Mary as a New Eve in the Thought of St Paul

Abstract

Although the theme of Mary as a new or second Eve is first explicitly found in the writings of Justin Martyr, there is an antecedent probability that it is of apostolic origin and familiar to St Paul. I argue that this theme helps to interpret several passages in the Pauline corpus that have remained without adequate explanation. The first and principal passage discussed is 1 Cor. 11:11-12, where the phrase ‘the man by the woman’ is put in parallel with the original formation of the woman ‘from the man’. Once it is thus accepted that St Paul understood the Virgin Mary through this typological lens, three others passages are seen to yield a more coherent and richer sense: ‘made of a woman’ in Gal. 4:4; ‘saved through child-bearing’ in 1 Tim. 2:14-15; and ‘each in his own “tagma”’ in 1 Cor. 15:23.

According to St John Henry Newman, the ‘great rudimental teaching of Antiquity from its earliest date’ concerning Mary is that ‘she is the Second Eve’.¹ The first author known to have drawn an explicit parallel between Eve and Mary is Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho, written around 160. Newman, however, believed that this presentation of the mother of Jesus Christ must have formed part of the teaching of the apostles themselves, given its widespread presence in the Church from a very early date.² Is there evidence for this claim in the writings of the New Testament? In recent years, some authors have argued that there is, appealing to the Gospel of St John and the Book of the Apocalypse.³ My suggestion, however, is that this theme also sheds light on four difficult passages in the writings of St Paul.

Many readers will probably be surprised at this proposal, since it is commonly thought that the only reference in the Pauline epistles to the mother of Jesus comes in the Letter to the Galatians: ‘When the fulness of the time came, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law’ (Gal. 4:4).⁴ On the other hand, if there is reason to suppose from the patristic data that the characterisation of Mary as antitype of Eve formed part of the apostolic teaching, it would be surprising if there were no allusions to this theme in St Paul, not only because of the range of his thought and his typological use of the Old Testament,⁵ but also because he alone among the writers of the New Testament explicitly uses Adamic typology in regard to Jesus Christ, referring to him as ‘the last Adam’ (1 Cor. 15:45) and ‘the second man’ (1 Cor. 15:47).⁶ Given that Adam and Eve are, so to speak, correlative ideas, it is antecedently plausible that the author who introduced these phrases into Christian thought would have had in mind also a second, or last Eve.⁷

The order I shall follow in analysing these four passages is neither chronological nor strictly thematic but rather, heuristic. I shall begin with the clearest example of implicit ‘Eve-typology’, analysing a passage that seems to me to admit of no other satisfactory explanation. I shall then seek to confirm the existence of this typology, by showing how it explains an unusual choice of word in a second passage. St Paul's use of the Eve-Mary parallel being now assumed, I use it to interpret a third passage which, while it admits of various senses, finds in this way its most satisfying explanation. Finally, in dependence on these findings, I shall examine a fourth passage which seems at first sight unrelated to the subject, but which nevertheless yields new riches when examined by this hermeneutical lens. My article thus resembles a snowball, gathering momentum as it proceeds.

Corinthians 11:11-12

The first part of chapter 11 of the first letter to the Corinthians, where the apostle is describing the relations of man and woman, is notoriously difficult to interpret, even by the standards of the Pauline corpus. Fortunately, it is not necessary for my purposes to disentangle all the threads of the argument. Up to the end of verse 10, St Paul has been explaining why Christian men who pray and prophesy in public should do so with heads uncovered, whereas women who engage in these activities should veil their heads. In verse 8, in words that commentators are unanimous in understanding as a reference to the original creation of Eve from Adam described in Genesis 2,⁸ he says: ‘Man did not come from woman, but woman from man’. In verses 11 and 12, apparently in order, as St John Chrysostom puts it, that ‘he might neither lift up the men more than was due nor depress the women’,⁹ he affirms the mutual dependence of the sexes. The Greek of these two verses is:

1. (11) Plēn oute gynē chōris andros oute anēr chōris gynaikos en Kyriō. (12) Hōsper gar hē gynē ek tou andros houtōs kai ho anēr dia tēs gynaikos; ta de panta ek tou Theou.

