Who the Son Is
Open your Bible and search for the word “Trinity.” It isn’t there. Search for the Greek word behind the historic creeds — homoousios, “of one substance” — and you won’t find that either. Not once, anywhere in the New Testament. So here’s the Berean question this two-part, maybe three-part series asks: if the word the creeds are built on isn’t in the text, what actually is? Today we look at what Scripture itself says about the Father and the Son — and it turns out the case is older, and stranger, than most people have ever been shown.
The Word That Isn’t There
Start with the fact itself, because it’s worth sitting with before moving on. The term homoousios (ὁμοούσιος) never appears in Scripture — not in the Gospels, not in Paul, not in John’s letters, not in Revelation. Even its root, ousia (οὐσία, “essence” or “being”), appears nowhere in the New Testament in a theological sense. It’s a word the Council of Nicaea adopted in 325 AD, borrowed from Greek philosophy, to describe how the Father and Son could both be God without being two Gods.
That doesn’t mean the question Nicaea was answering is fake. Arius, the presbyter at the center of the controversy, taught that the Son was the first and greatest created being. Arius’ teaching indicated that there was a time when the Son was not. That claim needed an answer, and a true one. What it means is that the word chosen to answer it came from outside the text. So set the philosophy aside entirely for now, and ask the more basic question first: what does the Bible itself say about who the Son is, and how He relates to the Father? That question has an answer, and it’s older than Nicaea by centuries.
Two Yahwehs in the Hebrew Text
Here’s where most people, Christian and skeptic alike, have never actually looked: the Old Testament itself, read on its own terms, records a numerical distinction within the divine identity — places where YHWH is sent by YHWH, or YHWH speaks to YHWH.
Genesis 19:24 says it in a single sentence: “Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven.” Read that slowly. One LORD raining fire from another LORD. This isn’t a translation quirk — the divine name YHWH appears twice in the Hebrew, once as the one acting on earth (the “angel of the LORD” who had visited Abraham the chapter before) and once as the source in heaven.
Zechariah 2:8-11 does the same thing across a few verses: “the LORD of hosts has sent me... I will dwell in the midst of thee, saith the LORD.” One YHWH, sent by another YHWH, both speaking in the first person as YHWH.
Psalm 45:6-7 is a related but slightly different case: one figure is addressed as “God” (Elohim), who is then anointed by another figure also called “God”: “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever... therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee.” Hebrews 1:8-9 quotes this directly and applies it to the Son. Elohim isn’t as exclusively reserved for deity as YHWH — Scripture also uses it of judges and angels elsewhere — but two figures both called “God” in this specific enthronement-and-anointing scene is still a pointed, real detail.
Psalm 110:1 gets cited constantly alongside these, and it’s worth being precise about what it actually shows, because the two words rendered “LORD” and “Lord” are not the same Hebrew word. “The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand.” The first “LORD” is YHWH, the divine name. The second, “my Lord,” is adoni — the ordinary Hebrew word for a human superior, used throughout the Old Testament of kings and masters (Sarah calls Abraham adoni in Genesis 18:12; David’s own men call Saul adoni ha-melekh, “my lord the king,” in 1 Samuel 24:8). This is not a second instance of the divine name. What actually makes the verse significant is a status reversal: David — the king everyone else calls adoni — here calls a coming figure his own superior, and that figure is invited to sit at YHWH’s own right hand. That reversal, not a repeated divine name, is what Jesus presses in Matthew 22:41-46 to show that David’s own Messiah is greater than David, and pre-existent to him.
None of this requires Greek philosophy to see. It requires reading the Hebrew text the way it was actually written — including being honest about which words repeat and which don’t.
The New Testament Confirms It
The apostolic writers pick up this exact pattern and name the second figure directly: the Son, who took on flesh in Jesus of Nazareth.
John 1:1 states it with a level of grammatical precision worth slowing down for: “the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Two distinct uses of “God” in one sentence — the Word with God (a distinct person, in relationship), and the Word was God (fully divine, not a lesser being). John 8:58 has Jesus applying the divine name to Himself directly: “Before Abraham was, I am” — the same “I AM” YHWH spoke to Moses from the burning bush. And John 17:5 has Jesus speaking of the glory He had “with thee before the world was” — a personal, conscious existence alongside the Father before creation began.
