What Scholars Have to Say

“Towards the end of the 1st century, and during the 2nd, 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.” 
_{James Strong and John McClintock, Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, Vol. 10, “Trinity”, (New York: Harper, 1891), p. 553.}

“Because the Trinity is such an important part of later Christian doctrine, it is striking that the term does not appear in the New Testament.  Likewise, the developed concept of three coequal partners in the Godhead found in later creedal formulations cannot be clearly detected within the confines of the canon.”

 “While the New Testament writers say a great deal about God, Jesus and the Spirit of each, no New Testament writer expounds on the relationship among the three in detail that later Christian writers do.”

 “The earliest New Testament evidence for a tripartite formula comes in 2 Corinthians 13:13, where Paul wishes that “the grace of the Lord Jesus, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit” be with the people of Corinth.  It is possible that this three-part formula derives from later liturgical usage and was added to the text of 2 Corinthians as it was copied.”

 “A more familiar formulation is found in Matthew 28.19, where Jesus commands the disciples to go out and baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”  The phrasing probably reflects baptismal practice in churches at Matthew’s time or later if the line is interpolated.”

 “While there are other New Testament texts where God, Jesus, and the Spirit are referred to in the same passage (e.g., Jude 20-21), it is important to avoid reading the Trinity into places where it does not appear. An example is 1 Peter 1.1-2” 

Daniel N. Schowalter, Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger, Michael D. Coogan, (Oxford University Press, 1993), pg 782-783.

“Many doctrines are accepted by evangelicals as being clearly taught in the Scripture for which there are no proof texts. The doctrine of the Trinity furnishes the best example of this. It is fair to say that the Bible does not clearly teach the doctrine of the Trinity… In fact, there is not even one proof text, if by proof text we mean a verse or passage that ‘clearly’ states that there is one God who exists in three persons.”

Charles C. Ryrie, Basic Theology: A Popular Systematic Guide to Understanding Biblical Truth (Chicago, IL, Mood Publishers, 1999), p.89

Is there any similar evidence in the Old Testament?  The answer is no, because what the Old Testament reveals concerning the Trinity is not clear and explicit but intimating and implicit.

Charles C. Ryrie, A Survey of Bible Doctrine (Chicago, IL: Moody Bible Institute, 1972), p 14

“Other passages have been seen on closer study to be applicable only under the greatest strain. The question however is this: It is claimed that the doctrine of the Trinity is a very important, crucial, and even basic doctrine. If that is indeed the case, should it not be somewhere more clearly, directly, and explicitly stated in the Bible? If this is the doctrine that especially constitutes Christianity’s uniqueness, as over against Unitarian monotheism on the one hand, and polytheism on the other hand, how can it be only implied in the biblical revelation?”

“This doctrine in many ways presents strange paradoxes …. It is a widely disputed doctrine, which has provoked discussion throughout all the centuries of the church’s existence. It is held by many with great vehemence and vigor. These advocates are certain they believe the doctrine, and consider it crucial to the Christian faith. Yet many are unsure of the exact meaning of their belief. It was the very first doctrine dealt with systematically by the church, yet is still one of the most misunderstood and disputed doctrines. Further, it is not clear or explicitly taught anywhere in Scripture, yet it is widely regarded as a central doctrine, indispensable to the Christian faith…”

In this regard, it goes contrary to what is virtually an axiom of biblical doctrine, namely, that there is a direct correlation between the scriptural clarity of a doctrine and its cruciality to the faith and life of the church….

“It is the peripheral matters that are hazy or on which there seem to be conflicting Biblical materials. The core beliefs are clearly and unequivocally revealed.” This argument would appear to fail us with respect to the doctrine of the Trinity, however, for here is a seemingly crucial matter where the Scriptures do not speak loudly or clearly. Little direct response can be made to this charge. 

Millard J. Erickson, God in Three Persons: A Contemporary Interpretation of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Group, 1995), p. 11-12, 109

“The confession of the Trinity in terms of essence makes too little sense…And the classic creedal distinction between different ‘persons’ of the Godhead, when ‘person’ is understood in its everyday sense, invites the perception of God in tri-theistic terms rather than Trinitarian terms, as three and distinct individual ‘persons’.

