I. Akin’s Position, Fairly Stated

The video is twenty-three minutes long, and the argument is careful. Akin’s position has three parts.

First, he is correct that the so-called “royal we” is not a feature of biblical Hebrew. Some older Christian commentators argued that “Let us make man” is a plural of majesty — the way an English king might say “We are not amused.” Modern Hebraists almost universally reject this reading. The royal we is well attested in Renaissance European court speech and in modern languages, but it does not occur in classical Hebrew. Akin states this plainly, and on this point we agree with him. The plural in Genesis 1:26 is not a stylistic flourish. It is a real plural addressed to a real plural recipient.

Second, Akin distinguishes two senses of the text. He says that within the spiritual sense of Scripture, “if you want to say that there’s an allusion to the Holy Trinity here, I think that’s totally fine. But the Holy Trinity had not been clearly revealed in the Old Testament period. And so that makes it unlikely that that’s what is the literal sense of the text, which is the one that the human author of Genesis would have been aware of.” His position is therefore not that the Trinitarian reading is wrong in every sense — only that it is wrong as a reading of what the human author of Genesis intended his audience to hear.

Third, Akin offers his positive proposal. “The natural understanding of who would the Hebrew author of Genesis have envisioned God talking to — it would have been the Divine Council.” The Divine Council is the heavenly court, the angelic host that surrounds the throne of God in passages like 1 Kings 22:19, Job 1:6, and Psalm 82:1. Akin then offers a refinement: he calls this an “associative we.” God associates the council with His act of creation without the council actually doing any creating. “The text makes it clear,” Akin says, “that God, not the Divine Council, created man.”

This is a careful position. Akin is not denying the Trinity. He is not even denying that the Trinitarian reading has a place in Catholic exegesis. He is locating that reading in the spiritual sense and reserving the literal sense for a contemporary scholarly model — the Divine Council model associated with figures like Michael Heiser in evangelical circles and a wider stream of academic Hebrew Bible scholarship.

The response that follows engages Akin’s position at its strongest, not at a caricature of it. The argument works at the same level of care.

II. What “Literal Sense” Actually Means in Catholic Exegesis

Before we address the substance of Akin’s reading, one piece of ground needs to be cleared. The whole shape of his argument depends on the move from “the Trinity is a spiritual reading” to “the Trinitarian reading is therefore not the literal reading.” This move is the heart of the disagreement, and on this point, Akin’s framing is at odds with how Catholic theology has understood the literal sense for at least 70 years.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraphs 115 through 119, sets out the four senses of Scripture in language that is precise and worth quoting in full:

§115. According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.

§116. The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: “All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal.”

§117. The spiritual sense. Thanks to the unity of God’s plan, not only the text of Scripture but also the realities and events about which it speaks can be signs.

§118. A medieval couplet summarizes the significance of the four senses: The Letter speaks of deeds; Allegory to faith; the Moral how to act; Anagogy our destiny.

Two things in this passage are decisive for our argument.

First, the literal sense is not defined as “what the unaided human author would have consciously understood.” It is defined as “the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation.” This is a wider definition than the modern historical-critical sense. It includes what God, the divine author of Scripture, intended to convey through the human author’s words — even if the human author did not fully grasp it.

The second decisive point comes from the source documents the Catechism cites. Behind §115–119 stands the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, promulgated by Pope Paul VI on 18 November 1965. Dei Verbum §12 is the magisterial text that governs all Catholic biblical interpretation, and it says this:

“However, since God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion, the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.“

And then a few sentences later:

“But, since Holy Scripture must be read and interpreted in the sacred spirit in which it was written, no less serious attention must be given to the content and unity of the whole of Scripture if the meaning of the sacred texts is to be correctly worked out. The living tradition of the whole Church must be taken into account along with the harmony which exists between elements of the faith.”

These two passages of Dei Verbum are not incidental remarks. They are the dogmatic constitution of the Second Vatican Council on Divine Revelation, which Pope Paul VI promulgated as binding teaching of the Catholic Church. They tell us that the literal sense of Scripture in Catholic exegesis includes (a) what the human author intended, and (b) what God-as-divine-author intended through the human author’s words, read in the unity of the whole canon and in continuity with the living tradition of the Church.

This is the standard Catholic and Orthodox hermeneutic. It is sometimes called the full literal sense, or the plenary literal sense, or — when the focus is on the deeper meaning the human author may not have fully grasped — the sensus plenior.

What this means for our reading of Genesis 1:26 is straightforward. Akin’s argument that the Trinitarian reading “could not have been the literal sense because the human author of Genesis would not have understood the Trinity” assumes a definition of literal sense that Dei Verbum §12 and CCC §§115–119 do not actually use. The Catholic literal sense is what God intended the words to mean, read in the unity of the whole canon, in continuity with the living tradition. That is a much fuller standard than what an ancient Hebrew author may have consciously held — and on that fuller standard, the question is open.

This does not yet decide the question. It only clears the ground. Saying that the Trinitarian reading is permitted as the literal sense in principle does not prove that it is the literal sense in fact. We still have to show why the Trinitarian reading better accounts for the text than the Divine Council reading. That is the work of the next two sections.

But before we get there, the framing matters. Akin’s “spiritual sense, fine; literal sense, unlikely” is not a peace treaty Catholic readers are bound to accept. It is a particular, contestable reading of where the literal sense ends — and one that owes more to modern historical-critical method than to the Catechism or to Dei Verbum.

III. The Textual Case — Genesis 1:27 and What the Words Actually Do

We come to the substance. The argument that follows turns on one feature of the text: what happens in the very next verse after the “Let us make man.” In Genesis 1:26, the verb is plural, and the pronouns are plural. In Genesis 1:27, both flip to the singular:

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” — Genesis 1:26

“And God created man in his image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” — Genesis 1:27

Verse 26 is a plural address. Verse 27 is a singular execution. And the grammar of verse 27 is unusually emphatic. The verb bara — “created” — is singular. The pronoun governing the image is singular. The subject is Elohim, but with a singular verb, indicating that the One God is acting alone. The verse repeats the singular three times for emphasis: in his image, in the image of God, he created him. It is hard to imagine the text underscoring the singularity any more strongly without writing it in capital letters.

This grammatical hinge is the centerpiece of the case against the Divine Council reading.

If God is addressing the angels in verse 26, then the angels are being included in the very thing being made. But verse 27 will not allow this.

If God is addressing the angels in verse 26 — that is, if the “us” and the “our” refer to the heavenly host gathered around the throne — then the angels are being included in the very thing being made. They are addressees of “let us make,” and the image of “us” is what man is being made in. But verse 27 will not allow this. Verse 27 says, “in his image, in the image of God.” Not in their image. Not in the image of the council. In his image, the singular God’s image alone.

The point can be sharpened by two cross-references. Genesis 9:6, in the covenant with Noah, gives the reason humans are not to shed each other’s blood: “for in the image of God he made man.” Singular God. Singular image. James 3:9 in the New Testament makes the same move: humans are not to be cursed because they have been “made in the likeness of God.” Singular God. Singular likeness. Nowhere in the canon — Old Testament or New — is it ever said that humans are made in the image of angels, or in the image of the heavenly council, or in the image of any plurality at all. The image is God’s image, and only God’s.

A defender of the Divine Council reading might answer that the singular in verse 27 is simply normal Hebrew syntactic concord — Elohim takes a singular verb regardless of theological context, and so the singular tells us nothing. This is true as far as the bare convention goes, but it under-reads what the text actually does. The narrator of Genesis 1:27 does not merely use the singular once. He repeats the singular three times in a single verse — in his image, in the image of God, he created him. Triple repetition is not neutral syntax. It is the narrator’s deliberate way of insisting that the One God alone performed the act, and that the image in which man was made is His singular image and no one else’s.

