Genesis 3 is proto-history, it is not allegory. At least it is not an allegoric telling of the facts, however much it may be an allegory about future things. Eve's sin is told as Eve's sin, as it happened, not told as something else or in terms of another scenario.
Nathan's story of King David's adultery is precisely an allegory. It was an allegory about what happened then. Nathan told it as an allegory, because King David had a bias about the real life version of the story.
Mark Shea* misses this:
Both woman and man reject God in the mythic telling of the fall in Genesis 3. ‘Myth’ here does not mean ‘non-historical’. It means that a real event in human history—our species’ rejection of God—is told in non-newspaper language just as the story of David’s real sin with Bathsheba is told in Nathan’s story of the rich man who stole the poor man’s ewe lamb.
On top of this blindness, he has probably misunderstood the questioner.
The questioner considered someone as wrong for claiming neither Eve's disobedience nor Mary's obedience mattered very much.
While Mark Shea actually gives him the arguments he wanted, he misunderstands in a not very flattering way who it was who considered Eve's sin as of little importance.
In pondering Mary as the new Eve, it seemed like denying this claim (which several of my family members do as they have left the church) would somehow imply that it didn’t matter if Eve sinned.
He then proceeds to give anyway some of the arguments he could not answer, not meaning they are his arguments.
Blindness to the Bible and to how the Church Father's read it (Eve's Sin is a kind of negative allegory precisely for Mary's obedience, but Eve's sin is given in historic direct terms, not in allegoric disguise) engenders this blindness:
I’m not clear why seeing Mary as the new Eve, untying through her obedience the knot Eve tied in her disobedience, makes Eve’s sin not matter.
It is precisely the family members who left the Church and who deny the obedience of Mary matters who are also denying Eve's sin matters. Not the questioner.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris I
St. Zenon of Verona
12.IV.2019
Veronae passio sancti Zenonis Episcopi, qui inter persecutionis procellas eam Ecclesiam mira constantia gubernavit, et, Gallieni tempore, martyrio coronatus est.
A little PS : I forgot to mention that "myth" is the Greek word for story. And that the "myth" of Aischylos' Persai is history. The word as such seems so rich in meaning, but it is in fact an equivocation./HGL
* A reader has a question about Mary and Eve
APRIL 11, 2019 BY MARK SHEA | Catholic and Enjoying It
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2019/04/a-reader-has-a-question-about-mary-and-eve.html
It seems I was so tired I just cut and pasted but did not copy back two new line markers in the html this night, just above my signature.
It seems Mark Shea was so cowardly he effaced my comment, which was given with a link here, to this reply, since now there is only one comment and not by me, and it was not yet there when I was adding mine.
Being tired and messing up the html is a bit bad, but being cowardly is worse.
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