The title for this thread is a reference to @Longfellow's thread ... it goes into some depth on an aspect that he touched on there, about locating Jesus in contemporary Jewish theological and mystical speculation.
These notes are taken directly from A Perennial Digression essay Paul's Adam and Paul's Christ (behind a paywall, however ... my interpolations are in grey) If anyone wants greater detail on any point, I'd be happy to provide, as long as I don't end up pasting the complete essay into responses.
There is a view I've put forward more than once, by a number of theologians, that the Fall is regarded as something 'outside' of our timeline. That the Big Bang and all subsequent history is as a result and consequence of the Fall, rather than the fall happening somewhere along our evolutionary timeline. This has been termed the 'alterist' view of our origins. The traditional view is the 'perseverist, that God created the spatio-temporal and material world as we currently experience it, and Adam fell within that.
"In this (alterist) protology, the original state of human beings was angelic in character: not absolutely incorporeal ... but possessed of a corporeality which was radically glorious, in which time, space, and matter were full of the divine presence and means of communion."
"Insofar as the beginning and the end coinhere with one another, then, the final end of humanity will be a restored angelic corporeality, in which the human body and the material kosmos are restored to their proper state in the divine pleroma of God’s indwelling presence, what rabbinic theology and Kabbalah after it would call the Shekhinah.
"... Both Testaments witness to a single God, and therefore the God who creates the world is also the God who saves it: and within those two poles even the fallen state of corporeality which we experience is itself an expression of divine oikonomia, “economy” or “administration” of the human fall so as to orchestrate human and cosmic redemption, centered around the covenants with Israel, the advent of Christ, and the communion of the Church.
"But alterism also happens to better reflect the Early Jewish milieu of the New Testament, especially the apocalyptic and sapiential traditions which envision human origins and destiny by reference to the angels. In several Early Jewish texts, Adam begins his existence as a kind of angelic or even quasi-divine being.
"There are already inklings of this tradition ... insofar as the Adam made in Genesis 1:26-28 is in the divine image while the Adam of Genesis 2:4-3:24 is made from the dust of the earth and inbreathed to become a nephesh chayyah, a “living being” or “living soul” (in Greek, psyche zon). In the Greek translation of the Septuagint, the distinction between these two creation narratives is signaled by the verb poieio, “make” in the first narrative and plasso, “mould” in the second.
"Early Jewish expansions and commentaries on the Adam stories pick up on these ideas, whether by the multiplication of Adams—a divine, celestial Adam and a terrestrial shadow... Philo writes in De Confusione Linguarum 62-63 that the heavenly, androgynous man of Genesis 1:26-28 is none other than the Logos, the deuteros theos who mediates between God and kosmos, while the man of Genesis 2:4ff is an earthly copy.
"In 2 Enoch 30:12, Adam is created a “second angel” on the earth. In other texts, the angels are dazzled by Adam’s celestial glory – since the light with which he is enrobed is in fact the light of creation’s first day in Genesis 1 ... Eve, furthermore, is created as a kind of diminution of Adam’s divine, angelic, celestial, and androgynous glory as he is split into male and female... the two continue to form the primal Adam even once parted ... It is only at Adam’s expulsion from the Garden that God gives Adam and Eve “garments of skin,” thus demoting them to fleshed existence (Gen 3:21).
"Just as Adam is thought to have contained Eve, originally, so too many Early Jews seem to have thought that he comprehended all human souls, an idea that would become essential to later Kabbalah ... periodically throughout the Old Testament and in early Jewish thought, different humans could reclaim “all the glory of Adam”... Noah, Enoch, Melchizedek, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and Elijah all receive some form of metamorphosis to this angelic, divine glory in several of the Early Jewish texts in which they appear, and many Early Jews seem to have believed that the Jerusalem Temple (or, for Qumranites, its temporary replacement) offered a kind of angelic deification.
"And of course, some early Jews ... also believed in angelic or divine messiahs, like the community that produced the Parables of Enoch, including the followers of Jesus, who conceptualized him in this way, all of whom were followed by later rabbinic and kabbalistic thinkers, several of whom also believed in the Messiah’s heavenly preexistence and descent into the world. Adam’s glory was lost in this world but periodically regained, piecemeal in the present aeon (olam hazeh) but nationally by the people of Israel (and perhaps the righteous among the gentiles) in the aeon to come (olam habah). Indeed, the restoration of Adam’s glory even to this world, the restitution of the Adam Kadmon, remained the mystical ideal in Judaism well into the period of the medieval and early modern kabbalists.
