How Early Is The Doctrine of Creatio Ex Nihilo #Bhk8

HOW EARLY IS THE DOCTRINE OF
CREATIO EX NIHILO?
W E are told that the mother of seven sons, ‘Filled with a noble
spirit _ fired her woman’s reasoning with a man’s courage’. I like
that: tòn hg̃lun locismón, the superior reasoning which is the mark
of most of the women I know. But she is commonly not allowed
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to be theologian enough to deploy the doctrine of creatio
ex nihilo (2 Macc. 7:28). In addressing her youngest son, whom
Antiochus promised to make rich if he recanted, she said: ȧjiṽ
se, téknon, ȧnabléyanta ei̇z tòn ou̇ranòn kaì tg̀n cg̃n kaì tà ėn au̇toĩz
pánta i̇dónta cnṽnai, ő´ ti ėj ou̇k o̊ntvn ėpoígsen au̇tà ő heóz, kaì tò
tṽn ȧnhrv́pvn cénoz oű´ tv cínetai. (The reading ő´ ti ėj ou̇k o̊ntvn
printed above is that of Lucian 55 311 Origen GCS 10.22.14
on John 1:17, Latin M, Syriac. The reading ő´ ti ou̇k ėj o̊ntvn is
found in A V 106, Latin B P, Coptic.)
The mother clearly did not originate the doctrine, nor can
she be taken to be oêring instruction to her last son in his
last moments. She must be reminding him of something he well
knew. Her ‘woman’s intelligence’ consisted in her easy allusion
to a weighty doctrine familiar to her son in order to help him to
keep his mind fixed in prayer on the God in obedience to whose
laws he was about to die.
Of course the style of the mother’s words is parenetic and
prayerful,1 but who has decreed that parenesis and prayer
cannot contain exact and specific doctrine?
We recall the prayer of another woman, Aseneth, who solemnly
prayed to God:
Lord God of the ages,
who created all (things) and gave life (to them),
who gave breath of life to your whole creation,
who brought the invisible (things) out into the light,
who made the (things that) are and the (ones that) have an appearance
from the non-appearing and non-being.
( Joseph and Aseneth 12.1–2, trans. Burchard)
Nevertheless the question still remains open: Did the words
on the lips of the mother and of Aseneth actually convey the speci-
fic doctrine? Had the mother been taught by teachers who held
that creatio ex nihilo in one case overruled the teaching nihil
1
Schmuttermayr, p. 206.
# Oxford University Press 2002
[Journal of Theological Studies, NS, Vol. 53, Pt. 2, October 2002]
450 J. C. O’NEILL
ex nihilo fit? Did her words exclude the idea that God worked on
pre-existing formless matter when he made the universe?
Besides a reference to the creation of heaven and earth and
all that is in them, the mother’s words also contain a reference
to the similar creation of tò tṽn ȧnhrv́pvn cénoz, the human race
(or perhaps, the human species). Abel takes this parallelism as
an indication that the mother, who well knew that the human
race was made from dust (Gen. 2:7; 3:19), also assumed that
the heaven and the earth and all that is in them was made from

a pre-existent matter. Abel alludes to the Vulgate: et intelligas,
quia ex nihilo fecit illa Deus, et hominum genus. (The Latin attaches
oű´tv cínetai to the start of the next verse: ita fit.) The mother
had alluded earlier, in verse 22, to the mystery of the origin of
her children. ‘I do not know how you came into being in my
womb. It was not I who gave you life and breath, nor I who
set in order the elements within each of you.’ Clearly, there
did exist elements, which God set in order. ‘For dust thou art,
and unto dust shalt thou return’ (Gen. 3:19). ‘And the Lord
God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into
his nostrils the breath of life _ ’ (Gen. 2:7). Since the mother
knew this, why did she specify something diêrent, out of
which the heaven and the earth and all that is in them was made?
The key di"culty in understanding 2 Macc. 7:28 is the pre-
position ėk. Once any writer about God as creator used the
word ėk, the possibility that the ėk implied some pre-existent
stu^ seems impossible to exclude. Hence commentators like
Grimm, who conclude that in 2 Macc. 7:28 (on either reading)
‘the church’s explanation [in terms of creatio ex nihilo] deserves
the preference as the simpler and more natural’,2 nevertheless
give a great deal of space to pleading for the possibility of other
readings. I think we can be less cautious.
Whoever formulated this statement about God’s power was
faced with a problem. Most other uses of the verb poieĩn implied
ėk something. Furthermore, anyone with the slightest acquaint-
ance with Greek philosophy would know the almost universally
agreed tag of Parmenides, ėk toũ mg̀ o̊ntoz ou̇dèn cínetai (e.g. Philo,
de aeternitate mundi 5; Aristotle, Metaphysica xi.6.1026B). In order
to speak of novelty it would have been necessary to use a formula
with ėk and to find some way of indicating the exception.
But notice that the very use of the Parmenidean formula as the
basis almost guarantees that the Parmenidean formula is being
modified.
2
Grimm, p. 127.
THE DOCTRINE OF C R E A T I O E X N I H I L O ? 451
The text closest to Parmenides is that of Lucian 55 311 (cf.
Origen GCS 10.22.14 on John 1:17): ő´ti ėj ou̇k o̊ntvn ėpoígsen
au̇tà ő heóz. A similar formula was used of parents, as in Xenephon
Memorabilia ii.2.3: oǔz oi̋ coneĩz ėk mèn ou̇k o̊ntvn ėpoígsan ei̇ñai,
but the point of that statement is that parents made children
to exist where there were no children before. This sentence
has nothing to do with where the flesh and blood of children
came from. The point is that where there was no child, now
there is a child. Socrates’ eldest son Lamprocles should stop

