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Nick: New page: '''Pre-Adamite hypothesis''' or '''Preadamism''' is the religious belief that humans existed before Adam, the first human being named in the Bible. This belief has a l...

2011-01-20T11:56:38Z

New page: '''Pre-Adamite hypothesis''' or '''Preadamism''' is the religious belief that humans existed before Adam, the first human being named in the Bible. This belief has a l...

New page

'''Pre-Adamite hypothesis''' or '''Preadamism''' is the religious belief that humans existed before [[Adam and Eve|Adam]], the first human being named in the [[Bible]]. This belief has a long history, probably having its origins in early pagan responses to [[Abrahamic]] claims regarding the origins of the [[human]] race.

Advocates of this hypothesis are known as "preadamites", as are the humans believed by them to have existed before Adam.

== History and development of the hypothesis ==
===Early development===
The first known debate about human antiquity took place in 170 AD between [[Theophilus of Antioch]] and an [[Aegyptus (Roman province)|Egyptian]] [[paganism|pagan]] [[Apollonius]], who argued that the world was 153,075 years old. Figures such as this occur regularly in [[Ancient Greece|Greek]] and [[Ancient Rome|Roman]] literature, as do the claims that the world and mankind have always existed.

The most serious early challenge to [[Bible|biblical]] Adamism came from the [[Roman Emperor]] [[Julian the Apostate]] who, upon his rejection of [[Christianity]] and his conversion to [[Theurgy]], a late form of [[Neoplatonism]], accepted the idea that many pairs of original people had been created, a belief termed co-Adamism or multiple-Adamism. Genesis 1:27-28 might allow for co-creation of multiple pairs, if the word "them" were construed accordingly: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it;..." In addition, if a framework of strictly sequential chronology were adopted in interpreting the order of these texts from the ancient Middle East, it might be argued that Adam, and therefore Eve, are created a little later than the humans created in Genesis 1:27-28. On the other hand, Eve is called "the mother of all living" in Genesis 3:20. These are matters of interpretation which require careful contextual study, as in all cases of alleged conflicts in the Bible.

[[Augustine of Hippo|St Augustine’s]] book ''[[City of God (book)|The City of God]]'' contains two chapters indicating a debate between Christians and pagans over human origins: Book XII, chapter 10 is called "Of the falseness of the history that the world hath continued many thousand years", while that of book XVIII, chapter 40 is "The Egyptians’ abominable lyings, to claim their wisdom the age of 100,000 years". As the titles indicate, Augustine clearly believed that pagan ideas concerning the history and chronology of both the world and the human race were completely absurd and incompatible with the revealed truth that man's existence on the earth was not yet [[Genesis creation myth|six thousand years old]]. Augustine’s position on this matter was supported by most rabbis and also by the church fathers, who generally dismissed views on the antiquity of the world as myths and fables not requiring any considered refutation.<ref>Popkin, 1992, p. 27.</ref>

===ca. 1000 - 1700===
The [[Kuzari]] (c. 1130-1140), a book by the [[Jewish]] [[Spanish people|Spanish]] [[philosopher]] [[Yehuda Halevi|Judah ben Samuel Halevi]], features a debate between the King of the [[Khazars]] and a Jew, a Christian, and a [[Muslim]] [[theologian]] in which the King attempts to find out which is the true religion. The King asks the "friend" (the Jew) whether he is concerned that the Indians claim to have buildings and artifacts that are [[Dating Creation|millions of years old]]. The rabbi dismisses these beliefs as unworthy ideas held by a dissolute and unreliable people with no fixed form of religion, or book "concerning which a multitude of people held the same opinion". In this same work Halevi attacked a number of ideas that appeared in a book called ''[[Nabatean]] Agriculture'', written or translated by [[Ibn Wahshiyya]] in 904. The ideas, attributed to the [[Sabians|Sabeans]], were that people lived before Adam, that Adam had parents, and that he came from India. Halevi dismissed these notions simply by saying that these people did not know of the [[Revelation]] contained in [[Scripture]].

The presence of belief in men before Adam amongst the [[Familists]], a religious community in [[Friesland]], was noted by John Rogers in 1578.<ref>Almond, 1999, p. 51.</ref>

In 1591 [[Giordano Bruno]] argued that because no one could imagine that the Jews and the [[Ethiopian]]s had the same ancestry that God must have either created separate Adams or that Africans were the descendants of pre-Adamite races.<ref>Graves, 2003, p. 25.</ref>

The claims in ''Nabatean Agriculture'' mentioned above were also discussed by [[Maimonides]] in his ''[[Guide for the Perplexed]]'' through which they became known to the 17th century French [[Millenarian]] [[Isaac La Peyrère]] who, because of his influence on subsequent thinkers and movements, is usually credited with formulating Pre-Adamite theory. In his ''Prae-Adamitae'', published in Latin in 1655 La Peyrère argued that Paul's words in Chapter 5, verses 12-14 of his [[Epistle to the Romans]] should be interpreted such that "if [[Adam and Eve|Adam]] sinned in a morally meaningful sense there must have been an Adamic law according to which he sinned. If law began with Adam, there must have been a lawless world before Adam, containing people".<ref>Almond, 1999, p. 53.</ref> Thus, according to La Peyrère there must have been two creations: first the creation of the Gentiles and then that of Adam, who was father of the Jews. The existence of pre-Adamites, La Peyrère argued, explained [[Cain]]'s life after [[Abel]]'s murder which, in the [[Book of Genesis|Genesis]] account, involved the taking of a wife and the building of a city. This account of human origins became the basis for 19th century theories of [[polygenism]] and modern [[racism]].

