The First Council of Nicaea in AD 325
What Really Happened?
In 5 Parts
The Disinformation About The Council
Parrots. What does a parrot do? It mindlessly repeats what it hears, without understanding what it is saying. This is what is done by those who propagate the lies about what happened at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. What do they contend happened at this council?
1. That the deity of Jesus was invented then.
2. That this council decided what books of the Bible were to be accepted and which ones where to be rejected.
That is only two of the major lies that many are staking their eternal destines upon. If I were a betting man, I would wager that 99.5%(I am being generous. It is probably more like 99.9%) of those who parrot these falsehoods, have never taken the time to investigate the matter for themselves. They simply repeat what they hear others say, hence, they are parrots.
They contend that before this council, the early church did not view Jesus as divine or as God in flesh. They mainly contend that He was just a man, who was a great teacher, or one who was endued with the “Christ Spirit”. One of the arguments they use is that the books of the NT, especially the four gospels, were written well after the First Century.1 The truth is, that all of the NT documents were written in the First Century, most before the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.
They also espouse the idea that there were ancient books that the Church rejected, which should have been accepted. They assert that these rejected books possessed a level of wisdom or teaching from Jesus, which the council didn’t want the lay persons of the community to have access to. The truth is far from this.2
The reality of the situation is that the council never once debated which books should be allowed into the Canon of Scripture, or which ones should be left out. The topic was never introduced. We will discuss this further in a later section. So where did these parrots and their trainers, get these ideas about the Council of Nicaea? In our own time, it all likely came from the writer of fiction, Dan Brown. Although these two lies were not original to Mr. Brown, he certainly profited from them.
In his imaginary work, entitled The DaVinci Code, the idea is advanced that it was at the Council of Nicaea where the books of the Bible were decided. In this book of fiction, one of the main characters, Leigh Teabing, stated, “Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made him godlike” (Brown, The DaVinci Code. p316-317) In this statement, he covers both lies.
Constantine did not commission a new Bible. He also hints that the four gospels which we do possess, have been “embellished” to make Jesus “godlike”. These are not the only two imaginary “truths” that were offered. He also introduced the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married and had a child.3 And the lies just keep coming. That is why his work is classified in the Fiction genre. The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines fiction as, something invented by the imagination or feigned.
1 With the NT documents written so late, it makes it impossible for the Gospels to be written by their namesakes, i.e., the Gospel of Matthew was written by Matthew, the Apostle of Jesus, and so on.
2 There were writings floating around at the time which were rejected by orthodox believers, due to their containing heretical Gnostic influences and outright lies. These books were never thought to be inspired by the Apostolic Church, but were seen for what they were, the heretical writings of the Gnostics.
3 One of the more egregious blasphemies proclaimed in Brown’s book, is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child. In his book, this child was referred to as, the “Holy Grail” or Sangreal, meaning royal blood. The Holy Grail was the royal blood line of Jesus and Mary Magdalene’s offspring.
