Transcript

trinities 291 - From one God to two gods to three "Gods" - John 1 and early Christian theologies

From khanpadawan · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 52 min · 8,937 words · 51 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "trinities 291 - From one God to two gods to three "Gods" - John 1 and early Christian theologies", an episode of khanpadawan published April 13, 2020 (52 min, about 8,937 words). It mentions 10 people, works and ideas, including Justin Martyr, Origen, Thomas Jefferson, Proverbs, Gospel according to John.

What this episode is about

In this thought-provoking episode of "Trinities," the host delves into the complexities of early Christian theology, specifically examining the prologue of the Gospel of John. By exploring the historical context of the text, the discussion challenges modern interpretations that project later concepts of the Trinity onto the original writings. Listeners will gain insights into the nuances of language and theology, as the episode raises critical questions about the nature of God as presented in John’s Gospel and the implications of anachronism in biblical interpretation.

Key takeaways

  • Avoid the anachronism trap: projecting modern ideas onto ancient texts is like claiming Jefferson invented Wi-Fi.
  • John's Gospel isn't a triune puzzle; it’s a one-God riddle waiting for a historical context to be solved.
  • When reading John, remember: one God, two references, and a whole lot of theological speculation in between.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Thomas Jefferson, Emperor Theodosius, Gospel according to John
  2. – 10:00: Millard Erickson
  3. – 20:00: Justin Martyr, Origen
  4. – 30:00: Justin Martyr, Proverbs
  5. – 35:00: Justin Martyr
  6. – 40:00: Origen
  7. – 45:00: Augusta, Justin Martyr, Origen
  8. – 50:00: Eusebius, Justin Martyr, Proverbs
  9. – 52:08: Proverbs

Notable quotes from "trinities 291 - From one God to two gods to three "Gods" - John 1 and early Christian theologies"

  • About multiple persons in one God and so on now let me make an analogy imagine that you're reading a letter by Thomas Jefferson written in the year 1775 and in that letter he…
    about Thomas Jefferson · at
  • When this triune God language was enforced on the church by the Emperor Theodosius the idea of a triune God was made mandatory by the emperor in the year 381 at the second…
    about Emperor Theodosius · at
  • Far as consistency is concerned Trinitarian evangelical theologian Millard Erickson says commenting on this passage the issue of the paradoxical relationship of the Sun or word…
    about Millard Erickson · at
  • Of God is this lesser God basically and this is what the Lagos theorist thought people like Justin Martyr in fact he seems to have kind of started this whole log austerity…
    about Justin Martyr · at
  • Existed and God created through him he's there as well and this is exactly what Origen thought and what Tertullian thought now is that a good idea I'll come back to that in a bit okay so I think as far as you know.
    about Origen · at
  • That equates God's Word with gods of wisdom that I think connects John's prologue to proverbs chapter 8 but I'm not going to talk about that today for lack of time so if we go…
    about Proverbs · at
  • Idea of different persons same God so here we have the famous western bishop Augusta in mangling John 17 one through three he says well the proper order of the words is that…
    about Augusta · at
  • 381 and Beyond right you had the so-called Aryan barbarian tribes Eusebius the famous church historian that you've probably heard of he thought this exactly greater and a…
    about Eusebius · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

Books & papers

  • Proverbs — Book · 3 mentions · first at
  • Gospel according to John — Book · 1 mention · first at
    Original audience in the last couple of years I have bought and read many commentaries on the Gospel according to John and most of them are when they get to the prologue…

Places & events

Full transcript with timestamps

this talk I'm going to give you is called from one God to two gods to three quote gods and this is part of a wider project of mine to try to understand the prologue of the fourth gospel as it was actually understood when it was written and when it was first received by the original audience in the last couple of years I have bought and read many many commentaries on the Gospel according to John and most of them are when they get to the prologue they're incredibly distracted by later ideas they just cannot get themselves to try to get into John's head and what this might have meant when the gospel was originally written they immediately start talking about multiple persons in one God and so on now let me make an analogy imagine that you're reading a letter by Thomas Jefferson written in the year 1775 and in that letter he says something about you know he wants this new country that he hopes to help found to be you know

truly connected or something like this and you reading this and you say to yourself aha Thomas Jefferson invented the Internet that's just wrong right he wasn't talking about the Internet even if he says something about an information superhighway I mean it's just coincidence right the idea of the Internet never entered into his mind and the internet just has nothing to do with Thomas Jefferson's writings and even if you try to smudge it a little bit and say maybe the roots of the Internet are here maybe the foundations of the Internet are here or you try to fudge it kind of have it both ways it is about the Internet and it's not no that's just wrong it's an anachronism to think that Thomas Jefferson is ever saying anything about the Internet I'm talking about the problem that historians call anachronism this is when you project back in history something that just didn't exist at that time now

