The Holy Trinity
Fresco from Cyprus Monastery (15th c.)
From Jesus to Godhead
(1) Beliefs About the Divine Nature of Jesus
Distinct from God?
"The Father and I are one."
- John 10:30
"The Father is greater than I."
- John 14:28
"Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature [or 'in the form of' - Greek: en morfh qeon] God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature [or 'the form'] of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death-- even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."
- Philippians 2:5-11
"Paul's Christ is not God, he is God's first creation, and there is no room for the trinitarian formula of the Athanasian Creed nor for its doctrine that the Son was 'not made, nor created, but begotten.' But inasmuch as the visible universe is the expression of the Invisible God, the Christ, as first-product, comprises the whole of that expression in himself."
- The Christian Conspiracy: The Orthodox Suppression of Original Christianity
"I can do nothing on my own initiative. As I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just, because I do not seek my own will, but the will of Him who sent me."
- John 5:30
"The lecture on authority is cast in the first person, which is uncharacteristic of Jesus' mode of speech....Rather than the authentic words of Jesus, the author of the Fourth Gospel is presenting his own meditations of the theological significance of Jesus."
- Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels
Although Jesus is portrayed in the gospels as someone distinct from God, the following phrase also crops up:
"Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in [or into] the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,"
- Matthew 28:19 (Acts 8:16; 19:5; Romans 6:3; 1 Corinthians 1:13; 10:2 and Galatians 3:27.)
"Matthew did not include in Jesus' fictitious instructions to his followers to preach to gentiles, the words: immersing them in the name of the father and of the son and of the consecrated breath [holy ghost] (Matthew 28:19b). That piece of Nicene mythology was interpolated into Matthew no earlier than the generation immediately preceding the council of Nicaea in 325 C.E. Eusebius, who wrote in the early fourth century C.E., quoted from some manuscripts of Matthew that contained 28:19b and some that did not. Since there was no conceivable way that a copyist could have accidentally omitted the trinitarian formula, that it was not part of the original version of Matthew is the necessary conclusion."
- William Harwood, Mythologies Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus
"For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus."
- 1 Timothy 2:5
The pastoral letter of 1 Timothy by Pseudo-Paul "can be taken as evidence that, as late as 120 C.E., even the Christians had not yet heard the theory that Jesus was God..."
- William Harwood, Mythologies Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus
This conclusion is not supported by contemporary Roman sources however.
"Pliny the Younger, proconsul in the province of Bithynia (in Asia Minor) during C.E. 111-13, describes for the Emperor Trajan his method of handling Christians who are denounced to him (Letter 10.96). Among the practices of Christians, Pliny mentions their custom of meeting regularly before dawn on a fixed day to chant verses 'to Christ as to a god' (Christo quasi deo)."
"...the satirist Lucian of Samosata (ca. 115-ca. 200) wrote a mocking life of a convert to and then apostate from Christianity, The Passing of Peregrinus. The Christians are said to be so enamored of Peregrinus that they revered him as a god '...next after that other, to be sure, whom they still worship, the man who was crucified in Palestine because he introduced this new cult into the world."
- John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew - Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 1.
The Trinitarian Doctrine
The concept of the Holy Trinity has a precedent in the "God is One" acclamation of the Egyptian New Kingdom a millenium before Jesus.
"The ancient Egyptians believed that God could be manifest in any form he/she chose. Thus, many deities have multiple representations, with Re, the solar deity having 76 forms in all, as may be seen in the New Kingdom royal tombs at Thebes. In those same tombs, you have a realistic picture of the trinity. The solar deity Re, depicted as a disk, and within the disk are Khepri, the scarab beetle form of Re, and the ram-headed Re-Horakhti. These three aspects of the solar deity were respectively, the morning sun, the midday disk sun, and the evening form. Incidentally, the morning form, Khepri, was the resurrected sun, which the Egyptians believed daily died when it set in the western horizon, but then, in the deepest night hours was magically transformed back into the scarab, and reborn in the eastern horizon, as Khepri. Many of the earliest Christian theologians lived in Alexandria, and so they adopted this Egyptian religious concept for explaining the Christian Trinity."
