IN HIS IMAGE

Among the 12th century mosaics in the Capella Palatina in Palermo, we find this one of the creation of man:

The title inscription in Latin identifies the scene:

CREAVIT DS OMINEM AT IMAGINEM SUA

Now as you can see, somewhat as in Church Slavic and in Greek, a line above a word indicates an abbreviation, so we should read the inscription as:
CREAVIT DEUS OMINEM AT IMAGINEM SUAM,

or if we put it into the standard spelling, it would be

CREAVIT DEUS HOMINEM AD IMAGINEM SUAM
Created God Man to Image His

or as we would put it in English,

“God Created Man in His Image.”

If you look at Deus (“God) at left, you will notice that is face is the same as that of the freshly-created Adam, right down to the style of the hair and beard. This shows us how very literally the artist took the notion that God created man/Adam in his own image — he was made to look exactly like God (minus the clothes, of course). You can see Adam’s name inscription to the right of his head.

In spite of all the theological tap-dancing over the centuries that tries to re-interpret this as man being created in the “spiritual” image of God, that was not the original meaning, and the artist has here followed that original, literal understanding. The line extending from God’s mouth to Adam is God breathing into Adam the breath of life. Originally the “spirit” was conceived of as the breath. The Vulgate version reads:

formavit igitur Dominus Deus hominem de limo terrae et inspiravit in faciem eius spiraculum vitae et factus est homo in animam viventem.

“And the Lord God formed man of the mud of the earth and breathed in his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul.”  

It just means that the “mud” man, when God breathed the breath of life into him, became a living being, a living “person.”  That, in their understanding, was why humans would die when they stopped breathing — the breath of life would leave them.

Most people are also under the mistaken impression that the story of the Creation and Fall tells that after Adam ate the forbidden fruit, death came into the world. That too is not in the original story. Man, in that tale, was not created immortal, but mortal. That is why after the new humans eat the forbidden fruit, God gets very worried that now the humans not only have the divine knowledge of good and evil, but if they were to also eat of the Tree of Life, they would also become immortal as God — so to prevent that jump in human status, he has them expelled from the Garden of Eden. God, in the Creation story, is not a nice guy, and is rather limited in knowledge compared to his stature in later theological fantasies.