Regarding the holy Trinity

by kristiano1122 44 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  yaddayadda

  
  There are only 3 verses in the bible that, if you had absolutely no prior knowledge of any kind of Christian belief at all, just picked up the bible and started reading it like a novel with no bias whatsoever, might make you wonder if Jesus had some kind of equality with God. Those are:

  John 1:1 - this is the trinitarians biggie. Yes, there is a strong case made by many scholars that it should rigorously be translated 'and the Word was God'. However, the fact remains that there are also some reputable scholars that make a strong case that it should not be rendered that way. And there are some bible translations that render it differently, as does the NWT. JW's are not unique on this. So who is right? It boils down to a matter of scholarly opinion. Everyone takes their pick according to their personal bias The point is, however, that the trinitarians view on this verse is open to debate and there is reasonable doubt about it. In a Court of law, if there is reasonable doubt about something the jury cannot convict with certainty.

  John 20: 28 - Thomas' saying "My Lord and My God". This is a hard one to get around for non-trinitarians, admittedly. However, who's word has more authority: Thomas' or Jesus' about Jesus identify? Just a few verses earlier in the same chapter of John, Jesus said to Mary "I am ascending to my Father and your Father, and my God and your God". So Jesus is plainly telling Mary that her God was Yahweh, the God the Jews had always worshipped before Christ came onto the scene (the first and foremost Jewish teaching, that Jesus reaffirmed at Luke 4:8). If Jesus was God and knew himself to be God, he would not have said this to Mary and told her to stop clinging to him. He was deliberately taking the emphasis off himself and directing Mary's worship to the Father. So Thomas' comment cannot be taken as categorical because it is contradicted by Jesus own words to Mary on that same day. Also, when Jesus asked his disciples in Matt 16 who people were saying he was, Peter did not say "You are God", or "You are God the Son", like Thomas appears to have said; no, but Peter said "You are the Christ, the son of the living God". Peter made a clear distinction between 'the living God' and Jesus. So who is right, Jesus and Peter, or Thomas? Is the bible contradicting itself? Obviously not. Peter and Jesus own statements about Jesus true identify have more weight than some off-hand comment by Thomas, so we must look at Thomas' unusual statement in a different light.

  John 10: 30 "I and the Father are one". Trinitarians love this 'proof text'. Yet it really isn't even in the ball-park. An unbiased reading of the context shows that Jesus was merely describing oneness of thought and purpose, just as he prayed for his disciples to all be 'one' just as he was 'one' with the Father.

  There are a few other 'proof texts' that trinitarians rely on, but you would only read that Jesus was God in those texts if you were approaching them with a trinitarian bias. Trinitarians have to force and extrapolate these other verses to mean something that is not obvious at first. No totally impartial reader would ever read these other few texts as suggesting that Jesus was God.
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  Narkissos

  they simply focused on different aspects of the same individual one focuses on his actions as a human, the others on his heavenly superior origins and position after the resurrection.

  Greendawn,

  This was a generic comment.

  Let's assume the contradictions are not insuperable and you can construct an ideal Christian synthesis which gives equal weight to what Jesus taught and who Christ is. Let's assume such a synthesis is viable at a theoretical and practical level. It will still be a 21th-century synthesis which can only be attained by distancing yourself from the inner logic of the texts. It will be neither Matthew's, nor Paul's, nor John's Jesus but yours. Which may be the best for you. But then you can't blame other syntheses such as the 4th-century Catholic one for being what they are.

  On the other hand, some NT texts are mutually exclusive in both what they affirm and what they deny. They build against each other. The Judeo-Christian human Jesus insists that you do what he says and fulfill the Law perfectly instead of calling him Lord. The Pauline heavenly Christ can only save you through faith/hope in him without relying on the works of the Law. The Johannine Divine Son urges you to enter eternal life right now through faith/knowledge instead of working or waiting for salvation.

  I admittedly point to the most acute differences, but I don't think I overstate them. As I said earlier, attempts at harmonisation exist right in the NT. If you are a moderate person you will likely be attracted to them and be inclined to tone down the most absolute, exclusive statements. If you are more absolute yourself nothing, not even the contradictions, will keep you from enjoying the latter in their fullest force.

