Yes, unlike what RC scholarship has been teaching multitudes for decades right in your own NAB Bible. Why would you not believe as they do?
Yet creation does not correspond to the neoplatonic theory of transubstantiation Rome decrees as fact, which would be a novel miracle, as would physically eating anything literal to obtain spiritual life, which is also pagan.
Br. Dennis Beach, OSB, is a monk of St. John’s Abbey since 1981. His doctorate in philosophy is from Penn Stat e:
I think it is technically right but quite misleading to say that transubstantiation is independent of Aristotelian Metaphysics. Yes, the use of the term “transubstantiation” antedates Aquinas by a good century or more. Aquinas is mid-13th century, and the 4th Lateran Council in 1215 already used the verb “transubstantiated” in a way that shows it was generally accepted well before William of Moerbeke began making literal translations of Aristotle available to Aquinas. However, I would argue that the Neoplatonic embrace of substance metaphysics means that Aristotle is tacitly present in any account of “substance” after the 4th century BCE. And Neoplatonic thought or at least conceptual terms are clearly interwoven with Christian theology long before the 13th century. One cannot disentangle Aristotle from Christian theological categories simply by identifying Aristotle with Aquinas.
It also seems disingenuous to claim that “All that is required, philosophically, to affirm transubstantiation is to accept that there is a distinction to be made between the identity of something and its appearance.” The doctrine of transubstantiation completely reverses the usual distinction between being and appearance, where being is held to be unchanging and appearance is constantly changing. Transubstantiation maintains instead that being or substance changes while appearance remains unchanged. Such reversals in the order of things are affronts to reason and require much, not little, to affirm philosophically. Moreover, transubstantiation seem to go far beyond the simple distinction between appearance and reality. It would be one thing if the body and blood of Christ simply appeared to be bread and wine. But I don’t think that is what is claimed with “transubstantiation.”
The claim that “substance” in the doctrine of transubstantiation is a common-sense concept, somehow independent of Aristotle’s purportedly esoteric and arcane philosophizing, is also a red herring. Aristotle picked up just such common-sense concepts as “what-it-is-to-be-X” and tried to explain rather complex philosophical problems with them. Thus, to take a “common-sense” concept like substance–even if one could maintain that it were somehow purified of Aristotelian provenance—and have it do paradoxical conceptual gymnastics in order to explain transubstantiation seems not to be not so anti-Aristotelian in spirit after all... - http://www.praytellblog.com/index.php/2010/05/30/transubstantiation-and-aristotle-warning-heavy-philosophy/
And,
In Sacred Games: A History of Christian Worship Bernhard Lang argues that, “When in late antiquity the religious elite of the Roman Empire rethought religion and ritual, the choice was not one between Mithraism and Christianity (as Ernest Renan suggested in the 19th century) but between pagan Neoplatonism and Neoplatonic Christianity.”
“In the third century CE, under the leadership of Plotinus, Plato’s philosophy enjoyed a renaissance that was to continue throughout late antiquity. This school of thought had much in common with Christianity: it believed in one God (the “One”), in the necessity of ritual, and in the saving contact with deities that were distinct from the ineffable One and stood closer to humanity. Like Judaism and Christianity, it also had its sacred books–the writings of Plato, and, in its later phase, also the Chaldean Oracles. In fact, major early Christian theologians–Origen, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysus–can at the same time be considered major representatives of the Neoplatonic school of thought.” - http://www.patheos.com/blogs/cosmostheinlost/2014/04/08/early-churchs-choice-between-neoplatonism/
And from a past century,
"The influence of Greek ideas and usages upon the Christian church" But beyond matters of practice, it is among the Gnostics that there appears for the first time an attempt to realize the change of the elements to the material body and blood of Christ. The fact that they were so regarded is found in Justin Martyr.^ But at the same time, that the change was not vividly realized, is proved by the fact that, instead of being regarded as too awful for men to touch, the elements were taken by the com- municants to their homes and carried about with them on their travels. But we read of Marcus that in his realistic conception of the Eucharistic service the white wine actually turned to the colour of blood before the eyes of the communicants.^
Thus the whole conception of Christian worship was changed. 2 But it was changed by the influence upon Christian worship of the contemporary worship of the mysteries and the concurrent cults. The tendency to an elaborate ceremonial which had produced the magni- ficence of those mysteries and cults, and which had combined with the love of a purer faith and the tendency towards fellowship, was based upon a tendency of human nature which was not crushed by Christianity. It rose to a new life, and though it lives only by a survival, it lives that new life still. In the splendid ceremonial of Eastern and "Western worship, in the blaze of lights, in the separation of the central point of the rite from com- mon view, in the procession of torch-bearers chanting their sacred hymns - there is the survival, and in some cases the galvanized survival, of what I cannot find it in my heart to call a pagan ceremonial ; because though it was the expression of a less enlightened faith, yet it was offered to God from a heart that was not less earnest in its search for God and in its efiort after holiness than •our own. Hatch, Edwin, 1835-1889, "The influence of Greek ideas and usages upon the Christian church;" pp. 308-09 https://archive.org/stream/influenceofgreek00hatc/influenceofgreek00hatc_djvu.txt
OK. How did God make man?