- Frank J. Yurco
A "succession of great Christian thinkers (and their Gnostic forerunners)...originated from Egypt or lived there, starting with Valentine and Basilides (c. C.E. 135), followed by Clement and Origen, and leading to Alexander, Athansius and the presbyter Arius."
- Seigfreid Morenz, Egyptian Religion
"It would be ridiculous to imagine that the body of the Redeemer, in order to exist, had the usual needs of man. He only took food and ate it in order that we should not teach about him in a Docetic fashion."
- Clement of Alexandria
"The Word disguised himself by appearing in a body...by the works he did in the body [he] showed himself to be, not man, but God."
- Archdeacon Athanasius [later bishop of Alexandria], On the Incarnation of the Word 16:1
"According to the Alexandrians, therefore, Jesus had been God, and had existed in total equality with God since before time began. To view him any other way made him less than God, which was unthinkable."
- Ian Wilson, Jesus, The Evidence
"Tertullian, a lawyer and presbyter of the third century Church in Carthage, was the first to use the word 'Trinity' when he put forth the theory that the Son and the Spirit participate in the being of God, but all are of one being of substance with the Father."
- "Islam: Prophethood, Jesus & Trinity"
"The merging of Jesus into a Holy Trinity occured "probably under Gnostic influence which in turn developed from Neo-Platonism. The concept is that the one transcendent God is an impersonal God (contrast with Judaism's personal God) who is beyond the reach of mere man - hence the need for a mediator between God and man. There are two mediators: Logos the son of God personifies male rationality and logic, and Sophos the daughter of God personifies female wisdom and intuition. Jesus of course was related to Logos in the Gospel of John and the 'Holy Spirit' tended to be seen as Sophos."
- Paul Harvey
"[Tom] Kopecek [CrossTalk - December 4 1996] locates the crucial philosophical background for the Trinity in Ptolemaic Valentinian Christianity. In their view, human beings differed most in how much of a share of the Spirit they had (most people didn't have much if any of it.) It was the Spirit which linked them to the divine. In the development of the Pleroma, there was a hierarchy of thirty Aeons. But because each of them were spiritual beings, they were all of the same substance or essence (homoousios)-- i.e., spirit. This idea of the Pleroma provided something of a model for the later orthodox Catholic view of the Trinity, for the Valentinians looked upon the Pleroma as divided into three main divisions, the beings or 'persons' of which were distinguishable but nonetheless all fully divine or God. The first known use of homoousios with reference to the relationship between God and Jesus was by Paul of Samosata, third century Bishop of Antioch."
- Bob Schacht (CrossTalk - 17 Oct 1998)
(2) The Council of Nicea
Alexandrian Theology
"Many scholars see the core of Alexandrian theology as Deification or the grace of renewal. By deification the Alexandrians mean the renewal of human nature as a whole, to attain sharing in the characteristics of our Lord Jesus Christ in place of the corrupt human nature, or as the apostles state that the believer may enjoy "the partaking in the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4), or the new man in the image of His Creator (Col. 3:10). This theological mind draws the heart of the Alexandrians away from the arguments about the definitions of the theological terms to concentrate on attaining the divine grace as being an enjoyment of the unity with the Father, in His only-begotten Son, Jesus, by the work of His Holy Spirit, or attaining Christ Himself who renews our nature in Him."
- The Characteristics of Alexandrian Theology
"For this He came down,
for this He assumed human nature,
for this He willingly endured the sufferings of man,
that by being reduced to the measure of our weakness
He might raise us to the measure of His power.
The Word of God, became man just that you may learn from a Man
how it may be that man should become god."
- Clement of Alexandria
" He was made man that we might be gods...For as, although there be one Son by nature, True and Only-Begotten, we too become sons, not as He in nature and truth, but according to the grace of Him that calls, and though we are men from the earth, are yet called gods."
