- Dec 19, 2020
- 141
- 83
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Marital Status
- Married
One Jewish source from over a century before the time of the New Testament declares:
“I beg you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed,” (2 Maccabees 7:28-29).
An early Jewish Midrash also preserves a conversation between a gentile philosopher and the first-century Jewish sage, Gamaliel, in which Gamaliel refutes the idea that God was merely an artist working with existing material.
The universe from nothing: Did God create ex-nihilo? | carm.org
Gerhard May said:
The best known text, constantly brought forward as the earliest evidence of the conceptual formulation of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, is 2 Maccabees 7:28. The need for caution in evaluating this is apparent from the context in which there is talk of creation “out of nothing.” There is here no theoretical disquisition on the nature of the creation process, but a parenthetic reference to God’s creative power: . . . A position on the problem of matter is clearly not to be expected in this context. The text implies no more than the conception that the world came into existence through the sovereign creative act of God, and that it previously was not there. (Gerhard May, Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation Out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: Clark, 1994); p. 6, 7)
James Hubler wrote in his dissertation:
Non-being [in 2 Maccabees] refers to the non-existence of the heavens and earth before God’s creative act. It does not express absolute non-existence, only the prior nonexistence of the heavens and earth. They were made to exist after not existing. (James N. Hubler, “Creatio ex Nihilo: Matter, Creation, and the Body in Classical and Christian Philosophy through Aquinas” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1995), 90)
The Rev N. Joseph Torchia, O. P., Ph. D. noted:
But the contention that 2Mc 7:28 upholds creation ex nihilo is by no means a universally shared assumption among contemporary scholars. The dispute surrounds the formula ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων ἐποίησεν (the reading of Lucian 55 311, Origen GCS 10.22.14 on Jn 1:17, Latin M, Syriac) and its unambiguous pronouncement of creation “from what does not exist.” The alternate reading (A V 106, Latin BP, Coptic) of οὐκ ἐξ ὄντων carries the connotation of “not from existent things”, a formula less explicit in its comitment to creation from absolutely nothing at all. In this respect, J. C. O’Neill suggests that the original reading was ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων ἐποίησεν, stressing that the very need to highlight the “novelty” inherent in this act of making required a formula indicating an exceptional case (even as he concedes that the preposition ἐξ “implied some pre-existing stuff”). (Rev. N. Joseph Torchia, O. P., Ph. D., Creation and Contingency in Early Patristic Thought, Lexington Books: 2019, p 18, 19)
Upvote
0