The Surprising Word That Is Never Mentioned In The Bible

The number of words the Bible contains is astounding. The King James Bible contains 783,137 words and more than three million characters, according to Word Counter – the Bible as translated into English, that is. If you were going to retype that Bible, you'd spend more than 217 hours at the keyboard, and that's if you did 60 words per minute. Some Bibles contain even more words, depending on the approach used to create a particular edition.

Not only does the Bible have different manuscript versions — more than 5,800 Greek New Testament manuscripts found so far, over 10,000 Hebrew Old Testament manuscripts, and upwards of 19,000 other manuscripts in other ancient languages — but various translation styles have been applied over the years, explained Christianity.com.  There are some 50 different English editions of the Bible today, and if you decided to add revisions to this tally, the number would soar into the hundreds.

Despite all these numbers and possibilities, there are words not included in the Bible. One in particular might surprise you.

While the three persons of the Christian God — the Father, the Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit — find space in the Bible, the phrase that refers to all there together never is mentioned, according to the Overview Bible. That's right: While these three divine persons are mentioned together often, some 20 times, the word "Trinity" (in its various translations) never links them together in the Bible. The Trinitarian doctrine never appears in the New Testament, at least in a phrase. Many academics, theologians, and others, however, insist that the phraseology is inferred, since the book does teach about these parts of God, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 

One example of this is seen in the story of Yahweh coming to Abraham in the form of three men, told in Genesis 18. This is interpreted as the three persons of God — the Trinity. There are other passages that do this, too. If you look, you can certainly find the Trinity within the Bible. You just need to read between the lines.