Who Created Death?

Who created Death? God? The Devil? Adam? Or the philosophers?

The question seems absurd only until we open Paul’s epistles. There we encounter a Death that enters the world, reigns over humanity, exercises dominion, is declared an enemy, and must ultimately be destroyed. But if Death exists, where does its existence come from? Did God create it? If not, who did? And how is it that, in a universe where everything owes its existence to the Creator, a power appears that God did not create but must later destroy? And if Death is not an entity but simply the cessation of life, what exactly is there to destroy?

This is not a game of words. It is the difference between two fundamentally different conceptions of existence. In one, life is the created reality, and death is its cessation. In the other, Death itself becomes a reality, a power opposed to Life that must be defeated. The first conception has no need to explain who created Death, because Death does not exist as an entity. The second must explain the origin of a cosmic enemy supposedly invading God’s creation. And here begins the story of an extraordinary philosophical construction that eventually came to be presented to the world as divine revelation.

The Good Creation and the Death That Had Not Yet Become an Enemy

Genesis 1 presents a material world in which God creates life. The earth brings forth vegetation, the waters and skies fill with living creatures, animals appear according to their kinds, and finally humanity is created, male and female, in the image of God. The Creator looks upon everything He has made and declares it very good. There is no enemy called Death in this account, no cosmic power hostile to life, no soul imprisoned in a body, no immaterial heavenly man, and no humanity that needs to be rescued from its own biological condition. Nor is there any declaration that living organisms were created biologically immortal.

The blessing of life is accompanied by fertility and multiplication. Life continues through life. Living beings belong to a material creation that God considers good. Of course, Genesis 1 does not offer a complete explanation of mortality. But that is precisely the important observation: the text does not introduce mortality as a cosmic catastrophe requiring the repair of creation. Ecclesiastes, by contrast, speaks directly about the condition of living creatures. In 3:19–20, humans and animals share the same fate. Both die and return to dust. In 9:5–10, the dead no longer know anything or participate in the activities of life. Psalm 146:4 says that when a person returns to the dust, their plans perish with them.

Here, death is not a cosmic character. There is no need for some power somewhere to kill a human being. A person is alive, and then ceases to live. And that changes everything. For if death means the cessation of life, there is no need to invent an explanation for the ontological origin of Death. There is no need to discover who created it, why it reigns, or how it can be destroyed. The extinguishing of a flame does not require the existence of a substance called Extinction. The ending of a song does not imply the appearance of an entity called Silence. And the cessation of life does not imply the existence of a power called Death.

Of course, in other Old Testament texts, such as Hosea 13:14 and Isaiah 25:8, Death is personified and becomes the object of divine victory. But poetic personification does not automatically amount to ontologization. It is one thing to speak of Death as a character in order to express the force of an image, and quite another to construct an entire theology in which Death enters the universe, acquires dominion, and must be eliminated through a cosmic event. It is precisely this transition that needs to be explained.

Plato: When the Death of the Body No Longer Means the Death of the Human Being

Centuries before Paul, Plato had already constructed a conception in which bodily death no longer meant the end of personal existence. In Phaedo, the soul is associated with the principle of life. That which brings life cannot admit its opposite, death. The soul is therefore presented as imperishable. Notice the change: we are no longer discussing merely people who live and die. We are discussing the nature of Life, the nature of Death, opposing principles, and a component of the human being that cannot die by virtue of its very essence. The body may cease to live. The soul continues.

And what does the soul do after death? Plato already has the answers. It is judged. It may be rewarded or punished. It may reach the Isles of the Blessed or Tartarus. It may return in another body, in another existence. All of this appears before Christianity. The judgment of the soul was not Paul’s invention. Neither were postmortem reward and punishment, personal existence apart from the body, or the idea that the soul may subsequently receive another bodily existence.

But Plato did not have a problem that Paul would regard as fundamental: Eden. Plato did not have to explain why Adam sinned, how sin introduced death into the world, or why all humanity supposedly needed to be saved from the consequences of that event. Plato had the immortal soul. He had no need for a last Adam.

