Jesus said that Adam and Eve were real. Nothing in the Bible supports the notion that most clerics have today, that they were metaphors. Paul said that in Adam all are killed by sin whereas in Christ they are redeemed. So if Adam is a myth, so is Jesus. If Jesus could not get the past right, then how can we trust him to tell us what God says?
Original sin is the doctrine that when Adam the first man ate the forbidden fruit according to the first book of the Bible, that this was a terrible infraction of divine law that cut him off God and made us born in the same rebellious state.
Original sin is supposed to be why we needed the atonement of Christ to make up for it so that we could be put right with God.
No good God would let us be born in such a state for he would want us to be with him in every moment of precious time. The Church says that the human weakness in us is evidence for this original sin. But it is just evidence for weakness and that is all. God is universally insulted to justify the claim that nobody is saved without Jesus for all have descended from Adam and inherited his antagonism towards God like a virus.
Getting regenerated or "born again" or new birth is presented as the solution. This concept seems to differ according to religious persuasion. To a Catholic, it means the start of God deciding to have a loving relationship with you at baptism. To the Protestant, it is the same thing but Protestants often think it happens when they accept Jesus consciously as their substitute who earned salvation for them by paying for their sins for them.
The born again thinking is terribly hurtful to good people who are not believers for it implies that they are spiritually lacking and defective. It is really no better than racism especially when it teaches that people who have never heard the gospel will not be saved and will have to pay for their own sins in Hell. Even to suggest that God might find some other way to save them implies that they might not be saved and they might be ripe for Hell. That is wholly impermissible.
The new birth allegedly removes original sin which causes our bias towards sin so it results in a holy life. Whether we are talking about born again Protestants or Catholics, most of them do not act in any remarkably virtuous way so the new birth has overtones of quackery and self-deception. Genuine concern checks if the remedies offered by faith and religion for human harmfulness do anything. Nobody cares. It is not about helping babies but bringing them into a tradition or religion. There is too much disobedience and sin among those who are supposedly washed from original sin and sin in general. They are not "fixed".
People took stories like Adam and so on literally in ages past. Theologians today who say it is symbolic cannot give us a Bible verse that says it was. The accounts look implausible but that does not mean they could not be history. The theologians are making assumptions and treating them as the word of God. To find absurdities and contradictions in the Adam story and claim that they indicate that the story is symbolically true but not literally true is dishonest. If we use that approach all the time we will have to start saying that every problematic story say in paganism is true.
Adam did not exist so original sin is false. There is no documentary evidence and DNA overthrows it. The incoherence in the Genesis account of his life does not help either.
The Bible often crafts stories presented as accurate history to teach us moral and theological lessons.
Some would say that the story of the underage Mary having a dangerous pregnancy that God approved of and specifically asked for tells us something about abortion is an example. They would say that it implies that the principle behind abortion, "An unborn baby does not have an equal right to life with the mother" is evil and wrong.
Similarly, Adam and Eve is meant to answer questions such as, "Who started off human life? Why do men want to marry women? Why is God's good creation so bad now?"
In any case, Adam and Eve are clearly denied to be products of evolution. The story says that Adam refused God when he offered him a companion from the animals and that means apes and whatever else was around then. There was no woman until later.
How should we understand the story of Adam being alone all alone and then God making Eve for him? How should we understand it in the light that God brought animals to Adam to see if they would be any good? Is Eve a last resort?
Genesis clearly shows that God bringing the animals to Adam to find a helpmeet - literally "a helper and partner worthy of and suited to him and complimentary to him" is a test to show that a man needs a woman. It is intended, as well, to indicate that bestiality is wrong. And it is clearly homophobic. But it does in fairness show that a man and woman are equal and together are amazing and incredible. It implies a woman has a good influence on a man and is to be his beneficial advisory.
