The Birth of the Trinity Quotes

“However, the nation of Israel, collectively speaking, was felt to have failed to enact sufficiently the mission of glorifying God, as the wider context in Hosea makes clear: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me; they were sacrificing to the Baals and were burning incense to idols” (11: 1–2).”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“in Isaiah 49: 1–12, early Christians would, of course, ultimately identify this servant as Jesus, the Christ, the Son. The triune implications are startling: Through the Spirit via Isaiah, God the Father spoke to Jesus the Son giving him in advance Israel’s vocation—”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“the inclusion of the Lord Jesus Christ on the divine side of the equation in citations of the Old Testament is inordinately common in earliest Christianity.36 For example, with regard to this very text, Isaiah 42: 1–9, Justin Martyr heavily underscores the theme of Gentile inclusion in his interpretation,37 while noticing that Isaiah 49: 8–9 indicates that God is not ultimately willing to share his glory with any other but nonetheless that this divine conversation implies that the Servant must be construed as sharing in that glory (see Dial. 65)”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“The Apostle Paul will later term all of this the great cosmic mystery—that the Gentiles are to be fully welcomed by the Father through the Son into the one people of God via a new covenant (see Rom. 11: 25–7; cf. Eph. 3: 1–6; Gal. 4: 24–7; 1 Cor. 11: 25; 2 Cor. 3: 6).”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“I have given you to be a covenant for people.”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“I will be his Father, and he will be my Son” (2 Sam. 7: 14 LXX in Heb. 1: 5)—were spoken to the Son by the Father not at the occasion of his resurrection or enthronement, but at or prior to the time when God commanded his angels, “Let all the angels of God worship him” (Heb. 1: 6 citing LXX Deut. 32: 43/Ps. 96: 7).”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“that Jesus was not thought to have been adopted as God’s Son but was exegetically construed as preexisting his own earthly life as the Son.”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“the words are not David’s alone, but the words of the preexistent Christ as the preexistent Christ reports an earlier conversation that he had with God the Father about his begottenness and Sonship.”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“Jesus need only to have believed that David, under the inspiring influence of the Holy Spirit (cf. Mark 12: 36), was capable of taking on a different persona when speaking as a prophet.”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“Christians Psalm 2: 7 was consistently regarded not merely as a direct speech made by the Father to the Son, but rather it was taken as a speech within a speech that was originally spoken by the Son, who was reporting the words the Father had spoken to him at an earlier time, all of which has critical implications for how Christology and Trinitarian dogma developed.”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“Sit at my right hand” were not appropriate to David, implying that although they were uttered by David, David was speaking prosopologically as a prophet in the guise of God the Father to Jesus at his ascension long before the earthly Jesus of Nazareth was born (Acts 2: 33–5).41”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“The most crucial pre-Christian interpretation of Psalm 110 (“The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand’”) can be found in a manuscript discovered at the Dead Sea, 11Q13,37 in which the author interpreted Genesis 14: 18–20, the puzzling passage about the priest Melchizedek, in light of Psalm 110, and then applied that interpretation to make a pesher-exposition of a variety of thematically related passages.”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“Yet since the moment for this Son of Man’s role as “a light of the nations” and object of worship has not yet come, for the present time this Son of Man has merely been “chosen and hidden” in God’s presence (1 En. 48. 4–6).”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“Psalm 72: 17, which contains a litany of prayer-requests for the king, was understood to announce that the Messiah’s name had been selected by God in advance: “Let his name be forever (lĕʿôlām), let his name flourish before the sun (lipnê-šemeš), let them bless themselves in him, let all the nations call him blessed.”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“The notion that God made certain other things before the creation of the physical world was quite common in Second Temple and early rabbinic Judaism—including wisdom, the heavenly throne, the Torah, the garden of Eden, Gehenna, the temple, and intriguingly, the name of the Messiah.27”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“segment in which the Father addresses the Son in Psalm 109: 4 describes the moment when the preexistent Christ receives, before the dawn of time, his eternal priesthood in the order of Melchizedek by virtue of an oath sworn by God himself (Heb. 5: 5–6; 7: 21)”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“shockingly Jesus has identified himself as this Christ even though Jesus himself was not yet born at the time of David.”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“Second, the inspired speech is not chronologically constrained to the time in which it was delivered by the prophet, but as Justin indicates, “he speaks as one announcing in advance things which are about to happen.”