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The Doctrine of the Trinity:
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The most obvious fact in the Old Testament histories and prophecies probably is the monotheistic conception of the Jews. All historians agree that it was the leading belief of this people, and Dean Farrar among them testifies that--
Professor Max Muller has also written an extremely interesting article upon this question of Semitic monotheism. The following is an extract from this article which appeared in The Times so long ago as April the 14th and 15th, 1860, and preserved by Dean Stanley in his work on the Jewish Church. Professor Max Muller writes:
While the Very Rev. J. S. Howson, D.D., Dean of Chester, writes in The Life and Epistles of Paul, p. 8:
Here, therefore, is noticed the beliefs of the people among whom Jesus had gone preaching and teaching, believing still in the "One God and Father of all;" that is in "a pure monotheism," after the mission of Christ had closed. It is obvious, therefore, that Jesus did not gainsay nor dispute their conception of their God and King; to the Jews God had ever been a supreme Unity, and nowhere in the Scriptures are they reproached for this simple yet exalted belief. Probably an almost equally important factor of the Gospel records is their silence -- if silence can be prominent -- upon any correction of the Jews in this their coveted doctrine, by Jesus. Upon many a point, some in comparison with this doctrine of very small importance, does Christ continually correct and warn these people, but never does He hint at any misconception of their God. When at the word of Christ to the man afflicted with palsy, "the man arose and departed to his house," the multitudes being overjoyed attributed the cure to man being endowed with the Spirit of God, Jesus neither corrects them nor rebukes them. Surely such an opportunity would not have been lost to instruct God's own nation of the nature of the One who had been their Guide through so many ages! The Jews from the first when God revealed Himself to them in the words:
have conceived Him to be a Unity; and Israel can be shown from history to have been the sole and grand exception in this belief, for all other nations bowed their heads to idols of wood and stone wherein there is no help, but Israel's cry through all ages had been (when they went not after those false gods) as the cry of the Zealot was in the days of Christ:
Their failing in the past had been that they had it gone awhoring after other gods,"and God had testified in that grand and pathetic language through the prophet Isaiah:
Under the Apostles the Jews did not alter. Seeking the greatest charge against the Apostle Paul, they omit all mention of God, and frame their grievance against him in the cry:
It would be absurd to believe that the Jews would have urged their weak case before the Sanhedrim, the chief captain, the several governors, and finally before Caesar at Rome, failing in each stage in their accusation, without mentioning such a marked contrast as the Trinity in Unity with the Jewish Oneness of God. The ordinary laws for the skilled production of evidence deny the omission, if the material for such a charge existed. Indeed, the inclusion of such a charge must have weighed heavily with any governor, who, not interested in the Jews' religion, but as a means of peacefully controlling a fanatical nation, sought only to agree with the party, whose tenets would prove to be of the greatest assistance to him as governor. So noted were the Jews by their religion of the One God, that for Paul to have sought to have introduced a Trinity in Unity as modern teachers affirm he did, would have caused such a revolution of thought, with its attendant noises and movements, that the governor would have been well advised, for peaceful control, to restrain Paul to the great satisfaction of this unruly people. The very fact of no such measure having been taken is the testimony that the doctrine was not promulgated by Paul; while to believe, in the light of the zealous affirmations of this peculiar people, that the doctrine was mutually understood, is to seriously and unwarrantably violate the testimony of history. There can be no doubt that upon this doctrine the Apostles did not differ from the Jews. Hagen back in his History of Doctrines emphasises, vol. i., p. 124:
While Lardner also adds his quota of evidence to this fact when he writes:
The heretic of modem times is not the heretic of the early church. The Monotheist is the heretic to the Trinitarian, but the Trinitarian was the heretic to the Monotheist. The Monotheist was first, and therefore true in the words of Tertullian (who originated in Christian literature the word "Trinity"):
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