HistoricalChristian.Faith
HistoricalChristian.Faith
Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: unsupported — in its popular modern form (Constantine "commissioned and financed a new Bible," voted the canon, and had the rejected gospels "outlawed, gathered up and burned"), the claim has no basis: the surviving acts and canons of the Council of Nicaea say nothing of the canon of Scripture; Eusebius and Athanasius, both present at the council, treat the canon as an open, gradually-settled question after 325; and Constantine's later commission of Bibles was copying an existing collection, not selecting one. A far narrower scholarly question — whether Nicaea recognized or used certain disputed books in passing — is a different matter, weighed separately · popularized by Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (2003)
Related arguments: the Nicene-canon legend — see also the altar-ordeal miracle and were the infancy gospels suppressed?
This argument takes the popular modern legend that the Council of Nicaea (325) is where the biblical canon was set — and asks what, if anything, it establishes. The specific miracle by which a later strand of the legend has the books sorted — the inspired ones leaping onto the altar, the spurious falling beneath — is a separate claim, weighed in its own right.
"The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not magically fall from the clouds. The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great. In 325 AD, he decided to unify Rome under a single religion: Christianity. Constantine needed to strengthen the new Christian tradition and held a famous gathering known as the Council of Nicea… 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 earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up and burned."
— Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003), the mouth of "Sir Leigh Teabing," ch. 55.1 The interpretation the claim serves is that the contents of the Bible were decided at Nicaea — by an imperial-conciliar act that voted certain books in, commissioned a purged edition, and destroyed the rest. It bundles together four assertions, each of which can be checked: that Nicaea took up the question of the canon at all; that it voted or decreed a list; that Constantine then commissioned a "new Bible" selected on doctrinal grounds; and that the losing gospels were burned.
Brown's is the bestselling modern form, but the underlying thesis is older and Enlightenment-rationalist in origin. Thomas Paine, in The Age of Reason (1794), has the "Church Mythologists" who "decided by vote which of the books… should be the WORD OF GOD, and which should not… those books which had a majority of votes, were voted to be the word of God" — the canon-by-vote picture, though Paine names no council.2 Earlier still, Voltaire, in the Philosophical Dictionary ("Councils," §III, 1764), already attaches the legend to Nicaea by way of its miraculous mechanism — the fathers "laid them all upon an altar, and the books which they were to reject fell to the ground" — a detail he draws from "the supplement to the Council of Nice," i.e. the late, pseudo-historical Synodicon Vetus. That altar-ordeal mechanism is a distinct claim, weighed in its own right; this page weighs the general thesis that Nicaea fixed the canon.3
The kernel that makes the legend plausible to a general reader. Each ingredient has a real counterpart, which is why the composite sounds historical. Constantine did convene the first ecumenical council at Nicaea in 325 to unify a divided church; the council did issue binding decisions — the Creed with its homoousios, the date of Easter, and twenty disciplinary canons. And Constantine did, a few years later, commission fifty parchment copies of "the divine Scriptures" from Eusebius for the churches of his new capital (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 4.36).4 From these genuine facts — an emperor, a council that legislated, and an imperial order for Bibles — the legend extrapolates a single dramatic act: a canon voted, a Bible purged, the rejects burned.
What holds. Nicaea is real, Constantine convened it, and it made authoritative decisions; and Constantine separately funded the production of Bibles. The legend is not spun from nothing — it is spun from these.
What fails, point by point.
