The Bible's Lack of a Trinity Doctrine Examined

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Introduction

There are few things more frustrating than trying to get a Trinitarian Christian to understand how completely made up the Trinity doctrine is when they’re not willing to listen to reason. I don’t know what hidden appeal the idea of the Trinity has, but there must be some comfort that people take in it or else they wouldn’t be so stubborn about believing in it despite its lack of support from the Bible or its late origination in the religion. (On the other hand, maybe it’s just that universal instinct to believe what you were brought up to believe even if it’s irrational to do so; the Koran complains again and again about this.)

This paper is written in the hopes that it can wake some Christians up to the truly made up and completely groundless nature of one of their religion’s central doctrines, that of the Trinity. I can only hope that the paper turns out to be persuasive enough to break through that instinct to keep believing. All I ask is that the reader read this with an open mind.

The Implication of the 1 John 5:7 Forgery

It is now a well known fact that the following verse, the only verse of the Bible which actually states the Trinity doctrine, is a medieval insertion to the text:

For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. (1 John 5:7, King James Version)

Christians these days understand this without understanding what the existence of this forgery obviously means: there would not have been such a forgery if a desperate need for one did not exist. In other words, the fact of the 1 John 5:7 insertion logically indicates that the Trinity doctrine is so completely without a biblical basis that a biblical basis had to be forged. At this point the Trinitarian will be telling me that whoever made the addition just didn’t know that the Trinity doctrine really is in the Bible if you read between the lines, and thought that we needed something more explicit. They’ll also tell me that the Bible refers to both Jesus (peace be on him) and the Holy Spirit as being God, and that is enough. But I will demonstrate in the sections below (and have, in fact, already demonstrated elsewhere on this page, in my refutation of Answering Islam’s article on the Trinity) just how untrue all of that is.

Matthew 28:19 and 2 Corinthians 13:14

With 1 John 5:7 gone, these are the only two verses in the Bible which mention the names “Father”, “Son” and “Holy Spirit” in the same sentence, and neither of them suggest even remotely that these three are the same:

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28:19)

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. (2 Corinthians 13:14)

That’s it. It’s a long, long way from there to the definitions of the Trinity found in the creeds, and it would be ridiculous to think that the placing of the names in the same sentence means anything, especially when you consider what I’m about to tell you about the phrase “Holy Spirit.”

The True Meaning(s) of the Term “Holy Spirit”

There are several things that the Bible can mean by the phrase “Holy Spirit”, but none of them suggest that it’s God Himself being referred to. (For more information on this than I give in this article, see the section on the phrase “Holy Spirit” in my article “Answering Islam’s Article on the Trinity Refuted”.) First, contrary to the allegations Christians made that we Muslims are being silly when we say that in the Koran the Holy Spirit is Gabriel, the Bible itself sometimes refers to angels as “spirits of God”:

And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders, I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. (Revelation 5:6)

Read through the rest of the relevant chapters of Revelation and it will be clear that these seven spirits are the seven angels in 8:2 and so on. So the term “spirit of God”, which Christians consider synonymous with the term “Holy Spirit”, can mean “angel”. The word “spirit” can also mean “prophet”, as we can tell from 1 John:

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. (1 John 4:1)

Hence the Islamic belief that the Holy Spirit prophesied in John 14-17 is Muhammad (peace be on him). Then, of course, there is the literal meaning of the phrase, which involves the Greek term “spiritos” literally meaning “breath”:

And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit." (John 20:22)

Then there is the more nebulous meaning of the term, in which the spirit is simply the spirit of inspiration, in the ordinary English sense of the word. Christians lump up all of these different meanings, all of which are both obvious and obviously different, under the same definition, and that is precisely why the Holy Spirit is the hardest part of the Trinity to define, the most meaningless of the three phrases. There is no single meaning of the phrase in actuality, but only a long string of different non-Trinitarian meanings, but Christians consider them all to be the same, and so they end up with a term that cannot be clearly defined, or can be only when everyone has a different definition to give. It’s jargon, in other words, nonsense talk. That’s what you get when you oversimplify a complicated series of different meanings of a term--you inevitably end up with a difficult, nebulous, hard to fix, subjectively interpreted meaning on your hands.

The Blessed Jesus’s Express Lack of Divinity in the Gospels

In my article on the Trilemma on this site’s “Christianity” page I have gone through all of the blatant misunderstandings of the words of Jesus (peace be on him) which are purported by Christians to be claims to divinity. Now I will show you other, much clearer verses which say the opposite. First, there is his own, express denial:

And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" And Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: 'Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.'" (Mark 10:17-19)

There is nothing hard to understand about this: the negation involved is unmistakable. Someone ran up and knelt and called him good; he said, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone”; he then proceeds to answer the man’s actual question. The speech, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” is about the clearest possible negation of both being good and being God I can think of. (Prophets tended to be modest about their own goodness.) The first sentence introduces the idea of him being good in a question. The second sentence then says that no one is good but God. It would be like if you ran up to me and said, “Great surgeon, how do I make a proper incision in the heart?” and I said, “Why do you call me a great surgeon? No one is a great surgeon but someone with the proper training.” Hence, I am denying being a great surgeon. Think about it and you’ll find that you can plug in any number of such scenarios and they all will clearly involve denial. The only other possibility is that I am making the statement in question to get the other guy to realize that he is indeed talking to a great surgeon, but that isn’t plausible since he already knows or else he wouldn’t have called me that. Blatantly, I am denying being a great surgeon. So it is with the scriptural passage.

And in addition to denying being God, Jesus (peace be on him) even prayed to God:

And in the morning, a great while before day, he rose and went out to a lonely place, and there he prayed. (Mark 1:35)

He also accused God of forsaking him:

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, "Eli, Eli, la'ma sabach-tha'ni?" that is, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46)

Does it not look to you like this is a mere human being that these verses are referring to, especially when he unmistakably said himself that he was nothing more? Christians always respond to this with the incoherent statement that Jesus (peace be on him) was both perfect God and perfect man at the same time. But this is a circular response, since it assumes that there is any reason to think he was God in the first place, which is exactly what I’m pointing out is not the case. You can’t be both perfect God and perfect man if you aren’t God to begin with, never said you were (c.f. “The Trilemma Refuted”, “Christianity” page) and even unmistakably said you weren’t, as I established above. (Besides, it’s in my experience that the “perfect God and perfect man” response is nothing more than a cop-out, a paradoxical way to evade doctrinal problems which Christians use only when something threatens their beliefs.)

The Temporal Gap Problem

As much as some Christian missionaries would like you to think that the Trinity doctrine was held by even the earliest Christians, it obviously was not since it did not appear in Christian writings for the first two hundred and fifty or so years of the religion. There is nothing written about the Trinity until the years preceding the official establishment of the doctrine in 325. Ordinarily I don’t like arguments from silence, but this is one of the few that works. I just can’t believe that if a doctrine were there from the start, no one wrote about it until the fourth century. It’s just too much of a strange fluke to swallow.

And as such, the late development of the doctrine betrays its artificiality. It was an innovation, and certainly wasn’t something that could be found in the teachings of Jesus (peace be on him) himself. Be reasonable here: if a doctrine is not to be found in the Bible and did not originate until over a quarter of a millenium after the religion started, is there really any reason to believe in it? Is it not just obviously false and heretical? Aren’t the Bible and the teachings of Jesus (peace be on him) in supposed to be the only sources of Christian doctrine? Think about that. Think about everything I’ve said. Please.