JoyJuice

I was browsing Peter Kirby's, Early Christian Writings trying to see about when the idea of the trinity developed, and from which early Christians it developed under, but it seems like a lot of browsing.

So I appeal to you fine individuals as to who they were, and whether they were Greek, or Pagan converts, or both?

And if this to be true is there anything to make of this or is this a mere coincidence?

thanks~

Amaleq13

1 John 5:7 is your explicit biblical reference and Cyprian, Treatise I, is the earliest reference to this passage according to Kirby's link to e-Catena.

Believe it or not, there is some dispute about the possibility of this passage being an interpolation.

That should at least provide a starting point for your search.

SLD

This is an interpolation? What are the arguments for that? Just because it doesn't fit?

SLD

seeker

There is no 1 John 5:7. I think you are referring to John 1:1
I hadn't heard that it was thought to be an interpolation before. Do you have more information about that?

Amaleq13

There is some debate on the subject because the phrase, according to the NIV, is apparently "not found in any Greek manuscript before the sixteenth century".

The phrase in question: "the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one"

Cyprian apparently only quotes "And these three are one." but that, alone, would seem to be sufficient to establish the concept's existence.

See above but below as well:

"For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one." (KJV)

"because three are who are testifying [in the heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these -- the three -- are one;"(YLT)

Mageth

http://www.blueletterbible.org/tmp_d...92-3014.html#7

From the above link:

So what the older mss actually say in 1 Jn 5:7-8 is something along the lines of:

For there are three that bear record, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one. (KJV)

asymptoticgiant

I am curious why there is so much interest in the patristic and conciliar doctrine of the Trinity of God. This topic shows up with almost predictable regularity. Do people think it is deliberate irrationality (like maintaining 3=1)? Or do they perceive it as a liability in a christian posture, worth exploiting as a counter to evangelism? Is it something entirely different from these guesses of mine? Well, I am curious.

SLD

Well, that got me thinking, we've got a lot of ancient bibles. So I checked the Codex Alexandrinus in the Catholic Encyclopedia online, and sure enough, it ain't there:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04080c.htm

That pretty much settles it. It's definitely got to be an interpolation from much later.

I've also been reading a book on Early Church Thought, and have just been reading of the battles between the Niceans (i.e. the modern day trinity) and the Arians. What's interesting is that they didn't debate much scripture on this issue. Or at least the book I'm reading doesn't discuss such much in the way of scripture debates on the subject. But even more interesting is that Eusebius was not a supporter of the Niceans, and was in fact an Arian and he was the one who baptized Constantine on his deathbed. Eusebius claims that Nicean Trinitarian doctrine was contradicted or at least not supported by scripture. It's a strange crazy mixed up theological debate that ultimately points to its failings as a religion.

SLD

chimaira

The only verses in the whole Bible that explicitly ties God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit in one "Triune" being is the verse of 1 John 5:7


"For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one."


This is the type of clear, decisive, and to-the-point verse I have been asking for. However, as I would later find out, this verse is now universally recognized as being a later "insertion" of the Church and all recent versions of the Bible, such as the Revised Standard Version the New Revised Standard Version, the New American Standard Bible, the New English Bible, the Phillips Modern English Bible ...etc. have all unceremoniously expunged this verse from their pages. Why is this? The scripture translator Benjamin Wilson gives the following explanation for this action in his "Emphatic Diaglott." Mr. Wilson says:


"This text concerning the heavenly witness is not contained in any Greek manuscript which was written earlier than the fifteenth century. It is not cited by any of the ecclesiastical writers; not by any of early Latin fathers even when the subjects upon which they treated would naturally have lead them to appeal to it's authority. It is therefore evidently spurious."


Others, such as the late Dr. Herbert W. Armstrong argued that this verse was added to the Latin Vulgate edition of the Bible during the heat of the controversy between Rome, Arius, and God's people. Whatever the reason, this verse is now universally recognized as an insertion and discarded. Since the Bible contains no verses validating a "Trinity" therefore, centuries after the departure of Jesus, God chose to inspire someone to insert this verse in order to clarify the true nature of God as being a "Trinity." Notice how mankind was being inspired as to how to "clarify" the Bible centuries after the departure of Jesus (pbuh). People continued to put words in the mouths of Jesus, his disciples, and even God himself with no reservations whatsoever. They were being "inspired" (see chapter two).


If these people were being "inspired" by God, I wondered, then why did they need to put these words into other people's mouths (in our example, in the mouth of John). Why did they not just openly say "God inspired me and I will add a chapter to the Bible in my name"? Also, why did God need to wait till after the departure of Jesus to "inspire" his "true" nature? Why not let Jesus say it himself?


The great luminary of Western literature, Mr. Edward Gibbon, explains the reason for the discardal of this verse from the pages of the Bible with the following words:


"Of all the manuscripts now extant, above fourscore in number, some of which are more than 1200 years old, the orthodox copies of the Vatican, of the Complutensian editors, of Robert Stephens are becoming invisible; and the two manuscripts of Dublin and Berlin are unworthy to form an exception...In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Bibles were corrected by LanFrank, Archbishop of Canterbury, and by Nicholas, a cardinal and librarian of the Roman church, secundum Ortodoxam fidem. Notwithstanding these corrections, the passage is still wanting in twenty-five Latin manuscripts, the oldest and fairest; two qualities seldom united, except in manuscripts....The three witnesses have been established in our Greek Testaments by the prudence of Erasmus; the honest bigotry of the Complutensian editors; the typographical fraud, or error, of Robert Stephens in the placing of a crotchet and the deliberate falsehood, or strange misapprehension, of Theodore Beza."