A very literal translation of these verses runs: ‘(11) However, neither woman without (xoris) man nor man without woman in the Lord. (12) For just as the woman of (ek) the man, so also the man by (dia) the woman; but all things of God’.

To make St Paul's Greek intelligible in English, the versions generally insert the verb ‘to be’ into verse 11, giving ‘neither is the woman without the man, nor the man without the woman, in the Lord’. Some Greek manuscripts, followed by the Vulgate and the King James Version, reverse the order of the first two clauses in this verse, giving ‘neither is man without woman, nor woman without man, in the Lord’, but nothing of importance turns on this.¹⁰

What is the meaning of verse 12? Commentators take the first half of this verse, ‘Just as the woman of the man’ to be a repetition of the reference in verse 8 to the formation of Eve from Adam.¹¹ This is reasonable, both because he is here repeating the very same phrase as in verse 8, and because, if the purpose of verse 12 is to add a thought that will balance the teaching of the earlier verse, it is natural to begin by briefly re-stating that teaching.

What of the second half? Modern commentators have assumed, like Chrysostom, that in saying ho anēr dia tēs gynaikos St Paul is simply referring to the fact that male human beings are born from women, as it were to compensate women for the advantage that men might seem to have over them from the fact that a man was the source of the first woman.¹² Thus, Jean Héring states that St Paul's argument is based on a fact drawn from human nature, affirming that dia gunaikos can only mean that man comes into the world through the intermediary of woman.¹³ Barrett agrees: for him, St Paul is speaking of ‘the ordinary process of childbirth’.¹⁴ Again, according to Collins, ‘[Paul] counterbalances the statement that woman has been created from man with an affirmation that (every) man is born of woman’.¹⁵ Fitzmeyer likewise says that the phrase ‘dia tēs gynaikos expresses a well-known fact’.¹⁶ Thiselton also concurs, translating: ‘Man derives his existence through woman’.¹⁷

This interpretation of ho anēr dia tēs gynaikos is not, however, satisfying, for three reasons. First of all, there would be a lack of symmetry, and a kind of bathos, about comparing the unique, miraculous relation between Adam and Eve, to the commonplace fact that every man depends on some mother. Secondly, if this were St Paul's meaning it would not have the desired effect of restoring a balance of dependence between the two sexes. Commentators seem to have overlooked the fact that not only does each man have a mother, but so also does each woman. In the coming forth of Eve from Adam, the woman is wholly dependent on the man: this fact is not balanced adequately by the fact that both women and men are dependent on women in order to be born – not to speak of the fact that they are also dependent on men in order to be in a position to be born.

Thirdly, the use of the conjunction gar (‘for’) at the start of verse 12 shows that St Paul is providing a reason for what he has just affirmed; but the standard interpretation of verse 12 does not do justice to the phrase en Kyriō (‘in the Lord’) which concludes verse 11. This phrase has puzzled the commentators, since ‘the Lord’, especially when used in distinction from the word ‘God’ (tou Theou), found in the next verse, is with St Paul a customary way of referring to Jesus Christ. ‘In the Lord’, therefore, suggests a relation between man and woman that derives in some way from Christ and from the Christian economy.¹⁸ Cornelius à Lapide thus proposed to interpret the phrase as ‘in the Christian law’, seeing an allusion to the mutual Christian duties of man and woman as spouses and parents.¹⁹ Among more recent commentators, Barrett tentatively glosses it as ‘in the Lord's intention, in the original creation and in its restoration’.²⁰ This, however, as just noted, partly departs from standard Pauline usage, and so Thiselton considers that the apostle has passed in this verse from creation to ‘eschatology or the order of the gospel’; he glosses the phrase as ‘among the Lord's people, or more strictly as those in the Lord.’²¹ Héring, similarly, gives us ‘on the Christian plane’,²² while Fitzmeyer asserts without discussion that ‘in the Lord’ here means ‘in the sight of the risen Christ’.²³

The trouble with all these explanations is that they do not plausibly indicate a dependence of man on woman that pertains in some way to Jesus Christ and that consists in man coming from woman. For St Paul is not affirming that that there is a distinctively Christian way for men and women to relate to each other, however true this may be; while Fitzmeyer's suggestion, which amounts to saying that the risen Christ is aware that male human beings are born of mothers, appears somewhat ludicrous.

