The Busy Bishops of Bithynia
As religious conspiracy theories go, none bests the Bithynian city of Nicea. There, in 325 AD, a church council is credited with all manner of secretive trickery and deception. What actually happened? Does the Council of Nicea really warrant its reputation for double dealing?
For whatever strange reason, conspiracy theorists seem to love the Council of Nicea. The bishops in attendance in 325 AD had no idea just how busy they were. In fact, with the passing centuries, they’ve become busier and busier. They’ve been credited with just about everything but causing crop circles. Ditto for the one who called them all together, Emperor Constantine. He’s treated as the force behind the Nicean chicanery. Makes you wonder how he ever found time to run an empire.
Depending on whose theology (or, more accurately, theoryology) you listen to, the bogeyman bishops were bent on hiding the truth from everybody. Christian reincarnation? The bishops canned it. After all, if you knew you were coming back anyway, why would you let them control you? And all those gnostic gospels? Same bunch at work there. Just had to keep all that secret stuff secret. So they torched them all , keeping the secrets, of course, for themselves.
And who do you suppose chose the books we find in the Bible today? You got it – the busy beaver bishops. Somewhere in a Nicean version of a smoke-filled back room, they sat around saying, “We like this one. We’ll keep it. Don’t like that one, though. We’ll throw it out. Besides, nobody will catch on until somebody invents talk radio, and by then we’ll have been reincarnated so many times, they’ll never find us!”
Sadly, the same truth that is stranger than fiction, is also more boring. If you do some research, you find the whole Nicean thing a bit more straightforward than the massive cover-up some claim it was. Credit it all to a man named Arius.
Arius was a presbyter in Alexandria, and an accomplished preacher. He developed a theology that placed Jesus in a position below the Father. It denied the deity of Jesus, going head-to-head with the orthodox Trinitarian doctrine of his bishop, Alexander. Even though Alexander was the man in charge, Arius wouldn’t back down. In fact, he even had a sort of jingle – “There was a time when the son was not” – that his followers sang, to the annoyance of Alexander and his orthodox majority. It seems Arius was not only a bad theologian, he was also an originator of the really irritating commercial.
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