“Didn’t the Council of Nicaea just arbitrarily pick the books for the Bible that they agreed with and suppress all the rest with political power?”

We dealt with the history of the canon in previous posts (July 1, 8).  Through a gradual process of collecting books that were accepted by the universal church as inspired Scripture, a consensus on a definitive list was reached by the Fourth Century.  But the canon had already taken a very familiar form by the end of the First Century, and the books were chosen not by political machination but by the application of four very appropriate criteria:  Was the book written by an apostle or a close associate working under the umbrella of his apostolic authority?  Was it accepted by all the apostolic churches?  Did it proclaim the Gospel, the faith that was handed down from the original apostles?  Did it impress itself on the church as coming with the power and conviction of the Holy Spirit?  The canon did not leap fully armed from the head of Constantine like Pallas Athena from the head of Zeus in 325 AD.  It was for all practical purposes already in place by the end of the First Century, though the process of building a full universal consensus took until the Fourth Century to be completed.

THE CONSPIRACY THEORY

The conspiracy-theory version is much more exciting, especially if you are looking for an excuse to dismiss the testimony of the apostles to Jesus or an opportunity to impress ignorant people with your supposedly esoteric knowledge.  We will lay out the version of it that Dan Brown used in his popular mystery novel The Da Vinci Code, and then look to see how it stands up to the actual historical evidence.  The novel is a fast-paced page turner made fascinating by its use of many accurately described details of European art and architecture.  The theory spun out of those details, though, is more fictitious than the mystery story itself: that the Holy Grail is not the cup of Christ but the womb of Mary Magdalene, who was secretly the wife of Jesus.  But that is a whole extra rabbit hole we don’t need to go down right now.  In order to set up that alternative timeline, Brown first has to poke holes in the standard canon of Scripture, because of course it does not tell the same story at all.

The critical conversation for our purposes occurs in chapter 55.^[1]  Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon and his companion Sophie visit Langdon’s friend Sir Leigh Teabing seeking information to help them in their quest for the secret of the Holy Grail, hidden, as Langdon knows, in the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci.  To prepare Sophie for that revelation, Teabing first has to give her a different view of the authority of the Bible (which, after all, tells a slightly different story). 

“Everything you need to know about the Bible,” Teabing says, can be summed up in one sentence:  “The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven.”  In other words, “The Bible is a product of man, my dear, not of God.”  The way man created the Bible was that Jesus’ life was recorded by “thousands” (!) of his followers, but then only a select few of those accounts were allowed to be read and the others were suppressed.  “More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen.”  That would be the four we know: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

How did this choosing take place, and more importantly, why?  ”The Bible, as we know today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.”   At the Council of Nicaea (AD 325), he transformed Christianity into a religion that could serve his purposes for unifying the empire by mixing it with the paganism Romans already believed in.  

This transformation of the original Christian faith included voting on the deity of Christ—which apparently nobody had thought of before.  “Until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet. . . . Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea.”  Why?  It was all a power play to shore up the emperor and his cronies.  “The early church literally stole Jesus from His original followers, hijacking His human message, shrouding it in an impenetrable cloak of divinity, and using it to expand their own power.” 

The part of this alleged process that concerns us here was the supposed creation of the canon as a power play to insure the dominance of the approved political faction.  “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.”  Bottom line:  “The modern Bible was compiled and edited by men who possessed a political agenda.”  Faithful testimony to the real historical Jesus had nothing to do with it.  In fact, the real story was suppressed by sheer political power, and the Catholic Church has been engaged in a massive cover-up ever since.

THE HISTORICAL REALITY

            How does this alternative imaginary history stack up against the facts we actually know?  To put it bluntly, there is hardly a word of truth in it.  The alternative story is not created simply by choosing different facts to emphasize.  It actually depends on outright fabrications of its own “facts” (or, to use a slightly less polite word, lies).

            Were there thousands of people writing lives of Jesus?  Certainly there were more than four, but no responsible scholar thinks there were “thousands” in any time period that is relevant.  Were more than eighty gospels “considered” for inclusion in the New Testament?  Considered by whom?  Almost none of the other gospels was ever seriously considered for canonization at all, because they are too late to be viable candidates.  The Council of Nicaea certainly did not start with any list of eighty-four gospels that was then narrowed down to four.  That was not even on the agenda, which focused on the date of Easter and the attempt to find consensus on the nature of Christ as human and divine.  Constantine certainly did not “collate” (i.e., collect together) the New Testament then, or have it done, because as we have seen, a canon almost identical to the one we have today was already functioning, accepted without controversy by churches across the Empire, more than two hundred years before the Council was ever called. He did commission fifty copies of the New Testament to be made, but that is hardly the same thing as “collating” an arbitrary version of it.

            Did the Council of Nicaea “vote” on the deity of Christ?  In a sense, yes.  It was called to deal with the Arian controversy, which had arisen because a theologian named Arius had denied the deity of Christ.  He viewed Christ as a very exalted supernatural being, but a created being, not fully God.  But even that fact reveals how distorted the conspiracy-theory version of the events is.  Teabing gives the impression that Jesus was revered only as a purely human rabbi right up to that moment of time. “Until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet. . . . Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea.”  But nobody—literally nobody—at the Council of Nicaea thought of Jesus as only “a mortal prophet” and nothing more.  They all believed that a powerful supernatural being had been incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth. 