All these difficulties vanish if we understand verse 12b as a reference to the virginal conception and birth of Christ. In this way, St Paul is seen to be establishing a satisfying parallel between the miraculous formation of Eve from Adam on the one hand and the miraculous formation of Jesus from Mary on the other. He is pointing out how the initial ‘advantage’ of man over woman has now been, so to speak, balanced. For in the virgin birth, there is a dependence of one man (and no women) on one woman (without the help of any man). This interpretation also explains why man is said to be not without woman in the Lord: it is the whole Christian dispensation that sprang from the Son of God's coming into the world by a woman.

In other words, I propose that the allusion to Adam and Eve initiated in verse 8 of this chapter is continued not only by the first clause of verse 12 but also by the second clause. This clause presents the relation of Adam and Eve as having now re-appeared, but on a higher plane, in the new, Christian order. It is true that at this point in the epistle, St Paul has not yet explicitly drawn the parallel between Adam and Christ, but it will appear a few chapters later, where our Lord will be named ho esxatos Adam, ‘the last Adam’, (1 Cor. 15:45) and ho deuteros anthrōpos, ‘the second man’ (ibid., v. 47). Thus, in St Paul's mind, the meaning of ‘as the woman of the man, so also the man by the woman’ is ‘As Eve is of Adam, so is the second Adam by the second Eve’.²⁴

Galatians 4:4

As noted above, Galatians 4:4 is the only explicit reference in the Pauline corpus to the mother of Jesus: ‘But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent his Son, made of a woman (genomenon ek gynaikos), made under the law’.²⁵ What is significant about the italicised Greek phrase is not the fact that St Paul mentions only a mother and not a father, since the phrase ‘born of woman’ is a common Semitic way of referring to a human being.²⁶ Despite what is sometimes claimed, the omission of any mention of a father is therefore not in itself a reference to the virgin birth. What is significant is that St Paul uses the participle genomenos, from the verb ginesthai (‘to become’, ‘to be made’), rather than the participle gennomenos, from the verb gennan (‘to beget or bear’, and in the passive ‘to be born’).²⁷ The latter verb is the usual New Testament word for being born, whereas there is no clear example of the former verb being used in the New Testament in this sense.²⁸ For example, later in the same epistle to the Galatians, St Paul uses the standard verb gennan three times when speaking of the birth of Ishmael (Gal. 4:23, 24, 29), and he uses it again in the epistle to the Romans when speaking of the birth of Esau and Jacob (Rom. 9:11). Again, contrary to what is asserted by some commentators, references to man ‘born of woman’ in the Septuagint version of Job (Jb. 14:1, 15:15, 25:4) and to ‘those born of women’ in Matt. 11:11 and Lk.7:28, are not true parallels to Gal. 4:4, since they use the standard verb, gennan.²⁹