being out of humour with his mother and be grateful for her,
for children are those whom ‘parents cause to be out of nothing’.
A child was not thought of as made out of the mother; the mother
conceived the child, bore the child as a burden, and gave the
child her own food (Xenephon Mem. ii.2.5). When the formula
is used of God as creator of heaven and earth it excludes
the notion that unformed matter was already there to be used
by God in creation; God made heaven and earth and all that
is in them where there was nothing at all before.
The sentence in 2 Macc. 7:28 was meant to convey absolute
novelty. What Parmenides had denied to be possible could and
did occur. It would have been safer to avoid the formula ėk, but
the ėk was necessary in order to make it clear that Parmenides’
rule did not always apply.
I suggest that ėj ou̇k o̊ntvn was the original reading. Two reasons
would incline scribes to move the negative ou̇k and to read ou̇k ėj
o̊ntvn ėpoígsen au̇tà ő heóz. Firstly, the pedantic would observe that
the usual negative with a participle was mǵ. Secondly, the precise
among the scribes would observe that the negative really should
go with the preposition ėk rather than with the participle: God
made these things not out of anything at all.
The scribes eliminated the shock of the majority reading which
dangled before us the possibility that we were being told out
of what God had made these things, only to have our normal
expectations, and our Parmenidean doctrine, contradicted by an
ou̇k o̊ntvn. Fritzsche prints ėj ou̇k o̊ntvn.
The reading I regard as secondary (printed by Hanhart) carries
the same message. Schmuttermayr thinks the form ou̇k ėj o̊ntvn
leaves open the question, If not from existing things, from
what then?, and Grimm suggests that the suppressed contrast-
ing clause could have been ȧll˙ ėj mg̀ o̊ntvn (i.e. out of fully
characterless primal stu^ ).3 In this context, however, it is imposs-
ible that the meaning God made these things not out of anything
3
Schmuttermayr, p. 225; Grimm, p. 127.
452 J. C. O’NEILL
[formed, but out of unformed stuff] could be understood, for the
sentence is concerned with God’s power, not with the details
of creation.4 So the secondary reading also teaches creation
ex nihilo, but in a tamer and less striking manner. I do not think
it likely that the reading ou̇k ėj o̊ntvn was changed by scribes
who thought that this reading was liable to be taken in an
unorthodox way, since such misunderstanding was not likely.
Jonathan A. Goldstein is the last of a line of commentators who
argue that creatio ex nihilo is ruled out as a reading of 2 Macc. 7:28

