by smiddy 72 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Hi Dreary Weather , l understand what you are saying but my experience of r&f JWs is that they think that the idea of the Trinity came about at Nicea . They have no understanding about the history of Trinity and l think that they would be surprised if they realised that in fact the Early Church Fathers actually had Trinitarian beliefs .
Jan
JW's are also surprised to learn that their Bible Canon was not fixed until what they would call the Apostate Catholic Church did so in the late 4th Century.
I even had one JW lady argue with me that there were Autograph copies of the N.T writings !
The selective teaching of "facts" ( in actuality half-truths) to JW's leads their minds to make totally wrong assumptions. I know, I was a JW for 58 years !
I would also be interested on your comments on what the great Leolaia had to say on this subject a few years ago, here is her Post :
"The evidence is quite clear that Adonai was a frequent reading substitute for the Tetragrammaton by the first century BC.
We find it replacing YHWH in quotations from the OT in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and as a favoured divine epithet in some of the hymns.
Most telling is the Great Isaiah Scroll in the Dead Sea Scrolls, where the scribe sometimes accidentally writes Adonai instead of YHWH and sometimes vice versa. Clearly the scribe mentally pronounced YHWH as "Adonai". This reflects the ketib-qere principle where one thing is written but it is read a different way.
Adonai wasn't the first substitution. Earlier on, Elohim was a common substitute for YHWH, as one can see in the Elohistic Psalter (Psalm 42-83), where Elohim replaces YHWH in the same passages elsewhere in the Psalter. This Elohistic redaction possibly dates to around the same time when Ecclesiastes was written (fourth or third century BC), where Elohim is the preferred DN.
We can also see that Paul, in reading the OT pronounced YHWH as kurios "Lord" (cf. Romans 10:9-13 citing Joel 2:32, 14:6-11citing Isaiah 45:23).
This brings up a point that is usually ignored in these discussions, which tend to focus too much on the graphemic representation of the Tetragrammaton in the LXX.
It isn't simply a matter of YHWH appearing in the LXX, and therefore it was "used", but rather how those characters were pronounced (remember, biblical texts were usually read aloud). Regardless of whether YHWH was written in Hebrew characters in Paul's Bible or replaced by kurios, the name was pronounced kurios by Paul. And the tendency to represent the Tetragrammaton in archaic (and often incomprehensible) Paleo-Hebrew characters in the midst of Greek lettering is a clue that probably it wasn't read letter for letter but rather recognized in toto as the ineffable name and handled however that name was handled by readers."
I have a lot of respect for Leolaia`s research and I have no problem accepting what she has written as being accurate.
jhine : Any JW lurkers please take note . As l said before the WT teaching that the Trinity was " thought up in Nicea is total bunkum . lf they are any kind of scholars they SHOULD know that .
jhine : Ignatius of Antioch...wrote much in defense of Christianity.
Any kind of scholar would know that the epistles ascribed to Ignatius of Antioch are considered to be either spurious or corrupted.
In an 'Introductory Note to the Epistles of Ignatius' by Philip Schaff (Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 1) he states :
There are, in all, fifteen Epistles which bear the name of Ignatius...
It is now the universal opinion of critics, that the first eight of these professedly Ignatian letters are spurious. They bear in themselves indubitable proofs of being the production of a later age than that in which Ignatius lived. Neither Eusebius nor Jerome makes the least reference to them; and they are now by common consent set aside as forgeries, which were at various dates, and to serve special purposes, put forth under the name of the celebrated Bishop of Antioch.
jhine : "In Christ Jesus our Lord, by whom and with whom be glory and power to the Father with the Holy Spirit for ever" (n. 7; PG 5.988).
This exerpt is taken from 'The Martyrdom of Ignatius' and so clearly was not written by Ignatius himself. The Martyrdom is a forgery thought to be from the latter part of the fourth century although there is no mention of it for another two centuries after that.
jhine : "We have also as a Physician the Lord our God Jesus the Christ the only-begotten Son and Word, before time began, but who afterwards became also man, of Mary the virgin.