whenever the Gospel of John was written and this is a matter of dispute some think it was in the 90s some think it was somewhat earlier decades earlier than that but let's say it was written between 50 and 100 AD whenever John was written there's a big big time gap - when this triune God language was enforced on the church by the Emperor Theodosius the idea of a triune God was made mandatory by the emperor in the year 381 at the second ecumenical council at Constantinople you don't even see any reference to this idea of three persons in one God until right before that Council really like the three 70s mostly it wasn't a required idea it was people speculating okay well the Emperor came in said the latter day nigh scenes are correct everybody else is a heretic they don't count as Christians we're gonna seize their churches get rid of their bishops okay so when this idea of a triune God became mandatory is pretty precise it

was 381 so whenever John was written there's more time between when John was written and when the Trinity was promulgated the triune God doctrine there's more time between those two things and there is between our time and Thomas Jefferson there's a vast time gap between 2020 and 1775 right was even a vaster time gap between 381 and 95 ok so when we're reading John and we're trying to figure out what he is and is not saying in his very interesting introductory portion here we have to just put off to one side these later ideas because we know they never entered into his mind the idea of three hypotheses and one who sia a tri-personal god he doesn't mention this in his gospel he doesn't imply it he doesn't presuppose it any God he talks about as a single person what I'm going to spend the most time worrying about in this presentation is what on earth is he up to here in this opening salvo this sentence with three

claims in it so he says in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God that's how it's usually translated and my question is is he referring to the same God twice or is he referring to two different gods so uses different forms of the Greek word Theo's two times in this passage he says Hika lagos aint procced on Theon and the word was with god and then kai Thais ain't Allah Gauss and God was the word how many gods is he talking about is he referring to the same one twice or is he referring to two different ones and he and there's two different reference to the word God that's the question of interpretation now some people want to fuss endlessly about how to translate that last phrase it doesn't use the word V in front of God when he says God was the word in the last part there and so technically it could be translated Oh God and some people like the Jehovah's Witnesses

argue that it should be translated and the word was of God others like to say no it's not a God they correctly make the point that in the New Testament you can refer to God with or without the the with or without the definite article you know typically it uses the word the hoff a Oz but it doesn't have to and it can still refer to God you don't have to translate it as a god just because it's lacking the word thee in front of it some modern translators say no it's something like the word was divine or what God was the word was or things like this I don't really think it matters because the question is going to be the same however you translate this and I don't think fussing about the translation is gonna answer this question that I'm asking if we translate it Oh God same question okay this God we're talking about that the word is is this the same god we just mentioned before or is it a different one right and if

you're saying that the law Gauss is divine well what is it to be divine it's to be a God so is this God the same God that was mentioned before or is it a different one and if it's saying what God was the word was I mean isn't that just a roundabout way of saying that the word was divine okay so back the same question did we just refer to the same God twice in two different ways which would be this it's talking about one God there one reference or are we talking about two different gods in this passage so that's the question I want to address a lot of people can't bring themselves to address this question and they used this old crutch that hey you know John is a paradoxical kind of guy and he is just not able to be consistent in fact he's inconsistent with himself right here in the very first sentence of his book he just you know he takes one step and he falls flat on his face as far as consistency is concerned

Trinitarian evangelical theologian Millard Erickson says commenting on this passage the issue of the paradoxical relationship of the Sun or word to the Father is faced immediately here in John 1:1 is the seeming contradiction of the word being God and yet not being God right the words with God he must be somebody else then oh but the word was god nope that's just God himself now look when you're interpreting anybody whether you're reading the Bible or a column by humorous Dave berry if you think he's just contradicting himself in an opening sentence I'm okay Dave Barry's a bad example maybe he's just being funny okay but in a serious source if you're interpreting it and the author's contradicting himself right off the bat you've probably made a big mistake because the authors probably not stupid he's probably competent to remain consistent with himself for the space of one sentence so this is really just a non-starter to

start gassing about paradoxes and you know to congratulate John for being super mysterious misery loves company that's a true saying but also confusion loves company and people who are confused about Jesus and God love to project their own confusions onto this book it just lends itself to that because of its abstract terminology but come on let's be serious the guy's not that confused right so let's see what else we can come up with and honestly I don't think that that option was taken seriously early there wasn't this tradition of celebrating apparent contradictions as wonderful mysteries they actually tried to make sense of it now normally in the New Testament when you see the word god it's almost always the father that's just how they use the word now they occasionally depart from this you know they'll refer in Hebrews 1:8 to a God who has a God well that can't be God there's talk about the god