- Athanasius
A Crisis in Christianity
"According to the Egyptian Gospel Jesus is supposed to have said to his disciples that 'the same was the Father, the same was the Son and the same was the Holy Ghost'."
- Seigfreid Morenz, Egyptian Religion
"However, for those who had grown up around Antioch, the region that included the homeland of the earthly Jesus, there was an altogether different emphasis and outlook. In the third century the great Lucian of Antioch, reflecting Christianity's origins in Jewish monotheism, had stressed the essential oneness of God, the simple humanity of Jesus, and the importance of the way of life Jesus taught, which those obsessed with theology too easily overlooked."
- Ian Wilson, Jesus, The Evidence
The School of Antioch was in directed opposition to the School of Alexandria, which supported the trinitarian creed. The Christians in Antioch claimed that they possessed the true manuscripts (Textus Receptus) of the Gospels. They charged that the Alexandrian manuscripts, which were used as the source for revised bible versions, were composed by heretics.
Although Arius was Deacon of the Church in Alexandria, Egypt, he was also a follower of Lucian. His philosophers and textual criticism opposed the trinitarian doctrine of the Alexandrian school and provoked a crisis within the church. The Arian controversy, as it came to be known, eventually spread across the Roman Empire.
"For He [the Son] is not eternal or co-eternal or co-unoriginate with the Father, nor has He His being together with the Father, as some speak of relations, introducing two ingenerate beginnings, but God is before all things as being Monad and Beginning of all. Wherefore also He is before the Son; as we have learned also from they preaching in the midst of the Church. "
- Arius' Letter to Alexander of Alexandria (excerpt) 320 CE
(Modern critics have charged that Arius' true agenda was to promote the worship of Theotokos, the mother-goddess. Arius, however, writes about "One God, alone Ingenerate, alone Everlasting, alone Unbegun, alone True, alone having Immortality, alone Wise, alone Good, alone Sovereign" ["Letter to Alexander"].) Airus' superior was Alexandria's Bishop Alexander, supreme ecclesiastical authority for Egypt and Libya. According to Alexander, Arius taught that God chose Jesus "on account of the carefulness of His manners and His practice" and was "a thing created, and a thing made" ("Epistles on the Arian Heresy and the Deposition of Arius"). This is in contrast to the description of Jesus in the Gospel of John as "the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father", whom Alexander describes as "subsistence of the divine Word [Logos]".
"St. Athanasius [the succeeding Bishop of Alexandria] defends the divinity of the Holy Spirit in his reply to the Arians who believed that He was a creature and less than the Logos. He also writes about the Holy Spirit in four letters addressed to his friend Bishop Serapion. His theology concerning the Holy Spirit is the same concerning Christ. The Holy Spirit must be God, because if He were a creature, we could not participate in His divine nature. He states, 'If by participation in the Spirit, we are made 'sharers in the divine nature' 2 Pet. 1:4. It should not to be doubted that His nature is of God."
- The Characteristics of Alexandrian Theology
In an attempt to end the controversy, Arius was excommunicated by Bishop Alexander. Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, however, convened a synod of the bishops in his region in support of Arius. The emperor Constantine suddenly found himself embroiled in a bitter theological dispute which had political consequences which threatened the Pax Romana he had foughtso hard to establish. Therefore, in 318 CE, he sent Arius and Alexander each a letter asking them to resolve the dispute.
Constantine
The Emperor Constantine
"Constantine the Victor, Supreme Augustus, to Alexander and Arius...how deep a wound has not only my ears but my heart received from the report that divisions exist among yourselves...having enquired carefully into the origin and foundation of these differences, I find their cause to be of a truly insignificant nature, quite unworthy of such bitter contention...Restore my quiet days and untroubled nights to me, so that joy of undimmed light, delight in a tranquil life, may one again be mine."
- Constantine
