Thanks for listening to Bible Project Podcast. This is John. And I'm Tim. And today we have

a special episode where we are going to interview a scholar by the name of Joshua Swamadas.

Yeah, Joshua is a professor of biomedical engineering at Washington University of Medicine

in St. Louis. This is actually our first time interviewing a scientist on the Bible Project

Podcast and we'll explain why in a minute. But we're really excited to talk with him today

about the early narratives about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden in Genesis.

Thanks for joining us. Here we go.

So Tim, before we jump into this conversation we had with Joshua, which is really great.

So I just want to paint the landscape why we're having this conversation.

Yeah, that's right. So maybe the first and real practical reason is that Joshua researched

and released a book, it's called The Genealogical Adam and Eve. And it's a contribution to the

larger conversation about how you read the stories about Adam and Eve in light of both

ancient cultural context and in light of modern scientific findings about the development

of the species and evolutionary science. And so I found the book so surprising and enormously

helpful for thinking about that larger issue, integration of science and how you read these

texts. And that's not an issue we've really ever tackled in depth here on the podcast.

No, we've stayed away from it on purpose because there's been this conviction that if you

approach these texts as literature, it's not trying to tell us about science. It's trying

to tell us about other things. And what you want to do with science is another issue altogether.

So we don't interview scientists, but like you said, this is a first for us. You told

me that it was very unifying the book. Yeah, yeah. Joshua, and as you'll hear later in

the conversation, he's putting forward a hypothesis. He grew up in a Christian tradition that had

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