of this world and well that's not God but in any context when you see God in the New Testament there's this general rule and this is expressed by this scholar who wrote a whole book about whether Jesus has called the God in the New Testament and how many times maybe that is and so he's exhaustively surveyed all the usage of the word fayus in the New Testament this is his summation of you know what it means he says whenever they oschter haws EOS that's without the the or with the V whenever those are found in the New Testament we are to assume that hepato the father is the referent unless the context makes this impossible so when you see God do you assume it's the father unless that just doesn't make any sense in the context okay so let's apply this to the sentence that we're looking at here in the beginning was the word and the word was with the Father and the word was the father interesting well remember we're

exploring two options is he talking about the same God in two different ways or was he talking about two different gods are there two different reference for the term thais in this passage so the other option would be in the beginning was the word and the word was with the father and the word was a god not the father himself but somebody else a God in addition to the father so those would be the options now if we put one other assumption in there and I have to say this is just an assumption it's not something that I am telling you is true but it's something that a lot of people bring to the text they look down in verse 14 and it says the word became flesh and dwelt among us okay well starting in at least in verse 14 that's definitely the man Jesus Christ they're talking about alright because it immediately goes off talking about how awesome Jesus is and how he's greater than Moses and everything they

say aha so the word must mean Jesus the same person who later became the man Jesus so if we were to suppose that the log-off's the word here is the son then these would be the two options in the beginning was the son and the son was with the father and the son was the father that should great on your Christian ears or here's the other option in the beginning was the son and the son was with the father and the son was a God in addition to the father hmm maybe a strange thought I thought there was only one God is that really what John is saying that turned out actually to be a surprisingly popular view at least by the time you got to the end of the 100's so there are these four options really in interpreting this sentence either it's the same God or it's not the same God the second god that's mentioned the second face that's mentioned and either we're going to assume that the word just is the son that those are the same one

or not maybe they're different and looks like just logically those are all the options the second face that's mentioned it's either the same God as the one mentioned before or it's another one and the law Gus is either supposed to be the son or it's not this I think is how the earliest well not the earliest but Christians in the era that I'm concerned about looked at this I'm specifically talking about the end of the 100's and the early 200s this is a very difficult subject what was going on in Christian theology in the end of the 100's in the early 200s there aren't a whole lot of sources the sources that we have are all from one side and are just viciously denouncing the other side as horrible heretics and so it's actually quite hard to figure out what all of these people were saying but interestingly if you just map out these four logical options in interpreting John one I believe that

they just map easily onto mainstream Christian theology as of the year say 200 starting in the upper left so if we're assuming that it's the same God and the word is the Sun same beam as the Sun in the beginning was the Sun and the Sun was with the father and the son was the father well this is what those people were saying who historians since the 1800s have called modal istic menarche ins for sometimes they get mocked as Patra posse ins because they think the son is the father so it was the father who got crucified and died well that can't be right you know okay go on over to the next option so if the word is not the son but we're talking about the same God as before when we're talking about the word in the beginning was the word the Word was with the father and the word was the father this is what people are in this era that historians called dynamic monarchy ins thought basically they thought yeah is

there something divine in Jesus yeah in a sense but you know and John Jesus says my father is in me does the works is doing these works through me basically and God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself Paul says and so yeah there is something divine but there's not two natures there's not another person in the man Jesus there's just the man Jesus and then there's like God's wisdom and power and message that's in him that's working through him it's the father working through him so those are called by historians dynamic monarchy ins okay go to the third option bottom left if it's not the same God and the word is the son then you have in the beginning was the son and the son was with the father and the son was a God in addition to the father okay so the son of God is this lesser God basically and this is what the Lagos theorist thought people like Justin Martyr in fact he seems to have kind of started this whole

log austerity thing and I'll tell you more about that in a minute the idea here seems to be that there's this second lesser God at a certain point in time this second lesser God took on a body and that's Jesus so some theologians and historians call this a log ah Sark's christ ology there's a body and there's the law Gauss and that's what Jesus amounted to okay fourth option so the word was not the son this is not the same God we're talking about as before when we're talking about the word so the bottom right of this chart in the beginning was the word the Word was with the father and the word was a God in addition to the father these are LA Goss theorists that said well the one true God now that's the father but there's also this lesser God this lesser God in the fullness of time kind of partnered up with a man and so when you're looking at Jesus there's really two persons there there's the man

miraculously conceived the Son of Mary descended of David and so on there's the man but there's also this ancient lesser deity that was around before the world existed and God created through him he's there as well and this is exactly what Origen thought and what Tertullian thought now is that a good idea I'll come back to that in a bit okay so I think as far as you know roughly around the - the Year 200 is concerned this is what you had as far as interpreting John one you had lagos theorists and then you had monarchy ins of two different kinds I think that's kind of revealing now what is the word end up being on these four options what's the bottom line about the Christ ology against our the upper left here so if the word just is the Sun and we're talking about the same God then the word or the Sun same thing is a mode or attribute or action of God that is of the Father by which God animated a body resulting in Jesus I'm