James Dunn, Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Know Press, 2010), p. 1.

There is no clear indication anywhere in Paul that he ever identified Christ (pre-existent or otherwise) with the Logos (Word) of God. (p. 39).

 Similarly in Acts there is no sign of any Christology of pre-existence.  (p. 51).

In Matthew and Luke Jesus’ divine son ship is traced back specifically to his birth or conception … he was Son of God because his conception was an act of creative power by the Holy Spirit. (p. 51 or 61).

In the earliest period of Christianity “Son of God” was not an obvious vehicle of a Christology of incarnation or pre-existence. Certainly such a Christology cannot be traced back to Jesus himself with any degree of conviction …. It is less likely that we can find such a Christology in Paul or Mark or Luke or Matthew. (p. 64).

There is no thought in any of the passages we have studied of Jesus existing prior to His birth whether as an angel or an archangel, spirit or Spirit. (p. 159).

They (the N.T. writers) do not think of Jesus as the incarnation of the Spirit, nor of Jesus as already Spirit prior to his existence on earth.  (p. 61).

In the early stages of this development (the time of Paul’s writings) it would be inaccurate to say that Christ was understood as a pre-existent being become incarnate, or that Christ himself was thought to have been present and active in creation.  (p. 211).

There is no indication that Jesus thought or spoke of Himself as having pre-existed with God prior to His birth or appearance on earth. (That is) Christological thinking which cannot be traced back to Jesus Himself. We cannot claim that Jesus believed Himself to be the incarnate Son of God. (p. 254).

There is of course always the possibility that popular pagan superstition became popular Christian superstition, by a gradual assimilation and spread of belief. (p. 251).

We cannot claim that Jesus believed himself to be the incarnate Son of God… (p. 254).

James D.G. Dunn, Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation,  (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1989), see page references

“There is in the Old Testament no indication of distinction in the Godhead; it is an anachronism to find either the doctrine of the Incarnation or that of the Trinity in its pages.

Encyclopedia of Ethics and Religion, ed. James Hastings, Vol. 6 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark,  1919), p. 254

“At first the Christian faith was not Trinitarian in the strictly ontological reference. It was not so in the apostolic and sub-apostolic ages, as reflected in the new testament and other early Christian writings.

W. Fulton, “Trinity,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, Vol. 12 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), p. 461.

“…many of the early Christians, in turn, found peculiar attractions in the doctrines of Plato, and employed them as weapons for the defense and extension of Christianity, or cast the truths of Christianity in a Platonic mold.  The doctrines of the Logos and the Trinity received their shape from Greek Fathers, who…were much influenced, directly or indirectly, by the Platonic philosophy, particularly in its Jewish-Alexandrian form.  That errors and corruptions crept into the Church from this source cannot be denied.”

Philip Schaff  “Platonism and Christianity” in The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol IX.  

“The Bible does not teach the doctrine of the Trinity.  Neither the word ‘trinity’ itself nor such language as ‘one-in-three,’ ‘three-in-one,’ one ‘essence’ (or ‘substance’), and three ‘persons,’ is biblical language. The language of the doctrine is the language of the ancient church taken from classical Greek philosophy” 

“But there is an obvious problem here (calling Jesus Lord and Savior).  There is only one God, the Creator of heaven and earth, the Lord and Savior of Israel.  If we say that God is really present and at work in Jesus, how can we avoid saying that there are in fact two Gods-one ‘up in heaven’ and one who appeared down here on earth?  The N.T. does not solve this problem”

Shirley J. Gutherie, Jr.  Christian Doctrine, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Know Press, 1994), p. 76-79

“The doctrine of the Trinity is itself, however, not a Biblical doctrine…It is the product of theological reflection upon the problem…The ecclesiastical doctrine of the Trinity is not only the product of genuine Biblical thought, it is also the product of philosophical speculation, which is remote from the thought of the Bible.”

