Duvduv

The usual explanation is that Constantine legalized the previously illegal "Christian" movement, even if the story of his own conversion is totally a legend. However, what "Christianity" was legalized if a fight immediately ensured with the successor movement to someone named Paul of Samosata in 325?

If the councils were being held on and off throughout the 4th century, it means that Constantine and his sons didn't even try to "eliminate" the "non-Orthodox" and that they were all legal - Trinitarian, Arian, Monarchianist, Adoptionist, etc.

It sort of sounds as if the entire struggle over the meaning of the Trinity was a BRAND NEW subject, and the orthodox trinitarians were NOT the victors that one thinks they are because Constantine's own sons sympathized with the Arians, who were thus NOT the "heretics" at all, but painted that way, not by a Eusebius who was writing in the same period, but by the later "winners" AFTER the Arians disappeared.

Not only that, but the so-called Nicene conference was supposed to be attended by 1,800 bishops invited by Constantine, of whom less than 200 showed up!! HOW MANY people thus were represented by 200 bishops in an empire which SUPPOSEDLY had several MILLION Christians?? Where were all the other bishops, what did they believe, and who says they accepted what the Nicene Creed stipulated?!

And who can really know what they believed or what those who attended believed as described by Anathasius. In addition to the fact that the first Nicene Creed didn't mention the virgin birth, Pilate, Mary or the crucifixion, and it took another 60 years for those elements to be included, none of the 4th creeds, some of which pro-Arian, even identified Jesus as the promised messiah of the Hebrew scriptures.

IF one single bishop could represent only a few thousand people, then all those in attendance may have only represented 10% of all Christians in the Empire! Many of the subsequent "councils" had far fewer than this number of participants in tmes when the Christian population was ostensibly increasing....

And how would this whole issue even emerge in the 4th century if the Church had existed for over 200 years with its APOSTOLIC traditons? Surely it would not take a century to work out christological issues that had to have been addressed for over 200 years previously.
UNLESS the whole notion of the TRINITY never existed much before the 4th century at all, in which case the precise doctrinal nature of the Christ would not have been an issue.

It sure wasn't an issue in the gospels, and not even in the epistles.

The so-called Toledo Council of 400 only had 19 bishops in attendance, and the fact that it included all those anathemas shows that there must have been plenty of "Christians" who did not accept the teachings of the canonical NT texts at all or even the Judaic/Hebrew orientation of the imperial Church. Look at this list of anathemas as late as 400. Something is wrong about the traditional views of the 4th century.

1. Therefore if anyone should say or believe that this world was not made by the omnipotent God and his instruments, let him be anathema.

2. If anyone should say or believe that God the Father is himself the Son or the Paraclete, let him be anathema.

3. If anyone should say or believe that God the Son is himself the Father or Paraclete, let him be anathema.

4. If anyone should say or believe that the Paraclete, the Spirit, is either the Father or the Son, let him be anathema.

5. If anyone should say or believe that the human Jesus Christ was not assumed by the Son of God, let him be anathema.

6. If anyone should say or believe that the Son of God as God suffered, let him be anathema.

7. If anyone should say or believe that the human Jesus Christ, as a human, was incapable of suffering, let him be anathema.

8. If anyone should say or believe that there is one God of the Old Testament and another of the Gospel, let him be anathema.

9. If anyone should say or believe that the world was made by another God that by the one of whom it is written, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” let him be anathema.

10. If anyone should say or believe that the human body will not rise after death, let him be anathema.

11. If anyone should say or believe that the human soul is a part or substance of God, let him be anathema.

12. If anyone should say or believe that there is another Scripture than that which the Catholic Church accepts or believes to be held as authoritative or has venerated, let him be anathema.

Duvduv

Many of the councils seemed rather partial to the Gospel of John, with only slight acknowledgement of the other gospels and the epistles, either at pro- or anti-Arian councils (if that is how they can be described). The Great Commission got mentioned only at one Antioch council attended by only 90 bishops and the Second Sirmium council in 357. Another Antioch council Creed mentioned 1 Corinthians 11 in 343. The so-called First Sirmium Council mentioned that Christ was known to Abraham and Jacob.

The First Sirmium council also had a long list of anathemas.