sorry but I'm pretty sure that's docetism God puppeteering a body that's not a man go down one if it's not the same God but the word is the Sun so now we have the word or the Sun is a lesser God in addition to God the Father who gained a body and so lived as Jesus I'm sorry I think that's docetism right docetism is jesus is not really a man he looks like one sure he actually isn't one he's some other kind of being so why would you think that a lesser deity who could somehow get itself a human body why would you think that was a man why would you think that is as CS Lewis would say son of Adam or a daughter of Eve it looks like it wouldn't be if a demon could somehow get rid of you and take over your body suppose that was possible that demon would not thereby become a human it'd be a demon with a body right if movies have taught me anything they would be talking in a growly voice and drooling and

cursing at priests okay so I mean look it looks like you don't have a human Jesus on these two left options go to the upper right one so the word is not the Son and we're talking about the same God and we talked about the log us being fayus so then the word would be something like a mode like a way God is an attribute or an action of God the Father which was active through the man Jesus that's the dynamic menarche and so you have a man and he's empowered by God to do signs and wonders among you mmm that sounds familiar I think I might have heard that somewhere before fourth option bottom right okay so the word is not the Sun but we're not talking about the same God when we talk about the log-off so the word is a lesser God in addition to God the Father and this lesser God lived in a mysterious union with the man Jesus so you have an ancient divine son I don't say eternal because these log-off's

theorists were really squishy about that some of them like Tertullian very clearly say that god when it was time to create he wanted to not do it directly so then he brought into existence this Lagos and then he had the Lagos great for him they said the Lagos it was already there when creation happened but it's not eternal on that view others said no the Lagos is eternal but if you go back far enough in time it was like God's reason or something I don't think that's coherent I don't think that makes any sense at all but that's what some of them thought okay now I'm not going to talk more about the development of theology right now but some of you who have studied the development of theology in the first four or five hundred years of Christianity which of these four options is the main way that mainstream orthodoxy went by the time you get to the three and four hundreds like which of the four is closed as to what they

thought you think it's the first one there were people who thought that like Marcellus and maybe Athanasius the upper-left one but I would argue that's one of the other ones I think it's the lower right one when they started talking about two natures they had a human nature and a divine nature in Jesus and the natures were beings like selves so the divine nature in Jesus the way they thought about it was it was a god a lesser God they eventually started saying that it was eternal just like God the Father is eternal and then the human nature that was a man so orthodoxy really kind of headed in the direction of the fourth option although they don't talk about two sons they forbade talking about it that way but the two nature's view that one out basically is the same as the fourth option but never mind that our question is what does John mean what is John up to okay let's not get in a tizzy about councils

and later developments we're thinking when this was written in the year ninety or the year 70 68 or whenever this was written what was meant what would the original recipients have understood I think if you move on just slightly in the prologue and see what it says next I think it points us in a certain direction so verse three all things came into being through him that's the word and without him the word not one thing came into being now this is something that John's audience would have been familiar with this idea that God creates through his word was not something new in John's time as a matter of fact if you were paying attention at all in the synagogue or equally well in early Christianity you just couldn't miss this idea of God creating through his word very beginning of the Hebrew Bible in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth God said let there be light and there was light so he created by

speaking now later on he says let us make man in our image and likeness and most contemporary interpreters think that he's addressing the divine council there what we would call angels but even though he says hey let us do this it proceeds then to say that he did it with a singular verb I think it's like when you're hanging out at Thanksgiving and your grandma says hey let's make some more pie we're gonna run out of pie and then she makes it herself so she's kind of announcing her intention but you know she didn't really need your help you're no good at making pie so yeah in the Old Testament God is credited in Genesis with creating everything just by speaking it into existence and obviously the word there is not like a helper for God it's not like there were two involved God oh and also God's Word and it was like a group project that idea just isn't there right another famous passage that sounds more like John

because it talks about the word of the Lord the psalm says by the word of the Lord the heavens were made and all their hosts by the breath of his mouth kind of saying the same thing twice Psalm 148 let them praise the name of the Lord for he commanded and they were created again God does it without any helper without any intermediary he just says it's so and it's so that's pretty impressive way of creating isn't it that's not how we create and we create we have to go and assemble all the materials get yourself a bunch of plywood and screws and nails and stuff then you go to work but God just says let it be and it is okay so you know in the prophets he very emphatically takes 100% of the credit for creating Isaiah 45 12 I made the earth and created humankind upon it it was my hands that stretched out the heavens and I commanded all their hosts isaiah 44:24 i am yahweh who made all things who alone stretched out the

