JESUS AND WHY DOES THE NEW TESTAMENT SAY HE IS THE SECOND ADAM?

 
Paul, the apostle and first Christian writer, said nothing concrete about Jesus that could be taken as evidence that Jesus recently lived.  Some think he thought Jesus was a spirit being of some kind or something magical and not really human.

Paul in 1 Corinthians said that he had a right to marry as did the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Peter (9:5). He didn't say he had a right to marry because Jesus had done it. An anti erotic tendency was in the Church from the start and even influenced official Church teaching. These considerations lead believers to hold that Jesus Christ was not married. But the gospels speak of Jesus being alone with loose women and allowing and protecting marriage. They don't mention Jesus being married but a man of his age would have had to have been married. People would not take to an unmarried man any more than they would a homosexual for marriage was considered to be of extreme importance.
 
So Jesus had to have been married if the gospels are even basically true in what they say about him. But he wasn't when we consider the reasons against his being a married man. The only solution is that Jesus was really so obscure nobody knew if he had a wife or not or he was only known when he started appearing to people claiming to be a resurrected being.

Anyway, Paul writing not many years after Jesus supposedly died according to the gospels, described Jesus as the second Adam. The first Adam was the first of his kind, the originator of the human race. Christians say Jesus was the second Adam not in the sense that God made him directly like he made Adam without a father and mother. They say Paul agreed for Paul wrote that Jesus had a mother. This argument is weak for Paul wrote that Jesus was born of woman so his mother could have been just a host mother and Jesus could have been made directly in her womb without her egg and without a sperm.
 
They say that Jesus was not the second Adam in the sense that he would father a new race like Adam for he didn’t. But the Bible does say we are spiritually connected to Jesus. In the spiritual sense, he is an Adam.
 
Some scholars say that Jesus was not the second Adam in the sense that Adam made a decision that destroyed us. For Christians, Jesus had to make the same choice - for God or against him - as Adam did. Jesus was to make this decision anew but this time to bring us life. Adam brought us death and antagonism from God. But the reality is, Jesus' choice has not undone what Adam did except for some but in the sense that he was the first to be our spiritual father and save us and found a new race not by procreation but by changing us to save us.
 
We cannot argue that Jesus was the second Adam in the sense that he was not an earthly man at all but the first of his kind on the basis of him being called the second Adam only. It could be that but we need more.

Read 1 Corinthians 15:45-50. Paul said that Adam was made of dust and became a soul or person when he became alive and that Jesus was something that became a life-giving spirit when he came alive too. Paul was on about life starting because he quoted Genesis saying that Adam became a living being to show this. Adam who came alive is linked to Jesus coming alive meaning the first time both of them came alive because Paul could not make a comparison between a man becoming alive and a man who had been alive coming back to life. Paul is saying that Jesus always had the spiritual body he came back from the dead in. This part of his letter is not on about the resurrection as most Christians think but about the nature of Jesus’ body before and after his return from the dead.
 
Paul says it is not the spiritual that takes place first but the physical and the physical becomes spiritual. To recap, Paul says that Adam became a living being of dust and the last Adam became a life-giving spirit meaning that Adam and Jesus came alive for the first time with very different natures and bodies. He then says the physical comes before the spiritual and therefore that the first man was the man of dust from earth for Adam was made of dust and those who are of the man of Heaven, Jesus, are not like this for Jesus is not like it. So Adam the physical being was made before the spiritual being Jesus. He is not saying then that Jesus had to have a body like ours before he could become a spiritual being. He is denying that Jesus had a body like ours. He is denying the gospel Jesus who did have such a body.
 
Notice how Adam does not exist until he becomes alive. The comparison between him and Jesus shows that Jesus may always have been a spiritual being and was created as such and was put to death and rose again as such. This would imply a heavenly crucifixion or an invisible one on earth carried out by bad angels.
 
Christians argue that Paul simply said that Jesus had to have a physical body before he could become a resurrected spiritual being. This is a mistake. Paul would not have believed such a silly thing – he believed in angels who were non-physical beings. He believed God had the power to put an angel out of existence or to sleep so that it is as good as dead and then bring it back to life.
Marcion maintained that Paul did not see Jesus as a real man. Maybe Marcion was right!