Hence, as John McHugh remarks, we may rightly look for a special significance in St Paul's use of genomenon in Gal. 4:4. Yet its purpose cannot be directly to signify the virgin birth, since authors who expressly affirm the virginity of Mary use gennan when they speak of her child-bearing, for example, Matt. 2:1,4 and Lk. 1:35.³⁰ I suggest that he uses it to evoke the same idea as we have seen in 1 Cor. 11:12; the general truth that Jesus comes from Mary, but abstracted from the specific way in which this happened, namely, by conception and birth. The common fact of ‘coming from’, and indeed of ‘being made from’, rather than the fact of ‘being born from’, grounds the parallel between the two couples Adam-Eve and Jesus-Mary. In each case, there is a man and a woman, and there is a miraculous procession of the one entirely from the other: Eve comes from Adam alone, and Jesus (in regard to his humanity) from Mary alone. Although this parallel is not affirmed in Galatians 4, its use in 1 Corinthians 11 shows that it is part of the apostle's mental furniture, and so we may legitimately use it to interpret this verse in Galatians, which otherwise remains without a satisfying explanation.³¹ In other words, St Paul, in speaking of the birth of Christ, spontaneously speaks of it in a way that accords with his habitual awareness of Jesus as the new Adam.³²

Timothy 2:14-15

For the purposes of this article, I must assume the Pauline authorship of 1 Timothy without replying in detail to the arguments of those who deny it.³³ I wish to consider two verses at the end of 1 Tim. 2. St Paul has stated that he does not allow women to have authority over men in the churches. In justification of this, he refers in verses 13–14a to two facts about the relation of Adam and Eve: that Adam was formed first, and that Adam was not deceived, whereas Eve was. He then writes: ‘(14b) The woman being beguiled hath fallen into transgression. (15) But she shall be saved (sōthēsetai) through the childbearing (dia tēs teknogonias), if they continue (meinōsin) in faith and love and sanctification with sobriety’. The Greek word translated as ‘child-bearing’ is often rendered ‘the birth of children’, for example in the Vulgate (per filiorum generationem).

The strangeness of speaking about child-bearing as the means through which women are saved, even with the added mention of faith and love, has caused this verse to receive various interpretations in both ancient and modern times. St Augustine read it allegorically, taking the children of the women to be good works performed in virtue of the ‘lower reason’.³⁴ St Thomas Aquinas suggested that the word ‘through’ here may be interpreted as ‘even if in the condition of’ marriage and child-bearing, as opposed to being in the state of virginity or widowhood.³⁵ Marshall's discussion of whether the dia is to be taken ‘instrumentally’ or ‘circumstantially’, that is, as a means of salvation or as the state in which salvation is in fact achieved, concludes inconclusively: ‘It may be best to say that the construction expresses a somewhat loose and ambiguous relationship’.³⁶ An argument against Aquinas's suggestion is that the context of the verse in 1 Timothy is not a comparison between the marital state and other states. Theophylact, the 10^th-11^th century bishop of Ohrid in Macedonia, proposed that the child-bearing through which woman is to be saved is that of the Blessed Virgin; Cornelius à Lapide, who quotes this opinion, rejects it as ‘far-fetched and unrelated to the context (remotum et alienum)’.³⁷

Cornelius himself understands the verse more straightforwardly, as a reference to the virtue shown by Christian women in accepting and undertaking the work of both bearing and raising children. With varying nuances,³⁸ this is the sense which most modern commentators also attribute to it. These commentators are aware that a Marian interpretation has been proposed for the verse, but find it extremely remote,³⁹ ‘most improbable’,⁴⁰ ‘more romantic than convincing’,⁴¹ ‘highly cryptic’ and hence able ‘safely to be rejected’;⁴² they consider it ‘incredible that Paul should have expected his vague “through the child-bearing” to be understood, without further explanation, of Christ's nativity’;⁴³ or else they mention this interpretation only in order to say that it need not be mentioned.⁴⁴

If, however, there is reason to hold that St Paul saw the mother of the Lord through a typological lens, there is reason also to revisit Theophylact's proposal. Verses 13 and 14 speak explicitly of Eve; hence, it would not be strange for the apostle's thought to move in verse 15 to the second Eve. This would also allow us to explain a puzzling feature within verse 15, namely, the shift in the subject of the verb. The first verb in this verse is in the singular, ‘she shall be saved (sōthēsetai)’; the second is in the plural, ‘they continue (meinōsin)’. Various explanations of this have been proposed: it was simply a ‘lapse’ on St Paul's part;⁴⁵ or else the subject of the second verb is children,⁴⁶ or the mother and children together,⁴⁷ or the husband and wife together;⁴⁸ or, ingeniously, because the author ‘is quoting from a source-document on church order’.⁴⁹ Dibelius and Conzelmann content themselves with saying that the form of the second verb is ‘problematic’.⁵⁰ In general, the tendency of the commentators is to suppose that the shift of subject arises simply because those to be saved may be considered indifferently as a class (woman) or as individuals (women).

