The journey of Adam and Eve

Trying to reconcile a belief in the literal truth of the Bible with the facts of the world as we observe it has never been the easiest of things. But heaven knows, people did try. Well enough known, I suppose, is the work of the 17th-century Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, who totted up all those begats to establish that the creation of the earth took place at six in the afternoon on 23 October 4005 bc. (‘He added,’ reports Stephen Greenblatt, ‘that Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise on Monday, November 10.’) In like manner, in the 18th century, a French mathematician called Denis Henrion calculated, from a bunch of what were presumably dinosaur bones, that Adam had been 123’ 8” tall and that Eve had been 118’ 9”.

In the 19th century Philip Gosse, disconcerted by the growing evidence from the fossil record that things might not have gone quite as the Book of Genesis claims, reasoned triumphantly that if Adam had a navel (which he must have had, because he’d have looked weird without one), then God put it there — and so the new discoveries of the geologists were like Adam’s tummy-button. God put them there just to baffle and amuse us.

By the 19th century, though, people were prepared to greet this sort of speculation with open laughter. His peers never stopped giggling at poor old Gosse. Here was, if not the end, then the beginning of the end, to the story of Adam and Eve as it had been understood through much of Western history. But, as Stephen Greenblatt’s gently punning title indicates, there was a rise before this Fall.

Greenblatt, a scholar of early modern literature and the inventor of something called ‘the New Historicism’, is a bit of an academic superstar in the United States.