Plato read Moses and (Mis-)Understood: The Middle Platonic Context in Which the Creatio Ex Nihilo Doctrine Was Devised

Abstract

Many Christian thinkers of the first centuries after Christ believed – or apologetically postulated – that Plato would have read Moses, because, in his dialogue Timaeus, Plato included the biblical doctrine of the creation of the world. Some of them claimed that Plato understood what he read in Moses’ writings, while others held that Plato did not really understand Moses, since Plato taught that the world was made of ungenerated matter. Both analyses fit into a broader context: the discussion among Middle Platonists surrounding the literal and allegorical interpretations of Timaeus. It is in this framework that the doctrine of the creation of the world from nothing (ex nihilo) appeared. The purpose of this article is to lay out the philosophical discussion about the origin of the world as it developed between the first and third centuries AD. In connection with this, we test the thesis of Gerhard May in his monograph Creatio ex nihilo, which claims that the doctrine of creation from nothing was established in the theology of the Church only after Christian thinkers perceived the destructive influence of Plato’s cosmological theories, which had led to the rise of Gnosticism.