The acts and canons of Nicaea say nothing about the canon of Scripture. The twenty surviving canons concern church order — the Melitian and Arian schisms, clerical discipline, the reception of the lapsed, the rule of Easter — and not one touches the list of biblical books. No ancient record of the council's proceedings mentions a canon of Scripture being debated, voted, or promulgated.5
Our fullest contemporary witness, who was at the council, knew of no such decision. Eusebius of Caesarea, present at Nicaea and the historian of the age, treats the canon as still open in his own day. In the Church History (3.25), completed around the time of the council, he sorts the books into the "acknowledged" (homologoumena), the "disputed" (antilegomena — James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2–3 John), the "spurious" (the Shepherd, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Acts of Paul, the Gospel of the Hebrews), and the heretical forgeries (the Gospels of Peter, Thomas, Matthias) — books "disputed… but nevertheless… publicly used by many" and others "altogether rejected." A man who had just sat in a council that settled the canon could not have written that the limits of the canon were still contested.6
Athanasius — a leading figure at Nicaea — still treats fixing the list as his own undertaking forty years later. In his Festal Letter 39 (367), the earliest list to match the present twenty-seven-book New Testament, Athanasius presents the enumeration not as the citation of an existing conciliar decree but as a fresh task he is "urged" to, modeled deliberately on the Evangelist Luke — "I shall adopt… the pattern of Luke… it seemed good to me also… to set before you the books included in the Canon, and handed down, and accredited as Divine" — and undertaken "of necessity" and "for greater exactness." The canon is "handed down," not recently decreed; the labor of setting it out is his own. The Catholic theologian A. E. Breen draws the inference plainly: "St. Athanasius would not have declared that it was a bold and difficult thing to fix the list of the Holy Books, had there been promulgated a catalogue of the same by a council of which he was an important factor, and whose decisions he venerated."7
The canon went on developing after 325, regionally and unevenly. Athanasius's 367 list, the African councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) that ratified catalogues, and the long Eastern hesitation over the Apocalypse all postdate Nicaea — the picture of a slow, regional settling, not a single 325 decree binding the whole church. Even Breen and Hefele, who think the Nicene fathers recognized the deuterocanonical books in their deliberations, deny that the council "drew up an official list," precisely because such a list would have steered the later Greek tradition it manifestly did not steer.8
Constantine's "new Bible" was copying, not selecting — and there is no burning. The one real imperial Bible-project, the fifty copies ordered from Eusebius (Life of Constantine 4.36), is described as the transcription of "the divine Scriptures" already in the churches' use, executed "by skilful calligraphers" — production, not a doctrinal redaction, and it presupposes an existing collection to copy. No ancient source records gospels being "outlawed, gathered up and burned" at or after Nicaea. And the textual history runs opposite to Brown's gloss: the four canonical Gospels were already the fixed fourfold core by c. 180 (Irenaeus), while the excluded "gospels" of the second century and later (Thomas and its kin) tend toward a more exalted, esoteric Christ — so it is false that Nicaea suppressed the gospels of a "human" Jesus in favor of "godlike" ones.9
Unsupported. The popular legend that the Council of Nicaea (or Constantine through it) fixed the biblical canon — voting the books, commissioning a purged Bible, and burning the rejected gospels — has no historical basis on any of its parts. The council's surviving acts and canons are silent on Scripture; Eusebius, who was there, records the canon as still disputed in his own day; Athanasius, also there, in 367 still frames listing the books as his own undertaking of "necessity," handed down rather than decreed; and Constantine's later Bible commission was the copying of an existing collection, not its selection, with no trace of suppression or burning. The truth the legend distorts is real but smaller — an emperor who convened a council that legislated on doctrine and discipline, and who later paid for Bibles. What must be kept separate from this verdict is a far narrower, genuinely scholarly question: whether Nicaea used or recognized certain disputed (deuterocanonical) books in passing — a claim defended by Cornely and denied by Breen and Hefele, weighed on its own and concerning recognition-in-deliberation, not the promulgation of a canon. Even its defenders concede Nicaea drew up no official list. The grand legend of "the Bible decided at Nicaea" is the thing that fails.
