Mr. Buzzard, now you have abandoned your previous misrepresentation of my position (that I supposedly agreed that the Shema was Unitarian and that Jesus himself affirmed Unitarianism), without acknowledging that you were wrong to make that claim, in favor of a new misrepresentation, that I supposedly think Jesus was affirming “a Trinitarian creed.” I said no such thing. Could you possibly try to listen to what I am saying instead of making up these wild misrepresentations?

The Shema is neither a statement of Unitarianism nor a statement of Trinitarianism. It is a statement of ancient monotheism. It is not theologically specific with regard to the issue that divides us.

Please direct any future comments to addressing the evidence presented in my post and now in this comment here that you are misrepresenting my position.

Mr. Buzzard, the focus of my blog article was on your misrepresentations of the statements I made in the book Putting Jesus in His Place. You chose to ignore that issue and in fact proceeded to manufacture another misrepresentation of what I said. I explained this in my previous comment to you and asked you to address these misrepresentations in any future comment. Yet you chose to ignore that issue entirely.

For some reason you have shifted your terminology now from “Unitarian monotheism” to “unitary monotheism.” Perhaps you think that by doing so you can avoid the problem of anachronism I explained in my article. It won’t work, because by “unitary” we know you mean “Unitarian.”

There is no dispute here as to “how many God is.” God is one. There is one God. Yahweh is one. Yahweh is one God. Trinitarians regard this affirmation as essential to their doctrine. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not three Gods. That’s Mormonism, not Trinitarianism.

It will be difficult to find exegetical commentators on Deuteronomy or on Mark who will claim that the Shema, or Jesus’ quotation of it, taught an explicit Unitarian view of God. Nor will they argue that it taught an explicitly Trinitarian view. Scholarly exegetes do not make the mistake of reading the biblical texts in such a flat-footed, anachronistic fashion.

Here is a typical comment on the Shema in its context in Deuteronomy:

“The Hebrew is literally, ‘Yahweh our God, Yahweh one,’ with the NRSV representing Yahweh as ‘LORD.’ On the basis of usage elsewhere in Deuteronomy, it is unlikely that ‘Yahweh our God’ should be rendered ‘Yahweh is our God,’ against the NRSV text; it is more likely that ‘is’ should be added between ‘Yahweh’ and ‘one.’ This yields the translation ‘the LORD our God, the LORD is one.’ It is then necessary to explain what is meant by ‘one.’ This most likely refers to Yahweh’s uniqueness. He alone is God, and he needs no other gods to assist him. However, this unique and incomparable God is also, for Israel, our God, not because of what Israel deserves or merits but because of God’s graciousness (cf. 7:7).” John W. Rogerson, “Deuteronomy,” in Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible, ed. James D. G. Dunn and John W. Rogerson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 157.

As this quotation illustrates, mining the Shema for a simple Trinity-killing proof text is not what good exegetes do.

Keefa, there is plenty of material in the Bible relevant to the doctrine of the Trinity. I have an outline study online that cites about a thousand biblical references pertaining to the subject: http://bib.irr.org/biblical-basis-of-doctrine-of-trinity

Mr. Buzzard, this is the last time I will approve a comment from you that does not acknowledge the fact that you misrepresented me on your YouTube video. I think I have been quite tolerant in allowing you to post three separate comments now that did not address this core point of my article. That tolerance has limits, which you have now reached.

You seem to have difficulty avoiding such misrepresentations. You did it again in your most recent comment. I did not say that the Shema makes no statement about how many God is. To the contrary, I agreed that it teaches that God is one. All Trinitarians agree that God is one and that this is taught in the Shema. You cannot get away with this straw-man criticism of the doctrine of the Trinity here.

Keefa,

In my previous response to you, I referred you to my outline study on the Trinity. Did you spend any time looking at it? If you had, you might have noticed that I specifically discussed the singular pronouns referring to God (http://bib.irr.org/biblical-basis-of-doctrine-of-trinity-part-two).

