The Holy Trinity
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40 free The Holy Trinity trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Trinity is the teaching that most clearly sets Christianity apart from the other great monotheistic faiths: one God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The word itself never appears in the Bible, and it took the early church centuries of argument, exile and imperial politics to settle how to say it. The debate has never fully ended. This quiz covers the Bible passages most often linked to the doctrine, the bishops and emperors who fought over its wording, and the heresies they ruled out. It also looks at how the idea has been pictured in icons, frescoes, poems and everyday symbols, and at the scientists, reformers and churches who have rejected it. It suits confirmation and religious education classes, Bible study groups, Trinity Sunday quiz nights and anyone curious about the history of Christian belief. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the Gospels, the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus after his baptism in the form of which bird?
A dove
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.
Q 02Which plant is Saint Patrick said to have held up to teach the Irish about the Holy Trinity?
Shamrock
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.
Q 03Which Cambridge scientist privately rejected the Trinity while a fellow of the college named after it?
Isaac Newton
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.
Q 04Which explorer named the island of Trinidad after the Holy Trinity on his third Atlantic voyage?
Christopher Columbus
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.
Q 05Which Roman emperor summoned bishops in 325 to settle whether the Son was truly equal to the Father?
Constantine
Constantine called the council although he was not yet baptised himself: he put off his own baptism until he lay on his deathbed.
Q 06In which river was Jesus baptised, a scene where Father, Son and Holy Spirit all appear at once?
The Jordan
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.
Q 07Which religion's core doctrine of tawhid, the absolute oneness of God, rules out the Trinity?
Islam
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.
Q 08Which denomination rejects the Trinity, teaching that Jesus is God's only direct creation rather than God himself?
Jehovah's Witnesses
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.
Q 09Which bestselling novel by William P. Young portrays God the Father as a woman called Papa?
The Shack
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.
Q 10Which gesture do many Christians make while naming the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit?
The sign of the cross
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.
Q 11Which Bible book has God say 'Let us make man', a plural often read as a hint of the Trinity?
Genesis
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.
Q 12Which Gospel ends with Jesus telling the disciples to baptise in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit?
Matthew
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.
Q 13Trinity Sunday falls in Western churches one week after which feast, itself seven weeks after Easter?
Pentecost
Pentecost is the very day on which Eastern churches honour the Trinity, rather than giving the doctrine a Sunday of its own.
Q 21Which Alexandrian priest was condemned in 325 for teaching that the Son was created and once did not exist?
Arius
Arius was deposed and exiled to Illyricum with two unyielding supporters, yet the quarrel over his teaching started up again almost at once.
Q 22Which bishop of Alexandria was sent into exile five times while defending the full divinity of the Son?
Athanasius
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.
Q 23Which Latin word meaning 'and the Son', added to the creed in the West, helped divide Catholic from Orthodox?
Filioque
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.
Q 14Which word from Old English does the King James Bible usually put after Holy where modern Bibles say Spirit?
Ghost
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.
Q 15Which poet ends his journey through Paradise with a vision of the Trinity as three circles of light?
Dante Alighieri
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.
Q 16Mainstream Christian teaching describes God as one being in three what: Father, Son and Holy Spirit?
Persons
Persons names who God is, while the one shared essence names what God is, which is how the doctrine avoids teaching three separate gods.
Q 17In the Acts of the Apostles, the Holy Spirit comes upon the disciples in Jerusalem looking like what?
Tongues of fire
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.
Q 18Which patriarch fed three visitors at Mamre, a scene Christians have read as a glimpse of the Trinity?
Abraham
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.
Q 19Which Carthage writer, called the father of Latin Christianity, is first recorded using the word trinitas?
Tertullian
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.
Q 20Which city, now İznik in Turkey, hosted the 325 council that declared the Son of one substance with the Father?
Nicaea
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.
Q 24Basil the Great and two Gregorys, champions of the Trinity, are named the Fathers of which region of Turkey?
Cappadocia
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.
Q 25Which North African saint, author of On the Trinity, features in a legend about a child emptying the sea?
Augustine of Hippo
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.
Q 26Which Russian monk painted the celebrated icon that shows the Trinity as three angels seated around a table?
Andrei Rublev
Andrei Rublev painted it to honour Saint Sergius of Radonezh, and by 1575 Ivan the Terrible had ordered the panel covered with gold.
Q 27Which physician, an early describer of blood flow through the lungs, was burned in Geneva for denying the Trinity?
Michael Servetus
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.
Q 28Which Florentine painter's Holy Trinity fresco is famed as an early triumph of linear perspective?
Masaccio
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.
Q 29Which Trinity symbol of three interlaced arcs also appeared on the Book of Shadows in the TV series Charmed?
Triquetra
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.
Q 30Which Greek term, usually translated 'the Word', does the opening of John's Gospel use for the Son?
Logos
Logos can also mean discourse or reason, and theologians often leave it untranslated when they write about the second member of the Trinity.