Some date the origins of racial theory precisely to 24 April 1684 when [[François Bernier]] distinguished four or five races (with no [[hierarchical]] distinction between them) in an article (‘A new division of the Earth, according to the different species or races of men who inhabit it') published in the ''[[Journal des sçavans]]''.<ref>The full title of the paper was "Nouvelle Division De La Terre, pour les differente Especes ou Races d'hommes qui l'habitent, envoyée par un fameux voyageur à M. l'Abbé de la **** à peu prés on ces termes", ''Journal des sçavans'', 24 April 1684, pp. 133-140. The title is slightly different in the 1685 reprint in ''Journal des sçavans pour l'année M.DC.XXXIV'', pp. 148-155 - see Boulle, 2003, pp. 11-27.</ref> Because of widespread theological opposition to the pre-Adamite theories of his friend, La Peyrère, Bernier published his paper anonymously.<ref>Flood, 2003, pp. 52-53.</ref>

===Age of enlightenment===
During the [[Age of Enlightenment]] pre-Adamism was adopted widely as a challenge to the biblical account of human origins, whereas in the nineteenth century the idea was welcomed by advocates of white superiority. A number of racist interpretive frameworks involving the early chapters of Genesis have arisen from pre-Adamism. Some Pre-Adamite theorists held that Cain left his family for an inferior tribe described variously as "white [[Mongols]]". Pre-Adamites also claimed that Cain took a [[Awan|wife]] from one of the inferior pre-Adamite peoples. The idea that Cain’s mark was blackness arose in 18th century Europe and was also popular in 19th century America.<ref>Haynes, 2002, p. 15.</ref>

===ca. 1800 - present===
In 19th Century Europe polygenism and Pre-Adamism were attractive to those intent on demonstrating the inferiority of non-Western peoples, while in the [[United States]] they appealed to those attuned to racial theories who found it unattractive to contemplate a common history with non-Whites. Writers such as [[Charles Caldwell]], [[Josiah C. Nott]] and [[Samuel George Morton|Samuel G. Morton]], rejected the view that non-whites were the descendants of Adam. Morton combined pre-Adamism with [[craniometry|cranial measurements]] to construct a theory of racial difference that justified slavery. As Michael Barkun explains,

:In such an intellectual atmosphere, pre-Adamism appeared in two different but not wholly incompatible forms. Religious writers continued to be attracted to the theory both because it appeared to solve certain [[Exegesis|exegetical]] problems (where did Cain's wife come from?) and exalted the spiritual status of Adam's descendants. Those of a scientific bent found it equally attractive but for different reasons, connected with a desire to formulate theories of racial difference that retained a place for Adam while accepting evidence that many cultures were far older than the few thousand years humanity had existed, according to biblical chronology. The two varieties differed primarily in the evidence they used, the one relying principally on scriptural texts and the latter on what passed at the time for [[physical anthropology]].<ref>Barkun, 1996, p. 153.</ref>

Following the [[American Civil War]] Southerners were increasingly receptive to arguments supportive of black inferiority. In 1867 [[Buckner H Payne]] wrote a pamphlet under the pen name Ariel entitled ''The Negro: What is His Ethnological Status?'', in which he argued that the Negro is a pre-Adamic beast of the field (specifically, a higher order of monkey) which was preserved on the [[Noah's Ark|Ark]]. In 1891 [[William Campbell]] under the pen name "Caucasian" wrote in ''Anthropology for the People: A Refutation of the Theory of the Adamic Origin of All Races'' that the nonwhite peoples were not descendants of Adam and therefore "not brothers in any proper sense of the term, but inferior creations" and that [[polygenism]] was the "only theory reconcilable with scripture". Following Payne, Campbell viewed the [[flood geology|great flood]] as a consequence of intermarriage between the white (Adamic) and nonwhite (pre-Adamic) peoples "the only union we can think of that is reasonable and sufficient to account for the corruption of the world and the consequent judgement".<ref>quoted in Harvey, 2005, p. 43.</ref>

In an unusual blend of contemporary evolutionary thinking and pre-Adamism the [[Vanderbilt University]] [[Evolutionary creationism|theistic evolutionist]] and [[geology|geologist]] [[Alexander Winchell]] argued in his 1878 tract ''Adamites and Preadamites'' for the pre-Adamic origins of the human race on the basis that the Negroes were too racially inferior to have developed from the Biblical Adam. Winchell also believed that the laws of evolution operated according to the will of God.<ref>Smith, 2003, p. 50.</ref>

