Beginnings

Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives

Peter C. Bouteneff

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780801032332
• eBook ISBN: 9781441201836
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

What are we missing when we look at the creation narratives of Genesis only or primarily through the lens of modern discourse about science and religion? Theologian Peter Bouteneff explores how first-millennium Christian understandings of creation can inform current thought in the church and in the public square. He reaches back into the earliest centuries of our era to recover the meanings that early Jewish and Christian writers found in the stories of the six days of creation and of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Readers will find that their forbears in the faith saw in the Genesis narrative not simply an account of origins but also a rich teaching about the righteousness of God, the saving mission of Christ, and the destiny of the human creature.

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And There Was Morning

An Introduction

As this study is concerned chiefly with the early Christian exegesis of biblical texts, our first task is to explore the nature of the texts themselves and then to see how they were used in subsequent biblical and extrabiblical literature before the first Christians came onto the scene. Paul’s use of Genesis 1–3 is so sure footed that it can give the impression of being built on long-accepted readings. Yet the Hebrew Bible is nearly silent on the six days of creation and on paradise. Did Paul’s reading, then, come out of nowhere? This introduction charts the long and bumpy journey leading to the NT Epistles and beyond.

The Text and Its Journey

The primary text whose early Christian interpretation is examined here comes to us, in the chapters assigned it in the Middle Ages, as Genesis 1–3. The broader context—Genesis 1–11, all of Genesis, the whole Pentateuch—is important, but the first three chapters, narrating the Hexaemeron and the story of Adam and Eve in paradise, have their own integrity and will be our primary focus here. Although an exhaustive critical survey is naturally beyond the scope of this study, we will raise questions about the redaction of the narratives and their respective character, shape, and emphases, as well as the project of their translation in the LXX, the text used by nearly all the interpreters examined in the chapters to come.

Two Narratives

Genesis 1–3 is unmistakably divided into two parts: that describing the “generations” of the creation and situation of the heavens and the earth (1:1–2:4a) and that focusing on the creation of the human person (2:4b–3:24). Because of this clear division, regardless of their respective provenance or how we may see them as interrelated and complementary, I speak of the creation narratives in the plural.

The presentation of creation from perspectives that narrate two different sequences, each invoking God’s making of earth and heaven (1:1 and 2:4b), has been a prime factor in modern hypotheses identifying multiple strands of authorship. The Hexaemeron narrative emerges as the work of the alleged “Priestly writer” (P) and the paradise narrative as that of a less distinct, probably earlier “Jahwist” (J).1 The particulars of Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis have been debated and challenged,2 yet the respective details and narrative styles leave no doubt that we are dealing with two related stories or an overarching event described from two perspectives. There is equally no reason to doubt that an author/redactor saw fit to bring these accounts together, probably adding material to give them coherence (e.g., 2:4a), and to conceive of them as together forming the beginning of the book whose Hebrew title, bereshit, means “In the beginning.” The evidence presented below will support the theory that this redaction took place quite late or, at any rate, that its entry into Israelite consciousness as a normative creation account did not take place until the first and second centuries BCE.

The Narratives’ Logic

Let us look at some of the clearest overarching characteristics of what I will here call the Hexaemeron narrative3 (or Gen. 1) and the paradise narrative (or Gen. 2–3). Genesis 1 is a primarily cosmocentric account, whereas Genesis 2–3 is anthropocentric—although it would be truer to say that both culminate in a focus on the human person, though in different ways. The creation of the human person—here not simply by the fiat of the divine word “Let there be” but with the conscious deliberation of “Let us make”—is presented as the culmination or crowning point of creation, and the divine image—whatever this is taken precisely to mean—is at the very least an indication of the unique role of the human person within creation.4 The movement in Genesis 1 is from chaos to cosmos: from the tohu wa bohu of formless void to an ordered creation, crowned by the human person, male and female. Aside from this movement toward the creation of humanity, Genesis 1 reflects the priestly interest in (cultic) order, in placement, and in distinction; the separation into “days” arguably speaks out of this concern rather than functioning as a historical or scientific chronicle.

