Many people believe or are coming to believe certain parts of Dan Brown’s book, The Da Vinci Code. This book contains many lies about divinity of Christ. The recently translated Judas Gospel is also urging people in the same direction.
One of the primary lies that The Da Vinci Code perpetrates that people believe is that Jesus was made God by the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. They say that before 325, practically no Christian believed that Jesus was divine. Some of them also believe that it was a very narrow vote that made Jesus God.
People who say this reveal a blatant ignorance of history as well as Christianity and the Bible. The Gospels, all of which being written before 70 AD, testify that Jesus is divine. The whole New Testament, for that matter, which was written in the 1st century, assumes and/or says plainly that Jesus is divine. After the writing of the Bible, and before the Council of Nicea, you have theologian after theologian, preacher after preacher who is documented as saying that Jesus was divine.
The whole point of Christianity, as opposed to Judaism, is that Jesus is divine, not just a good man. People in the early Church were converted from Judaism to Christianity. If the divinity of Christ were not widely accepted, they would have stayed in the synagogue. The unbelieving Jews persecuted the Church because they viewed the doctrine of the divinity of Christ as blasphemy. They murdered Christ because He declared himself to be God. (By the way, if Christ said it, wouldn’t that kind of dictate it for Christianity?) It is a central doctrine of Christianity.
The Council of Nicea was held in 325 to oppose an error introduced by Arius, a heretic from North Africa. He said (as the Jehovah’s Witnesses say today) that Jesus was not eternal or divine, but subordinate to God. This crafty, handsome, and superficially intelligent man started to hold sway with some pastors. The Council of Nicea was called to unify the Church on that issue. Athanasius, a bishop from Alexandria, led the way in opposing Arius’ theology. The vote was 250+ to 2. That’s closer than the chances a Republican has for getting elected in Boston.
If you characterize the whole of early Christianity by one heretic in the 4th century, you’re getting an extremely skewed view. You can’t describe the whole by an exception.
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