John 1 says Jesus was always God:

Not even the KJV reads that way. I don't know of any serious biblical scholar that attributes John 1 as biblical proof of the trinity doctrine. What most will tell you is that it's been mistranslated through most biblical translations as to remove what it would have meant at the time it was written.

The synoptic gospels contain no evidence the anonymous authors of those scriptures ever were intended to suggest a trinity. What they actually do intend and explicitly say was Christ was the messiah, and the messiah and god are mutually exclusive at least as far as any practicing Jew in the first century would have perceived those two entities. The reason the concept of the trinity is vague and confusing is because the biblical evidence for it or even any reasonableness is non-existent. As you allude, it was a doctrine formed centuries after the death of Christ.

I do like KJV better. I posted it in only answer to the question of whether Jesus existed from the beginning (and apparently he did, as logos), not as a basis for the doctrine of the Trinity, which was concocted much later to resolve a doctrinal dilemma - can you believe Jesus was God without becoming a polytheist?

It takes considerable liberty as a translation with a decidedly trinitarian perspective, and the passage offered is edited in that it’s missing several relevant verses which betray the idea the author is trying to project. To answer your question, you can’t really believe in the divinity of Christ without either becoming a polytheist or tying yourself into some serious logical pretzels. According to the gospels, Christ was quite clear he existed along with the invisible sky daddy and not of the same entity. Not all Christian denominations believe in the trinity, precisely because the biblical evidence for it is both missing and nonsensical.

translational accuracy (which is beyond my ken), and it was edited for brevity by me, just in a quick and dirty attempt to answer the OP's question as to whether Jesus was always around or just kind of came and went from heaven to earth - not how he fit into the Trinity, which, as I also noted, was an idea that was made up much later to try to explain how a divine being could be divine without being a god in a religion that allowed for only one of them.

I don't think he would have approved of the direction of most Christian denominations just purely from a theological standpoint, let alone a moral one.

and the church (churches) came to be among the most powerful and sometimes oppressive establishments ever. If he ever does come back like they say, he might chase a few more money-changers out of temples.

For one thing, it's impossible to separate the myth from reality and the myth is certainly going to trump anything that approaches reality. His life was so uninteresting nobody bothered to even begin writing anything down about him until at least 70 years after his death. We have more factual information about Plato who lived centuries before.

The money changer story is one of those that almost certainly never happened. But for the sake of argument, let's assume it did happen. These were people who would have been scamming people out of their money in exchange for religious approval. In other words, not that much different from what Jesus himself was doing. According to the bible, his ministry lasted at least 3 years and during that time he would have had to provide for himself and the people in his organization. Unless one believes he was hocus pocusing up all their worldly supplies, that takes money which came in the form of donations. He would have been selling the conveniently unverifiable promise of atonement in exchange for cash. If you think about it much, that makes him more establishment and less valuable to society than the money changers were. At least they were providing an actual service, albeit one that did take significant advantage from their clients.

The anti-establishment part about Christ that probably resulted in his execution was his messianic claims. This would have probably been viewed as blasphemous by the Jewish authorities.

about 150 years later.

Thanks for this info.

Promises.

We are all children of god via our possessing souls.
If he thought he was God, why would he say that students can surpass the teacher? No one could surpass god. And why, if he came to forgive our sins to give us pardons, did he give instructions on all the things we had to do to earn heaven?

What is the nature, the essence, the non-negatable truth of God before the creation? And after?
Is the creation (including humanity) intrinsic or extrinsic to God?
If God, does God have existence or is God 'existence'?
If God is equivalent to (the meaning of) 'existence', can God be non-existent.
If God, is consciousness an add-on or essential nature of Divinity?
If God is infinite, limitless, unbounded, and if God is also consciousness, how can the limited me claim to be separate 'consciousness'?

Way too many loosy-goosy words, thoughts, ideas, concepts, fallacies, and countless confusions exist about the word/name "God".

And has been nonsense for 1800 years or so since it was more or less invented. The christians of the 200s-400s spent a lot of time arguing about and frequently killing each other over ‘the true nature of christ’. The intervention of the Roman State, starting with Constantine, resolved the dispute (with state violence of course) in favor of the absurd trinitarian ideology.

The christian god is three divine entities all of which are eternal and all of which are basically aspects of the one god. There are no logical rational answers to your questions as the belief system is irrational at its core.

dedicated to the discussion of religion, which is "irrational" almost by definition because it requires acceptance of certain unprovable things as a matter of faith. This particular thread has to do with the origin of certain Christian beliefs, not whether they are actually true. If you find religion offensive you might not want to participate in the religion forum.

it is open to both believers and non- believers.
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