“When we turn to the problem of the doctrine of the Trinity we are confronted by a peculiarly contradictory situation.  One the one hand, the history of Christian theology and of dogma teaches us to regard the dogma of the Trinity as the distinctive element of the Christian idea of God, that which distinguishes it from the Idea of God in Judaism and in Islam, and indeed, in all forms of rational Theism, Judaism, Islam and Rational Theism are Unitarian. On the other hand, we must honestly admit that the doctrine of the Trinity did not form part of the early Christian—New Testament—message, nor has it ever been a central article of faith in the religious life of the Christian Church as a whole, at any period in its history.”

“Certainly, it cannot be denied that not only the word ‘Trinity,’ but even the explicit idea of the Trinity is absent from the apostolic witness to the faith….We must honestly admit that the doctrine of the Trinity did not form part of the early Christian–New Testament–message.” 

“No Apostle would have dreamed of thinking that there are three divine Persons”

Emil Brunner, Dogmatics, Vol. 1: The Christian Doctrine of God, trans. Olive Wyon, (London: Lutterworth Press, 1949), p. 205, 226

What About the Trinity?  … I customarily refer to God as the Trinity, meaning that God has always existed as three Persons in one essence—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I believe this is sound biblical doctrine.  Nevertheless, there is no appearance of the word Trinity in the Bible, nor is there any single passage that describes God as three Persons in one essence. That is why it took hundreds of years of debate to arrive at our trinitarian doctrinal conclusion. It obviously had to be the result of extrabiblical revelation.

C. Peter Wagner, “But That’s Not in the Word,”  Charisma, accessed April 13, 2019,  http://www.charismamag.com/spirit/bible-study/19995-but-that-s-not-in-the-word 

“It must be admitted by everyone who has the rudiments of an historical sense that the doctrine of the Trinity formed no part of the original message.”

“St. Paul did not know it, and would have been unable to understand the meaning of the terms used in the theological formula on which the Church ultimately agreed… [it] formed no part of the original message.”

_{W.R. Matthews, W.R., God in Christian Experience,  (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2010 (1930),  p. 180.}

“It was during the patristic centuries that the church’s Trinitarian faith assumed the shape it has largely retained throughout its history. Athanasius and the Cappadocians in the fourth century, and later Augustine, played a formative role. The Nicene and ‘Athanasian’ Creeds embody the determination of the fathers on the Trinity.”

Daniel F. Wright, Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, Second Edition, ed. Everett Ferguson (NY: Garland Publishing, 1999), pg 1142, 1147

“The Old Testament tells us nothing explicitly or by necessary implication of a Triune God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit…. There is no evidence that any sacred writer even suspected the existence of a [Trinity] within the Godhead….  Even to see in the Old Testament suggestions or foreshadowings or ‘veiled signs’ of the Trinity of persons is to go beyond the words and intent of the sacred writers.”

Edmund J. Fortman, The Triune God: A Historical Study of the Doctrine of the Trinity, (Baker Book House, 1972), p. xv, 8, 9.

“There is no mystery about their oneness, and no attempt to show that there are three in one, or even a statement that the three are one.  The word Trinity is never used, and there is no indication that the idea of Trinity had taken form.  It has long been a common practice to read the New Testament as if the ideas of a later age upon this subject were in it, but they are not.  In the days of the apostles the doctrine of the Trinity was yet to be created.  But the materials for it were already there, and the occasion for the growth of the doctrine was sure to arise…

“When that time came, after the lapse of three or four centuries, there was wrought out a doctrine of the Trinity which became, after a period of conflict, the accepted belief of the Christian people.  This historic doctrine differed widely from the simplicity of the early faith. It moved in a new region, it employed new methods, and it required a new kind of belief, for it was now a metaphysical doctrine concerning the interior nature and life of God.”  

William Newton Clarke, The Christian Doctrine of God, 1909, p. 230-231 

“The question we are asking is what future is there for the traditional, classical, doctrine of the Trinity? I am bound to reply, even within these walls of Trinity College, ‘Not much’.” 

G.W.H. Lampe Explorations in Theology, Vol. 8, (SCM Press, 1981), p. 30

 “The formulation ‘one God in three Persons’ was not solidly established, certainly not fully assimilated into Christian life and its profession of faith, prior to the end of the 4th century. But it is precisely this formulation that has first claim to the title THE TRINITARIAN DOGMA. Among the Apostolic Fathers, there had been nothing even remotely approaching such a mentality or perspective.”

