The Name of God — What Do We Actually Know?

In the Hebrew original of the Old Testament, God's personal name appears 6,828 times. It is written with four consonants: י ה ו ה — transliterated into Latin as YHWH, the so-called Tetragrammaton (Greek: “the four letters”).

The problem is that ancient Hebrew was written without vowels. We therefore do not know with certainty how the name was pronounced.

The most common interpretations:

  • Yahweh — the pronunciation most biblical scholars and linguists today consider most likely, based on early Greek transliterations (including that of Church Father Clement of Alexandria ~200 CE, who writes Iaouê) and comparisons with related Semitic languages.
  • Yehova (or Jehovah) — emerged in the 13th century when medieval Christian scribes combined the consonants of YHWH with the vowels of the Hebrew word Adonai (Lord) — which Jews pronounced instead of the sacred name. The result was a hybrid that never existed in the original. Yet this is the form that survives in many Western traditions and is used by, among others, Jehovah’s Witnesses.
  • Yah — a shortened form that appears directly in the Bible, including in Hallelujah (הַלְלוּיָהּ) — “praise Yah”.
  • Adonai / The LORD — the substitution Jews used to avoid pronouncing the sacred name. In English Bible translations this is indicated by LORD in small capitals.

Why don’t we know?
Jewish piety forbade pronouncing the name except by the High Priest once a year, on the Day of Atonement, in the Holy of Holies. When the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE and the High Priesthood disappeared, the living pronunciation tradition vanished with it. The secret of the correct pronunciation may have been lost by design — or by the passage of history.

The name is explained in Exodus 3:14 when Moses asks what God is called: “I am who I am” (Hebrew: Ehyeh asher ehyeh). It is a deliberately enigmatic definition — a declaration of existence rather than a name in the ordinary sense.

Jesus and the Father — What Do the Texts Say?

Before discussing what church councils decided, it is worth reading what the actual texts say.

Texts suggesting Jesus is subordinate to the Father:

  • “The Father is greater than I” — John 14:28
  • “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” — Mark 13:32
  • In Gethsemane Jesus prays: “Not my will, but yours be done” — Luke 22:42
  • On the cross he cries out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — Mark 15:34
  • “When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him” — 1 Corinthians 15:28

Texts used to argue for Jesus’s divinity:

  • “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” — John 1:1
  • “I and the Father are one” — John 10:30
  • Thomas’s exclamation: “My Lord and my God!” — John 20:28

A textual-critical observation:
The Gospel of John is the youngest of the four Gospels — written approximately 90–100 CE, some 60–70 years after the crucifixion. It is also theologically the most developed. The Gospel of Mark, the oldest (~65–70 CE), contains no parallel to the Johannine prologue about “the Word that was God.” The gradual theological development is visible in the chronology of the Gospels.

What Did Jesus’s Contemporaries Believe?

Jesus’s disciples were all devout Jews. Judaism rests on an absolute monotheism summarised in the Shema — the prayer every observant Jew recited morning and evening:

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” (Deuteronomy 6:4)

For a Jew in the 30s CE, the idea that God would become human was not merely foreign — it was blasphemous. The concept of Messiah (Hebrew: the anointed one) referred to a long-awaited king and deliverer of the line of David, not an incarnate deity. His contemporaries expected a political-religious leader who would free Israel from Roman occupation.

The early disciples formed a Jewish sect known as the Nazarenes. The Letter of James — written by Jesus’s own brother James, who led the Jerusalem church — reads almost identically to Jewish wisdom literature. Jesus is barely mentioned. Nothing in that letter suggests that James regarded his brother as God.

The role of Paul:
Paul of Tarsus never met Jesus during his lifetime. He was a Pharisee and initially a persecutor of Christians, before his conversion on the road to Damascus. It was Paul who spread the Christian faith in the Hellenistic (Greek-Roman) world — a world in which divine men and divine royal sons (Heracles, Augustus, Dionysus) were familiar figures. The concept of Son of God in an ontological sense — not merely as a metaphor for a chosen leader — landed naturally in that cultural soil.

The Council of Nicaea 325 CE — What Actually Happened?

The Background

In the early 4th century, the Christian church was deeply divided by a theological dispute that threatened to tear the institution apart from within. The dispute concerned a single question: what is Jesus in relation to God?

On one side stood Arius (~256–336), a presbyter in Alexandria. His position was simple and logical: God is eternal and uncreated. The Son is created by the Father — exceptional, divine in a derived sense, but not of the same substance. “There was a time when the Son did not exist,” Arius maintained. Christ was God’s supreme creation, not God himself. This view — Arianism — had enormous support in the eastern parts of the empire.

