The Paradox of Trinity
7/18/20243 min read
Greek Philosophy's Influence on the Trinity Doctrine
As Bible scholars John McClintock and James Strong explain: "Towards the end of the 1st century, and during the 2d, many learned men came over both from Judaism and paganism to Christianity. These brought with them into the Christian schools of theology their Platonic ideas and phraseology" (Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, 1891, Vol. 10, "Trinity," p. 553).
Many of the church leaders who formulated the doctrine of the Trinity were steeped in Greek and Platonic philosophy, and this influenced their religious views and teaching. The language they used in describing and defining the Trinity is, in fact, taken directly from Platonic and Greek philosophy. The word trinity itself is neither biblical nor Christian. Rather, the Platonic term trias, from the word for three, was Latinized as trinitas—the latter giving us the English word trinity.
Why Jesus can’t be God according to Bible?
1. I am a man (John 8:40)
2. I am a son of man (Matthew 11:19)
3. God sent me ONLY to the LOST SHEEP OF ISRAEL (Matthew 15:24 and Matthew 10:5-6)
4. God is GREATER than me (John 14:28)
5. God sent me to proclaim to the Israelites that He is one and ONLY (Mark 12:29 and John 17:3)
6. God sent me to tell the Israelites that He is the ONLY one to be served and worshipped (Matthew 4:10, Mark 12:30)
7. God didn't send me as a God to be served and worshipped but to serve and worship Him only. (Matthew 20:28)
8. ANYBODY who worship me, is wasting his/ her precious critical time. (Matthew 15:9)
9. I never ever claimed to be God because I have God to whom I cried and prayed (Matthew 27:46 and Matthew 26:39)
10. I can't do ANYTHING on my own. I do only what God commands me to do. (John 5:19, 30)
If, still with what Jesus said about himself above, someone continues to say Jesus is God,then there are at least TWO Gods. Jesus and the God he cried and prayed to in Matthew27:46, John 11:35 and Matthew 26:39!
And if that's true, then Jesus must be lying in John 17:3 because he said God is one and only.
"The Alexandria catechetical school, which revered Clement of Alexandria and Origen, the greatest theologian of the Greek Church, as its heads, applied the allegorical method to the explanation of Scripture. Its thought was influenced by Plato: its strong point was [pagan] theological speculations. Athanasius and the three Cappadocians [the men whose Trinitarian views were adopted by the Catholic Church at the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople] had been included among its members" (Hubert Jedin, Ecumenical Councils of the Catholic Church: an Historical Outline, 1960, p. 28).
The preface to historian Edward Gibbons' History of Christianity sums up the Greek influence on the adoption of the Trinity doctrine by stating: "If Paganism was conquered by Christianity, it is equally true that Christianity was corrupted by Paganism. The pure Deism [basic religion, in this context] of the first Christians . . . was changed, by the Church of Rome, into the incomprehensible dogma of the trinity. Many of the pagan tenets, invented by the Egyptians and idealized by Plato, were retained as being worthy of belief" (1883, p. xvi). (See "How Ancient Trinitarian Gods Influenced Adoption of the Trinity".)
The link between Plato's teachings and the Trinity as adopted by the Catholic Church centuries later is so strong that Edward Gibbon, in his masterwork The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, referred to Plato as "the Athenian sage, who had thus marvelously anticipated one of the most surprising discoveries of the Christian revelation"—the Trinity (1890, Vol. 1, p. 574).
