Plato and Moses

So that you may learn that Plato took from our teachers—by which we mean the account given through the prophets—his statement that God made the world by transforming matter that was formless, hear the exact words spoken through Moses. He was, as already shown, the first prophet and older than the Greek writers. Through him the prophetic Spirit, making known how and from what God first fashioned the world, said:

“In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth. The earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss, and the Spirit of God was moving over the waters. And God said, ‘Let light come to be,’ and it came to be so.”

Thus Plato and those who say the same things, as well as we ourselves, learned—and you too can be convinced—that the whole world was made by the word of God from the underlying matter previously described by Moses. And what the poets call Erebus, we know had been spoken of earlier by Moses.