Hi Jerryh
I typed up the original article 16 years ago, a few years after I left the Watchtower and while I was an evangelical christian. I decided to scan it and publish here 3 years ago because I think it has real potential to help a JW see that their religion is very different from early christianity.
It isn't really a doctrinal discussion, more of an observation of the way early christian writers spoke about Jesus. in my opinion this is a far more powerful approach than debating the deity of Jesus and inviting a barrage of "proof-texts".
would you say the trinity was a reasonable thing for the early church to deduce?
No I wouldn't to be honest.
As we read the NT we see an evolution of Christology. The crucial moment in Jesus biography shifts from his baptism to a miraculous birth to a pre-human life. Early christians faced a conflict between monotheism in theory and adoration of Jesus in praxis.
They eventually co-opted esoteric Greek notions about essence and substance to try to square the circle. The addition of the HS to complete the triad came even later.
It is impossible to explain the trinity in everyday, simple language without self-contradiction and/or heresy.
More than one early christian writer spoke about the "god and father of our Lord Jesus". This simple fact makes the trinity impossible.
This is why I think it is important to have a much more modest objective when talking to a JW and be content to show them that their relationship with Jesus is very different from the one early christians would recognise...
