Walk into almost any church in the world and look up. Somewhere — in a window, on a banner, carved into a pew end, stamped on the cover of the Bible in the rack — you will find a small design: three interlocking loops, a triangle, a circle of rays, a golden sun. Most worshippers have never asked what those shapes mean or where they came from. This study asks. It follows the symbols of the three-in-one back to their sources, separates what can be proven from what cannot, and sets the whole picture beside the God the Bible actually reveals. The question in the title is meant seriously: when the world bows before the mystery of the trinity, whose image is it really looking at?
Two names on two foreheads
Revelation closes the story of this earth with two companies, and it marks each of them on the forehead — the seat of the mind and of belief. On one side stand the redeemed with the Lamb:
And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father’s name written in their foreheads.
On the other side sits a woman who rules the kings of the earth:
And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.
One people carries the Father’s name — a God they know. The other carries a title that begins with the word Mystery. Hold that word in mind, and then listen to how the largest church on earth describes the centre of its own faith:
The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them.
The mystery of the Trinity is the central doctrine of Catholic faith. Upon it are based all the other teachings of the Church.
The older Catholic Encyclopedia says the same: “The Trinity is the term employed to signify the central doctrine of the Christian religion.” The church does not hide that this is a mystery; it insists on it. A God who is one Being in three Persons is, by its own admission, beyond understanding. Scripture, by contrast, wants God’s people to carry His name — to know whom they worship (John 4:22; 17:3).
Babylon: confusion by mixing
The second word on the woman’s forehead is Babylon, and Scripture explains it the first time the city appears:
Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
The King James margin gives the meaning plainly: Babel — that is, Confusion. The confusion of Babylon is not the confusion of open unbelief; it is the confusion of a mixture. Babylon holds a golden cup — “a golden cup in her hand full of abominations” (Revelation 17:4). The cup is gold; the wine is not. That is how the whole system works: true names, true words, true verses, poured into a vessel that carries something else. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are biblical names. Whether the doctrine that uses them is biblical is exactly the question.
A God with no body
To see how the mixture works, start with the most basic question of all: what is God like? An American diocesan catechism of the nineteenth century put the Catholic answer in a few lines:
Q. Has God a body? A. No, God has no body; he is a pure spirit. Q. Are there more Gods than one? A. No; there is but one God. Q. Are there more persons than one in God? A. Yes; in God there are three persons.
Notice the order of the answers. First God is made formless — no body, no shape, pure spirit. Only then can He be described as one Being holding three Persons inside it. The two claims belong together. A God with a real form and a real face cannot easily be three Persons inside one undivided essence; a formless abstraction can be divided and combined any way a philosopher likes. That is why the creed must speak this way:
That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one.
Scripture describes a different God. Man was made “in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26) — the same words used when “Adam … begat a son in his own likeness, after his image” (Genesis 5:3). Ezekiel saw on the throne “the likeness as the appearance of a man” (Ezekiel 1:26). Jesus told His hearers they had never “seen his shape” (John 5:37) — which means the Father has one. He said the angels “do always behold the face of my Father” (Matthew 18:10), and He promised the redeemed, “they shall see his face” (Revelation 22:4). And Paul says the Son, before He became a man, was “in the form of God” (Philippians 2:6).
It is fair to note what Moses told Israel at Sinai: “ye saw no manner of similitude” (Deuteronomy 4:15). But read the next verse — the point was “Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image” (4:16). God hid His form from Israel to keep them from carving it, not because He has none. Scripture never calls God formless; it calls Him holy, and too glorious to be pictured by human art.
And God is spirit too — “God is a Spirit” (John 4:24) — not instead of having a form, but in addition to it. His Spirit is His own presence reaching where His throne does not: “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” (Psalm 139:7). When Paul quotes Isaiah’s “Who hath directed the Spirit of the LORD” (Isaiah 40:13), he renders it, from the Greek Old Testament, “who hath known the mind of the Lord?” (Romans 11:34). The Spirit of God is God’s own mind and presence, as “the spirit of man which is in him” is the man himself (1 Corinthians 2:11) — not a third person sharing an essence. (More in Who Do We Truly Worship?.)
