The Trinity revisited

Perhaps, but G-d was forever giving new meaning to things with which the hearer was familiar. This is not really much different from Paul's speech on Mars Hill. In fact, I believe G-d likely inspired, in some indirect and mysterious sense, the traditions in pagan cultures that He later gave full meaning to in His chosen people.

But it's also unfair to say that, because religion A had a concept of sacrifice for sins, that religion B necessarily borrowed from it.n This is a common tactic of liberal scholars, but it's simply not always true. There are certain concepts that are basic, and it's not surprising they'd turn up in more than one place without borrowing or connections at all.

Example: Daguerre and Fox-Talbot were, completely independent of one another, developing a photographic process in the 1830s. They had no connections whatever, and they just happened to introduce their processes within weeks of one another--they were remarkably similar. They were both operating from the very basic, funadamental premise that light could be focused via lens or camera obscura on a perpendicular surface, and that certain materials were highly light sensitive. I assure you that historians looking back at the 19th century 2,000 years from now will make a connection and state conclusively that there was collaboration--when there was none. Zilch. Hisotrians never believe that anyone or any people can come up with the most fundamental concepts independent of one another. There always has to be borrowing or collusion. But many times, it's simply not there.

The trinity is the trinity because it's a description of the actual G-d of the Universe that we can understand on a primitve level. G-d is one, yet also three. The Jews wrote about this because G-d told Moses and Abraham and the prophets about Himself. I really believe that, and I really believe that honest history, archeaology, anthropology, textual criticism, and personal experience bear it out.

 

It was almost 100% Jews at first.

 

Really? At what point did it virtually cease to contain ANY Jews?

 

I don't know, perhaps Bill Grover or Jimmy or someone else with more knowledge than me can answer that one. You should read what Jesus said if you haven't already. He was a thoroughly Jewish rabbi, He used common rabbinical techniques to teach, He referred constantly to the Law, Scriptures and Prophets. Virtually everything He did was the fulfillment of some Jewish prophecy (in my opinion).

I can't imagine that anybody who wasn't a Jew would have thought Him any less than utterly incoherent, so tied was He to Jewish culture and faith.

 

The ancient Mediterranean world is REPLETE with demi-gods and other manifestations of the divine in human form, so the concept of the mixing of the divine and human had been understood for centuries in this part of the world.

The first Christians, still holding to Jewish monotheism but convinced that Jesus was in fact divine, faced a bit of a dilemma. If they held that Jesus was fully divine, they were faced with having two gods. If they asserted that Jesus was part human and part divine, a concept which Greek speakers would have easily understood, it would have betrayed their understanding of the centrality of his advent and the import of his sacrifice. Many, if not most, early Christians probably asserted these beliefs without understanding or caring about the logical contradictions which their beliefs faced. They simply attempted to remain faithful to their monotheistic roots and to their conception of the divine Jesus. However, their Greco-Roman opponents soon pointed out the apparent logical inconsistencies of their beliefs, resulting in several centuries of Christian intellectuals trying to justify their beliefs to those opponents and to come to an agreement among themselves over just how the coexistence of these two natures in Jesus ought to be understood. What came to be known as the hypostatic union was carved out of several centuries of debate, but its origins, it seems, date from the first generation of Christians.

marilynd

 

No, little fauss, that statement at least is NOT correct.

Think for a moment about the statement that the crowd was amazed because Jesus did not teach from earlier teachers but from his own authority.

That is a clean break with Pharisaic practice and absolutely contrary to the Jewish technique of preserving and passing down the Law. NO Rabbi, even today, teaches from his own authority. EVER. To do so is to deny the concept that all of the oral and written law comes from Mount Sinai and THAT would be to end the single source of authority for the Law itself.

This is not a small thing. At Sinai, Moses received the written law. (Exactly what form this took is a matter of considerable debate even today.)

According to Pharisaic (and modern rabbinic) theory, Moses also received the Oral Law together with a command not to commit the latter to writing.

The Oral Law was passed down from scholar to student over 1,500 years. Look at the beginning of Pirke Avot for a description of this principal.

Not until the destruction of the Second Temple did Judah h'Nasi overcome the ancient reluctance to commit the Oral Law to writing and even then, it was done only because the diasporah was beginning and h'Nasi and others knew that the Law would be lost once the academies ceased to function. Thus was codified the Mishnah.

Jesus was no Rabbi in the Pharasaic or modern sense.