“[The doctrine of the Trinity] is not directly and immediately in the Word of God.” 

“It is difficult in the second half of the 20th century to offer a clear, objective and straightforward account of the revelation, doctrinal evolution, and the theological elaboration of the Mystery of the Trinity… Historians of dogma and systematic theologians [recognize] that when one does speak of an unqualified Trinitarianism, one has moved from the period of Christian origins to, say, the last quadrant of the 4th century.  It was only then that what might be called the definitive Trinitarian dogma ‘One God in three Persons’ became thoroughly assimilated into Christian life and thought… it was the product of three centuries of development.” 
_{(Thomas Carson,  “Trinity,”  The New Catholic Encyclopedia, Second Edition, Vol. XIV (Farmington Hills: Gale, 2003), p. 299, 295 and 304 respectively}

“We believe the doctrine of the triune God because we have received it by tradition, though not mentioned at all in Scripture.” 

 _{Cardinal Stanislaus Hosius, Conf. Cathol. Fidei, Chap. XXVI}

“Believers in God as a single person (God, the Father), were at the beginning of the third century still forming the large majority.”

Encyclopedia Britannica, 11 ed., Vol, 23, p. 963

“[The doctrine of the Trinity] is not found in any document or relic belonging to the church of the first three centuries… Letters, art, usage, theology, worship, creed, hymn, chant, doxology, ascription, commemorative rite, an festive observance…are as regards to this doctrine, an absolute blank.”

Alvan Lamson, The Church of the First Three Centuries (Toronto: University of Toronto Libraries, 1875), p. 466-67.

“It is understandable that the importance placed on this doctrine is perplexing to many lay Christians and students. Nowhere is it clearly and unequivocally stated in Scripture… How can it be so important if it is not explicitly stated in Scripture?”

“The doctrine of the Trinity developed gradually after the completion of the New Testament  in the heat of controversy, but the church fathers who developed it believed they were simply exegeting [explaining] divine revelation and not at all speculating or inventing new ideas. The full-blown doctrine of the Trinity was spelled out in the fourth century at two great ecumenical (universal) councils: Nicea (325 A.D.) and Constantinople (381 A.D.)” 

_{Olson, Roger E., Christopher Hall. The Trinity. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), p.1-2.}

“The New Testament gives no inkling of the teaching of Chalcedon.  That council not only reformulated in other language the New Testament data about Jesus’ constitution, but also reconceptualized it in the light of current Greek philosophical thinking.  And that reconceptualization and reformulation go well beyond the New Testament data.”

Joseph Fitzmyer, A Christological Catechism, (Costa Mesa, CA: Paulist Press, 1991), p. 102  

“The Trinity of God is defined by the Church as the belief that in God are three persons who subsist in one nature.  The belief as so defined was reached only in the 4th and 5th centuries AD and hence is not explicitly and formally a biblical belief.  The trinity of persons within the unity of nature is defined in terms of “person” and “nature” which are GK philosophical terms; actually the terms do not appear in the Bible.  The trinitarian [sic] definitions arose as the result of long controversies in which these terms and others such as “essence” and “substance” were erroneously applied to God by some theologians.  The ultimate affirmation of trinity of persons and unity of nature was declared by the Church to be the only correct way in which these terms could be used.”

“The elements of the trinity of persons within the unity of nature in the Bible appear in the use of the terms Father*, Son*, and Spirit*.  The personal reality of the Spirit emerged more slowly than the personal reality of the Father and Son, which are personal terms.” 

“The OT does not contain suggestions or foreshadowing of the trinity of persons.”

John L. McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible, (New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1995),  p. 899-900         

“The formal doctrine of the Trinity as it was defined by the great church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries  is not to be found in the NT  [New Testament]”

“Trinity” in The Harper Collins Bible Dictionary, ed. Paul Achtemeier (1996)

“Today, however, scholars generally agree that there is no doctrine of the Trinity as such in either the OT  [ Old Testament ] or the NT  [ New Testament]… It would go far beyond the intention and thought-forms of the OT to suppose that a late-fourth-century or thirteenth-century Christian doctrine can be found there . . . Likewise, the NT does not contain an explicit doctrine of the Trinity”

“Trinitarian doctrine as such emerged in the fourth century, due largely to the efforts of Athanasius and the Cappadocians …  The doctrine of the Trinity formulated in the late fourth century thus affirms that the one God exists as three Persons.”