The Divine Council reading cannot account for this. If God is associating the council with His act in verse 26 — in any sense, “associative we” or otherwise — then verse 27’s singularity strips the council back out of the picture, leaving only God acting alone, in His own singular image. The plural address of verse 26 collapses into the singular execution of verse 27 with no remainder for the angels.

Akin’s “associative we” model tries to soften this by saying that the council is included in the speech but excluded from the act. “The text makes it clear that God, not the Divine Council, created man.” This is true as far as it goes, but it does not solve the problem. It only relocates it. If the council is excluded from the act, and the image in verse 27 is God’s image alone, then, on the Divine Council reading, the entire purpose of the plural address in verse 26 is decorative. God speaks consultatively to addressees who do not actually share in what is being made and do not actually contribute to its making. This is what the Talmud calls God’s consultation with the heavenly entourage — a real proposal in contemporary rabbinic Judaism, but a striking one. Why would the divine speech of the One God to the angels take the form of a plural that includes them in the image of man, only to immediately exclude them from that image two words later?

A second defender response might be that the alternation of numbers between plural and singular is a normal feature of biblical Hebrew, and that the article overpresses what is in fact ordinary stylistic variation. Number alternation does occur elsewhere in biblical Hebrew. But the rabbis of the Talmud themselves recognized this particular alternation as theologically charged — and they recognized it precisely because the Christians of their day were already pressing the point. The Divine Council reading must neutralize the v.26/v.27 shift; it cannot afford to call it ordinary stylistic variation, because if it is ordinary, the rabbinic counter-tradition that built the divine-council reading would have had no reason to develop. We will turn to that rabbinic counter-tradition next.

The Christian Trinitarian reading does not have this problem. On the Trinitarian reading, the addressees in verse 26 — the Son and the Holy Spirit — do share the singular image of the One God in verse 27, because the three Persons are one God. The plural address of the Father to the Son and the Spirit is real. The singular execution by the One God is also real. The two verses do not contradict each other; they reveal the inner life of the Trinity in its act of creating man. “Let us make man in our image” means let us — Father, Son, Spirit — make man in our image, which is the singular image of the one God we together are. And then “God created man in his image” states what has just happened: the One God, in three Persons, has made man.

This is what the Fathers saw, as we will document section by section beginning in §VI. But before we leave the textual argument, one more point has to be made — because it is the single most surprising thing the panel surfaced in preparing this article, and it changes the rhetorical shape of the whole question.

The grammatical tension between verse 26 and verse 27 was not invented by Christian apologists. It was recognized by the rabbis of the Talmud themselves.

IV. The Talmud’s Own Admission — Sanhedrin 38b

In the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin, folio 38b, the third-century Palestinian rabbi Yoḥanan bar Nappaḥa addresses the very question this article addresses. He is responding to what the rabbis call the minim — the heretics, a term that in this period included Christians and other Jews who held that there was more than one divine Person in heaven. R. Yoḥanan’s pastoral concern is to give Jewish students a ready answer to Christian readings of Hebrew Scripture. He does this by pointing to a textual feature that he says holds true across multiple plural-address passages in the Bible:

“R. Yoḥanan says: Any place in the Bible from where the heretics attempt to prove their heresy, i.e., that there is more than one god, the response to their claim is alongside them, i.e., in the immediate vicinity of the verses they cite.” (b. Sanhedrin 38b)

He then lists six such passages. The first one is Genesis 1:26 and 27:

“The verse states that God said: ‘Let us make man in our image’ (Genesis 1:26), employing the plural, but it then states: ‘And God created man in His image’ (Genesis 1:27), employing the singular.”

The other five passages he names are Genesis 11:5–7 (the Tower of Babel — let us go down and the singular the Lord came down), Genesis 35:3 and 35:7 (Jacob’s vow — God who answered me singular and God was revealed plural), Deuteronomy 4:7 (God so near plural and upon Him singular), 2 Samuel 7:23 (God went plural and unto Himself singular), and Daniel 7:9 (thrones were placed plural and one Ancient of Days did sit singular).

R. Yoḥanan’s point is clear. He is acknowledging what the minim — the Christians and the binitarian Jews — were saying about these verses. He is conceding the textual fact: in each case, a plural verb or pronoun is followed by a singular that immediately governs it. And he is offering a counter-reading: the singular verses, taken together, prove that there is only one God; the plural verses must therefore mean something other than what the heretics say.

What does R. Yoḥanan say the plurals mean? The Talmud tells us a few lines later, immediately after the six-verse list:

“Why are these plural verses necessary? In accord with R. Yoḥanan. As R. Yoḥanan said: The Holy One, Blessed be He, does not act unless He consults with the heavenly entourage [pamalya shel ma’alah], as it is stated: ‘The matter is by the decree of the Watchers, and the sentence by the word of the holy ones.’ (Daniel 4:14)”

This is, almost word-for-word, Jimmy Akin’s position. The plural is a consultation with the heavenly council. God speaks to His angels but acts alone. In the third century in Tiberias, R. Yoḥanan developed the divine-council reading as the Jewish counter to the Christian reading of these very verses.

Three things follow from this, and each one matters for the argument.

First, the divine-council reading of Genesis 1:26 is not a finding of modern Hebrew Bible scholarship. It is a third-century rabbinic move, developed in conscious response to Christian Trinitarian exegesis. The Christian reading is older. R. Yoḥanan is not preserving an ancient Israelite tradition that the Christians had forgotten; he is generating a counter-reading because the Christian reading was already established and pressing.

Second, the rabbis of the Talmud saw the very grammatical tension this article rests on. They did not think Genesis 1:26 could simply be read in isolation. They knew that verse 27 was a problem for any reading that put real plurality into verse 26, and they answered the problem with a careful exegetical move: God speaks plurally but acts singly. They saw the tension. The Christian reading sees the same tension. The two traditions disagree about what to do with it.

Third, the Christian reading handles the tension better than the rabbinic reading does. The rabbinic reading leaves the question open: why does God speak consultatively at all if the angels do not contribute to the making and do not share the image? The Christian reading answers it: because the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit genuinely share the singular image, and the speech of one Person of the Godhead to the others is real speech to real Persons who really share what is being made. The Trinitarian reading respects the plural and the singular at once. The divine-council reading respects the plural by emptying it of meaning.

This is the actual shape of the disagreement between Akin’s position and the patristic Catholic-and-Orthodox position. It is not an argument between an old superstition and a sophisticated modern reading. It is the same argument that R. Yoḥanan and the Christian Fathers were having in the third century, run on the same texts, with the same grammar, with the same problem on the table. The question is which tradition resolves the tension better. The Christian tradition does.

V. The Textual Argument Summarized

Let us pause and gather what we have established before we move to the patristic chain.

The literal sense of Scripture in Catholic exegesis includes both what the human author intended and what God intended through the human author’s words, read in the unity of the whole canon and in continuity with the living tradition. This is the magisterial teaching of Dei Verbum §12 and CCC §§115–119. The question whether the Trinitarian reading of Genesis 1:26 is the literal sense is therefore a real and open question, not a pre-decided one. Akin’s “spiritual sense, fine; literal sense, unlikely” depends on a narrower definition of literal sense than the magisterium uses.

The text of Genesis 1:26–27 presents a real plural address followed by an emphatic singular execution. The singular execution describes the action of the One God in the singular image of God. Genesis 9:6 and James 3:9 confirm that the image is God’s image, not the angels’, not the council’s. The Divine Council reading cannot account for the singularity of verse 27 without rendering verse 26’s plural decorative.

The Christian Trinitarian reading accounts for both verses. The plural is real because the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are real Persons who address one another. The singular is real because the three Persons are one God who acts in one image. The verse is a glimpse of the inner life of the Trinity in the act of creating man.

The Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 38b, recognizes the same grammatical tension we have identified and answers it with R. Yoḥanan’s divine-council reading — which is the same reading Jimmy Akin defends. The Christian and Jewish-rabbinic readings are therefore not separated by an ignorance of the text on either side. Both saw the problem; the disagreement is about which reading better resolves it.

