In my teens I got perplexed that at church there was insistence on a Trinity concept of God even though we were told to believe the Bible and nothing I read in years of Bible-reading ever seemed Trinitarian. I tried to test my church peers by picking a weak tentatively Trinity-supporting verse, probably not really Trinitarian, and pointing to it as support for the Trinity concept about God. I was secretly hoping to provoke a response to elucidate why Trinity was taught without it being genuinely supported in scripture. I knew applying the verse to Trinitarian concepts was silly. I hoped someone would point this out to me and either admit Trinitarianism was not biblical or point me to a better verse that I had missed which did explain why Trinity was so important to the church. (I think the American word for this is straw-manning.) The verse I chose is in John when Thomas sees Jesus alive from the dead and exclaims “My lord and my god!” Trinitarians would love to explain this as Thomas telling Jesus that he now believed that Jesus is God. But, of course, if Thomas suddenly became a Trinitarian, would it not be sensible to think that John would have explained this? If Trinitarian ideas of God being three persons were what John wanted to teach, that would contradict statements by Jesus written by John earlier in a previous chapter “This is eternal life that they would know You the Only True God and Jesus Christ who You sent” This was said by Jesus when Jesus was praying to the Father. So, if John meant us to realise that Thomas suddenly believed something different and effectively became a Trinitarian, at least John would explicitly write about that. John would not leave the reader to read into Thomas’ exclamation a contradicting doctrine to the explicit statement by Jesus that only the Father is the Only True God and that He Jesus is the Christ sent by this One True God. Yet the Trinitarians did not refute the use of the verse to support Trinitarianism. On the contrary they started using that verse as proof of Trinitarianism from scripture. So I concluded there are no better verses in the Bible to support a Trinity idea. Then years later the Trinitarian apologists were all using this verse. Or they use a twisted translation of John 1 verse 1. That is all they can use. Other verses have been mistranslated by Trinitarians or even inserted from scratch to support their teachings but these are easily debunked by using online interlinear Bibles. They are not genuinely reading what scripture actually says and believing it.
