The claim is familiar: Genesis borrowed pagan creation myths, removed most of the gods, and placed the God of Israel at the top. The language of Genesis 1 seems to invite the comparison. Darkness lies over the deep, waters cover the earth, light appears, the waters are divided, dry land emerges, living creatures fill the sea and land, and humanity arrives at the end of the ordered sequence.

The question is not whether Genesis and pagan creation accounts contain similarities. They do. The real question is what kind of relationship those similarities establish. Do they prove direct copying, show that several cultures were describing the same world with a common ancient vocabulary, or reveal that Genesis deliberately confronted rival accounts of creation?

Eusebius of Caesarea entered this discussion more than sixteen centuries before the modern debate took its present form. In the first books of his Preparation for the Gospel, he quoted Phoenician, Egyptian, and Greek accounts of the cosmos at remarkable length. He then placed them beside what he called the theology of the Hebrews, allowing his readers to see both the parallels and the contradictions.

Eusebius did not think Genesis was a late Israelite copy of pagan mythology. He believed pagan writers had preserved scattered memories of the beginning, mixed them with physical speculation, and eventually turned parts of creation and dead human rulers into gods. His conclusion was not that the accounts had nothing in common. His conclusion was that they gave rival explanations of the common material.

Eusebius Let the Pagan Writers Speak for Themselves

Eusebius wrote the Preparation for the Gospel during the early fourth century as a defense of Christianity addressed to readers formed by Greek education. Before arguing directly for the gospel, he asked why Christians had abandoned the traditional gods of their cities and accepted the Scriptures of the Hebrews. He could not answer that question merely by quoting the Bible to people who did not yet recognize its authority.

His method was therefore comparative. He announced that he would survey ancient theologies and philosophical accounts of the world, but he would build the case from pagan authors rather than his own assertions. The comparison would depend on witnesses who did not accept Christian Scripture, so he called Greek philosophers and historians to testify about their own traditions.

That procedure explains the unusual shape of the work. Eusebius becomes an archivist before he becomes a critic. He preserves extended passages from Diodorus Siculus, Philo of Byblos, and Plutarch, including material from works that are no longer complete.

The method also corrects a weak Christian response to the question of Genesis and pagan creation myths. Eusebius did not protect Scripture by hiding the resemblances. He put the accounts on the same page, examined how each one worked, and then asked which account could actually explain the order of the world without worshiping the world.

Readers who want the larger Genesis 1 background can begin with Fresh Ground Theology’s study of the Genesis gap theory and ancient creation myths. That article compares Genesis with Mesopotamian accounts and examines the Hebrew grammar of the chapter’s opening verses. The present study turns westward to the Phoenician, Egyptian, and Greek materials preserved by Eusebius.

Diodorus Siculus: A World That Organized Itself

Eusebius begins his sustained comparison with Diodorus Siculus, whose Library of History gathered material from many earlier traditions. Diodorus reports two broad explanations for the origin of humanity. Some thinkers held that the universe and the human race had always existed, while others believed both had come into being within definite periods of time.

The second explanation sounds closer to Genesis at first. Heaven and earth begin in a mixed condition, their parts separate, the higher and lighter material rises, the heavier material settles, and recognizable regions of the cosmos emerge. Diodorus says that the fiery material moved upward and carried the sun and stars into the cosmic whirl, while muddy and moist material settled downward and contracted into sea and earth (Preparation for the Gospel 1.7).

The account continues with the first living creatures emerging from the heated mud. Moist matter becomes fertile under the sun, membranes swell and burst, and various kinds of animals spring forth. Humanity eventually develops language, tools, shelter, and social order under the pressure of necessity.

The parallels with Genesis are easy to list. Both accounts move from an undifferentiated condition toward an ordered cosmos. Both speak of heaven and earth, light and darkness, water and dry land, celestial bodies, animals, and humanity.

The explanation, however, is not the same. In Diodorus’s account, the material separates through its own properties. Fire rises because it is light, muddy material falls because it is heavy, motion produces the arrangement, and heat animates moist matter. The world forms without a divine command, and Diodorus names no Creator in the process.

Eusebius seized on that omission. He concluded that Diodorus had presented the arrangement of the universe as “accidental and spontaneous.” His charge of atheism referred to this exclusion of God from the origin of the world, not to a denial that gods might exist somewhere else in Diodorus’s history.

