3-6 The Trinity: A Desire For Acceptance
Thomas Gaston and others have pointed out that
despite the initial working-class beginnings of first century Biblical
Christianity, by the second century there was a determined effort by
the Christian community to attract higher class followers. The majority
of the non-canonical Acts, epistles and Gospels reflect something of
this. There was a desire to present the Christian message in terms
which the educated and upper classes could understand and accept. The
attacks of Celsus and others on Christianity in the 2nd century
indicate a concern on their part that the edcuated classes were being
attracted to it and even accepting it. Kyrtatos observes: "Christianity
is presented in the New Testament in a form that was unacceptable... to
people of education... one of the dearest concerns of the second
century [Christian] apologists... [was] the translation of Christianity
into a language that could be understood and accepted by the upper
classes" (1). This would explain why the Christian apologists began to
present Biblical Christianity in Platonic terms, just as Philo the Jew
presented Jewish history in such terms- and it was but a short step to
accepting and incorporating the Platonic ideas of the immortal soul, a
personally pre-existent "Logos" figure etc. And this is what happened.
The desire to win educated converts led to the early church writers of
the second century adopting Platonic terminology with which to describe
the Lord Jesus, and it stuck. Some second century Christian leaders
even wrote to the Roman Emperor, addressing him as the "chief
philosopher", begging him not to persecute Christians because
Christianity and Greek philosophy were essentially the same thing.
Justin's First Apology is a classic example (2). The apocryphal Preaching Of Peter
2 claims that "we [Christians] and the good Greeks worship the same
God" (3). The deconstruction of Greek philosophy which we meet
throughout the New Testament was sadly ignored in the desperate desire
to be acceptable within society. As Gaston comments: "It is not
coincidence that the Middle Platonists also believed in the
'three-ness' of God" (4). Thus it was through the conscious desire to
present Christianity in Platonic terms that the concept of the trinity
entered Christian thought. But there can be no doubt that this was not
a reflection of the Biblical texts themselves.
Notes
(1) D.J. Kyrtatos, The Social Structure Of The Early Christian Communities (London: Virgo, 1987) p. 99. See too Thomas Gaston, Proto-Trinity: The Development Of The Doctrine Of The Trinity In The First And Second Centuries (MPhil. thesis, University of Birmingham UK, 2007, published by Lulu Press, 2007) p. 28.
(2) See F. Young in M.Edwards et al, eds., Apologetics In The Roman Empire (Oxford: O.U.P., 1999) pp. 83,84, 94.
(3) As cited in Gaston op cit. p. 35.
(4) Gaston op cit. p. 56.
