The Adamic Origin of the Human Nature of Christ

The dogma that Christ is true man implies not only the reality and integrity of His human nature, but likewise the origin of that nature from Mary. It is this latter fact which, beyond all else, guarantees the reality and integrity of our Lord’s sacred manhood. In other words, Christ is truly and integrally a man because, by maternal generation from the Virgin-Mother Mary, He is a “Son of Adam” according to the flesh, and consequently our “Brother.” To establish unity of species between Himself and us it would have been sufficient for the Logos to have brought His humanity with Him from Heaven. But His humanity is specifically identical with ours. It is founded upon kinship of race and blood-relation. By His “real incorporation with our kind” in Adam, Jesus Christ is “bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.”

1. Heretical Doctrines on This Subject vs. the Teaching of the Church

Certain Gnostics of the second century, notably Valentinus¹ and Apelles, a disciple of Marcion,² who held an attenuated Docetism, admitted the reality and integrity of Christ’s human nature only after a fashion. Their theory was that He possessed a “celestial body.” This teaching involved a denial, first, of the earthly origin of Christ’s manhood, and second, of His conception and birth by the Virgin Mary. In describing the latter, Valentinus employed the simile of “water flowing through a channel.”³ Similar errors were harbored by the Paulicians of Syria,⁴ and, in modern times, by the Anabaptists, the Quakers, and certain pseudo-mystics of the sixteenth century.⁵

The Church never for a moment left her faithful children in doubt as to the true origin and descent of Jesus. The Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451) defined:

“We teach that He [Christ] is perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood, being truly God and truly man; that He is of a rational soul and body, consubstantial with the Father as touching the Godhead, and consubstantial with us as touching His manhood, being like us in all things, sin excepted; that, as touching His Godhead, He was begotten of the Father before the worlds; and, as touching His manhood, He was for us and for our salvation born of Mary, the Virgin, Mother of God.”⁶

This is a most important dogmatic definition, and to grasp its full import the student should ponder the following points:

1. Christ’s homoousia with the Father and His consubstantiality with the human race are not co-ordinate relations. The divine homoousia is based on “numerical identity,” whereas Christ’s consubstantiality with man rests on a purely “specific identity”⁷ which, however, in consequence of our common descent from Adam, is a true blood-relationship.
2. This blood-relationship arises formally and immediately from the fact of Christ’s being engendered in the Virgin Mary. Had He merely passed through her virginal womb, as Valentinus and his fellow sectaries held, no blood-relationship would have been established between Him and us.
3. In order to show that Christ’s temporal generation from His mother is equally true and real with His divine generation from the Eternal Father, the Council applies the same word — “begotten” — to both, without, of course, thereby denying the fundamental distinction between divine and creatural generation.
4. The dogma would not be complete without a distinct reference to the purpose of the Redemption, inasmuch as the Adamic origin of Christ is intimately bound up with His mediatorial office and the redemption of the human race. The creeds, including that of Chalcedon, bring out this soteriological relation with the phrase: “for us and for our salvation.”

2. The Teaching of Revelation

Holy Scripture teaches that Christ became consubstantial with man by descent from Adam, for the purpose of redeeming the human race, of which He is a member and a scion.

In the Old Testament the Redeemer was promised, first as “the seed of the woman,”⁸ later as “the seed of Abraham,” and finally as “the seed of David.” The New Testament frequently refers to Him as “the Son of David.”⁹

Whenever the inspired writers of the New Testament wish to point to the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecies in the life of Jesus Christ, they strongly emphasize His conception and birth from the Virgin Mary. So Luke 1:31–32: “Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bring forth a son… He … shall be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord shall give unto Him the throne of David his father.” Luke 1:35: “The Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.” Matthew 1:16: “And Jacob begot Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.” Romans 1:3: “Who was made of the seed of David, according to the flesh.” Galatians 4:4: “God sent his Son, made of a woman.”

These and many similar texts prove, first, that Christ is a genuine descendant of Adam, and second, that He traces His lineage by maternal generation through Mary, who was a daughter of Adam. The soteriological aspect is sharply accentuated by St. Paul when he says that the human race was redeemed by One who was not only God made man, but also of the blood of Adam. Hebrews 2:11, 14: “For both he that sanctifieth, and they who are sanctified, are all of one. For which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren … that, through death, he might destroy him who had the empire of death, that is to say, the devil.”¹⁰

In considering the Patristic tradition we note the remarkable fact that the early Fathers and ecclesiastical writers, down to the time of Fulgentius, attribute very great importance to the preposition “of” (ex) in the Scriptural formula “made of a woman.”