“God,” The Harper Collins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, Richard McBrien, general editor, 1995, p. 564-565 and 1271

“It is another question, of course, whether or not the church, in developing the doctrine of the Trinity, had recourse to certain thought forms already present in the philosophical and religious environment, in order that, with the help of these, it might give its own faith clear intellectual expression. This question must definitely be answered in the affirmative. In particular cases the appropriation of this concept or that can often be proved. Unfortunately, however, it is true that particularly in reference to the beginnings of the doctrine of the Trinity there is still much uncertainty. In this area final clarity has not yet been achieved. As far as the New Testament is concerned, one does not find in it an actual doctrine of the Trinity.”

Bernhard Lohse,  A Short History of Christian Doctrine, (Fortress Press, 1966), p37-39.

“Our opponents sometimes claim that no belief should be held dogmatically which is not explicitly stated in Scripture … but the Protestant Churches have themselves accepted such dogmas as The Trinity, for which there is no such precise authority in the Gospels.”

Graham Greene, “Assumption of Mary,” Life Magazine, October 30, 1950, Vol. 29, No. 19), p. 51

“No responsible New Testament scholar would claim that the doctrine of the Trinity was taught by Jesus, or preached by the earliest Christians, or consciously held by any writer of the New Testament. It was in fact slowly worked out in the course of the first few centuries in an attempt to give an intelligible doctrine of God.”

Hanson, Anthony Tyrrell. The Image of the Invisible God. (London: SCM Press, 1982), p.87.

“Much of the defense of the Trinity as a ‘revealed’ doctrine, is really an evasion of the objections that can be brought against it”

“My conclusion, then, about the doctrine of the Trinity is that it is an artificial construct…It produces confusion rather than clarification; and while the problems with which it deals are real ones, the solutions it offers are not illuminating. It has posed for many Christians  dark and mysterious statements, which are ultimately meaningless, because it does not sufficiently discriminate in its use of terms.”

Cyril Richardson, The Doctrine of the Trinity, (Abingdon Press, 1958), p. 16 and 148-149

“The Church began to formulate its doctrine of the Trinity in the fourth century. The Council of Nicaea declared the Son to be co-essential with the Father (325 A.D.), while the Council of Constantinople (381 A.D.) asserted the deity of the Holy Spirit, though not with the same precision.” 

“The Church confesses the Trinity to be a mystery beyond the comprehension of man. The Trinity is a mystery, not merely in the biblical sense of what is a truth, which was formerly hidden but is now revealed; but in the sense that man cannot comprehend it and make it intelligible”

Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, (GLH Publishing, 2017), p. 82 and 89.

[The Trinity] is a second-century term found nowhere in the Bible, and the Scriptures present no finished trinitarian statement”

“Trinity,” The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Vol. 4,  p. 914

“All trinitarians agree that the ideas about God expressed in the doctrine of the Trinity are not found directly in the Old Testament.”

Robert M. Bowman, Jr., Why You Should Believe in the Trinity: An Answer to Jehovah’s Witnesses (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1989), p.22.

“The truth is that Jewish sources never thought of Messiah as divine or pre-existent—in mainstream Judaism he is the descendant of David’s covenant in 2 Samuel 7… If Jesus thought of himself as Messiah it is this human figure that he had in mind, with the traditional terms “the Son of God,” “the Son of Man,” “Lord”—all used of human Jewish kings in the Psalter (2:7; 80:18; 110:1, etc.)… Being a monotheist, Jesus cannot have thought of himself sanely as being Yahweh; and in the more primitive traditions he always speaks of himself in the human, messianic categories… [He did not think] he was God, but that he was God’s viceroy… It is the bias of orthodoxy constantly to overlook middle terms.  The earliest church [did not view him] as God the Son, but as the man whom God raised up and [assigned] the Holy Spirit to pour out upon the church (Acts 2:33).”