The Christian reading resolves the tension better. The rabbinic reading leaves the plural address decorative; the Christian reading honors both the plural and the singular by locating the plurality in the inner life of the One God.

One last objection deserves a direct answer before we close this textual section. A careful reader may say that even on the fullest definition of the literal sense, the Trinitarian reading still requires the New Testament and the Church’s later dogmatic development to become legible — and that this disqualifies it from being the literal sense of the Old Testament text. The answer is that on the Church’s own definition, the literal sense is permitted to bear a sensus plenior that the human author did not fully articulate but that God intended and that the canon and the living tradition later render explicit. The question is not whether later theology is needed to name the Trinity. The question is whether the text itself, read in canonical unity, already contains the reality that the later theology names. The grammar of Genesis 1:26 and 1:27, taken together, indicates that it does. The patristic chain, to which we now turn, will show that this is what the Church has said it does, from the second century onward.

VI. The Witness of the Fathers — Second to Fifth Centuries

The patristic witness is not a single voice but a chorus, and it is a chorus that, on Genesis 1:26, sings the same line with remarkable consistency over four centuries, in Greek and in Latin, in Antioch and in Alexandria and in Lyons and in Carthage and in Milan and in Hippo and in Poitiers.

We will work through the chain in chronological order. The witnesses are seven, and each adds something the others did not.

Saint Justin Martyr (c. AD 100–165)

Justin is the earliest extended Christian engagement with Genesis 1:26 we possess. His Dialogue with Trypho, written around AD 160, is a recorded conversation — perhaps stylized, but built on actual debates Justin held with educated Jews — in which a Jewish interlocutor named Trypho challenges Justin to prove from the Hebrew Scriptures that there is more than one divine Person. Chapter 62 of the Dialogue is the moment Justin engages Genesis 1:26 directly. What he says deserves to be read in full:

“And God said, Behold, Adam has become as one of us, to know good and evil. 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 which is said to be among you 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.”

The bolded sentence deserves to be held up to the light. “For I would not say… that the teachers of it can prove that God spoke to angels.” Justin is naming and rejecting, in the second century, the very reading that Jimmy Akin in 2025 calls the natural literal sense of Genesis 1:26. The Jewish teachers Justin refers to are the rabbinic and proto-rabbinic interpreters of his day, the same tradition that will eventually produce R. Yoḥanan and the Sanhedrin 38b reading we examined in §IV. Justin tells Trypho that this reading cannot be proved from the text. He then offers his own reading: God communed with His Offspring, the pre-incarnate Son, who is Wisdom, begotten as a Beginning — the very word reshit that begins Genesis 1:1 and stands at the heart of Proverbs 8:22.

Two things follow from this, and they bear directly on our argument. First, the Christian Trinitarian reading of Genesis 1:26 was not a fourth-century innovation. It was already firmly in place by the middle of the second century, articulated by a Christian apologist who knew Hebrew Scripture well, in conversation with Jews who knew it equally well. Second, Justin connects Genesis 1:26 to Proverbs 8 by the shared word reshit — the same connection R. Yoḥanan would later try to neutralize by reading reshit as Torah rather than as the pre-existent Wisdom of the Son. The argument we made in §III about the connection between bereshit in Genesis 1:1 and reshit in Proverbs 8:22 is not original to us. Justin makes it. He makes it in the second century. He makes it to a Jew. And the Jew engages with him on it rather than dismissing it as a foreign Greek imposition, which itself tells us that the move was already recognized as a legitimate one within the Jewish hermeneutical world.

Saint Irenaeus of Lyons (c. AD 130–202)

A generation after Justin, Saint Irenaeus of Lyons gives us the patristic statement on Genesis 1:26 that Catholic and Orthodox readers have most often returned to. It comes in Against Heresies IV.20.1, in the context of Irenaeus’s argument against the Gnostic heretics who taught that the world was made by angels rather than by God:

“It was not angels, therefore, who made us, nor who formed us, neither had angels power to make an image of God, nor any one else, except the Word of the Lord, nor any Power remotely distant from the Father of all things. For God did not stand in need of these beings, in order to the accomplishing of what He had Himself determined with Himself beforehand should be done, as if He did not possess His own hands. For with Him were always present the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, by whom and in whom, freely and spontaneously, He made all things, to whom also He speaks, saying, ‘Let us make man after our image and likeness.’“

This is the Irenaean statement. Read it twice. Notice what Irenaeus does. He explicitly excludes angels from the answer — “It was not angels who made us, nor who formed us, neither had angels power to make an image of God.” He explicitly identifies the addressees of “Let us make man” as the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit. And he says they were always present with the Father, by whom and in whom He made all things. Irenaeus is writing seven generations before the Council of Nicaea, in a Latin-influenced Greek-speaking church on the borders of Roman Gaul, and he is articulating with full clarity the Trinitarian reading of Genesis 1:26 as the Church’s reading.

Irenaeus’s image of the two hands of the Father — the Son and the Spirit as the two hands by which the Father shapes creation and forms man — became one of the most influential metaphors in early Christian theology. It is not decorative. It is exegetical. Irenaeus reads it directly out of the plural address of Genesis 1:26.

Tertullian of Carthage (c. AD 155–220)

A few years after Irenaeus, in North Africa, Tertullian addressed Genesis 1:26 in his treatise Against Praxeas — a polemic against the modalist heresy that held the Father and the Son and the Spirit to be three names for one Person rather than three Persons in one God. Against Praxeas 12 contains Tertullian’s specific argument from Genesis 1:26, and the argument is precisely the one we made in §III:

“If the number of the Trinity also offends you, as if it were not connected in the simple Unity, I ask you how it is possible for a Being who is merely and absolutely One and Singular, to speak in plural phrase, saying, ‘Let us make man in our own image, and after our own likeness;’ whereas He ought to have said, ‘Let me make man in my own image, and after my own likeness,’ as being a unique and singular Being? In the following passage, however, ‘Behold the man has become as one of us,’ He is either deceiving or amusing us in speaking plurally, if He is One only and singular.”

Tertullian’s argument is grammatical. He observes that a strictly singular God would have said let me make man in my own image, and that the choice of plural over singular makes no sense unless there really is plurality. The Modalist position cannot account for the actual words on the page. Neither can the Divine Council position. The plural is a real plural addressed to real Persons, and the singular execution in verse 27 is the action of the One God in three Persons.

Saint Athanasius of Alexandria (c. AD 296–373)

The fourth century brought the Arian controversy and the Council of Nicaea. The defender of Nicene orthodoxy, Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, treats Genesis 1:26 in his Discourses Against the Arians — particularly in Discourse II §31. The Arians held that the Son was a creature, the highest of creatures, but a creature nonetheless. Athanasius reads Genesis 1:26 against them: he argues that God addressed “Let us make” not to any of the angels but to His own and proper Word, who is the Wisdom and Power of God; the Word is therefore not from created things but from God Himself, the Workman and not the Workmanship.

Athanasius’s argument turns on the same point Irenaeus made: God did not say “Let us make” to the angels, because the angels are creatures and could not contribute to the making. He said it to His Word and Wisdom, who is not from things which are created but is from God, the Workman and not the Workmanship. The Trinitarian reading of Genesis 1:26 is here the explicit rebuttal of Arian creature-theology.

This is the same Athanasius who wrote On the Incarnation, who suffered five exiles for the Nicene faith, and whose theological vision shaped the Catholic and Orthodox understanding of the Trinity for the next sixteen centuries. His reading of Genesis 1:26 is not a marginal opinion. It is one of the load-bearing foundations of patristic Trinitarian theology.