heavens who by myself spread out the earth do you have to take this literally that God you know literally got his hands dirty I don't think so but saying I did it with my own hands is a way of emphatically saying that it was all me like I didn't order this from a catalogue I didn't ask somebody to do this for me it was just a hundred percent me so it's pretty clear that in the Old Testament God's creating word isn't an agent in addition to God there's one actor there's one agent there's one doer there that's the Lord God Almighty and there is talk about his word but word isn't a second God or a second creator or anything like that think this is relevant for interpreting John 1 and I got some help here from somebody you may or may not have heard of do any of you know who Nathaniel Lardner was I wish more people did he is one of the greatest apologists of all time and also one of the greatest

patristic scholars of all time he had this insanely a cyclopædia acknowledge of ancient sources and he could read them in the original languages and he published these giant tomes kind of defending the reliability of the New Testament writings by comparing them with other ancient writings and he was what we would call a biblical Unitarian he has a very interesting letter that was written in 1730 discussing John 1 and grappling with this question that I asked at the start of the presentation is the LA Goss if we're saying that the lagos is a fayus is it the same theost that was mentioned before or is it another one and this is what he says who should this be talking about this word that made all things but God the Father the one living and true God an author of life and all being are there more creators than one would any Jew or disciple of Jesus ascribe the creation of the world to any but God or equally well to God's reason

or understanding or discretion his wisdom his power his word his spirit which is the same as God himself then on the part of the prologue that says he came to his own and his own received him not still talking about the word he says I pray whose people were the Jews but God's his who called himself Jehovah so I think he's on the right track here this is something that John would have presupposed in his audience that they were familiar with Genesis that they were familiar with this idea that God creates through his word and there's even more I think that they would have been familiar with because there's literature in between the Testaments that equates God's Word with gods of wisdom that I think connects John's prologue to proverbs chapter 8 but I'm not going to talk about that today for lack of time so if we go back to our four options it looks like you shouldn't say it's not the same God you should say it is the

same God that we were talking about before and then that would leave us with the top two options but remember I thought that upper left one was de setec it has a Jesus that only appears to be human and isn't really a human obviously John is against this if you read the first letter from John he denounces people who won't say that Christ came in the flesh coming in the flesh means being a man right so if you're a doctrine of Christ is they he's some kind of wonderful heavenly something or other but he had the appearance of a man John is very against that we know these not going to endorse any kind of docetism and so I think you can rule out three of the four options and basically I think the dynamic monarchy ins were correct whatever the law Gus is it's not a being it's like an attribute or an action of God or even both we already mentioned that orthodoxy eventually broke hard in the direction

of the fourth option here in the lower right of the chart how did that happen well basically it happened because of La Goss theory this you can trace right back to the early ex plate inist and Christian philosopher Justin Martyr who died and was martyred because he wouldn't deny his Christian faith in about the year 165 very interesting character Justin Martyr we have this long dialogue with try foe the Jew that he wrote that may derive from an actual conversation he had with a rabbi around the year 135 or so and we have some apologies that he wrote kind of public defenses of Christianity and kind of weirdly he wore the Philosopher's toga there was a special outfit that he would wear as a philosopher in ancient times in Greece and Rome it's kind of like the Hindu holy men where they would wear a special hairdo or special outfit like oh well that's a holy man right philosophers they weren't you know

university professors but they were considered to have you know some wonderful mystical knowledge and to be kind of like holy men so he tried to have it both ways he wanted to be a Christian he didn't think that the plate inist could really give you knowledge of God but he thought that you could get knowledge of God through studying prophecy and learning through Jesus and things like that so he did become a Christian but whether he left behind all of his platonic ideas is another thing he tells us in his kind of biographical account that he was like a convert to Platonism Platonism was basically a religion in those days but then he converted away but anyway there was this idea that was current and it was due really to Plato the philosopher in the 300s BC he wrote this dialogue called the Timaeus and the Timaeus has this long yarn about creation and how all things supposedly came to be and it's

just this imaginary tail it's not clear what you're supposed to make of this and whether he actually thinks it's true or not but in part of it the ultimate source what we would call God God is to hi and separate from this cruddy dirty nasty world down here to have any direct interaction with it and so in this tale that Plato tells the way that God creates is he can't do it by himself so first he kind of emanates out this other being called the Demiurge or the craftsman and it says this beam is neither created nor uncreated he's like halfway in between so he needs this in-between being to create because somehow he can't do it now this is a very strange idea that an all-powerful God can't create the heavens and the earth how would you be all-powerful if you couldn't do that but this is what they thought people like Justin thought that there had to be this lesser God that created directly on behalf of God

