Basically, what things boil down to with this writing, is: Jesus, not being a persona [as in Son; part of what is noted as the Trinity], but a plan, thought of by God before mankind was created [showing Deuteronomy 6:4 with there being one LORD meaning exactly that, one. Along with 1 Timothy 3:16, mentioning God was manifested in the flesh, being Jesus. Not part of the Trinity [the Son, Jesus], but God Himself, one LORD Himself.], before the Earth was formed [Ephesians 1:4]. Revelation 4:2
David K. Bernard
God and the Logos
In the Age of the Greek Apologists, we find a progressive
shift away from the biblical doctrine of Oneness and
the substantially identical views of the Post-Apostolic
Age. The vague possible indications of a preexistent Son
by Pseudo-Barnabas and Hermas become explicit in this
age.
Near the beginning of the age stood Aristides, whose
doctrine of God was for the most part biblical Oneness,
and the Epistle to Diognetus, which still retained a predominantly
biblical view but began to separate God and
the Word. At the apex of the age, Justin and his disciple
Tatian clearly differentiated the Father and the Word as
two distinct beings. By the end of the era, Theophilus and
Athenagoras had begun to express a vague, undefined
form of triadism (threefold nature of God), although the
former still used some Oneness expressions. Melito still
48
A History of Christian Doctrine
maintained a predominantly Oneness view of God, but
even some of his terms had become distorted, at least as
they have come down to us.1
God’s oneness. Like the writers of the Post-Apostolic
Age, the Greek Apologists proclaimed that there is one
God, not the many gods of the pagans. In contrast to
Greek and Roman polytheism, they affirmed monotheism.
The doctrine of the Logos. Nevertheless, in this age
we find a compromise of the pure monotheism of the
Bible, particularly with the Apologists’ doctrine of the
Logos. Logos is a Greek term translated as “Word,” and it
represented a very popular Greek philosophical concept
during this time. To the Greeks, the Logos was the reason
of God or the reason by which the universe was sustained.
It was not a god in a personal sense; rather it referred to
the principles by which the universe operated.
Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the apostle
John used this term in his Gospel: “In the beginning was
the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God. . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among
us” (John 1:1, 14). As a monotheistic Jew, he used it in
sharp contrast to prevailing pagan philosophies, drawing
instead upon the Old Testament background of God’s
Word as God Himself in action and in self-revelation. (See
Psalm 107:20; Isaiah 55:11.) There was no thought that
the Word was a second person. (See Isaiah 44:24; 45:5-6;
46:5, 9.) While John surely knew how his pagan contemporaries
used the term, under divine inspiration he used it
in a unique way to point both Jews and Gentiles to Jesus
Christ as the one true God manifested in the flesh.
To summarize the doctrine of the Logos in John 1, in
the beginning God existed alone. At the same time, His
49
The Greek Apologists
plan, His thought, His mind, His reason, His expression
was with Him and was Him from eternity past. In the fullness
of time God manifested himself in flesh. His plan,
reason, and thought was expressed or uttered. God
revealed Himself. John thereby identified Jesus as the one
true God of eternity past. He was not an afterthought, but
the eternally foreordained revelation of God Himself.
As an analogy, before someone can speak a word or a
message, the mind must first think it. First it is an unexpressed
word; then, at the right time, it is uttered or
expressed. Similarly God’s mind, reason, plan, or Word
was unexpressed in times past. The Incarnation was
God’s plan from the beginning, but it did not actually take
place until the fullness of time.
The Greek Apologists, particularly Justin, Tatian,
Theophilus, and Athenagoras, seized upon the Logos as a
means of making Christianity palatable to the pagans of
their day. They said, in effect, “The Logos you have been
speculating about for hundreds of years is the basis of our
faith. The Logos that controls the universe is actually
Jesus Christ.” But to do that, instead of using the context
of the Old Testament and the Gospel of John, the Apologists
went to Greek philosophy to develop, define, and
explain their doctrine of the Logos.
To a great extent, the philosophy of the time was
based upon the ideas of the Greek philosopher Plato.
Plato taught that there are two worlds: the good, real
world of ideas or forms and the imperfect, physical world
of phenomena that reflects the world of ideas. The summit
of the world of ideas is the one supreme, perfect God,
who is uninvolved with the evil world of matter and who is
impassible—incapable of emotional feeling and suffering.
