How and when did Jesus and the Spirit come to be regarded as fully God? According to Matthew Bates’s vigorous research, the earliest Christians felt they could metaphorically “overhear” divine conversations between Father, Son, and Spirit whenever they opened the Old Testament. In The Birth of the Trinity, Bates offers a new historical approach by exploring the way in which first- and second-century Christians read the Old Testament in order to differentiate the one God as multiple persons.

In this text, Bates exemplifies the theological interpretation of Scripture and illuminates how and why one can read the Old Testament and the New Testament together as Christian Scripture. In so doing, he unfolds the story of God in a uniquely Trinitarian fashion, forwarding fresh evidence for an early high Christology.