>>20016574On an incredibly technical technicality, you happen to be right, but also wrong on several other levels as far I'm able to conclude: "the trinity" is "taught" in the OT not because that's explicit doctrine that any of the writers wished to knowingly convey, no exegesis will ever get you there and the three visitors in Genesis 18 really are just three people, not the trinity. You can see it as being about the trinity, but that'd be an esoteric reading of which you could not hope to convince anyone else reasonably (just go ahead, I've heard it all, and then some). "God with two angels" is a much more plain and more plausible explanation for why there were three men there; people used to travel with entourages.
However, due to how our world and our consciousness works, we have a somewhat dim idea of an arrangement which was worked out, to some degree, as this idea of a trinity, for which I have tried to make some representations in the image. Since the OT, as well as any other book, was written by humans, and about human nature to boot, they necessarily, to some greater or lesser extent would have encoded this somewhat vague human awareness about the nature of their own consciousness into the text (maybe for some vague reason, the author "felt" that three was an appropriate number of people to depict; 3 is also a perennially popular number of items), and you, as also a human, would have both read that out, as well as, due to being aware of the doctrine of the trinity, read that in: you could have read any story involving three anything and seen the trinity in it. This reading in is somewhat particular to you and you can't hope to convince someone who doesn't believe in it just because there's three people somewhere. The Bible doesn't teach any of these doctrines THAT clearly; the word "trinity" does not occur anywhere, nor do such abstract doctrinal discussions occur anywhere in it. In fact, I'd argue that the very emphasis on doctrine is misplaced.
