In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Growing up Catholic, this was the first thing I was taught—to make the sign of the Cross while invoking the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, otherwise known as the Trinity. The reason this is the first thing most Catholics are taught is because the Trinity is the most important belief in Christianity. The reason it’s the most important belief is because Christians believe it reveals the deepest truth about God, God’s actual identity. Who God really is. Everything else Christianity claims about God depends upon and flows out of this core doctrine which says that God’s innermost being is Tri-Personal, One God in Three Divine Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
One of the questions I most frequently get asked—which is often put more in the form of a challenge—is: Where is the Trinity is found in the Bible? Or, as someone recently put it and in a way that I think gets more to the point: Did Jesus ever talk about the Trinity? To this question, there is a very clear, simple, and emphatic answer: No! The word “Trinity” is not found anywhere in the Bible. Nor is it ever found rolling off the lips of Jesus in the Gospels. Jesus never uttered the word “Trinity”. Ever.
In fact, the Latin word which we translate as “Trinity”—“Trinitas”—only first appears in the year 213, when the venerable Church Father Tertullian is recorded using it. This is the first time we have any record of the word being used—roughly 150 years after scripture was written; nearly 200 years after Jesus lived.
However, the Greek word “Trias”, which means “tirad” or “the three”, and which the Latin “Trinitas” is probably meant to translate, is used slightly earlier, in the year 180 by Theophilus of Antioch, to refer to the Church’s understanding of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So, this is probably the first recorded use of the word we translate as Trinity being used. But still, 180 is a long way out from New Testament times, and even further out from the time of Jesus.
But if the word “Trinity” itself is clearly not found in the Bible, if it clearly never rolls off the lips of Jesus in the Gospels, is what the word points to found in the Bible? Is what the term Trinity describes, the understanding of God as Three Divine Persons, the belief that the very Name of God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the conviction that this is the fullest revelation of the True Identity of the One True God, found in the Bible? And to this question, there is a also very clear, simple, and emphatic answer: Yes! Absolutely yes.
In fact, in the Bible, the understanding of Who God is—God’s Innermost Nature and Being—which the term “Trinity” would later be used as shorthand to express couldn’t be more clearly, simply, or emphatically stated—by Jesus Himself. In Matthew 28:19, it rolls right off his lips!
To the question, then, of whether Jesus ever talked about the Trinity, the unequivocal answer is yes. While Jesus never used the term “Trinity” itself, He could not have been any clearer that what the term itself was later used by the Church as shorthand to point to is the deepest Truth about God. He could not have been any clearer in revealing that this is the essence of the Divine Identity: One God in Three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Over the next several blogs, I’m going to show a number of the most important places where this understanding of God as what would later be called the Trinity can be found in the Bible—it’s actually found in many texts and many ways that are usually overlooked because they don’t use the term “Trinity”.
But it’s even better than that. Not only will I show where you can find evidence for a clearly Trinitarian understanding of God, including in several of the earliest New Testament books. I’m also going to show how this understanding of God as a Trinity predates the New Testament.
Historical scholarship has used these early texts to reconstruct with a high degree of confidence what some of the core beliefs of the Early Church must have been. As far back as we can trace—to the earliest Christianity—the understanding of God as Three distinct but coequal Divine Persons seems to have been widely held and accepted. So much so that it was not even a matter of discussion or debate—it could simply be presumed.
Though not nearly, or as firmly, or as abundantly attested as the belief in Jesus’ divinity is, still this Trinitarian understanding of God’s nature had to be alive and well in order to account for some of the striking developments that are clearly evident in the earliest New Testament texts. Because this historical reconstruction pushes this “Triadic” understanding of God back to a time not too far removed from the Crucifixion, it makes it much more plausible that it came from the very lips of Jesus.
Actually, I’m not going to be the one to show you all of this. I’m not the expert. But I know who the experts are. So instead, I’m going to share with you what I’m calling my “Trinity of Scholars” has to say about this subject: John Meier from Notre Dame, Raymond Brown who passed away a number of years ago but whose scholarship remains a dominant force in the field, and N. T. Wright, who is probably the most prominent New Testament scholar of our day.
At the risk of being too cute or clever for my own good, I’m calling them my “Trinity of Scholars”. No one else does. However, they are widely respected as being among the handful—if not top three, then at least top five or ten—of what their peers, be they liberal or conservative, hard core skeptics or ardent believers, consider to be the top critical biblical scholars in the field. They are especially known and respected for their sober and balanced judgment.
In this blog, I’m going to focus on the first member of my Scholarly Trinity, John Meier, specifically something he says in his commentary on Matthew’s Gospel when he comes to Matthew 28:19.
