Were Adam and Eve born?

[bmy-]

Sorry, can u help me understand what u mean by that please? Thank you

My interpretation of Genesis is largely allegorical. To many inconsistencies between our own scriptures and science to take it literally IMO.

I personally believe that Adam/Eve were born on an earth. Just not this one. They were placed here because they were given the oppurtunity to continue the work of progression [Exaltation].

Edited January 27, 2009 by bmy-

[Dr T]

So the "being formed of the dust" "breathing into his nose" etc. as it says is allegorical in your opinion? OK, thanks :)

[bmy-]

So the "being formed of the dust" "breathing into his nose" etc. as it says is allegorical in your opinion? OK, thanks :)

It was my pleasure.

[Justice]

Quick Sidetrack:

Jesus has His scars to show people who He is. Remember that one guy? That had to see them and feel them to believe it really was Jesus resurrected?

Thomas always gets a bad wrap for this, but if you read the text closely it is clear than none of the Apostles believed... they all had to see for themselves.

Luke 24:

9 And returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest.

10 It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles.

11 And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.

Then he met and walked with the 2 on the road to Emmaus, and they journeyed back the same night and told the eleven.

36 And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.

37 But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit.

Mark 16:

9 Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven evils.

10 And she went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned and wept.

11 And they, when they had heard that he was alive, and had been seen of her, believed not.

12 After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they walked, and went into the country.

13 And they went and told it unto the residue: neither believed they them.

14 Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their bunbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen.

So, yes, Thomas didn't believe... but neither did the rest. The reason Thomas gets a bad wrap is because it is believed he probably wasn't there when Jesus appeared to them this particular time. So, the other "ten of eleven" saw Him and believed before Thomas. It is true it says "eleven" here, but I think to make the point that there were "eleven" Apostles now was more important. To say "ten" would have cast some doubt on whether there were actually 10 or 11. Only one died, and that was Judas.

I think the fact that none of them believed the words of those trusted friends prepared them, and gave them understanding, for how hard it would be to convince others of the truth they would have to teach.

[Justice]

And, as to the main point of this thread, I believe very much the same thing as bmy- has said.

As you head down this path with your belief, it will cause you to pose many questions. But, I assure you, there are answers.

I searched for quite a long time for quotes on the Church web site. I found some close, like the King Follet discourse, but nothing clear yet.

[Gwen]

I thought Jesus still had His scares for some reason. hmmmm

i know i'm coming in late on your comment but.... how i understand it is that yes jesus' scars of the crusifiction will remain, not just to show who he is and where he has been but because of the significance of the event that created the scar. it was not a "normal" scar of life.

i believe the same is true about our belly button. i do believe it's a scar. when the umbilical cord dries up it very much has a scab apperance, it seals the opening the same as a scab would seal a large wound. when the opening closes, or the wound heals, it falls off leaving behind the the evidence it was there....... a scar. however, i personaly believe we will still have that scar after the resurrection. the gaining of a body had such huge significance and an important part of our eternal existance that the scar of that will remain after the rest of our body is perfected. it's not a "normal" scar of life, it is a symbol of who we are, where we have been, and has significance.

but that's just my opinion.

[Traveler]

So the "being formed of the dust" "breathing into his nose" etc. as it says is allegorical in your opinion? OK, thanks :)

Just a note here: to the ancients dust was considered the most useless element of creation. The statement that man came from dust is a rather interesting thought - to have come from dust is far more degrading than to have come from monkies. :)

The Traveler

[Moksha]

My interpretation of Genesis is largely allegorical. To many inconsistencies between our own scriptures and science to take it literally IMO.

It is nice not to feel alone in this interpretation. It seems that science helps expand the boundaries of religion in understanding God's handiwork. You mention progression and I think of how God really wants us to progress in our understanding and how we instead limit our understanding of God's handiwork by clinging to a creation story based on primitive man's limited capacity.

My guess is that many LDS scientists have worked around this limitation, at least in their own minds.

.

[Dr T]

Thank you for your thoughts Gwen and Traveler :)

[Webster]

Since the umbilical cord dries and falls off, it cannot leave a scar. The place where the incision was made is no longer there. What is left is what the body did after it removed the part (cord) which was not it's body.

[Webster]

I take some of the Genesis account as figurative as I believe the temple may allude to.

While we're using scripture to suggest Adam's parentage or not, what about the following?

Luke 3:38

Which was [the son] of Enos, which was [the son] of Seth, which was [the son] of Adam, which was [the son] of God.