 

Or it could just be that that's the way G-d is: one, yet three, and they were describing what we can understand of His real nature.

The Bible does say we're made in His image. Moses wrote that about 3,300 years ago, before the Greeks were atwinkle in History's eye. And we do, as a point of fact, have precisely three different attributes to our very singular being: body, mind, spirit.

Interesting that this coincides precisely with the G-dhead as described--not just in fourth century dogma--but very clearly in the first century New Testament (example: John 1). The dogma only restated and compiled what was already there for centuries in black and white. And of course, it seems like a mystery, it seems odd--a paradox. The New Testament calls it just that (see 1 Peter 3:16). But so it is when trying to describe G-d with mere words and trying to grasp with with mortal minds (there, I'm beating that drum again).

 

The body/mind/spirit tricotomy is Plato, isn't it?

I do get the impression that Christianity is a thoroughly Hellenic idea perhaps as a result of its earliest texts being written in Greek?

 

Actually, I understand the echad in the Sh'ma is one of a potentially composite unity (e.g., a bunch of grapes), as opposed to yachid, which connotes absolute unity.

Richard Bauckham, professor of NT at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland wrote a book several years ago called God Crucified, in which he demonstrated quite strongly that the early Jewish believers (including the writers of all NT books except Luke and Acts) understood Jesus as being identified as Logos, or the Word, which had already been understood as being not another god, but within the Identity of who the One God was. Full-blown Nicene Trinitarian terminology is not found in the NT because the Jews were not so much concerned with what God is than with Who God is. Since Jesus certainly seemed to demonstrate in word and deed certain things which were understood to be the prerogative of God alone, His disciples understood that, within the already existant idea of the Divine Logos/Word, Jesus was within God's identity. This idea in Judaism comes up in the Targums, the Aramaic paraphrases of the Tanakh (OT) Scriptures; in many places where the Hebrew reads that YHWH did or said something or other, the Targums often read that the Memra, or Word of YHWH did or said this. The Jewish Memra idea and the Hellenic Logos idea were later synthesized just prior to the time of the writing of the NT by the Jewish-Hellenic philosopher Philo of Alexandria.

(incidentally, a shorter presentation of Bauckham's thought on this can be found in his essay "Paul's Christology of Divine Identity": http://forananswer.org/Top_JW/Richard_Bauckham.pdf)

In Messiah,

Matt (who is also a Messianic)

 

No. The idea of the triune god, I think, originates from a conflation of three entities thought to be divine, all of them found in the earliest Christian writings: God, Jesus, and God's Spirit. In other words, I think the concept developed internally rather than being borrowed or influenced from another tradition.

However, once they felt that they had to justify themselves to pagan attackers, they chose the Middle Platonic arguments to explain themselves. Middle Platonism, of course, would have been well understood by Christian opponents and its emanationist ideas suited Christian needs to find a way of explaining how it makes sense that there are three divine beings but not three gods, only one God.

The emanationist philosophy which they used, however, led to subordinationist explanations (the son is a little less divine that the father; the spirit is a little less divine than the son). Many Christian refused to hold this idea, however, and two centuries of dispute within the Christian community ensued. Two Christian bishops chiefly, Gregory of Nyssa in the east and Augustine of Hippo in the west, developed formulations which essentially ended the dispute and have become the standards means of explaining the triune God to new Christians and non-Christian alike.

Hope this helps,

marilynd

 

And also, much later, Acquinas--at least regarding its relationship to the Trinity.

That's a subject of debate. Some think that much of the NT gospels were originally in Hebrew, as many of the idoms seem kind of stilted in the Greek. There's a scholar, I think his name is Dwight Prior, who wrote a book or three on this.

 

Actually, Plato doesn't have a trichotomy but rather a dichotomy: matter and form (by extension with regards to humans) mind and body. Ancient Greeks and Romans did not readily distinguish "mind" or "soul" or "spirit" as different entities.

