What's a myth?

CRUDE SAID:

If I were to interpret the fall of Adam as a real historical fall - but viewed the fall as having happened to a group of humans rather than just one - am I making Adam into a myth?

 

What if I interpret the fall as the fall of a man and a woman, but who weren’t the singular parents of humanity - say, there was some breeding with those they were interfertile with (or perhaps their offspring did)? Myth?

 

Mind you, I imagine someone could argue that both of these interpretations are wrong. But would they be full-blown myth if they affirm that what Genesis describes is a real fall?

Let’s begin by defining our terms. Here’s a sympathetic definition by a renown theologian and literary critic:

A traditional narration which relates to events that happened at the beginning of time and which has the purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of men of today and, in a general manner, establishing all the forms of action and thought by which man understands himself in his world. For us, moderns, a myth is only a myth because we can no longer connect that time with the time of history as we write it, employing the critical method, nor can we connect mythical places with our geographical space. This is why the myth can no longer be an explanation; to exclude its etiological intention is the theme of all necessary demythologization.

 

This new level of expression embarrasses the modern man. In one sense, he alone can recognize the myth as myth, because he along has reached the point where history and myth become separate.

P. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Beacon Press 1967), 5,161.

Your reinterpretation reduces Gen 3 to myth by implicitly demythologizing Gen 3. For if the narrator understood Adam and Eve to be the first human couple, and you gloss that as something else, then you have dehistoricized the account. That’s no longer a description of what really happened. You’re setting aside original intent to retrofit the account with a view to modern science.