The New Testament and the Baptismal Faith

The New Testament nowhere states the doctrine of the Trinity in the vocabulary of the councils, and the Church has never claimed that it does. What it contains is the material the councils were defending: a threefold name into which converts are baptized, a threefold blessing, prayers addressed to the Father through the Son in the Spirit, and a Son who is worshipped and called God. This file sets out that evidence, including the texts whose bearing is contested and the one famous verse that must be given up.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Faith Was Prayed Before It Was Defined

The apostolic writings are not a treatise. They are letters, gospels, and preaching produced by communities that were already baptizing into a threefold name, already praying to the Father through Jesus Christ, already invoking the Spirit. The Trinitarian shape of the New Testament is therefore not a doctrine stated in it but a practice presupposed by it — which is a stronger kind of evidence, not a weaker one, since a practice that everyone assumes is older than any document that assumes it.

This has a direct bearing on the fourth-century argument. When St. Basil defends the doxology “Glory to the Father with the Son together with the Holy Spirit,” his argument is not that the formula is in Scripture but that the Church has always prayed it, and that the Church’s worship is itself a witness to her faith (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 27.66; trans. NPNF II/8). The order of discovery runs from worship to doctrine, and the councils are downstream of the font.

The Baptismal Command

The governing text is the Lord’s command at the end of Matthew: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28:19). Three features of it carry weight.

First, “in the name” is singular — eis to onoma, not “into the names.” One name is borne by three, which is precisely the confession the councils would make and precisely what no unitarian or tritheist reading can accommodate.

Second, the three are coordinated. There is no grading in the formula, no “and also,” no derivative construction. Whatever is done to a candidate by the naming of the Father is done by the naming of the Son and the Spirit.

Third, it is a command about practice, not a proposition. What the Church received was an instruction, and the doctrine is the exposition of what the Church does when she obeys it. The Didache (7.1–3), written probably in the first half of the second century, already gives the triadic formula as the rule for baptizing, and St. Justin describes the same practice at Rome in the 150s (Justin, First Apology 61; trans. ANF 1).

[Disputed: the textual integrity of Matthew 28:19. Every Greek manuscript and every ancient version contains the triadic formula, and it is attested from the *Didache* onward; there is no manuscript evidence for any other reading. Eusebius of Caesarea, however, cites the verse some seventeen times in a shorter form — "make disciples of all nations in my name" — chiefly in works written before Nicaea, and F. C. Conybeare argued from this in 1901–1902 that the shorter form was original (Conybeare, "The Eusebian Form of the Text Matth. 28,19," *Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft* 2 [1901]: 275–288). The thesis has not been sustained: the standard assessment is that Eusebius was abbreviating in citation, since he also quotes the long form, and that the unanimity of the manuscript tradition is decisive (Bruce M. Metzger, *A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament*, 2nd ed., Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994, ad loc.). It is noted here because the claim recirculates and because a reader is better served by knowing the evidence than by not meeting the objection.]

The Apostolic Blessings and Formulas

Beside the baptismal command stand a set of formulaic passages in St. Paul which have the same threefold structure and which were not composed for controversy:

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all” (2 Corinthians 13:13[14]) — the blessing with which the Orthodox anaphora still begins.
“Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all” (1 Corinthians 12:4–6).
“There is one body, and one Spirit… one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” (Ephesians 4:4–6).
“Through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father” (Ephesians 2:18) — the pattern of all Christian prayer in a single clause.
The greeting of 1 Peter 1:2, which distributes the work of salvation among Father, Spirit, and Christ.

Two things should be noticed about this set. It is large, it is incidental, and it is early — Paul is writing in the 50s, within twenty-five years of the crucifixion. And it is asymmetrical: “God” in these passages regularly means the Father, and the Son is “Lord.” That asymmetry is not a defect to be explained away; it is the New Testament form of what the Church would later call the monarchy of the Father, and it is the reason the Creed says “one God, the Father Almighty” and then confesses the Son as “true God of true God” (see The Father as Sole Cause).

The Son Called God, and Worshipped

Alongside the asymmetry stands the other half of the evidence. The Son is called God in the New Testament, though in a limited number of places, and he is worshipped without qualification.