Grammatically, however, the first verb is most naturally taken to be governed by ‘the woman’ of verse 14, who is not woman in general, but Eve.⁵¹ The change in number within verse 15 from singular to plural then becomes significant: Eve is being considered both in her own person and as representative of her sex. If the child-bearing in verse 15 is indeed Mary's, then the verse will be alluding to two themes made explicit by later authors: the theme of Eve's personal ‘transgression’ when ‘beguiled’ by the serpent (v. 14) as having been remedied by Mary's obedience to the angel's message and her consequent child-bearing; and the theme of a disgrace as thereby removed from womankind as such, through a woman as emblematic of her sex as Eve herself.⁵² Thus Eve is saved by the birth of Christ; and Christian women in general are saved in the same way, though (to prevent presumption), the apostle adds ‘if they continue in faith and love’ Since Eve received the title of ‘mother of all living’ (Gen. 3:20), but became also a universal cause of death,⁵³ it is fitting that she be said to be saved by a child-bearing which is also a universal cause of salvation.

It may be objected that a reference to Eve's salvation should be in the past tense, not the future (sōthēsetai). This, however, would have denoted her simply as a historical figure, and no longer as emblematic of womankind. Yet it is not only Eve's personal sin, but also the harm that she brought upon her sex till the end of time that is in question; to express the close connexion between these two things, St Paul uses a single verb, but since it is not possible to put a verb in more than one tense at the same time, he uses the one that emphasises her emblematic character.

On the other hand, if the child-bearing in question were simply the ordinary child-bearing of Christian women, the verse would be less convincing. Not only would Eve's personal sin not be blotted out by Christian women's bearing children and continuing in faith and love, but the basic problem would remain unsolved of its being strange to speak of womankind as such as saved ‘through child-bearing’, whether ‘through’ be taken literally as instrumental or as merely circumstantial. What of the women who have no children?⁵⁴

Finally, the Marian interpretation of this verse has been denied on the grounds that teknogonia strictly denotes ‘the physical act of “bearing children”’, and that it ‘refers to the bearing of children [in general] and not to the actual birth of one specific child’.⁵⁵ But these are no real objections. On the contrary, the fact that the word denotes the act itself of child-bearing, and not simply a child considered as having been born, fits well with the patristic presentation of Mary herself as being by her virginal child-bearing in some way causa salutis.⁵⁶ Again, the use of a word denoting a category of acts rather than a single act is easily understood as an example of the figure of speech called antonomasia, by which the name of a category is given to its most excellent member.⁵⁷ Eve, personally and as a representative of women in general, is saved by the Child-bearing.

Corinthians 15:20-23

For my final and most tentative suggestion, I return to the first letter to the Corinthians. In chapter 15, in the course of defending the reality of the future resurrection of believers, St Paul writes: ‘(20) But now hath Christ been raised from the dead, the first-fruits (aparchē) of them that are asleep. (21) For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. (22) For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive (en tō Christō pantes zōopoiēthēsontai). (23) But each in his own order (hekastos de en tō idiō tagmati): Christ the first-fruits; then they that are Christ's (hoi tou Christou), at his coming. (24) Then cometh the end (eita to telos), when he shall deliver up the kingdom to God, even the Father’.

