C. Marvin Pate, Adam Christology as the Exegetical and Theological Substructure of 2 Corinthians 4.7-5.21, University Press of America,
____ 1997. ***

C. M. Pate's doctoral dissertation is, as expected, a scholarly work. His numerous footnotes and academic idiom, his immersion in the Greek text and references to unfamiliar Hebrew documents may put off some readers.

The value of Pate's exegesis is in his ability to penetrate the Pauline first-last Adam construction as it permeates and informs the Apostle's thinking on the resurrection the resurrection body and the ethics of salvation. Pate follows Morna Hooker's exegetical insights into Paul's use of Adam as a paradigm in Romans 1 (a text without explicit reference to Adam) in order to identify those other passages where the Apostle is moving along similar lines. That by itself is reward enough for struggling through his complex argument.

The main short-coming of Pate's exposition of the Pauline two-Adam construct is his misinterpretation of the Pauline Adam. Rather than viewing the last Adam as the heir of that life which the first Adam, by his fall, failed to achieve (the life-forever extended to him in the paradisal "tree of life"), Pate views the glory of the last Adam merely as a recovery of the glory that Adam possessed by virtue of his creation in the image of God.

In 1 Corinthians 15, however, Paul argues that the "first Adam" became a living soul, a clear reference to his creation in the image of God, but the "last Adam" became a life-giving Spirit, a reference to Christ's resurrection. Paul proceeds to argue that the pattern of Adam is "first the natural and after that the Spiritual." The first Adam did not move beyond the natural glory (image) to the Spiritual glory (image). This error leads Pate to an impoverished soteriology, and dare I say, to a fundamental perversion of Paul's theology.

It is surprising that for his extensive bibliography, Pate failed to take note of two critical works which address Paul's two-Adam construction by theologians working within his own tradition. I mention them here because they provide an important corrective to Pate's misread.

For a penetrating exegesis of Paul's two-Adam schema see R. B. Gaffin's Resurrection and Redemption and G. Vos's The Pauline Eschatology, both available through Presbyterian and Reformed Publishers--1993 and 2000 respecively (this refers to the most recent editions).