  I guess I am not a centrist.
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  Narkissos

  yaddayadda,

  What if "God," in John, was neither the OT Yahweh nor the Catholic Trinity, but a different, open, inclusive notion of the Divine which encompasses Jesus and eventually the believers/elect themselves? Why not read the Gospel again from this perspective and see how it works?
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  Navigator

  Narkissos-Good Suggestion! Charles Fillmore, the founder of the Unity movement, once replied when asked whether Jesus was God:

  "Jesus was not God! However, he so gave up his sense of personal self and so identified with his creator that it becomes difficult to tell where Jesus leaves off and God begins."
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  Navigator

  Kristiano

  I would give up quoting 1John 5:7 as support for the Trinity doctrine. It is acknowledged by most bible scholars that the passage "There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit: and the three are one" is phony. It got added in Spain ca. 380 a.d.and is nowhere found in the most ancient manuscripts or in the early church fathers. The Catholic Church had a monestary in Spain that specialized in "ageing" manuscripts so that they appeared to be more ancient than they were. One of the early Greek scholars working for a Swiss printer got fooled by one of these and incorporated it into his translation which was later used by the King James compilers. You won't find the passage in the Revised Standard Version and most modern translations as the fraud was discovered after the King James edition was published.
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  Hellrider

  I don`t think ANY passage by itself could be used to support the trinity-doctrine, not even John 1.1. But when it comes to an overall view of the Bible, that`s a different story. How do you otherwise explain John 1 with Isiah 45,12 and Genesis 1. These are the things that the Trinity-doctrine can explain. Not one single passage. It`s about the over-all view, and their relation to eachother (who, without the trinity-doctrine, results in serious problems) not the single passages.
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  greendawn

  TD, I made an inquiry about that verse with someone whose native language is Greek and he is also a teacher of modern and ancient Greek at secondary school level. In addition he is an atheist and therefore I think unbiased on the Trinity issue.
  
  The word "ito" (or eeto) he tells me is from later medieval Greek but is equivalent to "en" in Hellenistic Greek and it means "was".
  
  I have every reason to believe that his understanding of the verse is sound. He is certain that to the Greek ear "kai theos en o logos" is correctly translated as "and of divine status (ie a god) was logos"
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  greendawn

  Hellrider, isn't the overall picture of the God and Jesus relationship anti trinitarian? As yadda says there are just a handful of verses that could indicate trinity, but there are a lot more that indicate a subordinate Jesus, eg He says "conquer and I will grant you to sit on my throne just as I conquered and sat on my Father's throne." which implies that if he hadn't conquered he wouldn't sit on His Father's throne.
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  Narkissos

  I have every reason to believe that his understanding of the verse is sound. He is certain that to the Greek ear "kai theos en o logos" is correctly translated as "and of divine status (ie a god) was logos".

  Yes, but what does "of divine status" mean?

  - in a polytheistic context it can mean "a god";

  - in a Gnostic context where "God" is not a self-enclosed entity, separate from that which emanates from him, it can mean "God".

  But from a traditional monotheistic standpoint (One "God" = "creator" vs. "creation") what the gehenna can that mean?

  If you want to make sense of such a statement without resorting to either polytheism or Gnosticism, you have to posit some sort of dual Godhead. And then you'll have to add a third member to make sense of the texts where believers/elect share in the divine oneness: here comes the Holy Spirit.

  In sum, the orthodox Trinity appears as a second choice after Gnosticism to make sense of the Johannine texts; a second choice motivated by the additional constraint of taking into account the Jewish notion of exclusive monotheism which Gnosticism could dispense with.
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  TD

  Hi Greedawn,

  I understand what the words mean, thanks.

  I'm not trying to be pedantic, I was just struck by the incongruency of the example. Unlike ancient Greek, modern Greek can concisely express the idea of "a god"

  Yet most modern Greek translations (With the exception of the NWT) have a trinitarian bias (As you might expect) and do not. They simply read as you quoted.