Loading...I have pointed out that the earliest Christians believed they were living at the end of time and that in fulfillment of the promises of Scripture, especially in the Old Testament prophet Joel, they (or at least many of them) believed God had sent his Spirit to guide and direct them in these final days before the Kingdom of God arrived. We find this idea in the letters of Paul (our first Christian author), in the book of Acts (e.g., on the Day of Pentecost in ch. 2), and elsewhere in the New Testament.
In this post I want to point out that when later Christians told their stories about Jesus they took this belief that the Spirit had come upon them and applied it to the (earlier) life of Jesus, saying that the Spirit was particularly manifest in his life, since he was the one who inaugurated the end of time.
You get some a whiff of that view already in the Gospel of Mark. When Jesus is baptized in the opening chapter, the Spirit of God descends from heaven and comes “upon him” (Mark 1:10). Actually the Greek is a little odd here; the preposition Mark uses typically means “into.” Did the Spirit enter *into* Jesus at that point?
The Spirit certainly was believed to come upon and into believers after Jesus’ death, at least according to some of our early writings (Paul, Acts). Of all the Gospels, it is Luke that places the greatest emphasis on the role of the Spirit in the life of Jesus. For example:
- Jesus’ virgin mother becomes pregnant when the Holy Spirit “came upon” her (1:35);
- The Spirit identified Jesus as the Son of God already when he was an infant, through the prophet Symeon (2:25)
- The Spirit descended upon Jesus at his baptism “in bodily form” (a phrase found only in Luke; 3:1)
- Jesus returned from his baptism “full of the Spirit” and the Spirit then “drove him into the wilderness” to be tempted by the Devil (4:1)
- When Christ returns from the desert and enters into the synagogue in Nazareth, he proclaims himself by declaring that the Scripture from Isaiah that says “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” so that he can miraculously do good for people has now been fulfilled in his own life (4:14-18)
And so on. Jesus receives the Spirit, is directed by the Spirit, does miracles by the Spirit – all in anticipation of what will happen to his followers after his death.
It is important to remember that Luke and Acts are written by the same author, as two parts of the larger story. Luke gives the beginning of the new era brought by God through Christ, in recording Jesus’ birth, life, teachings, miracles, death, and resurrection; the book of Acts picks up immediately after Jesus’ resurrection, with his commission to the disciples to proclaim the Gospel once “the Holy Spirit comes upon” them (ch. 1). That then happens on the day of Pentecost (ch. 2); and throughout the account of Acts – which covers the first thirty years of the spread of the church – the Spirit is incredibly active.
The author, in other words, shows that the Spirit is the link between the life of Jesus and the life of his followers. Like him they get baptized, receive the Spirit, heal the sick, cast out demons, raise the dead; and all along their powerful preaching and deeds are directed by the Spirit. This link, then, between the earthly Jesus and his later followers, through the Spirit is an important literary motif for the author of Luke-Acts.
And this understanding of the role of the Spirit shows that (some) early Christians believed the Spirit was some kind of divine being that was not God the Father himself (who sent the Spirit) or Christ his Son (who was empowered by the Spirit). The Spirit was some kind of tertium quid, a third divine being. And yet these early Christians, so far as we can tell, never deviated from their monotheistic belief – there was only one God.
None of our early Christian authors articulated how that could be, how God could be God and Christ be God and the Spirit be God, but there be only one God. It might seem absolutely incredible to people today to think that no one bothered to realize there was a problem here, that the Christians conceived of three distinct entities, all of them thought of as God, but continued to say there was one God. Even so, I need to be clear: the term “trinity” never appears in these early writings (not until Tertullian around 200 CE). The writings provide no reflections on how the three all existed and were not the same but there was only one God.
It is completely inappropriate for us today to think that these early Christians – at least the highly educated ones — MUST have thought there was a Trinity, or that they MUST have reasoned it out, or that they MUST have had an explanation. There’s no evidence they did so.
Whenever I myself think: “Look, the MUST have. It would be incredible if they didn’t,” then I think about all the other people in the world today, billions of them, who believe contradictory or at least seemingly inconsistent things without working them out and putting a label on their solution (whether in religion, social policy, scientific “knowledge,” or whatever). People believe contradictory things all the time, even if it is impossible for contradictory things to be true. If you don’t think so, I’d suggest you re-read Alice in Wonderland:
“Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
> Actually the Greek is a little odd here; the preposition Mark uses typically means “into.”
Mark says εἰς αυτον but Matthew and Luke say επ αυτον. But basically all English, Spanish and Russian versions of Mark 10:1 that I’ve looked at in biblegateway.com translate the εἰς to agree with the Matthew and Luke take.