Genesis begins at the point Diodorus leaves empty: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Matter does not tell itself where to go. Light appears because God speaks, the waters divide because God orders them, and the earth produces life because God commands it to do so.

The sequence may share ancient cosmological features, but the cause has changed completely. Diodorus describes the properties of matter as sufficient to explain order. Genesis repeatedly makes the order dependent upon the will, speech, evaluation, and blessing of God.

Philo of Byblos: Darkness, Wind, Desire, and Môt

The most arresting comparison comes from Philo of Byblos, a Phoenician writer of the first and early second centuries. Philo claimed to present the ancient history of Sanchuniathon, whom he placed before the Trojan War. His work survives mainly because Eusebius quoted it while criticizing Phoenician religion.

The material probably contains genuine Phoenician traditions, although Philo arranged and interpreted them for a Greek-reading audience. The names, divine genealogies, and cultural heroes belong to the religious world of the Levant. Eusebius valued the account precisely because Philo presented it as an insider’s recovery of Phoenician theology rather than a Christian caricature of it.

Philo’s cosmogony begins with dark, windy air and a watery or muddy substance called Môt. Desire joins the first principles, living germs emerge, and the heavenly bodies finally appear. The powers within nature generate one another without the command of a transcendent Creator.

The first principle of the universe he supposes to have been air dark with cloud and wind, or rather a blast of cloudy air, and a turbid chaos dark as Erebus; and these were boundless and for long ages had no limit. But when the wind, says he, became enamoured of its own parents, and a mixture took place, that connexion was called Desire. This was the beginning of the creation of all things: but the wind itself had no knowledge of its own creation. From its connexion Môt was produced, which some say is mud, and others a putrescence of watery compound; and out of this came every germ of creation, and the generation of the universe. (Preparation for the Gospel 1.10)

Philo then describes the heating of sea and land, the formation of clouds and storms, and the awakening of animals at the crash of thunder. Once again, the points of contact with Genesis are visible. Darkness, wind, watery matter, light, sun, moon, stars, sea, land, and living creatures all appear within an account of cosmic beginnings.

Yet Philo’s account does not contain the God of Genesis disguised under a Phoenician name. Its first principles are dark air, wind, and turbid chaos. Desire is a generative force, Môt becomes the matrix of life, and creation emerges through mixture, heat, separation, and awakening.

Genesis 1 uses some of the same parts of the world without turning any of them into first principles. Darkness is not a power that produces. The deep is not a deity, the wind or Spirit over the waters does not mate with chaos, and desire does not generate the cosmos.

The sun and moon receive an especially severe demotion. Genesis does not even use their ordinary names in the creation account, but calls them the greater and lesser lights. They appear on the fourth day as objects placed in the firmament to serve times and seasons, while vegetation already covers the earth.

Philo’s account moves from cosmic elements toward beings that can be treated as divine. Genesis moves in the opposite direction by placing every element under the word of God. The shared vocabulary of the world becomes the means by which Genesis denies that any part of that world is God.

Fresh Ground Theology’s study of the gods of the Old Testament provides a broader introduction to the divine beings, pagan rivals, and ancient religious world surrounding Israel. That background is important here because pagan creation stories often merge cosmogony with theogony. The birth of the world and the birth of the gods become parts of the same family history.

Diodorus and the Gods Who Began as Human Beings

When Eusebius turns from Phoenicia to Egypt, he again relies heavily on Diodorus. The Egyptian material does not offer only one creation sequence. It combines heavenly gods, elemental powers, culture heroes, animal symbols, kings, and deceased benefactors within several layers of religious explanation.

Diodorus reports that Egyptians identified the sun and moon with Osiris and Isis. He also reports a second line of interpretation in which gods such as Kronos, Rhea, Zeus, Hera, Osiris, and Isis had originally been mortal rulers or benefactors. Their wisdom, kingship, inventions, and public benefits led later generations to grant them divine honors.

Diodorus presents these gods as mortal rulers and benefactors who later received immortality and worship because of their wisdom or public service. Some shared names with heavenly bodies, while others retained personal names. Religious history therefore moved in both directions: nature received personal names, and human persons received the names or status of cosmic gods.