The passage in which this verse is found records a resurrection appearance of Jesus to a large group of disciples. As He is about to ascend into Heaven, Jesus commissions them to go out into the World and make disciples of all nations. This verse has been widely cited throughout the history of the Church in relation to Christian mission. Most Christians are very familiar with it. Many non-Christians are familiar with it as well. But because the focus of the passage in on mission, the earthshattering revelation Jesus shares gets lost in the mix: He changes the Name of God. The disciples, Jesus says, are to go make disciples, baptizing them: “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
Meier deftly points out what is rarely noticed, what in that first-century Jewish context would have been the unequivocally clear, but cosmos shattering significance of Jesus’ words: “Certainly, one could hardly imagine a more forceful proclamation of Christ’s divinity—and, incidentally, of the Spirit’s distinct personality—than this listing together, on a level of equality, of Father, Son, and Spirit” (John P. Meier, Matthew: New Testament Message 3, p. 371)
In this concise but supremely incisive remark, Meier makes three massively important points: First, Jesus “forcefully proclaims” the “distinct personality” of the Spirit. In other words, He doesn’t simply describe the Spirit as it was depicted in the Old Testament, namely as “God’s Spirit”, an impersonal force, an attribute of God, an extension of or even a kind of euphemism for God’s activity in the world. Rather, He presents the Spirit as having a distinct personality, as being a completely separate and unique individual, as a distinct “Person” within the Godhead.
Second, as this terse baptismal formula just naturally rolls off His lips, Jesus stunningly places the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit on the same level, a level of equality with one another. He “forcefully proclaims” that the Father, the Son—Himself—and the Holy Spirit are “coequal”.
And third, Jesus prefaces this coequal relationship He describes the three Divine Persons who form the Godhead as having with “in the Name of”. As anyone familiar with ancient Judaism will know, back then a person’s name was thought to capture, express, and even reveal their true identity—Who they really are. In the deepest part of themselves.
Later in his commentary on this verse, Meier goes on to point out that the Name the disciples are to invoke when baptizing new disciples is none other than the Name. The Divine Name.
In the context of this passage, where the Risen Lord Jesus, the Son, has already declared in verse 18 that the “all authority in heaven and earth”, that authority which belongs to God alone, has been given to Him by the Father, Jesus’ command to baptize in a Name which includes the Father and the Son can be none other than the very Name of God.
But the baptismal formula He tells them to use contains a mind-blowing revelation: It includes the Holy Spirit as the Third Divine Person in full equality with the Father and the Son. By telling His disciples to baptize in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Jesus has just revealed that this is the Divine Name, and thus the ultimate truth about God, the Divine Identity, Who God is in His innermost being.
In the language of first century Judaism, there could be no more clear, simple, or more emphatic way to reveal the One God as Three Persons. There could be no more clear, simple, or emphatic way to reveal that this is the most profound insight into God’s true nature, the most intimate gaze into God’s very Being.
Just from this, it couldn’t be any clearer that Jesus couldn’t have been any clearer about revealing a “Trinitarian” understanding of God. No, He doesn’t use that specific term. But He does reveal that specific understanding, precisely what the term is later used as shorthand to describe. He may not have used the word; but He certainly couldn’t have proclaimed what the word points to more forcefully.
Given an accurate understanding of ancient Judaism’s approach to names and especially the Divine Name, this much is beyond question: Jesus was as clear and explicit about the One God being Three Persons as He could be. He revealed the Trinity before the term was used to describe it. This shows that the Bible, the New Testament, indeed Jesus Himself, talked about the Trinity. Even if He didn’t use that term itself. At least not in so many words.
But there’s something even more astounding to note about this verse. Being Jewish, Jesus and His disciples already knew the Name of God! God Himself had already revealed His name, and thus His true identity, to them—way back in Exodus, through Moses, in the passage about the burning bush. In Exodus 3:14, God Himself appears to Moses from a burning bush and forcefully proclaims that His Name is “Eyweh asher Eyweh”, translated as “I am that am”, or “I am who am”, or simply “I AM”. The idea being that God is the very ground of our being, existence itself. God is the one necessary being. He’s the one thing that exists that is not contingent, not dependent on anything else for its existence. He is “being-ness” itself. “I AM” is what God had revealed the Divine Identity to be, the ultimate truth about the Divine Nature.
And in verse 15, God punctuates all of this by declaring to Moses that this shall be His Name forever! Eternally. Unchangingly.
The name that God reveals to Moses in Exodus 3:14, ‘Eyweh” is actually the first person, “I am”, form of Yahweh, which is the third person form of the same Hebrew root, rendered colloquially “He is” or “He who is”. (Roughly, the Hebrew root is our verb “to be”) Yahweh is the Third Person form of the Divine Name God reveals in the First Person to Moses.
