Was Jesus proclaimed to be divine at the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D.? Dan Brown seems to claim as much through one of the characters (Leigh Teabing) in his book, The Da Vinci Code. Although many people have come to accept this view, credible historians regard it as completely false.
Dr. Bart Ehrman is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a non-Christian, he cannot be accused of being biased towards Christianity. Yet he recognizes the monumental problems with this claim. Ehrman points out that not only do the Biblical documents (written long before the council) present Jesus as divine, but the earliest Christian writings (outside of the Bible) also regard Jesus as divine. Ehrman writes:
This view of Jesus as divine is not restricted to Paul and the Gospels, however. It is the common view held among Christian writers of the early centuries. As one of our earliest writers outside of the New Testament, the Christian martyr Ignatius of Antioch (d. 110 CE), put it in his own poetic way:
There is one physician, both fleshly and spiritual, born and unborn, God come in the flesh, true life in death, from both Mary and God, first subject to suffering and then beyond suffering, Jesus Christ our Lord. (Ignatius, To the Ephesians, 7.2)
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Reference
Bart D. Ehrman, “What Was the Council of Nicea?,” Belief Net, 2004, https://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/christianity/2005/06/what-was-the-council-of-nicea.aspx.
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