Aristotle offered a different explanation of the human being. For him, the soul was the form of the living organism, not simply an occupant of the body. Yet when he turns to the intellect in De Anima III.5, it receives a special status, being described as imperishable and eternal. The exact interpretation of this statement remains debated, but the vocabulary of intellect and the relationship between form and matter would become important in later philosophy. Plato and Aristotle had not constructed identical systems. That is precisely why combining them could produce new explanations. And Alexandria became one of the great laboratories of this syncretism.

Alexandria: Where Death Entered the World

In the Wisdom of Solomon, a Greek work associated with Alexandrian Judaism, we encounter a remarkable declaration: “God did not make death” (Wisdom 1:13). Very well. But only a few verses later, in 2:24, we learn that death entered the world through the envy of the Devil.

Excuse me? God did not create Death, yet Death entered the world? From where? What exactly entered? A being? A power? A principle? A law? And who gave it existence? The text does not resolve the problem. It introduces it.

Moreover, Wisdom 2:23 declares that humanity was created for incorruptibility. And in 3:1–4, we learn that the souls of the righteous are in God’s hands and that their hope is immortality. We already have a construction combining immortality, the survival of the soul, the intervention of an adversary, and the entrance of Death into the world.

Now open Romans 5:12. Paul says that sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin. The same fundamental image: Death enters the world. Only the explanation changes. Wisdom attributes its entrance to the Devil’s envy. Paul connects it to Adam’s sin.

We need not assume that Paul was copying a manuscript of Wisdom at that particular moment. But the intellectual model already existed, and the similarity of the Greek wording is verifiable. And that is the point that matters: before Paul, there was already a theology in which death was treated not merely as the cessation of life but as a reality entering creation. Paul did not have to invent this construction. He only had to integrate it into the story of Adam.

But Alexandria had prepared something even more interesting: a man whom Genesis 1 never describes.

Philo: How to Create a Man God Never Created

Let us read Genesis 1:27. God creates humanity in His image. He creates them male and female. The statement is explicit. It does not speak of a sexless model. It does not say that the true human being is immaterial. It does not present an intellectual archetype separate from the living human being. Male and female are created in God’s image.

Now let us see what Philo of Alexandria does. In De Opificio Mundi 134, Philo presents the human being made in God’s image as an intelligible, incorporeal, incorruptible model, neither male nor female.

Just a moment. Genesis says male and female. Philo says neither male nor female. Genesis presents humanity within material creation. Philo transforms the human being into an immaterial archetype. He then supplies the explanation: the human being in Genesis 1 is the intelligible model, while the human being in Genesis 2, Adam formed from dust, is the material man.

There they are: the two men. But where did they come from? Not from an explicit statement in Genesis about two ontological levels of humanity. They emerged from applying the philosophy of the intelligible model to the two creation accounts. This is the decisive operation. Philo does not simply discover a ready-made anthropology in Genesis. He constructs one by combining the biblical narratives with philosophical distinctions between intelligible and sensible, incorporeal and corporeal, incorruptible and mortal.

And he does not stop there. In his allegorical interpretation of Eden, Adam represents the intellect, Eve represents sensory perception, and the serpent represents pleasure. Thus, the man, the woman, and the serpent become characters in a philosophical drama about mind, senses, and desire. We no longer have merely the story of Eden. We have a theory of human psychology dressed in the characters of Eden.

And, as in any successful syncretism, the result begins to appear older than its author. The reader is told that philosophy was already there in the sacred text. In reality, the interpreter is the one who introduced it.

Genesis supplied the characters. Philosophy wrote the script.

And in Paul, this construction would acquire a new protagonist: Christ, the heavenly man.

Paul and the Heavenly Man: When Philosophy Acquires a Savior

In 1 Corinthians 15:45–49, Paul speaks of the first Adam and the last Adam, the earthly man and the heavenly man. The first is from the dust. The second is from heaven. The first represents the natural and mortal condition. The second represents the spiritual and incorruptible condition.