because the mother said that the genus of humanity came into
being in the same way as heaven and earth, that is, ėj ou̇k o̊ntvn
(or ou̇k ėj o̊ntvn). Since everyone held that ‘the matter for the
growing embryo came from the mother’, the world must also
have been made out of pre-existent matter.5 However, the
cínetai in 2 Macc. 7:28b is a gnomic present and the clause
refers to the creation of the first man out of dust, and dust
is not unformed matter. The mother of the seven sons cannot
possibly have been made to contradict the story of Adam in
Genesis. The sentence 2 Macc. 7:28b silently assumes xoũn, ȧpò
tg̃z cg̃z, dust from the earth (Gen. 2:7 LXX). The oǔtv refers
not to the previous prepositional clause ėk ou̇k o̊ntvn, for the
silently assumed equivalent in 7:28b is xoũn ȧpò tg̃z tg̃z. The
oű´tv refers to the whole confession of God’s sovereign power in
7:28a: and the race of men similarly [by the exercise of a unique
sovereign power] came into being.6
4
May deploys a similar argument to mine to conclude that 2 Macc. 7:28 simply
expresses the almighty power of God and could not mark a critical distance from
any doctrine of creation out of eternal material, which was not even on the horizon
of our text (p. 7). That I concede. My case is that the words naturally express a
doctrine that excluded the idea that God was presented with already existing
matter before he began the work of creation. Below I argue that the doctrine
already existed before the time of the Maccabean revolt.
5
Goldstein, p. 310.
6
On Goldstein’s ingenious reading, the mother says that, since God could make
both heaven and earth and humanity exist even though neither had existed before,
how much more easily will he be able to raise from the dead a martyr like her son,
who had once existed and then ceased to exist (p. 311). Goldstein translates the
crucial clause: ‘I ask you, my child, to look upon the heaven and the earth and to
contemplate all therein. I ask you to understand that it was not after they existed
that God fashioned them, and in the same manner the human race comes to be’
(p. 291). However ou̇k ėj o̊ntvn ėpoígsen au̇tà ő heóz cannot mean ‘he had not made
them after they had existed’. The preposition ėk can carry a temporal force as in the
expression g̋méran ėj g̋méraz (Gen. 39:10; Num. 30:15; 2 Pet. 2:8; 2 Clem. 11:2), and
day after day is a good translation, but the meaning is day following day. In that
expression and elsewhere, ėk with temporal force is used to indicate continuity not
the discontinuity required by Goldstein (e.g. Mark 9:21: ėk paidióhen, since or from).
Both in 2 Macc. 7:23 and in 7:28, God stands as creator of the
world out of nothing before the shaping of the origin of humanity
and the inventing of the origin of all things. God’s power both
before anything material existed and after the material came into
existence is sovereign. Therefore, by raising the dead, he can give
back both spirit and life to those who die for his laws.
Gerhard May concedes that the mother could have been draw-
ing on a firm tradition, but he denies the formula indicates creatio
ex nihilo and asserts that there is no direct evidence in Judaism for

such an ancient theory of creation, and that Hellenistic Jewish
theology had never expressed a theory of creation out of nothing
in direct conflict with current Greek theories of creation as the
formation of pre-existent matter.7 Is May right?
Contemporary scholars tend to side with Gunkel against
Wellhausen on the issue as to whether or not Genesis 1 teaches
creatio ex nihilo, but Wellhausen’s arguments still deserve a hear-
ing. Wellhausen knew that the traditions employed in Genesis 1
thought of chaos as uncreated matter, but he maintained that in
Gen. 1:1 the remarkable idea was put forward that chaos itself
was created by God. In this ‘Hebrew narrative the immanent
Spirit has yielded to the transcendent God, and the principle of
evolution is put aside in favour of the fiat of creation’.8 A verb
was employed which decisively dissociated God’s creation from
any comparison with human making and shaping.9 Hermann
Gunkel denied that Gen. 1:1 taught creatio ex nihilo because
heaven and earth described the organized cosmos and could not
describe a chaotic primeval world. He conceded that the verb
atb, probably more ancient than Wellhausen believed, became
popular later and helped to produce the doctrine of creatio ex
nihilo in 2 Macc. 7:28 and Heb. 11:3.10
It is true that heaven and earth in Gen. 1.1 is a formula.
The earth of Gen. 1:2 belongs to another formula, assuming
formless matter as the pre-existent substance out of which
the universe was made. God by his Spirit worked on formless
matter: the febf fev of Gen. 1:2 is rendered as kénvma kaì ou̇hén
by Aquila, and as kenòn kaì ou̇hén by Theodotion.11 But the
earth, which can be said to be nothing, is now the earth of Gen.
1:1 which has previously been said to have been created by
7
May, p. 7.
8
Wellhausen, German p. 313; English pp. 297–8; this citation from the English,
p. 298.
9
Wellhausen, German p. 321; English p. 305.
10
Gunkel, p. 90.
11
Cf. Jer. 4:23; also LXX; Isa. 34:11; 40:17; see Schmuttermayr, p. 215.
454 J. C. O’NEILL
God. It is the juxtaposition of two distinct traditional formulae,
with Gen. 1:1 put first, that converts the old mythology into
a statement of creatio ex nihilo. ‘With good reason verse 1 stands
before verse 2.’12
Isa. 44:24 looks like a direct rebuttal of a cosmology that
believed in gods who shaped the universe out of pre-existent
matter:
I am the Lord that maketh all things,

