On Genesis 1:
It would be difficult to maintain
that the first Genesis account expressly teaches that God created all things
out of nothing. The notion of ‘nothing’ was unimaginable to the unphilosophical
author, but he can still get across the essential truth that whatever does
exist was created by God. For this reason everything that exists is good, as
the author repeatedly insists. There is no dualism of a good and a bad
principle at play in the work of creation. Evil did not exist alongside God,
and cannot have come from him. Man, too, stands in a privileged position,
directly and specially created by God with God-like qualities: no mixture of
clay and a dead god’s blood. (Robert Butterworth, The Theology of Creation [Theology
Today Series 5; Butler, Wis: Clergy Book Service, 1969], 37)
Commenting on 2 Maccabees 7:
Not only does this mother’s
speech display the sustaining power that faith in God the Creator had come to
have among the Jews; it also shows how, through contact with Greek thinking,
the Jews were able to make clear, in a way that had been beyond the author of
the first Genesis account, that God created what exists out of nothing. The
myth of pre-existing chaos, independent of God, had been finally laid to rest. (Robert
Butterworth, The Theology of Creation [Theology Today Series 5; Butler,
Wis: Clergy Book Service, 1969], 41)
In other words, before 2 Maccabees and the influx of
Greek thinking among the Jews, the Genesis 1 account, as well as creation
itself, was understood as being ex materia. Of course, I dispute the
reading proposed for 2 Maccabees, as do many scholars.
