Betrayed by Dan Brown

There’s one account that says things got so heated that this guy Nicholas slapped Arius in the face. And this is the famous St. Nicholas. So this is Santa Claus, who some people like to think of as him punching Arius.

Oh, Santa, how far you’ve fallen.

Hey, everybody.

Hi, friends, I’m Dan Beecher.

And I’m Dan McClellan. And welcome to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we try to increase access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation. About the same. We have a great show for you today. We’re going to start off, Dan, with a segment that I like to call. All right, let’s see it.

That’s right, that’s right. And then we’ll move on to Dan. You’re going to be taking us through one of the urban legends. One of the urban legends spread far and wide.

Yes.

In the world.

Yes. Thanks so widely to Dan Brown. But oh, Dan Brown, the thorn in your side.

Another Dan, what’s up with all the Dans?

I don’t know.

Too many Dans.

Yeah, it’s an issue.

Well, yes, let’s, let’s launch in with. I’m gonna make you say it again because I’m sure this is gonna become one of the favorite segments of the Data Over Dogma podcast. And it is.

All right, let’s see it.

So today’s. All right, let’s see it is about the origin, traditions and celebration of Easter.

Yeah.

Now I have trawled the Internet to find some of the most pervasive ideas about Easter and I am going to present them to you, Dan, and we can talk about how they are 100% correct and how Easter is actually a pagan holiday that the Christians just stole because they’re a bunch of festival ruining thieves.

So did you trawl the Internet or troll the Internet? I wasn’t.

A little bit of both. I trawled, they trolled, who knows? It’s a little bit of everything.

That’s fair.

What’s fun about this, this segment is that our show is so often about dispelling myths and misinformation within Christianity. But this segment, I get to mess around with a lot of stories that have become prevalent among my people, namely the atheists about Christianity. One of the narratives that I see a lot among atheists and non Christians, and I will admit here that I have participated in spreading this, is that when early Christians were out trying to make the world Christian, they would go into a population, say the pagans, for example, and they would try to impose Christian traditions upon them and make them stop doing their own celebrations. But the pagans liked their own traditions and they would reject Christianity. So the Christians got clever and they just started incorporating all of the pagan stuff into their traditions and voila. And everyone became Christian. Now, obviously, that is 100% true and there’s no bit of falsehood in it, but we’re going to test the theory anyway.

Yeah.

And our first test case will be Easter. So are you ready, Dan? Here we go.

Hit me.

Fact number one, the name Easter actually comes from the Sumerian goddess of love, war and fertility, Ishtar, which was actually pronounced Easter. And she. She went to the world of the dead. She was killed and hung on a pole, and then she came back and the world had a rebirth and renewal. And that’s where the Christians got the idea to make up the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Fact.

Boom.

Checkmate, Christians.

So there’s. a. It’s an interesting mix in. In that story, because some of this is based on some academic frameworks from the 19th century. Some of it is accurate, and a lot of it is inaccurate. It seems to me that this is something that has developed over time as people kind of caught wind of scholarly discussions and concocted this kind of Frankenstein’s monster of ideas about where Easter came from. But to start with Ishtar. So Ishtar wasn’t pronounced Easter. This has. The deity Ishtar has absolutely no relationship whatsoever to Easter.

But how dare you?

The. The roots of that idea, I think, come from a scholar named Frazer, who published a very, very popular, influential book in the 19th century called The Golden Bough. And one of the frameworks that he came up with for that book was this idea of the dying and rising god, that there was this kind of broad narrative template that was the origin of a number of different traditions regarding deities who died and then resurrected. And it usually was associated with the cycle of the seasons. So, for instance, fertility deities, those associated with the growth of vegetation and flora and fauna, basically died during the winter, and that’s why nothing grew. And then in the spring, they would resurrect and then everything would be able to come back to life. And this is associated with the storm deity Baal, who is also known as Hadad and known by a number of other names in the Northwest Semitic pantheon and also to some degree, in the East Semitic pantheon.

So Mesopotamia, which is where we find Ishtar and the predecessor Inanna, from the Sumerian pantheon. And there are traditions Inanna’s descent into the underworld involves her kind of storming the gates of the underworld. But in order to progress deeper, she is stripped of accoutrements and clothing and, and things like that. And there’s one version of the story that has her hung on a hook and remains there for three days. And ultimately she is successful in, in coming back up from the underworld. And this narrative of descent and then ascent, descent into the underworld, ascent from the underworld is conceptually parallel to the idea about death and resurrection. Now for. Okay, sure, yeah, okay, I’ll give you that. Now, for a long time, scholars thought that this, we could take this conceptual template, say, okay, there’s this dying and rising god idea.