that stretched forth the heavens alone,
that spreadeth abroad the earth by myself (jdbl).13
In Prov. 8:24, Wisdom existed before the earth was made
and before the abyss was made, which ‘is not consistent with a
pre-existent watery chaos’. In Prov. 8:22–23, ‘Wisdom existed
before the teho–mo–t, which therefore belongs to the series of
Yahweh’s creative acts listed in vv. 24–29’.14
The same view is found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. In the War
Scroll 10:13 God is addressed as creator of, among all else, the
circle of the sea and the reservoirs of the rivers and the chasms
of the abyss or the deeps: vfmev psbmf.
Of course the theory that the abyss was made by God could
then go on to assume that God shaped everything else using this
matter he had himself created. That seems to be the position in
the Wisdom of Solomon. God’s all-powerful hand created the
cosmos out of formless matter (11:17), but this same God loves
all things that exist (tà o̊nta pánta), and nothing could have
been preserved unless called forth by him (11:24–25)—not even
formless matter.
Wis. 1:14a is clear: For he created all things so that they might
exist (e̊ktisen càr ei̇z tò ei̇ñai tà pánta) (cf. Wisd. 9:1).
At worst, Wis. 11:17 might show that both doctrines existed
side by side. That is not impossible, for the Wisdom of Solomon
is not the work of one writer but a collection of aphorisms,
connected by catchwords. However, the ű´ lg out of which the
cosmos was created was the formless cg̃ which God had pre-
viously made (Gen. 1:1). That was the line pursued by Justin
Martyr. In his First Apology 59 he argued that Moses was
Plato’s teacher. Plato said that God altered shapeless matter and
made the world. This corresponded to the moment in Gen. 1:3
where God uttered the word, Let there be light. Moses, however,
12
Von Rad: German p. 39; English p. 49.
13
Cf. Isa. 45:18; 46:9; Isa. 45:5, 7; and Isa. 44:6; 48:12; and see Copan, p. 90.
14
McKane, p. 355; cf. Copan, p. 83 and n. 23.
had already said in Gen. 1:1 that God had made heaven and
earth: God made the world out of the material (heaven and
earth) that he had already previously created.15
The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is assumed in the Epistle
of Aristeas 136, against the human tendency to make gods of
men like ourselves. Inventors are contrasted with the true God.
Inventors simply take existing objects already created, and
combine them together. They do not themselves create the sub-
stance of the things (tg̀n kataskeug̀n au̇tṽn ou̇ poiǵsantez au̇toí).16

May is right: the thought is not teased out, and there is no
explicit discussion of the origin of matter.17 But that argument
cuts both ways. The conclusions may not need to have been
made explicit because they belonged to the common currency
of belief. Gamaliel II mounted an argument against his philo-
sopher opponent similar to the argument in the Epistle of
Aristeas. When the philosopher said, ‘It is true your God was
a great artist, but he also had good colours already there to
help him: chaos and darkness and water and wind and abysses’,
Gamaliel replied that all these were described as having been
created by him (Isa. 45:7; Ps. 148:4–5; Amos 4:13; Prov. 8:24).18
The Shepherd of Hermas provides evidence of the credal
status of the belief. ‘First of all believe that God is one, who
created and perfected all things, even made all things come into
existence out of what was not, and though containing all things,
he alone is uncontained’ (Mandates i.1; cf. Visions i.1.6). This
is probably an ancient tradition, going far back into Judaism.19
Since the name of Jesus never appears in the Shepherd, I would
argue that it is a collection of Jewish traditions rather than a
Christian creation.
If the Shepherd’s credal formula can be heard echoed in other
places in Judaism, as well as in the New Testament, we have
evidence that the mother of the seven martyred sons was simply
recalling for her last son the substance of a fixed doctrine. Some-
thing like this wording is found in Wis. 1:14: e̊ktisen càr ei̇z tò ei̇ñai
tà pánta; in 2 Bar. 48:8: ‘with the word you bring to life that
which does not exist’ (cf. 2 Bar. 21:4); in the Paris Magical
Papyrus where God is the one who made all things to come into
existence from what did not exist; in the (Jewish) Odes of
15
The reading of Justin Martyr oêred by Otto and Blunt.
16
Wolfson, i.303, argues that the construction, kataskeuǵ, may have been made
out of formless matter. Would not this interpretation have destroyed the argument?
17
May, p. 8.
18
Moore, i.381–2; iii. n. 120, pp. 119–20; May, p. 23 and n. 98; Copan, p. 85.
19
Cf. Dibelius, p. 497.
456 J. C. O’NEILL
Solomon 16: 18–19: ‘And there is nothing that is without the
Lord; for he was before anything came into being. And the
worlds were made by his word, and by the thought of his
heart’; and in the Apostolic Constitutions viii.12.7: ő tà pánta ėk
toũ mg̀ o̊ntoz ei̇z tò ei̇ñai paracacv́n.
But a similar formula appears also in Philo, who would have
been expected to have a theoretical discussion of the relation
of such a belief to the apparently diêrent dominant Greek
beliefs, yet remains strangely silent on the subject. If Philo does

