Three Hundred Men and One Question

In AD 325 the emperor Constantine paid for a great many men to travel a long way to argue.

The town was Nicaea, in what is now Turkey, and the invitation went out across the empire. Bishops came from Egypt, from Syria, from Asia Minor, from as far as Spain, and at least one from Persia beyond the imperial border. Some of them, the accounts say, still carried the marks of the persecution that had ended only about a dozen years before.

How many came is contested, and I am going to say so rather than repeat the round number. Eusebius, who was there, wrote that there were more than two hundred and fifty. Other early accounts give three hundred. The figure of three hundred and eighteen became traditional later, and historians do not treat it as a headcount. Nobody at Nicaea was writing an attendance register.

What they came to discuss was a question that had been raised by a presbyter of Alexandria named Arius, and the question was about Jesus: specifically, about the relation of the Son to the Father.

That is the fact I want to hold in front of you, before anything else about the council.

The whole church, at enormous expense, in the first year it was legally able to meet in the open, assembled to talk about a question somebody had asked about Jesus.

The question was not forbidden. It was taken seriously.

Here is what I am not going to do in this article.

I am not going to relitigate the council. This site tells what happened and does not score it, and there are readers of this page in communions that have taken different roads since, and none of them is being told here that they lost.

What I will do is point at the shape of the event.

A man asked a question about who Jesus is. The question was serious enough that it could not be waved away. And the answer the church gave was not to silence him but to convene, from three continents, and spend weeks on it, and produce a statement.

That is what happens when a question is taken seriously. Nobody travels from Spain to Turkey to suppress something trivial.

And it is worth saying what the traveling actually cost. There were no imperial roads to most of those cities that made the journey short, and a bishop from Spain was months away from home in each direction. Men in their sixties made that trip. Some of them had been in prison for the faith within their own lifetimes and were now being funded by the state to sit in a room and argue, which must have been one of the strangest experiences anybody in that generation had.

You are not holding a dangerous question. Matthew 16:15 has Jesus asking whom say ye that I am, which is the same question, put by Him, to His own friends, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that in front of somebody who has been told to stop wondering.

Because that is where the question comes from originally.

He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am?Matthew 16:15, King James Version

He asked it. He raised the subject. He put the question about His own identity into the mouths of the people closest to Him and waited for an answer.

You have been asked this question before you ever thought to ask it, and it came from Him. Matthew 16:15 is written as a question He put rather than one He fielded, and the same Spirit who preserved that verse is the reason curiosity about Christ is not an intrusion.

Now the honest part about Nicaea, and it is the part popular accounts leave out.

The council did not end the argument.

The dispute went on for decades after AD 325. There were further councils, reversals, exiles, and imperial interventions in both directions. Athanasius, who was a young deacon at Nicaea, spent much of his later life exiled and recalled and exiled again. The written record of that century is a long, messy, human sequence, and it does not read like a matter closed in a fortnight.

I am not going to tidy that. Where the record is untidy, this site says so.

What that means practically is that a person can hold the creed and still be working something out. The men who wrote it went home and kept arguing. The statement was a marker, and it did not function as the end of anybody's thinking, and the century that followed is the evidence.

You have been living inside a question that a whole century did not close quickly, and nobody in that century was told they were faithless for still asking. The written history of that period is a record of continued argument, and it is His Spirit who makes that a comfort to somebody who has been made to feel their unfinished question is a defect.

There is one more thing about the men in that room.

Some of them had been maimed. The persecution under Diocletian and his successors had ended within living memory, and the accounts describe men present at Nicaea who bore the marks of it.

Which means the people who argued longest and hardest about who Jesus is were people who had already suffered for Him. They were not being academic. They wanted to get it right about somebody they had already paid for.

You are asking because it matters to you, and that is exactly why those men traveled. Matthew 16:15 shows the question mattering to Christ Himself, and the same Spirit who put it in His mouth is the reason a person who cannot stop wondering is not in trouble.