This fluidity is foreign to Genesis 1. God does not emerge from the world, receive power from an older divine generation, or gain immortality through public service. He creates before any king, culture hero, animal, sun, moon, or human community exists.

Humanity receives an exalted position, but not divinity. Men and women are created in the image of God and appointed to rule the creatures. They remain creatures who receive life, food, blessing, and vocation from the Creator.

That distinction also explains why biblical creation theology can speak positively about the sun, sea, animals, and human rule without worshiping them. Their goodness is received goodness. Fresh Ground Theology’s discussion of humanity’s divine calling in the image of God develops this human vocation across Genesis, while Genesis 1 can call the creation “very good” precisely because nothing within it has to be called God.

Plutarch: Myth as an Allegory of Nature

A thoughtful pagan reader could object that Eusebius was taking myth too literally. Perhaps the stories of gods marrying, fighting, hiding, dying, and returning were never intended as accounts of divine behavior. Perhaps they encoded philosophical truths about nature beneath the narrative surface.

Eusebius anticipated that answer and turned to Plutarch. Plutarch explained that the ancient myths and rites concealed physical doctrines through riddles and allegories. On this reading, the myths were philosophical riddles rather than crude biographies of the gods.

The physiology of the ancients both among Greeks and Barbarians was a physical doctrine concealed in legends, for the most part a secret and mysterious theology conveyed in enigmas and allegories, containing statements that were clearer to the multitude than the silent omissions, and its silent omissions more liable to suspicion than the open statements. This is evident in the Orphic poems, and in the Egyptian and Phrygian stories. But the mind of the ancients is most clearly exhibited in the orgiastic rites connected with the initiations, and in what is symbolically acted in the religious services. (Preparation for the Gospel 3.1)

Plutarch then interprets the gods as features or processes within nature. Dionysus can represent drunkenness, Hera marriage, Zeus heat or fire, Hera again wind and rain, Apollo the sun, and Ares a fiery celestial body. A quarrel between Zeus and Hera becomes an imbalance between elements, while their reconciliation represents the return of cosmic order.

In Plutarch’s explanation of one myth, “The variance and quarrel of Hera and Zeus is nothing else than the distemper and confusion of the elements.” If Zeus, understood as heat and fire, gains excess, drought follows. If Hera, understood as rain and wind, gains excess, the result is a flood.

Eusebius objects that the interpretations do not remain stable. The same divine name can refer to marriage in one explanation, air in another, earth in another, or a mortal person elsewhere. Allegory may rescue a myth from its surface absurdity, but it does not establish which explanation the myth actually carries.

More fundamentally, the physical reading does not escape Eusebius’s charge. If Apollo is the sun, Hera is the atmosphere, and Osiris is the Nile, religious worship is still being directed toward parts of the created order. The story may become more respectable, but the creature has not ceased to occupy the place of the Creator.

Genesis uses the parts of nature without giving them divine identities. Light is light, water is water, land is land, and the lights in the heavens are lights. They may declare the glory of God, but they do not become gods through either myth or allegory.

This difference appears throughout Eusebius’s argument against the development of pagan religion. The problem was not that pagans observed no order, power, or beauty in the world. The problem was that they repeatedly stopped at the world and gave divine honor to something within it.

Genesis Does Not Tell the Birth Story of God

The sharpest distinction between Genesis and the accounts Eusebius quotes is easy to miss because it appears in the Bible’s first four words: “In the beginning God.” Genesis begins with God already present, already active, and underived. It gives no account of his birth, parents, rivals, accession to power, or discovery of the ability to create.

Many pagan cosmogonies are also theogonies. The elements generate gods, gods generate other gods, younger gods displace older gods, and the present order arises from divine sex, conflict, succession, or dismemberment. The world is organized through a history inside the divine realm.

Genesis contains no divine genealogy. The waters do not resist God, the darkness does not threaten him, and the sea creatures are not defeated enemies whose bodies must be subdued. God speaks, creation obeys, and God evaluates what he has made.

The difference is therefore larger than monotheism replacing polytheism by reducing the number of characters. Genesis does not present one god who happens to win a contest among several candidates. It distinguishes God from the entire order of heaven, earth, seas, celestial lights, living creatures, and humanity.