The Bible’s God has a face, a form, a Son in His own form, and a Spirit that is His own presence. The creed’s God has no body, three Persons, and one substance. They use the same names. They are not the same picture.
The sun at the centre
Where did a formless, threefold deity come from? Long before any church council met, the oldest rival to the worship of the Creator was the worship of His brightest creation — the sun. Moses warned against it by name: “when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars … shouldest be driven to worship them” (Deuteronomy 4:19). And the Bible records how far it got, all the way into the house of God:
Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the LORD’s house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz.
And he brought me into the inner court of the LORD’s house, and, behold, at the door of the temple of the LORD, between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the temple of the LORD, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east.
Tammuz — the Mesopotamian dying-and-rising god — mourned at the gate. Men at the very door of the temple, backs to the sanctuary, bowing to the rising sun. Before Ezekiel, King Josiah had to clear out the same thing: “he took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun, at the entering in of the house of the LORD … and burned the chariots of the sun with fire” (2 Kings 23:11). Sun-worship was not a distant heathen curiosity. It was the recurring temptation of God’s own people, and it always arrived by mixing itself into the true worship.
The sun in three forms
The ancient world did not only worship the sun; it divided it. In Egypt the sun god was honoured in three forms according to the time of day: Egyptologists describe Khepri as the morning sun, Ra as the midday sun, and Atum as the evening sun — one sun, three names, three faces, a single daily cycle. Babylon set the sun beside two other lights in a sacred triad. An older encyclopaedia of Babylonian religion describes “a second triad composed of Shamash, Sin and Ishtar … the sun, the moon and the life-giving power,” standing beneath the great triad of Anu, Bel and Ea, among whom the priests divided heaven, earth, and the waters.
The pattern runs through the whole ancient world. Egypt grouped its gods into family triads — Osiris, Isis, and Horus; Amun, Mut, and Khonsu; Ptah, Sekhmet, and Nefertem. Rome crowned its state religion with the Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. India still speaks of the Trimurti — Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. To be fair, these are not the creed’s formula; they are groupings of gods, not one substance in three Persons. But that is the point. The idea that the supreme divine should come in threes was not born in the Bible. It was the native religious language of the nations the Bible warns against: “Learn not the way of the heathen” (Jeremiah 10:2). (For the full historical audit of the triads, see The triad before the trinity.)
What we can prove — and what we cannot
Much of what is popularly said about the trinity and Babylon traces back to one book: Alexander Hislop’s The Two Babylons (1853). It deserves an honest word, because a good case is weakened, not strengthened, by claims that will not bear weight.
What Hislop claimed
Hislop taught that Nimrod, the builder of Babel, his wife Semiramis, and her son Tammuz were worshipped as the first divine trinity, and that this triad, disguised under local names, spread to every nation. He also wrote:
In the unity of that one Only God of the Babylonians, there were three persons, and to symbolise that doctrine of the Trinity, they employed, as the discoveries of Layard prove, the equilateral triangle, just as it is well known the Romish Church does at this day.
What the evidence shows
No ancient text makes Nimrod and Semiramis husband and wife, or makes the three of them a worshipped trinity. The historical Semiramis was an Assyrian queen, Shammuramat, of the ninth century BC — far later than Nimrod. No Assyriological source confirms a Babylonian triangle-symbol of the trinity. Ralph Woodrow, whose popular book once spread Hislop’s ideas widely, later withdrew it, writing that “Hislop’s ‘history’ was often only an arbitrary piecing together of ancient myths” and that Nimrod and Semiramis “did not even live in the same century.”
