Genesis 1:1 and Isaiah 44:24 state that God the Father created everything alone, explicitly stretching out the heavens 'by myself.' John 1:3 and Colossians 1:16 instead attribute creation to Jesus, through whom 'all things were created.' 1 Corinthians 8:6 tries to split the job, assigning creation 'from' the Father and 'through' the Son.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
God the Father did it all by himself.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Genesis 1:1
Thus saith the LORD, thy redeemer, and he that formed thee from the womb, I am the LORD that
maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone; that spreadeth abroad the earth
by myself.Isaiah 44:24
24Yahweh, your Redeemer, and he who formed you from the womb says: “I am Yahweh, who makes all things; who alone stretches out the heavens; who spreads out the earth by myself;
6There came a man, sent from God, whose name was John.7The same came as a witness, that he might testify about the light, that all might believe through him.8He was not the light, but was sent that he might testify about the light.9The true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world.10He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world didn’t recognize him.
16For by him all things were created in the heavens and on the earth, visible things and invisible things, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things have been created through him and for him.
6yet to us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we for him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we live through him.
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement— a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
This contradiction exposes a real developmental fault line in how creation language was attributed across the canon. The Hebrew Bible is emphatic that YHWH creates alone. Isaiah 44:24 is the sharpest statement: the Deutero-Isaian oracle says YHWH 'stretches out the heavens' le-vaddi ('by myself, alone') and 'spreads out the earth' mei-itti — a phrase the Masoretic Text marks with a Ketiv/Qere note (Ketiv mi 'itti, 'who was with me?', Qere me-itti, 'from myself'), and on either reading the polemical thrust is identical: there was no co-worker. The literary setting is the anti-idol polemic of Isaiah 40-55, where the whole rhetorical purpose is to deny that any other being shares in YHWH's creative or saving work (cf. 44:6, 'I am the first and the last; besides me there is no god'). John Collins situates this as the high-water mark of Israelite monotheistic rhetoric, forged in the exilic crisis when the apparent triumph of Babylon's gods made an uncompromising claim of YHWH's sole sovereignty theologically necessary.
The New Testament then attributes creation to Christ. John 1:3 says 'all things came into being through him (di' autou), and without him not one thing came into being,' and Colossians 1:16 — drawing on the personified-Wisdom traditions of Proverbs 8:22-31, Sirach 24, and Wisdom of Solomon 7:22-8:1 — declares 'in him all things were created… all things have been created through him and for him.' James Dunn reads Colossians as Wisdom Christology: the church applied to Jesus the cosmological role Hellenistic Judaism had already assigned to personified Wisdom/Logos, a figure said to be 'with' God at creation and the agent through whom the world was ordered. This was a move Larry Hurtado traces in the earliest devotional practice — the inclusion of Jesus in cultic worship — and Bart Ehrman frames as the progressive elevation of Jesus to divine status across the first century.
The strongest harmonization is not the popular Trinitarian appeal but Richard Bauckham's 'divine identity' thesis. Bauckham argues that Second Temple Judaism defined God's uniqueness not primarily through abstract metaphysics but through two functional markers: sole sovereignty over all things and sole agency in creation. The NT writers, he contends, deliberately include Jesus within that unique identity — so attributing creation 'through' Christ is not adding a second creator alongside God but specifying the mode of the one God's single creative act. The internal NT engine for this is 1 Corinthians 8:6, a likely pre-Pauline confessional formula that carefully splits the prepositions: all things are 'from' (ex) the Father and 'through' (dia) the Lord Jesus Christ. Source (ex) and agency (dia) are distinguished, not divided between two creators, and the formula appears to be a Christological reworking of the Shema itself ('one God… one Lord'). On Bauckham's reading the tension within the NT genuinely dissolves, and the popular Trinitarian harmonization (Father creating through Son by Spirit) is a later systematic articulation of the same first-century intuition rather than its source.
Where this leaves Isaiah 44:24 is the crux. The verse does not merely under-specify the agency; it actively denies that anyone was with YHWH — the Ketiv reading even poses it as a rhetorical question, 'who was with me?', expecting the answer 'no one.' Bauckham's solution works only by reading the later Christological 'inclusion within the divine identity' back into a text whose own logic is the exclusion of any second party. That is a coherent theological synthesis but a developmental one: the categories that make 'the Logos was within YHWH's single act' intelligible are not present in Deutero-Isaiah and emerge through the Wisdom traditions and their first-century Christological appropriation. So the NT is internally harmonizable, and the popular 'both did it' framing of 1 Cor 8:6 is a misreading — it does not split the job between two beings but distinguishes source from agency within one creative act. But the diachronic move — from a text whose entire point is 'no one was with me' to a confession that creation occurred through Christ — reflects theological evolution, not a doctrine latent in Genesis and Isaiah from the start.
Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable within the NT and partly overstated, but a genuine developmental tension with Isaiah's sole-creator monotheism.
Sources for this reading
Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Eerdmans, 2003) pp. 27-78on early exaltation Christology
Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God (HarperOne, 2014) pp. 251-282
James D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making (Eerdmans, 1996) pp. 187-196on Colossians and Wisdom Christology
Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel (Eerdmans, 2008) pp. 18-31for the divine-identity harmonization
John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Fortress, 2018) pp. 388-393on Deutero-Isaiah's monotheism
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
This contradiction exposes a real developmental fault line in how creation language was attributed across the canon. The Hebrew Bible is emphatic that YHWH creates alone. Isaiah 44:24 is the sharpest statement: the Deutero-Isaian oracle says YHWH 'stretches out the heavens' le-vaddi ('by myself, alone') and 'spreads out the earth' mei-itti — a phrase the Masoretic Text marks with a Ketiv/Qere note (Ketiv mi 'itti, 'who was with me?', Qere me-itti, 'from myself'), and on either reading the polemical thrust is identical: there was no co-worker. The literary setting is the anti-idol polemic of Isaiah 40-55, where the whole rhetorical purpose is to deny that any other being shares in YHWH's creative or saving work (cf. 44:6, 'I am the first and the last; besides me there is no god'). John Collins situates this as the high-water mark of Israelite monotheistic rhetoric, forged in the exilic crisis when the apparent triumph of Babylon's gods made an uncompromising claim of YHWH's sole sovereignty theologically necessary.
The New Testament then attributes creation to Christ. John 1:3 says 'all things came into being through him (di' autou), and without him not one thing came into being,' and Colossians 1:16 — drawing on the personified-Wisdom traditions of Proverbs 8:22-31, Sirach 24, and Wisdom of Solomon 7:22-8:1 — declares 'in him all things were created… all things have been created through him and for him.' James Dunn reads Colossians as Wisdom Christology: the church applied to Jesus the cosmological role Hellenistic Judaism had already assigned to personified Wisdom/Logos, a figure said to be 'with' God at creation and the agent through whom the world was ordered. This was a move Larry Hurtado traces in the earliest devotional practice — the inclusion of Jesus in cultic worship — and Bart Ehrman frames as the progressive elevation of Jesus to divine status across the first century.
The strongest harmonization is not the popular Trinitarian appeal but Richard Bauckham's 'divine identity' thesis. Bauckham argues that Second Temple Judaism defined God's uniqueness not primarily through abstract metaphysics but through two functional markers: sole sovereignty over all things and sole agency in creation. The NT writers, he contends, deliberately include Jesus within that unique identity — so attributing creation 'through' Christ is not adding a second creator alongside God but specifying the mode of the one God's single creative act. The internal NT engine for this is 1 Corinthians 8:6, a likely pre-Pauline confessional formula that carefully splits the prepositions: all things are 'from' (ex) the Father and 'through' (dia) the Lord Jesus Christ. Source (ex) and agency (dia) are distinguished, not divided between two creators, and the formula appears to be a Christological reworking of the Shema itself ('one God… one Lord'). On Bauckham's reading the tension within the NT genuinely dissolves, and the popular Trinitarian harmonization (Father creating through Son by Spirit) is a later systematic articulation of the same first-century intuition rather than its source.
Where this leaves Isaiah 44:24 is the crux. The verse does not merely under-specify the agency; it actively denies that anyone was with YHWH — the Ketiv reading even poses it as a rhetorical question, 'who was with me?', expecting the answer 'no one.' Bauckham's solution works only by reading the later Christological 'inclusion within the divine identity' back into a text whose own logic is the exclusion of any second party. That is a coherent theological synthesis but a developmental one: the categories that make 'the Logos was within YHWH's single act' intelligible are not present in Deutero-Isaiah and emerge through the Wisdom traditions and their first-century Christological appropriation. So the NT is internally harmonizable, and the popular 'both did it' framing of 1 Cor 8:6 is a misreading — it does not split the job between two beings but distinguishes source from agency within one creative act. But the diachronic move — from a text whose entire point is 'no one was with me' to a confession that creation occurred through Christ — reflects theological evolution, not a doctrine latent in Genesis and Isaiah from the start.
Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable within the NT and partly overstated, but a genuine developmental tension with Isaiah's sole-creator monotheism.
Sources for this reading