I recently heard a very respected [rightfully so] scholar, who may be considered an apologist comment on the fact that the Bible does not call Jesus “God”. [I don’t know him very well, and cannot remember his name, but I do respect his scholarship and his commitment] His position was that it took the ‘early church’ [what the Bible calls the “Congregation”] several hundred years to ‘work out’ the “trinitarian formula” that finally reveals that “Jesus is God”. This brilliant scholar, however, agreed with that notion, and was not only ‘okay’ with it, but was behind the conclusion one hundred percent. So is the vast majority of those who claim faith in “Jesus”.
I am not. And I take joy in knowing that Isaac Newton also was not. Nor was Michael Servetus, and neither was one of my favorite founders, Thomas Jefferson. Those of us who dare to differ from mainstream ‘orthodoxy’ do so at the risk of losing respect, friends, jobs, and even our lives. [Not yet in America for the latter, but it is likely coming. It hasn’t been so long ago it would have gotten us killed; the spirit of Anti-Messiah is alive and well. It is only the Anti-Messiah that murders people to force them to believe].
The notion that the ‘trinity’ was rightfully ‘teased out’ of scripture is absurd, and violates John’s warning about such behavior, and Paul’s warning about ‘vain philosophies of men’:
24“As for you, let that, therefore, abide in you which you have heard from the very beginning. For if that which you have heard from the beginning shall remain in you, you also shall continue in The Father and in The Son.” ~1 John 2
8Beware, lest any man mislead you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the teaching of men, after the principles of the world, and not after Messiah.” ~Col 2
Paul and John were both Jewish, and held to the fact that God is ONE entity, who manifests in His Son. They would never have accepted Aristotelean metaphysics and ideas about ‘being’ in order to ‘define’ the God of the Bible, who is already so well defined in the Torah.
That scholar [I will try to find his name] and apologist rightfully stated rather tongue-in-cheek that the Bible does not call Jesus “God” [going forward, I will refer to Him exclusively as “Yeshua”, His Hebrew name] , but asserted that there was a linguistic process academically called philology, that brought about the eventual appelation of Yeshua as “God”. I agree. The problem is, so few theologians see that process as error, whereas scripture very loudly declares it not only as intellectual error, but sin.
“You shall not add unto The Word [הדבר] which I command you, neither shall you diminish from it, that you may keep the Commandments [Mitzvot] of יהוה your God which I command you.” Deut 4:2
By his own admission, and that of the Catholic Church, other words were necessarily created and added to the ontological discussion in order to identify Yeshua as ‘very God’. Catholicism claims the authority to add to the sacred revelation, and most of the western world of Christendom bows to that authority; some willingly and joyfully, and some ignorantly. The discussion on ‘trinity’ was exclusively the realm of the ‘Catholic Church’, and it was a religio-political entity that forced it on the western world via the Roman Empire.
I also agree that the doctrine developed over time, and that is one of the very reasons that we reject it! At the risk of losing the respect of family and friends [having already lost many], and of being on a short-list for the future Anti-Messiah, I do not agree with the result of that linguistic process.
So, what was that ontological, linguistic process?
Since the “Trinity” doctrine is utterly a “New Testament” doctrine, as it cannot be found in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Tanak/”OT” without forcing NT concepts into a scant few verses, we will look at the development of the Scriptures of the Renewed Covenant over time. It is important to note here, however, that God, the Creator, when speaking to Israel at Mount Sinai, defined Himself ‘ontologically’ for Israel:
“Shema, Yisra’el: יהוה is our Elohim, יהוה is Ekhad.”
“Hear, O Israel, יהוה / Yahweh is our God, יהוה is ONE.”
[Deut 6:4]
And that is a ‘numeric’ ONE.
Yeshua affirms that statement, as, before Yeshua’s day, it had become and is still regarded even in modern Judaism as the ‘most important command’:
“And one of the Scribes [Sofrim] came near and heard them debating, and he saw that He [Yeshua] gave them a good answer. So he asked Him, “Which is the first [most important] Commandment [mitzvah] of all?” Yeshua said to him, “The first of all the Commandments is,
‘Shema, Yisra’el, יהוה Eloheinu, יהוה Ekhad! [Hear O Yisra’el, יהוה is our God, יהוה is One]’.”
[Mark 12:28-29]
Nothing is more important to a first century Jewish person, including all the apostles, than to know that יהוה , the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Israel, is singular.
Yeshua spoke Hebrew. The first century Israelis spoke Hebrew. Some of them still spoke Aramaic, having switched to using Aramaic during the time of the Babylonian capivity. Aramaic heavily influenced the Hebrew of Yeshua’s day, seen in some of the obviously borrowed words like “Bar Mitzvah”, but recent scholarship has challenged the norm that they spoke Aramaic. It has been widely accepted, however, that the common Jews did not speak Greek as formerly claimed, but a Semitic tongue, and more probably Hebrew.