Moses 6:22 (also in JST)

And this is the genealogy of the sons of Adam, who was the son of God, with whom God, himself, conversed.

[HiJolly]

Since the umbilical cord dries and falls off, it cannot leave a scar. The place where the incision was made is no longer there. What is left is what the body did after it removed the part (cord) which was not it's body.

um. I think someone's guilty of imprecise language here. The cord is cut, bleeds a little, the scab forms then dries, the skin of the cord heals, leaving a scar. The scab eventually falls off after the healing of the scar and surrounding tissue is complete, revealing the remaining scar which then becomes less and less obvious throughout life.

I cut the cord on 8 of my 9 kids.

HiJolly

[Webster]

I find your calling a dried up umbilical cord a 'scab', a bit imprecise.

My point is that the scar found at the site of the belly button was created by the body, not an incision. It is not a "scar" made by cutting the cord.

If the doctor cut the cord at one inch, your children do not wind up with a one inch belly button. If the doctor cuts it at one inch or three inches, the cord dries up to where the child's body begins. You are not left with a one or three inch belly button.

That wasn't a scab which fell off, it was the dried umbilical cord. Scabs don't progress from the point of injury down into living tissue. They cover a wound.

When I cut my finger it forms a scab at the site. The scab does not spread down my finger, nor does my finger dry up for an inch, otherwise, a cut on the tip of your finger would result in you losing about an inch of your finger!

Perhaps at the resurrection we should also have holes in our hearts and bones in our sculls that are soft and not fused as that is the condition of a baby at birth. My point is that the 'scar' of the belly button was naturally produced by our body, and is not the remnants of a wound.

[ninjormon]

PERSONAL OPINIONS

I think that birth is a relative term

BIRTH DEFINITION 1 : a. The emergence and separation of offspring from the body of the mother.

In this first definition of the dictionary it doesnt state that it is born of the womb, In Moses 7:48-49 it mentions Heavenly Mother as being the earth itself, so using the dust/dirt of the ground is literaly man being formed of a Heavenly Mother. Hence the term mother earth.

As far as Heavenly Father saying be fruitful and multiply, Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, so either by that they knew how to concieve or Heavenly Father had to explain it to them, only two logical choices to me, if not one of them they would have kept doing math and not a soul would have been born. (play on words multiply)

[Hemidakota]

My interpretation of Genesis is largely allegorical. To many inconsistencies between our own scriptures and science to take it literally IMO.

I personally believe that Adam/Eve were born on an earth. Just not this one. They were placed here because they were given the oppurtunity to continue the work of progression [Exaltation].

A story of the first Ahmen.

[Hemidakota]

Adam was indeed born of immortal parents.

The trouble is there are so many questions this opens up, and so many things we have not been told, that you have to delve into speculation at some point.

In any case, logic and odds are on the side of Adam being born of a mother. Every person that has ever inhabited this earth has been born. It is the way we come to have a physical body, whether mortal or immortal.

Adam and Eve both have belly buttons, as does Father in Heaven.

If only there is a Seer in the land that is called by the Lord to receive and open the sealed portion of the plates.

[Hemidakota]

I'm a little new to LDS.net, but thought I would put this question out there. My question is: Were Adam and Eve born?

I was recently listening to a gospel talk by (I think) Vivian McConkie Adams, called Father Adam Mother Eve. In the talk Sister Adams states that Adam was born; she quotes Joseph F. Smith for support. Then she Quotes Brigham Young, something to the extent that if Adam were formed from a lump of clay he would be resurrected as a lump of clay.

I'm looking for the refferences she states. I think I might have found the quote from Joseph F. Smith. But I found it online, so I'm a little skeptical. The quotes are below.

If anyone has any info, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I know that my Redeemer liveth; . . . I know that God is being with body, parts, and passions and that His Son is in His own likeness, and that man is created in the image of God. The Son, Jesus Christ, grew and developed into manhood the same as you or I, as likewise did God, His Father grow and develop to the Supreme Being that He now is. Man was born of woman; Christ the Savior, was born of woman and God, the Father was born of woman. Adam, our earthly parent, was also born of woman into this world, the same as Jesus and you and I."

Joseph F. Smith (Desert Evening News, Dec. 27, 1913, Sec III, p. 7; Deseret News: Church Section, Sept. 18, 1936, pp, 2, 8).