J. H. Hertz was a respected Jewish scholar in the first half of the twentieth century. It is not surprising that he claimed that the doctrine of the Trinity was incompatible with the Shema. This claim became a standard polemical Jewish argument against Christianity.

The bottom line is that one must consider all of the Bible’s teaching, not just one or two verses. When we do that honestly and in a sound manner, it becomes clear that the New Testament reveals more about the Lord God than what was revealed in the Old Testament. It does not contradict the Old Testament, but it goes further, and it contradicts some popular Jewish interpretations of the OT, some of which are still being pressed by Jews today against Christianity (e.g., the Messiah was supposed to destroy Israel’s enemies and set up an earthly kingdom in Jerusalem).

As to why the Code of Justinian banned the recitation of the Shema, the short answer is that Justinian and those in power with him had some real blind spots and shortcomings in their understanding. If they really thought the Shema per se was incompatible with the Trinity, they would be contradicting basic Christian doctrine on two fronts: Christianity then and now teaches that God is one, and it also teaches that the whole Bible, including Deuteronomy 6:4-5, is true. But I would like to see an exact quotation and a reference to a specific statute in the Code of Justinian, which is quite long, before accepting the claim (which others have also made) that the regulation was imposed because they perceived the Shema as incompatible with the Trinity.

Yes, I’ve seen those quotations. Those are modern comments on the matter. What I want to see are citations to the specific statements in the Code of Justinian. I have not seen those statements.

If Jews really were prevented by force of law from reciting the Shema, that was a stupid act of religious oppression and had nothing to do with belief in the Trinity. Again, I would like to see primary source documentation that any professing Christians in the medieval era thought the Shema was even implicitly contrary to the doctrine of the Trinity. If anyone did think that, they didn’t understand the Trinity.

EY74,

It is obvious you are getting these quotations secondhand or worse. For example, your quotation from Werner cannot possibly come from six pages of his book. I don’t have a copy of the book handy, but it appears from the quotation and from what I know about Werner’s views that the quotation you are repeating secondhand may be taken out of context. As far as the statement goes, I actually agree with it. The NT is monotheistic, just as was the OT. Yahweh, the Creator of the universe, is the only God, the only proper object of religious devotion and worship. As I keep pointing out, that is a basic doctrinal premise of the doctrine of the Trinity.

I am pretty sure you have not read and would not agree with L. L. Paine. He argued that Trinitarianism, which he called Athanasianism, “has its roots in the New Testament.” That statement comes at the beginning of the same paragraph that you quoted—again, no doubt without ever having looked at the book yourself. Paine argued that the virgin birth of Christ was a second-century legend, that Paul was the source of what developed into the Trinity, and that Greek Trinitarianism remained firmly monotheistic. See Levi Leonard Paine, A Critical History of the Evolution of Trinitarianism: And Its Outcome in the New Christology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin; Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1900), 4-33.

I know you would not agree with Barth, since he advocated a doctrine of the Trinity that many scholars think bordered on modalism. What the quotation you repeated left out was that Barth maintained that the elements of the doctrine of the Trinity not found expressly in the Bible were implicit in the Bible, and that they were necessarily true if one accepted what the Bible does say expressly. So this is simply an instance of someone quoting the Bible out of context.

The Internet makes it possible for almost anyone with a computer to spout forth endless streams of scholarly quotations. Few people who do so have actually read the works they are quoting or understand what they are saying in context.

I have been able to determine that the person using the pseudonym “ELOHIMyhwh74” is either Anthony Buzzard or someone using the same computer. EY74 submitted comments under that pseudonym apparently to circumvent my decision that Mr. Buzzard would not be allowed to post additional comments if he did not address the problem of his misrepresentation of the statement in my book.

Dr. Tuggy, Thank you for Taking the Time and Trouble to give such a Thoughtful comment on your Trinities blog. 🙂 I will respond as my Time permits.

Christine, thanks very much for your comment. I apologize for the delay in getting it posted; my mother passed away three weeks ago and that event has slowed some things down. God bless you and again I appreciate your kind encouragement.