"Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve"

[exchemist]

Surely you recognize that the bible (and other religious scripture) is taken literally even today by millions.

If necessary, these people interpret holy writ to suit their needs (a day is not a day - it could be millions of years) but still do take it all literally.

Oh yes, but that is a different matter. Being a bit old-fashioned, I tend to judge systems of belief by what their informed thinkers say about them, rather than relying on the highly imperfect - sometimes quite garbled - understanding of the the man on the Clapham Omnibus, who after all has a lot of priorities in life other than making sure everything in his faith dovetails neatly.

The main strands of Western Christianity, as judged by theologians and clerical authorities not apparently seen as heterodox, did not take a wholly literalist approach to the bible even at the very beginning. I quote a passage from Dairmid McCulloch's 2009 "History of Christianity" (p.151), in which he talks about Origen:

QUOTE
" ...when he read the bible, he shared Greek or Hellenistic Jewish scepticism that some parts of it bore much significant literal meaning. Looking at the Genesis account of creation, "who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, planted a paradise eastward in Eden, and set in it a visible and palpable tree of life, of such a sort that anyone its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life?" Origen might be saddened to find that seventeen hundred years later, millions of Christians are that silly. He would try to tell them that such things were true because all parts of the scriptures were divinely inspired truth, but they should not be read as historical events, like the rise and fall of Persian dynasties. He insisted that this rule should even be applied within the text of the gospels.

In viewing the biblical text in this way, Origen followed Clement [his predecessor in the Christian school in Alexandria, in 190AD ] in relishing the use of an allegorical method of understanding the meaning of literary texts, which by then had a long history in Greek scholarship. This is how the Greeks had read Homer and how learned Alexandrian Jews like Philo had read the Tanakh.
UNQUOTE

This is what I have been referring to.

I really think we have heard so much from extreme c.19th and early c.20th American sects on this that we are in danger of losing our perspective on how early Christian theologians really thought. As I say, these people were not stupid......unlike some of these modern sects!