2 - New creation in the Jewish Scriptures: an overview

Summary

Creation and redemption belong together, as the obverse and reverse of the same theological coin.

Bernhard Anderson, From Creation to New Creation

By all accounts, the motif of new creation as encountered in the literature of Second Temple Judaism had its ultimate origin in the eschatological hopes of the later prophets. Whether mediated through subsequent developments of this idea or not, Paul's own application of this motif is commonly linked to these prophets, principally the so-called trito-Isaiah, so any analysis of new creation in Paul must begin here. In the following pages I offer only a survey of this Old Testament theme, outlining the main contours of this idea as it is found in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Nothing controversial will be argued in this section, and the focus therefore will be on the primary source material. Unlike the following sections, interaction with secondary literature will be kept to a minimum.

Yet while the analysis here must be brief and to the point, I do not mean to give the impression that this material is unimportant for understanding the motif of new creation in Paul. As noted above, contemporary scholarship traces the Pauline application of this idea to the Isaianic oracles concerning the new heavens and the new earth, and this connection is considered crucial to the interpretation of καιν κτίσις in Paul's letters. But contemporary scholarship seems unaware that there is more than one new-creation motif in the later prophets, and apart from excluding the witness of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah 40–55, any adequate survey of this theme will have to reckon with more than one possible Old Testament background.