The Irish lawyer Dominick McCausland, a Biblical literalist and anti-Darwinian polemicist, maintained the theory as a means of upholding the Mosaic timescale. He held that the Chinese were descended from Cain, and that the "Caucasian" race would eventually exterminate all others. He maintained that only the "Caucasian" descendants of Adam were capable of creating civilisation, and tried to explain away the numerous non-"Caucasian" civilisations by attributing them all to a vanished "Caucasian", race, the Hamites.{{Citation needed|date=October 2007}}

The ideologies of [[British Israelism]], which developed in [[England]] in the 19th century, also sometimes involved a pre-Adamic worldview, though this was a minority position. According to this model the pre-Adamites were viewed as a race of inferior bestial creatures apart from Adam, who was the first white man and son of God. In this narrative [[Satan]] seduces Eve and the resulting offspring is a hybrid creature called Cain. Later Cain flees to East Turkestan to establish a colony of followers intent on realizing the Devil’s plan for domination of the earth. Further elaboration of this myth involved the identification of the Jews with [[Canaanites]], the putative descendants of [[Cain]] (although the [[eponym]]ous ancestor of Canaanites is not Cain but [[Canaan]]). It followed that, if the [[Tribe of Judah|tribes of Judah]] were supposed to have intermarried with Cain’s descendants, then the Jews were the offspring of Satan as well as sundry nonwhite pre-Adamic races.

In the United States, British Israelism developed into the aggressively [[anti-Semitic]] [[Christian Identity]] movement in which the Jews were increasingly seen as outside the domain of humanity.

==See also==
*[[Race (classification of human beings)|Race]]
*[[Slavery]]
*[[Sons of Noah]]
*[[Ham, son of Noah|Ham]]
*[[Shem]]
*[[Japheth]]
*[[Cradle of civilization]]
*[[Human history]]
*[[Garden of Eden]]
*[[Fertile crescent]]
*[[Antediluvian]]

==Footnotes==

==References and further reading==
*Almond, Philip C. (1999). ''Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-66076-9
*Barkun, Michael (1996). ''Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement''. UNC Press. ISBN 0-8078-4638-4
*Boulle, Pieere H. (2003). François Bernier and the Origins of the Modern Concept of Race. In Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (Eds.). ''The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France'' (pp. 11–27). Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-3117-9
*Duncan, Isabella (1860). ''Pre-Adamite Man; or, The story of our old planet & its inhabitants, told by Scripture and science''. Original imprint: London: Saunders, Otley, and Co., Conduit Street. London: F. Shoberl, Printer, 37, Dean Street, Soho. NB. Some later editions were published under her married name, Mrs George John C. Duncan.
*Griffin, Lee (1863). ''Pre-Adamite Man: the story of the human race, from 35,000 to 100,000 years ago.'' New York.
*Randolph, Paschal Beverly (1869). ''Pre-Adamite man : demonstrating the existence of the human race upon the earth 100,000 thousand years ago!''. Boston : William White.
*Flood, Gavin (2003). ''The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism''. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 0-631-21535-2
*Frederickson, George M. (1987). ''The Black Image in the White Mind''. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-6188-6
*Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (2003). ''Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity''. New York, NY: NYU Press. ISBN 0-8147-3155-4
*Graves, Joseph L. (2003). ''The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium''. Newark, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ISBN 0-8135-3302-3
*Haynes, Stephen R. (2002). ''Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery''. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514279-9
*Harvey, Paul (2005). ''Freedom's Coming : Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era''. UNC Press. ISBN 0-8078-2901-3
*Livingstone, David N. (2008). ''Adam’s ancestors : race, religion, and the politics of human origins''. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0801888137.
*Popkin, Richard Henry (1992). ''Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought''. Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN 90-04-09324-9
*Smith, Christian (2003). ''The Secular Revolution''. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-23000-0
*Swain, Carol M. (2002). ''The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-80886-3

== External links==
*A.J. Maas, [http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12370a.htm "Preadamites"], ''Catholic Encyclopedia'' (1911) : [[Catholic]] view
*[http://www.marycoredemptrix.com/CenterReview/center_review_6_2004_adamite.html "Neanderthal Man: Pre-Adamite, Co-Adamite, or Adamite?"], '''29''' ''Creation Research Society Quarterly'' (Mar. 1993) : Protestant [[creation science]] view
*[[Hugh W. Nibley]], [http://farms.byu.edu/display.php?table=transcripts&id=73 "Before Adam"], Provo, Utah: Maxwell Institute : Latter-day Saint view

[[Category:Adam and Eve]]
[[Category:Antisemitism|P]]
[[Category:Theology]]
[[Category:Pseudohistory]]

Pre-Adamite - Revision history

Beza 1598: /* External links */

Nick: Protected "Pre-Adamite" [edit=autoconfirmed:move=autoconfirmed]

Nick: New page: '''Pre-Adamite hypothesis''' or '''Preadamism''' is the religious belief that humans existed before Adam, the first human being named in the Bible. This belief has a l...