Jews regarded that name, the divine Name, Yahweh, as being so sacred they wouldn’t even pronounce it. By the time of Jesus it was only pronounced once a year, in the Holy of Holies, by the High Priest, on the feast of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
It wasn’t just using the Lord’s name in vain that was forbidden. Even using the Divine Name in a positive way, in prayer or praise for example, was absolutely forbidden. To utter the Name in any context could get you stoned to death. On the spot. That’s what the Law declared.
Because the Name was believed to reveal the Divine Identity, the most profound knowledge and intimate insight God Himself had given into His very nature and being, it was revered as too sacred to be uttered, to be found on the lips of any ordinary man or woman. Because the Name contained and communicated the Divine Identity, it was held to be too precious, too sacred for mundane use. It was only to be uttered in the most extraordinary and holy of contexts. To do otherwise was to be reckless with and even trample upon the Divine Identity Itself. Hence, it was understood as blasphemy, the most heinous offence against God, punishable by immediate death.
So just stop and think for a second how horrifying, how anathema, how unfathomable Jesus’s forceful proclamation of the “new and improved” Divine Name as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit would be Jewish ears, to His own disciples. With breathtaking brevity, He just changed the unchangeable Name. He just dared to declare that He possesses a more intimate knowledge of the innermost Being of God than the eternal Name that God Himself had already revealed contains. You can’t do that—unless you’re God Himself!
What’s worse, Jesus modifies the identity of God in a way that first-century Jews would have found utterly unrecognizable. Actually, they would recognize it. As paganism. Polytheistic. Pure Blasphemy. Pure folly, a logically impossible.
So, who does Jesus think He is? What right does He have to modify what God had already—and definitively—revealed concerning the ultimate truth about the Divine Identity? How does He know that God’s innermost being is Tri-Personal? How can He make such a heretical suggestion? How can the One God of Israel be Three Persons? How does Jesus know that this is Who God really is?
See, while this verse settles all debate about whether the understanding of the One God being Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is found in Scripture, while it settles all debate that that what would later be called the Trinity is found on the lips of Jesus, it raises another huge problem: Given their massive reverence for the Divine Name and all it revealed about the Divine Identity, what first-century Jew would ever dare to think they had the authority to modify the Divine Name, let alone in such a radical and blatantly blasphemous way?
As a skeptical person, one of the things I dare to think when I come across passages like this is one in Matthew 28 is: How do we know that Matthew didn’t just invent this Trinitarian formula? Or someone else in the Early Church? How do we know Jesus is the one responsible for this new Name for God?
Unlocking the historical context yields the answer that enjoys a high degree of accuracy. See, if you put yourself into the mindset of a first-century Jew, it’s easy to see how wildly unlikely it would be for anyone other than Jesus to come up with this understanding. And only after the Resurrection, when the disciples finally came to believe He was Lord, God Incarnate. Because, in that context, only someone who was believed to be God Himself could modify the Divine Name, especially in such an earthshattering way.
Indeed, there are three good reasons no one in the Early Church outside of Jesus would have proposed a Trinitarian understanding of God. Firstly, the idea of the Holy Spirit as a distinct person in the Godhead would have been superfluous. Completely unnecessary. Believing that Jesus was God, along with the Father, was already a huge step for the Early Church. An unthinkable, stupefying, disorienting, heretical, blasphemous, immensely problematical step. There was no appetite—nor need—to introduce another divine person into the mix and force the Early Church to take another jarring, head-spinning leap.
As Jews, it would be easier, safer, far less blasphemous to talk about the Spirit as the Old Testament did, as the spirit of Yahweh, as a sort of euphemism, if you will, for His presence and activity. Or as it were, the spirit of God the Father. Or even as the spirit of Jesus, the presence of the Risen Lord. Indeed, both ways of talking about the Spirit are found in the New Testament, just not as frequently or pervasively as the Holy Spirit being a separate Divine Person Who exercises His own agency and will.
But instead, the Early Church does take this baffling, additional step which further jolts them out of the security of their Jewish worldview. And they do it in the face of the sure-fire, ready-made understanding provided in the Old Testament that would have been so much easier for them to live with. A way they were already perfectly comfortable with. A way that came without all the extra baggage. A way that wouldn’t further upset their already beautifully fractured worldview, confusing and complicating it twice as much.
