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 birds of the sky, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
⛓ Read Genesis 1 forward — the whole chapter and its afterlife →Where this passage surfaces again, sorted by the strength of the link. Each kind of reuse — formal quotation, deliberate allusion, faint echo, figural pattern — carries its own mark. Follow any reference to read it in place.
Allusion1
A deliberate verbal borrowing without a citation formula.
Christ 'existing in the form of God' (en morphe theou) evokes humanity made in the image/likeness of God, the foundational image-of-God text, setting up the Adam/Christ contrast that runs through the hymn. Coherence is high with Pauline image-of-God theology (cf. 2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15), though 'form' is not the LXX 'image,' so this remains an allusion of medium volume.
Medium confidence◇ Figural1
A typological pattern re-read in a later text — no verbal quotation, high figural coherence.
Calling Christ 'the image of God' reads the creation of humanity in God's image figurally, with Christ as the true eikon. The pairing of image (4:4) and the creation of light (4:6) keys the whole pericope to Genesis 1, making this a deliberate new-creation typology.
High confidence