Saint Ambrose of Milan (c. AD 339–397)

A few decades after Athanasius, Saint Ambrose of Milan — bishop, mentor of Augustine, defender of the faith against the Arian Empress Justina — gives us a Latin Western witness in his Hexameron, the great six-day commentary on Genesis. In Book VI, on the sixth day and the creation of man, Ambrose says directly that the Father is speaking to the Son:

“To whom does He speak, when He says, ‘Let us make man in our image and after our likeness’? To whom does He speak, except to Him with whom He shares both image and likeness? But there is no one with whom God shares both image and likeness, except the Son. The Father, then, is speaking to the Son.”

Ambrose makes the move our textual argument made: the addressees of verse 26 must share what is being made, and what is being made is the singular image of God. Therefore the addressee is one who shares the singular image of God — and that one is the Son. Ambrose draws the inference cleanly. He does not name the Sanhedrin 38b problem we identified — he does not need to — but he is solving the same textual problem from the same starting premise.

Saint Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430)

Augustine, the greatest Latin theologian of the patristic age, treats Genesis 1:26 in De Genesi ad Litteram — On the Literal Meaning of Genesis — Book III, chapter 19. The very title of Augustine’s commentary is significant for our purposes. Augustine is offering a literal reading of Genesis. And his literal reading is Trinitarian:

“In making the other creatures God said, ‘Let there be,’ whereas in making man He said, ‘Let us make.’ Why this change, except to hint, so to speak, at a plurality of Persons in God on account of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit? But immediately He indicates the unity of the Godhead when He says, ‘And God made man in His own image’ — singular God, singular image.”

Augustine performs a single-paragraph version of our entire textual argument. The plural in verse 26 hints at the plurality of Persons. The singular in verse 27 indicates the unity of the Godhead. Singular God, singular image. Sixteen centuries before our argument, Augustine made the same move — and he made it under the title On the Literal Meaning of Genesis. The literal sense, in Augustine’s understanding, is Trinitarian. This is decisive evidence that our framing of Dei Verbum §12 in §II — the literal sense includes what God-as-divine-author intended through the human author’s words — is not a modern overreach. It is what Augustine took the literal sense to be.

Saint Hilary of Poitiers (c. AD 310–367) and Peter Lombard (c. AD 1096–1160)

The seventh and final witness in the patristic-medieval chain is the joint testimony of Saint Hilary of Poitiers and Peter Lombard. Hilary, the great Western defender of Nicene orthodoxy in fourth-century Gaul, treats Genesis 1:26 in De Trinitate IV.16–21. His argument is reproduced verbatim by Peter Lombard six centuries later, in Sentences I, distinction 2, chapters 4 and 5 — the Sentences being the standard theology textbook of medieval European universities for nearly four centuries, from the 1150s into the Reformation. What Lombard quotes from Hilary is the most concentrated single passage of patristic-medieval reasoning on Genesis 1:26 that exists. It deserves a featured block quotation:

“He who said ‘Let us make man in our image and likeness’ shows that there are others similar to himself, when he says ‘our image and likeness.’ For an image does not exist in isolation, and a likeness is not relative to self alone… The profession of partnership took away the notion of his singularity; for there cannot be a partnership in the case of a solitary… ‘Let me make’ and ‘my’ suit a solitary; but it is suitable for one who is not a solitary to say ‘Let us make’ and ‘our’… We must confess, then, that he is neither solitary, nor diverse. And so we find that God made man in an image and likeness common to himself and to God.”

The argument is precise. Hilary observes that the words our image and our likeness require multiple persons to share that image and likeness. “For an image does not exist in isolation, and a likeness is not relative to self alone.” You cannot have our image unless there is more than one to whom the our refers. And the addressees must share that image — they must be ones who genuinely possess the divine image — not ones who are excluded from it by being mere creatures. This is the Hilary-Lombard formalization of the same argument we made from the grammar of verses 26 and 27 in §III. The plural address must include addressees who genuinely share the singular image. Angels do not. The Son and the Spirit do.

When Lombard transmitted Hilary’s argument to the medieval West through the Sentences, he made it the standard reading of Genesis 1:26 for every medieval Catholic theologian who learned theology from his textbook. That includes Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Albert the Great, Duns Scotus, and the whole Scholastic tradition. The Trinitarian reading of Genesis 1:26 is not a marginal patristic curiosity. It is the standard reading transmitted through the standard textbook of European Catholic theology for four centuries.

VII. The Continuity of the Chain — What the Fathers Actually Agree On

We have walked through seven witnesses. We have heard Justin in second-century Rome, Irenaeus in second-century Gaul, Tertullian in third-century Carthage, Athanasius in fourth-century Alexandria, Ambrose in fourth-century Milan, Augustine in fifth-century Hippo, and Hilary in fourth-century Poitiers as transmitted by Lombard in twelfth-century Paris. They speak Greek, and they speak Latin. They write under Roman emperors who hate them and Roman emperors who try to control them. They face heresies on opposite sides — Gnostic on one hand, Modalist and Arian on the other — and they argue against those heresies with whatever tools the moment requires. But on Genesis 1:26, they agree on three things that matter for our argument.

First, they agree that the addressees of “Let us make man” are not angels. This is explicit in Justin (who names and rejects the angel reading), in Irenaeus (who insists angels did not make man and could not), in Athanasius (who names the angels as creatures and says the Word is not from creatures), and in Ambrose (who asks “to whom does He speak?” and answers “the Son”). The Divine Council reading that Akin defends is not a reading the Fathers debated and split over. It is a reading of the Fathers as a body considered and, where they engaged it directly, rejected.

Second, they agree that the addressees of “Let us make man” are the Son and the Spirit. Irenaeus says, “the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit.” Athanasius says, “His own and proper Word, who is the Wisdom and Power of God.” Ambrose says “the Son.” Augustine says “the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” The chorus does not vary. Different Fathers emphasize different aspects of the Trinitarian reading — some focus more on the Son, some include the Spirit explicitly, some draw the connection to Wisdom traditions in Proverbs 8 — but the substrate is the same.

Third, they agree that the singular execution in Genesis 1:27 indicates the unity of the Godhead. This is the very move our textual argument made. Augustine states it explicitly: “singular God, singular image.” Tertullian states it implicitly when he asks why a singular God would speak in the plural. Hilary and Lombard formalize it: the plural address requires real plurality, and the singular execution requires real unity, and only the Trinity — three Persons, one God — accounts for both at once.

Not seven Fathers saying the same sentence in the same words, but seven Fathers writing in different languages and in different centuries against different opponents, all reading the text the same way and giving the same answer to the same question.

This is what consensus looks like.

VIII. The Pastoral Frame — Christ in the Act of Making Us

At this point, we have argued the textual case in §III–V and walked through the patristic chain in §VI–VII. What remains, before we turn to the Targums and the broader Jewish background, is to say plainly what the Trinitarian reading of Genesis 1:26 actually means for the Catholic or Orthodox reader who is trying to live by it. The doctrine is not a museum piece. It is good news.

What Genesis 1:26 tells us, on the patristic reading, is that the act of making man was not a solitary act of a solitary God. It was a Trinitarian act. The Father spoke to the Son and the Holy Spirit, with whom He shares the singular image, and together — the three Persons of the One God — they made us. The image we bear is therefore not the image of an isolated will but the image of a communion: of the Father loving the Son in the Spirit and the Son loving the Father in the Spirit, eternally. We were made in the image of love itself.

This is why the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 221, says that “God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange.” And why, in paragraph 257, the Catechism cites Saint Maximus the Confessor: the goal of all creation is to be conformed to the Trinitarian image. Genesis 1:26, read with the Fathers, is the textual root from which these magisterial statements grow. We were made by the Trinity for the Trinity, in the image of the Trinity. Strip out the Trinitarian reading of Genesis 1:26, and these doctrines lose their first chapter.

There is a pastoral dimension here that the article should not pass over too quickly. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that the patriarchs of Israel — Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob — “died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.” (Hebrews 11:13) They lived as sojourners, the Letter says, looking for “a homeland… a better country, that is, a heavenly one.” (Hebrews 11:14, 16) The Trinitarian reading of Genesis 1:26 tells us why: we were made in the image of the Triune God, and only the Triune God can finally satisfy what He has made in His own image. We sojourn because we are made for Him. The Divine Council reading cannot give that account. If we were made in the image of an angelic council, our final rest would be among the angels. We are made in the image of the Trinity, and our final rest is in the Trinitarian life itself.

