The commandment was explicit:

Deuteronomy 6:14: “You shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the peoples who are around you.”

I documented in Chapter Five that Numenius and Plotinus taught the principles of a triune deity well before the Cappadocian fathers adopted these concepts. What follows traces exactly what was being developed in the world.

The Shared Pagan Milieu

The Trinity did not emerge from a single inventor. It emerged from a shared intellectual environment operating simultaneously across Egyptian Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonic philosophy—all arriving at triadic divine structures through the same method: natural human reasoning.

Aristotle admitted this method as early as 384–322 BC:

“Having taken these three from nature as laws of it, we make further use of the number three in the worship of the Gods.” —Aristotle.

When Trinitarians look to nature to try to describe the Trinity, they do the same thing as Aristotle:

Water/ice/steam: human reasoning says three persons in one essence.

Yolk/white/shell: human reasoning says three persons in one essence.

Body/soul/spirit: human reasoning says three persons in one essence.

That’s modalism or, more accurately, partialism, not triunity. But even worse, that’s reasoning, not a commandment.

Neither Aristotle’s initial triad nor its Gnostic and Neoplatonic offspring were spiritually revealed. They were all concepts initially deduced from nature. This single fact, which I will now document, demolishes the Trinitarian contention that only a spiritual mind could conceive of triunity. The absolute reverse is historical fact: each of these pagan philosophers arrived at it through natural observation—without Scripture, without the apostles, and without the Holy Spirit.

The Egyptian Hermetic Root

At the center of this shared milieu was Egyptian Hermeticism—specifically the god Poimandres, whose theological vocabulary would eventually reach the Nicene Creed through Constantine:

“It is certainly no coincidence that we find the same fundamental idea of a divine, personified Intelligence coupled with a divine, personified Word in the first of the Hermetica, where Poimandres as the divine Intelligence is assisted by a personified Word in the creation of the universe.” —Kingsley.

The pagan world’s conception of creation as an act of multiple persons is well attested—and explicitly contradicted by Scripture: “Yahweh, your Redeemer, and he who formed you from the womb says: ‘I am Yahweh, who makes all things; who alone stretches out the heavens; who spreads out the earth by myself’” (Isaiah 44:24).

This documentation exposes how human reasoning alone has been used to negate just such biblical truths and replace them with man-made imaginations to the contrary. The difference between Gnostics and philosophers is that Gnostics knew the scriptures yet resorted to human reasoning anyway, claiming it to be spiritual enlightenment. The philosophers, by contrast, were seeking wisdom through observation of their world. Scripture teaches otherwise:

“…Hasn’t God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For seeing that in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom didn’t know God, it was God’s good pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save those who believe.” (1 Corinthians 1:20–21)

“We speak wisdom, however, among those who are full grown, yet a wisdom not of this world nor of the rulers of this world who are coming to nothing.” (1 Corinthians 2:6)

Numenius himself drew from Egyptian and other Eastern sources as part of what he called his perennial philosophy. Plotinus—who built directly on Numenius—was born and raised in Egypt and was aware of the Hermetic tradition operating in that same environment. His successor Porphyry had a documented ‘nearness of feeling’ to the Hermetica, and Iamblichus—the next generation of Neoplatonism—exploited them extensively in developing his doctrines:

“Plotinus was educated in Egypt and must have been aware of the doctrines of Hermes…a scholar with much experience in this field has spoken of Porphyry’s nearness of feeling to the Hermetica; and Iamblichus…exploited them extensively in the development and explanation of his theurgical doctrines.” —Fowden, pgs. 199–200.

“Writers of the period often associate Hermes with Zoroaster—clearly they were widely felt to belong to the same intellectual milieu.” —Fowden, pgs. 202-203

This means the Egyptian Hermetic tradition was already circulating within the same intellectual environment as Numenius and Plotinus, the philosophers who taught at the schools that trained Gregory of Nyssa. The forbidden stream of compromise did not first enter at Nicaea. It had been flowing since at least the second century. Nicaea made it the official state religion.

The Spirit Behind Plotinus

The connection between Plotinus and Egyptian spiritual powers is on record. Plotinus’s own biographer Porphyry documents an extraordinary incident:

“An Egyptian priest who had arrived in Rome…became desirous of displaying his powers to him, and he offered to evoke a visible manifestation of Plotinus’ presiding spirit. Plotinus readily consented, and the evocation was made in the Temple of Isis…At the summons, a Divinity appeared, not a being of the spirit-ranks, and the Egyptian exclaimed: ‘You are singularly graced; the guiding-spirit within you is not of the lower degree but a God.’” —Porphyry.

This is not a hostile account written by a critic. This is Plotinus’s own biographer and devoted disciple recording, as a point of honor, that his master’s philosophical inspiration was identified—in a Temple of Isis, by an Egyptian priest—as a divine power of the highest order.

