Christianity inherited a creation story from Judaism and then spent its first three centuries defending it against people who found it embarrassing. The Gnostic and Marcionite systems that competed with the early church all shared one instinct: the world is a mess, therefore whoever made it cannot be the good God, therefore salvation means escaping matter. The church's answer was to double down — creation out of nothing, by the one God, and good — and then to make the point unmissable by insisting that God took a body, ate, bled and was buried in one. The practical consequences are large and often missed. It is why Christian asceticism, at its most extreme, is framed as disciplining a good thing rather than escaping a bad one; why sacraments use bread, oil, water and wine rather than pure inward states; and why Christian art has never had a serious anti-body strain, whatever its individual moralists said.