Adam

The name "Adam" not only is not said by Jesus, but in the four gospels it occurs only in the genealogy in Luke.. At age 13 it bothered me that the world was older than 6000 years, but for 54 years I have been a Christian without believing it or believing it is possible. I have been variously Methodist, Roman Catholic, Episcopalian and now Lutheran as a theistic evolutionist and still can't imagine believing the world Is only 6000 years old.

That's a reasonable position, though if you're not a Christian I don't see why you would think whether they're YEC or not is going to affect whether they go to Heaven or not. I last believed the world was created in six days in 1954. When my Presbyterian minister pushed me on the issue with his Westminster Confession, I (like almost all other teenage boys) stopped going to church. When I started college in 1960 I started questioning my agnosticism and became a Seeker. By 1961 I had gotten as far as Arianism (from believing the Gospel of Mark plus the Major Prophets from the OT), by 1962 I was trinitarian (accepting all three Synoptic gospels), by 1963 I was first ready to accept all the Bible--but based on the authority of the Church (as a Roman Catholic catechumen). That blew up when the priest insisted Natural Law implied anyone not a Christian would go to Hell. But by 1969 I could find a more liberal priest, got baptized and committed to believing the whole Bible (all 72 books). At that point I could first have taken Bryan College's oath. Until 1992, that is, when I broke from the Roman Catholic Church and no longer had a reason to believe the whole Bible. And I still don't. The obligation to believe the whole Bible (all 72 books) did not come until the Council of Trent in 1545 to 1563, but that Roman Catholic decision does not apply to me as a Lutheran--we broke away in 1517.

As I am Lutheran (ELCA, not true for LCMS) we diverged off from the Roman Catholic Church in 1517 before the Council of Trent settled the canon (72 books for them) and both plenary inspiration and verbal inerrancy. So I'm not committed to, say, the first 11 chapters of Genesis. Nevertheless I do believe there was a literal Adam and Eve (thus agreeing with papal interpretation by Pope Pius XII, as opposed to polygenism, a rather extreme racial version of physical anthropology). I'm allowed to agree with current scientific beliefs that the first Adam (the "Y" chromosome that all human males do in fact share) first lived some tens of thousands of years ago as compared with the first Eve (the "X" chromosome that took longer to stabilize because each female is limited to a dozen or less children, as compared to an Old Testament male like Jacob who had children from four women) over 100,000 years back. Beyond that there is plenty of evidence that we share more genes in common with the apes (presumably millions of years back), more genes in common with monkeys (like tens of millions?), with mammals (back at least to the mass extinction 65 million years ago).... What I am leading up to telling you is that the Gospel is true, the gospels are true, but nevertheless written by men. I have studied the four gospels thoroughly for 55 years and can identify seven written eyewitness records contained (as sources) within the four gospels. They're true. But I have never seen any indication that the editing of these seven sources was preserved by God from human error. Among the questionable additions is the darkness interpreted as as dark as an eclipse. Some early Christians cite some early pagan writers that tell of an eclipse or something like it (but then there is the impossibility of an eclipse occurring at Passover), but the references are obscure and have not been preserved. As myself a Charismatic, I have personal experience that Jesus is Lord and Savior. This does not prove three hours of darkness--maybe the cloud cover was appropriately dark and dismal the day Jesus died. A