What still stands
None of that touches the case Scripture makes. Tammuz is not Hislop’s invention; he is in Ezekiel, mourned at the gate of God’s house. Sun-worship at the temple door is in Ezekiel. The horses and chariots of the sun are in Kings. The threefold sun of Egypt and the sun–moon–Venus triad of Babylon are documented by the specialists. The triads of Egypt, Babylon, Rome, and India are matters of record. And the symbols this study traces next — where they came from and where they ended up — are documented one by one. We do not need a single disputed claim to see the pattern.
The symbols, one by one
God commanded Israel, when they entered the land, to “destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images” (Numbers 33:52), and He warned them never to ask, “How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise” (Deuteronomy 12:30). A symbol is never only decoration; it carries an idea. Here are the symbols that now surround the worship of the triune God, and where each one came from.
1. The sun-disk halo
The bright circle around the heads of saints is so familiar that most people assume it is a Christian invention. It is not. The Greek sun-god Helios was shown wearing a crown of rays; the famous Colossus of Rhodes wore one. Roman emperors were portrayed with the radiant crown or a circle of light to mark them as divine, and Buddhist art gave the Buddha a halo in the first centuries AD. Art historians date its entry into Christian art to the fourth century — the century of Constantine. The sun’s disk was moved from the heads of gods and emperors onto the heads of the saints, and eventually onto images of Christ and of the three Persons of the trinity.
2. The triquetra
The triquetra — three interwoven arcs forming one continuous figure — is pre-Christian. It appears on ornamented pottery of Anatolia and Persia from around the fourth century BC and on early Lycian coins, and it became a common ornament in Germanic and insular art. Only later was it read as a picture of the trinity, a reading that spread most widely with the Celtic revival of the nineteenth century. (Some modern writers say it stood for the phases of the sun; there is no good evidence for that, and we do not claim it. Its pagan age is enough.)
3. The three rings
Three interlocking circles — each passing through the others so that none can be removed without the whole falling apart — were used in medieval Christian art as a diagram of “unity in trinity.” A thirteenth-century French manuscript showing the rings with that label was reproduced by the French scholar Adolphe Napoléon Didron in 1843 and later lost in a fire during the Second World War. The image survives because it was copied: three circles, one figure, three-in-one made visible.
4. The triangle
The equilateral triangle became the trinity’s most common geometric emblem. Later painters sometimes gave God the Father a triangular halo to signify the trinity. From around the sixteenth century the Eye of Providence — a single eye set inside a triangle, often bursting with rays — appears in European Christian art as an explicit symbol of the trinity; an early example is Pontormo’s Supper at Emmaus (1525). The same eye-in-triangle later passed into Masonic and civic use, which is how it came to be printed on the back of the American dollar.
5. The Shield of the Trinity
The Scutum Fidei, or Shield of the Trinity, is a triangle with “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” at the corners and “God” at the centre, each corner joined to the centre by “is” and to the others by “is not.” It is first attested in a manuscript of Peter of Poitiers from about 1208–1216. It is perhaps the clearest picture ever drawn of the doctrine — and it makes a triangle out of God.
6. The sun in the sanctuary
In Catholic worship the consecrated host is displayed for adoration in a vessel called a monstrance. The most common design places the host at the centre of a golden sunburst. The Catholic Encyclopedia describes it without embarrassment:
… surrounded, like the sun, with rays. Monstrances of this shape, dating from the fifteenth century, are also not uncommon, and for several hundred years past this has been by far the commonest form.
The same century gave the church the sunburst Christogram. Bernardino of Siena popularised the letters IHS set on a blazing sun — by his own account to replace pagan and factional emblems — and the Jesuit order later adopted the IHS within a sun as its emblem. The intention was to Christianise the sun. The result is that, in the most sacred moments of Catholic worship, what the worshipper sees is a golden sun.
7. The three-faced trinity — banned by Rome itself
Some painters went further and showed the trinity as a single head with three faces — one body, three mouths, three noses, four eyes. The image looks unmistakably like the many-faced gods of the heathen. In 1628 Pope Urban VIII condemned such pictures and ordered them burned, and in 1745 Benedict XIV classed the three-headed trinity among the forbidden “monsters.” Rome recognised that this particular picture had gone too far. But it kept the doctrine the picture was trying to draw.
