Dear David,

thank you for your reply. Maybe I should have been a bit more precise with the timeframe ‘between the 1st and 4th century’.I am interested here in christianity of the 2nd and 3rd century. After the NT was written, and before the great ‘Arian’ conflict started in the 4th century. It is not my intention here to discuss biblical evidence of the trinity in the NT but to point out that there has been an amazing majority of christians in the 2nd and 3rd century AD that has not been trinitarian the way St. Athanasius has been. It is difficult to exactly reconstruct in which ways 2nd and 3rd century christians have through about the ‘trinity’, since this obviousely has not been a topic of discussion for them. To assume that they have all been ‘trinitarian’, however, is hard to uphold. It seems that St. Athanasius position has been a ‘lone voice’ at the time, which just shows how many christian dioceses throughout the christian world have been of a different view about the nature of Christ.

My point here is not to argue for or against Athanasius’ position rather than show that there have been christians in the 2nd of 3rd century that I hope we could accept as part of our christian tradition.