So, when Yeshua spoke the Shema [Deu 6:4 in Mark 12 above], the Greatest Commandment, He said God’s Name, and He said “One“.
The mindset of the Jewish people was naturally entrenched in Judaic thought and customs, so when Yeshua said “יהוה is One”, He was, quite literally, saying that God is singular.
During this time, Yeshua referred to Himself most as “The Son of Man,” which is Ben HaAdam, which literally meant “The Human Being”, and then also Ben HaElohim, or “The Son of God.” These were semitic relational terms that implied seniority vs juniority, authority vs submission, similar to ‘lord’ versus ‘servant’ in the Hebrew mind. Thus, it was understood by our Jewish forebears that Yeshua came to serve both His Father and Mankind. So, the word “Ben” was used of Him the most. When this word was translated to Greek, “huios”, only then did scripture begin to become more ontological, or defining one’s essence of being, instead of what it was in the Jewish mindset: defining relationship. All of Yeshua’s words were spoken in Hebrew, in and for the receptive, Judaic, Semitic mindset.
Yeshua, when referring to the “Spirit” used the word “Ru’akh”, which in Hebrew literally means ‘breath’, and the notion of ‘spirit‘ was relational to the concept of ‘breath’, especially in referrring to God’s “Ru’akh”; it was not another person in the Jewish mind. It was an ‘extension,’ or better, an ‘instantiation’ of God from heaven into the realm of humanity. The term was relational. This is seen best in Yeshua’s immersion, where Yeshua, the man, is standing in the water of the Jordan River, and the “Ru’akh” visibly descended from Heaven and rested on Him, much like a Jewish person wraps himself in his tallit/prayer garment for prayer, and God the Father spoke from heaven, while the Son and the “Spirit” are seen by witnesses in the river on Earth: “This is my beloved Son“. In this episode, the Ru’akh, the ‘spirit/breath’ is carrying the voice of God His Father speaking to the hearers, just as human ‘breath’ communicates the ‘word’ of a man: his intent, his heart, his will.
Yeshua also referred to himself or was referred to as “Adon”, or Adoni, or Adonai”. This is ‘master’, and, again, in the 1st century Judaic Semitic mind, it is a relational term, and not ontological. He was in no way implying that He was “God”, and neither were the Jews who called Him “Adoni”, my master; He was implying that He had been given authority by God, relative to the subjects of His Kingdom, which He came to declare. And they were showing respect and submitting to Him. Eventually, they came to call Him “Rabbi”, if they respected Him enough to undertake how He taught the Torah.
One might question how we know these were the words used in scripture, since there are no remaining Hebrew copies of the NT scriptures. The ones that were written in Hebrew were all probably destroyed, either in 70 A.D. when Rome destroyed Jerusalem, or in the later time of the Bar Kokhba rebellion when Messianic Jews were blamed for Rome’s final assault on Israel, when the Jewish tribes were finally scattered as predicted by the Prophets. That question is answered quite simply. The Aramaic Scriptures were already in circulation in the Aramaic speaking world, where Paul did most of his preaching, and all of his early preaching. Just as many scholars today now accept that Hebrew was the lingua franca of 1st century Israel, so do many now accept that the lingua franca of the Mesopotamian region was Aramaic. The region was, in fact, still called “Aramea” at the time.
The Aramaic Peshitta community has maintained their scriptures since that day. Because they treated scrolls like ancient Jews did, burying them when they were no longer useable, they do not have early copies before about the fifth century. But, their scrolls originated before that, and based on several major scholars, were written originally and not translated from Greek, as most of the world has previously asserted.
Aramaic has words equal to all those mentioned above, and they carry the same relational, semitic meaning, and are not ‘ontological’.
Ben HaElohim is Bar Elaha. Ru’akh is Ru’kha. Adon/Adonai is Mar or Maran. Ekhad is Khad. Even in these transliterations, one who does not study the languages can see the close relationship. The relational meaning is just as obvious to the native speaker of those languages.
The words were changed in translations from Aramaic to Greek.
Ben became ‘huios’, which is definite ontological identity.
Adon became Kurios, which is more ontological and less relational. [Incidentally, this word alone is a major proof of Aramaic primacy. One could not translate ‘kurios’ to Marya, מריא, the Aramaic equivalent of the Name יהוה , with precision, in all the many places where מריא is used, and not ‘maran’, ‘lord’.]