It seems like there must be some scholarly literature examining how this difference came to be and how modern translations go with the επ αυτον version, to the extent of altering the Mark wording. Any recommendations for further reading on this?
I talk about it in my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. εἰς CAN mean “unto” instead of “into” (prepositions are tricky things), but it does appear that Matthew and Luke both felt uncomfortable with it…. The Gnostics thought it actually mean “into.” THis is when the divine Spirit entered into Jesus to empower him for his ministry.
Mr. Ehrman, the concept of Trinity does not appear explicitly stated in the New Testament (in our oldest copies at least, to be precise).
In your judgment, what can we say with a high level of certainty about our earliest inputs (pre-literary traditions, Paul and Mark) in the New Testament about the issue? Is it congruent to claim that the idea of Trinity is absent in early Christianity? Or it is rather present, but in subtle ways? Is it (too) a matter of interpretation or we can establish a definite answer historically?
I dealt with just those questions in my early posts on the thread. I think if you do a word search for Trinity you’ll see them. I argue that the trinity as an actual doctrine is much later, and that the later theologians who came up with it appealed to biblical passages in support, as did the theologians who took completely contrary views. (!)
I wonder if belief in a trinity is really any stranger than modern belief in the wave-particle duality required by quantum mechanics: All matter consists simultaneously of two fundamentally, by definition, different kinds of things, waves and particles. It’s NOT sometimes one and sometimes the other; it’s always BOTH. Depending on what you do to it, you will see it behave like one or the other, with a smooth transition between the two (the Correspondence Principle). And that doesn’t even begin to confront the impossibilities of entanglement, virtual particles in the vacuum, and relativity.
I”ve wondered the very same thing….
Oh, it gets much worse. Quantum mechanics basically uses the “Copenhagen Interpretation.” That works, but has the embarrassing feature that it depends on an act of magic. I.e., the wave function, which is what QM is based on, is a probability function that collapses into a definite value when someone/something looks at it. This is currently called the “Measurement Problem.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem
This isn’t to say QM is wrong — it is fantastically right in many verifiable ways — but it does leave one wondering what’s going on under the hood.
Belief , if that’s an appropriate word, in the trinity is definitely stranger. Wave-particle duality in particular and quantum mechanics in general are impossible for our feeble minds to comprehend. The quantum world is not that with which the vast majority of humans interact. But there’s abundant empiric proof (Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-tester one of many examples) of wave-particle duality, of entanglement and of most of the remainder of the quantum world. There’ll never be proof of god. Last I heard, religion is based on…faith.
Do we know what Marcion thought about the Spirit?
I can’t speak for all of us, but I certainly don’t! (I can’t recall if Tertullian etc. say anything about it)
Tertullian’s “Against Praxeas” 7 (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf03/anf03.v.ix.i.html) describes many of his points about the Trinity.
For example, 7.2 says: “in thinking that one cannot believe in One Only God in any other way than by saying that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are the very selfsame Person. As if in this way also one were not All, in that All are of One, by unity (that is) of substance; while the mystery of the dispensation is still guarded, which distributes the Unity into a Trinity, placing in their order the three Persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost: three, however, not in condition, but in degree; not in substance, but in form; not in power, but in aspect; yet of one substance, and of one condition, and of one power, inasmuch as He is one God, from whom these degrees and forms and aspects are reckoned, under the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. How they are susceptible of number without division, will be shown as our treatise proceeds.”
And then 7.3 compares the Trinity to an absolute coregency.
However, Tertullian did not believe that the personalities of the Son and Spirit always existed.
I’m not sure that the Spirit needs to be a divine “being” so much as an active force of God. And yet folks like Origen thought that the Spirit is the same in the Hebrew Bible as in the NT; and yet the Spirit was not a separate being in the HB as far as I know.
Bart, is there a history of where the personhood of the Spirit idea started and was promulgated?
I don’t know, but I doubt it! But they sense I’m trying to convey in these posts is that it appears to have been a distinctively (early) Christian development
Off topic: I’ve just completed your Did Jesus Exist? and I feel now that if I had to have only one of your books in my collection, that one would be it. Not only do you make it clear that Jesus really did exist, you touch at least lightly upon virtually every topic you’ve covered in depth in your other books, and clarify many issues I’ve encountered reading other books by other authors. And you manage to give a very plausible motivation for those who try so hard to “prove” that Jesus never really existed.
