ABSTRACT
In the Middle Ages the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was frequently attacked by Jewish scholars since it appeared to undermine pure monotheism. In contrast to Christian exegetes who interpreted the Shema with its three references to God as denoting the Trinity, Jewish scholars maintained that the Shema implies that there is only one God, rather than three persons of the Godhead. For medieval Jewish theology the belief in divine unity was a fundamental principle of Judaism. For a number of Jewish theologians the concept of God’s unity implies that there can be no multiplicity in his being. Thus the tenth century philosopher Saadiah Gaon insisted in The Book of Beliefs and Opinions that the Divine creator is a single, incorporeal Being who created the universe out of nothing. Like the Islamic Mutazilite theologians, he asserted that if God has a plurality of attributes, He must be composite in nature. Thus, such terms as ‘life’, ‘omnipotence’ and ‘omniscience’ should be understood as implications of the concept of God as creator rather than attributes of the Deity. According to Saadiah, the reason why we are forced to describe God by means of these descriptions is because of the limitations of language, but they do not in any way involve a plurality in God. In this light Saadiah argued that the anthropomorphic expressions in the Bible must not be taken literally, since this would imply that God is a plurality.
