[xzins]

Marlowe is right. If there is no sin in the Garden of Eden, then there is no transmitted sin, and there is no need for a savior to save us from those sins. That makes Jesus Christ unnecessary at best and a madman at worst.

An earlier comment says that there is variation within a kind and not the change of one kind to another. I don’t think this is contradicted in any fossil record that I know of. At what point do the bones of a primate belong to an extinct species and at what point do they belong to one within the ‘human kind?’

Alamo-girl has the neat idea that the Garden of Eden was in both the heavenly and the earthly dimension. This is based on the Tree of Life being in the Garden and also appearing in the heavenly in New Jerusalem at the end of Revelation. Time didn’t really begin for Adam and Eve until their expulsion from the Garden. Some 900+ years later Adam died.

My addition to that, in reference to ‘human kind’, is that humans did not begin until that point. Those without the spirit, even the dead carnal spirit, are not “man.”

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you both so very much for sharing your insights, dear brothers in Christ!

Marlowe is right. If there is no sin in the Garden of Eden, then there is no transmitted sin, and there is no need for a savior to save us from those sins. That makes Jesus Christ unnecessary at best and a madman at worst.

Very true, as P-Marlowe asked (paraphrased) did Christ came to save rocks?

Alamo-girl has the neat idea that the Garden of Eden was in both the heavenly and the earthly dimension. This is based on the Tree of Life being in the Garden and also appearing in the heavenly in New Jerusalem at the end of Revelation. Time didn’t really begin for Adam and Eve until their expulsion from the Garden. Some 900+ years later Adam died.

Indeed, I perceive Genesis 1-3 speaking of both the spiritual and physical realms and the perspective of Scripture changing to man's (earthly) at the beginning of chapter 4 when Adam has been banished to mortality.

These [are] the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and [there was] not a man to till the ground. – Genesis 2:4-5

You continued:

My addition to that, in reference to ‘human kind’, is that humans did not begin until that point. Those without the spirit, even the dead carnal spirit, are not “man.”

I agree. They may have even had a similar physical appearance, but they did not have neshama - the breath of God that made Adam a living soul.

And the LORD God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. - Genesis 2:7

To God be the glory!