On the other side stood Athanasius (~296–373), a deacon and later Bishop of Alexandria. His position: the Son is of exactly the same substance as the Father (Greek: homoousios). No gradation, no subordination in essence — only in relation.

Emperor Constantine and Politics

Emperor Constantine I had in 313 CE issued the Edict of Milan, granting Christians religious freedom. He was now interested in Christianity as a politically unifying instrument for the fractured Roman Empire. A church in internal conflict was useless for that purpose.

Constantine summoned a church council in 325 CE at Nicaea (modern-day Iznik in Turkey) — the first ecumenical council in church history. He paid the travel expenses of all attending bishops and presided personally over the meeting, despite not yet being baptised (he was not baptised until his deathbed in 337 CE).

The Participants

Approximately 250–318 bishops attended — most from the eastern Mediterranean, relatively few from the west. Among the better known:

  • Arius — came to defend his position but was given no proper opportunity to speak
  • Athanasius — attended as deacon and assistant to Bishop Alexander of Alexandria; his sharp mind shaped the outcome
  • Eusebius of Caesarea — the church’s first great historian, initially sympathetic to Arius
  • Nicholas of Myra — yes, that Nicholas, later Santa Claus; attended as bishop
  • Hosius of Córdoba — Constantine’s theological adviser, chairman of the council

The Outcome and Its Aftermath

The council adopted the Nicene Creed, establishing that the Son is “of the same substance as the Father” — homoousios. Arius and two bishops who refused to sign were condemned and exiled.

But the victory was not final. What followed is one of the most turbulent chapters in church history:

  • Constantine rehabilitated Arius a few years later and recalled him from exile
  • Athanasius — now Bishop of Alexandria — refused to accept Arius’s return
  • Athanasius was driven from his office five times during his lifetime, totalling 17 years in exile
  • Under Constantine’s son Constantius II, Arianism again dominated — he was a convinced Arian
  • Bishop Hilary of Poitiers said of the period: “We have made a creed out of a political decision”
  • It took a further council — Constantinople 381 CE under Emperor Theodosius — before Trinitarian doctrine was finally established as the official teaching of state religion

The Word That Does Not Exist in the Bible

The Trinity — trinitas in Latin, coined by Tertullian ~200 CE — does not appear a single time in the Bible. Neither does homoousios. These are theological concepts developed by church fathers and ultimately codified by politicians and bishops at a council summoned by an unbaptised emperor with strong political motives.

Isaac Newton and the Bible

Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) — the man who formulated the law of gravity, invented calculus, and laid the foundations of classical mechanics — devoted at least as much time to theology as to natural science. His theological writings are if anything more extensive than his scientific ones.

Newton was a convinced anti-Trinitarian. He studied the biblical texts in their original Hebrew and Greek and concluded that the doctrine of the Trinity was a fabrication — a political invention without support in Scripture. He concealed these convictions during his lifetime because they were heretical and could have cost him his position and his freedom.

In his unpublished text “An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture”, Newton argued that two of the most important Trinitarian Bible verses — 1 John 5:7 and 1 Timothy 3:16 — were later additions to the text, not original. Modern textual critics have proved him right: they are absent from the oldest manuscripts.

Newton was not alone. John Milton, the author of Paradise Lost, was also an anti-Trinitarian. Michael Servetus, the Spanish physician and theologian, rejected the Trinity on biblical grounds — and was burned alive at the stake in Geneva in 1553 at the instigation of John Calvin.

What Is a Reasonable Conclusion?

  1. Jesus’s contemporaries saw him as an exceptional prophet and Messiah — not as God in the Trinitarian sense.
  2. The theology developed gradually over the first three centuries, shaped by Hellenistic influences and internal power struggles.
  3. Nicaea 325 CE was a political meeting as much as a theological one — summoned by an unbaptised emperor, with the losing side exiled rather than answered on the merits.
  4. The word “Trinity” does not exist in the Bible. It is a human theological concept, not a biblical term.
  5. A straightforward reading of the Gospels — especially the older ones — presents a Son who prays to his Father, submits to his will, and does not know everything the Father knows.

This does not mean the doctrine of the Trinity is wrong — it is a possible interpretation of a complex body of texts. But it does mean it is one interpretation, not the only possible one, and that it prevailed for historical and political reasons that every honest believer deserves to know.

A son who prays to his father is not the same person as his father.
Jesus’s contemporaries knew this.
Isaac Newton understood it.
And it is what the Bible says — if you read it straight.

Sources and further reading: Eusebius of Caesarea, “Ecclesiastical History” (~313 CE); Athanasius, “On the Incarnation”; Richard Rubenstein, “When Jesus Became God” (1999); Bart Ehrman, “How Jesus Became God” (2014); Isaac Newton, “An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture” (written ~1690, published posthumously).