Well, that must be what’s going on with Jesus. And that must, must be why we have all these traditions, not just Baal, but. And there are a bunch of deities that are named along with this, Tammuz and Osiris and Horus. And some of them are more accurate than others, like Horus never resurrects, Osiris is brought back to life. But they’re, you know, one day we’ll get into that in one of these segments with Osiris and Horus. But, but the idea that Jesus’s death and resurrection is patterned after this template doesn’t really have much data to support it. The idea that this was something that people consciously or even unconsciously stole from earlier ideas in order to create these new stories doesn’t fit the data we know about Jesus. If we look, take just a totally critical look at the historical Jesus. What most scholars agree on is that there was an apocalyptic preacher who was talking about the kingdom of God and got executed by the Roman state.

And then at some point later, his followers started talking about him having resurrected or his having resurrected. And the story develops from there. Years later, we have the composition of the Gospels, we have the Pauline epistles just before that, and the Christ tradition develops from that. The idea that this narrative was created ex nihilo from whole cloth because somebody wanted to take these earlier traditions and superimpose it on this figure that they’re making up, called Jesus, is not accepted by the overwhelming majority of scholars.rs. It is in the overwhelming minority, the folks who think that this was all created from scratch.

But the mythicists, as they.

The mythicists, yeah, yeah. And the, the majority of mythicists are, are actually not specialists in Christianity and Christian origins in the New Testament. So the framework of the dying and rising God is something that most scholars don’t think means much today. It’s something that we impose on the ancient world to try to make sense of things, but that doesn’t really have any real analytical value. So if you look.

Well, even if you were a mythicist, you’d have to acknowledge that like, you know, the Romans used crucifixion as a thing. So it’s not like, you know, it’s not like Ishtar or Astarte, what was the other name?

Inanna.

Inanna. Hanging on a hook or hanging on a pole would have been the prototype for a crucifixion when that was an actual thing that was occurring in the time.

Yeah, and this is something that happens with a lot of apologetic approaches to the Bible. We have some similarities that are very, very vague. They’re not very close, they’re just kind of eh. This feels like they’re similar and people will squint at them, the edges blur and run together. And now all of a sudden we’ve got a direct genetic relationship. And that can happen with apologists just as much as it can happen with folks who are critical of the Bible and of the religions that are based on the Bible. So Ishtar and Easter, there are no data that support any relationship whatsoever. There is a discussion to be had regarding the way the resurrection of Jesus, the traditions associated with the resurrection of Jesus, and the broader story of Jesus’s pre-existence and birth and mortality and everything. There’s a discussion to be had there regarding how there is influence from the broader Greco-Roman world and other traditions that may have been in circulation in that Greco-Roman world.

But regarding trying to connect Ishtar to Easter through this idea of the dying and rising God is something that scholars don’t take seriously today.

Okay, okay, well, maybe it wasn’t Ishtar, but the name Easter definitely wasn’t originally of Christian origin.

That is correct.

Easter was named after an Anglo-Saxon pagan goddess of the spring, Eostre or Ostara, who we know a lot about.

Right. So again, a mix just so much. Yeah, it’s an embarrassment of riches. And no, we, we are pretty sure that the name Easter comes from a Germanic spring deity of some kind, named Eostre or Ostara or something like that. And we have one source for that. In fact, we have about two sentences that establish that there is a Christian named Bede, or some people pronounce it Beda, who lived I think in the ninth century, eighth century, eighth century. Okay. Excuse me. Lived in.

I was doing some research. Baby, I got you on one.

Yeah, you caught me. Flat footed there, 8th century, who wrote a text where he was basically just trying to account for a lot of dates and celebrations and festivals and things like that, a calendar system. And he notes that in this month that was. He calls Eosturmonath, he says that they celebrate Easter and this name was taken from this month, Eosturmonath. And the name of the month was taken from this deity named Eostre. And he says who was celebrated with feasts in that month. And that is literally all that we know about this deity. And we have to. And we feel pretty confident that this was not being made up, that Bede was not just creating this out of whole cloth, but that this is based on data that he had available to him.e to him. And the only other piece of data that substantiates this is some inscriptions, some votive inscriptions from around the 2nd or 3rd century CE, so almost 500 years before Bede, that use some variation on an Indo-European root from which Eostre or Ostara probably derives.

And it seems to have something to do with the idea of the dawn or the spring, and so.