On topic: one would expect a holy spirit, if it existed, to infuse every Christian with the same “stuff” and that the effect would be unifying, making one community. But that is clearly not the case. There was never a unified community of Christians, all marching to the same anthem and moving in the same direction. If anything, if a holy spirit exists/existed, the effect, once one is infused with it, is to make you crazy and unpredictable.
Great! I”m soon going to be reposting a ten-part interview written for the blog about just that book (from nine years ago!)
Tertullian and Gregory of Nazianzus compared the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to an absolute coregency, which I wrote about in my 2016 “Identical Legal Entities and the Trinity: Relative-Social Trinitarianism.” And one of my works in progress will propose that the absolute coregency analogy of the Trinity is far superior to the Creeds about eternal generation and eternal procession. Also, the concept of absolute coregency in Egypt, Israel, and Rome was well known to ancient Jews and Christians.
Do you think that one reason that Christians did not think about the trinity for so long was because Christians were converted out of a polytheistic culture? Sure Christianity was supposed to be monotheistic but they were used to multiple gods so three gods was not that big a deal to them. Also maybe it took time for Christians to buy into the upgrade of statuses of Jesus and the holy spirit to that of god the father so dealing with three equal gods was not an early concern?
My sense is that most just didn’t have the philosophical background to see a problem, like most peole today.
Given that about 2/3 of early Christians were strict monotheists (with Arius manning the adoptionist mega-horn and Athanasius waiving the trinitarian super-bowl winning banner) how were the Cappadocian Fathers able to sell their refinements by utilizing thoughts and ideas *outside* of scripture like the neo-Platonists (Plotinus)? Concepts such as the “nous” the “one” and the “world-soul” would certainly need to be rebranded and reverse-engineered like a cheap Chinese cell phone. Seems like a crack-team of marketing specialists needed to decide anthropomorphic, transcendent, or immanent spirit cereal flavoring to feed to the new converts.
Being a monotheist does not require one to reject philosophical forms of discourse.
I note that in the critical translations of the Hebrew Bible I have consulted (including Jewish scholars), in neither of the passages you mentioned, Joel (I will pour out my spirit) or Isaiah ( The spirit of the Lord is upon me) is the word “spirit” capitalized. In both contexts the “spirit” seems to be an aspect or quality of God who remains the principle actor involved.
Of course when you get to translations of the New Testament it’s an entirely different matter. The word is capitalized in every situation, even quotes from the OT. In trying to interpret the thought of the NT writers doesn’t this practically guarantee that everyone will read the NT through a Nicaean lens and obliterate any nuance that might be detectable?
Yes, issues of capitalization are always matters of interpretation, and decisions of translators in turn seriously affect how others read the texts being translated.
I think 1 John 5:7-8 means the concept of trinity was first century.
“there are three that testify … and these three-in-the-one are”
These verses are not found in any manuscripts from antiquity. Look up Johannine comma on the blog.
When the johannine comma gets removed we are left with this
1 John 5:7-8 “there are three that testify … and these three-in-the-one are”
Nope. “There are three that testify, the spirit and the water and the blood, and these three are one.”
“these three are one” is actually the johannine comma. The original is “these three-in-one are”; which is arguably the more trinitarian version. (The johannine comma being closer to modalism).
Anyway regardless of who the the “three” are, the original verse speaks of *a* trinity; the only question is whether or not it is *the* trinity.
Nope. Sorry. There are two “these three are one” statements. One of them is in the comma, the other not.
Sinaiticus has “there are three who testify the Spirit and the water and the blood and these three in one are”.
So even without the Johannine comma we have three testifiers that are three-in-one. And this three-in-one testimony is god’s testimony 1 John 5:9
That’s what I said. Reading this as the Christian Trinity is one of the old interpretations of the passage. The passage does not mention the three persons of the God head explicitly.
Not explicitly, but it does say the three-in-one is God’s testimony. And that its God’s testimony about his son.
John 8:18 “I am he who testifies about myself and my father having sent me testifies about me”
John 15:26 ” … the spirit of truth who proceeds from the father will testify about me”
Taken together these are the three who testify about God’s son.
“the spirit the water and the blood” is supposed to be eternal life, which is itself God.
Prepositions are among the most difficult words to translate.
Do you agree with Morton Smith that the image of the Spirit descending as a bird is a pagan magical motif? If not, do you have an alternate explanation for the use of the dove in the story?
I guess pagan converts used to polytheism probably weren’t troubled too much by what logically amounts to three divine beings. But Jewish Christians would have found it problematic I would have thought.