The man whose triadic framework became the philosophical backbone of the Christian Trinitarian formulation was not working from Jerusalem. He was working from Alexandria. Not from the apostles. From Egypt. Not from Scripture. From a spirituality that Paul himself had already weighed and addressed:

1 Corinthians 10:20: “The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God.”

The reader may draw their own conclusions. The historical record has already spoken.

The Gnostics: Always Trinitarian

The Gnostics—identified biblically as “antichristian”— were not merely parallel to this development. They were ahead of it—and they acknowledge it. From a Gnostic source itself:

“One of the common questions we receive as Gnostics is ‘Why do you espouse the doctrine of the Christian Trinity?’ To answer this question, we have only to listen to the voices of the early Gnostics themselves…The Gnostic scriptures of the Nag Hammadi collection are filled with Trinitarian expressions of God…We can state quite emphatically that we, as Gnostics, are Trinitarians…Whereas the mainstream Church has spent nearly two thousand years developing a dogma of the Trinity, Gnostics have always approached the Trinity as an archetypal symbol and a mystery…” —Marshall.

Shockingly, but not surprisingly, the Gnostics claim their Trinitarian reasoning of dual natures in Christ applies equally to themselves:

“In the Gospel of John, Jesus proclaims to the multitudes, ‘Ye are gods!’…If we can accept that we are both divine and human, then it is not such a great stretch to conceive of Jesus as an exemplary of that dual nature. God is manifest in the mystery figure of Jesus, as in ourselves…” —Ibid.

This reveals the full trajectory of the Gnostic Trinity, taken to its logical conclusion. It was never merely a doctrine about God. It was a doctrine about man becoming god—the serpent’s original lie in Trinitarian dress, albeit in reverse. Instead of man becoming God, now it is presented as God becoming man, so man can become God. That’s how the subtlety of the devil works.

We have an important witness that the Gnostics—not the apostles, not the Jews, not the Bible—first introduced the dual nature doctrine into the Christian conversation.

Irenaeus: A Pre-Nicene Witness Against the Gnostic Dual Nature

Irenaeus, writing well before Nicaea, identified the dual nature doctrine as coming directly from the Gnostics and called it by its proper name:

“Therefore did the Lord also say to his disciples… ‘Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise again from the dead, and that repentance for the remission of sins be preached in his name among all nations.’ Now this is he who was born of Mary; for he says: ‘The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected, and crucified, and on the third day rise again.’ The Gospel, therefore, knew no other son of man but him who was of Mary, who also suffered; and no Christ who flew away from Jesus before the passion; but him who was born it knew as Jesus Christ the Son of God, and that this same suffered and rose again, as John, the disciple of the Lord, verifies, saying: ‘But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have eternal life in his name,’ –foreseeing these blasphemous systems which divide the Lord, as far as lies in their power, saying that he was formed of two different substances. For this reason also he has thus testified to us in his Epistle: ‘Little children, it is the last time; and as ye have heard that Antichrist doth come, now have many antichrists appeared…’” Irenaeus, Bk 3, Ch. 16, par. 5.

Irenaeus testifies that it was the dual nature doctrine that led John to write against a coming antichrist spirit. Valentinus, the antichristian Gnostic, appears to have coined the term “dual natures” that would become a standard phrase as the Trinity doctrine developed. And that dual-nature doctrine, whoever may have used it historically, corresponds directly to the pagan idea of gods coming to earth in the form of men” (Acts 14:11). This is how the biblical doctrine of foreknowledge was replaced with the pagan idea of preexistence.

The Gnostics Coined the Key Vocabulary

Before Constantine imposed homoousios and before Tertullian translated trias into trinitas, the Gnostics had already employed, if not coined, both terms:

“The Gnostic terminologies within the Æon speculations were partly reproduced among the Catholic theologians of the third century; most important is it that the Gnostics have already made use of the concept ‘homoousios’… the word means ‘of one substance.’…Other terms also which have acquired great significance in the Church…are found among the Gnostics…Bigg. (1. c. p. 58, note 3) calls attention to the appearance of trias in Excerpt. ex. Theodotus § 80, perhaps the earliest passage.” —Harnack, I, 259, § 3, footnote 357.

Even the word “Trinity” represents a major cover-up. Harnack says that it was the Gnostics who had already made use of the word that would eventually give Trinitarians the name of their manufactured God: “Trinity.”

“The Gnostics…were the first to transform Christianity into a system of doctrines…They attempted to capture Christianity for Hellenic culture, and Hellenic culture for Christianity…a revealed metaphysic and philosophy of history…with a complete disregard of the Jewish Old Testament soil on which it originated.” —Harnack, Chap. 4.