"When Paul talks about Adam ... he should be read with the grain of Early Jewish apocalyptic and sapiential thought about Adam, as it was received in later Judaism and Christianity, not against it... So, for instance, in 1 Corinthians 15:22: “For just as in Adam all die, thus also in the Christ all will be made alive.”
"(In) the divine, angelic, celestial Adam, the paradisaical Adam existing in a pretemporal form of the universe to our own—all die, because all human souls were contained in that Adam; in Christ, all will be made alive, for the exact same reason. This is not Augustinian original sin: it is something much more metaphysically complicated and morally demanding.
"On this reading of Paul, every human soul is a fragment of the primordial Adam, whose sinful moral activity in this world is in fact the very condition of the pretemporal Adam’s fall. Likewise, in the eschatological future, all will be made alive in Christ, in whom the primordial unity of the fallen, cosmic Adam is restored. How shall this be? 1 Corinthians 15:45: “Thus also it is written: the first human Adam ‘became a living soul’; the last Adam a life-creating pneuma.”
"Again, reading Paul in the context of Early Judaism ... it is completely possible to read Paul as creatively retconning the creation story of Genesis 2:7 from being a story about Adam’s first creation to being a story about Adam’s diminution from his heavenly, pneumatic state to a terrestrial, psychic state, what Origen of Alexandria would have called his “cooling” from being a pneuma to being a psyche (playing on a fun, but wrong, etymology of the latter word). Just as the first Adam was demoted to psychic existence, Paul is saying, so the last Adam has reclaimed pneumatic existence: hence, Paul goes on to say, so too shall we in and through him, the “celestial” man (15:42-49). “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” Paul writes in 15:50, but pneuma—the substance and state of the original, heavenly Adam—can... Paul’s notion of salvation is nothing less than reclamation of the angelic, astral state of deified beings, including the original Adam, in Early Judaism.
"... whether Paul’s Adam and Paul’s Christ are scientifically or theologically untenable depend largely on whether we are judiciously reconstructing Paul’s own views—which are far more versatile than we typically give them credit for—or are merely retrojecting our own habits of thinking. Paul—and the rest of the New Testament authors, for that matter—are often not saying what we are used to thinking they are saying; for that reason, we often invent more problems for ourselves than are necessary in theology."
These notes are taken directly from A Perennial Digression essay Paul's Adam and Paul's Christ (behind a paywall, however ... my interpolations are in grey) If anyone wants greater detail on any point, I'd be happy to provide, as long as I don't end up pasting the complete essay into responses.
There is a view I've put forward more than once, by a number of theologians, that the Fall is regarded as something 'outside' of our timeline. That the Big Bang and all subsequent history is as a result and consequence of the Fall, rather than the fall happening somewhere along our evolutionary timeline. This has been termed the 'alterist' view of our origins. The traditional view is the 'perseverist, that God created the spatio-temporal and material world as we currently experience it, and Adam fell within that.
"In this (alterist) protology, the original state of human beings was angelic in character: not absolutely incorporeal ... but possessed of a corporeality which was radically glorious, in which time, space, and matter were full of the divine presence and means of communion."
"Insofar as the beginning and the end coinhere with one another, then, the final end of humanity will be a restored angelic corporeality, in which the human body and the material kosmos are restored to their proper state in the divine pleroma of God’s indwelling presence, what rabbinic theology and Kabbalah after it would call the Shekhinah.
"... Both Testaments witness to a single God, and therefore the God who creates the world is also the God who saves it: and within those two poles even the fallen state of corporeality which we experience is itself an expression of divine oikonomia, “economy” or “administration” of the human fall so as to orchestrate human and cosmic redemption, centered around the covenants with Israel, the advent of Christ, and the communion of the Church.
"But alterism also happens to better reflect the Early Jewish milieu of the New Testament, especially the apocalyptic and sapiential traditions which envision human origins and destiny by reference to the angels. In several Early Jewish texts, Adam begins his existence as a kind of angelic or even quasi-divine being.
"There are already inklings of this tradition ... insofar as the Adam made in Genesis 1:26-28 is in the divine image while the Adam of Genesis 2:4-3:24 is made from the dust of the earth and inbreathed to become a nephesh chayyah, a “living being” or “living soul” (in Greek, psyche zon). In the Greek translation of the Septuagint, the distinction between these two creation narratives is signaled by the verb poieio, “make” in the first narrative and plasso, “mould” in the second.
