Early Christianity developed the idea of the Trinity as a way to keep together two commitments that stood in tension: a Jewish inheritance that insisted God is one, and the emerging conviction that Jesus and the Spirit participate in the divine life. The classical Trinitarian claim was that God is one divine essence eternally existing as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so that Jesus could be called fully divine without dissolving monotheism. Yet this framework depends heavily on philosophical distinctions between essence and person, substance and hypostasis, rather than a straightforward reading of scripture or Jewish law. If three persons share one essence, the result is said to be one God, but critics have long pointed out that sharing a category does not make multiple entities numerically one. One may say that the numbers one and two are equally integers, fully integer in essence, but they remain two distinct realities. Essence alone does not make plurality collapse into singularity.
This difficulty becomes sharper when examining sayings of Jesus in light of Jewish legal principles. At one point he invokes the requirement of two witnesses and presents himself and the Father as those two witnesses. Jewish law demands that a second testimony come from another being with its own agency, will, and capacity to speak. If the Father and the Son are numerically one being, their two testimonies would not satisfy the law. For Jesus to appeal to the Father as an independent witness is to speak as if there are two powers with distinct authority. The distinction here is practical and functional, not merely relational or metaphysical. If their testimony is counted as two, then in the framework of biblical law they are not one single agent but two, however perfectly united in purpose.
Jesus did not tighten the definition of monotheism to prevent such plurality; if anything, he loosened it. When accused of blasphemy for calling himself the Son of God, he quoted a psalm that says, “I said, you are gods,” appealing to a scriptural precedent in which divine terminology is used in the plural. Instead of arguing that there can only be one being who is God, he defended his divine sonship by pointing out that scripture itself acknowledges a category of “gods” broader than the Most High. The conclusion embedded in his response is that calling someone divine does not deny the supremacy of the Father. The Most High remains unique, but uniqueness does not mean aloneness. Jesus presents himself as a divine power under the Father, not the same being collapsed into a single ontological essence.
Once this is seen, the scriptural landscape shifts. Instead of one essence expressed in three persons, we find one supreme God with other real powers who derive authority from Him. This pattern fits Jesus’ appeal to two witnesses, the plurality recognized in Psalm 82, and the exalted figure of Daniel 7 who is given dominion by the Ancient of Days rather than sharing His identity. In such a framework, the divinity of Jesus does not require the numerically absolute oneness assumed by later Trinitarian formulations. Instead, it reflects a more flexible monotheism, in which fellowship, hierarchy, and plurality all exist under the supremacy of the Father. The unity of Father and Son is relational, moral, volitional, and purposeful, not a numerical identity of being that dissolves meaningful distinction. This preserves Jesus’ claims, satisfies the law he appealed to, and resonates with the way scripture itself handles the language of divine plurality.
Stephen D Green for content, with AI for wording
