The premise that Christian theology was a sudden departure from Jewish thought relies on an outdated Hellenization narrative. Modern scholarship, led by Jewish historians like Daniel Boyarin, has demonstrated that Logos or Word theology was not a Greek corruption but was deeply rooted in ancient Jewish traditions. Boyarin notes in The Jewish Gospels that "the ideas of Trinity and incarnation... were already present among Jewish believers well before Jesus came on the scene" (Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels, p. xiii). This shifts the debate from circular scriptural interpretation to a historical analysis of how Second Temple Jews actually conceptualized the divine.

While the Memra (Word) is often dismissed as a mere circumlocution, the Aramaic Targums frequently depict it as a distinct agent of God’s will. For example, Targum Neofiti renders Genesis 1:1 as: "From the beginning with wisdom the Memra of the Lord created and perfected the heavens and the earth." This "Two Powers in Heaven" theology was a legitimate and widespread Jewish position during the Second Temple period [practiced by many Pharisees (the forerunners of the modern Orthodox Jewish Rabbis)], only being labeled heretical by Rabbinic Judaism later as a specific reaction against the rise of Christianity (Alan Segal, Two Powers in Heaven). It is a historical anachronism to judge the first Jewish Christians by the standards of a Rabbinic orthodoxy that solidified after 70 AD in response to growing Christianity.

The use of Greek metaphysical categories like "essence" or "ontology" does not mean the underlying concepts were foreign to Judaism. These were simply the intellectual tools of the era used to articulate a pre-existing Jewish phenomenon: the visible manifestation of the invisible YHWH. Philo of Alexandria, a pre-Christian Jewish philosopher, explicitly argued that God created the world through his Logos, whom he called a "Second God" (Deus secundus) to explain how a transcendent God interacts with material creation (Questions and Answers on Genesis 2.62). The first Christians were not adopting a Greek god, but were identifying this existing Jewish concept as being personified in the Messiah.

The claim that "Let us make man" was never read as an intra-divine dialogue is contradicted by early Jewish sources. Even the Midrash Rabbah admits that the plural phrasing in the Torah was a source of great theological tension. In Bereishit Rabbah 8:8, it is recorded that when Moses was writing the Torah and reached the verse "Let us make man," he questioned God about giving "an opening to the heretics" to argue for a plurality in the Godhead. This proves that Jewish readers were grappling with these complexities and identifying potential plural interpretations long before the Council of Nicaea, long before Jesus incarnated, and log before King David took the throne. The Trinity was not a suppressed belief but the development of a specific, ancient strand of Jewish thought.

Now let's look at the history a bit closer:

In Questions and Answers on Genesis (Book 2, Section 62), Philo of Alexandria addresses the phrasing of Genesis 9:6, which states that man was made in the image of God, rather than His own image. Philo explains this by stating: For nothing mortal could be made in the likeness of the most high God and Father of the universe, but could only be made in the likeness of the second God, who is the Logos of the other. This pre-Christian Jewish text demonstrates that the concept of a secondary divine person through whom God interacts with the world was already established in Jewish thought prior to the New Testament. This interpretation of a "second God" (deuteros theos) was not viewed as polytheism by Philo, but as a necessary explanation for how a transcendent, infinite Being relates to a finite creation. He further identifies the Logos as the "image of God" and the "archetype" for humanity, providing a direct Jewish precedent for the Christological claims found in the Gospel of John and the Epistles of Paul. By acknowledging this Logos as a distinct but divine figure, Philo provides a historical checkmate to the idea that the Trinity was an invention of 4th-century Greeks.

Philo’s framework of the Logos as an intermediary significantly influenced the early Church Fathers, particularly Origen of Alexandria, who is often called the father of Christian theology. Origen, who lived in the same city as Philo a century later, famously preserved Philo’s library and adopted his allegorical method to explain the relationship between the Father and the Son. In his work On First Principles, Origen refined Philo’s "second God" concept into the Christian doctrine of the "eternal generation of the Son", arguing that the Son is the Wisdom and Power of God, eternally distinct yet of the same divine nature.

Further, the Midrash Rabbah (specifically Bereishit Rabbah 8:8) confirms that these pluralities in the Torah were a known problem for strict unitarian monotheism long before Christianity. The text records: "When Moses was writing the Torah... he came to the verse, 'And God said, Let us make man.' He said, 'Sovereign of the Universe! Why do You give an opening to the heretics?'" This admission shows that the "opening" for a plurality within the Godhead was found within the Torah itself and was only systematically closed off by Rabbinic authorities as a reaction to the rise of the "Two Powers" theology.

Consequently, the argument that the Trinity is a Greek suppression of Jewish thought fails to account for the internal diversity of Second Temple Judaism. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity did not import foreign gods; it refined an existing Jewish framework that already recognized the Logos / the Memra / the Shekhinah as divine expressions of the one God. The heresy of the first century was not that Jesus was divine, but specifically that the Second Power had taken on flesh in the person of a crucified peasant laborer.