The Apostles’ Creed confesses that Christ “descended into hell” — into the realm of the dead — and that He brought out the righteous who had died before His coming. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 631 through 637, expounds this article of the Creed at length, drawing especially on 1 Peter 3:18–20 and 4:6 and on the universal patristic teaching. Christ — the same Christ who, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, said “Let us make man in our image” in Genesis 1:26 — descended into the realm of the dead and brought home the patriarchs and prophets who had been waiting in the bosom of Abraham. The hands that fashioned Adam are the hands that pierced the gates of Hades. The Word who said “Let us make man” is the Word who became man and rescued the man He had made. This is what the Trinitarian reading of Genesis 1:26 ultimately gives us: the unity of the Christian story from creation to incarnation to redemption to consummation. The Divine Council reading gives us — at best — a heavenly committee and an associative we. The Christian reading gives us the God who made us speaking to the Son who would die for us, with the Spirit who would breathe new life into our dead bones.

IX. The First Christian Gezerah Shavah — Theophilus of Antioch

One last patristic witness deserves to be brought forward, because it bridges the patristic chain and the Jewish hermeneutical world we will examine in §XI–XV. Saint Theophilus of Antioch, writing around AD 180, is the first Christian author known to use the term trias — the Trinity. His apologetic work Ad Autolycum, addressed to a pagan friend named Autolycus, is the earliest surviving Christian engagement with Genesis 1 by name. And Theophilus, in Ad Autolycum II.10, does what no patristic figure before him is recorded as doing in writing: he applies what we now call gezerah shavah — the rabbinic interpretive method of linking verses by their shared vocabulary — to Genesis 1 in a thoroughly Christian way.

Theophilus connects Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”) with Proverbs 8:22 (“The LORD possessed me at the beginning of His way”) through the shared word reshit — beginning. He identifies the Beginning of Proverbs 8 as the pre-existent Wisdom of God, and the pre-existent Wisdom as the Word who became Christ. He then connects this to Genesis 1:3 (“And God said, Let there be light”) and identifies the speaking and the spoken — God and the Word — as the two who together create the world by the Wisdom that is the Spirit. The reading is rabbinic in method and Christian in conclusion. Gezerah shavah on the word reshit yields the pre-existent Word and Wisdom of God; the Word becomes flesh in Jesus Christ; therefore, the Christian Trinitarian reading of Genesis 1 is the natural extension of the same hermeneutical method the rabbis themselves codified.

We will say more about this in §XIII, where we examine the Jewish hermeneutical method in detail. For now, what matters is this. The Christian reading of Genesis 1 was not imposed on the Hebrew text from outside the Jewish hermeneutical world. It was developed within that world, using methods that the world recognized, by Christian authors who knew and respected the Jewish interpretive tradition. Theophilus in second-century Antioch is doing what Justin is doing in second-century Rome and what Irenaeus is doing in second-century Lyons. The patristic Trinitarian reading of Genesis 1:26 is not a Greek philosophical imposition; it is a Christian extension of Jewish hermeneutics applied to the Hebrew text.

X. Where the Patristic Witness Leaves Us

We have now done two things. We have argued the textual case from the grammar of Genesis 1:26 and 27, with the surprising corroboration of b. Sanhedrin 38b. And we have shown that what we argued from the text is what the Church has taught from the second century to the high Middle Ages — through Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Athanasius, Ambrose, Augustine, Hilary, Lombard, and the patristic chain that culminated in the standard medieval theology textbook of Catholic Europe.

The Trinitarian reading of Genesis 1:26 is therefore not a marginal opinion held by a few Fathers. It is the consistent reading of the Catholic and Orthodox tradition for over a thousand years before any Christian theologian even questioned it. And the reading itself is not a foreign imposition on the Hebrew text. It is the natural extension of Jewish hermeneutical methods — gezerah shavah, the reading of reshit in Genesis 1:1 against reshit in Proverbs 8:22 — applied with rigor by Christian authors who knew what they were doing.

The next sections turn to that Jewish background. We will examine the Targumic tradition — what the Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible say about Genesis 1, and how Targum Neofiti’s Memra of the Lord and wisdom readings of Genesis 1:1 illuminate the Christian reading. We will engage Targum Pseudo-Jonathan’s angel-reading of Genesis 1:26 — the rabbinic position that most strongly supports Akin’s view — directly, and show why our grammatical argument from §III defeats it on the text’s own terms. We will document the gezerah shavah method from Hillel through the apostolic period, drawing on the major academic sources. And we will draw on the recent two-powers scholarship — Segal, Boyarin, Sommer, Schäfer, and the new monograph of Wilhite and Winn — to demonstrate that pre-Christian Jewish thought already contained the multi-personal divine framework that the Christian Trinitarian reading inherits and develops.

We will close with a respectful note on the Filioque, where Catholic and Eastern Orthodox readers disagree but jointly affirm the eternal generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit, both of which are presupposed in any reading of “Let us make man in our image” as a Trinitarian utterance — and with an invitation to Protestant readers to consider how the centerpiece argument we have built on the text’s own grammar transcends magisterial-authority debates and can be verified by anyone with a Hebrew Bible.

XI. The Jewish Background — What the Targums Actually Say

The Divine Council reading draws much of its appeal from the claim that this is what Jews read in Genesis. Akin himself frames it that way: “the natural understanding of who would the Hebrew author of Genesis have envisioned God talking to — it would have been the Divine Council.” The article must show what Jewish readers in the centuries surrounding Christ actually read in Genesis 1.

The Targums are the place to start. A Targum is an Aramaic translation-paraphrase of the Hebrew Bible, used in the synagogues of Late Antiquity when most Jews could no longer follow the Hebrew text directly and needed it rendered into Aramaic, the spoken language. The Targums are not idiosyncratic. They were authoritative. They reflect what the Jewish synagogue actually heard when Genesis 1 was read in its presence. Three Targums of Genesis matter for our argument, and we will take each in turn.

Targum Neofiti — the Memra of the Lord and the wisdom of creation

Targum Neofiti is the largest and most significant Palestinian Aramaic Targum of the Pentateuch. It was discovered in the Vatican Library in 1956 — a manuscript that had been misclassified for centuries — and the standard critical edition with English translation is Martin McNamara’s Targum Neofiti 1: Genesis (The Aramaic Bible Volume 1A, Liturgical Press, 1992). McNamara is a Catholic priest and Aramaic scholar; the volume is published by Liturgical Press, the standard Catholic academic publisher for biblical and liturgical scholarship. There is nothing fringe or sectarian about it.

What does Targum Neofiti say about Genesis 1:1? The verbatim English from McNamara, page 52, reads:

“From the beginning with wisdom the Memra of the Lord created and perfected the heavens and the earth.”

Two things are here that the Hebrew text does not have explicitly. First, the Memra — the Word — of the Lord is named as the agent of creation. Memra is the Aramaic equivalent of the Greek Logos; it is the personified, hypostatic Word of God. When the Targum says that the Memra of the Lord created the heavens and the earth, it is saying, in pre-Christian or early-Christian Jewish synagogue language, that God created through His Word. Second, the Targum renders bereshit — the opening word of the Hebrew, which can mean “in the beginning” or “with wisdom” depending on how the preposition be- is read — as a double translation: both from the beginning and with wisdom. The wisdom of Proverbs 8:22, which speaks of Wisdom as the beginning of His way, is read into Genesis 1:1 directly. Memra and wisdom are coordinated as the way God creates.