50
A History of Christian Doctrine
The world of ideas serves as an intermediary between
God and the physical world.
For people who were educated with these ideas, it was
difficult to believe the biblical teaching that Jesus Christ
is the supreme God Himself who came in flesh to suffer
and die for the redemption of fallen humanity. The Gnostics
dealt with the conflict between Greek philosophy and
Christianity on this point by essentially following the former.
To them God remained impassible but related to the
world through a series of aeons, of which the Creator was
one and the Redeemer was another.
Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jewish philospher
who lived around the time of Christ, likewise struggled to
reconcile Greek philosophy and Judaism. He had a
motive similar to that of the Apologists: he sought to
make Judaism seem reasonable and acceptable to pagans.
His solution was to proclaim that God is one but also to
speak of the Logos as God’s intermediary in creating the
world.
His concepts were not always clear and were perhaps
even contradictory in places. He referred to the Logos as
the son of God, first-begotten of God, and even a second
god, but he seemed to use these phrases metaphorically,
for he did not describe the Logos as having personality
distinct from God. In essence, he tried to fuse Greek and
Jewish thought by employing the popular Greek concept
of the Logos, identifying it with God’s Word and wisdom
as described in the Old Testament, and using this idea to
explain how the one true God of the Bible could relate to
the world without Greek concepts being violated.
Thus he said God created the world by His Logos,
God speaks to the world by His Logos, and God interacts
51
The Greek Apologists
with people by His Logos. He even found a way to include
the revered Greek philosophers in the picture, stating
that the one true God of the Bible who communicated
with Moses also communicated with Socrates, Plato, and
Aristotle by the Logos. He always stopped short of making
the Logos a second person, however.
The leading Apologists adopted Philo’s approach in
their own attempt to reconcile Greek thought with Christianity,
with a significant new development: they clearly
did make the Logos a second person. Such a notion was
abhorrent to the Jewish mind, steeped in the absolute,
uncompromising monotheism of the Old Testament
(Deuteronomy 6:4-9; Isaiah 44:6-8; 45:21-22). However,
it seemed plausible to Gentiles of the day, including the
Apologists, whose background was polytheism (I Corinthians
8:5).
The Apologists explained that Jesus Christ is not the
supreme God, not the Father, but a second person, the
Logos, who is the same as the Logos of Greek philosophy.
In this way they sought to convince pagans that Christianity
was legitimate as a philosophy and ultimately to show
them that it was actually the best and truest philosophy.
The Apologists’ doctrine of the Logos was a departure
from the strict monotheism of the Bible and of the earlier
Post-Apostolic Age. It marks the beginning of a personal
differentiation in the Godhead among Christian writers.
We find no hint of this Logos doctrine in the earlier writings
of the Post-Apostolic writers, although it bears some
resemblance to the ideas of the Gnostics.
The Apologists equated the Logos with the Son. In
other words, the Son is a second person in the Godhead,
although they preferred to use the term Logos. Here we
52
A History of Christian Doctrine
find for the first time the doctrine of the preexistent Son
expressed clearly and definitely.
In the New Testament, however, Son refers to the
Incarnation. Jesus Christ is the eternal God, and His Spirit
is the Spirit of God from eternity past, but Jesus was
not the Son until He came in flesh in the Incarnation. (See
Luke 1:35; Galatians 4:4; Hebrews 1:5.) God was
revealed in the Son; God came in flesh as the Son (II Corinthians
5:19; I Timothy 3:16).
To put it another way, the Word of God, or the Logos,
was revealed in the Son. Although Jesus is both Logos
and Son, in scriptural terminology there is not an exact
equation of the terms. The Logos is the eternal God Himself,
the eternal Spirit, the eternal divine mind (John 1:1),
but the Son is specifically God coming in the flesh. The
Son of God is the authentic human being who was born of
the virgin Mary, lived, died for our sins, and rose again.
The Apologists’ belief in two persons is not the same
as the modern doctrine of the trinity. In modern trinitarianism,
the divine persons are coequal, but the Apologists
taught that the second person is subordinate to the first
person (subordinationism).
