Anthony Rogers quotes scholars [most of whom are not Christians] showing how Trinitarian-like views pre-dated Christianity in Second Temple Judaism, during the intertestamental period, and after the advent of Christianity even to the medieval period.
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An objection that Unitarians have about these types of quotes is that they are more friendly to Modalism than to Trinitarianism. Here are some of my responses to that objection:
The quotes are useful for a number of reasons:
1. They refute the claim made by some Unitarians (especially in times past 20 years ago and since before the time of the Reformation) that Judaism has always been monolithic in their understanding and always taught strict monotheism of the kind we find in modern Judaism whereby God is uni-personal without qualification.
2. Even if some of these quotes and views by Jews were more akin to Modalism than Trinitarianism that doesn't mean all of them were more akin to Modalism. But EVEN IF ALL of them were more akin to Modalism, they show how Jews were struggling and grappling with the OT passages that seem to imply plurality and/or fluidity in God. It shows that they were in the process of hammering out a formula of how these things could be, and they tried to do this without the New Testament. Sometimes because the NT didn't yet exist [if they lived BCE/BC], other times because they rejected the NT consciously/intentionally [if they lived during CE/AD].
3. The fact that many of these Jewish views are closer to Modalism shows that they are farther away from Semi-Arianism and Arianism or similar formulations/models.
4. It seems to me that Trinitarianism does best in balancing the oneness of God found in some of these Jewish Modalistic views on the one hand, and on the other hand the proper genuine desire by views like Semi-Arianism and Arianism (and similar views) to affirm the New Testament's teaching of the genuine personal distinctions between the Father and the Son [and the Holy Spirit, though many Unitarians would not consider the HS a distinct person]. Trinitarianism sits comfortably in the middle of Modalism and Semi-Arianism-like views because it takes in ALL of the Biblical evidence that affirms both the real unity of God and the real plurality of God.
5. All the above shows how versions of Humanitarian Unitarianism are ahistorical, aberrant and unlikely correct.
Here are the quotes that Rogers posted on the screen. Note, I'm not sure I always accurately cited the source correctly:
"...it is at least possible to find a clear precedent [in Judaism-AR/Anthony Rogers] of hypostases within the Hebrew Godhead." (Alan Segal, "The Incarnation: The Jewish Milieu," p.116)
"The ideas of Trinity and incarnation, or certainly the germs of those ideas, were already present among Jewish believers well before Jesus came on the scene to incarnate in himself, as it were, those theological notions and take up his messianic calling." (Daniel Boyarkin, "The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ," p. xiii)
"Although the official rabbinic theology suppressed all talk of the Memra or Logos by naming it the heresy of "Two Powers in heaven," both before the Rabbis and contemporaneously with them there was a A MULTITUDE OF JEWS, in both Palestine and the Diaspora, who held onto this version of monotheistic theology." (Daniel Boyarkin, "The Gospel of the Memra," p. 254)
"There is no doubt that the Christianity of the New Testament and the early church fathers of the first centuries CE adopted Jewish monotheism–however, it was not 'pure' monotheism matured to eternal perfection but rather the 'monotheism' that had developed in the postexilic period in the later canonical literature of the Hebrew Bible and noncanonical writings, the so-called apocrypha and pseudopigrapha. The New Testament took up these traditions that existed in Judaism, and did not reinvent but instead expanded and deeped them. The elevation of Jesus of Nazareth as the first-born before all creation, the God incarnate, Son of God, Son of Man, the Messiah: all these basic Christological premises are not pagan or other kinds of aberrations; they are rooted in Second Temple Judaism, regardless of their specifically Christian character." (Peter Schäfer, "Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity" pp. 4-5)
"It may be said that the Jewish mystics recovered the mythical dimension of a biblical motif regarding the appearance of God in the guise of the highest of angels, called 'angel of the Lord'...,'angel of God'..., or 'angel of the Presence"...which sometimes appeared in the form of a man. Evidence for the continuity of the exegetical tradition of an exalted angel that is in effect the manifestation of God is to be found in a wide variety of later sources." (Elliot R. Wolfson, "Through A Speculum That Shines," p. 225)
