As most of us sing (or at least listen to) the Gloria more times than we can count, the discussion on In Our Time (R4 9am today) concerns The Holy Trinity. I imagine it will be informative even for those (like me) without much of a religious bent.
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The only explicit (or near-explicit) reference to the Trinity in the New Testament is the infamous "Johanine comma" -1 John 5:7 - which says ""For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one". The problem is that it's almost certainly a late addition, probably Roman, from several centuries after Jesus. The earliest manuscripts (all Greek) don't have it. This was a problem for Erasmus, who was first to publish a Greek testament in the early 1500s. None of the Greek manuscripts available to him contained the Johanine Comma, so he omitted it, bringing opprobrium on his head for leaving out the Trinity. He is supposed to have replied something like "If you can produce a Greek manuscript that has the verse, I'll include it in the next edition." Accordingly, a Greek manuscript was 'produced' by translating from the Vulgate.
Good scholarship.
Of course, many don't accept the Trinity - Unitarians and Jehovah's Witnesses for a start. -
On oily post-Christian invention, I seem to recall. [I'll get me Papal Tiara.]
[Pipped by Pabmusic.]Comment
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I thought this was one of the weaker IOTs. The flaw was that all three guest scholars were Christian apologists and spent the entire programme dancing the same dance on the same head of the same pin as St Athanasius (he who famously wouldn't leave the First Council, declaring, "It's Nicaea").
It would have been good to have had a secular scholar, a non-theologian, who could have put the case that the doctrine of the Trinity was a fudge to keep Christianity under the umbrella of monotheism.Comment
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ardcarpOriginally posted by ardcarp View Post
The choir at St Albans recently had the Holy Trinity singing in its ranks with three father and son combinations. As a believer I'm sure that the Holy Ghost was also somewhere around in the cathedral!!
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Pin-heads / dance / just a few. That one tiny snippet of Latin '-que'. Hmm.
The programme began to drift through dense forensic semantics towards ALL the experts agreeing that the Trinity / Holy Ghost were pretty nigh on impossible to justify without anyone actually saying so.Comment
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But isn't that exactly what they did say?Originally posted by ardcarp View Post
And I thought they explained the full significance of the filioque clause rather well.Comment
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And furthermore, they barely stopped short of saying that it is just a lot of nonsense made up by theologians.
It just made me ask why public money is spent on paying people to think about this sort of thing in the 21st century.
I usually enjoy IOT, although Melvyn Bragg sometimes irritates me with the way he moves the discussion on by asking questions such as "Did Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Sīnā have any influence on the work of any nineteenth century female novelists born to Anglican clergymen of Irish origin in villages with steep, cobbled man streets in Yorkshire?" to which the answer is always "yes" although I would prefer, "gasp ... actually, yes, but how on earth did you know that?".
At least he broke the pattern this week by asking a question to which the answer was "no".Comment
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Agree about the 'filioque' clause; and I hadn't realised the difference between the Western and the Orthodox churches. But I thought they all rehearsed the classic Trintarian arguments...and I'd have liked a non-theologian in the studio to take an outsider's view.But isn't that exactly what they did say?
And I thought they explained the full significance of the filioque clause rather well.Comment
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I don't know VC I found them infinitely more believable than scientists trying to get me to accept that something was created from nothing.Originally posted by Vile Consort View Post
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Mmmm... Because you can't understand how 'something' can come from 'nothing' by any natural means, it becomes "infinitely more believable" that something did in fact come from nothing by supernatural means. Well, if that's so, we just don't have to ask any more questions - we can just accept it as a fact (as people did for centuries, after all).Originally posted by Magnificat View Post
Of course, it rather hinges on the meaning of 'nothing'. Is it the 'nothing' beloved of philosophers since Plato, or could it possibly be an unstable state in which virtual particles appear and disappear constantly? In which case, 'nothing' is unstable and 'wants' to become 'something'. Yes, and particle physics does my head in too.Comment
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How do you define "created" in this context?Originally posted by Magnificat View Post[FONT=Comic Sans MS][I][B]Numquam Satis![/B][/I][/FONT]Comment
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Pabs, you mean like.....Yes, and particle physics does my head in too.
\operatorname P [a \leq X \leq b] = \int_a^b |\psi(x)|^2 \, \mathrm{d}x
...which of course is the probability of finding a particle anywhere between a and b.
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What about the probability of understanding that equation?Originally posted by ardcarp View PostPabs, you mean like.....
\operatorname P [a \leq X \leq b] = \int_a^b |\psi(x)|^2 \, \mathrm{d}x
...which of course is the probability of finding a particle anywhere between a and b.Comment
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