the Father this is the lagos they also thought in this time so we're talking about mid 100's on through the mid 200s mere man Christ ology obviously that's wrong this is when they coined the phrase mere man selänne thir passe in greek it was mocking the non lagos theorists like your Jesus is just a guy huh dummies that's a mere man I think this is mind-bogglingly wrongheaded to call the Messiah with all that's involved in being the Messiah a mere man is stupid but they thought that you know no matter how high Jesus's calling was no matter how much God empowered him and how much God did through him they thought well if there wasn't another being in there then that's a quote mere man they just thought hey the way you detect beans is by their actions or the results of the action so if you see crying that's a sign of suffering so you know there's really a man there so there must have been a man there but if you see miracles

and divine teaching oh there must be a God there and so there must be a man and a God there in Jesus well it can't be the High God because in one place toward the end of his dialogue with try foe Justin Martyr he basically mocks the idea that God could be incarnate this is not even the stupidest person would think that the High God could come down to some little corner of this earth and do stuff here they did not believe that Jesus was God incarnate no they thought Jesus was an incarnation of this second lesser God and Justin literally calls him a second God and he's very clear that he's a lesser God as well he says we hold him in the second place like we honor him not as much as we honor God but anyway more than the others he comes in second place isn't that pretty good he gets the silver medal that's how he view in the whole then there's a Holy Spirit which is in third place and then the angels

below that so when you see Jesus as divine teaching and his miracles oh there's a God there now the dynamic menarche ins I think had the right answer to this yes there is a God there and he tells you which one he says my father does his works in me that's the God in Jesus God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself you don't need this lesser God theory this looking at effects and discerning what kind of beam they come from this is stupid if you looked at Moses and saw him part the Red Sea and predict the future and deliver God's law to the people he saw ha Moses must be a God man there must be a divine nature there No God empowered Moses okay well even to a greater degree God empowered Jesus in this gospel he mentions that God gives the Messiah his spirit without measure so this is log austere II this was a theory that was popular with some of the elites in Rome where Justin Martyr was

active and in other highly educated places and why was that well it was pretty embarrassing to educated pagans and people from a pagan background that Christianity was this religion founded a hundred years ago or less by this Jew those are weirdos nobody likes the Jews by this weird Jew who got himself killed seemingly for some kind of crime against the state or who knows what so Jesus was an embarrassment to these guys some of these people who were Christians and wanting to defend Christianity you know he was a Jew with a criminal record basically fact he got the death penalty I mean who would keep company like that so yeah obviously this lesser God the law Gauss this was the same God that inspired all the Greek philosophers it's like God's reason and it's like the reason that's in all of us but especially in the great philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics and so yeah our religion yeah we have

God sure but we also have this Lagos and this is really awesome because this is actually who is inspiring all these wonderful guys that you guys love like Plato executed Jew did we mention the LA Goss who's the direct creator who inspires all men of reason people like us so I mean some of these guys like Athen a giris and Theophilus they will write whole books defending Christianity they don't mention Jesus one time but they will mention this guy the second god because it was cool was what the cool kids were interested in back then now I said that this was an elite view in that time how do I know that nobody did a Barna poll among all the Christians back then I mean I don't think the early Christians were very theological I don't think they had a lot of systematic thinking about God in Christ it was more kind of just on the practical level but some of the Lagos theorists especially Tertullian and

origin who are the two most prominent Lagos theorists in the early 200s Tertullian up through about to 25 or 30 and Origen died I think it was in 254 they tell us repeatedly that the common herd of Christians who aren't as smart as them don't like this law Goss tiri business and they're always objecting that hey we don't believe in two gods we don't believe in two creators where do you guys get this stuff from even in the baptismal Creed's the earliest Creed's that we have that they would have new converts confessed to be baptized they begin like all the early Creed's you know we believe in one God the Father Almighty Creator of the heavens and the earth okay well there's one creator there right and there's one gut and it's the Father Almighty so one God one creator they found offensive this idea that God had to do it indirectly or the law Gauss is really the direct creator but God's kind of

sponsoring the whole thing and their slogan was against the law Gauss theorists we are faithful to apostolic tradition we uphold the monarchy of the Father this is why they're called monarchy ins by historians you know the rule the reign the regime of one God the Father so monarchy ins are basically people who rejected LA Goss tiri and according to some of the LA Goss Theory people they were the majority and they were the common folk among Christians not the elite how late does this go on well things aren't terribly clear I'll give you a kind of answer in a minute so this two gods are one God question is really a difficult one for the LA Goss theorists one of the most exciting discoveries in the history of early Christian theology was in the 20th century they discovered a lost little dialogue by origin who is the greatest early Christian scholar basically and there was this Bishop named Herick