James The Least

I wonder if this had anything to do with Mani, who had claimed to be the Paraclete?

aa5874

Where did Paul get the authority to hand out Anathema.

1 Corinthians 16:22 KJVGalatians 1:9 KJV Paul talked like the 4th century and acted like the 4th century.

Duvduv

Sounds definitely like the council anathemas......hmmm.... i wonder why...... ;-)
Imagine how the so-called "orthodox" were still struggling against troublesome upstarts 300 years after Paul.....at least that's what the propagandists wanted everyone to believe........after all, didn't everyone have the gospels and epistles and apostolic tradition to rely on for 300 years?! Or at least 200 years?!

Duvduv

Next to nothing is really known about Paul of Samosata or Arius. Arius' letter to Eusebius doesn't mention any canonical texts at all. But all the problems surrounded the seemingly new idea of the Trinity, something that was never resolved in the religious life of an ever increasing membership over 200 or more years.With a first Creed under Constantine that mentions none of it or even relies on Paul or the gospels, and which is still not resolved decades later with a still relatively small number of bishops?!

mountainman

A profane political history of the 4th century was not preserved except in the books of Ammianus Marcellinus commencing c.350 CE. If his earlier books covering the rule of Constantine had been preserved they would tell a different story than the pseudo-historical polemics of the victorious heresiologists of the 5th century: Socrates (covering 303 to 439), Sozomenus (303 to 421) and Theodoretus (303 to 428 CE).

The research of Charles Freeman has shone the light on the later 4th century. His entire thesis of his book AD 381: Heretics, Pagans and the Christian State (or via: amazon.co.uk) may be summarised as follows:


In 381 CE the Nicaean trinity was imposed from above by a Roman Emperor.


What was going on between 325 and 381 CE?


What was imposed from above in 325 CE by a Roman Emperor?


Was it the Nicaean Church of Jesus?


Was it was made and deployed (via the supremely victorious BARBARIAN army) out of nothing existing?





The Post Nicaean Trinity

The Christian trinity is a rip-off of the philosophical and metaphysical trinity of the 4th century Platonist philosophers, and is to be found in the writings of Porphyry, the Enneads of Plotinus.

The post Nicaean christians somehow adopted the Platonic expressions for the nondual theology of Plato, and made them monotheistic and Christian.

"The teachings of Plato", says Justin, "are not alien to those of Christ;
and the same is true of the Stoics." "Heraclitus and Socrates lived in'
accordance to the divine Logos" and should be recognised as Christians.
Clement says that Plato wrote "by the inspiration of God".

Augustine, much later, finds that "only a few words and phrases" need
to be changed to bring Platonism into complete accord with Christianity.

For more of this see The Legacy of Greece

"We must not see the fact of usurpation"

mountainman

The pagans did not read the New Testament Bible until Nicaea.
It became obligatory to read the Bibe at Nicaea.

Celsus may be an exception, although it is more likely that he represents a retrojected literary profile, introduced to take the heat off the Big Nicaean Bang.


Creation out of nothing of the quantum vacuum, like the particle and its antiparticle. Were the heresiological Christians and the heretical Pagans (formerly gentiles) created together out of nothing by the supreme power of the emperor? Did the Emperor align himself to either group? Where did the pagans disappear to? Who was Eusebius? Who was Anathasius? Who was the 4th century Christ and who was the 4th century Antichrist?

Duvduv

The usual narrative is strange. Here's a guy who at a meeting of barely 200 bishops of a growing Christianity that has no confirmed view about the nature of the christ after 250 years of tradition who is barely 30 years old, is cited as defining the canon for "Christianity" but who is admitted to be exiled several times by the regime supposedly adopting orthodox Christianity at a conference whose creed doesn't even hint at essential pillars of the same Christianity that this man is renowned for. Under the banner of the mysterious Chi Rho.
A canon of books that had been written 200 or more years earlier with years of tradition?
It doesn't add up.

Duvduv

With such a small representation of so-called bishops deciding on a creed for the vast majority of supposed believers in a religion of several million people with no information at all from Eusebius or Athanasius about what the vast majority actually believed? Who empowered the 180 bishops to decide anything?