For example, Justin said the Logos is “another God
and Lord subject to the maker of all things. . . . He . . . is
distinct from Him who made all things—numerically, I
mean.” Following the Greek concept of God, Justin told
Trypho, a Jew, that it was not the Father but the Logos
who spoke and appeared to people in the Old Testament:
“You must not imagine that the unbegotten God Himself
came down or went up from any place. For the ineffable
Father and Lord of all . . . remains in His own place,
wherever that is.”2
53
The Greek Apologists
In the beginning, said the Apologists, God existed
alone, but in order to create the world He first caused His
Word to come out of Him. Originally, His Word was inherent
in Him in an impersonal form, but He brought forth
His Word as a second person. This event they identified
as the begetting of the Logos or Son.
Once again the Apologists deviated from the scriptural
use of terminology. In the New Testament the term
“begotten Son” refers to the uniqueness of Jesus Christ,
and Hebrews 1:5-6 specifically relates this concept to the
Incarnation. According to Matthew 1:18-20 and Luke
1:35, Jesus was not conceived by an earthly father, but
the Spirit of God moved upon the womb of the virgin
Mary. Therefore Jesus was literally begotten as a baby at
that time and so was called the Son of God. The begetting
refers to the Incarnation, not the eternal nature of Jesus
Christ. The Apologists changed that understanding, however,
by placing the begetting at a point in time before the
creation of the world.
In sum, the Apologists interpreted John 1:1 much as
Oneness Pentecostals do today. In the beginning the Word
was God Himself, God’s mind, God’s reason inherent
within Him. They deviated from Scripture by saying that
before creation the Word came out of God as a second
person begotten by God.
This belief contains another contrast to modern trinitarianism,
which teaches that the divine persons are
coeternal and that the term “begotten” refers to an eternal,
ongoing process and relationship between the Father
and the Son. Obviously, the Apologists did not think their
second person was coeternal with the Father. The Word
was created or begotten by the Father at a point in time,
54
A History of Christian Doctrine
and He retains an inferiority or subordination in rank.
The Holy Spirit. The Apologists did not explicitly distinguish
a third person. They mentioned the Holy Spirit,
but it is not clear how they viewed the Spirit. At times
they seemed to identify the Spirit as simply the Spirit of
the Father—the Father in emanation, not another person.
At other times they seemed to identify the Spirit as the
Logos, the second person. For instance, Justin said the
Logos inspired the prophets of the Old Testament but also
said the Spirit inspired the prophets.3
A few passages seem to identify the Spirit as a third
person, some sort of created being inferior to the other
two. In one passage Justin identified “the prophetic Spirit”
as a third being to worship, after God and “the Son of
the true God,” while in another place he said that he worshiped
God, the Son, “the other good angels,” and “the
prophetic Spirit.”4 Athenagoras spoke freely of the Father,
Son, and Spirit.
Threefold references. Theophilus was the first
known writer to use the Greek word triados in relation to
God. It is the genitive form of trias, which means “triad”
and was later used to describe the trinity. He simply mentioned
it in passing without trying to teach a doctrine:
“The three days [of creation] which were before the luminaries,
are types of the Triados, of God, and His Word,
and His wisdom.”5 Elsewhere he identified God’s wisdom
with His Word and His Spirit.6 By contrast, trinitarians of
the third and fourth centuries identified wisdom as the
second person.
It is not clear whether Theophilus referred to three
persons, but it does not seem likely in context. He did not
use the term persons (plural) but used person (singular)
55
The Greek Apologists
in a manner incompatible with later trinitarianism, saying
that the Word, which is God’s power and wisdom,
assumed the person of the Father, the person of God.7
Some people say this was the first Christian use of the
word trinity (about 180), but most historians reserve that
dubious distinction for Tertullian in the early third century,
because he clearly did intend three distinct persons.
In this connection, Melito, bishop of Sardis, is quite
intriguing. His writings do not display the same kind of
philosophical thinking as the other Apologists. In fact, he
made strong statements about the oneness of God and the
deity of Jesus Christ. In two surviving fragments he
described Jesus as “God put to death.” Although two
statements of his seem to indicate a preexistent Son, it
does not appear that Melito followed the concepts of the
other Apologists but was much closer in thought to the
Post-Apostolic writers. Unfortunately, we do not have
enough of his writings to make a definitive judgment.
