One Christian anti-evolution argument that I came across recently goes something like this: evolution can’t be true because Jesus believed in a historical Adam and Eve, a historical fall, etc., and this is incompatible with evolution. Clearly this is an argument aimed only at convincing other Christians.

What’s interesting here is the implicit view of Jesus. In olden times there were indeed Christian writers who seemed to think that the man Jesus possessed divine omniscience. But more recently this view has been abandoned by most theologians for a variety of reasons. Not least of which is that it contradicts the Nicene Creed itself: if Jesus is truly human, then his knowledge must have been limited. Strict omniscience isn’t, as far as we know, a potential human capability.

Jesus was a man of his time; his mind was formed by the concepts and language available to him in his particular context, and so on. It would be absurd–wouldn’t it?–to think that Jesus knew, for instance, all of modern physics, or that Barack Obama would be elected the 44th president of the U.S.A., or that he was familiar with post-structuralist literary theory.

Maybe I’m naive, but surely no one wants to defend the omniscience of the historical Jesus in this strong sense. So, at least on first blush, it would seem that there’s no problem with saying that Jesus likewise was unfamiliar with evolution and probably had a view of the development of living things that he inherited from his culture and its sacred stories, most prominently the creation narrative in Genesis. More speculatively, Jesus may not even have had the conceptual apparatus for clearly distinguishing between “myth,” history, sacred story, and scientific explanation that we take for granted.

Still, I imagine the idea that Jesus was wrong about Adam and Eve (assuming for the sake of argument that he did believe in what we’d call a “historical” Adam and Eve) may not sit well with a lot of people. Maybe the discomfort here comes from the suggestion that Jesus was wrong about something of specifically religious importance. Sure, we may say, Jesus can’t have been expected to know everything there was to know about science, history, geography, and so on. But surely the Son of God knew all there was to know about moral and religious subjects!

What this objection assumes, though, is that the “religious truth” of the Genesis story is identical, or at least inextricably bound up with, the existence of a historical Adam and Eve. If we deny this (as I think we should), then we can say that Jesus was correct about the “religious” issue–in this case his diagnosis of the human condition–while admitting that his apprehension of this truth might have been expressed in a way that we can’t share. In other words, Jesus was right about sin even if he was wrong about Adam and Eve.*
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*For what it’s worth–and I’m well out of my depth here–my impression is that Judaism has a very different understanding of the significance of the story of Adam and Eve from the one that has prevailed in Christian churches; so, what Jesus understood as the significance of that story may well not be identical, or even very similar, to how most Christians have understood it.