40 Fun Facts About The Holy Trinity

In the Gospels, the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus after his baptism in the form of which bird?

A dove is why artists nearly always show the Spirit as a bird with wings outspread, hovering above or between Father and Son in paintings of the Trinity.

Which plant is Saint Patrick said to have held up to teach the Irish about the Holy Trinity?

Shamrock is first linked to Patrick on coins of 1675, some twelve centuries after he lived, so the famous lesson is legend more than history.

Which Cambridge scientist privately rejected the Trinity while a fellow of the college named after it?

Isaac Newton kept his views private, and won a special dispensation so he could remain a fellow of Trinity College without being ordained a priest.

Which explorer named the island of Trinidad after the Holy Trinity on his third Atlantic voyage?

Christopher Columbus had vowed to name his next discovery for the Trinity, and in July 1498 a lookout sighted an island topped by a cluster of three peaks.

Which Roman emperor summoned bishops in 325 to settle whether the Son was truly equal to the Father?

Constantine called the council although he was not yet baptised himself: he put off his own baptism until he lay on his deathbed.

In which river was Jesus baptised, a scene where Father, Son and Holy Spirit all appear at once?

The Jordan scene has the Son standing in the water, the Spirit coming down on him and a voice from heaven speaking of a beloved Son, all three in a single moment.

Which religion's core doctrine of tawhid, the absolute oneness of God, rules out the Trinity?

Islam treats any plurality within God as a denial of tawhid, and counts shirk, the ascribing of partners to God, as the worst of all sins.

Which denomination rejects the Trinity, teaching that Jesus is God's only direct creation rather than God himself?

Jehovah's Witnesses also regard the holy spirit as God's active force, and grew out of the Bible Student movement that Charles Taze Russell founded in the nineteenth century.

Which bestselling novel by William P. Young portrays God the Father as a woman called Papa?

The Shack shows the Trinity as three people sharing a cabin: Papa, a Middle Eastern carpenter and an Asian woman named Sarayu. It began life as a self-published book.

Which gesture do many Christians make while naming the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit?

The sign of the cross is made in Eastern Orthodox churches with the first three fingertips joined to stand for the Trinity, and runs from right shoulder to left.

Which Bible book has God say 'Let us make man', a plural often read as a hint of the Trinity?

Genesis repeats the plural after Adam and Eve eat the fruit, and many scholars now read it as God addressing a heavenly court rather than speaking as three in one.

Which Gospel ends with Jesus telling the disciples to baptise in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit?

Matthew sets the scene on a mountain in Galilee, and the instruction, known as the Great Commission, became the rallying text of the modern missionary movement.

Trinity Sunday falls in Western churches one week after which feast, itself seven weeks after Easter?

Pentecost is the very day on which Eastern churches honour the Trinity, rather than giving the doctrine a Sunday of its own.

Which word from Old English does the King James Bible usually put after Holy where modern Bibles say Spirit?

Ghost comes from Old English gast, a cousin of German Geist, while Spirit is a later loan from Latin spiritus. The two names mean exactly the same thing.

Which poet ends his journey through Paradise with a vision of the Trinity as three circles of light?

Dante Alighieri sees three equal circles filling the same space and a human form within them, then admits that grasping how they fit together is beyond him.

Mainstream Christian teaching describes God as one being in three what: Father, Son and Holy Spirit?

Persons names who God is, while the one shared essence names what God is, which is how the doctrine avoids teaching three separate gods.

In the Acts of the Apostles, the Holy Spirit comes upon the disciples in Jerusalem looking like what?

Tongues of fire came to rest over each head, with a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and the disciples began to speak in other languages.

Which patriarch fed three visitors at Mamre, a scene Christians have read as a glimpse of the Trinity?

Abraham hurried to serve his guests a meal beneath a tree, and the scene later became the subject of the most famous of all Russian icons.

Which Carthage writer, called the father of Latin Christianity, is first recorded using the word trinitas?

Tertullian was the first Christian author to leave a large body of writing in Latin, which is why so much of the Western church's vocabulary for God begins with him.

Which city, now İznik in Turkey, hosted the 325 council that declared the Son of one substance with the Father?

Nicaea drew at least 200 bishops, who also agreed a single way of dating Easter and drafted the first part of the creed many churches still recite.

Which Alexandrian priest was condemned in 325 for teaching that the Son was created and once did not exist?

