Loading...Now that I’ve established that the earliest Christians came to think Christ was God (in some sense or other) and continued to think God was God, and yet thought there was only one God — I am able to move into the thinking and debates based on those views that eventually led to the doctrine of the trinity. This seems like a good time to share a video produced five years ago or so in which I talk about the issue at a speaking gig I did at the Coral Gables Congregational Church in (as one would expect!) Coral Gables, Florida. I did this gig soon after my book was published: “How Jesus Became God.” The lecture was the third in a series I did at the church. This was back when I did lectures in front of human beings instead of in front of a computer screen. Ah, the good ole days.
On future posts on the blog I’ll be going into considerably more detail, but this can give you the major nuts and bolts on the issue.
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Pagan triads and triune gods were a dime-a-dozen. You had the Capitoline triad, the Olympic Triad, the Delphic Triad, etc., as well as the Matronae of Germanic and Celtic culture… do you think this may have influenced the doctrine of the Trinity? That three just seemed like a good number.
Yes, and there were plenty of dyads. And … quadrads? (is that a word) In any event, The three gods in all these collocations were never like the trinity in the least, at least in the way the trinity was understood that the three are one (which is its essential element).
We just returned from the FL keys, and i must say that i suspect you only accepted this invitation as a DESTINATION gig; am i right sir? Thanks for the vid post, Professor!!
Nah, I’m afraid it was all business. It’s amazing the places I’ve been too and not played in….
Terrific lecture. As you talked about Arius, I couldn’t help but think about the creation stories of 2nd century gnostics like Basilides and Valentinus. Like the gnostics, Arius seems to have said that Christ was the son/creation of the supreme God who was sent to earth to ensure salvation for (at least some) humans. Christ didn’t always exist and therefore was subordinate to the father from whom he was created. Is much known about the cosmological or metaphysical beliefs that Arius held when he formulated his theory of the relationship between the father and the son? Do any of his writings survive?
We have a few scraps of his writing. He would have been diametrically oppose to gnostic cosmologies; he believed there was only one ultimate God, not a pleroma, and only one Son from eternity past, not a number of aeons. Unfortuantely we don’t have any lengthy discourses from him, but he was completely orthodox on most points other than christology.
Regardless of whether you are trinitarian or not, there is a lot of intellectual gymnastic. Trinitarian have resolved the problem saying that it is a mystery. One need not to even try to understand it. On the other hand, non-trinitarian are forced to explain some bible passages in which Jesus is said to be a god, with upper case G or with lowercase G. If it is with lower case g, Jesus is only ‘godlike’, not God or Yahweh.
So if you don’t mind Mr Ehrman, i have a question about that. In gospel of John there is this famous passage where Thomas is calling Jesus as a God (capital letter).
“My Lord and my God!” John 20.28.
In The New Testament in the Original Greek by Westcott and Hort the greek word which is translated as a God is the same as in John 1:1. Why Thomas called him a God? Was this part of the development of christology and not authentic view of early followers of christ? At least as we all know, Jesus never called himself as a God or even ‘godlike’. I think for anti-trinitarians this passage is hard to deal with.
No wonder that Carl Jung, who extensively also worked with religious symbolism in an analytical psychological sense, was interested in Eastern religions and esoteric Christianity to find the “myths” behind the concepts, and definitely aslo the the idea of the Trinity
The Trinity has in my mind been found throughout history in many symbolic forms, even described in symbolic terms in ancient archeology. From an esoteric religious perspective that often relates to consciousness, spirituality and understanding of the “Self”, this “trinity” symbolism has been found in antiquity in the centuries BC. (Buddhism, even symbolic views of Zoroastrianism and other Eastern traditions, and even parts of Christian Gnosticism), and even the millennium BCE. in Hindu Vedas. Jung’s perspectives interestingly correlate his search for the “Self” with the “esoteric” views of the Eastern religions and thoughts. This was also in my mind one of the great questions for Plato, to find the true “Self” which seems quite central in Plato’s dialogues, perfectly in the context of Eastern ideas of “Self” and knowing one self, often symbolically expressed in the “trinity” of deyeties, gods and principles. The principles of knowledge (gnosis) are also central and essential in these concepts also found in the concept of liberation through “knowing yourself”.
Perhaps these are the essential differences between the Platonic, Eastern religious ideas / “esoteric” thoughts, and Carl Jungs who elaborate on the concepts of trinity, ideas about the inner “Self” from the more Abramic religion’s approaches of external deity.
Sometimes the thoughts come to my mind if the ideas of inner esoteric concepts of Self and Soul in Plato /various Eastern religions, supported by Jung, are another view of our own concept of how we understand God and its trinity , one view from wtihin and one from without.
Anyway, it seems for me that trinitorial ideas can be derived from much earlier sources than Christianity
Question: what is a good ancient source that shows that some early Bishops of Rome were Modalists?
Hippolytus Refuation of All Heresies and Tertullian Against Praxeas. I don’t know if *both* of htem say it, but I believe at least Hippolytus does.