clydie Zork li days and he was teaching something that people thought sounded off so they held a conference of Bishops and they brought in Origen to kind of try to set the guy straight so it wasn't like later councils it wasn't sponsored by the Emperor it wasn't a judicial kind of council that was gonna throw you out and excommunicate you things like that it was a Synod of Bishops but they were just you know let's all come and reason together and see if we can work this out and so in this dialogue Origen you know he kind of intimidates this poor guy and questions him in front of everybody and these are origins words as recorded in the dialogue he says God is the Almighty the uncreated the Supreme who made all things Christ Jesus who was in the form of God being other than the God in whose form he existed right if Jesus is in the form of God that means he's not God that means he's like God

was he says this Jesus was a God before he came into the body in one sense there are two gods while another since there is one God later on he says now I hey guys some of the Brethren take offense that we talked about to gods he says this because there was probably a gasp coming out of these bishops but you know it didn't really bother him that much if you're talking about God just like a powerful beam then there's two of them there's God and then there's the law Gus they're two different beans and he thinks the God eternally generated the law goes he clearly thinks the Lagos is not the same God as God the Father and if you want to talk about a God in the sense of the ultimate source of everything else well there's this one God that's the Father Almighty like the Creed says he believes in two gods if a God is like a powerful self he does have two gods he's got one true God he's got this lesser God but

eventually orthodoxy ends up in a different place so in the Revised Nicene Creed of 381 this is from the Council at Constantinople and I think they understood the same words differently in 325 and 381 if you want to see what I mean by that it's in a chapter of my book what is the Trinity but part of the famous Nicene Creed says we believe in one Lord Jesus Christ and the only begotten Son of God begotten of the father before all Yun's for all ages light of light true God from True God begotten not made consubstantial with the father here we have two instances of the word god and now we're actually talking about Trinitarians people who believe that there are three persons in God how many gods do they think they're referring to one but the things they're referring to are they're not the triune God as such right there in the triune God they're referring to two different in their terms with two persons

for these persons which supposedly share the divine essence they're calling them God okay so they're talking about two gods they're using the word God equivocal II the true God that's from the true God the first true God they mentioned there is the Sun or the log-off's the word and the second one is supposed to be the father in their mind they're not talking about to God they're talking about to quote gods to different ones which are called God strictly speaking it's the Trinity which they think is God but they're willing because those share the divine essence to call each of them God another later development which when you first learn it is kind of shocking is that they kind of deliberately forgot about the law Goss theories it's in this quotation from Athanasius the famous polemicist on behalf of the Nicene Creed writing during the controversy that came after the 325 council and basically in this

quote he's mocking the idea that God would have had to create indirectly through another well that was the whole idea with the law Goss theories but now it's stupid now we've forgotten about it so they kind of used la Goss series to get a second God into the picture oh because God couldn't create directly and by the time you go on 150 years like oh well obviously there is only one God involved in creation not two it's bizarre so he says if the Aryans the so-called Aryans say that the log office or the Sun alone was brought to be by God alone and other things were created by God through the Sun right that's precisely what Justin Martyr thought that's precisely what Origen thought although there was a ternal generation it's precisely what Tertullian thought but now now that he seems to think the Aryans just came up with this out of the blue on their own which is foolish and uninformed this he

says is a futile and novel idea those novel eyes of the year 150 it wasn't novel and 3:45 whenever he was writing this again is irreligious to suppose that God disdained as if a humble task to form the creatures himself which came after the son he through his word made all things small and great really Athanasius thinks that fundamentally God and the word are the same he he just thinks God God's Word animated a body so he's like no there aren't two creators is one creator right just forgetting what they were saying earlier another later development the idea of different persons same God so here we have the famous western bishop Augusta in mangling John 17 one through three he says well the proper order of the words is that they may know you and Jesus Christ whom you have sent as the only true God no that's not it's not the proper order of the words right he's just like well this doesn't sound like

Trinitarian orthodoxy there must have been some mistake here well there is some mistake here but it's Agustin's consequently therefore the Holy Spirit is also understood blah blah blah nor the father and son Holy Spirit three gods but the Trinity itself is the one only true God and yet the father and son spirit are three persons well John didn't have that kind of idea going on there's zero evidence in the Gospel of John about an idea of multiple persons in God so as far as the timeline honestly I don't think any of these ideas have really ever died out but what you see in history is as you enter the Middle Ages the mainstream church becomes very uniform information is strictly controlled churches are strictly controlled who gets to be a bishop is strictly controlled and if you have some of these other opinions you're just you're out of luck if the view is that Jesus is a man who's empowered by God to do amazing things as

