Adam, "a Figure of Him Who Was to Come"
Old Testament: Genesis 3:6, 17-19
The woman... took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave to her husband who did eat... cursed is the earth in thy work; with labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life... In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth, out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return.
New Testament: Romans 5:12, 14, 18-19
Wherefore as by one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death; and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned... death reigned from Adam unto Moses, even over them also who have not sinned after the similitude of the transgression of Adam, who is a figure of him who was to come... as by the offence of one, unto all men to condemnation; so also by the justice of one, unto all men to justification of life. For as by the disobedience of one man, many were made sinners; so also by the obedience of one, many shall be made just.
The connection
Paul doesn't build this typology by inference; he names it as the passage's own governing premise. The whole argument depends on treating Adam and Christ as structural equals: one man's act determines the condition of everyone who stands under him, in one direction or the other. Adam's disobedience opens onto a sentence of death precisely because he acted as more than a private sinner, "by one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death; and so death passed upon all men" (5:12). Christ's obedience reverses the same structure, man for man, act for act: "as by the disobedience of one man, many were made sinners; so also by the obedience of one, many shall be made just" (5:19).
Moral sense
Paul refuses to let the two men balance evenly. "Not as the offence, so also the gift" (5:15), the correspondence in form doesn't mean a correspondence in scale. Adam's sin explains why death reached everyone; it does not explain why grace should reach further still, and yet "where sin abounded, grace did more abound" (5:20). The pattern of representation is symmetrical; its result is not.
Anagogical sense
CCC 359, quoting an ancient homily: "The first Adam, the last Adam: the first had a beginning, the last knows no end... The last Adam is indeed the first; as he himself says: 'I am the first and the last.'" The figure and what it prefigures are not sequential chapters of the same story so much as two poles of a single truth about what it means to be human, one broken open by a beginning, the other holding no end.
The Fathers
St John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans 10, on Romans 5:14: "Now this is why Adam is a type of Christ," though "sin and grace are not equivalents, death and life are not equivalents." St Augustine, On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins 3.14, reads Romans 5:12 against the Pelagians to mean that when Adam sinned "they were all as yet the one Adam."
Warrant
Checked in the Greek. The shared word is the name: Adam stands in both, at Genesis 3 in the Septuagint and at Romans 5:14, and beyond it only zoe. That is the right result for this entry rather than a thin one, because Romans 5:14 makes its connection by naming Adam a typos of the one who was to come. The warrant is the apostle's own word for the relation, and the name he attaches it to is there in both texts. This was invisible until the two corpora were reconciled: CATSS writes the name bare and STEPBible accents it, so an earlier version of this note reported almost nothing shared.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 359.
The verses
Genesis 3:6 · Genesis 3:17 · Genesis 3:18 · Genesis 3:19 · Romans 5:12 · Romans 5:14 · Romans 5:18 · Romans 5:19