God is incapable. He clumsily decides that it is not good for Adam to be alone and brings him animals to mate with. In those religious times, goddesses and gods were partly or fully animals and engaged in bestiality. We are not told if Adam tried sex with them and didn't like it or got bored. The animals being brought to Adam would seem to be a hint that this is what happened.
Adam's rib is cloned by God to make Eve. The account never says Adam consented to this. If there was no suffering in that world, then why did God put him to sleep? The implication is that God wanted to exploit him. He didn't care about his choice. The rib is built up into a new person and it is a woman. It must have been gender-changed then. She is presented as a last resort.
New Testament writers gloss over the errors in the legend.
Jesus alleges that the story shows that marriage is a union of lifelong commitment involving man and woman for their bodies fit. What woman means is anybody's guess for in that age female children were expected to wed and get pregnant as soon as they could. Even today in some systems a girl is called woman.
The serpent tells the woman in Genesis that when God told her to eat of any tree, but one, he meant all the trees were out of bounds. She in childlike fashion agrees with him. This is not an adult. [If she is then the story is misogynistic implying that women are stupid that they forget what they hear and imagine what they heard.] The implications are jarring. Adam was a child abuser and she was a child bride.
[Jesus sensed this for he went out of his way to ban females from divorcing though he knew they were forced to wed too young and impregnated too young. He appealed to Genesis in support of his teaching.
Also the teaching of Jesus is paraphrased and elaborated on by Paul, in 1 Corinthians 7. He writes that the alternative to marriage is sexual immorality so a man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and she with her husband. He says it is not about the man asking the woman for sex, but him in love sacrificing himself to deal with her needs. He says it is not about the woman asking the man for sex, but about her sacrificing in love to deal with his needs. This implicitly says that any sex outside of man-woman marriage is a sin.]
For Genesis, the man and woman together are the image of God. The declaration comes later that man will be the master of his wife. That is a punishment for their sin. They were originally totally equal.
Psalm 8:5 says that God has made human beings only a bit lower than the angels. The angels were seen as supernatural glorious super-powered beings so to say that humans are rather like them is very flattering. This rejects the common notion today that we are rather just a little higher than the ape-like creatures we came from.
Genesis 2:7 says that Adam’s life began with his first breath. Christians warn we cannot say the same thing about babies for Adam was made from the ground not a uterus so it is not the same thing. But why not? Perhaps Adam was alive like a big foetus but did not become a person until God breathed in him. This would allow abortion up to first breath. If Genesis is right then their argument falls apart.
Genesis is clear that eating the forbidden fruit was a terrible sin. Additionally, the story says that according to Eve, Adam was asked not to touch the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God made this law. Eating or touching the tree was not wrong in itself. God made it wrong. The story implies that sin is not exactly doing harm - it is the disobedience to divine authority that is the problem. Original sin if it exists then causes the wish to unify law and morality in the name of God.
Theologians say that the tree was called the tree of knowledge of good and evil because anybody who partook from it would learn by experience what it is to stop being good and become evil. They deny that Adam was going to get a purely intellectual knowledge of these things without experiencing them. This is actually a very mystical idea. Many of us are fuzzy on what good and evil are and see it all as a spectrum of grey. God must have sent some kind of religious experience on them. The fruit did not do that. He did.
In conclusion, the Adam and Eve legend, when examined critically, raises significant challenges to traditional Christian doctrines such as original sin and the necessity of atonement through Christ. The story’s inconsistencies, its symbolic interpretations presented as literal truth, and the absence of historical or scientific evidence undermine the foundational claims of inherited guilt and universal human depravity. Moreover, the implications of this legend—especially its views on gender, morality, and divine justice—reveal troubling assumptions that conflict with modern understandings of equality and goodness. Rather than serving as a factual account, the Adam and Eve narrative appears to function more as a mythological framework to address profound human questions, but one that should not be used to justify exclusion, condemnation, or doctrinal inflexibility. Christianity, if it is to remain relevant and compassionate, must reconsider the role and interpretation of this legend in light of reason, evidence, and ethical progress.