our current Lebenswelt.  It eclipsed and occluded the Lebenswelt that we evolved in. 

0242 The hypothesis of the first singularity is introduced in plain form in The First Singularity and its Fairy Tale Trace.  The hypothesis is presented in dramatic form in the masterwork: An Archaeology of the Fall.  These works, by Razie Mah, are available at smashwords and other e-book venues.