“…The Gnostic systems represent the acute secularising or hellenising of Christianity, with the rejection of the Old Testament; while the Catholic system, on the other hand, represents a gradual process of the same kind with the conservation of the Old Testament…” —Harnack, Chap. 4, par. 2.

The entire confession—“a Trinity of one substance in three persons”—was adapted and reassembled by Trinitarian theologians from just such a forbidden milieu. The raw material was already in circulation, but in the world, not in the church. Constantine did not introduce a new ingredient, nor a biblical one. He delivered a little leaven into the lump.

Marcellus of Ancyra’s Testimony

Marcellus of Ancyra is another first-hand witness to the cross-pollination of ideas pioneered by the Gnostics and carried over into Trinitarian thought. Fowden observes:

“Not only were the Hermetica widely read by Christians, but we are also told by Marcellus of Ancyra that many gnostics, including the famous Valentinus, who studied in Alexandria and was probably a native of Egypt, drew on Hermes along with Plato and Aristotle in formulating their doctrines.” —Fowden, Pages 172-173

“Attacking the Arians, and in particular Asterius of Amasea and Eusebius of Caesarea, for teaching that the Son is a ‘second god’, distinct from the supreme God, Marcellus asserted that this notion was derived from Hermes Trismegistus, and adduced the passage from the Perfect discourse (Ascl. 8) about the material world being a second god, offspring of the One God… He also asserted that Eusebius owed the notion of the divine Logos as a second god to Hermes; and it looks as though he may here have in mind Hermetic texts concerning the divine Logos and its relationship to God similar to those later used by Cyril of Alexandria.” —Fowden, Page 209

Here we have a bishop, Marcellus, accused of Sabellianism, defending Nicene Trinitarianism by accusing Arians of Hermeticism, because Arianism looks too much like the Hermetic ‘second god.’ It is important to note that the Arian sympathizer Eusebius was a close advisor to Constantine and his successors—Satan’s heirs who imposed the doctrine of homoousios by imperial decree.

The reader will recall the outrage by mainstream Christianity at Justin Martyr for introducing the ‘second god’ concept—what Hillar called ‘the first step to Nicaea.’ That accusation still held at Nicaea. Likewise, the outrage by the simple majority that rejected Tertullian’s view as resembling “the world’s plurality of gods.”

Marcellus seems to have forgotten that there wouldn’t be a Nicene homoousios if it hadn’t been for Justin first proclaiming logos as a second God, and for Tertullian developing his admittedly Valentinian doctrine of emanations, or prolations, as Tertullian called them, thereby preparing the way for Satan’s heirs to impose homoousios by imperial decree.

This explains the context of Gregory’s claim that the Nicene settlement ‘destroys both heresies’ by accepting what is useful from each. What Gregory presented as a synthesis was in reality an assemblage—Jewish monotheism’s vocabulary stripped of its ‘one He,’ Hermetic emanationism supplying the Logos framework, Numenius and Plotinus providing the tri-personal structure, Tertullian’s Valentinian prolations supplying the substance language, and imperial decree providing the enforcement mechanism. Gregory thought they had solved the problem of the one and the many. What they actually built was a doctrine with no single biblical foundation—only a collection of borrowed parts hammered together on their theological workbenches and handed to the church at sword point.

The Trinity, exposed for the man-made assembly from parts it is, has more in common with Frankenstein’s monster than Moses’ ‘one He’ God of the Shema.

If what has been exposed thus far is not pure idolatry—going to the gods of pagans to learn how they served their gods, and then applying that framework to YHWH—what is? It would be overly conciliatory to call this a milieu. This is what theological chaos looks like when it is no longer grounded in the ‘one He’ of the Shema. Whatever you want to call it, this is the process by which the Christian Trinity was eventually arrived at, and all Trinitarians today owe their doctrine to this process of going to the gods of the people around them. But for those of us who love God for who and what He proclaimed Himself to be, this documented syncretism with pagan concepts is nothing short of rebellion against our God and Father. To call it anything less would be dishonest.

Taken together, the Gnostic, Hermetic, and Neoplatonic threads documented in this chapter establish a precise evolution from Hermeticism directly into Christian Trinitarian theology:

Egyptian Hermeticism (Poimandres/Nous doctrine) → Valentinus (trained in Alexandria, explicitly drew on Hermes—Fowden, p. 171) → Justin Martyr (introduced the Stoic/Numenian Logos into Christian theology, connecting it to John’s Prologue) → Tertullian (Against the Valentinians documents his detailed knowledge of the Valentinian system; Against Praxeas admits adopting Valentinus’s prolation mechanism) → una substantia, tres personae → Nicene Trinity

This is not a chain of circumstantial similarities. It is a chain of documented admissions—confessed by the participants themselves and confirmed by scholars, even those sympathetic to the evolution.