Arius was deposed and exiled to Illyricum with two unyielding supporters, yet the quarrel over his teaching started up again almost at once.

Which bishop of Alexandria was sent into exile five times while defending the full divinity of the Son?

Athanasius spent more than 17 years in banishment on the orders of four different emperors, and at times seemed to stand almost alone against the world.

Which Latin word meaning 'and the Son', added to the creed in the West, helped divide Catholic from Orthodox?

Filioque makes the Spirit proceed from the Son as well as the Father. The Eastern Orthodox churches reject the addition, and it was a major cause of the schism of 1054.

Basil the Great and two Gregorys, champions of the Trinity, are named the Fathers of which region of Turkey?

Cappadocia produced all three in one generation, and they owed much to Macrina, sister of two of them, who turned the family estate into a monastic community.

Which North African saint, author of On the Trinity, features in a legend about a child emptying the sea?

Augustine of Hippo is said, in an apocryphal letter, to have met a child trying to pour the sea into a hole with a seashell, who then vanished before his eyes.

Which Russian monk painted the celebrated icon that shows the Trinity as three angels seated around a table?

Andrei Rublev painted it to honour Saint Sergius of Radonezh, and by 1575 Ivan the Terrible had ordered the panel covered with gold.

Which physician, an early describer of blood flow through the lungs, was burned in Geneva for denying the Trinity?

Michael Servetus was denounced by John Calvin and burned in 1553 on a pyre of his own books, although Calvin had asked for him to be beheaded instead.

Which Florentine painter's Holy Trinity fresco is famed as an early triumph of linear perspective?

Masaccio painted it in Santa Maria Novella above a skeleton in a tomb. A later altar hid the fresco from about 1570 until it was rediscovered in 1860.

Which Trinity symbol of three interlaced arcs also appeared on the Book of Shadows in the TV series Charmed?

Triquetra comes from the Latin for three-cornered, and the knot became a popular emblem of the Trinity mainly with the Celtic revival of the 1800s.

Which Greek term, usually translated 'the Word', does the opening of John's Gospel use for the Son?

Logos can also mean discourse or reason, and theologians often leave it untranslated when they write about the second member of the Trinity.

The Catholic Catechism calls the Holy Trinity the central what of Christian faith and life?

Mystery, in the Catechism's strict sense, is a truth that can never be known unless God reveals it, and this one is called the source of all the others.

Which symbol on the back of the US one-dollar bill sits inside a triangle that once stood for the Trinity?

The Eye of Providence inside a triangle was an explicit symbol of the Trinity in late Renaissance art, and the Great Seal design reached the dollar bill in 1935.

Which title, from a Greek word for an advocate or helper, does John's Gospel give the Holy Spirit?

Paraclete joins the Greek for beside with a verb meaning to call, and in the New Testament the word turns up only five times, all in John's writings.

Which teaching, condemned by the early church, treats Father, Son and Spirit as three masks of one God?

Modalism earned the nickname Patripassianism, because if Father and Son are one actor in different roles, the Father himself must have suffered and died.

Which Roman emperor's Edict of Thessalonica in 380 made belief in the Trinity the empire's official faith?

Theodosius I ordered his subjects to believe in one deity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and his edict dismissed everyone who refused as foolish madmen.

Which second-century bishop of Antioch wrote the earliest surviving work to use the Greek word for Trinity?

Theophilus wrote of a trias of God, his Word and his Wisdom in a defence of Christianity addressed to a pagan friend named Autolycus.

Which scholar left the Johannine Comma, a disputed Trinity verse, out of his first Greek New Testament?

Erasmus could not find the words in his Greek manuscripts. They survive mainly in Latin copies, and the earliest Greek manuscript to carry them dates from the 14th century.

Which Greek term did John of Damascus apply to the interpenetration of Father, Son and Spirit in the Trinity?

Perichoresis is called circumincession in its Latin-derived form, and modern writers such as Jürgen Moltmann have brought the idea back into fashion.

The Trinitarian Order, approved by the pope in 1198, was founded chiefly to carry out which work of mercy?

Ransoming Christian captives taken in crusades and pirate raids was the founding aim, said to follow a vision its founder had of Christ with two prisoners.

Which short hymn of praise, said at the end of psalms, honours Father, Son and Holy Spirit in turn?

Gloria Patri is known in English as the Glory Be, and is also called the Lesser Doxology to tell it apart from the longer Gloria in Excelsis Deo.