The phrase translated in verse 23 as ‘in his own order’ is rendered sometimes as ‘in his due order’, ‘in proper order’, or ‘in turn’. The trouble with all such translations of en tō idiō tagmati is that the Greek word tagma is a concrete term, meaning ‘that which is ordered’. In classical Greek, it was ‘used almost (though not quite exclusively) in a military sense’, meaning a body of troops of the same kind.⁵⁸ In later Greek it came to be used more widely to mean ‘a number of persons who belong together and are therefore arrayed together; division, group.’⁵⁹ A more natural translation of St Paul's phrase would thus be ‘each in his proper group’. If he had wished to say simply that the resurrection would happen in the orderly manner determined by divine wisdom, with Christ rising on Easter Sunday and the faithful at the second coming, he had a more natural way to express this, by employing the abstract term taxis, in the phrase kata taxin (literally, ‘according to order’). This is the phrase he uses at the end of the previous chapter, when he reminds the Corinthians to worship God ‘decently and in order (kata taxin)’.⁶⁰

But if tagma means ‘group’, what are the groups in which each one will rise? St Paul names ‘Christ’ and, at his coming, ‘those who belong to him’, which looks like one man and one group, not several groups. Apparently moved by this consideration, some commentators have striven to find some other group or groups to which he could be supposed to refer. Some exegetes see an allusion to the teaching of 1 Thessalonians 5:14-16, that those Christians who have died before the coming of the Lord will rise first, and that those who are still alive will be taken up afterward.⁶¹ One objection to this interpretation is that neither of these two groups can be said to belong to Christ more or less than the other group does, and so this distinction is not even remotely suggested by St Paul's distinction between ‘Christ’ and ‘those who belong to him’.

Other commentators have speculated that St Paul has in mind, after the resurrection of the faithful, the resurrection of non-believers. They have suggested that to telos might be interpreted here not as ‘the end’, but as ‘the remainder’, or ‘the rest’. This theory has, however, been generally rejected for want of evidence that to telos can bear this sense.⁶²

Another objection to both these theories is that to introduce three moments of resurrection would undermine the comparison that the apostle is apparently drawing between, on the one hand, the resurrection of Christ and that of Christians, and on the other, the lifting up of the first-fruits at the Passover and the presenting of a new grain offering seven weeks later.⁶³

1 Cor. 15:23 offers, however, a second problem of interpretation, which appears to have gone generally unnoticed. In the previous verse, St Paul has stated that all shall be made alive in Christ. In verse 23, he explains this: the ‘each’ (hekastos) of verse 23 denotes the divisions of the ‘all’ of verse 22. But that apparently yields the conclusion that Christ himself is one of those who are made alive in Christ, which seems impossible.

Someone might suggest that it refers to Christ as God bringing himself to life as man. This answer is theologically sound, but is not consistent with the way in which St Paul uses the phrase en tō Christō (‘in Christ’). This phrase denotes our union with Christ insofar as he died, rose again, and ascended; to put it another way, our union with the incarnate Son in and in virtue of his saving acts.⁶⁴ Again, this verse continues the thought of the previous one, which states that resurrection comes ‘by a man’ (di'anthrōpou): ‘It is in Christ as man that all are brought to life’.⁶⁵ Christ cannot as man bring himself to life.

Is St Paul simply expressing himself carelessly, assuming that his readers would know what he meant? If so, we should not have simply an ungrammatical phrase or anacoluthon, but a real confusion of thought: the ‘each’, or rather the several ‘eaches’ of verse 23, would not explain the ‘all’ of verse 22, when they are clearly meant to do so.