Summary. In summary, the leading Greek Apologists
made a personal distinction between the Father and the
Son, or Logos. They taught a form of binitarianism (two
persons in the Godhead), the second person being subordinate
to the first. There is some indication of a threefold
nature in God, or a third person, especially among two
later Apologists, but they did not develop this idea to the
point that historians consider it to be trinitarianism as we
know it today.
In the Age of the Greek Apologists, we find a progressive
shift away from the biblical doctrine of Oneness and
the substantially identical views of the Post-Apostolic
Age. The vague possible indications of a preexistent Son
by Pseudo-Barnabas and Hermas become explicit in this
age.
Near the beginning of the age stood Aristides, whose
doctrine of God was for the most part biblical Oneness,
and the Epistle to Diognetus, which still retained a predominantly
biblical view but began to separate God and
the Word. At the apex of the age, Justin and his disciple
Tatian clearly differentiated the Father and the Word as
two distinct beings. By the end of the era, Theophilus and
Athenagoras had begun to express a vague, undefined
form of triadism (threefold nature of God), although the
former still used some Oneness expressions. Melito still
48
A History of Christian Doctrine
maintained a predominantly Oneness view of God, but
even some of his terms had become distorted, at least as
they have come down to us.1
God’s oneness. Like the writers of the Post-Apostolic
Age, the Greek Apologists proclaimed that there is one
God, not the many gods of the pagans. In contrast to
Greek and Roman polytheism, they affirmed monotheism.
The doctrine of the Logos. Nevertheless, in this age
we find a compromise of the pure monotheism of the
Bible, particularly with the Apologists’ doctrine of the
Logos. Logos is a Greek term translated as “Word,” and it
represented a very popular Greek philosophical concept
during this time. To the Greeks, the Logos was the reason
of God or the reason by which the universe was sustained.
It was not a god in a personal sense; rather it referred to
the principles by which the universe operated.
Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the apostle
John used this term in his Gospel: “In the beginning was
the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God. . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among
us” (John 1:1, 14). As a monotheistic Jew, he used it in
sharp contrast to prevailing pagan philosophies, drawing
instead upon the Old Testament background of God’s
Word as God Himself in action and in self-revelation. (See
Psalm 107:20; Isaiah 55:11.) There was no thought that
the Word was a second person. (See Isaiah 44:24; 45:5-6;
46:5, 9.) While John surely knew how his pagan contemporaries
used the term, under divine inspiration he used it
in a unique way to point both Jews and Gentiles to Jesus
Christ as the one true God manifested in the flesh.
To summarize the doctrine of the Logos in John 1, in
the beginning God existed alone. At the same time, His
49
The Greek Apologists
plan, His thought, His mind, His reason, His expression
was with Him and was Him from eternity past. In the fullness
of time God manifested himself in flesh. His plan,
reason, and thought was expressed or uttered. God
revealed Himself. John thereby identified Jesus as the one
true God of eternity past. He was not an afterthought, but
the eternally foreordained revelation of God Himself.
As an analogy, before someone can speak a word or a
message, the mind must first think it. First it is an unexpressed
word; then, at the right time, it is uttered or
expressed. Similarly God’s mind, reason, plan, or Word
was unexpressed in times past. The Incarnation was
God’s plan from the beginning, but it did not actually take
place until the fullness of time.
The Greek Apologists, particularly Justin, Tatian,
Theophilus, and Athenagoras, seized upon the Logos as a
means of making Christianity palatable to the pagans of
their day. They said, in effect, “The Logos you have been
speculating about for hundreds of years is the basis of our
faith. The Logos that controls the universe is actually
Jesus Christ.” But to do that, instead of using the context
of the Old Testament and the Gospel of John, the Apologists
went to Greek philosophy to develop, define, and
explain their doctrine of the Logos.
To a great extent, the philosophy of the time was
based upon the ideas of the Greek philosopher Plato.
Plato taught that there are two worlds: the good, real
world of ideas or forms and the imperfect, physical world
of phenomena that reflects the world of ideas. The summit
of the world of ideas is the one supreme, perfect God,
who is uninvolved with the evil world of matter and who is
impassible—incapable of emotional feeling and suffering.
50
A History of Christian Doctrine
The world of ideas serves as an intermediary between
God and the physical world.