Tertullian, for instance, insists in his treatise On the Flesh of Christ that Christ was born of the Virgin and not merely through her, appealing to the angel’s word to Joseph, to the genealogy in Matthew, and to St. Paul’s own phrase “made of a woman” — asking pointedly whether this can mean merely “through a woman,” or “in a woman.”¹¹ St. Basil, in his treatise on the Holy Ghost, makes the same point: the Apostle’s choice of “out of the woman” rather than “through the woman” was deliberate, since “through” might suggest a mere transit, while “out of” expresses the true communication of nature between mother and child.¹²

We note in passing that Christ’s descent from Adam, and His blood-relationship with us, is not impaired by the fact that His conception was effected without male cooperation. As St. Ignatius of Antioch observes, “Our God Jesus Christ was conceived by Mary as the fruit of her womb, according to the decree of God — from the seed of David, ‘tis true, but of the Holy Ghost.”¹³ Whoever is born of a daughter of Adam, though without male cooperation, is a genuine descendant of Adam in all respects except original sin.¹⁴

Why did Christ choose to enter into blood-relationship with the children of Adam? Following St. Paul, the Fathers hold that the reason is found in the ulterior purpose of the Redemption. According to the classic teaching of St. Irenaeus, Christ, as man, was not, like Adam, formed of “the slime of the earth,” but born of a daughter of Adam, so that it would not be a different creation that needed to be saved, but the very same one recapitulated in Him.¹⁵ St. Athanasius puts it similarly: Christ took a body like ours “in order that the nations be of the same body and have a share with Christ.”¹⁶ Some of the Fathers say, more strongly still, that Christ assumed the flesh of the entire human race for the purpose of redemption. So St. Hilary: “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, that is, by assuming the nature of the entire human race.”¹⁷ And St. Leo the Great, still more graphically: “He dwelled among us, whom the Godhead of the Word had fitted to itself, whose flesh, taken from the womb of the Virgin, we are… He made His own the substance of our body, not of any material whatever, but of our proper substance.”¹⁸ These last statements, Pohle notes, are of course hyperboles, but they underline how seriously the Fathers took Christ’s real, bodily kinship with the race He came to save.

3. Incidental Theological Questions

a) Christ and the Name “Mother”

Although Sacred Scripture frequently refers to the Blessed Virgin Mary as “the mother of Jesus,”¹⁹ it cannot but surprise the careful student that Christ Himself never calls her by the tender name of “mother.” In Matthew 12:46 ff. He even expressly declines the title and points, with a semblance of harshness, to the higher duty of doing the will of His Heavenly Father. At the marriage feast of Cana Mary is anxious because “they have no wine,” and “Jesus saith to her: Woman, what is that to me and to thee? My hour is not yet come.”²⁰ From the Cross He charges her, “Woman, behold thy son,” committing her to the care of His favorite Apostle with the words, “Behold thy mother.”²¹

Pohle argues this pattern of address is not adequately explained simply by noting that “woman” was, among Jews and Greeks, a term of respect. A deeper theological explanation is needed. He finds it, first, in the fittingness that our Divine Redeemer should everywhere place His relation to His Heavenly Father above the ties of flesh and blood; and second, in the fact that a single figure of “the woman” runs from the Protevangelium in Genesis, through Isaias and the Gospels, to the Apocalypse²² — organically connecting the “first Gospel” to the “second,” and both to the “last,” namely St. John’s Revelation. He credits Alois Schäfer with developing this reading: the “woman” of the first promise of salvation in Paradise, the mother of Him who was to crush the Serpent’s head, and — in and through her — the mother of all who possess spiritual life, together with the Church itself, is the same “sign” heralded by Isaias and seen by St. John on Patmos.²³

b) Christ’s Outward Appearance

Regarding the outward physical appearance of Christ’s human nature, Pohle says plainly that we have no reliable information.²⁴ Tertullian’s claim that Christ closely resembled Adam — because the Creator, in fashioning our first parent, had “the Second Adam” before Him as a kind of pattern — is, Pohle says, an entirely gratuitous assumption.²⁵ The conjecture of several Fathers,²⁶ including Clement of Alexandria, Cyprian, and Tertullian himself, that our Lord’s bodily presence was unimpressive arose from a misreading of Isaiah 53:2, which describes the Messias specifically in His suffering, not His ordinary appearance. Alleged physical evidence — the Veil of Veronica, a supposed resemblance to an ancient Egyptian portrait at Karnak, the description attributed to the “ambassadors of King Abgar” — is examined and set aside as unreliable or spurious in each case.²⁷

Pohle’s own judgment is modest: it is safe to assume that the Son of God, conceived by the Holy Ghost, was beautiful in form and figure, of majestic mien and sympathetic presence; and that the absence of any trustworthy portrait of Him may be due to a purposive design of Divine Providence, lest the beauty of His manhood outshine His spiritual form and dignity.²⁸

Further Reading

J. Morris, Jesus the Son of Mary, 2 vols., London 1851 — P. Vogt, Der Stammbaum Christi bei … Matthäus und Lukas, Freiburg 1907 — J. M. Heer, Die Stammbäume Jesu nach Matthäus und Lukas, Freiburg 1910.

Notes