Before moving on to specific citations of the Genesis 1-3 narrative in the New Testament, I want to take a little closer look at ways in which the Old Testament idea of creation is modified in the New.

In my last comment I noted that Paul and John place Christ at the beginning with God as mediator of the creation. This move pulls Christ out of his incarnation in a specific place and time, making him equal or identical to Yahweh himself. It also establishes Christ as mediator not just in the specific context of the Mosaic covenant but all the way back to the beginning. Presumably, then, whenever mediation between God and the world has taken place in history, Christ-as-God has been the mediator.

However, in a well-known passage Paul says that there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (I Timothy 2:5). Not Christ as God, but Christ as man, is mediator. We’re entering into nuances of Christian trinitarian theology here: whenever Christ-as-God has served as mediator between God and men, or even between God and the creation, has he always done so in the form of Christ-as-man? Is the second person of the trinity, "the Word" in John’s terminology, eternally man as well as God?

This is the kind of question I suspect the early church fathers and the medievalists wrestled with at length. I don’t know what they decided. Every time God and man interact directly, God makes himself accessible on human terms: he speaks in human language that humans can either hear or read; sometimes he makes himself visible to human eyes; he causes events to happen in the material world that can be perceived by humans. Maybe this sort of mediation between divine and human is always the work of Christ as the eternally human.

Christ isn’t just the mediator of creation in the NT; he’s also the firstborn of creation.

And He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities —all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. (Colossians 1:15-17)

We might hypothesize that, for Paul, God began the creation by entering into the to-be-created material world in the person of Christ. Christ the material mediator of creation is "the image of the invisible God." But Christ is also firstborn of creation: man comes into the world in the image of the firstborn, as a material manifestation of the invisible God.

None of this speculation directly contradicts the Old Testament. None of it relies directly on the Genesis 1-3 narratives. I don’t think any of it contradicts orthodox Christian teaching. Or am I mistaken?