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003), ch. 55 (the character Leigh Teabing). On Brown's repeated public insistence that the novel's historical claims are accurate, and the scholarly response, see "The Da Vinci Code," with the canon-and-Nicaea claims treated under "Criticism of The Da Vinci Code." ↩
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Part First (1794): "they decided by vote which of the books out of the collection they had made should be the WORD OF GOD, and which should not… those books which had a majority of votes, were voted to be the word of God." Paine gives the canon-by-vote picture without naming a council. ↩
Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, "Councils," §III (1764): "in the supplement to the Council of Nice it is related that the fathers, being much perplexed to find out which were the authentic and which the apocryphal books… laid them all upon an altar, and the books which they were to reject fell to the ground." The "supplement" is the Synodicon Vetus; the altar-ordeal mechanism is weighed as a distinct claim. Roger Pearse gathers and dissects the whole legend at "The Council of Nicaea and the Bible." ↩
Eusebius, Life of Constantine 4.36 (c. 339): Constantine writes to Eusebius ordering "fifty copies of the sacred Scriptures… to be written on prepared parchment in a legible manner, and in a convenient, portable form, by professional transcribers thoroughly practised in their art" for the churches of Constantinople — the transcription of the existing Scriptures, dated after Nicaea. newadvent.org; local text at historicalchristian.faith. ↩
The Canons of the 318 Holy Fathers Assembled in the City of Nice, in Bithynia (NPNF² 14): the twenty canons concern clerical discipline, the lapsed, the Melitian and Arian schisms, kneeling at prayer, and the like — none addresses the canon of Scripture. Karl Joseph von Hefele, A History of the Councils of the Church, vol. 1, surveys what the council is securely known to have done; nothing in the record concerns a list of biblical books. ↩
Eusebius, Church History 3.25 (c. 325): "the writings that bear the name of Peter, only one of which I know to be genuine"; "Among the disputed writings, which are nevertheless recognized by many, are extant the so-called epistle of James and that of Jude, also the second epistle of Peter, and those that are called the second and third of John"; and a catalogue "distinguishing those works which according to ecclesiastical tradition are true and genuine and commonly accepted, from those others which, although not canonical but disputed, are yet… known to most ecclesiastical writers… such books as the Gospels of Peter, of Thomas, of Matthias." newadvent.org; local text at historicalchristian.faith. That the canon's limits were still openly contested in the year of Nicaea is incompatible with the council's having settled them. ↩
Athanasius of Alexandria, Festal Letter 39 (for 367), §§3–5: "I shall adopt, to commend my undertaking, the pattern of Luke the Evangelist… it seemed good to me also, having been urged thereto by true brethren, and having learned from the beginning, to set before you the books included in the Canon, and handed down, and accredited as Divine"; and §7, "for greater exactness I add this also, writing of necessity." historicalchristian.faith (NPNF² 4). The characterization "a bold and difficult thing to fix the list" is A. E. Breen's paraphrase of this framing: A. E. Breen, A General Introduction to the Study of Holy Scripture, ch. VIII, p. 361 fn.: "St. Athanasius would not have declared that it was a bold and difficult thing to fix the list of the Holy Books, had there been promulgated a catalogue of the same by a council of which he was an important factor, and whose decisions he venerated." ↩
On the post-Nicene, regional development of the canon: Athanasius's 367 list (n. 7); the Synod of Hippo (393) and the Third Council of Carthage (397); and the long Eastern hesitation over the Apocalypse of John — none of which would have been needed had Nicaea bound the whole church in 325. Breen, General Introduction, p. 361 fn.: "we hold that it is not sufficiently substantiated by historical data, that they drew up an official list of the Holy Scriptures. Had they done so, it would have had a greater influence on the trend of thought of the Greek fathers." Hefele, History of the Councils, vol. 1, pp. 367, 370–371, likewise distinguishes a council's use of a book from its drawing up a canon (the same distinction he draws for Ephesus and Hebrews). The narrower claim that Nicaea recognized particular deuterocanonical books is the subject of the Jerome-to-Hippo arguments. ↩
On the Bible-commission as transcription, see n. 4 (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 4.36). On the fourfold Gospel already fixed by c. 180: Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.11.8 ("it is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are"), newadvent.org. On the character of the excluded gospels — the second-century "gospels" (e.g. the Gospel of Thomas) tending toward a more esoteric and exalted, not more "human," Christ — see Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities (Oxford, 2003), and Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford, 1987). No ancient source attests gospels "outlawed, gathered up and burned" at Nicaea. Roger Pearse, "The Council of Nicaea and the Bible," traces the modern claim to its sources and finds none. ↩