Where have we encountered this opposition before? In Philo. But Paul gives it a new explanation. The heavenly man is Christ, and humanity must come to bear his image.

There is no need to invent a philosophical reversal of the two men. In Philo, the intelligible man is the model. The model is not an organism that lived biologically before Adam. In Paul, Christ may be understood as preexistent in relation to his human existence, while the risen Christ is presented as the realization of the heavenly condition that humanity must attain. The order of the model and the order of historical fulfillment are not the same thing.

But the connection becomes even more interesting when the expression “image of God” appears. In 2 Corinthians 4:4, Christ is the image of God. In 1 Corinthians 2:16, Paul declares that believers have the mind of Christ. In Romans 12:2, human transformation is associated with the renewal of the mind. The divine image. The mind. The heavenly man. The earthly man. Incorruptibility.

We are no longer dealing with an accidental resemblance between two expressions. We are dealing with an entire family of concepts present in Alexandrian philosophical-religious anthropology.

Scholar Stefan Nordgaard has explicitly argued that Paul transforms the theory of the two men known from Philo to support his doctrine of resurrection. This explanation is stronger than simply invoking undocumented oral traditions, even though it cannot be demonstrated that Paul personally read Philo’s writings.

And here comes the irony. Paul constructs the entire story of humanity’s restoration to the divine image. But when he speaks about men and women, the very equality explicitly expressed in Genesis 1 becomes a casualty of his method.

How Woman Lost the Image of God Between Two Chapters

Genesis 1:27 states that God created humanity in His image, male and female. He does not create the man first and the woman afterward. He does not say that the man is God’s image while the woman is the man’s image. He establishes no hierarchy of spiritual dignity.

But in 1 Corinthians 11:7–9, Paul declares that the man is the image and glory of God, while the woman is the glory of man. Where did he get that distinction? Not from Genesis 1. From Genesis 2, where the woman is derived from the man.

And now the operation is visible before our eyes. Paul takes the expression “image of God” from Genesis 1 but assigns it a hierarchical function by using the story in Genesis 2. The combination produces a new anthropology: the man directly represents the divine image, while the woman is defined by her relationship to the man.

Here, syncretism is no longer a hypothesis about what Paul might have been thinking. It is visible in his argument. Two different narratives are brought together, and one ends up controlling the meaning of the other.

Philo had transformed the male and female of Genesis 1 into a sexless archetype. Paul uses the man from Eden to interpret the divine image in a manner that privileges the male. And even the fact that he later speaks of the interdependence of the two sexes in 1 Corinthians 11:11–12 does not erase his preceding statements. What Genesis 1 explicitly granted to both is redistributed through interpretation.

Therefore, before accepting that Paul explains the true meaning of creation, we should ask who gave him the authority to modify the very fundamental statement about humanity created in God’s image.

For he employs the same method when he turns to Adam, sin, and death. Only now the consequences no longer concern merely the relationship between men and women. They concern all humanity.

Adam, Sin, and Death: Constructing the Universal Enemy

In Romans 5, Paul presents sin as entering the world through Adam, and death as following sin. Death begins to reign. In Romans 6:9, death no longer has dominion over Christ. In 1 Corinthians 15:26, Death is the last enemy to be destroyed. And in 1 Corinthians 15:56, the sting of Death is sin.

Notice that Paul does not simply identify Death with the Devil or with sin. Death receives its own role within the system. Sin is the instrument through which Death exercises its power. Adam is the one through whom it enters human history. Christ is the one through whom victory over it begins.

This is no longer merely the poetic personification of death. It is a theological structure in which Death functions as a real power, with a narrative origin, a reign, and an end.

Of course, we need not imagine Paul attributing a body or an address to Death. Ontology does not always require the existence of a material object. But it does require us to establish what kind of reality we are attributing existence and causal power to. And Paul does not resolve that problem. He explains the circumstances under which Death entered the world, not what it is or where it receives its existence.