As a layman and a non-specialist it’s difficult for me to see a functional difference between what came to be called “Arianism” and earlier subordinationist views going all the way back to Philippians 2. The winners write the histories of course and Arianism came to be seen as a heresy but isn’t it closer to the truth that it was the older of the two views and it was the Trinitarians who were the innovators with the “new-fangled” ideas, not the other way round?
Thanks
Arian certainly would have claimed that Phil 2 made his point. My view is that both Arians and anti-Arians were innovators. No one had the trinitarian view in the NT either.
I have seen plenty of Christians quoting church fathers to prove that the Gospels (specifically Mark) were written by the people traditionally claimed. What do you think of that?
The church fathers certainly did think that, yes. That is the starting point for the question, though, not the answer! The real question is whether htey were right and what the evidence for it is. (If I say that FDR was the 44th president, it wouldn’t be right because I said so! You’d want to see if it were right).
Well, geographically speaking the Christian Trinity seeds com from North African former pagans (Tertullian, Athanasius) and gets developed and formalized in nowadays Turkey. It does not come from Jerusalem, Damascus or Babylon.
Mark 12:29 and John 17:3 are certainly an embarrassment to “sola scriptura” Trinitarians.
Bishops- who decided to call them that? How did one become qualified for the position and what WAS the position? What was a Bishop?
The Greek word for bishop is overseer; it just means one who is in charge of a community, who oversees it.
Hello Dr. Ehrman.
I wanted to ask you the following.
In John 1:1 it says that the Word was with God and the Word was God. The writer does not use tha language of the trinity to differentiate between the son and the father, since that came later. Did the writer meant that there are two Gods, since it says that the Word was with God? What is the meaning here of “was with”?
Thanks. I really like your work.
He appears to think that God’s “word” is both separate from God and the external revealer of who God really is (just as you yourself are what you speak), so it was with God and was God.
I still do not understand why Thomas call him God. I have understood he was one of the apostles. Nobody of his apostles used that title except he. That is confusing me. Maybe i have missed something.
Because in John’s Gospel this is directly how Jesus is identified.
Bart do you think the Johannine Comma text was being created at roughly the same time the church was finalizing its view and adoption of the Trinity concept ?
TY
Steve
Yes, or sometime thereafter.
I am so glad I joined this site….there is so much to be read…that I don’t have time to submit a question…lol…
And for that I bless you….
at about 33:05 in the lecture, the argument is made that water does not coexist as ice, liquid, and steam at the same time to oppose the concept of modalism: however, at the so-called “triple point” all three phases of water in fact DO coexist in thermodynamic equilibrium… but this occurs ONLY at one UNIQUE combination value of a specific pressure (4.56 mm Hg) and a specific temperature (0.01C)
at all other temperature and pressure combinations, water either is present in ONE form or co-exists as two phases in thermodynamic equilibrium
Ha! There *is* a God!
I have always thought that the deification of Jesus following a evolutionary path. Pliny the younger in the early 2nd century already says they worshipped Jesus as a god. These were gentile Christians coming from a Roman/Pagan background who could imagine people being called ‘god’ nd worshipped, but not be the ONE GOD overall.
This would not have been the case for Jesus himself, and his Jewish followers who acknowledged only one God, intrinsically worthy of worship. We see this most clearly from Jesus and his acknowledgement of the Shema as being fundamental.
Bart,
According to the Trinity concept is the statement:
Jesus is Yahweh come in flesh
Accurate?
I am familiar with Modalism and Sabellianism but the finer points of this are still somewhat murky to me
If Yahweh is a “name” for God
Doesn’t that mean :
The father is Yahweh
Jesus is Yahweh
Holy Spirit is Yahweh
According to the Trinity concept?
This is kinda like quantum mechanics lol
Thanks!
No. It’s a mistake to think that in traditional Christian theology Jesus is Yahweh. He’s the son of Yahweh. I don’t know why evangelicals get that so confused…. (People who are not evangelical appear to pick up the idea from those who are)
Bart,
TY one follow up:
I have Catholic friends who just say the Trinity is a mystery that can’t be understood by reason
And Protestant friends who really try to understand it through reason and come up ramshackle explanations that to me don’t make sense
Is this idea of just calling the Trinity concept a Mystery beyond human reason common among Catholics ?
🙏
Among theologians, yes, I would say so. But also among many Protestant theologians. BAsically among people who think deeply about it.
I see that Christians are still divided about the trinity amongst themselves even in 2022. Every Pastor is trying to have their own way of explaining the trinity. So when you ask different Christians about the trinity you get different answers like some think Jesus is the God of the Old Testament . Some separate Jesus from the old Testament. It seems like some of the same debates Christians had about the trinity before Constantine is still present today. Is the correct stance of Jesus to believe he is the creator of the heavens, the earth, and man?
That’s a theological question, so I”m not the right person to ask: I’m a historian, and so I don’t have any particular access to theological truth. What I’d say is that that *is* the traditional orthodox Christain view, yes.