Todd said:
But is it not possible that Adam and/or his lineage influenced the "others" into sinning just as the serpent did with Eve and Eve with Adam? This would still hold true the fact that one man brought sin into the world.
There is a golden rule of how to approach language or literature when doing an analysis of it. We call it the historical, grammatical, and literary rule. We define the words in the historical context. We interpret words in their precise grammatical structure. We examine the book or text in its overall literary style (poetry, wisdom, legal, prophecy, etc). Some call it genre analysis, but that is sometimes stretched too far and in ways I do not mean here. In short some simply call it literal interpretation.
As for the Greek grammar of Romans 5:12 it will not do to say that Adam influenced others to sin later. The text by the actual rules of grammar demand that we accept the idea that when Adam sinned his sin at that very moment placed all of humanity inside of him as guilty before God. the English translations get it basically right by saying: When Adam sinned all sinned." they rightly connect our sin to his sin. When he sinned we did to, or at least we were charged with it in God's mind. Interestingly too we can see this plays out
experientially for Eve. As soon as Adam ate it was then (not before) that
Eve's eyes were opened. She was not charged or guilty of sin before God until her head ate and he, as her perfect representation (her head), imputed sin to her as the head to the body. That historically as we see in it Genesis is confirmed by Romans 5:12 by the tenses of the verb. When Adam sinned ALL SINNED. Al of humanity at that very moment stood guilty before God.
Theologians have come up with a term to describe this. It is called the doctrine of Imputation. Adam's sin was imputed, or charged, to the whole human race as soon as he disobeyed God's law. That was imputed, put to all of mankind's account. Why? Because Adam, as the name suggests, was the representative and perfect head of the race and he stood in our place and he did what we would have done had we been there. But, in a sense we WERE there because we were in his loins, we were all in Adam in seminal form. So when he acted we with him acted.
The doctrine of Christ's righteousness as the second Adam also plays into this. Our sins were imputed to him and his righteousness is imputed to us. he bore our sins and we now wear his righteousness. Some want to reject the doctrine of Adam's imputation of sin to us but that is inconsistent if we accept Christ as the second Adam. Christ as the second Adam fulfilled what the first did not. He lived righteously so that when he paid our debt our sins were imputed to him in exchange for his righteouness being imputed to us (Romans 5:12-20).
Another rule beyond the grammar rule is the literary analysis rule. That is that we start with the clear direct statements in any piece of literature (Scripture, legal texts, law books, fictional books etc) and build from that. There is about a sixfold breakdown of authority or degrees of authority in statements in literature.
The first three levels are 1. Direct Statements, 2. Direct Implications, 3. Logical Inferences.
The next levels include general assumptions from science or common grace revelation and outright speculation.
In this case I always ask someone, is not the burden of proof on the one wanting to build a view that has no direct statement from Scripture? Seems like to me this is what people do against the doctrine of marriage all the time. They build their theology on sub-levels of 4-6 or so type ideas and use the
less clear to overrule the clearer texts of Scripture.
I'm always curious as to motive too when this is where people begin. If we have
direct statements of Scripture to lay as our foundation to work upward from I am always curious as to why we would begin with an unclear statement or a speculative idea and then try and build upon that as our chief foundation to the rest of the ideas as we try and make those direct statements fit into our proposed speculative idea.
That type of literature analysis is not accepted for any piece of other literature in any respectable field. So I would suggest that we do not start with it in our approach to the Bible either if we want to arrive at respectable conclusions that honor the totality of Scripture as a whole.
In this case we have no hint of any other human alive, we have direct statements that Adam's sin ruined the whole human race, that when he sinned all actually sinned at that moment in time, his name represents and means all of mankind, Acts tells us all came from him, and no Scripture anywhere else gives a direct or even an implied hint that others were alive before them or with them.
Thus the burden of proof would seem to rest on those who want to start there and try and make the rest of Scripture fit into a speculation or theory instead of building our views upon the clear and direct statements we do have. If there is a specific text of Scripture that says something else then that might be another game to work with. But in the absence of a text or set of texts it seems like an approach to literature that is not on safe methodological grounds.