"Early Jewish expansions and commentaries on the Adam stories pick up on these ideas, whether by the multiplication of Adams—a divine, celestial Adam and a terrestrial shadow... Philo writes in De Confusione Linguarum 62-63 that the heavenly, androgynous man of Genesis 1:26-28 is none other than the Logos, the deuteros theos who mediates between God and kosmos, while the man of Genesis 2:4ff is an earthly copy.
"In 2 Enoch 30:12, Adam is created a “second angel” on the earth. In other texts, the angels are dazzled by Adam’s celestial glory – since the light with which he is enrobed is in fact the light of creation’s first day in Genesis 1 ... Eve, furthermore, is created as a kind of diminution of Adam’s divine, angelic, celestial, and androgynous glory as he is split into male and female... the two continue to form the primal Adam even once parted ... It is only at Adam’s expulsion from the Garden that God gives Adam and Eve “garments of skin,” thus demoting them to fleshed existence (Gen 3:21).
"Just as Adam is thought to have contained Eve, originally, so too many Early Jews seem to have thought that he comprehended all human souls, an idea that would become essential to later Kabbalah ... periodically throughout the Old Testament and in early Jewish thought, different humans could reclaim “all the glory of Adam”... Noah, Enoch, Melchizedek, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and Elijah all receive some form of metamorphosis to this angelic, divine glory in several of the Early Jewish texts in which they appear, and many Early Jews seem to have believed that the Jerusalem Temple (or, for Qumranites, its temporary replacement) offered a kind of angelic deification.
"And of course, some early Jews ... also believed in angelic or divine messiahs, like the community that produced the Parables of Enoch, including the followers of Jesus, who conceptualized him in this way, all of whom were followed by later rabbinic and kabbalistic thinkers, several of whom also believed in the Messiah’s heavenly preexistence and descent into the world. Adam’s glory was lost in this world but periodically regained, piecemeal in the present aeon (olam hazeh) but nationally by the people of Israel (and perhaps the righteous among the gentiles) in the aeon to come (olam habah). Indeed, the restoration of Adam’s glory even to this world, the restitution of the Adam Kadmon, remained the mystical ideal in Judaism well into the period of the medieval and early modern kabbalists.
"When Paul talks about Adam ... he should be read with the grain of Early Jewish apocalyptic and sapiential thought about Adam, as it was received in later Judaism and Christianity, not against it... So, for instance, in 1 Corinthians 15:22: “For just as in Adam all die, thus also in the Christ all will be made alive.”
"(In) the divine, angelic, celestial Adam, the paradisaical Adam existing in a pretemporal form of the universe to our own—all die, because all human souls were contained in that Adam; in Christ, all will be made alive, for the exact same reason. This is not Augustinian original sin: it is something much more metaphysically complicated and morally demanding.
"On this reading of Paul, every human soul is a fragment of the primordial Adam, whose sinful moral activity in this world is in fact the very condition of the pretemporal Adam’s fall. Likewise, in the eschatological future, all will be made alive in Christ, in whom the primordial unity of the fallen, cosmic Adam is restored. How shall this be? 1 Corinthians 15:45: “Thus also it is written: the first human Adam ‘became a living soul’; the last Adam a life-creating pneuma.”
"Again, reading Paul in the context of Early Judaism ... it is completely possible to read Paul as creatively retconning the creation story of Genesis 2:7 from being a story about Adam’s first creation to being a story about Adam’s diminution from his heavenly, pneumatic state to a terrestrial, psychic state, what Origen of Alexandria would have called his “cooling” from being a pneuma to being a psyche (playing on a fun, but wrong, etymology of the latter word). Just as the first Adam was demoted to psychic existence, Paul is saying, so the last Adam has reclaimed pneumatic existence: hence, Paul goes on to say, so too shall we in and through him, the “celestial” man (15:42-49). “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” Paul writes in 15:50, but pneuma—the substance and state of the original, heavenly Adam—can... Paul’s notion of salvation is nothing less than reclamation of the angelic, astral state of deified beings, including the original Adam, in Early Judaism.
"... whether Paul’s Adam and Paul’s Christ are scientifically or theologically untenable depend largely on whether we are judiciously reconstructing Paul’s own views—which are far more versatile than we typically give them credit for—or are merely retrojecting our own habits of thinking. Paul—and the rest of the New Testament authors, for that matter—are often not saying what we are used to thinking they are saying; for that reason, we often invent more problems for ourselves than are necessary in theology."