From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Creation of Adamin the Sistine ChapelThe pre-Adamite hypothesis or pre-Adamism is the theological belief that humans (or intelligent yet non-human creatures) existed before the biblical character Adam. Pre-Adamism is therefore distinct from the conventional Abrahamic belief that Adam was the first human. "Pre-Adamite" is used as a term, both for those humans (or human-like animals) believed to exist before Adam, and for believers or proponents of this hypothesis.
Early development
The first known debate about human antiquity took place in 170 AD between a Christian, Theophilus of Antioch, and an Egyptian pagan, Apollonius the Egyptian (probably Apollonius Dyscolus), who argued that the world was 153,075 years oldAn early challenge to biblical Adamism came from the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, who, upon his rejection of Christianity and his return to paganism, accepted the idea that many pairs of original people had been created, a belief termed co-Adamism or multiple Adamism.
Augustine of Hippo's The City of God contains two chapters indicating a debate between Christians and pagans over human origins: Book XII, chapter 10 is titled Of the falseness of the history that the world hath continued many thousand years and the title of book XVIII, chapter 40 is The Egyptians' abominable lyings, to claim their wisdom the age of 100,000 years. These titles tend to indicate that Augustine saw pagan ideas concerning both the history of the world and the chronology of the human race as incompatible with the Genesis creation narrative. Augustine's explanation aligned with most rabbis, and with the church fathers, who generally dismissed views on the antiquity of the world as "myths and fables", whereas Jewish and Christian claims were based on "revealed truth".
Augustine did take a critical view of the young earth narrative in some aspects, arguing that everything in the universe had been created simultaneously by God, and not seven literal days. He was primarily concerned with arguing against the idea of humanity having existed eternally rather than a Bible-based chronology of human history.
Above is a brief record of certain scholars about the existence of pre-adamic man. As far as I am aware the bible is silent about this subject. The question arises, where do the skeletons of human beings come from that are carbon dated to many millions of years ago ? Before the fourth day of creation week there was no such thing as time. It was on the fourth day that all the heavenly objects that we use to measure time were created therefore before this there was no time. So then from day 1 to the end of day 3 could have been millions or billions of years. When reading Genesis 1 take careful note that earth was already in existence just in a state of darkness and formlessness, something had to have happened to do this. When GOD creates He always states it is very good but earth in Genesis 1:2 was not good. It may have been the earth was severely damaged by the angelic rebellion led by Satan and what we read in Genesis is GOD repairing the damage and preparing it for humans. It could be surmised that a creature existed before Genesis that was on earth at the time it was the first estate of the angels. Jude 1:6 This pre-adamic man was destroyed along with other pre-historic creatures that existed at that time. Today archaeologists dig up the bones of all these pre-historic creatures but spiritually do not understand their origin.
All of this is pure speculation as are all the theories about this subject. We will just have to wait until we are born into the kingdom for the answer.