To claim that sin introduced Death is not the same as explaining how an entity unknown to the Creator could begin to exist.

And so we arrive at an extraordinary situation. God creates the world. Man sins. Death appears. Death reigns. God must send a Savior. The Savior rises. Death must be destroyed.

But if death had been understood from the beginning as the cessation of life, the entire story of destroying an ontological enemy would have been unnecessary. God could simply have given life again to the one who died. And He could have sustained that life without end.

Instead of this explanation, Paul constructs a cosmic conflict in which the solution becomes just as complicated as the problem.

And Revelation would carry this construction to an astonishing conclusion.

When Death Dies by Its Own Death

In Revelation 20:14, Death and Hades are thrown into the lake of fire. At last, the enemy is eliminated. But the author adds that the lake of fire is the second death.

Just a moment. The first Death is destroyed by the second Death? Then what happened to Death? Did it disappear, or was it replaced?

In Revelation 21:4, we are told that death will no longer exist. But only a few verses later, in 21:8, the lake of fire appears again, once more identified as the second death. And the question becomes unavoidable: where did the second death go?

If the second death is a real power, then Death has not disappeared. One of its forms continues to exist. If the second death is not a power but merely the definitive cessation of existence, then we have just returned to the simple definition from which the philosophical construction tried to depart. Death is the cessation of life. And it no longer needs to be killed.

The paradox is so striking that it almost seems like an unintended irony of the text: in order to destroy Death, the narrative introduces a more powerful Death.

It is possible that this scene represents a redactional development intended to bring the story of Paul’s last enemy to its conclusion. That hypothesis must be demonstrated separately through an analysis of Revelation’s composition. But regardless of the history of its redaction, the conceptual problem remains in the text. Once Death has been transformed into a cosmic power, the author must explain not only how people die but also how Death itself dies. And for that, another Death is required.

A system meant to eliminate Death ended up doubling it.

Immortality Without Philosophy: Life Does Not Need an Indestructible Soul

Now the difference between the two constructions becomes clear. In the philosophical conception, immortality is associated with the nature of a component of the human being, with the soul, with the intellect, or with transformation into a higher ontological condition. In the Pauline construction, Adam represents the mortal condition, while Christ is the incorruptible heavenly man into whose image humanity must be transformed.

But from the perspective of the good creation, immortality can be explained much more simply. Life is the Creator’s gift. Death is the cessation of individual life. And immortality is life sustained by God without end.

There is no need for a soul that is indestructible by its very nature. There is no need for an intellect that escapes matter. There is no need for an immaterial heavenly man who must subsequently be realized. Above all, there is no need for God to enter an ontological war against a power called Death.

If God can create a living being from what was previously not alive, He can restore life to that being after it has died. Resurrection does not require a soul that survived the body. It requires the Creator’s power. And eternal life does not require the destruction of a cosmic entity. It requires the continuation of life through God’s will.

This is the conception that Melekism affirms, beginning with the goodness of creation and the authority of the Creator, not with the Eden myth of a fallen humanity. Human beings do not need to become the image of God through a philosophical transformation into an ideal human. In Genesis 1, male and female were already created in that image.

And the divine image is not the exclusive property of the male intellect, the privilege of a heavenly archetype, or something that a woman receives indirectly from a man. Humanity is created with dignity, freedom, conscience, and responsibility. The human being is not a failed copy of an invisible model, not the result of an Edenic mistake that God must repair, and not the prisoner of a cosmic Death.

The human being is a living creature, created by God. And if God wishes that life to continue forever, there is no reason why He could not sustain it.

The Enemy That Never Existed

We began with a question: who created Death? We encountered Greek philosophy, where the immortal soul and the metaphysical opposition between life and death offered a new interpretation of human existence. We arrived in Alexandria, where death enters the world, the soul survives the body, and immortality becomes part of a philosophical theology. We encountered Philo, who transforms humanity created male and female into a sexless archetype, and Adam, Eve, and the serpent into intellect, senses, and pleasure. We encountered Paul, who uses the heavenly man and the earthly man to construct a theology of Adam and Christ, sin, death, and salvation. And we arrived in Revelation, where Death is thrown into another Death, after which we are told that death will no longer exist.

