Jimmy Akin advises a caller on how to discuss the Biblical evidence for the Trinity with her friend who claims that Matthew 28:19 (“baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”) is a later interpolation made by the Catholic Church.
Transcript:
Host: Mary in Denver, Colorado, listening on 1060 AM, you are on with Jimmy Akin.
Caller: Hi, I had a question about how to explain to someone who claims the Trinity is unbiblical and that the Catholic Church adds the verse about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to Matthew’s Gospel; how do we explain that to them? And this is somebody that needs Scripture only.
Jimmy: Okay, what–I was going to ask, what kind of faith background is this person coming from? What kind of religious organization do they belong to?
Caller: Probably fundamentalist.
Jimmy: Okay, most fundamentalists do believe in the Trinity. There are some people who are–like, they’re called Oneness Pentecostals, that are sort of derived from the Protestant community even though they’re not really part of it anymore. So you don’t have a specific knowledge of the name of the Church this person goes to?
Caller: They’re wandering around.
Jimmy: They’re wandering around. Okay, so they’re kind of free-ranging. Well, what I would say is a couple things.
The first one is: if someone says that the Trinitarian formula at the end of Matthew 28–this is the last chapter in Matthew’s Gospel, it’s where Jesus says “Go into all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” That–if someone’s saying that verse is was not in the original manuscript, I’d say, “Okay, let’s have some evidence for that.” You can assert that, but actually, textual scholarship and the history of how the texts of the Bible developed is a very heavily studied field. And so if there–if it were true that this was not in the original, then we should find evidence of manuscripts from the ancient Church of Matthew that didn’t have this verse. Because there are verses in various books in the New Testament that seem to have come along later, and we know that because we have manuscripts that don’t contain those verses.
So I would challenge the person and say–I mean, in a nice way–but I’d say, “If you want to say that, that’s a very striking claim; you need some evidence to back it up. So where are the manuscripts that don’t have this verse? And if there aren’t any–if they all have this verse–then you need to be prepared to take this verse seriously. And I understand it may be convenient for your position to say, ‘Well, this verse was added,’ but convenience is not a criterion of truth. It’s not a good test for truth. You need to go with the evidence.”
The second thing I would say to someone who was making this argument is that our belief in the Trinity is not dependent on this one verse. This verse could be completely ignored, and we would still be able to prove the doctrine of the Trinity from elsewhere in the New Testament, because the doctrine of the Trinity involves several claims. It involves the claim that there is one God–and that’s easy to show from all kinds of verses, both Old Testament and New; it involves the claim that the Father is God–that’s also very clear from various verses; it involves the claim that the Son is God–and there are verses that document that; and the claim that the Holy Spirit is God–and there are verses that document that. It also involves the claim that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are distinct from each other; so the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Holy Spirit, the Father is not the Holy Spirit. And those also can be documented from a variety of different verses in the New Testament.
So even without Matthew 28–or any other single specific verse–we can show the doctrine of the Trinity based on the teaching of the New Testament in multiple places. And if you’d like examples of those verses, I can’t really rattle them off right now–and it would also be bad radio if I did–but go to Catholic.com and type in the word “Trinity.” You’ll find verses there. Also, check out my book A Daily Defense, because in that book I go into the biblical basis for each of these points: the divinity of Jesus, the divinity of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity as a complete doctrine; and so that information for you will be right there.
Host: Thank you very much, Mary.
For more reading on the trinity and its basis in Scripture, see our encyclopedia, our article “Defending the Trinity,” and our tracts, “God in Three Persons,” “The Trinity,” and “Filioque.”