not have the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, we may have to concede
May’s point, that no proper philosophically tenable doctrine of
creatio ex nihilo, as later understood by the Church, had yet
emerged, or agree with Wolters that there is a tension in Philo’s
thought; although Philo does not hold the concept, he never-
theless probably tried to argue that the already existing material
had been created.
May argues that Philo in de opificio mundi simply assumes,
without argument and without seeing the di"culties, the Stoic
theory that the world was fashioned out of matter. The term
ou̇sía in Philo simply stood for the Stoic material matter.20
A little later on, May rightly notes that Philo reads Gen. 1:1–5
as describing the making of the world of ideas, not the visible
bodily world. May is then puzzled that the origin of matter was
simply not handled by Philo. May has not noticed that the begin-
ning of Philo’s exegesis of Gen. 1:1–5 in de opificio mundi lies
as far back as paragraph 15: Moses is speaking of that beautiful
world which is perceptible only by the intellect (opif. 15).
Consequently, the citation of Plato’s Timaeus 29E in paragraph
21 belongs to Philo’s discussion of the world of ideas, not to his
discussion of the visible bodily world. The ou̇sía in question
lacked order, quality, and animation and was full of disorder
and confusion, but received a share of the Father and Creator’s
own excellent nature. It was changed and transformed, being
invested with order, quality, animation, unity, arrangement, and
harmony—all the things belonging to the more excellent idea
(opif. 21–22). But all this happened at the level of intelligible
ou̇sía. This ou̇sía is not pre-existent matter at all. Plato’s words
are applied by Philo to the work of the Creator who, from a
model perceptible only by intellect, made an incorporeal heaven
and an invisible earth, and the form of air and of empty space
(opif. 29). Philo agrees with Plato that the intelligible world
does not exist in any place (opif. 17; Symposium 211A) and
20
On opif. 21–22, May, p. 10, n. 34.
nowhere attacks Plato for having departed from this view.21 Philo
takes the LXX of Gen. 1:2 as evidence that Moses held the
doctrine, later expounded by Plato, that the invisible world of
forms provided the model according to which God created the
visible corporeal world: g̋ dè cg̃ ġñ ȧóratoz kaì ȧkataskeúastoz.22
The four elements, beginning with earth, were first conceived as
invisible before the visible corporeal elements were created out
of which the world was constructed. Philo consistently distin-
guishes the ou̇sía which is incorporeal, perceptible only by the

intellect, from the ou̇sía which is bodily and intelligible by the
external senses (opif. 29, 49, 55, 66, 67, 69, 70, 92, 98, 111, 114,
132, 135) and he assumes that he is following Moses and Plato.
The invisible ou̇sía, perceptible only by the intellect, and shaped
by God to form the ideas, could not possibly be thought of as
pre-existent in relation to God. These ideas are the model accord-
ing to which the world was created. It follows that the corporeal
visible ou̇sía which was created when time was created, or shortly
before (opif. 26), could not have been thought of as existing inde-
pendently of the created world. By applying to the ideal incorpor-
eal world the Stoic concept of God’s acting on matter, Philo has
undercut the theory that God needed matter to work on in creat-
ing the world. He rejects the Stoic theory because his God must
be thought of as creator of the invisible world before he can be
thought of as creator of corporeal matter and the whole visible
world (de aeternitate mundi 8). The word ou̇sía in Philo does
not simply represent the Stoic matter. The word is clearly used
both of incorporeal ou̇sía discernible only by the intellect and
of corporeal ou̇sía which is discernible by the external senses.
The latter, and only the latter, is called ű´ lg (opif. 62, 136, 137,
142, 146, 171).
Philo interpreted Plato’s story of creation in the Timaeus as a
drama going on in the head of God, as it were, in the intelligible
world. All that happened in the intelligible world is of God,
so that it is out of the question that any substance pre-existed
before God got to work. And bodily substance is also out of
the question since nothing bodily as yet exists. The creation
of the visible bodily world is a new beginning, and space, place
21
Wolfson, i.240–1 only surmises that Philo attacked Plato and gives no
evidence from Philo himself. This surmise unnecessarily complicates Wolfson’s
argument that Philo taught creatio ex nihilo, i.300–312.
22
Aet. mundi 19. Origen in his commentary on Genesis seems to be attacking
this interpretation of Gen. 1:2 (Eusebius praeparatio evangelica vii.20.9).
458 J. C. O’NEILL
and bodies, made of the four elements which are themselves
created, is a creatio ex nihilo (de confusione linguarum 136).
In discussing the seventh day, which had a natural precedence
over all other days, Philo extols the knowledge of this prece-
dence given prophetically through Moses. He distinguishes the
time when the world was created from the time before the origina-
tion of the heaven and all the objects perceptible to the outward
senses (ou̇k ȧw˙ oű˜ mónon ėdgmiourcǵhg ő kósmoz, ȧllà kaì prò tg̃z
ou̇ranoũ kaì pantòz ai̇shgtoũ cenésevz) (de vita Mosis ii.263). Philo