McNamara’s apparatus on this verse, on the same page 52, comments at length on the Jewish exegetical matrix:

“‘From the beginning with wisdom’: double translation of the Hebrew text, as ‘beginning’ and ‘wisdom.’ For creation of the world / wisdom, compare Proverbs 8:22; 3:19; Wisdom of Solomon 9:9; Psalm 104:24. Rabbinic tradition, identifying wisdom and the Torah, speaks of God creating the world by the Torah; Beginning = Torah, Genesis Rabbah 1:4: ‘In the beginning by means of the Torah God created.'”

This is exactly the network of texts that the article has been arguing the patristic Trinitarian reading inherits and develops. Genesis 1:1, Proverbs 8:22, Psalm 104:24, Wisdom of Solomon 9:9 — the same proof-text matrix the Christian Fathers used. The matrix was already in place in the synagogue of Late Antiquity, in the Aramaic that Jews heard the Torah read in. The Christian reading did not invent this matrix; it received it.

There is a further detail in the McNamara apparatus that has caused some excitement in apologetics circles, and that deserves a careful, honest treatment. McNamara notes:

“The text of Neofiti has: ‘the son of the Lord,’ which is due most probably to a late, even sixteenth-century, correction. However, in Christian tradition from earliest times the opening word of Genesis was understood to mean ‘in the Son’; see Jerome, Hebrew Quaest., in Genesis 1:1.”

The Codex Neofiti 1 manuscript — the actual Aramaic manuscript — reads at Genesis 1:1 not “the Memra of the Lord” but “the Son of the Lord” (Aramaic bara d’YYY). McNamara, the leading Catholic Targum scholar of the twentieth century, treats this as most probably a late scribal correction, perhaps as late as the sixteenth century. We claim no more than McNamara himself claims. The Christian reader should not lean on the “Son of the Lord” reading as proof of anything; the manuscript variant is genuinely disputed, and the scholarly consensus is that it is late. But the existence of the variant, and the patristic tradition Jerome attests of reading bereshit as “in the Son,” is itself evidence of how natural the connection between Genesis 1:1, the reshit of Proverbs 8:22, and the Son-as-Wisdom of God appeared in the Christian tradition from very early on. It was not a stretch. Even some Jewish scribes, copying Targum Neofiti, were drawn to it.

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan — the angel reading honestly engaged

The fairness of the article requires us to bring forward the Targum that supports Akin’s reading, not just the Targum that supports the patristic reading. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan is the most expansive of the three major Targums of Genesis; it is also the latest in its final redaction, generally dated to the fourth through seventh centuries AD. The standard critical edition is Michael Maher’s Targum Pseudo-Jonathan: Genesis (The Aramaic Bible Volume 1B, Liturgical Press, 1992). At Genesis 1:26, Pseudo-Jonathan reads:

“The Lord said to the angels who minister before Him, ‘Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.'”

This is, almost word for word, the Divine Council reading. Pseudo-Jonathan does the same thing at Genesis 11:7 (“the seventy angels which stand before Him”) and at Genesis 3:22. The angel-address reading of the plurals in Genesis is a real Jewish tradition, attested in a Palestinian Aramaic Targum, and we engage it honestly rather than pretend it does not exist.

Two observations. First, Pseudo-Jonathan is the latest of the three Targums in its final redaction — fourth through seventh centuries AD, well after the Christian Trinitarian reading was established and well after R. Yoḥanan’s Sanhedrin 38b counter-formulation in the third century. Pseudo-Jonathan is not a window into Second Temple Judaism. It is a window into the rabbinic Judaism that had already been in conversation with Christianity for several centuries by the time it received its final form. The angel-reading in Pseudo-Jonathan reflects the same theological move the article documented in §IV: a rabbinic counter to the Christian reading, articulated in the language of the divine council, deployed in Aramaic synagogue paraphrase.

Second, the centerpiece argument from §III — the Genesis 1:27 grammatical move — does not change because Pseudo-Jonathan reads angels into 1:26. Pseudo-Jonathan is paraphrasing 1:26 with an interpretive expansion, but it cannot rewrite 1:27. The Hebrew text of 1:27 says “in his image, in the image of God, he created him,” and this is what was read in every synagogue that read the Pentateuch, regardless of whether the paraphrase of 1:26 included angels. The rabbinic interpretive expansion of 1:26 must still face the singular execution of 1:27. As we showed in §III, that singular execution does not allow angels into the image. Pseudo-Jonathan supplies the rabbinic angel-reading; Sanhedrin 38b acknowledges the v.27 problem this reading creates; the patristic chain solves the problem the rabbinic reading cannot. The article’s case is unaffected by the existence of Pseudo-Jonathan. We honor the Targum’s witness, and we answer it.

Targum Onkelos — the silent witness

The third Targum is Targum Onkelos. It is the most authoritative Targum for Jewish halakhic purposes, the most literal of the three, and the one that traveled with rabbinic Judaism from Babylon into the medieval and modern Jewish world. The standard critical edition is Bernard Grossfeld’s Targum Onqelos to Genesis (The Aramaic Bible Volume 6, Liturgical Press, 1988). At Genesis 1:1, Onkelos reads — simply, without expansion:

“In the beginning the Lord created the heavens and the earth.”

No Memra. No wisdom. No Son. Onkelos elsewhere uses Memra freely — at Genesis 3:8, for example, where it says “they heard the Memra of the Lord walking in the garden” — but at Genesis 1:1 the most authoritative halakhic Targum is silent on Memra theology. We honor this silence. The article does not claim that all Jewish tradition reads Memra into Genesis 1:1. It claims that some of it does — strongly, and in a major Palestinian Targum — and that the Christian reading inherits and develops that strand.

This is the honest picture of the Jewish background. Three Targums, three different relationships to the Memra and wisdom traditions. Neofiti reads them into Genesis 1:1 in coordinated form. Pseudo-Jonathan reads angels into Genesis 1:26 in conscious counter-position to Christianity. Onkelos says nothing on either point at Genesis 1:1. The Christian reading is one interpretation of one strand of this Jewish background; it is not a foreign imposition, but it is also not a forced reading of every Jewish source. It is the natural development, on Christian premises, of the Memra and wisdom strand that Targum Neofiti most clearly preserves.

XII. The Two-Powers Scholarship — What Modern Academic Judaism Has Documented

For Catholic and Orthodox readers approaching this article, what we have shown so far should be sufficient. The text supports the Trinitarian reading. The Fathers consistently held it. The Targums preserve a Jewish strand from which it organically grows. But for readers who want to know what modern academic Jewish scholarship has documented about the multi-personal divine concepts in pre-Christian Judaism, the picture is even more striking — and it has been built almost entirely by Jewish scholars, in major academic publishing houses, over the last fifty years.

The conversation begins with Alan F. Segal, Professor of Religion and Ingeborg Rennert Professor of Jewish Studies at Barnard College, whose 1977 monograph Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (Brill, reissued by Baylor University Press in 2012) is the foundational study. Segal documents that the rabbis of the second century AD treated “two powers in heaven” — the belief in a primary divine power and a second divine power coordinate with the first — as a heresy that needed to be combatted. But Segal’s central thesis is that this belief was not a foreign Christian or Gnostic intrusion. It had roots in the Hebrew Bible itself — in Daniel 7’s vision of the Ancient of Days and the Son of Man, in the appearances of the Angel of the Lord, in Exodus 23 and Exodus 15, and in the Wisdom traditions. The rabbis declared it heretical only after Christianity made it a defining position of a rival religious community.

The conversation continues with Daniel Boyarin, Talmud Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Boyarin’s Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and his earlier landmark article “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John” (Harvard Theological Review 94, no. 3, July 2001) argue that the Prologue of the Gospel of John is, in its form and method, a Jewish midrash on Genesis 1 — that John 1:1–14 is what the Logos / Memra theology of the Aramaic synagogue would naturally produce when applied Christologically to the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. Boyarin’s reframing of Segal sharpens what the rabbinic tradition actually faced. “There is significant evidence,” Boyarin writes, “that in the first century many — perhaps most — Jews held a binitarian doctrine of God.” The Christian reading of Genesis 1:26 is not the imposition of Greek philosophical categories on Jewish monotheism. It is the Christological development of a Jewish theological framework that already existed, was widespread, and that the rabbis later moved to suppress.