The unambiguous instance is Thomas’ confession before the risen Christ: “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28), which the Evangelist reports without correction and immediately follows with a blessing on those who believe. The Prologue is equally direct: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Hebrews addresses the Son in the words of the Psalm: “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever” (Hebrews 1:8) and calls him “the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person” (apaugasma tēs doxēs kai charaktēr tēs hypostaseōs autou, Hebrews 1:3) — a verse whose vocabulary would be quarried by both sides in the fourth century. Other candidates are genuinely contested on grammatical grounds: Romans 9:5 and Titus 2:13 turn on punctuation and on the Granville Sharp construction respectively, and this collection does not press them.

More telling than the titles is the practice. The Church prayed to Jesus (Acts 7:59; 1 Corinthians 16:22, Marana tha), sang to him “as to a god” — the testimony of a hostile outsider, Pliny writing to Trajan around 112 (Epistles X.96) — and applied to him without embarrassment texts of the Septuagint in which Kyrios renders the divine Name (Philippians 2:9–11 on Isaiah 45:23; Romans 10:13 on Joel 2:32). Whatever the apostolic Church thought it was doing, it was doing this.

The Johannine Material

The Fourth Gospel supplies most of the language the councils would use, and supplies it in both directions.

On one side: “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30); “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (14:9); “all things that the Father hath are mine” (16:15); the glory the Son had with the Father “before the world was” (17:5). On the other: “my Father is greater than I” (14:28); “the Son can do nothing of himself” (5:19); “as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself” (5:26). Arius and Athanasius quoted the same Gospel.

For the Holy Spirit the Farewell Discourse is decisive, and it supplies the single verse on which the later controversy over the Filioque turns: “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father (ho para tou Patros ekporeuetai), he shall testify of me” (John 15:26). The verse holds both a sending by the Son and a proceeding from the Father, and the distinction between the two is the hinge of everything in Section 08 (see Why It Is Not a Verbal Difference). The Spirit is elsewhere in the discourse called “another Comforter” (14:16) — another of the same kind as Christ, not a power or an influence — and is spoken of throughout in the personal masculine, against the grammatical gender of pneuma.

The Verse That Must Be Given Up

One text long used in Western Trinitarian argument has no standing and should not be cited: “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one” (1 John 5:7 in the Textus Receptus and the King James Version), the so-called Johannine Comma.

The facts are not in dispute. The clause is absent from every Greek manuscript before the fourteenth century and from all the ancient versions except the Latin; it is absent from the Greek text as the Orthodox Church has ever received it; it appears first in Latin writers of Spain and North Africa from the late fourth century, apparently as a marginal gloss that migrated into the text; and it entered the printed Greek New Testament only when Erasmus, having omitted it from his first two editions for lack of manuscript support, included it in the third of 1522 on the authority of a single late and probably made-to-order codex (Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed., 1994, on 1 John 5:7–8). It is not part of the Church’s Scripture and it never was. The Greek Fathers who fought the Arian controversy did not have it, which is itself the plainest evidence: had it existed, Athanasius would have used it on every page.

Giving it up costs the Orthodox case nothing at all, and keeping it would cost the case its credibility.

The Shape of the Witness

What the New Testament yields, then, is this. One God, who is the Father. A Son who is his own, eternally, and who is God, and who is worshipped. A Spirit who is sent, who proceeds from the Father, who is spoken of as a person and not a force, and who is joined to the Father and the Son in blessing, in baptism, and in the distribution of gifts. And a Church that prays to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit, and that immerses its converts in a single threefold name.

None of this is the Creed. All of it is what the Creed was written to protect. The next four centuries are the record of the Church discovering, under pressure, what she would have to say in order to go on saying this.

References

Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 27. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8.
The Didache 7. Trans. ANF, vol. 7; also in Michael W. Holmes, ed. and trans., The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007.
Justin Martyr. First Apology 61, 65–67. Trans. ANF, vol. 1.
Pliny the Younger. Epistles X.96.
Metzger, Bruce M. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft / United Bible Societies, 1994. (On Matthew 28:19 and 1 John 5:7–8.)
Conybeare, F. C. “The Eusebian Form of the Text Matth. 28,19.” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 2 (1901): 275–288.
Hurtado, Larry W. Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. (On the worship of Jesus in the earliest communities.)
Behr, John. The Way to Nicaea. Formation of Christian Theology 1. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2001.