uses the miraculous production of manna out of air on the
first day of the week as a parable of the creation of the world,
bringing it out of non-existence into existence (Mos. ii.267).
Winston would argue that this pre-supposes creation out of
pre-existent matter, overlooking the consistent distinction Philo
makes between the activity of God in the intelligible realm,
where no visible thing yet exists, and his activity after he has
made the tangible world perceptible to the outward senses.23
Philo claims that creatio ex nihilo is one of the current inter-
pretations of Plato. Plato, unlike Aristotle, held that the world
was created and indestructible, not uncreated and indestructible
(aet. 14, 15). Of course Moses was the first to present this
view (aet. 19). Throughout the whole of the Timaeus Plato calls
that Author of the gods Father and Creator and Maker, and
he calls this world his work and his o^spring (aet. 15; Timaeus
41A). Plato, according to Aristotle (aet. 16) and according to
some Platonists of Philo’s day, taught creatio ex nihilo (aet. 15).
Philo does refer to the tag, ‘nothing comes into being from the
non-existent’, but in the context this applies only to the world
after it has been created. He deploys the tag as an argument
against the theory that the world is destructible. As nothing is
generated [within the universe] out of nothing, so neither can
anything that exists be destroyed so as to become non-existent.
Since, within the universe, there is no cause of destruction that
would destroy the world, the engendering of destruction would
come from something that has no existence (aet. 5, 78).24
May concedes that Philo often talks of God’s creation out
of what is not, but argues that his words are to be understood
neither as referring to creatio ex nihilo nor as referring to the form-
ing of relatively non-existing material: the ‘relative non-being
23
Winston, p. 8; Mos. ii.263. Cf. de decalogo 58: no part of the world is its own
master but each is created. There was a time when it had no existence. See
Winston’s attempt to brush aside this passage, p. 17.
24
Cf. Winston, p.12.
or unformed matter, so shadowy and vague that it cannot be
said to have the status of ‘‘being’’, which is imparted to it by
the shaping hand of the Creator’ (to cite Chadwick).25 May says
that those alternatives mean nothing to Philo. Philo simply
states that the world, which hitherto had not existed, came into
being through God’s creative act—what any Platonist could say.
According to May, the eternity of matter was just assumed.26
If my argument is valid that Philo always took it that Plato’s
theory of creation in the Timaeus applied to the intangible and

invisible world of the forms and not to the later (if one can use
the word later) creation of the visible tangible universe, then we
must re-open the possibility that Philo regarded all material as
created from nothing. Of course God used the four elements to
construct the world (de cherubim 127) but these four elements
were created according to the intelligible model, for everything
is God’s (cher. 124). Chadwick concedes this for de somniis i.76
and de providentia ii. 50 apud Eusebius praep. ev. vii.21.27
De somniis i.76: ‘but also he created what had not existed before,
being not only a shaper but also a creator’. The extract from
de providentia presented by Eusebius extols the wisdom of
God who, being already the originator of numbers and measures,
precisely calculated the quantity of matter (ou̇sía) that he required
to make the universe. (This is all at the stage of planning, and
the ou̇sía is incorporeal, so that it is uncertain whether it can
be said to exist yet.)28 Then, at the stage of creation, God took
care that the exact amount of ű´ lg, matter in the corporeal sense,
was available.29 I would add legum allegoriarum iii.7–10: God is
he ‘who composed tà ő´ la, just everything, out of what did not
exist’. But if Philo is quite clear that God shaped an invisible
world by the Logos before (as it were) there was any visible
world, all his statements about the creation of the visible world
out of nothing should be taken literally. There was nothing
visible or tangible before he made the visible and tangible.
25
Chadwick, 1966, p. 46.
26
May, p. 18.
27
Chadwick, 1966, p. 142, n. 70; 1967, p. 142, n. 7.
28
The controversial clause ei̇ dg̀ céconen o̊ntvz was taken by Eusebius to refer
to ou̇sía, and that is the most natural way of reading Philo’s Greek (see Schroeder,
pp. 278–9).
29
See May pp. 14–15 and n. 54, who again misses the two ways of talking of
‘matter’. Winston cites de providentia i.22 (Eusebius Praep. Ev. vii.21) as an
explicit statement that God created the world out of pre-existent matter (p. 7).
460 J. C. O’NEILL
In Quaestiones in Genesim iv.68 it is said that the Father of
all things did not need matter for his creative work.30
Siegert argues that in de Deo 7–8 (preserved only in the
Armenian) Philo assumes that God, before he shaped the world,
first found in the requisite quantity the material on which he
was to work.31
Philo is dealing with the seeming paradox that God is
a consuming fire (Deut. 4:24).32