"In a tradition from the Sar-Torah material of the Hekhalot texts...Metatron is described as 'Metatron, Lord God of Israel, God of the heavens and the Earth.' In the Book of Illumination written by the first known Kabbalist in Castile, R. Ya'acov ben Ya'acov ha-Koken, Metatron is called...logos." (Daniel Abrams, "The Boundaries of Divine Ontology: The Inclusion and Exclusion of Metatron in the Godhead," Harvard Theological Review, 87:3 July 1994, ISSN 0017-8160, p. 296, fn17)
"This approach to the pardes account in general and the role of Metatron in particular can be found in the works of some kabbalists, beginning in the early thirteenth century. Although it may seem that we are reading a rabbinic text through the lenses of the kabbalistic worldview, the understanding of the continuous or organic being of the divine, which extends from the simple unity of the godhead to a hypostatic manifestation, predates much of the Talmud." (Daniel Abrams, "The Boundaries of Divine Ontology: The Inclusion and Exclusion of Metatron in the Godhead," Harvard Theological Review, 87:3 July 1994, ISSN 0017-8160, p. 296-297)
"In the passage from Nahmanides' Commentary to the Torah discussed by Pines, Nahmanides explicitly takes issue with Maimonides (and with the tenth-century sage Sa‘adia Ga’on by inference), and seeks to characterize the fundamental difference between his tradition and Maimonides' Aristotelian worldview. The difference centers around the inclusion or exclusion of the divine manifestation within the godhead. Nahmanides posits an organic or continuous relationship between God's being and that of the angel–that is, they are both immanent in the same divine substance." (Daniel Abrams, "The Boundaries of Divine Ontology: The Inclusion and Exclusion of Metatron in the Godhead," Harvard Theological Review, 87:3 July 1994, ISSN 0017-8160, p. 297)
"There can be little doubt however that early Jewish theologoumena related to such a [hypostatic, supernal] son existed, as the books dealing with Enoch - in particular the Ethiopian one - and Philo's views...concerning the Logos as Son or firstborn convincingly demonstrate, and likewise there can be little doubt that they informed the main developments in a great variety of the nascent Christologies. In the course of time, due to the ascent in Christianity of both the centrality and cruciality of sonship understood in diverse forms of incarnation, it seems that Jewish authors belonging to rabbinic circles attenuated and in some cases even obliterated the role of sons as cosmic mediators. Nevertheless, some of these earlier traditions apparently survived in traditional Jewish writings that were subsequently transmitted by rabbinic Judaism. Yet there is no reason to assume that only the literary corpora adopted by rabbinic Judaism mediated the late antiquity views of theophoric sonship to the more extensive corpora written in the Middles Ages, or that sonship survived only in the written documents..." (Moshe Idel, "Ben: Sonship and Jewish Mysticism," pp. 49-50)
"In some instances, the Messiah has been conceived also as the representative of the divine into this world. The very fact that the phrase meshiyah YHWH recurs in the sources shows a special connection between him and God. This nexus could sometimes be stronger and richer, as it later became in Christian theology, in the ecstatic Kabbalah and Sabbateanism, or, less evidently, in some other cases in Jewish sources, though such a view is found also in the rabbinic literature, where the Messiah is described as one of the three entities designated by the Tetragrammaton." (Moshe Idel, "Messianic Mystics," p. 41)
"...earlier systems [of Judaism] resorted to the myth of the Messiah as savior and redeemer of Israel, a supernatural figure...even a God-man facing the crucial historical questions of Israel's life and resolving them: the Christ as king of the world, of the ages, of death itself." (Jacob Neusner, "Judaism and the Messiahs At the Turn of the Christian Era," p. 275)
"We shall find four basic messianic paradigms (king, priests, prophet, and heavenly messiah), and they were not equally widespread. (Admittedly, the "heavenly messiah" paradigm is somewhat different from the others, since it is not defined by function, and can overlap with the other paradigms.)" (John J. Collins, "The Scepter and the Star," p. 18)
"There were other paradigms of messianism besides the Davidic one, and some elements of these were found to be applicable to the Christian messiah...We shall find, also, texts that envisage exaltation and enthronement in heaven and texts that apply certain attributes of divinity to a messianic figure." (John J. Collins, "The Scepter and the Star," p. 19-20)
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