The Method That Made It Possible

The Neoplatonists used human reason to inform their understanding of God. The problem is, Christians had been warned not to:

Colossians 2:8: “Beware lest anyone rob you through philosophy and empty deceit, after the tradition of men, after the elements of the world, and not after Christ.”

Antichristian Gnostics, Numenius, and Plotinus personified, elaborated, and assembled what had been a triad into a tri-unity. They accomplished this entirely outside of Scripture, outside of apostolic revelation, and outside of the Shema that Jesus himself affirmed as the greatest commandment. Tertullian imported the theological system from Valentinus. And none of them—not one—was even trying to align with the ‘one He’ of the Shema, or with Jesus’s affirmation of it, or with the faith once delivered to the saints.

The Loyalty Oath Excuse

Some Trinitarians claim the Shema was only a loyalty oath given to protect Israel from the gods of the surrounding nations. They claim it was never meant to define God as only one person. They say it only means exclusively one, as in the only one worth serving, compared to Baal, Molech, and the rest.

This is the very denial this book is written to address. As shown above, the idea of three gods goes back to Aristotle, who deduced it from nature. The idea of two gods in one substance in Egyptian Hermeticism was already being articulated by pagan philosophers Numenius and Plotinus in the second century. The anti-Christian Gnostics often syncretized beliefs from outside sources, in direct violation of the commandment against worshiping other gods. One of the chief architects of the Trinity, Gregory, flat-out admitted they got the idea of multiple persons from the Hellenists, meaning the Greek philosophers. And I provided numerous modern scholars who have confirmed that Trinitarians derived their ‘substantialist formulas’—their idea of one substance—from philosophy.

We also have firsthand testimony from Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Gregory that they did not get the idea of multiple persons in the Godhead from the Jews; rather, they developed the idea despite objections from the Jews. These three first-hand witnesses destroy the argument that they were trying to defend a Hebrew view of divine multiplicity.

Notice what God said:

“You shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the peoples who are around you.” (Deuteronomy 6:14)

“You shall not inquire after their gods, saying, ‘How do these nations serve their gods? I will do likewise.’” (Deuteronomy 12:30)

The loyalty oath was given precisely to protect God’s people from going after foreign gods and importing their categories of thought. When Trinitarians attempt to use that excuse to develop the Trinity, they are hoping you and I don’t notice that they are doing exactly what even they admit the Shema was given to prevent.

Summary—In this chapter, I have documented:

✦ That the idea of triunity was deduced from nature by pagan philosophers—not spiritually revealed—demolishing the Trinitarian claim that only a spiritual mind could conceive of triunity.

✦ That Egyptian Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism formed a shared intellectual milieu from which triunity and homoousios both emerged simultaneously.

✦ That Numenius and Plotinus operated within the same Egyptian-influenced philosophical environment as the Hermetists—and that Plotinus’s own successors, Porphyry and Iamblichus, were demonstrably familiar with and influenced by the Hermetica—meaning the forbidden stream was flowing through the philosophical schools well before Constantine formalized it at Nicaea.

✦ That Plotinus’ own biographer documented he was operating under a spirit identified as a god in the Temple of Isis—the same Temple whose deity Paul had already categorized in 1 Corinthians 10:20.

✦ That the Gnostics were always Trinitarian by their own admission—and that they applied the dual nature doctrine not only to Jesus but to themselves, revealing the serpent’s original lie at the root of the entire system.

✦ That Irenaeus—writing before Nicaea—identified the dual nature doctrine as coming from the Gnostics and connected it directly to the antichrist spirit John warned against.

✦ That the Gnostics coined both homoousios and trias and the concept of dual natures in Christ before Constantine or Tertullian used them, making the entire Trinitarian confession assembled from Gnostic and pagan vocabulary.

✦ That the Trinity dogma represents a precise evolution: Egyptian Hermeticism → Valentinus → Justin Martyr → Tertullian → una substantia, tres personae → Nicene Trinity—confessed by the participants themselves and confirmed by scholars.

✦ That the Trinity is the result of an assembly of parts, the most important of which came from outside the Bible, not a revealed doctrine explained or commanded in Scripture.

“Be careful that you… not inquire after their gods, saying, “How do these nations serve their gods? I will do likewise.” (Deuteronomy 12:30)

The commandment was clear. The boundary was drawn. The forbidden gods were outside of God’s revelation. This chapter documents what was being assembled there—and by what spiritual power.

Now you know what was on the outside—and how it entered the collective Trinitarian Christian consciousness and became acceptable. Satan’s job is to seduce you to eat the forbidden fruit—and it is equally the job of the heirs of his kingdom, which explains why God commanded his people to stay away from it. The warning wasn’t arbitrary—it was protective. A good Father protecting his children from a very real danger.

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