Paragraph 7. How can God consume without destroying?—for to pre-
serve, not to destroy is the activity proper to God. It is easy to show
that what God seems to consume remains unconsumed by appealing
to examples. When a painter uses all his paint to make a picture, or a
sculptor his bronze, or a builder his wood and stone, we don’t say that
he has destroyed the material. The materials persist in a better fashion.
So God consumes matter (as Moses and all those who have become
students of nature after him have maintained) not in order to let it
return to nothingness but on the contrary, as by a preservative trans-
formation, to bring it from non-existence to existence. For God is the
cause of salvation for all things.
Paragraph 8. God resolved the thicker, coarser, heavier part of the

stu^s into the substance of earth; the finer and lighter for the birth of
fire; for the birth of water the finer substance than earth; what was coarser
than fire and finer than water for the birth of air. For nothing was left over
(cf. de plantatione 6). The four stu^s that are origins of everything, I say,
he has used up for everything, not desiring destruction but salvation.
The point of this passage is certainly to emphasize that God did
not literally destroy the four parts of the stu^s that he transformed
into earth, fire, water, and air. Nor did he leave anything uncon-
sumed and untransformed. However, the end of de Deo 7 assumes
that all material once did not exist; the consuming transformation
did not allow the stu^ to fall back into the non-existent state
it once had. The emphasis on God’s responsibility for the salva-
tion of all things at the end of each paragraph leaves no room
for a pre-existent matter he did not make.
It seems likely that this passage assumes the theory that God
first conceived of matter in his head (as it were), then brought it
into existence and, by a transforming consumption, worked it up
30
Siegert, p. 59.
31
Siegert, p. 117 with n. 26, referring also to May, pp. 14–15 and n. 53 on the
passage from Philo preserved in Eusebius praep. ev. 7.21.1–4.
32
This paraphrase is based on Folker Siegert’s back-translation from Armenian
to Greek, and his translation of his Greek reconstruction into German. I have
received valuable help from Professor Robert W. Thomson on the Armenian.
into the four elements. God cannot have been portrayed as so
subservient to the being who had provided him with just the right
amount of material that he took care to use it all. On the contrary,
the whole cosmos is God’s vision: it is the eternal non-
material lócoz of the everlasting God which supports the
universe (de plantatione 8).
Philo’s assertion that God did not touch limitless chaotic
matter in the act of creation (de specialibus legibus i.328–9) is
taken as evidence that limitless chaotic matter was already in

existence before God created the world.33 In fact the passage
in context is an argument that God created all things. Philo
is attacking those who deny that incorporeal ideas exist. These
thinkers are the allegorical equivalent of eunuchs (Deut. 23:1).
By their theories they reduce the universe to formless eternal
matter. But God created everything out of the incorporeal existent
idea and was not a shaper of pre-existent matter, as though the
all-wise and all-blessed God should have had to dirty his hands
and touch already existing material (spec. i.326–329).
A passage in which God is said not to praise perishable dis-
ordered material which he had worked up into something that
he saw as very good (Gen. 1:31) but to praise his own skilful work
is taken by Winston as poignantly a"rming that God had to
gloss over the unfortunate fact that he needed to work on dis-
orderly already-existent matter. In fact the passage is denying
this view of creation, for God both engendered and fashioned
everything. He did not have to praise perishable material because
there was nothing he himself did not make (quis rerum divinarum
heres sit 157–160).34
A similar cosmology is found in 1QS 3.15: ‘From the God of
knowledge comes all that is and shall be, and before beings existed
he established all their design’, and in the Hymn Scroll.35 God
judged through the heavenly host (?) all his works before he created
them (1QH 13.7–8 [5.13–14]). He established (the heavenly
host?) before eternity (1QH 13.10 [5.16]). Once the uncreated is
as alien as possible from the visible (opif. 12), then the creation
of the visible must be ‘out of nothing’, in the strictest sense.
Now the mass of statements in Philo to the eêct that God
created the universe ėk toũ mg̀ o̊ntoz (Mos. ii.267; de decalogo
111; de deo 7 [Latin: de nihilo]; quod deus sit immutabilis 119)
33
Winston, pp. 8–9; Siegert, p. 59.
34
Cf. Winston, p. 12.
35
On 1QS 3.15, see Copan, p. 85.
462 J. C. O’NEILL
or called tà mg̀ o̊nta into existence (op. 81; Mos. ii.100;
spec. iv.187; de mutatione nominum 46; her. 36; de migratione
Abrahami 183) may be taken as echoes of a credal formula. God
begot all things, not only leading them into the light; he made
what formerly did not exist, he being not only their Shaper, but
also their Creator (de somniis i.76; cf. legum allegoriarum iii.
7–10; spec. i.30). Of the five articles of the creed at the end of de
opificio mundi 170–172, the third, that the world came into
being, and the fourth, that the world is one and its Maker is

