There is perhaps no more maligned and misrepresented event in the history of the church than the Council of Nicaea. Many wild theories fly about the internet about this council creating the doctrine of the Trinity or declaring Jesus to be divine for the very first time. The one I find to be most egregious is probably the assertion that it was here that the New Testament canon was decided upon and created.
The story generally goes like this: Constantine called together the Council of Nicaea in 325 to firmly establish his rule and to bring Christianity into conformity. Along with decreeing that Jesus should now be considered God, he also determined what books should be included in the canon to support this new theology. Alternatively, the council was a gathering of powerful bishops foisting the books they wanted upon the church to support their theology, while suppressing all the rest. In other words, the canon of the New Testament is entirely arbitrary and could have looked completely different. The problem with this idea is that it is completely fictional; about the only truth is that Constantine did call the Council of Nicaea.
What makes this claim even more fictional is that it was popularized by a work of fiction: Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. It can be found coming from the mouth of the fictional character, Sir Leigh Teabing:
‘The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book… More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them.’
‘Who chose which gospels to include?’ Sophie asked.
‘Aha!’ Teabing burst in with enthusiasm. ‘The fundamental irony of Christianity! The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.’[1]
Now while it should be recognized that this is a piece of fiction and should not be relied upon as accurate information, there are many people who do not seem to realize where this claim originated from. And it is not only the denizens of the internet who present this fiction as fact; Richard Dawkins has put a very similar claim out in one of his published books:
The canon was largely fixed in AD 325 by a conference of church leaders called the Council of Nicaea, set up by the Roman Emperor Constantine — the one whose conversion led to Europe becoming Christian… Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were only four out of a large number of gospels doing the rounds at the time of the Council of Nicaea.[2]
Dawkins goes on to describe this “large number” of other Gospels as “about fifty of them, any of which might have been included in the canon along with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”[3] The parallels with the The Da Vinci Code are so striking that this seems to be his (unconscious) source, rather than getting his facts from real history.
When you encounter wild statements about Constantine and the Council of Nicaea creating the canon of Scripture and deciding which books should be kept and which should be thrown out, remember these quotations from Bart Ehrman:
“Despite Dan Brown’s claim at the beginning of his novel that all of its ‘descriptions of documents… are accurate,’ nearly everything he says about the Gospels outside the New Testament is wrong. We don’t know if there were eighty Gospels, none of the ones that survive ever mentions Jesus’ alleged marriage to Mary Magdalene, and Constantine had nothing to do with deciding which books would be included in the New Testament.”[4]
“This claim, we will see, is completely wrong; the formation of the New Testament canon was a long, drawn-out process that began centuries before Constantine and was not completed until well after his death. He in fact had nothing to do with it. Among other things, the four Gospels we consider to be part of the New Testament were already firmly ensconced well before Constantine’s conversion, and the “other” Gospels had already long been proscribed by Christian leaders as heretical productions—they weren’t suppressed by Constantine.”[5]
Ehrman himself is no believer. He is a skeptical scholar who views Christianity as false, but he does not present fictions as truths.
The Council of Nicaea had nothing to do with the canon of Scripture; the topic was simply not discussed during the proceedings. In question was addressing the teaching of Arius that Christ was creature, rather than fully divine. The council affirmed the deity of Christ, but it did not create it. I refer you to an earlier post for some quotations to that effect.
The canon, in fact, is the creation of no council. There was no church body that met together and decided which books were to guide the life of the church. In fact, by the end of the second century, a core canon of 21 or 22 books of the New Testament was undisputed throughout the church. These books were the four Gospels, Acts, Paul’s epistles, 1 John, 1 Peter, Revelation, and perhaps Hebrews. In other words, over 150 years before Constantine and the Council of Nicaea, the majority of the books of the New Testament canon were already established beyond any shadow of a doubt.[6] As John Barton has commented, “Astonishingly early, the great central core of the present New Testament was already being treated as the main authoritative source for Christians.”[7] Christians never consciously decided what books they should have in their canon; they were simply the books they had received.
Yes, some disputes did continue around the smaller books at the edge of the canon for some time (James, Jude, 2-3 John, 2 Peter), and no church council ever finally settled this matter. It largely organically settled on its own throughout most of the church. And the disputes around the edges do not diminish from the fact that the core canon was long since established and unaffected by these issues. As Michael Kruger says,
Nevertheless, the discussions of these disputed books would have taken place within a context where the main canonical foundation had already been laid. Thus, whatever their outcome, by the middle of the second century the overall canonical direction of early Christianity had been determined. Therefore, dramatic claims that the canon was not finalized until the fourth century may be true on a technical level, but often miss the larger and more important point, namely, that the core of the canon had already been in place (and exhibiting scriptural authority) for centuries.[8]
So the next time you hear someone saying that we only have the books we have in our New Testament because Constantine and the Council of Nicaea decided which ones should be kept, gently remind that person that this statement is fictional and derives from a work of fiction. Most of the New Testament was firmly established long before Constantine was born or ever dreamed of calling the Council of Nicaea.
[1] Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (Corgi Press, 2004), 312–313.
[2] Richard Dawkins, Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide (New York: Random House, 2019), 21, https://archive.org/details/outgrowing-god/page/22/mode/2up
[3] Dawkins, Outgrowing God, 23.
[4] Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), 53.
[5] Bart D. Ehrman, Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 24.
[6] For an overview of the development of the core canon, see Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books
[7] John Barton, The Spirit and the Letter: Studies in the Biblical Canon (London: SPCK, 1997), 18.
[8] Kruger, Canon Revisited, 232.