AW! Epistles
From Art Tunnell
Abstract
Monday, September 25, 2000
Unable to find origin of Holy Trinity. When was it originated? By whom? In what year? Is it true it was the result of the Christians fearing civil war with the Romans who had multiple gods? Can you recommend search sites or references?
You’ll find a page on the Trinity in the AskWhy! Mystery of Jesus pages, but it devotes itself to parallels in other religions.
It is pretty clear that the Trinity came out of the Christian deification of the Son, contrary to the supposed monotheism of Judaism. (The well known letter of Pliny to Trajan (111 AD) speaks of Christians who prayed to Christus as a God.) The gospels, particularly the latest one, John, place the Son on a par with God, and of course their actions were supposed to have been handed on to mere mortals by the Holy Ghost. The Trinity, in the equality of these three elements, appears already in the New Testament (Mt 28:19; 1 Cor 12:4; 2 Cor 13:13) though the passage in Matthew and possibly the others are later interpolations.
The real impulse to define the Trinity came from the Arian heresy declaring the Son to be inferior to God—a much more rational position for a monotheistic religion, you might think—especially as Jesus denies being God explicity in several places in the gospels. The early churches were torn by these hypothetical differences and Constantine imposed unity at the Nicene Council where the doctrine was set out originally, to be developed by others such as Augustine and theologians in the Middle Ages.
There is little doubt that the Trinity sought to prevent any recurrence of the separate worship of any of its elements, which originally were God, Goddess and Son. The Goddess was completely submerged into the Holy Ghost (a feminine principle) even in Judaism, and the Christian Trinity bound the Son into "one substance" with God too.
Perhaps this is what you mean about multiple gods. I don’t know of any expressed desire to copy Roman practice, and indeed the Christian veneration of Saints and the Virgin as separate supernatural entities that mediate with God seems closer to Roman practice. They would choose the temple of the God or Goddess that could most suitably answer their prayers. Hope this helps.
Thank you very much for your informative letter. I had heard that the Trinity was an outgrowth of dissention between the Romans and the Christians. The Romans claimed that the Christians, by being monotheistic, would logically negate their multiple gods as being false. To avoid civil war the Trinity was instituted as dogma at the Nicene council. Does this have any validity to your knowledge?
Where are you located in the UK? Thanks again.
It seems unlikely to me, but I do not have detailed sources about the Nicene Council at hand, so it might make an interesting library project for you, if you have access to any good libraries in Daytona. If Constantine had felt it necessary to embody several deities into one to avoid a civil war, he must have included a goddess because Isis was the among the most popular of deities at the time. No, the fudge seems to be entirely a Christian one because they were puzzling about how they could have two clear gods, the Father and the Son and apparently a third counting the Holy Ghost even though they were supposedly monotheistic.
It is true that other religions might have been jeering at them for being inconsistent, and the bishops therefore felt the need for a formula that would save the day and prevent dissension and criticism. The Trinity was it, though it created the problems of "substance" then that went on for centuries.
We are in Frome, Somerset in the English South West. You’ll find us winking at you on our books pages. Best wishes.
Thank you again for your very informative reply. I am now trying to find a book written by Alan {possibly ALON] Maxwell entitled The Awful Doctrine of The Trinity. Have you heard of it?
Not me. Anyone out there able to help?
