Annotatio XVII

”Let us make man to [our] image.” — Genesis 1:26

Philo, in the book On the Fashioning of the Six Days, narrating this proposition, writes thus: “God said, ‘Let us make man’ — which indicates that others were taken up as cooperators, so that both the reprehensible wills and the actions of man (when he conducts himself rightly) are, [the good ones,] referred as accepted to God the ruler of all, but the contrary ones to those others who are subject [to him]. For it behooved that the Father not be the cause of evils to his own children.”¹ By which words he seems to indicate that the first man was made partly by God, partly by the angels, God’s cooperators. Which also among us Basilides and Cerinthus, heretics, held² — whom Chrysostom (homily 8 on Genesis) and Theodoret (question 19) refute. And the demonstration by which Philo shows this opinion of his seems to allude to those words of Plato, by which he introduces the supreme God, in the Timaeus, speaking to the lesser gods concerning the creation of living beings. See below, Annotation 93 of this book.