Little fauss' human trichotomy is the process of nearly a thousand years of Christian theology trying to explain how human beings are consructed; specifically, how human immortality is possible. This later development (trichotomy), I think, is being used to read back into Scripture distinctions which have not yet emerged.

marilynd

 

Actually, Jesus interacted with Rabbinical teaching a fair amount, sometimes siding with one or another interpretation of Torah, sometimes giving what was to be understood as a corrective of Pharisaic or other teaching. For example, Deuteronomy 24:1 reads,

"When a man takes a wife and marries her, and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some uncleanness in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house". (NKJV)

What was this "uncleanness"? Of the two most important schools of rabbinic thought, there were two contrasting interpretations. The school of Hillel allowed that divorce could take place for pretty much anything the husband disliked; the famous example is for burning the bread! The generally more strict school of Shemei, on the other hand, insisted that this "uncleanness" could only refer to adultery. Jesus, teaching in Matthew 5:31-32 on this topic, clearly sides with the school of Shemei on this. Jesus is also depicted (as is Paul, for that matter) as siding theologically fairly consistently with the Pharisees on issues with which they were inconflict with the Sadducees.

We need to be careful of anachronistically applying modern, or even medieval or Pharisaic distinctives to Jesus, who was certainly considered a rabbi in his day by many Jews.

Matt

 

Consider the words of Ya'akov (as James would have been known) the Apostle to Paul when he arrived in Jerusalem,

"And when they heard it, they glorified God. And they said to him, "You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed; they are all zealous for the law" (RSV)

The fate of the Nazarenes, as the Messianic Jews came to be called, was researched by Ray Pritz in his doctoral dissertation on the subject for Hebrew University in Israel, published under the title Nazarene Jewish Christianity. The Nazarenes survived as a distinct group until they were unfortunately more or less assimilated in (I think) the fifth century. Still, there were in fact a significant number of Jewish followers of Jesus for hundreds of years (and indeed, that has grown again in the past several decades).

Peace,

Matt

 

Yeah, but I think it's true.

I really do believe we have a spirit that's immortal.

I really do believe we have a brain that tells the body what to do.

I really do believe we have a body that, while matter like the brain, is really distinct from it.

And the vast majority of human beings on this planet believe that as well, including most of you. It's not just a made-up thing, a theory, it's likely a real statement about what actually is.

And I also believe that it's a possibility that this is one of the ways in which we are made "in G-d's image". I'm not trying to read into the Bible something that's not there, I'm just suggesting it as a possibility (and a rather tantalizing one). There's nothing in the Scriptures per se that compels this conclusion.

 

To say that the trinity is the trinity because that's the way God is doesn't get us very far, does it? These sorts of responses are simply assertions, virtually tautologies, useless in helping understand the unfolding of human understanding of these issues. The last time I looked God hadn't put up a Web site explaining the divine nature in unmistakeable, unamibiguous terms. Understanding requires interpretation, which requires the exercise of rationality, which is what theology is all about. Simply asserting that "it's the way God is" is a bit unsatisfying, to say the least. That's probably why these issues were debated and the ideas refined over centuries.

What does it mean to say that something can be understood on a primitive level? 2 + 2 = 4? A gut feeling? Mystical awareness? What's being asserted here?

Not as a point of fact but of assertion. This construct of the three-in-one human being as a mirror of trinity is a late antique, and especially, high medieval theological construct. In other words, it is ex post facto and you can't use it read the trinity into the Torah.

Where is this description exactly? I don't see the trinity described or referred to in John 1. I see the divinity of Jesus. I see, at best, two elements of the Godhead, although describing it this way may be a bit misleading. I don't see a trinity. I do see how it's possible, once a firm trinitarian structure has been elucidated, to read a trinity back into John 1, but that wouldn't be fair, would it?

marilynd

 

Speaking of Hillel, he's one of my favorites. And as an aside that's appropos of nothing, on Pesach, I like hot foods so much and think so little of wimpy sweet things like haroset (perhaps a result of my Tucson days), that I eat my Hillel sandwich in reverse.

 

You're right, two-thirds of the Trinity is expressed in John 1.

 

mattchand:

YES, by golly, you are right about that from a strictly bible hebrew perspective!

Another example occured to me whilst reading your post...I really hate to admit this but there's such a thing as intellectual honesty...

The phrase "...brothers dwell as one" uses ECHAD. Yes, it does.

Interesting.

 

See, I'm much more comfortable with these statements. These are statements of your personal belief, not assertions of fact. Assertions of fact make claims about what others should accept as true. Assertions require proof before they can compel acceptance. They are useless by themselves.

At one time, the "vast majority of human beings" believed that the stars and planets were perfect luminous spheres, made of ether, inhabited by astral intelligences. At one time, the Greeks thought piles of rocks were gods. I don't think we want to establish fact by popular vote.

In this, we agree.

Regards,

marilynd