This distinction also governs the dignity of humanity. In pagan accounts, human beings may spring from mud, arise through natural necessity, serve the gods’ needs, or descend from divine and human unions. In Genesis, God deliberates before making humanity, creates male and female in his image, blesses them, and entrusts the earth to their rule.

What Eusebius Believed the Hebrews Understood

After six books of pagan theology and philosophy, Eusebius turns in Book 7 to the Hebrews. His structure is deliberate. He has already shown his readers accounts in which matter organizes itself, celestial bodies become gods, dead rulers receive worship, and myths become physical allegories.

He then describes the Hebrew position by denying each of those moves. The elements are real, ordered, and worthy of study, but they are neither divine nor self-explanatory. Their understanding of creation provides his answer to the pagan accounts.

The children of the Hebrews alone among so many go off on the opposite course. For of all mankind these were the first and sole people who from the very first foundation of social life devoted their thought to rational speculation; and having set themselves to study reverently the physical laws of the universe, first as to elements of bodies, earth, water, air, fire, of which they perceived that this universe consisted, the sun also, and moon, and stars, they considered them to be not gods, but works of God. They further argued that it is not possible that the order of the whole cosmos, so well and wisely composed, and full as it is of living beings both rational and irrational, should have a spontaneous cause ascribed to it, nor possible to suppose the creative principle of the living to be lifeless, nor the formative principle of the rational to be itself irrational. (Preparation for the Gospel 7.3)

Eusebius follows with analogies from ordinary acts of making. Timber and stones do not assemble themselves into a house, a garment does not exist without a weaver, a city requires order and law, and a ship does not reach harbor without a pilot. His argument is not that the Hebrews ignored natural causes, since he expressly says that they studied the physical laws and elements of the universe.

His point is that physical processes cannot account for the intelligible order of the whole by themselves. The laws, elements, and motions belong to the thing being explained. They do not remove the need for the wisdom that gives the cosmos its ordered existence.

The complete text of Book 7 shows how closely Eusebius connects creation with Hebrew identity. The Hebrews are not distinguished by ignorance of nature but by their refusal to confuse nature with God. For him, this is the intellectual center of biblical monotheism.

Theophilus Saw the Same Contrast Before Eusebius

Eusebius was not the first Christian writer to compare Genesis with pagan accounts of the world. In the second century, Theophilus of Antioch addressed a pagan acquaintance named Autolycus and set the biblical creation account beside Greek philosophy and poetry. His comparison is especially useful because he comments on the order of Genesis 1 rather than merely repeating its contents.

Theophilus begins with the Creator’s priority over matter. Nothing exists beside God as an independent first principle, and the creation depends upon God’s will. Creation is neither eternal nor self-originating.

And first, they taught us with one consent that God made all things out of nothing; for nothing was coeval with God: but He being His own place, and wanting nothing, and existing before the ages, willed to make man by whom He might be known; for him, therefore, He prepared the world. For he that is created is also needy; but he that is uncreated stands in need of nothing. God, then, having His own Word internal within His own bowels, begot Him, emitting Him along with His own wisdom before all things. He had this Word as a helper in the things that were created by Him, and by Him He made all things. (To Autolycus 2.10)

Theophilus then quotes the six days of Genesis at length. After doing so, he claims that other writers imitated the account and drew suggestions from it, but mixed those truths with error. His argument reverses the modern accusation: pagan similarities are not evidence that Moses copied the philosophers, but that later writers retained fragments of a more ancient account.

His comment on the fourth day makes the polemical force of Genesis especially clear. Theophilus writes, “On the fourth day the luminaries were made; because God, who possesses foreknowledge, knew the follies of the vain philosophers, that they were going to say, that the things which grow on the earth are produced from the heavenly bodies, so as to exclude God.” He then gives the logic of the sequence: plants and seeds appear before the sun, moon, and stars, “for what is posterior cannot produce that which is prior.”

The arrangement of Genesis is therefore theological, not merely chronological. The heavenly lights govern days and seasons, but they are not the ultimate source of fertility or life. Their placement after vegetation prevents the reader from treating them as the gods upon whom the earth depends.