The halo came from the sun-gods and the emperors. The triquetra came from pagan ornament. The sunburst holds the host. The triangle holds the eye. Rome itself burned the three-faced god. Each symbol tells the same story: an old pagan form, given Christian names.
In our churches
These symbols did not stay in Rome. Revelation calls the woman “the mother of harlots,” and daughters resemble their mother. When the Protestant churches came out of Rome, they brought much of her worship with them — including the doctrine of the trinity and, with it, its emblems. Today the triquetra and the triangle can be found in the stained glass of Anglican cathedrals, on the pew ends of Presbyterian and Methodist churches, on altar cloths and baptismal fonts, on pastors’ stoles, and on church logos of nearly every denomination. Bookshops sell trinity jewellery stamped with the triquetra, while the same knot is sold in neopagan and occult shops as a charm of their own — because both claim it.
Most of the people who sit beneath these windows have never been told what the shapes mean, and that matters. The quarrel here is not with them. Many of God’s children worship in those buildings with sincere hearts, and He knows them. The quarrel is with a system that took the images of the heathen, wrote Christian names on them, and taught the world to call the result the God of the Bible.
On our Bibles
The symbol has reached even the cover of the Scriptures. For years the New King James Version carried a triquetra as its logo, and its publisher explained the design on the copyright page:
The triquetra (from a Latin word meaning ‘three cornered’) is an ancient symbol of the Trinity. It comprises three interwoven arcs, distinct yet equal and inseparable, symbolizing that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three distinct yet equal Persons and indivisibly One God.
Read that and then open the book it is stamped on. You will search from Genesis to Revelation and never find the words trinity, three Persons, or indivisibly One God. The symbol on the outside teaches a doctrine the pages inside never state. It is a small thing to print a knot on a cover. It is not a small thing to train every reader, before they open the book, to see God as a pagan ornament describes Him.
The number of a man
Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
Revelation gives a number and tells the wise to count. Two counts converge on the system that holds the mystery of the trinity at its centre.
The geometry. The triangle at the heart of the trinity’s emblems — the triangle of the Shield, the triangle around the Eye, the triangle latent in the triquetra’s three arcs — is equilateral: three equal sides, and three equal angles of sixty degrees each. Sixty, sixty, sixty. The figure the church chose to picture its God signs, in its own geometry, three sixes.
The title. The papacy’s claim to stand in the place of the Son of God is expressed in the Latin title Vicarius Filii Dei — “Vicar of the Son of God.” The title is old: it stands in the Latin text of the Donation of Constantine, the forged document (exposed by Lorenzo Valla in 1440) on which the popes long rested their temporal power, where the apostle Peter is said to have been “vicarius filii dei” on earth. Count the Latin letters that are numerals: V (5) + I (1) + C (100) + I (1) + V (5) + I (1) + L (50) + I (1) + I (1) + D (500) + I (1) = 666. (A Catholic weekly printed in 1914–15 that the title was inscribed on the papal mitre, and later retracted the inscription claim; the title and its sum stand regardless.) For the full study of the beast, the image, the mark, and the name, see Revelation 13.
The day of the sun
Every god of the ancient world had his day, and the sun had the first. The Roman dies Solis — the day of the sun — became our Sunday. When the emperor Constantine, who for years had honoured the Unconquered Sun on his own coins, made the first civil Sunday law in A.D. 321, he named the day for the sun, not for Christ:
On the venerable Day of the Sun let the magistrates and people residing in cities rest, and let all workshops be closed.