Sounds ironclad. Man, this is good stuff.

So most scholars are happy to see, yes, the name Easter, which these days really only exists in English and in German. Yeah, all the other. Not all. There. There are some. A couple of outliers. But the overwhelming majority of Christians refer to this celebration by some variation on the Hebrew word Pesach, which refers to the Passover, because Easter is a Christian adaptation of the Jewish Passover. And so in English and German, we have this name, Easter, that most likely was taken from the month in which it was celebrated. And that month was most likely named after a Germanic spring goddess.

Okay, okay, fine. We got it. Named after a month that was named after a goddess. That’s kind of sorta like, like. Yeah, okay, fine.

It’s, it’s. It’s just like Thursday is named after Thor. After Thor, that’s right. And if somebody did something every Thursday and said, I’m going to name this after Thursday, and they called it Thur or whatever thorough that would be, you’d have about the same relationship.

That’s right. Okay. You know, one thing I really get a kick out of is that in multiple places that I looked on the internet, people claimed that Easter was named both after Ishtar and. And Eostre or Ostara.

Yeah.

Like pick a non-Christian origin story and stick with it. You don’t get both. It’s very funny to, to. To claim both things are the origin of this word when they are completely unrelated things.

Yeah, well, it’s. I think they’re trying to multiply the argument. Say if this. It’s throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what’s going to stick. It’s like, well, if this one doesn’t work, bam. I got the. I got the draw four on you.

So I got. I got ten of these. None of them are from Christianity anyway. Okay, so Ostara, Eostre, whatever her name is, goddess of the spring. And the date. Now here, this is more. More pagan origin stuff. The date of Easter is on the first Sunday after the first full moon of the spring equinox. So spring and spring. As you can see, it just. It all. It makes sense. It just lines up. Try this one on for size.

Okay.

Eostre, Ostara, whatever her name was, she had many symbols, two of which were bunnies and eggs.

Yep.

As a matter of fact, there is a legend of Ostara turning a bird into a hare that laid eggs. Slam dunk. That is a slam dunk.

There’s no coming back from that. This is. This is a tradition that starts in the 19th century. It is most famously shared by one of the Grimm brothers. I don’t remember which one. But the oldest attestation to this idea we can find comes from, like, the 1820s, and it’s not. It’s of folklorists, and it does not seem to be based on any ancient data whatsoever.tsoever. I don’t know if there were oral traditions in circulation in the early 19th century from which these folklorists drew this, or if they were consciously creating new traditions, or if it was a dream they had and that turned into this story. And I am confident that that has happened many times with. With stories that have been shared. So there are no data from before the 19th century that connect hares and eggs with any pagan origins.

The.

The hare and the egg is associated with Easter through the internal kind of organic machinations of medieval European Christianity. And while there are oral traditions within neopagan traditions about these having gone back to medieval and earlier pagan roots, there are no data that support those oral traditions. Now, it is true that there are not a lot of written texts for these traditions, that most everything was passed on by oral tradition, but we can actually account much better for their organic development within medieval Christianity than we can as a borrowing or an appropriation from non-Christian European traditions.

Well, let me bring this up because this is something that confuses me, and maybe you can help me out with this. Maybe you can’t. I don’t know. But it seems to me that even if the traditions of eggs and bunnies or hares or whatever arose from. From Christianity, I don’t see how they connect. And I did a little bit of research on this. Not a lot, but I did a little research on it. I don’t see how they connect to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, which is theoretically what the mass of Easter is meant to be celebrating. Right?

Yeah.

And so it seems. So it seems like even. I mean, these are fertility symbols, aren’t they?

So there are. There are parts of the world, there are times in history where they have been used as. As different kinds of symbols of rebirth and sometimes of fertility, the egg in particular. Even within early Christianity, we had these ideas of the phoenix rising from an egg, and this was a symbol of immortality or rebirth or things like that. And so we do have scattered instances where by themselves, they may be associated with fertility or something like that. But within Christianity, we have clearer origins for their connection to Easter, and they seem to arise organically. So the egg was one of the things that was avoided during the Lenten fast. So the 40 days of Lent where you. In medieval Christianity, you were not supposed to eat things like meat and eggs, and the. An Easter was actually the day that you broke that fast.

