Oh, Kill Me Now!
“This day is getting to be more and more trying. It was selected and set apart last November as a day of rest. I already had six of them per week, before. This morning found the new creature trying to clod apples out of that forbidden tree.”~ Mark Twain, Extracts from Adam’s Diary.
IN THE PSEUDEPIGRAPHA, resides the First Book of Adam and Eve. I at first approached this apocryphal book with great interest, hoping for some elucidation of the missing portions in Genesis. After reading it, I was very clear about why it was not included in the Bible we accept today. From a literary standpoint, it is poorly written, repetitious and aggravating in its absurdity (though, honestly, so is much of the bible; I thought I would scream before making it through the purple prose of the Book of Job).
The chapter of the Book of Adam and Eve
Each chapter of the Book of Adam and Eve is normally only a few paragraphs long, and in each one, you can find Adam and/or Eve “weeping” and fraught with all manner of fear and trembling before God. Adam repeatedly dies or kills himself and is constantly resurrected by God. This is fine once or twice, but when it happens over and over again, in almost every short chapter, it just becomes intolerable. All right, already! We get it. God can resurrect humans. Got it.
In just the first half of the book only, Adam and/or Eve either wept or were weeping approximately 40 times. They fell down in fear and often died on the spot from grief or fear or some other factor some 35 times; God resurrected them from death every single time.
When one reads closely, it is like reading a manual of how a cult leader wears down his subjects until finally he has them completely at his mercy and worshipping him no matter what heinous acts he might perpetrate upon them.
The entire thing was so absurd and so disgusting on so many levels, that I could scarcely suffer through it, and only did so, so that I could say I had actually read all of it, and could then speak of it with an appreciable amount of credibility.
The only interesting things I gleaned from the text were two:
First, According to this, Adam and Eve were not “human” or at least not “of the flesh” until after they left the Garden.
They noticed that their bodies were now different, and reacted as if they were for the first time, walking on the ground. They were fearful of the terrain. And they also realized that they now required food or water to survive. Had they been spirits? Angels? Essences?
Second, God told them they had “five days and a half” to exist in this new world. Adam lamented, (crying again) but God explained that what he meant was 5,000 and 500 years, and “One would come and save him and his seed.”
Well okay, so no worries about the Second Coming for another 3,000 years almost! Why is everyone so anxious and why are there so many Christians insisting that the world is about to end? Is it because God is notorious for making proclamations and prophesies that don’t come to fruition? And even then, according to the First Book of Adam and Eve, everyone gets to be saved, because EVERYONE will be of the seed of Adam, since EVERYONE sprang from him, right? So when referring to the “Seed,” instead of the seed of one man, among others who have seed, it seems it means the seed of humans in general.