Put the Old and New Testament pieces together and the picture is consistent, not invented: the Hebrew Scriptures already record a second, exalted figure — sometimes named with the divine name itself, sometimes invited to share God’s own throne and right hand — distinct from yet united with the first; the apostolic writers identify that figure as the Son, who became flesh.
A Reading Older Than Nicaea
Here’s the historical detail that changes the whole conversation, and it’s worth naming precisely because it cuts against both the skeptic narrative and the popular assumption about where this reading came from. Around 150 AD — nearly two centuries before Nicaea — a Christian writer named Justin Martyr wrote a lengthy dialogue with a Jewish scholar named Trypho. In it, Justin presses Trypho on exactly these texts: Genesis 19:24, the appearances to Abraham and Jacob, Psalm 45, Psalm 110. His argument is built entirely from grammatical-historical reading of the Hebrew Scriptures — not from Plato, not from Aristotle, not from any Greek category of “substance” or “essence.” Justin is doing careful exegesis of the Old Testament text, in Greek-speaking Rome, a century and three-quarters before any council met.
This matters because it answers a real question directly: is the “two divine figures” reading something Christians invented late and read backward into the Old Testament to prop up a philosophical system? The dates say no. The reading is early, textual, and predates the very controversy it eventually got pulled into. The first-century Dead Sea Scrolls material (the so-called “Son of God” text, 4Q246) shows that elevated, YHWH-adjacent categories for a coming figure were already circulating in pre-Christian Jewish thought — this wasn’t manufactured by the church at all, let alone at Nicaea.
To be clear about how this evidence is being used: Justin Martyr’s writing carries no doctrinal authority here — no post-apostolic writer’s opinion does. What it carries is forensic weight, as a dated historical marker. It tells us precisely when this reading of the Hebrew text is already on record, which is enough to settle the timing question the “invented at Nicaea” claim depends on.
One, But Not Sameness of Substance
So the Father and the Son are numerically distinct — a real distinction the Hebrew and Greek text both establish, not a later invention. But Scripture is just as clear that they are one, and it tells us a great deal about what that oneness looks like, without ever reaching for a word like homoousios to explain it.
John 14:9-11 describes mutual indwelling: “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father... I am in the Father, and the Father in me.” John 5:19 describes unity of will: “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do.” John 10:28-30 describes shared authority culminating in Jesus’s own summary statement: “I and my Father are one.” Colossians 1:19 and 2:9 describe the fullness of deity dwelling in Him bodily.
Here’s the verse that gives the clearest shape to that oneness, because Jesus defines the category Himself. Praying for His disciples, He asks: “that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us... that they may be one, even as we are one” (John 17:21-23). Think about what that means. Jesus prays that believers would be one with each other in the same way He and the Father are one. Believers plainly do not share one metaphysical substance with each other or with God — nobody has ever claimed that. So whatever kind of oneness Jesus is describing between Himself and the Father, it has to be the kind of oneness ordinary believers can actually share: relational, purposeful, indwelling, a bond of love and shared will.
Worth stating plainly rather than treating as a gap still waiting to be filled: Jesus gave us the best way finite human beings can actually understand the oneness of God — not a placeholder awaiting a fuller explanation, and not a formula requiring further philosophical elaboration either. He did not go on to explain the inner metaphysics of exactly how the Father and Son share one being, and the wise posture is to let that silence stand rather than supply the missing precision ourselves — the same humility Scripture asks of us anywhere it doesn’t fully resolve a question: “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us” (Deuteronomy 29:29). That caution cuts in both directions. It’s the reason a mandatory word like homoousios goes further than Jesus’s own categories required. It’s just as much a caution against this series claiming more precision than Jesus gave. Define the oneness the way He defined it, and stop where He stopped.
Closing
So here’s where Part 1 leaves us. The Bible itself, read on its own terms, establishes a real, numerical distinction between the Father and the Son — visible in the Hebrew text centuries before Christ, confirmed by the apostolic writers, and already being read that way by a Christian writer a hundred and seventy-five years before Nicaea ever convened. And it establishes a real oneness between them — described in relational, not substance, terms, defined by Jesus’s own prayer as the very model for how believers are meant to be one with each other. None of that required a word that doesn’t exist in Scripture.
So if the biblical case doesn’t need homoousios, why did a council in 325 AD make it mandatory — and what happened to anyone who wouldn’t say it? That’s next.
Prove these things for yourself in the Bible. Then believe the Bible, trust Jesus, and follow Him.