For he called us when we were not and it was his will that out of nothing we should come to being. (2 Clement 1:8)
The phrase translated as "out of nothing" is the Greek phrase εκ μη οντος. While often taken as evidence of creation ex nihilo at an early date (2 Clement is dated to the middle of the 2nd century CE), this is not what many scholars believe the phrase to mean. Commenting on this text, Jeffrey Russell, professor of History at the University California, Santa Barbara, wrote:
It is not clear what Clement meant by "from nothing." He used the phrase εκ μη οντος rather than εξ ουκ οντος. Since μη is a conditional negative rather than the absolute negative ουκ, it is likely that he did not mean ex nihilo, but rather from unformed matter, υλη, which both Clement and the Neoplatonists regarded as almost total nonbeing. In such systems, the ore real a thing is the more spiritual it is; the less real it is, the more material it is. Matter is, as Gilson once put it, tottering on the verge of unreality. This idealism is philosophically the exact opposite of the materialism prevalent in western culture today. (Jeffrey Burton Russell, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition [Cornell University Press, 1981], 109 n. 8; emphasis in original)