"Man has descended from God: In fact, he is of the same race as the Gods. His descent has not been from a lower form of life, but from the Highest Form of Life; in other words, man is the most literal sense, a child of God. This is not only true of the spirit of man, but of his body also. There never was a time, probably, in all the eternities of the past, when there was not men or children of God. This world is only one of many worlds which have been created by the Father through His Only Begotten."

Joseph F. Smith, Course of Study for Priests, 1910, under the subject "The Creation of Man," cited in Deseret News: Church Section, Sept. 19, 1936, p. 8

Astronomy, Papyrus, and Covenant -- The Creation of Humankind, and Allegory?: A Note on Abraham 5:7, ”

Through Joseph Smith, Latter-day Saints have additional scriptures that deal with the advent of humankind on the planet. A revelation the Prophet received between June and October 1830 restored material that originally belonged to Genesis but had become lost. The question is, does this new material change the Genesis account of humankind's creation in any essential way? The answer is no. From it, we learn that God "said unto mine Only Begotten, which was with me from the beginning: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and it was so. . . . And I, God, created man in mine own image, in the image of mine Only Begotten created I him; male and female created I them" (Moses 2:26–27). Except for learning that Jehovah was the unnamed person whom God addressed in Genesis, the scripture adds nothing new to this portion of the creation account. The same is true when the text describes the actual advent of Adam. It says matter of factly that "I, the Lord God, formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul, the first flesh upon the earth, the first man also" (Moses 3:7). The change from Adam being made "of the dust of the earth" to "from the dust of the earth" seems insignificant. The basic outline of the narrative remains the same. This is also true of the creation of Eve. According to the restored material, God said that "the rib which I, the Lord God, had taken from man, made I a woman" (Moses 3:22). The only difference between the two accounts is a voice shift from third to first person. In both, God makes Adam's rib into a woman.

The agreement between the two accounts has not persuaded all Latter-day Saints to take them literally. One of the earliest to take exception was Parley P. Pratt. In his work Key to the Science of Theology, Pratt wrote that due to apostasy:

Man was no longer counted worthy to retain the knowledge of his heavenly origin. . . . At length a Moses came, who knew his God, and would fain have led mankind to know Him too, and see Him face to face. But they could not receive His heavenly laws or bide His presence. Thus the holy man was forced again to veil the past in mystery, and in the beginning of his history assign to man an earthly origin. Man, moulded from the earth, as a brick. Woman, manufactured from a rib. Thus, parents still would fain conceal from budding manhood the mysteries of procreation, or the sources of life's ever-flowing river, by relating some childish tale of new-born life.

With these words, Elder Pratt rejected the literal reading of the Genesis and Moses texts and suggested a new understanding. At the same time, he explained why Moses chose to hide the real story behind symbols: Israel was too spiritually immature to handle the truth. To protect them, Moses veiled the secrets of creation.

Brigham Young also rejected the biblical account. He told the Saints, "When you tell me that Father Adam was made as we make adobes from the earth, you tell me what I deem an idle tale." He went on to explain that "Mankind are here because they are the offspring of parents who were first brought here from another planet, and power was given them to propagate their species."

Latter-day Saints are not the only ones who insist on viewing portions of the Bible in a less-than-literal way. Men and women have been doing this kind of thing with sacred texts at least from the first millennium B.C. The ancient Greek noun for proclaiming an idea with a meaning other than the one readily apparent was αλληγορια. The verb describing this action was αλληγορεω and product of the action was αλληγουμενα. From the noun αλληγορια comes the English word allegory. All these words denote speaking or writing in such a way the hearers or readers should not take literally.

[Hemidakota]

As noted, Brigham Young was another contemporary of Joseph Smith who insisted that the creation accounts of humankind should not be taken as they read. Only nine years after the Prophet's death, he said, "suppose Adam was made and fashioned the same as we make adobies; if he had never drunk of the bitter cup, the Lord might have talked to him to this day, and he would have continued as he was to all eternity, never advancing one particle in the school of intelligence." Going on, he questioned, "Supposing that Adam was formed actually out of clay, out of the same kind of material from which bricks are formed; that with this matter God made the pattern of a man, and breathed into it the breath of life, and left it there, in that state of supposed perfection, he would have been an adobie to this day. He would not have known anything."18 Thus did Brigham Young deny that God created Adam like a brick. Six years later, as noted above, he stated his belief that Adam and Eve were transplanted to the earth from another planet "to propagate their species." 19

Reference:

19 - Journal of Discourses, 7:285. Brigham Young's views about Adam have become known as "The Adam-God Theory." It lays well outside the scope of this paper to address the Adam-God issue. Others have discussed it in detail. See for example, Rodney Turner, "The Position of Adam in Latter-day Saint Scripture and Theology" (Provo, Utah: master's thesis, BYU, 1953) and David John Buerger, "The Adam-God Doctrine," Dialogue 15/1 (1982):14-58. For the purposes of this paper, it should be noted that Brigham Young never claimed that he received the material either by revelation or from Joseph Smith. In fact, he neither fully explained his ideas nor attempted to reconcile them to the scriptures. As was his custom, he simply declared his views and left it to others to accept or reject them. As Hugh Nibley wrote: "He sometimes made statements that surprised or even offended those who tended to accept his every utterance as doctrine, but with a New Englander's passion for teaching and learning, he plunged ahead" (Hugh Nibley, "Teachings of Brigham Young," in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 4:1609).

Even today, some may be concerned about a prophet expressing his own ideas. The Brethren of the nineteenth century, differing from those of the twentieth, felt much more free in expressing their personal views publically and in a forceful manner. As Rodney Turner has written in addressing the Adam-God problem, "When speaking under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, a prophet's word is as the word of the Lord himself. . . . But a prophet is not a pope." He goes on to say that what a prophet says is "not an ex cathedra pronouncement that is infallible" when the Holy Ghost is not acting. "When the prophet speaks without inspiration, his word may or may not prove correct." For a more full discussion on this see Turner's work, " Adam-God Controversy" (unpublished statement prepared by BYU, April 1983), copy in possession of the author. See also Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1956), 3:203.

[Traveler]

I asked the question a while back and no one responded. For those that believe Adam and Eve were not born - the question is: Is being born not a creation? If it is then why do you believe G-d has changed the manner and method in which he creates. Are you speculating that we are created differently than Adam or do you have any scripture that has given you that impression.

Which also begs the question - Is the Bible truly canon (complete) or is there important stuff left out - as in this case; the true doctrine of creation.

The Traveler

[trulykiwi]

You need to remember that

1. Even the elements obey God, so as Jesus said while on earth, he could make sons of Abraham out of the rocks. He can make a human body by commanding the elements.

2. Adam was next in line to Jehovah in intelligence so he didn't need to figure out the birds and the bees or anything for that matter. He was also inspired by the spirit and had the greatest instruction from heavenly beings.

3. Don't believe too much what people say, the scriptures are sometimes symbolic, but not in this case with the creation. I believe it is pretty literal how he created man.

4. Adam was the first man on earth, so how could he have been born of a Mother if he was the first. Ask the lord in prayer if all else fails, but I am pretty sure the scriptures tell you all you need to know.

Cheers guys!

[Guest tomk]

I like the idea that Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother made Adam and Eve.

I like that idea more than to think Adam and Eve came from the dust of the earth. Why would Heavenly Father and Mother resort to molding bodies from DUST when they could make Adam and Eve the old fashioned way? WINK WINK :)

[Dr T]

I like the idea that Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother made Adam and Eve.

I like that idea more than to think Adam and Eve came from the dust of the earth. Why would Heavenly Father and Mother resort to molding bodies from DUST when they could make Adam and Eve the old fashioned way? WINK WINK :)

My thought is because there is no heavenly mother and the Father is a spirit and the creator which is not not us and therefore no need to question "how" or "why" He chose to create the way he did.

[trulykiwi]

Yes but the Bible doesn't say they were made the old fashioned way......Adam was made from the dust and through his nostrils was the breath of life given. Eve was made from one of Adams ribs which was literal, but at the same time symbolic of how much a part of her husband she was. Where do you get 'made the old fashioned way' out of that?

[trulykiwi]

Tomk, it is your idea to like to think that was the way, but may not necessarily be the truth, and it doesn't have any relation to what the scripture says! Peace!

[trulykiwi]

I asked the question a while back and no one responded. For those that believe Adam and Eve were not born - the question is: Is being born not a creation? If it is then why do you believe G-d has changed the manner and method in which he creates. Are you speculating that we are created differently than Adam or do you have any scripture that has given you that impression.

Which also begs the question - Is the Bible truly canon (complete) or is there important stuff left out - as in this case; the true doctrine of creation.

The Traveler

Ha ha that's funny - Remember when Adam was put on Earth his body was still eternal and he and Eve probably weren't ageing, until they ate the fruit of the tree of life, then they became mortal, and would have then started to age. So how could he have possibly been a baby?