In coming to terms with a Crucified Lord, they had already absorbed so much. But at least there was a catalyst for making this move they couldn’t deny: the Resurrection. With the Holy Spirit, there is no such catalyst. Pentecost wouldn’t be enough to push them beyond their Old Testament understanding that it was God’s spirit manifesting itself in such extraordinary and magnificent ways. No, there was nothing like the Resurrection to compel them to include the Holy Spirit along with Jesus in the Godhead. It is a completely unnecessary and superfluous step to see the Spirit as anything more than the Old Testament presented it to be: an extension of Yahweh. Understanding the spirit to be the spirit of the Father and/or the presence of the Risen Lord, would have suited them just fine.
But wouldn’t such a monumental leap in believing Jesus to be divine make belief in the Holy Spirit a much smaller step, perhaps even the natural next step? That’s what I suspected for many years.
To be sure, there is no doubt that believing in Jesus’ divinity was the truly quantum leap. Nothing else compares. It relativizes everything else. But even after coming to believe Jesus is Lord, belief in the Holy Spirit as another divine person was neither natural nor without massive complication.
And that leads to the second point: For those first disciples, it would have already been hard enough trying to convince their fellow Jews that Jesus was Lord. That, in other words, God was no longer One, but Two Persons, Father and Son. Adding a Third Person to the Godhead would add insult to injury. Two Persons would present a nearly insurmountable stumbling block for most Jews. Presenting the Holy Spirit as another Person in the Godhead, as opposed to simply presenting the spirit as the spirit of God the Father and/or the spirit of Jesus, would make the early Christians look like they were multiplying deities, creating a whole new Pantheon, only now of Christian Gods. Any Jew back then would vehemently object: How far are you going to take this? Where will this bewildering and blasphemous contagion end?
If the early Christians stopped at Jesus, at least there would be a limit, as unthinkable and unbearable as One God in Two Persons would be. And at least that could be explained by the Resurrection, an event that, if believed, seemed to compel such a response.
But belief in the Holy Spirit was a totally unnecessary and gratuitous development. A development that would offend potential Jewish converts and confuse Pagans ones, who the early Christians insisted must become monotheists like themselves if they wanted to convert to Christianity. In the wake of the explosive proclamation of Jesus’ Lordship and the way it appeared to undermine Jewish monotheism, it is hard to imagine a more counterproductive move than to add another divine person. Doing so only exposed the Early Church to more intense and devastating Jewish critique and made the fledgling Faith more vulnerable to Pagan distortion. Doing so only doubled down on what was already the height of folly and scandal in the ancient world. So, what motive would any early Christian have to make this move? They had no reason to—and every reason not to.
But the third and most important consideration is that no first-century Jew would ever dare to make such a move. Given how highly they revered the Divine Name, given that it revealed the most precious truth a first-century Jew could know—the Divine Identity—given that none of this could be revealed except by God Himself, who else but God would be understood to have the authority to reveal a radically new Divine Name, to reveal a deeper level of the Divine Identity? Maybe more to the point, who among those early Jewish-Christians believers would ever accept or embrace such a move if it came from another member of the church, a mere mortal, even a mere mortal “claiming” divine revelation?
If you put yourself in a first-century Jewish mindset, it becomes clear how wildly unlikely it would be that any of those early Jewish disciples would dare tinker with the Divine Name so as to add the Holy Spirit to it. Because nothing is more profound or ultimate or intimate or personal when it comes to God’s identity, it could only come from the lips of God Himself. The only person who had the authority to change the very Name of God is God Himself.
But it is only after the Resurrection, after they believe that Jesus had appeared to them risen from the dead, that those first Jewish disciples came to believe that Jesus is God. So, it is only in a post-resurrection context, most likely during a resurrection appearance, that they could ever find the revelation of a new Name for God intelligible.
And this means that the most intelligible way to understand how they came to a Trinitarian understanding is that Jesus, in their eyes now God Himself, somehow communicated to them that the deepest truth about the divine identity is that it is One God in Three coequal Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Anything is possible, I know. Maybe somebody in the early church made the Trinity up. Maybe Matthew invented it. But while anything is possible, it is wildly unlikely that anyone but Jesus was responsible for the drastic change that takes place from Exodus 3:14 to Matthew 28:19. The only person a first-century Jew would ever dare imagine having the authority to make such a radical change in the understanding of Who God is in God’s innermost Being would be God Himself—would be Jesus in a post-resurrection appearance.
In the next several blogs I’m going to talk about how pervasive the idea of the Trinity is not only in Scripture but even prior, in the Early Church, as far back as we can trace, before any New Testament book was even written. In the process, I’ll introduce you to the other two members of my “Trinity of Scholars” as I share how they make this argument and demonstrate how early and prevalent belief in God as Three Persons, Father, Son, and Spirit, was.
I would love to hear your thoughts on all of this. Please go to the “Contact E. J.” Page of the Raising Jesus website and leave your comments there. I look forward to hearing from you!