"Decline and fall of the Roman Empire," IV, Gibbon, p. 418.


Edward Gibbon was defended in his findings by his contemporary, the brilliant British scholar Richard Porson who also proceeded to publish devastatingly conclusive proof that the verse of 1 John 5:7 was only first inserted by the Church into the Bible in the year 400C.E.(Secrets of Mount Sinai, James Bentley, pp. 30-33).


Regarding Porson's most devastating proof, Mr. Gibbon later said


"His structures are founded in argument, enriched with learning, and enlivened with wit, and his adversary neither deserves nor finds any quarter at his hands. The evidence of the three heavenly witnesses would now be rejected in any court of justice; but prejudice is blind, authority is deaf, and our vulgar Bibles will ever be polluted by this spurious text."


To which Mr. Bentley responds:


"In fact, they are not. No modern Bible now contains the interpolation."


Mr. Bentley, however, is mistaken. Indeed, just as Mr. Gibbon had predicted, the simple fact that the most learned scholars of Christianity now unanimously recognize this verse to be a later interpolation of the Church has not prevented the preservation of this fabricated text in our modern Bibles. To this day, the Bible in the hands of the majority of Christians, the "King James" Bible, still unhesitantly includes this verse as the "inspired" word of God without so much as a footnote to inform the reader that all scholars of Christianity of note unanimously recognize it as a later fabrication.


Peake's Commentary on the Bible says


"The famous interpolation after 'three witnesses' is not printed even in RSVn, and rightly. It cites the heavenly testimony of the Father, the logos, and the Holy Spirit, but is never used in the early Trinitarian controversies. No respectable Greek MS contains it. Appearing first in a late 4th-cent. Latin text, it entered the Vulgate and finally the NT of Erasmus."


It was only the horrors of the great inquisitions which held back Sir Isaac Newton from openly revealing these facts to all:


"In all the vehement universal and lasting controversy about the Trinity in Jerome's time and both before and long enough after it, the text of the 'three in heaven' was never once thought of. It is now in everybody's mouth and accounted the main text for the business and would assuredly have been so too with them, had it been in their books… Let them make good sense of it who are able. For my part I can make none. If it be said that we are not to determine what is scripture and what not by our private judgments, I confess it in places not controverted, but in disputed places I love to take up with what I can best understand. It is the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries, and for that reason to like best what they understand least. Such men may use the Apostle John as they please, but I have that honor for him as to believe that he wrote good sense and therefore take that to be his which is the best"

According to Newton, this verse first appeared for in the third edition of Erasmus's (1466-1536) New Testament.


For all of the above reasons, we find that when thirty two biblical scholars backed by fifty cooperating Christian denominations got together to compile the Revised Standard Version of the Bible based upon the most ancient Biblical manuscripts available to them today, they made some very extensive changes. Among these changes was the unceremonious discardal of the verse of 1 John 5:7 as the fabricated insertion that it is. For more on the compilation of the RSV Bible, please read the preface of any modern copy of that Bible.


Such comparatively unimportant matters as the description of Jesus (pbuh) riding an ass (or was it a "colt", or was it an "ass and a colt"? see point 42 in the table of section 2.2) into Jerusalem are spoken about in great details since they are the fulfillment of a prophesy. For instance, in Mark 11:2-10 we read:


"And saith unto them, Go your way into the village over against you: and as soon as ye be entered into it, ye shall find a colt tied, whereon never man sat; loose him, and bring [him]. And if any man say unto you, Why do ye this? say ye that the Lord hath need of him; and straightway he will send him hither. And they went their way, and found the colt tied by the door without in a place where two ways met; and they loose him And certain of them that stood there said unto them, What do ye, loosing the colt? And they said unto them even as Jesus had commanded: and they let them go And they brought the colt to Jesus, and cast their garments on him; and he sat upon him. And many spread their garments in the way: and others cut down branches off the trees, and strawed [them] in the way And they that went before, and they that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna; Blessed [is] he that cometh in the name of the Lord: Blessed [be] the kingdom of our father David, that cometh in the name of the Lord: Hosanna in the highest."


Also see Luke 19:30-38 which has a similar detailed description of this occurrence. On the other hand, the Bible is completely free of any description of the "Trinity" which is supposedly a description of the very nature of the one who rode this ass, who is claimed to be the only son of God, and who allegedly died for the sins of all of mankind. I found myself asking the question: If every aspect of Christian faith is described in such detail such that even the description of this ass is so vividly depicted for us, then why is the same not true for the description of the "Trinity"? Sadly, however, it is a question for which there is no logical answer.

Infidelettante

You may find these verses helpful in understanding the scriptural foundation of the trinity.

Matthew 28:19 Baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit

I Corinthians 12:4-6. now there are diversities of gifts but one Spirit. And there are differences of administrations but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations but it is the same God which worketh all in all.

II Corinthians 13:14. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost be with you all.

Ephesians 4:4-6. There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling. One Lord, one faith, one baptism. One God and Father of all who is above all and through all and in you all.

I Peter 1:2. Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father through sanctification of the Spirit unto the obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Christ: Grace unto you and peace be multiplied.

JT