And the old Catholic catechism that taught generations of English-speaking Catholics joins the three things this study has followed — the trinity, the sun, and the day — in a single answer:
Q. What is Sunday, or the Lord’s Day in general? A. It is a day dedicated by the Apostles to the honour of the most holy Trinity, and in memory that Christ our Lord arose from the dead upon Sunday, sent down the holy Ghost on a Sunday, &c. and therefore is called the Lord’s Day. It is also called Sunday from the old Roman denomination of Dies Solis, the day of the sun, to which it was sacred.
Dedicated to the honour of the most holy Trinity … the day of the sun, to which it was sacred. The catechism says it, not its critics. And the church has never claimed the change came from Scripture. A Catholic newspaper put the claim in its plainest form:
The Church is above the Bible; and this transference of Sabbath observance from Saturday to Sunday is proof positive of that fact.
Scripture saw it coming. The little horn would “think to change times and laws” (Daniel 7:25). The law it reached for was the one commandment that names the Creator and His day — “the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God … For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth” (Exodus 20:10-11) — the day God called “a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the LORD” (Ezekiel 20:12). One day is the sign of the Creator who has a name. The other is the day of the sun, dedicated to the mystery.
A caution belongs here too. The issue is never only the day. The Jews of Jesus’ time kept the right day and rejected the Lord of the Sabbath. It is possible to keep the seventh day and still carry the mystery in one’s mind. The day is the sign; the God is the substance. Revelation’s faithful are those who “keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus” (Revelation 14:12) — the right day, kept for the right God.
One world, one mystery
Revelation pictures the whole world gathered in wonder behind one power (Revelation 13:3). The gathering has a centre, and it is a doctrine. The World Council of Churches, the main body of the ecumenical movement, admits churches on one confessional basis:
The World Council of Churches is a fellowship of churches which confess the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour according to the scriptures and therefore seek to fulfil together their common calling to the glory of the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
When the earlier 1948 wording drew questions, a WCC-published history records, a study concluded that it needed no change, but that it was necessary to “make clear that the incarnation and the Trinity were implicit in it.” The door into the world’s fellowship of churches is the triune name.
The political side of the picture is visible too. In April 2005, a sitting American president and two former presidents knelt together before the body of Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s — the first time a sitting president attended a papal funeral. In 2009, Benedict XVI wrote that there is “urgent need of a true world political authority,” which “would have to have the authority to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties” (Caritas in Veritate, §67). And Sunday is never far from the conversation: Benedict lent his support to Europe’s alliances for a free Sunday; Pope Francis asked in 2014 “whether working on Sunday is true freedom”; Germany’s constitutional court, in a case brought by the churches, struck down Berlin’s Advent Sunday shopping in 2009; and Croatia cut working Sundays to sixteen a year in 2023. None of this is yet the enforced worship of Revelation 13. But it shows which way the river runs.
The Reformers would not have been surprised. As a nineteenth-century historian summarised their testimony, “This identity of papal Rome with anti-Christ was maintained by Luther, Melancthon, Calvin, and all the continental reformers; by Latimer, Ridley, Cranmer, and all the British reformers” (John Dowling, The History of Romanism, 1845). What the Reformers saw in Rome’s authority, Scripture also shows in her God.
Who will you worship?
Babylon has met this test before. Nebuchadnezzar raised a golden image on the plain of Dura and commanded every nation to bow, on pain of the furnace. Three young men answered:
But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.
Revelation describes the same test on a world scale, and heaven answers it in advance: “Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters” (Revelation 14:7). The Creator is not a mystery to be adored in a triangle. He is “one God, the Father, of whom are all things … and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things” (1 Corinthians 8:6) — a Father with a face, a Son in His form, and a Spirit that is Their own presence with us. “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3).
We do not need to smash windows or burn books to answer this call. We need to take the mystery out of our own worship — out of our minds first, then out of our songs and our symbols — and put back the name the redeemed carry on their foreheads: the Father’s. And we need to hear the voice that still speaks from heaven, not in anger but in mercy:
And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.
Further reading
The history behind the formula, the prophecy behind the symbols, and the God behind the names.
The history
The prophecy
The true God