It is common to hear from Trinitarian apologists these days that Paul “split” the Shema in 1 Cor 8:4-6 (a text that is actually strongly anti-Trinitarian). However, allowing for the sake of argument that Paul did split the Shema, such would not allow for the Trinity. If Bauckham et al., are correct, one would have to render the Shema as follows:
Listen, O Israel, Jesus is our Father, Jesus is One.
It is clearly unintelligible and smacks more of modalism than Trinitarianism. The split Shema idea could only work if one is a proponent of the Father and Son being the same person, which would be antithetical to 1 Cor 8:4-6 and a host of other passages when exegeted carefully.
James McGrath, author of The Only True God and John’s Apologetic Christology (both volumes I recommend to interested readers) wrote the following on Bauckham’s thesis:
One question we need to ask ourselves is whether Paul is likely to have made his most substantial points about the nature of Jesus by quoting or alluding to key texts that were slogans of Jewish monotheism, while at the same time supposedly making subtle but significant additions or insertions so as to (in the words of N. T. Wright) “split the Shema” or (in the terminology of Richard Bauckham) “include Jesus within the divine identity.”…Could someone have heard that Paul “split the Shema” in [1Cor 8.4-6]?
I’ve already noted that the widespread knowledge of the Shema in Paul’s time was a loud, unified voice, and that Paul would have needed to shout vociferously were he disagreeing with that dominant voice in some significant way. Yet he does not do so. It seems advisable therefore to assume that Paul’s earliest hearers would have heard him as joining in unison with those voices, perhaps adding a distinctive descant about the Anointed One, but not dissonantly singing a different note or even noticeably out of tune. Paul would have seemed to be building on that already-established foundation rather than challenging it…
In our time, many of us have heard the Shema far less frequently than the Nicene Creed. This cannot but be an influence, even on scholarly interpreters who make an effort to avoid reading our assumptions and contemporary influences into the texts we study…historical study seeks to hear Paul’s voice not as an expression of a Nicene orthodoxy that had not been defined as such in his time, but as a specific voice of his own time in an earlier period (Dunn, New Testament Theology: An Introduction). Paul’s journey may well have been on the same road that eventually led to Nicaea and Chalcedon, but the debates and conflicts of the intervening centuries suggest that the road from Paul to Nicaea was often uphill and frequently rocky, and by no means an instance of a casual linear stroll through flat, familiar terrain…
…it seems overwhelmingly probable that Paul echoes the Shema and other monotheistic passages so as to support his monotheism, rather than to redefine it or transform it into something radically new. (J.F. McGrath, “On Hearing [Rather Than Reading] Intertextual Echoes: Christology and Monotheistic Scriptures in an Oral Context”)