one, together imply creatio ex nihilo, since the world includes
every visible thing.
I am arguing that there is evidence that the doctrine of creatio ex
nihilo was already formulated as a credal statement by the time
of the New Testament. If so, that would explain why there is
nothing in the New Testament to contradict creatio ex nihilo. It
would also explain why the doctrine is simply alluded to, without
elaboration. John 1:3 and Heb. 11:3 are clear positive statements.
‘All things were made by [the Logos] and without him was not
even one of the things that exist made.’ ‘By faith we understand
that the ages were made by the word of God, so that what is
seen exists not out of what was [already] apparent.’ Rom. 4:17
and 1 Cor. 1:28 seem to be homiletical allusions to an agreed
and fixed belief.
Yet the absence of the wording we have found in Philo and
Hermas is surprising, and gives May ground for supposing that
there was not yet in existence a cosmological theory. No one,
according to him, had yet found it necessary to formulate a theory
of creation ex nihilo.36 Of course May does not agree that the
wording which I have argued is credal would convey the later doc-
trine. Nevertheless, if I could show that the formula itself
appeared in the New Testament, my case would be strengthened.
The possibility that the formula does occur in the New
Testament was first drawn to my attention by the Rev Kenneth
Lintern. I mentioned to him that Lionel North and I were col-
lecting examples of places where some manuscripts of the
New Testament either omitted or added the word not. Kenneth
Lintern asked whether I had noticed that some manuscripts
read a not in Rev. 4:11. Instead of ‘You created all things and,
for your will, they were and were created’, a number of manu-
scripts read, ‘You created all things and, for your will, they
were not and were created’ (046 18 61* 69 1678 1778 1828 2020
2080). Mr Lintern thought that this was the original.
36
May, pp. 26–7.
The longer reading in Rev. 4:11 was favoured by Ewald on the
grounds that the text without the negative is so little Hebraic or
indeed so unclear in any other language that it is necessary to read
the ou̇k before the ġ˜san in order to produce something genuinely
Hebraic. Most commentators reject it. Charles supposed that
the original should have been kaì ėktíshgsan kaì ġ˜san or, better,
that we should omit kaì ėktíshgsan with the Codex Alexandrinus
and explained kaì ėktíshgsan as a gloss by a scribe who did
not understand that ġ˜san meant ėktíshgsan. But surely the reading

of A is a case of homoioteleuton. Düsterdieck rejected the
longer text with ou̇k, but conceded that, as a gloss, it was a
‘not unskilful expedient’ that got around the di"culty of the
imperfect ġ˜san.
I think Ewald’s instinct was the right one. Perhaps the omission
of the ou̇k arose from a pedantic scribe’s wish to avoid saying that
God created all the things that did not exist. The omission or
addition of a negative is one of the most common textual cor-
ruptions, partly because it does not always make much diêrence
(as in Matt. 18:20). Dr North tells me that he has now found
eighty examples in the New Testament. With the negative, the
sentence states the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.
The mother of the seven sons knew of the distinction between
creation out of dust and creation out of nothing. Proverbs, at least,
contradicts a view which might have been based on Genesis 1 that
God created the universe out of pre-existent matter. Philo and the
Dead Sea Scrolls make a clear distinction between God’s formu-
lating his creative plans before he made the universe and the act of
creation itself. The clear distinction entails creation of the visible
and tangible universe out of nothing.
The Shepherd of Hermas provides evidence that the doctrine of
creatio ex nihilo had been formulated as a creed long ago. The
mother of the seven sons alluded to the credal formulation;
Philo employed it often. The New Testament assumed this doc-
trinal belief and, if we can accept the longer reading in Rev.
4:11, contained an explicit statement of the doctrine of creatio ex
nihilo.37
J. C. O’NEILL
37
I am grateful to Professor William Horbury for reading an earlier draft and
for directing me to further issues and to the arguments of other scholars that
needed to be addressed.
464 J. C. O’NEILL
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