The Watch Tower of June 1882 stated: “Many pagan philosophers finding that it would be policy to join the ranks of the rising religion [an apostate form of Christianity endorsed by Roman emperors in the fourth century C.E.], set about paving an easy way to it by trying to discover correspondencies between Christianity and Paganism, and so to blend the two together. They succeeded only too well. . . . As the old theology had a number of chief gods, with many demi-gods of both sexes, the Pago-christians (if we may coin a word) set themselves to reconstruct the list for the new theology. At this time, therefore, the doctrine of three Gods was invented—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.”

Some of the clergy endeavored to give Biblical flavor to their teaching by quoting such texts as 1 John 5:7, but Brother Russell presented evidence showing that it was well-known by scholars that a portion of that text was an interpolation, a spurious insertion made by a scribe to support a teaching that is not found in the Scriptures. Other apologists for the Trinity appealed to John 1:1, but the Watch Tower analyzed that scripture on the basis of both content and context to show that this in no way supported belief in the Trinity. In harmony with this, in its issue of July 1883, the Watch Tower said: “More Bible and less hymn-book theology would have made the subject clearer to all. The doctrine of the trinity is totally opposed to Scripture.”

Brother Russell outspokenly exposed the foolishness of professing to believe the Bible while at the same time teaching a doctrine such as the Trinity, which contradicts what the Bible says. Thus he wrote: “In what a jumble of contradictions and confusion do they find themselves who say that Jesus and the Father are one God! This would involve the idea that our Lord Jesus acted the hypocrite when on earth and only pretended to address God in prayer, when He Himself was the same God. . . . Again, the Father has always been immortal, hence could not die. How, then, could Jesus have died? The Apostles are all false witnesses in declaring Jesus’ death and resurrection if He did not die. The Scriptures declare, however, that He did die.”d

[Box on page 126]

‘Shall We Contradict Christ Himself?’

After exposing the unscripturalness and unreasonableness of the doctrine of the Trinity, C. T. Russell expressed righteous indignation when he asked: “Shall we thus contradict the Apostles and Prophets and Jesus Himself, and ignore reason and common sense, in order to hold to a dogma handed to us from the dark, superstitious past, by a corrupt apostate Church? Nay! ‘To the Law and to the testimony! If they speak not according to this Word, it is because there is no light in them.’”—“The Watch Tower,” August 15, 1915.