The question the Council debated was whether that being was the fully divine Son of God or something less.  The purely human Jesus was not replaced by the divine Son of God at Nicaea for the simple reason that such a concept of Jesus never existed.  One of the earliest documents in the New Testament, from about 51 AD, is First Thessalonians.  Only twenty years after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, Paul is already presenting Him as the divine “Son from Heaven” (1 Thes. 1:10).  In his famous Pentecost Sermon, preached less than a couple of months after the resurrection, Peter speaks of Christ as one stronger than death who is exalted to the throne of God and capable of sending forth the divine Holy Spirit (Acts 2:24, 33).    There is not one shred of evidence of any period of time at all when the followers of Jesus thought of him as a mere mortal man and nothing more. The assumption by conspiracy theorists that there “must” have been such a time is not evidence.  In fact, the (First-Century) canonical Gospels are already full of passages that imply Jesus’ deity, and some that directly claim it.  “Before Abraham was born, I AM” (John 8:58) is perhaps the most impressive.  “Before Abraham was born, I was” would have been a pretty bold claim, but what Jesus actually said not only claims pre-existence but uses a translation of the sacred Hebrew name of God, Yahweh, “I AM.”  If material like that did not go back to the beginning, it would have been being debated at Nicaea in the first place.

So the bottom line for our question: Is it true that “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”?  The very opposite is true, which is evident to anyone who has read the canonical Gospels and compared them with the so-called apocryphal “gospels” of the Second Century and later.  The four Gospels of the New Testament are full of the humanity of Jesus, presented right alongside His deity.  (And there is no evidence of “embellishment” either, by the way.  The claims to deity do not just show up in later manuscripts!)  The Jesus in those Gospels got hungry and thirsty, He had to sleep—indeed, He got so tired on one occasion that He was sleeping right through a storm on the Sea of Galilee and had to be woken up to still the storm and calm the winds and the waves.  That passage (Mark 4:35-41, cf. Mat. 8:23-27, Luke 8:22-25) is typical in that it has the very real humanity of Jesus and His equally real divine power right next to each other so we can experience the difficulty the disciples had at first in getting their heads around it.  “What manner of man is this, that even the winds and the waves obey Him?” 

By contrast, it is precisely the apocryphal “gospels” that downplay Jesus’ humanity.  They are full of what by contrast with the more sober New-Testament Gospels looks like pious fiction for the gullible:  Jesus as a boy, for example, is making clay models of animals with his friends, and then Jesus throws his bird up into the air and it comes to life and flies away.  The fact is that the humanity of Jesus is all over the canonical Gospels right alongside His deity, and the merely human Jesus does not appear in any gospel of any kind from the ancient world.  Teabing’s representation could not in fact be further from the truth.

So, again, bottom line:  Was “the modern Bible . . . compiled and edited by men who possessed a political agenda”?  Was that agenda to alter the original theology about Christ in order to solidify the power of Constantine, and was it done at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD?   In fact, Constantine’s position as Emperor was already solid by that time.  His calling the Council was evidence of the security of his power and influence in the Empire, not an attempt to create it. In fact, the Council of Nicaea simply recognized a canon that had already been coming together for a long time. In fact, its delegates used that canon to settle a theological controversy that existed, not because other gospels needed to be suppressed, but because the four canonical Gospels that they all accepted presented a picture of Jesus, going all the way back to the time of Jesus, that was hard to get your head around. 

The picture was hard to get your head around because Jesus was hard to get your head around.  How could the same Person be God and man at the same time?  In fact, the deity of Christ was not “voted on” at Nicaea as a new “proposal.”  It was affirmed in clearer terms than ever before because it had been hanging over the church’s attempts to understand what they were dealing with ever since the disciples started asking, “What manner of man is this?”  In fact, the other “gospels” were not “suppressed” because they had an alternative view of how to answer that burning question that was being rejected for political reasons.  They were not indeed “suppressed” at all.  Nobody was ever jailed for copying or reading them!  They were simply not approved for use in worship or for use in deciding doctrine.  Why not? Because they were too late and spurious to .be helpful in dealing with the question insistently posed by the original testimony as recorded in the original documents:  “What manner of man is this?”

CONCLUSION:

The church was not ultimately based on a book.  (Of course, in a sense it is based on a book, the Bible; but not in an ultimate sense.)  It was ultimately based on a Person.  The book, the documents that belong in the book, the criteria for discerning those documents that belong in the book, the manuscripts of those documents, the criteria for evaluating those manuscripts:  All these things are important because the Person is important.  They matter because the Person matters.  The documents that belong in the Book and the words that belong in the documents are accepted because He accepted one group of those documents (the Old Testament) and commissioned the other (the New). 

“You search the Scriptures,” that Person said, “because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that speak about me” (John 5:39).  All the evidence says that they speak authentically, truly, trustworthily, and well.  And so they leave us with the very same question they first posed and then answered for the early church:  “What manner of man is this?”  The early church answered at Nicaea, “He is the Christ, the Son of the living God, incarnate in human flesh.  He is fully God and fully man.  He is the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world.”

How will you answer?      

This post is adapted from a chapter in my new book The Young Christian’s Survival Guide: Common Questions Young Christians Are Asked about God, the Bible, and the Christian Faith Answered (Cambridge, OH: Christian Publishing House, 2019).  To order, go here:

Ebook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VFR66Z4

Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1949586898

[1] Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (N.Y.: Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 249-56.