The full second book of To Autolycus develops the point across the creation account. Theophilus can use the sun as a symbol within Christian interpretation while refusing to worship it as a god. Created things can signify God because they are not God.

Genesis and Pagan Creation Myths: Similarity Is Not Literary Dependence

The evidence permits a more careful answer than either “Genesis copied paganism” or “Genesis has nothing in common with paganism.” Genesis belongs to the ancient world. Its first readers knew the sky as a realm of lights, the sea as a dangerous depth, the earth as the source of vegetation, and humanity as uniquely responsible for ordered life upon the land.

Shared subjects do not by themselves establish literary borrowing. Every creation account must speak about some combination of matter, order, sky, earth, water, life, and humanity. To demonstrate direct dependence, a comparison must move beyond a list of common objects and show distinctive sequence, language, narrative structure, or conceptual dependence.

The sources quoted by Eusebius do not establish that kind of direct line into Genesis. Diodorus, Plutarch, and Philo of Byblos wrote long after Genesis, even when they claimed to preserve older traditions. Their accounts also disagree with one another concerning the first principles, the mechanism of creation, the identity of the gods, and the meaning of the myths.

The more plausible relationship is cultural and argumentative. Genesis speaks about the same world that surrounding peoples interpreted religiously, but it reorganizes that world around the sovereign speech of one Creator. It does not merely remove extra divine names while leaving the pagan system intact.

Calling that procedure “borrowing” can conceal more than it reveals. If borrowing means that Genesis uses ancient cosmological subjects and images, the description is reasonable. If it means that Genesis copied a pagan story and lightly baptized it, the differences in divine identity, agency, worship, humanity, and cosmic order oppose the claim.

Modern scholars often describe Genesis 1 as a theological engagement with the ancient Near Eastern world. That formulation is stronger than pretending the parallels do not exist, and more precise than treating every parallel as proof of copying. Genesis does not speak from a cultural vacuum, but neither does it surrender its account of God to the religious logic of its neighbors.

Eusebius’s Answer to the Borrowing Question

Eusebius believed the direction of dependence ran away from Moses, not toward him. The oldest Hebrews knew one Creator, while other nations directed worship toward the stars, elements, animals, rulers, and benefactors. Later philosophers sometimes recovered true observations, but they mixed them with incompatible accounts and unstable allegories.

His chronology is not identical to every modern reconstruction of the Pentateuch, but his comparative judgment remains valuable. He asks readers to compare complete systems rather than isolated images. Darkness and water may occur in two accounts while doing entirely different theological work.

For Diodorus, order can arise from the motion and properties of matter. For Philo of Byblos, dark air, wind, desire, Môt, heat, and mixture generate the cosmos. For Plutarch, divine myths can become allegories of fire, rain, air, earth, rivers, and celestial bodies.

For Genesis, none of these is the first principle. God is before the deep, distinct from the heavens and earth, sovereign over the waters, and responsible for the life and order of the whole. The elements do not generate him, and he does not bear their names.

So, did Genesis borrow from pagan creation myths? It shares the ancient world’s questions and some of its cosmological vocabulary, but it does not reproduce the theology that governed the pagan answers Eusebius preserved. It takes the world that pagan religion filled with divine powers and places the whole of it beneath the word of God.

Eusebius read the accounts side by side and saw neither an embarrassing resemblance nor a reason to deny the evidence. He saw a dispute over the most basic distinction in theology: whether the world contains the gods or whether the world was made by God. Genesis answers by refusing to worship anything it has already called creation.

Selected Sources

• Eusebius of Caesarea. Preparation for the Gospel. Books 1–3 and 7. Translated by E. H. Gifford. Oxford, 1903.
• Theophilus of Antioch. To Autolycus. Book 2, especially chapters 9–15 and 32–35.
• Attridge, Harold W., and Robert A. Oden Jr. Philo of Byblos: The Phoenician History. Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series 9. Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1981.
• Baumgarten, Albert I. The Phoenician History of Philo of Byblos: A Commentary. Études préliminaires aux religions orientales dans l’Empire romain 89. Leiden: Brill, 1981.
• Johnson, Aaron P. Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Smith, Mark S. The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010.
• Walton, John H. Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011.
• Wenham, Gordon J. Genesis 1–15. Word Biblical Commentary 1. Waco, TX: Word Books, 1987.