Pre-Adamite Race
In St. Augustine of Hippo's series of twenty-two books entitled "The City of God," two full chapters are dedicated to condemning an early heresy of the early fifth century: The notion of a race that existed before Adam and the Garden of Eden, which is considered the Genesis of all mankind by Christians. The pagans did not accept the Genesis narrative and claimed that the world had existed for at least a hundred thousand years. St. Augustine titled chapter 40 of book 18, "About the Most Mendacious Vanity of the Egyptians, in Which They Ascribe to Their Science an Antiquity of a Hundred Thousand Years."[1] Since Christians believed the Biblical Genesis of mankind to have happened less than a few thousand years prior, the Egyptians' claim of a hundred thousand-year history would mean that they had existed before Adam as a pre-Adamic Race. Augustine argued that the world was less than six thousand years old.
Pre-Adamism is the belief that races or civilizations existed before Adam, a view rejected by Augustine and early Christian orthodoxy but later revived in racialized forms through British Israelism, Christian Identity, and white supremacist theology as a way to separate nonwhite peoples and Jews from the biblical Adamic line; in these systems, especially the Two-Seed or Serpent's Seed doctrine promoted by figures such as Wesley Swift and later William Branham, the Genesis narrative was reworked into a racial origin myth in which Cain, the serpent, pre-Adamic peoples, and forbidden "hybreeding" were used to justify antisemitism, segregation, interracial marriage bans, and a spiritually charged hierarchy of races within Latter Rain and healing revival circles.