Taken together, these texts show how philosophy supplied the categories, Alexandria constructed the religious synthesis, and Paul organized it into a history of salvation. We need not demonstrate that Paul personally read every philosopher or every work of Philo to identify this process. The intellectual constructions already existed. The parallels are concrete. And Genesis 1 does not contain the philosophical anthropology that later interpreters claimed to discover there.

But now we must ask the question that the entire construction has attempted to avoid. If the human being created by God was already in His image, why would humanity need to become another kind of human being, heavenly and incorruptible, in order to fulfill creation? If life was good, why did the material condition become a problem requiring correction? If death is merely the cessation of life, why should there exist a Death that reigns over the world? And if the Creator can restore life, why would He need to destroy a power He did not create?

The answer is uncomfortable precisely because it is simple. God does not need Death to explain life. Philosophy needed Death to explain its immortality. And the theology built upon that philosophy subsequently needed a Savior to defeat the enemy.

Thus, the cessation of life was transformed into a cosmic tragedy, the material human being into a creature that had to be surpassed, and the promise of eternal life into a victory over an entity whose existence was never demonstrated.

But life does not need such a war. The Creator does not have to kill Death in order to give life. He does not have to destroy an imaginary power to sustain the existence of those He created. And He does not have to transform humanity into a philosophical ideal in order to grant immortality.

It is enough for Him to do what He did in the beginning: to give life, and never cease giving it.

Here lies the final irony of a theology that made the destruction of Death God’s greatest victory: before Death could be defeated, someone first had to turn it into something that exists. And if that philosophical construction is abandoned, the entire cosmic war loses its object. There is no longer a power to be killed, an enemy to be thrown into a lake of fire, or a second Death required to destroy the first.

Only life and its Creator remain.

And perhaps the true victory over Death is not its destruction, but the discovery that God never had such an enemy in the first place.

References and Further Reading

Primary philosophical sources

1. Plato, Phaedo, 105–107 — The soul, life, death, and immortality.
2. Plato, Gorgias, 523–527 — Judgment after death, the Isles of the Blessed, and Tartarus.
3. Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), II.1 and III.5 — The soul as the form of the living body and the question of the imperishable intellect.

Alexandrian and Hellenistic Jewish sources

4. Wisdom of Solomon 1:13–15; 2:23–24; 3:1–4 — The origin of death, incorruptibility, and the immortality of the righteous.
5. Philo of Alexandria, De Opificio Mundi (On the Creation), §§69, 134–135 — The divine image, the intelligible human being, and the material human being.
6. Philo of Alexandria, Legum Allegoriae (Allegorical Interpretation), Book II — The allegorical interpretation of Adam, Eve, the serpent, intellect, perception, and pleasure.

Biblical texts

7. Genesis 1:26–31; chapters 2–3 — Creation in God’s image and the Eden narrative.
8. Ecclesiastes 3:19–21; 9:5–10 — Mortality and the condition of the dead.
9. Psalm 146:4 — The cessation of human plans at death.
10. Hosea 13:14; Isaiah 25:8 — The personification and defeat of Death.
11. Romans 5–6 — Adam, sin, the reign of Death, and Christ.
12. 1 Corinthians 2, 11, and 15 — The mind of Christ, the divine image, the two Adams, and the resurrection.
13. 2 Corinthians 4–5 — Christ as the image of God and existence in relation to the body.
14. Revelation 20–21 — The destruction of Death, the lake of fire, and the second death.

Modern academic research

15. Nordgaard, Stefan. “Paul’s Appropriation of Philo’s Theory of Two Men in 1 Corinthians 15.45–49.” New Testament Studies, vol. 57, no. 3 (2011), pp. 348–365. Cambridge University Press. Read the study.