Michael Goulder, Incarnation and Myth: the Debate Continued, (Eerdmans Publishing, 1979), p. 143.

“Neither the word Trinity nor the explicit doctrine appears in the New Testament  . . . The doctrine developed gradually over several centuries and through many controversies

The New Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, p. 126.

“It was not until the 4th century that the distinctness of the three and their unity were brought together in a single orthodox doctrine of one essence and three persons” 

The New Encyclopedia Britannica, 1985 edition, Micropaedia, Vol. 11, p. 928

“…primitive Christianity did not have an explicit doctrine of the Trinity such as was subsequently elaborated in the creeds of the early church”

“God, Gods, Emmanuel,” by Johannes Schneider, et al., in New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, ed. Colin Brown, Vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1976), 84.​

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The NT does not contain the developed doctrine of the Trinity. The Bible lacks the express declaration that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are of an equal essence and therefore in an equal sense God himself. And the other express declaration is also lacking, that God is God thus and only thus, i.e., as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. These two express declarations, which go beyond the witness of the Bible, are the twofold content of the church doctrine of the Trinity.”

Karl Barth, “God, Gods, Emmanuel; The Trinity,” New International Dictionary of  New Testament Theology, ed. Colin Brown, Vol. 2, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1976) p. 84.

[The Trinity]…it is not a Biblical doctrine in the sense that any formulation of it can be found in the Bible….”

The New Bible Dictionary, 2nd Edition, J.D. Douglas, ed. (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1982), p.1221

“The Church’s doctrine of the Trinity would seem to be the farthest thing from [the writers of the New Testament’s] minds, and today’s reader may well wonder if it is even helpful to refer to such a dogma in order to grasp the theology of the New Testament. When the church speaks of the doctrine of the Trinity, it refers to the specific belief that God exists eternally in three distinct ‘persons’ who are equal in deity and one in substance. In this form the doctrine is not found anywhere in the New Testament; it was not so clearly articulated until the late fourth century AD.”

Christopher B. Kaiser, The Doctrine of God: A Historical Survey, (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2001), p. 27.

“We are not to suppose that the apostles identified Christ with Jehovah; there were passages which made this impossible, for instance Psalm 110:1, Malachi 3:1″

Charles Bigg, D.D., International Critical Commentary, (T&T Clark, 1910), p.99

“In the NT there is no explicit statement of the doctrine….”  

The Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001), p. 

“The Trinity is a mystery.  Reverent acknowledgement of that which is not revealed in Holy Scripture is necessary before entering the inner sanctum of the Holy One to inquire into His nature.” Pg 145

“Reason does discover a stumbling block when confronted with the paradoxical character of Trinitarian theology. Pg 145

“Historically, the Church formulated its doctrine of the Trinity following great debate concerning the Christological problem of the relationship of Jesus of Nazareth to the Father.  Three distinct Persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—are manifest in Scripture as God, while at the same time the entirety of the Bible tenaciously holds to the Jewish Shema: “Here, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” (Deut 6:4).” Pg 146

“In the second century the apostolic fathers displayed an undeveloped Christology.  The relationship between the two natures in Christ, the human and the divine, is not clearly articulated in their works.  The doctrine of the Trinity is implied in their high Christology, but is not made explicit.” Pg 155

“In reflection, one may ask whether it is necessary to believe in the doctrine of the Trinity to be saved.  In response, historically and theologically, the Church has not usually required an explicit declaration of faith in the doctrine of the Trinity for salvation.” Pg 168

Kerry D. McRoberts, “The Holy Trinity,” Systematic Theology, Revised Edition, Standly M. Horton, ed., (Springfield, MO: Logian Press, 1994), p. 145-46, 155, 168 

“It must be owned, that the doctrine of the Trinity, as it is proposed in our Articles, our Liturgy, our Creeds, is not in so many words taught us in the Holy Scriptures.  What we profess in our prayers we nowhere read in Scripture, –that the one God, the one Lord, is not one only person, but three persons in one substance.  There is no such text in the Scripture as this, that ‘the Unity in Trinity, and the Trinity in Unity, is to be worshiped.’ No one of the inspired writers hath expressly affirmed, that in the Trinity none is afore or after other, none is greater or less than another, but the whole three persons are co-eternal together and co-equal.”