I propose that these two problems may be resolved by noticing that St Paul speaks of Christ as initiating the resurrection of the dead (v. 20) precisely as antitype of Adam. Thiselton, commenting on 1 Cor. 15:20, notes: ‘Adam is, for Paul, both an individual and a corporate entity: “he was what his Hebrew name signifies — ‘mankind’’”.⁶⁶ Hence, the risen Christ, Adam's antitype is also to be understood as both an individual and a ‘corporate entity’, Christians rising by incorporation into him.⁶⁷ Yet as used in Gen 1:26-27, ‘Adam’ refers not only to mankind as such but also to the first pair. ‘God said, “Let us make man” (’ā·ḏām) in our image […] God created man (hā·’ā·ḏām) in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.’ This is still clearer in Genesis 5:2: ‘[He] called their name Adam (’ā·ḏām), in the day when they were created’. Commentators note that in this verse, ‘Adam’ is being for the first time explicitly used as a proper name;⁶⁸ and yet what it is most naturally taken to name here is the first couple.⁶⁹ By contrast, in subsequent verses of Genesis 5, it must refer to an individual man, like the other proper names in the genealogy of that chapter.

Hence, ‘Adam’ in Hebrew is not only both a common noun and a proper name: when used as a proper name, it is able to denote, according to context, both the first man and the first couple. We should be alive to the possibility that when St Paul speaks of another Adam, this name may have in his mind a similar flexibility.⁷⁰ In other words, we may adopt as a working hypothesis that just as ‘Adam’ in Genesis is at once the name of an individual man and the word for this man together with all who share his nature and depend on him, that is, for mankind, and a name for the first man and first woman, so also ‘Christ’ when presented as another Adam may, according to context, name an individual man, and this man together with those who share his nature and depend on him, and even this man together with a woman.⁷¹ In case this should seem far-fetched, we should note that there is a precedent in this letter for the use of ‘Christ’ to mean more than one man. In chapter 12, St Paul calls by the name of its head the wider tagma made up of Christ and those living by his life: ‘As the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ’ (1 Cor. 12:12). Fitzmeyer comments: ‘This remarkable identification of Christians with Christ makes use of the name Christos as a way to speak of what will be explained further in v. 27 as the “body of Christ”’.⁷² How does this suggestion resolve the two problems mentioned? First of all, it explains how St Paul can speak in verse 23 of Christ as a tagma, that is, as ‘a number of persons who belong together and are therefore arrayed together’. The word ‘Christ’ is used here as ‘Adam’ is used in Gen. 1 and 5, to refer not only to Jesus himself but to the person or persons sharing his nature and thus united to him. Thus, the ‘first fruits’ will include the others who have already risen in virtue of his resurrection (see Matt. 27:52-53.) Secondly, this interpretation of Christos in 1 Cor. 15:23 also explains how having just said that all are brought to life in Christ, St Paul can now say that ‘Christ’ is the first fruits of this ‘all’. All the faithful who have already risen, or who will rise in the future, come to life through their union with the individual man Jesus Christ (v. 22); but the relatively small group of those who have already risen receives, together with him, the name ‘Christ’ (v. 23). And if, as I have argued above, St Paul is thinking in 1 Corinthians 11:12 of a second Eve who completes his presentation of Jesus as the second Adam, then although she is not mentioned by name here, it is reasonable to see her as nevertheless included in this verse, rather as Eve is included Gen. 5:2. ‘Eve is also Adam’.

Conclusion

I believe that this investigation justifies the assertion of Newman with which I began, by showing that St Paul saw the Blessed Virgin Mary as a new, or last, or second Eve. I have considered four passages that contain special difficulties of interpretation or oddities of language. But if I am correct, we may also use this typology to interpret some other passages which do not present the same difficulties. For example, given what has been said about the use of the name ‘Adam’ we may find several layers of meaning within 1 Cor. 15:45 and following, when St Paul returns to the parallelism of Adam and Christ. When he writes that ‘the last Adam became a life-giving spirit’ (v. 45) and ‘is of heaven’ (v. 47) we could see a reference not only to the man Jesus Christ as having ascended to be the source of the spiritual life of believers, but also to the last Eve and to the others who are already ‘at home with the Lord’ (2 Cor. 5:8), who foster this spiritual life in dependence on him. Again, in the Adam typology of Romans 5 we should perhaps be justified in finding also an allusion to the first and second Eves. And there may be other such allusions waiting to be discovered beneath the surface of St Paul's words. But all that lies beyond the limits of the present article.