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The Christian theologian Hilary of Poitiers cites 2 Maccabees as an authoritative source when defending creation from nothing, citing the mother who tells her son that God did not make heaven, earth, and humanity from anything that already existed.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
2 Maccabees 7:28
Deuterocanon
25 But when the young man would in no way listen, the king called to him his mother, and urged her to advise the youth to save himself. 26 When he had urged her with many words, she undertook to persuade her son. 27 But bending toward him, laughing the cruel tyrant to scorn, she spoke this in the language of her fathers: “My son, have pity upon me who carried you nine months in my womb, and nursed you three years, and nourished and brought you up to this age, and sustained you. 28 I beg you, my child, to lift your eyes to the sky and the earth, and to see all things that are in it, and thus to recognize that God made them not of things that were, and that the race of men in this way comes into being. 29 Don’t be afraid of this butcher, but, proving yourself worthy of your brothers, accept your death, that in God’s mercy I may receive you again with your brothers.”
Date: 160–63 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Early Christian
Since, then, the Apostle's words, One God the Father, from Whom are all things, and one Jesus Christ, our Lord, through Whom are all things, form an accurate and complete confession about God, let us see what Moses has to say about the beginning of the world. His words are, And God said, Let there be a firmament in the middle of the water, and let it divide the water from the water. And it was so, and God made the firmament and God divided the water through the middle. Here, then, you have the God from Whom, and the God through Whom. If you deny it, you must tell us through whom God's work in creation was done, or else explain it by pointing to an obedience in things not yet created, which, when God said Let there be a firmament, drove the firmament to establish itself. Suggestions like these are inconsistent with the clear sense of Scripture. For all things, as the Prophet says, were made out of nothing; it was not a transformation of existing things, but the creation of what did not exist into a perfect form. Through whom? Listen to the Evangelist: All things were made through Him.
Date: 355–360 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... It is not clear whether Origen is referring to 1 Maccabees alone, but in any case it is said, here, that 'the Maccabees' are outside the canon. However, one should note that Origen’s list is meant to reflect the Hebrew Bible, not to claim that only those books are holy (something which, of course, no Christian would suggest). Accordingly, we should not be surprised to find that elsewhere he cites 2 Maccabees (7:28) as proof for the belief in creatio ex nihilo and had no problem commenting that the belief was thus documented on the authority of the Scriptures (“ex scripturarum auctoritate”) ... compare Hilary of Poitiers, On The Trinity 4.16 ... It is sometimes thought that his reference to an unidentified “prophet” alludes to 2 Maccabees 7:28 ..."
Daniel R. Schwartz, 2 Maccabees (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 58.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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