Benjamin D. Sommer, Professor of Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary, brings the same point home from a different angle. His The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge University Press, 2009) argues that the depiction of YHWH in the Hebrew Bible — with multiple bodies, multiple manifestations, fluid presence — is indigenous to ancient Israelite religion, not a foreign import. Sommer is a Conservative Jewish scholar; his work is published by Cambridge; his argument is that the multi-personal divine framework is older than the Christian-rabbinic split and predates the controversies that produced the Sanhedrin 38b passage we examined.

Peter Schäfer of Princeton extends the documentation in Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2020). Schäfer surveys binitarian texts from Daniel 7 through 1 Enoch, the Wisdom of Solomon, Philo of Alexandria, and rabbinic sources, demonstrating that two-powers thinking is broadly attested across Second Temple and rabbinic Jewish literature. He does not draw Christian conclusions from this. He simply documents what is there.

The most recent major contribution is David E. Wilhite and Adam Winn’s Israel’s Lord: YHWH as “Two Powers” in Second Temple Literature (Lexington / Fortress Academic, July 2024) — the first volume of a planned three-volume series. Wilhite is Professor of Historical Theology at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary; Winn is Professor and Chair of Biblical and Religious Studies at Samford University. Their thesis: “Much of [Second Temple] literature reflects the existence of two powers in heaven that are both rightly understood as YHWH.” They argue that the second power figure — variously named God’s Word, God’s Wisdom, the Angel of the Lord, the Son of Man, and others — appears across a wide range of pre-Christian Jewish sources and is rightly identified with YHWH Himself. This “two powers paradigm,” they argue, is the framework within which early Christian commitments regarding Jesus must be understood. The 2024 monograph is endorsed as “a landmark publication” by Michael F. Bird of Ridley College.

The cumulative weight of this scholarship — from 1977 through 2024, in Brill, Cambridge, Princeton, Penn, Harvard Theological Review, and Fortress, by Jewish scholars at Barnard, Berkeley, JTS, Princeton, and by Christian scholars at Baylor and Samford — is that the multi-personal divine framework Christians read in Genesis 1:26 is not a foreign imposition on Jewish monotheism. It is a Christological development of a Jewish theological framework that the academic literature has comprehensively documented.

We must add one note of scholarly precision. The two-powers scholarship documents binitarian — two-power — divine thought in pre-Christian Judaism. It does not document Trinitarian divine thought as such. The Christian reading takes the multi-personal framework that the Jewish sources preserve and develops it into a fully Trinitarian theology, with the Holy Spirit as the third Person, distinct from but consubstantial with the Father and the Son. Schäfer himself has cautioned against over-connecting the two-powers material to the full Trinity. The article honors that caution. We are not claiming that the Targums or the Wisdom of Solomon teach the doctrine of the Trinity. We are claiming that the multi-personal divine framework on which the Christian doctrine of the Trinity builds was already present in Jewish thought before Christianity, and that the Christian reading of Genesis 1:26 inherits and develops that framework rather than imposing a foreign one.

XIII. Gezerah Shavah — The Jewish Method that Produced the Christian Reading

We have referenced the rabbinic interpretive method called gezerah shavah throughout the article. The opening textual section deployed it in the connection between bereshit in Genesis 1:1 and reshit in Proverbs 8:22. The patristic chain noted that Theophilus of Antioch was the first patristic figure recorded as deploying gezerah shavah on these very texts. We owe the reader a brief, focused treatment of what gezerah shavah actually is, where it comes from, and how it shows that the apostolic and patristic Christian reading of Genesis 1 stands in continuity with — not in opposition to — recognized Jewish hermeneutics.

Gezerah shavah, literally “equivalence of expressions,” is the second of the seven middot (rules of interpretation) attributed to Hillel the Elder, the great Jewish sage of the first century BC. The standard reference work for the middot is Strack and Stemberger’s Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, second English edition (Fortress Press, 1996). The standard scholarly consensus, as Strack and Stemberger summarize it, is that the middot are not Hillel’s invention but his codification of interpretive methods already current in the Judaism of his day. Gezerah shavah is the rule that when the same word or phrase appears in two different scriptural passages, the rulings of each passage illuminate the other. The rabbis used this method constantly. So did the apostles.

The standard modern reference for the apostolic deployment of gezerah shavah is Richard N. Longenecker’s Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period, second edition (Eerdmans, 1999). Longenecker — a Protestant evangelical biblical scholar — documents in detail the apostolic use of Hillelite interpretive methods. Three examples will suffice for our purposes here.

Peter at Pentecost. In Acts 2:25–35, Peter quotes Psalm 16:8–11 (“I saw the Lord always before me… you will not abandon my soul to Sheol”) and links it to Psalm 110:1 (“The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand”). The link is the shared phrase “at my right hand.” This is gezerah shavah. Peter uses it to argue that the Resurrected Christ is both the one who escapes Sheol in Psalm 16 and the enthroned Lord at the right hand of God in Psalm 110. The first Christian sermon is built on a textbook application of Hillel’s second middah.

Paul at Antioch in Pisidia. In Acts 13:34–35, Paul quotes Isaiah 55:3 and Psalm 16:10 and links them through the Greek word hosios — “holy one.” Again gezerah shavah. Paul uses it to argue that the Christ is the holy one of God’s promise.

Hebrews 1:5. The author of Hebrews links 2 Samuel 7:14 (“I will be his Father, and he shall be my Son”) and Psalm 2:7 (“You are my Son; today I have begotten you”) through the shared word Son. This gezerah shavah establishes the eternal Sonship of Christ from the Old Testament texts themselves.

The implication for our argument is direct. The Christian Trinitarian reading of Genesis 1:26 connects bereshit (Genesis 1:1) to reshit (Proverbs 8:22) by the shared word, identifies the reshit of Proverbs 8 as the personified Wisdom present at creation, and reads that Wisdom — the Beginning of God’s way — Christologically as the Son who is with the Father in the act of “Let us make man.” This is gezerah shavah. It is the same method Peter used at Pentecost, that Paul used at Antioch, that the author of Hebrews used in Hebrews 1:5. The Christian reading of Genesis 1:26 is therefore not a foreign imposition on Jewish hermeneutics. It is the apostolic continuation of recognized Jewish hermeneutics applied to a text that the rabbis themselves read by the same method, with the difference that the apostolic reading is Christological, where the rabbinic reading is anti-Christological. The argument is not whether gezerah shavah is a legitimate method; both sides of the disagreement use it. The argument is whether the reshit of Proverbs 8 should be read as the pre-existent Word of God or as the Torah. The Christian tradition reads it as the Son. The rabbinic tradition, from the third century onward, reads it as the Torah. Genesis Rabbah 1:1 — the great rabbinic midrashic commentary on Genesis — preserves Rabbi Hoshaya’s third-century reading: “In the beginning by means of the Torah God created.” The Christian reading and the rabbinic reading face the same text, use the same method, and reach different conclusions because they begin from different theological premises.

We honor the rabbinic reading without accepting it. The Christian reading, on the same hermeneutical method, reads the Beginning of Genesis 1:1 as the personified Wisdom of Proverbs 8 and the Wisdom as the Son who “was with God in the beginning,” as the Gospel of John says in chapter 1, verse 2. Wisdom = Word = Son. This is the chain Theophilus deployed, that the patristic chain inherited, that Dei Verbum §12 calls the literal sense of Scripture read in canonical unity. The article’s case is built on the very Jewish method the rabbis themselves codified.

XIV. A Note on the Filioque — For Our Eastern Orthodox Readers

A word must be said for our Eastern Orthodox readers, because the article has been written with Catholic and Orthodox readers as a joint primary audience, and one matter of disagreement between us deserves to be addressed before we close.

