NikL,
No need to worry, whichever side you choose you are right.
The Bible is contradictory. There are scriptures which state that Jesus is God & there are scriptures which state that Jesus is NOT God.
Just a note: the doctrine of the Trinity is no where announced in the Old Testament (OT).
The Trinity - God in three persons - is a concept completely foreign to Jewish thought.
Not only did Jesus not fulfill the OT prophecies of what the messiah would do, in nature he was also completely different from what the OT said the messiah would be. The Old Testament’s clear expectation is that the Jews’ savior would be a righteous and powerful, but still entirely human ruler.
There is no hint that he would be God’s own son, much less one-third of God himself. This development - the division of the formerly unified deity into Father, Son and Holy Ghost - did not come about until later, the time of formation of the New Testament canon.
No verse in the Old Testament anticipates such a startling disclosure, and some verses even seem to deny it:
- Deuteronomy 6:4
- Deuteronomy 32:39
- Isaiah 46:9
Rather than affirming his oneness for millennia and then suddenly telling his people to believe something different, why didn’t God say he was tripartite all along? Did he not want to confuse the Israelites’ strict monotheism?
But isn’t it even more confusing to neglect to tell them about it for a long time and then suddenly spring it on them?
Many Jews reject Christianity because they see the Trinity as polytheism.
Far more likely is that the Trinity was invented by later Christians in response to their need for a structure for God that could accommodate their beliefs about the divinity of Jesus.
Jesus certainly fits the criterion of a god the Jews had not known, and thus by the Bible’s own standard, they were obligated to reject him (Deuteronomy 13:1-3).
