Let Us Make Man
Genesis 1:26-27, the image of God, as the early church read it
At the summit of the creation account God does something He had not done before: He deliberates, and He speaks in the plural. "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." Then man is made, uniquely, in the image of God. The early church heard two great truths here: that the one God is not solitary, the Father speaking with His Word and Spirit, and that humanity bears a dignity no other creature shares, the very image of its Maker. Justin Martyr and the Epistle of Barnabas, two of the oldest voices outside the New Testament, read it this way. Their words below, with a plain restatement.
The Fathers' words are verbatim and attributed (Justin Martyr and the Epistle of Barnabas, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, public domain; selected from the running prose, footnote apparatus omitted). The box marked "In plain terms" is our own restatement, never the Fathers' words.
Genesis 1:26 · KJVAnd God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air… and over all the earth…
"From which we can indisputably learn that God conversed with some one who was numerically distinct from Himself, and also a rational Being… But this Offspring, which was truly brought forth from the Father, was with the Father before all the creatures, and the Father communed with Him; even as the Scripture by Solomon has made clear, that He whom Solomon calls Wisdom, was begotten as a Beginning before all His creatures."
Justin MartyrJustin takes the plural seriously. "Let us make" is not God talking to Himself, nor (he argues) God addressing the angels, who are not creators; it is the Father speaking with One "numerically distinct from Himself," the eternal Word and Wisdom (the same One Proverbs 8 sings of) who "was with the Father before all the creatures." The God of Genesis is one, and yet not alone. The seed of what the New Testament will call the Trinity is already here in the first chapter of the Bible: the Father creating through His Word.
Genesis 1:27 · KJVSo God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
"For the Scripture says concerning us, while He speaks to the Son, 'Let Us make man after Our image, and after Our likeness; and let them have dominion over the beasts of the earth…' These things were spoken to the Son… Behold, therefore, we have been refashioned, as again He says in another prophet… 'I will take away their stony hearts, and I will put hearts of flesh within them,' because He was to be manifested in flesh, and to sojourn among us."
Epistle of BarnabasBarnabas, writing near the close of the apostolic age, agrees: "these things were spoken to the Son." And he adds something tender. The image of God in us was marred by sin, but it is not abandoned; in Christ there is a "second fashioning," a re-creation. God promises to take out the heart of stone and give a heart of flesh, "because He was to be manifested in flesh, and to sojourn among us." So the image stamped on us at creation is restored by the One who came in our own image, making us, as the New Testament says, "renewed… after the image of him that created him" (Colossians 3:10).
Where the traditions diverge
Two themes here, two kinds of divergence. On the plural "let us make," the historic Christian reading (Justin, Barnabas, Irenaeus, and the mainstream after them) hears the Father speaking with His Word and Spirit, in harmony with John's "all things were made by him" and Paul's "by him were all things created" (John 1:3, Colossians 1:16); read in the light of the whole Bible, Genesis already hints at the God later revealed as triune. The Jewish reading that Justin debated took the "us" as God addressing the angels, and a common grammatical reading, ancient and modern, takes it as a "plural of majesty" or of deliberation. In honesty, the verse alone does not prove the Trinity, and the Fathers did not rest the doctrine on it by itself; their case was cumulative, this verse with Proverbs 8, the visitor at Mamre, the Angel of the LORD, and the rest, read backward from Christ. The drift to resist is flattening it so completely that the Old Testament gives no glimpse at all of the God the New Testament unveils. On the image of God, the whole church confesses that humanity uniquely bears God's image, the ground of every person's dignity; traditions discuss what the image consists in (reason, dominion, relationship, moral likeness), but the drift to resist is the modern denial that there is any image at all, which leaves human worth resting on nothing. (See Wisdom and the Word, the Word was God, and Adam and Christ.)
Patristic text from Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho (ch. 62), and the Epistle of Barnabas (ch. 5-6), in the Ante-Nicene Fathers (public domain), selected from the running prose with footnote apparatus omitted; nothing added or paraphrased within the quotation marks. Scripture in the King James Version; the plain-language lines are our own restatement. This passage in the Study Bible; Genesis 1 at BibleHub.