Did the early Church believe in the Trinity

Early Christian Wisdom Forums Past discussions on Origen Dialog on Origenes Did the early Church believe in the Trinity

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  • #1680
    Shawn T Murphy
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    Unfortunately only a minority of the 318 church fathers at the Council of Nicaea were followers of the teachers of Origenes. I have not seen any evidence that true followers (those who moved to Caesarea with Origenes and those students of Didymos) voted with those loyal to Constantine, thereby helping to eventually bring the Trinity dogma into the church. I understand that the vote was close though which brought in the oneness between God and Jesus. But once any dogma was brought into the church, all of the translations‚ done over time were interpreted with this new dogma. So unless we have original texts from Origenes‚ hand, it is hard for us to say that Origenes or any of the early Christian communities taught the Trinity as it is now depicted in the church. It is also hard to say that when the Trinity concept came into the Latin translations of Origenes.

    #1681
    Edward Moore
    Participant

    You said: “This concept came in from Rome and there is no sign of it in the early church. The fact that surviving writings from Origen contain the subject can only be coincidental.”
Origen is not the only relatively early theologian to develop a trinitarian theology; Tertullian, writing about a decade earlier, attempted to codify a concept of the Trinity. The deeper origins of trinitarian doctrine are found in the ‘Unwritten Doctrines’ of Plato himself [see J. Dillon, The Middle Platonists (Cornell 1977), and E. Moore, “Middle Platonism” http://www.iep.utm.edu/m/midplato.htm)]. A basic triadic emanationist schema of One-Dyad-Demiurge (or World-Soul) goes back as far as Speusippus and Xenocrates, and is given a central place in the Pythagorean cosmologies of Ocellus Lucanus, (pseudo-) Timaeus Locrus, and others, on into the period of Gnosticism and early Christianity, not to mention ‘esoteric’ Platonists like Numenius (whose works Origen read) and Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, etc., etc. …

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