For people who were educated with these ideas, it was
difficult to believe the biblical teaching that Jesus Christ
is the supreme God Himself who came in flesh to suffer
and die for the redemption of fallen humanity. The Gnostics
dealt with the conflict between Greek philosophy and
Christianity on this point by essentially following the former.
To them God remained impassible but related to the
world through a series of aeons, of which the Creator was
one and the Redeemer was another.
Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jewish philospher
who lived around the time of Christ, likewise struggled to
reconcile Greek philosophy and Judaism. He had a
motive similar to that of the Apologists: he sought to
make Judaism seem reasonable and acceptable to pagans.
His solution was to proclaim that God is one but also to
speak of the Logos as God’s intermediary in creating the
world.
His concepts were not always clear and were perhaps
even contradictory in places. He referred to the Logos as
the son of God, first-begotten of God, and even a second
god, but he seemed to use these phrases metaphorically,
for he did not describe the Logos as having personality
distinct from God. In essence, he tried to fuse Greek and
Jewish thought by employing the popular Greek concept
of the Logos, identifying it with God’s Word and wisdom
as described in the Old Testament, and using this idea to
explain how the one true God of the Bible could relate to
the world without Greek concepts being violated.
Thus he said God created the world by His Logos,
God speaks to the world by His Logos, and God interacts
51
The Greek Apologists
with people by His Logos. He even found a way to include
the revered Greek philosophers in the picture, stating
that the one true God of the Bible who communicated
with Moses also communicated with Socrates, Plato, and
Aristotle by the Logos. He always stopped short of making
the Logos a second person, however.
The leading Apologists adopted Philo’s approach in
their own attempt to reconcile Greek thought with Christianity,
with a significant new development: they clearly
did make the Logos a second person. Such a notion was
abhorrent to the Jewish mind, steeped in the absolute,
uncompromising monotheism of the Old Testament
(Deuteronomy 6:4-9; Isaiah 44:6-8; 45:21-22). However,
it seemed plausible to Gentiles of the day, including the
Apologists, whose background was polytheism (I Corinthians
8:5).
The Apologists explained that Jesus Christ is not the
supreme God, not the Father, but a second person, the
Logos, who is the same as the Logos of Greek philosophy.
In this way they sought to convince pagans that Christianity
was legitimate as a philosophy and ultimately to show
them that it was actually the best and truest philosophy.
The Apologists’ doctrine of the Logos was a departure
from the strict monotheism of the Bible and of the earlier
Post-Apostolic Age. It marks the beginning of a personal
differentiation in the Godhead among Christian writers.
We find no hint of this Logos doctrine in the earlier writings
of the Post-Apostolic writers, although it bears some
resemblance to the ideas of the Gnostics.
The Apologists equated the Logos with the Son. In
other words, the Son is a second person in the Godhead,
although they preferred to use the term Logos. Here we
52
A History of Christian Doctrine
find for the first time the doctrine of the preexistent Son
expressed clearly and definitely.
In the New Testament, however, Son refers to the
Incarnation. Jesus Christ is the eternal God, and His Spirit
is the Spirit of God from eternity past, but Jesus was
not the Son until He came in flesh in the Incarnation. (See
Luke 1:35; Galatians 4:4; Hebrews 1:5.) God was
revealed in the Son; God came in flesh as the Son (II Corinthians
5:19; I Timothy 3:16).
To put it another way, the Word of God, or the Logos,
was revealed in the Son. Although Jesus is both Logos
and Son, in scriptural terminology there is not an exact
equation of the terms. The Logos is the eternal God Himself,
the eternal Spirit, the eternal divine mind (John 1:1),
but the Son is specifically God coming in the flesh. The
Son of God is the authentic human being who was born of
the virgin Mary, lived, died for our sins, and rose again.
The Apologists’ belief in two persons is not the same
as the modern doctrine of the trinity. In modern trinitarianism,
the divine persons are coequal, but the Apologists
taught that the second person is subordinate to the first
person (subordinationism).
For example, Justin said the Logos is “another God
and Lord subject to the maker of all things. . . . He . . . is
distinct from Him who made all things—numerically, I
mean.” Following the Greek concept of God, Justin told
Trypho, a Jew, that it was not the Father but the Logos
who spoke and appeared to people in the Old Testament:
“You must not imagine that the unbegotten God Himself
came down or went up from any place. For the ineffable
Father and Lord of all . . . remains in His own place,
wherever that is.”2
53
The Greek Apologists
In the beginning, said the Apologists, God existed
alone, but in order to create the world He first caused His
Word to come out of Him. Originally, His Word was inherent
in Him in an impersonal form, but He brought forth
His Word as a second person. This event they identified
as the begetting of the Logos or Son.
Once again the Apologists deviated from the scriptural
use of terminology. In the New Testament the term
“begotten Son” refers to the uniqueness of Jesus Christ,
and Hebrews 1:5-6 specifically relates this concept to the
Incarnation. According to Matthew 1:18-20 and Luke
1:35, Jesus was not conceived by an earthly father, but
the Spirit of God moved upon the womb of the virgin
Mary. Therefore Jesus was literally begotten as a baby at
that time and so was called the Son of God. The begetting
refers to the Incarnation, not the eternal nature of Jesus
Christ. The Apologists changed that understanding, however,
by placing the begetting at a point in time before the
creation of the world.
In sum, the Apologists interpreted John 1:1 much as
Oneness Pentecostals do today. In the beginning the Word
was God Himself, God’s mind, God’s reason inherent
within Him. They deviated from Scripture by saying that
before creation the Word came out of God as a second
person begotten by God.
This belief contains another contrast to modern trinitarianism,
which teaches that the divine persons are
coeternal and that the term “begotten” refers to an eternal,
ongoing process and relationship between the Father
and the Son. Obviously, the Apologists did not think their
second person was coeternal with the Father. The Word
was created or begotten by the Father at a point in time,
54
A History of Christian Doctrine
and He retains an inferiority or subordination in rank.
The Holy Spirit. The Apologists did not explicitly distinguish
a third person. They mentioned the Holy Spirit,
but it is not clear how they viewed the Spirit. At times
they seemed to identify the Spirit as simply the Spirit of
the Father—the Father in emanation, not another person.
At other times they seemed to identify the Spirit as the
Logos, the second person. For instance, Justin said the
Logos inspired the prophets of the Old Testament but also
said the Spirit inspired the prophets.3
A few passages seem to identify the Spirit as a third
person, some sort of created being inferior to the other
two. In one passage Justin identified “the prophetic Spirit”
as a third being to worship, after God and “the Son of
the true God,” while in another place he said that he worshiped
God, the Son, “the other good angels,” and “the
prophetic Spirit.”4 Athenagoras spoke freely of the Father,
Son, and Spirit.
Threefold references. Theophilus was the first
known writer to use the Greek word triados in relation to
God. It is the genitive form of trias, which means “triad”
and was later used to describe the trinity. He simply mentioned
it in passing without trying to teach a doctrine:
“The three days [of creation] which were before the luminaries,
are types of the Triados, of God, and His Word,
and His wisdom.”5 Elsewhere he identified God’s wisdom
with His Word and His Spirit.6 By contrast, trinitarians of
the third and fourth centuries identified wisdom as the
second person.
It is not clear whether Theophilus referred to three
persons, but it does not seem likely in context. He did not
use the term persons (plural) but used person (singular)
55
The Greek Apologists
in a manner incompatible with later trinitarianism, saying
that the Word, which is God’s power and wisdom,
assumed the person of the Father, the person of God.7
Some people say this was the first Christian use of the
word trinity (about 180), but most historians reserve that
dubious distinction for Tertullian in the early third century,
because he clearly did intend three distinct persons.
In this connection, Melito, bishop of Sardis, is quite
intriguing. His writings do not display the same kind of
philosophical thinking as the other Apologists. In fact, he
made strong statements about the oneness of God and the
deity of Jesus Christ. In two surviving fragments he
described Jesus as “God put to death.” Although two
statements of his seem to indicate a preexistent Son, it
does not appear that Melito followed the concepts of the
other Apologists but was much closer in thought to the
Post-Apostolic writers. Unfortunately, we do not have
enough of his writings to make a definitive judgment.
Summary. In summary, the leading Greek Apologists
made a personal distinction between the Father and the
Son, or Logos. They taught a form of binitarianism (two
persons in the Godhead), the second person being subordinate
to the first. There is some indication of a threefold
nature in God, or a third person, especially among two
later Apologists, but they did not develop this idea to the
point that historians consider it to be trinitarianism as we
know it today.