God's Messiah and the one true God that's the father you want to know where did that start well have you ever read the synoptic Gospels Matthew Mark and Luke that's exactly what you have Jesus doesn't pre-exists Jesus isn't God Jesus is the Son of God and a real man well it's the same in John really once you understand John although John has been made difficult to interpret by later traditions okay but then you have this intermediate state where you've got the one true God oh and there's also this lesser God and you have this as soon as you had la Gauss theorem in right around 150 with Justin Martyr and then a bunch of people piggybacking on the thoughts of Justin Martyr and you had those people all the way up through the Year 381 and Beyond right you had the so-called Aryan barbarian tribes Eusebius the famous church historian that you've probably heard of he thought this exactly greater and a lesser God

and by the time you get to about 381 you have those three so-called gods three quote gods but they're really just persons who are really the same god they're persons in the in the divine nature and the one true God but you don't see that in the time of John you know see it in the time of Justin but you do see it right around just before that you're 381 okay so the way I think John and his audience would have heard this is something like this in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God in Greek he says it the other way around I take it that as he's being emphatic in Greek he says and God was the word and the reason I think is he doesn't say the God is because it might make you think that God is the subject of that third assertion but no the subject of these first three claims it's the word that he's making claims about the word was in the beginning the Word was with God and

God was the word what he's telling you is it's not somebody else okay but arguably he's still personifying here he I put those quotation marks and of course in ancient times they didn't exist quotation marks and it's a shame because they make things a lot clearer in certain instances he was in the beginning with God all things came into being through him this word of God and without him not one thing came into being I'm on the side of the dynamic monarchy ins here now just before I finish just one objection and my answer when you read Trinitarian commenters they love to wax eloquent about the meaning of profs the Greek word which is usually translated with and they say well this shows you that the logos is not some kind of abstract idea or divine attribute or divine action no the law Gauss is definitely it's a someone because it's said to be with God with like face to face or maybe he's mediating between God

and humans but anyway it's a person-to-person kind of relationship that this communicates to say that the word has profs God towards God with God with godlike person to person that's their point okay what I'm suggesting is no the word of God is just a way of referring to God it's like his wisdom or something like that and it's not self in its own right it's not an additional God or an additional person so how could how could a non self be said to be with God in that sense okay here's my answer proverbs chapter 8 from the Septuagint version which the New Testament writers would have looked at it says he the Lord established me and this is lady wisdom this character hopefully you remember her from proverbs she's calling out you know fools you know gain me I'm more valuable than gold and silver and all this stuff well she's talking here he established me before time in the beginning and that sounds familiar and

RK before he made the earth even before he made the depths before the mountains were settled and before all Hills he begets me when he God prepared the heaven i lady wisdom was present with him and when he prepared his throne upon the winds and when he strengthened the foundations of the earth I was by him suiting myself to him I was that wherein he took delight and daily I rejoiced in his presence continually now let me ask you God created the heavens and the earth did he have this lady helping him or a female spirit like a goddess or something but look at all this personal language here man she's rejoicing in his presence she's present with him she was by him doesn't that sound like a person-to-person relationship yes it does so this is my answer was a familiar tradition and it's not only in this book it's in some other books that were written before John it's not only in Proverbs it's in some later

Jewish writings so I think this is something the audience could handle they could see that the word was being personified and this is what personification is if a guy has a boat and he loves his boat and he says I want to spend the rest of my life with her she's my one and only I guess he's really lonely or something he's a rich guy with no wife that doesn't mean his boat is a lady that means he's talking about his boat in highly personal terms he's personifying the boats right so whenever you have personification this is what it is it's personal language being applied to something that's not a person okay I think there's a lot more that needs to be said about the prologue I think you have to show the writers train of thought through the entire thing and I haven't done that but I've done the first part of it so that's all I have to say for now thank you

Questions about this episode

What is "trinities 291 - From one God to two gods to three "Gods" - John 1 and early Christian theologies" about?

In this thought-provoking episode of "Trinities," the host delves into the complexities of early Christian theology, specifically examining the prologue of the Gospel of John. By exploring the historical context of the text, the discussion challenges modern interpretations that project later concepts of the Trinity onto the original writings. Listeners will gain insights into the nuances of…

What is mentioned in this khanpadawan episode?

10 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Justin Martyr, Origen, Thomas Jefferson, Proverbs, Gospel according to John, Emperor Theodosius. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "trinities 291 - From one God to two gods to three "Gods" - John 1 and early Christian theologies"?

The episode runs 52 min; the transcript is about 8,937 words in 51 timestamped sections.

More from khanpadawan

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated April 23, 2026.