George Smalridge, Bishop Smalridge: Sixty Sermons, No. XXXLIL, p. 348

“New Testament scholars disagree whether the N.T. directly calls Jesus as God because of the difficulty such language would create for early Christians with a Jewish background. It is important to note that every passage that identifies Jesus as “theos” can be translated other ways or has variants that read differently.

In biblical Judaism the term “messiah” did not necessarily carry any connotation of divine status, and Jews of Jesus’ day were not expecting their messiah to be other than human.

While some have used the title Son of God to denote Jesus’ deity, neither the Judaism nor the paganism of Jesus’ day understood the title in this way. Neither did the early church.” 

Douglas McCready, He Came Down From Heaven: The Preexistence of Christ and the Christian Faith, (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2005), p. 51, 55, 56.

“The Trinity doctrine; the Catholic Faith, is this: We worship one in trinity, but there is one person of the Father, another of the Son and another of the Holy Ghost – the Glory equal, the Majesty coeternal. The doctrine is not found in its fully developed form in the Scriptures. Modern theology does not seek to find it in the O. T. At the time of the Reformation the Protestant Church took over the doctrine of the Trinity without serious examination.”

New International Encyclopedia, 1916 edition, Vol. 23; p. 47, 477

The doctrine of the Trinity did not form part of the apostles preaching as this (preaching) is reported in the N.T.”

Encyclopedia International, 1982 ed., Vol. 18, p. 228

“The first teachers of Christianity were never charged by the Jews (who unquestionably believed in the strict unity of God), with introducing any new theory of the Godhead. Many foolish and false charges were made against Christ; but this was never alleged against him or any of his disciples. When this doctrine of three persons in one God was introduced into the Church, by new converts to Christianity, it caused immense excitement for many years.  Referring to this, Mosheim writes, under the forth century, “The subject of this fatal controversy, which kindled such deplorable divisions throughout the Christian world, was the doctrine of the Three Persons in the Godhead; a doctrine which in the three preceding centuries had happily escaped the vain curiosity of human researches, and had been left undefined and undetermined by any particular set of ideas.” Would there not have been some similar commotion among the Jewish people in the time of Christ, if such a view of the Godhead had been offered to their notice, and if they had been told that without belief in this they ‘would perish everlastingly’?”

_{Frederic William, Farrar, Early Days of Christianity, Vol. I (Boston, Massachusetts: DeWolfe, Fiske & Company, 1882), p. 55.}

“The beginning of the doctrine of the trinity appears already in John (c. 100)…[but then Hopkins goes on to say] To Jesus and Paul the doctrine of the trinity was apparently unknown; at any rate they say nothing about it.”

Washburn Hospkins, The Origin and Evolution of Religion (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1923), 336.

“Since most readers of the Gospel of John approach the gospel with a firm belief in the Nicene dogma of the Holy Trinity, a plea for caution is here imperative.  Those who listened to Jesus during his life-time did not come already endowed with faith in a Trinitarian Godhead, nor did those who heard the preaching of the Apostles; it was not a matter of teaching people who already believed in a Holy Trinity that one of those divine persons had become a human being. Neither in Judaism nor elsewhere is there any trace of such a belief..”

John 1-4, International Critical Commentary, (New York, NY: T &T Clark International, 2009), p. 51

“Platonism is part of the vital structure of Christian theology . . . . [If people would read Plotinus, who worked to reconcile Platonism with Scripture,] they would understand better the real continuity between the old culture and the new religion, and they might realize the utter impossibility of excising Platonism from Christianity without tearing Christianity to pieces. The Galilean Gospel, as it proceeded from the lips of Jesus, was doubtless unaffected by Greek philosophy . . . . But [early Christianity] from its very beginning was formed by a confluence of Jewish and Hellenic religious ideas.”  (emphasis added)

 W.R. Inge,  The Philosophy of Plotinus (London:Longmans, 1918), p. 12, 14