You do not give a reference for this exerpt but the CARM web-page 'Early Trinitarian Quotes', which I suspect you lifted it from, identifies it as part of the 7th chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians.
The Letter to the Ephesians is one of the letters thought to be genuine. However, the 'Introductory Note to the Epistles' referred to earlier goes on to say :
But after the question has been thus simplified, it still remains sufficiently complex. Of the seven Epistles which are acknowledged by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl., iii. 36), we possess two Greek recensions, a shorter and a longer. It is plain that one or other of these exhibits a corrupt text, and scholars have for the most part agreed to accept the shorter form as representing the genuine letters of Ignatius.
The quotation that you provide comes from the longer Greek recension which is the one most scholars believe exhibits a corrupt text, so again it is most unlikely that Ignatius wrote what you have attributed to him.
So the idea of the trinity was not "about very early on". There was a lot of uncertainty about who or what Jesus was. He was thought of as a second god through whom we could access God. But just how he was like God was only "fixed" in the fourth century. And even then it was not cast in stone. Athanasius was exiled five times as the emperors favoured one side and then another. It was only under Ambrose that things were finally settled.
Any kind of scholar would know that the epistles ascribed to Ignatius of Antioch are considered to be either spurious or corrupted.
Earnest- There are numerous complete writings of many of the church fathers. Every one of them stated that Jesus was God in the flesh...
just saying, cause it's true
The Truth Will Set You Free
Here is the text of Bishop Challoner's note found at Exodus 6:3 of the Douay-Rheims (Project Gutenberg #1609) :
My name Adonai. . .The name, which is in the Hebrew text, is that most proper name of God, which signifieth his eternal, self-existent being, Ex. 3.14, which the Jews out of reverence never pronounce; but, instead of it, whenever it occurs in the Bible, they read Adonai, which signifies the Lord; and, therefore, they put the points or vowels, which belong to the name Adonai, to the four letters of that other ineffable name Jod, He, Vau, He. Hence some moderns have framed the name Jehovah, unknown to all the ancients, whether Jews or Christians; for the true pronunciation of the name, which is in the Hebrew text, by long disuse, is now quite lost.
Phizzy : JW's are also surprised to learn that their Bible Canon was not fixed until what they would call the Apostate Catholic Church did so in the late 4th Century.
Phizzy, the time when the canon was fixed is not universally agreed. There are two extremes, if you like. Those who favour an open canon, such as yourself, and maintain that the canon was only fixed in the late fourth century when Athanasius wrote his thirty-ninth Festal Letter with a list of the canonical books.
On the other hand, you have scholars like David Trobisch who argues for a closed canon as early as the second century as a response to Marcion, in his book The First Edition of the New Testament.
This morning I heard a talk on 'Manuscript Evidence for New Testament Canon Formation'. The premise was that where we find different NT books in the same manuscript it indicates a recognition that they belong together. Of course, the earlier you go the fewer manuscripts there are but the evidence was very convincing that by the third century there was a recognisable canon.
“Trinity” is the modern English translation of the Greek τριας (trias), of which trinitas was the usual Latin translation. It might also be translated into English as “triad.” As part of its defense of this doctrine, the Catholic Encyclopedia points out that in the late 2nd century, Theophilus of Antioch mentioned a trias of θεος (theos, “God”), λογος (logos, “Word”), and σοφια (sofia, “Wisdom”).
As TTWSYF said many more Early Church Fathers taught the theology of the Trinity
Jan
ps that came from a site about the history of Christianity
Phizzy , l wouldn't dream of arguing with Leolaia's research l am sure that it is accurate . l cannot see however how it has bearing on the theme of this thread . How anyone pronounced YHWH or substituted it with another word when reading aloud neither proves nor disproves if it was originally in the NT . Am l missing something here ?
Jan