Let’s say that the Hindu religion and a few other eastern religions covered most people in the world around 100 AD. or so who had their belief system documented in for example the Vedas. This area was not that far from the Middle East and had trade routes to Europe in antiquity too. Their creation myth would have no problem defining an eminence from “nothing” ,,,, or just a state outside any reality (Brahman) ,,, until it came to be (in a “self” /Atman, and from there expand in the broadest sense. I guess contemporary researchers will say ,,,, “actually it fits pretty well” as a mythology of the scientific creaton knowledge we have today. They also had their theory of an emanation in creation from the all,,,or a singel point or whatever (Altman), which in a way led out to a kind of trinity.
In a scientific world, I do not think this should cause any problem at all. Einstein has, for example, proved that energy (invisible) is equal to mass and/or oposite. In a three-dimensional world (and science knows that there are many more), it is difficult to comprehend these ideas, without using some kind of abstract assumptions. One could easily lead to that nothing (energy) is everything (mass)
Aslo, if one look at the last proven variable of the “equation” of defining mass, proven by the Cern experiment ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, then the invisible (basically nothing) are the electrons ,,, and even smaller particles like Quarks and such, ,,,,,,,, basically we’re talking about “nothing” ,, stumble through some kind of energy field that seems to be there, for some reason ,,, but when this nothing stumbles through this energy (Higgs field) ,,,, ends up adding mass on itself. Still it is the same, energy equals mass, seemingly two different thing, but still the same. And if one wist to add another factor to this energy/mass, or time and space, the first quantum physics Max Planck said that behind all thing is only the conciousness or if you like psyche. This will add another dimention to this relativity, and it will be a relativation of time and space through the psyche or conciousness.
Then, energy, mass, and conciousness could live perfectly harmony in a definition of “one”, but still have different properties.
I do not find this concept of Trinity an obstacle today, not for me at least.
Bart; thanks again for this.
While it is true that the author of Luke and Acts presents the greatest number of ‘Holy Spirit’ references in the New Testament; Paul is not that far behind. Indeed, with the exception of the second and third letters of John; every book in the New Testament refers to the Holy Spirit; most of them very frequently.
Which is much less true of the Hebrew bible; and even of the Dead Sea Scrolls – although ‘the Spirit’ still appears frequently in both. But in Christian New Testament writings, the Spirit is ubiquitous. By contrast, ‘Holy Spirit’ features not at all in non-Jewish religious discourse of this time.
One straightforward explanation for the new prominence of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament writers must be (as you have said), the belief in these days as the end-times; if the end is coming soon; then continual encounters with the Holy Spirit are to be expected. But the rationalisation also seems to run the other way; the commonly recognised and widespread experiences of believers in encountering the Holy Spirit are a down-payment, a guarantee of the promised end-time.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but in the Greco-Roman world, a god could and often did take on different forms/guises for different people and situations. I can see how the three gods in one concept could seem not at all confusing in this milieu.
A chicken-vs.-egg question. Bear with me. Jesus’ baptism is recorded in 3 of 4 gospels and seems implicit in outlier John, and the three have the Spirit coming to Jesus at baptism, or in John as independent of explicit baptism. John also provides “baptism in the Holy Spirit,” a confounding idea pervasive and inconsistent in Acts. No gospel has Jesus baptizing, except oddly in John 3:22ff and 4:1-2, and Jesus never instructs his disciples to baptize, except the Great Commission. Following your remarks, the gospels have taken the Spirit as Jesus may have understood it – Joel 2 – and set it among the earliest churches’ (ritual) practices. Disciples must follow Jesus’ pattern of baptism-Spirit-empowered Kingdom service. For the disciples to continue to advance the Kingdom as Jesus did, then the Spirit is required … with Acts providing maddening exceptions.
A windy way to get to the question: is the Spirit part of Jesus’ teaching, or do the gospels reflect the church’s appropriation of the Spirit? Or both? – the Spirit of God authorizes Jesus as Son of Man to advance the Kingdom, and the same Spirit must be realized (however it gets realized) by the disciple to advance the Kingdom.
My view is that the Spirit was not a topic Jesus talked about, but came in only after the followers of Jesus came to think the Spirit was active intheir community, and they transposed his actions back onto the life of Jesus.
In Mark 6 Jesus is unable to perform miracles in his home town and is amazed by “their lack of faith”
It is rather revealing as surely miracles performed by the spirit should not be dependent on location.
The account in Mark would suggest Jesus was a faith healer. Is there a difference between miracles and faith healing?
I suppose faith healing is one *kind* of miracle. Controlling nature would be another. ANd there are others…