Genesis 2–3 is not concerned with a first-to-last order; it begins already speaking as from the future, of a “time” when there were yet no plants, and is unconcerned with the heavens, or even very much with the earth except to specify the geographic location of Eden. Its chief subject matter is the human person. In a manner of speaking, we move from a void (no plants and no rain/ mist) to cosmos (beautiful and tasty vegetation and finally human personhood, which is complete or “good” only when there is a complementary pair of persons) and back to chaos (the curse and expulsion from paradise).

Far from a redundant retelling, then, the two accounts fulfill different functions and are, for the purposes of subsequent thinking, both indispensable. Many observers have come up with ways of describing the complementary features and functions of the two narratives. Genesis 1 is about “showing”: God’s words are immediately transformed into action. Genesis 2–3 is about “telling”: “In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens . . .”5 Genesis 1 is an objective account, culminating in the creation of humanity but defining it from the outside; Genesis 2–3 is a subjective account, beginning with the creation of humanity and defining it from the inside.

This kind of analysis, though utterly foreign to the writers considered in this study, remains useful in underlining for us both the distinction and the complementarity of the Hexaemeron and paradise accounts. The main question—whether the juxtaposition of two evidently distinct narratives is the work of a single author or a single redactor—does not have theological consequences that fit within the scope of this book. The fact is that they are enshrined next to one another in the scriptural canon and were read as such by the Christian interpreters here considered.

Points of Departure: The Content of the Narratives

Every journey has a point of departure. The journey toward the Christian interpretation of Genesis 1–3 begins (after their composition, compilation, and redaction) with what the narratives seem to be saying as distinct from what was made of them in later imagination. Although it is unrealistic to pretend to a definitive account of the narratives’ meaning or to aspire to unlocking authorial intent, we can at least try to return to a reading that ignores some of the later questions posed to the narratives and the interpretations foisted on them: much of the significance and many of the features we take for granted in the paradise narrative are absent from the text itself. The biblical text nowhere says that the serpent is the devil or that Eden is a heavenly garden where the righteous will live eternally; it does not even present itself as describing the fall of humanity. All of this comes from later interpretation, some of which is so powerful—and indeed so ancient—that it is difficult to extricate it from the scriptural narrative.6

In this chapter we will try to read the text on its own as a first step in plotting a trajectory of how the later exegesis developed. We will focus on just a few key features within the stages of the story: humanity before the distinction of “Adam” and “Eve,” the result of their transgression vis-à-vis mortality, and their story in its wider context.7 The emphasis will be on the human person as described in the paradise narrative (though with reference also to Gen. 1:26–27) because this is what chiefly engaged later interpreters.

The Hexaemeron also generated significant commentaries in the early church, but these neither vary greatly nor are they theologically complex. An observation at the outset, however: the Hexaemeron was not concerned primarily with establishing God as Creator of the world. True, it was significantly distinct from other ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies in that it presented creation as the work of one God, not the outcome of a battle of gods or the work of a series of demiurges. But “Israel had no need expressly to believe that the world was created by God because that was a presupposition of their thinking.”8 This disinterest also meant that the Hexaemeron did not set out to answer in a fixed way the question of how God created the world, because Israel was not terribly interested in this question—which is probably why the Hexaemeron account is unapologetically followed by a paradise narrative that recounts creation in a different sequence and why allusions to creation in the Psalms, Job, and Isaiah vary from it and from each other.

HUMANITY BEFORE ADAM AND EVE

The translation problem posed by the Hebrew 'adam will be a recurrent theme in this introduction.9 This word may refer to human beings generally (“man,”

.), to any particular person (“a man”), or to a particular person or character named Adam; the author or redactor of Genesis 1–3 exploits this ambiguity. The word first occurs in Genesis 1:26–27:

Then God said, “Let us make

adam in our image, according to our likeness. . . . So God created

adam in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

In 1:26 and 1:27a, it would be impossible to call 'adam a particular person, and certainly not a male person. This is why the LXX has here

and the NRSV ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• And There Was Evening: A Preface
• 1. And There Was Morning: An Introduction
• 2. At the Birth of Christian Reflection: Paul and the New Testament
• 3. Recapitulation: The Second-Century Apologists
• 4. Senses of Scripture: The World of Origen and the Origin of the World
• 5. Paradise, Whatever That May Mean: The Cappadocians and Their Origen
• 6. These Are the Generations: Concluding Observations
• Appendix: Genesis 1–3 and Genesis 5:1–5
• List of Abbreviations
• Bibliography