The Catholic Church confesses, with Augustine and the Latin tradition, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son — the Filioque. The Orthodox Church confesses, with the Cappadocian Fathers and the Greek tradition, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, or from the Father through the Son, but not from the Son as a co-cause of the procession. This is a real disagreement. It has been debated for over a thousand years. The article does not adjudicate it.

But the article’s argument from Genesis 1:26 does not depend on adjudicating it. Both Catholic and Orthodox traditions confess that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three Persons in one God. Both confess the eternal generation of the Son from the Father. Both confess the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father (Catholics adding “and the Son” to specify the manner; Orthodox preserving the original Constantinopolitan formula). When we read Genesis 1:26 as the Father addressing the Son and the Spirit in the act of creating man, we read it in a way that both traditions can affirm. The plural “Let us” presupposes real distinction of Persons; the singular “in his image” presupposes consubstantial unity. Both presuppositions are common ground between Catholic and Orthodox theology. The Filioque debate is downstream of the eternal generation and procession that Genesis 1:26 already requires us to confess. It is therefore not an obstacle to the joint Catholic-and-Orthodox reading of Genesis 1:26 that the article has built.

We say this not to minimize the Filioque debate but to recognize that it is downstream of the matter the article is engaging. Genesis 1:26 is read the same way in the Latin and Greek liturgical traditions: as the Triune God making man in His own image. Saint Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Trinity — sometimes called the Hospitality of Abraham because it depicts the three angelic visitors of Genesis 18, who are read in the iconographic tradition as a manifestation of the Holy Trinity — hangs in Catholic and Orthodox churches alike as a visual confession of the same reality the article has been arguing from the text. We share the icon. We share the reading. The Filioque debate addresses a downstream question.

XV. An Invitation to Our Protestant Readers

The article has been written with a Catholic and Orthodox primary audience. We have leaned on Dei Verbum §12, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the patristic-medieval consensus that culminates in Peter Lombard’s Sentences. A Protestant reader who has followed the argument this far may say, fairly: “I do not accept the magisterial authority of the Catechism. I do not grant Lombard the interpretive authority you grant him. I read Genesis on the principle of sola scriptura. What in your argument can stand without the Catholic and Orthodox magisterial framework?”

The answer is: nearly all of it. The centerpiece argument from §III — that the plural address of Genesis 1:26 is followed by the singular execution of Genesis 1:27, that the singular execution describes the One God acting in His own singular image, that Genesis 9:6 and James 3:9 confirm that humans bear God’s image and not the angels’, and that the Divine Council reading therefore cannot account for verse 27 — is text-internal. It can be verified by anyone with a Hebrew Bible and a willingness to read Genesis 1:26 and 27 alongside each other. Magisterial authority is not required to make the move. The text does the work.

The Sanhedrin 38b corroboration from §IV is also magisterial-authority-independent. R. Yoḥanan was a third-century rabbi, not a Catholic bishop. His acknowledgment of the v.26 / v.27 grammatical tension stands on its own as evidence that the textual move the article makes was visible to the rabbinic tradition and required a counter-formulation.

The gezerah shavah documentation in §XIII — that the apostolic deployment of Hillelite interpretive methods is well-attested in Acts 2, Acts 13, and Hebrews 1, as Longenecker’s Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period documents — is a Protestant-published scholarly resource. It does not require a Catholic magisterial framework to engage. The conclusion the article draws from Longenecker — that the Christian Trinitarian reading of Genesis 1:26 is the apostolic continuation of recognized Jewish hermeneutics, not a foreign imposition — is available to any Protestant reader who picks up Longenecker’s book.

The two-powers scholarship from §XII is published by Brill, Cambridge, Princeton, Penn, and Fortress. It is academic scholarship, not Catholic magisterial teaching. A Protestant reader can engage Segal, Boyarin, Sommer, Schäfer, Wilhite and Winn directly.

What changes if a Protestant reader rejects the Catholic magisterial framework is not the centerpiece argument or the Sanhedrin corroboration or the gezerah shavah method or the two-powers scholarship. What changes is the framing of the literal sense in §II. A Protestant who does not accept Dei Verbum §12 and CCC §§115–119 may not grant that the literal sense includes what God-as-divine-author intended through the human author’s words. The article respects that disagreement. But the textual case in §III–V does not require the Dei Verbum framing in order to land. The grammar of verses 26 and 27, the rabbinic acknowledgment in Sanhedrin 38b, the apostolic deployment of gezerah shavah, and the Jewish multi-personal divine framework attested in modern academic scholarship — these together make the case. If a Protestant reader, on Protestant principles, looks at Genesis 1:26 and 27 with the methods Longenecker documents the apostles used, the conclusion the article reaches is available to that reader through the texts themselves.

We invite our Protestant readers to follow the argument on its own merits, without needing to grant any premise about magisterial authority that they do not already hold. The argument from the text stands. The argument from the rabbinic tradition stands. The argument from the apostolic method stands. Whatever the reader decides about the Catholic and Orthodox framing, the Trinitarian reading of Genesis 1:26 is the reading the text itself, the rabbis’ own acknowledgment, and the apostles’ own method support.

XVI. Closing — For the Catholic Answers Reader Who Came to This Article from Akin’s Video

We began with Jimmy Akin’s 27 February 2025 Catholic Answers video on Genesis 1:26. We have argued, across sixteen sections, that Akin’s reading is mistaken — that the literal sense of Genesis 1:26 in Catholic exegesis, properly understood through Dei Verbum §12, includes what God-as-divine-author intended through Moses’s words; that the grammar of Genesis 1:26 and 27 cannot be accounted for by any reading that puts angels in the addressee’s chair, and that the rabbis of the Talmud themselves recognized this; that the patristic chain from Justin in the second century to Peter Lombard in the twelfth speaks with one voice on this verse; that the Jewish hermeneutical world from which the Christian reading grew already contained the multi-personal divine framework on which Christian Trinitarian theology was built; and that the apostolic method of biblical interpretation, Hillelite gezerah shavah, is the method the patristic Trinitarian reading uses.

The Catholic Answers reader who arrived here from Akin’s video deserves a final word — direct, not rhetorical. The Divine Council reading is a real position in current Catholic apologetics. It is held by serious people, defended with care, and offered in good faith. It is also wrong on the literal sense of Genesis 1:26, and wrong in a way that matters for Catholic and Orthodox theology and for Catholic and Orthodox prayer.

It matters for theology because it weakens the textual root of the doctrine of creation by the Trinity — the doctrine that the Catechism in paragraph 290 grounds in this very passage, that the Catholic and Orthodox traditions confess at every Mass and Divine Liturgy in the Nicene Creed, and that the Fathers from Justin to Augustine read directly out of “Let us make man in our image.” If the “us” of Genesis 1:26 is the angelic council rather than the Son and the Holy Spirit, then the doctrine of creation by the Trinity loses its first-chapter scriptural root and must be developed from later texts alone. The Catholic and Orthodox traditions have never read it that way, and the magisterial documents we have engaged in this article do not read it that way.

It matters for prayer because the Catholic and Orthodox understanding of what we are — what we are made in the image of, what we are made for, what our final rest is — depends on the Trinitarian reading. We are not made in the image of an angelic council. We are made in the image of the Father loving the Son in the Holy Spirit, eternally, before time and before angels. Our final rest is not in the angelic council. It is in the Trinitarian life itself. The Catechism, in paragraph 221, says that “God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange.” The first textual root of that destiny is Genesis 1:26.

We close with a sentence from the Catechism, paragraph 257, citing Saint Maximus the Confessor: the goal of all creation is to be conformed to the Trinitarian image. This is what we are. This is what we were made to become. And this is what “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” means, in the literal sense of Catholic exegesis, in the witness of the Fathers, in the rabbinic acknowledgment of Sanhedrin 38b, in the apostolic method of gezerah shavah, and in the prayer life of the one Catholic and Orthodox tradition we share.