Davar, דבר , which is Hebrew for ‘Word,’ and is frequent in the Old Testament to communicate both the spoken and written WILL of God that often manifested in an angelic being, became logos in the greek, which is merely ‘reason’.
These shifts were only the beginning of the ‘working out of the language’ of changing the ‘identity’ of Yeshua.
Other words had to be added to the Catholic, extrabiblical canon, ie, the ‘catechism’ of the Catholic church, in order to justify the later developments in identifying just who Yeshua is.
“Ouisia”, and by extension “homoousios”, are later additions coming from Greek philosophy and the metaphysical discussions of Plato and Aristotle, who worked out their ideas of ‘essence’ and ‘being’ outside the context of the Bible. These are terms that were very late in the discussion of who Yeshua is, not arriving in the conversation until the council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. They had to be added in order to make the new identity of Yeshua work. See Deuteronomy 4:2.
Still, after that council, the Roman empire, newly united politically through the creation of a ‘church state’, where Rome was the seat of both the Empire and the new ‘catholic / universal church’, was at odds within itself due to the new doctrine. They tried to reinterpret the new term homoousios which meant ‘of the same essence’ into a less ontologically perfect term homoiousios, adding literraly ‘one iota’ to change it’s meaning to ‘of similar essence’. [which is actually where the phrase ‘one iota’ was coined]. This argument went on for twenty years or more, until finally Theodosius I forced “Nicene orthodoxy’ at the “Council of Constantinople” on the realm in 381 A.D. and made it punishable by death if the idea was rejected. Finally, they added the Holy Spirit only then to the formula. So, 350 years went by before the ‘universal church’ could ‘create’ a universally accepted identity of Yeshua. That does not sound biblical at all to us.
It is important to note the Tertullian was the first person to call this formula a trinity, doing so about a century earlier in North Africa. He invented the phrase ‘tres personae, una substantia’. “Consubstantial” thus became the later, fifth century term from Latin for homoousios once Theodosius laid the hammer down. The Catholic leaders are thus still ‘working out the language’ all the way into the fifth century, long after the Apostles clearly preached Messiah as the Son of God.
All of this is not ‘natural’ biblical language, but ‘technical philosophy’ and metaphysics. It was all riding on the current of political upheaval and the fight for power. It was being used as a tool to unite the empire, and when it didn’t work, it finally became a theocratic law that when broken was punishable by death, with the new ‘vicar of christ’ killing people who confessed Yeshua as the Son of God.
Working out the language went hand in hand with working out the politics of the Roman realm. It reeks of corruption.
Just like God told Israel through Moses not to add anything to “HaDavar”, The Word, so Paul told the Corinthians not to accept another “Yeshua.” Unfortunately, so many people have been accepting another Yeshua long after Paul’s warning.
“For if he who has come to you declares [preaches] another Yeshua whom we have not declared, or if you have received another spirit which you had not received, or another “good news” [gospel] which you had not accepted, you might have given in.” [2 Cor 11:4]
If one examines the book of Acts, which is the only source of what the Apostles preached, one cannot find even a hint that Yeshua is ‘very God’, perfectly equal to God in every way and in fact the only manifestation of God. The language of all the Jewish Apostles is quite relational when discussing the Father and the Son, and even in today’s English translations that is most visible.
It is Biblically dishonest to say that we must believe that God is ‘three’. Yet the vast majority of believers are forced to think that God is three gods in one substance.
Isaac Newton decided that the trinitarian formula was so devoid of reason that in order to accept a divine trinity a student of the Bible must ‘renounce their own reason’. In other words, just push the “I believe” button, which is actually what most people do.
I cannot. Newton could not. Michael Servetus could not. Thomas Jefferson could not. Our Jewish people never even brought it up. In fact, when the Jewish Rabbis wanted to kill Yeshua for calling Himself the Son of God, they only accused Him of a relational violation:
“While you yourself are only a man, you make yourself equal to Elohim.”
They did not affirm that Yeshua called Himself “God”. They affirmed that His identity as the Son gave Him the same ‘authority’ as God. Their own interpretive authority over scripture would be in jeopardy, and that is why they wanted to stone Him.
So, the young apologist was right; it was a linguistic process that ‘worked out’ the notion that “Jesus is God.” And that process is a violation of Biblical interpretation, the abandonment of Yeshua’s Jewishness, the discarding of His human body which is the anchor of our faith, and the demoting of God the Father to something less than יהוה , who WAS, IS and ALWAYS WILL BE, the same in the end as He was in the beginning.
To understand our full position on the Unity of the Father and The Son, see What about ‘trinity’?
Read more on Isaac Newton: Isaac Newton and the Problem of the Trinity: Exegesis, History, and Heresy