created He them. And God blessed them, and said, Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and have power over it.'[1] And that you may not change the [force of the] words just quoted, and repeat what your teachers assert, either that God said to Himself, 'Let us make,' just as we, when about to do something, oftentimes say to ourselves, 'Let us make;' or that God spoke to the elements, to wit, the earth and other similar substances of which we believe man was formed, 'Let us make,'—I shall quote again the words narrated by Moses himself, from which we can indisputably learn that [God] conversed with some one who was numerically distinct from Himself, and also a rational being. These are the words: 'And God said, Behold, Adam has become as one of us, to know good and evil.'[2] In saying, therefore, 'as one of us,' [Moses] has declared that [there is a certain] number of persons associated with one another, and that they are at least two. For I would not say that the dogma of that heresy[3] which is said to be among you[4] is true, or that the teachers of it can prove that [God] spoke to angels, or that the human frame was the workmanship of angels. But this Offspring, which was truly brought forth from the Father, was with the Father before all the creatures, and the Father communed with Him; even as the Scripture by Solomon has made clear, that He whom Solomon calls Wisdom, was begotten as a Beginning before all His creatures and as Offspring by God, who has also declared this same thing in the revelation made to Joshua the son of Nave (Nun). Listen, therefore, to the following from the book of Joshua,
- ↑ Gen. i. 26, 28.
- ↑ Gen. iii. 22.
- ↑ Heresy or sect.
- ↑ Or, "among us." Maranus pronounces against this latter reading for the following reasons: (1.) The Jews had their own heresies which supplied many things to the Christian heresies, especially to Menander and Saturninus. (2.) The sect which Justin here refutes was of opinion that God spoke to angels. But those angels, as Menander and Saturninus invented, "exhorted themselves, saying, Let us make," etc. (3.) The expression διδάσκαλοι suits the rabbins well. So Justin frequently calls them. (4.) Those teachers seem for no other cause to have put the words in the angels mouths, than to eradicate the testimony by which they proved divine persons.