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“On the Term “Prosopological Exegesis.” First, Justin identifies the inspiring agent—here construed as the Logos—that speaks through the prosōpon, the person or character; hence prosopological exegesis.”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“Paul’s use is vital because it locates the prosopological method in the very earliest stratum of Christian literature that we possess.”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“Michael Slusser succinctly treats Justin Martyr, and Stephen Presley helpfully explores Irenaeus.44”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“Tertullian—the Spirit makes the basic prophetic utterance, obviously through the human medium, who then takes on different characters or acting-roles, and as such he steps into the role of the Father as the speaker, sometimes the role of the Christ, and at other times the Spirit speaks as the Spirit’s own self—indeed, the person addressed by the speaker also shifts. In short, for Tertullian, there are traces of divine conversation in the Old Testament. On what basis were such role assignments made and justified by early Christian interpreters such as Tertullian?—and what are the theological implications of such assignments? And vitally, when did the church begin using this reading strategy in conceptualizing God? Here I want to introduce the reader more thoroughly to a vehicle that I shall argue was irreducibly essential to the birth of the Trinity—a theodramatic reading strategy best termed “prosopological exegesis.” Previous Scholarship Related to Prosopological Exegesis In 1961 Carl Andresen’s landmark study, “Zur Entstehung und Geschichte des trinitarischen Personbegriffes” (“Toward the Origin and History of Trinitarian Conceptions of the Person”), foregrounded the degree to which early Christian exegesis contributed to the rise of Trinitarian dogma, bringing this critical dimension to the attention of patristic and systematic theologians.41 Andresen showed that Tertullian’s scriptural exegesis was definitive for his formulation of persons (Latin: personae) of the Trinity, and argued that this reading strategy—which Andresen termed prosopographische Schriftexegese (“prosopographic exegesis”)”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“No, but almost all the psalms which sustain the role [personam] of Christ represent the Son as speaking to the Father, that is, Christ as speaking to God. Observe also the Spirit speaking in the third person concerning the Father and the Son: The Lord said unto my lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies the footstool of your feet [Ps. 110: 1]. Again, through Isaiah: Thus says the Lord to my lord Christ [Isa. 45: 1]….”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“What is of import here is not just Tertullian’s dependence on an earlier exegetical tradition, but the person-centered reading strategy that he and his predecessors undertook—assigning dramatic speakers or addressees that are unmarked, and indeed in some cases, seemingly totally foreign to the Old Testament text.”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“Tertullian has long been recognized as the father of the doctrine of the Trinity, since he is the one who first used the term “Trinity” (Latin: trinitas) and who coined much of the distinctive Trinitarian nomenclature that would subsequently come to dominate Western theology.”
― Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“In sum, Mark and the other synoptic writers portray Jesus as engaging in a startling prosopological reading of Psalm 110 (Ps. 109 LXX), indicating that Jesus, at least as he is described by the Evangelists, believed that the preexistent Christ—of whom Jesus himself was the human embodiment—was begotten by God and brought forth from the womb before the dawn of the first morning, also telling of his eternal priesthood and his future role as a powerful ruler.”
― Matthew W Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“The irony is that in spinning stories of Christian dogmatic development, scholarship has by and large significantly overvalued the evidence of the hypothetical pre-history and redactional layers that we do not actually possess (and about which there is lack of scholarly agreement), but has undervalued the non-hypothetical coeval and subsequent Christian texts that we do actually have.”
― Matthew W Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“I am grateful that we live in an era in which it is increasingly recognized that there is no neutral, objective, independent ground that is unsullied by prior commitments and worldviews upon which any historian might stand when examining these matters.”
― Matthew W Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“other words, prosopological exegesis affirms and further develops the notion that for the earliest Christians the God of Israel had revealed himself as a personal God.”
― Matthew W Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament

“Yet for Augustine, in terms of those who err regarding the Trinity, there is a third category of people—perhaps the most pernicious—those who “strive to climb above the created universe,” which is “so ineluctably subject to change” in hope that they can entirely escape their creaturely limitations, gain a transcendent vantage point on the unchangeable God, and from that lofty height, then speak about God apart from any creaturely analogy.”
― Matthew W Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament