Adam in the story of Genesis is a mythical construct of the biblical authorship determined to give an account of the origin and destiny of a particular nation of people, but starts out as a universal myth of man’s origin.  And there we have it, for even in today’s usage of the term ‘man’ we have a single representative term for ‘all men’.  We say, for example, man is ingenious, or man is the cause of the world’s woes, or man has conquered space.  This ‘man’ is no particular man we refer to, but it implies a collective individual.  We simply replace the name Adam by the term 'man'.  Adam in the myth of the garden of Eden stands for man as in all men, and Eve for all women.  Thereby are they representative.

The myth has significance for the whole of humanity. Christ, by contrast, is a historical individual, but as in Adam, Christ is ‘man’, the clue to this being his own self-endowed title of the ‘Son of Man’.  It is said that all men as ‘man’ sin in Adam who represents them and therefore as ‘man’ are redeemed by Christ whose humanity subsumes all mankind or ‘man’.

To think of Adam in the myth of the garden of Eden as an historical person in his own right, and Eve, for that matter, is premature, and confuses the all-inclusiveness of man in Adam in the myth with an historical individual in his own right subsequently.  Indeed, the biblical authorship signifies the fall of Adam’s representation of man one with his being cast out of the mythical garden, when indeed, he becomes de-mythologised and sets out on a new tack as the genealogical head of an elected people destined to be restored to favour in God’s sight.  Manifestly, in genealogical terms, all men are not descended from Adam, though being represented by Adam in the Garden of Eden.  Fallen Adam’s narrow genealogical line of descent yet holds the seed of an event as extraordinary as the myth of the Adam in  the garden of Eden and as all-embracing in its representation of man in the historical Christ, who, genealogically descended from the mythical turned historical fallen Adam, as the ‘Son of Man’, resumes by his divinity the representation of ‘man’ as the new Adam in whom by divine grace we are raised to life eternal.