And in medieval Christianity and still today, ironically, eggs keep longer than cheese, milk, meat. And so they were traditionally used as a means of breaking the Lenten fast on Easter. And so among the more elite levels of society, you have people exchanging eggs and even fake eggs, fabricated eggs that were decorated different colors as a means of celebrating Easter. And so they would be painted red for the blood of Jesus, or they would be painted green or yellow to be with rebirth or with joy and things like that. So we can account fairly well for the association of eggs with Easter in a way that does not require we reconstruct pagan origins. Now, it’s not like Christianity did something entirely unheard of with the egg. We have, like I said, other examples of.

Of eggs being associated with. With rebirth, but not with this time period, not with this tradition. Bunnies is a little weirder. And I don’t know that we can account for every step in the process. But if you look at medieval artwork featuring the Virgin Mary, she is frequently around bunnies, hares, to be more specific. And from what we can tell, this association arose because of an observation that the European brown hare, and forgive me, I don’t know the scientific name, but the European brown hare can conceive a second litter while it is still pregnant with the first, and so it can give birth and then shortly after can give birth again. So without having gone through a full gestational period, it can give birth again. And Europeans noticed this and it became associated with parthenogenesis or virgin birth.

The idea that, ah, this, the European brown hare is giving birth. And it didn’t even have to go through the whole process of gestation. It didn’t have to go through the mating process. And so it became a symbol in some artwork and some traditions in medieval Christianity, for virginity, for virgin birth became associated with Mary. And I think somewhere in the 19th century, the close association of the traditional date of Jesus’s conception, which would be nine months before the traditional date of Jesus’s birth, which would align very closely with the traditional date of Jesus’s death. In other words, around the spring equinox, that proximity created this association between bunnies and the celebration of Easter. And so in the 19th century, as these traditions were firming up and becoming more formalized, you had had hares, you had eggs, both being associated with Easter.

And there may be traditions out there where bunnies are associated with that time period with fertility. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone successfully draw a line between those traditions and the association of hares with Easter. I think we can account for it much more confidently through this, this other, more organic route.

Because if there’s one thing we should associate bunnies with, it’s virgins. They are virginal for sure.

Yeah, that’s, that’s the. As the, as the great poet said.

You know, one thing I. That does make sense in all of this for me is that pagans certainly did have celebrations around the vernal or spring equinox.

Absolutely.

Spring is a big deal, at least in the cultures that have nasty winters. I spend every winter trying to survive until spring. And when I finally start seeing signs of it, as I did looking out my window this morning, which, oh, that was nice, I genuinely want to celebrate. So I imagine that this, you know, there’s no reason to not believe that there was. There were springtime celebrations.

Right.

And, you know, the Christians had their own. What’s funny to me about this is the myth that Christians stole a pagan celebration kind of glides over the fact that the Christians did steal a celebration for this one, which is Passover. They, like you, you alluded to it before. There already was a celebration right at this time in the tradition that Christianity grew up out of, and that is Passover. So they stole it. They just didn’t steal it from the pagans.

Yeah, stole is. Is an interesting word there. There’s still a lot of. There are debates about what we call the parting of the ways. When did Judaism and Christianity become two different things rather than one version of. Of the other? And so some people say stealing, some people say it was an adoption or a borrowing. I’m not. I’m not totally concerned with that. But yeah, this is. This is an adaptation of the Passover. This is taking the Passover celebration and reorienting it toward the celebration of the Resurrection. So in a sense, it’s related in that the. The destroying angel passed over Israel in Egypt, and.sociated with them staying alive. And the celebration of Jesus’s Resurrection is acknowledging Jesus’s conquering of death victory.

But also like the Bible does. I mean, I think it’s John that has the. The crucifixion happen on or around Passover.

Yeah, yeah, this is. This is happening on Passover. And that’s. And that has to do with the symbolism of Jesus as. As the paschal lamb, as the. The sacrifice. And you have the. The Passover, the. The Last Supper associations as well, and particularly in John. And. And so this is all happening around the same time. So the fact that Jesus is dying and then resurrecting within a few days of the celebration of the Passover is why the celebration of Easter is closely connected with the spring equinox. The celebration of the Passover was associated with the spring equinox as well. It was not directly related, but it was based on Judaism’s lunisolar calendar. So they had things that were based on the movement of the sun and other things that were based on the movement of the moon. And so the Passover was associated with lunar cycles and so closely associated as well with the spring equinox.

Therefore, the Resurrection. And any celebration associated with the Resurrection is also going to be associated with the lunar calendar and the spring equinox.

Which is not confusing at all. And didn’t. Didn’t mess me up as a kid in the slightest.

Yeah. Why it was different every year.

We will get to the dating of Easter in our next segment. Thanks for this. I think that. I think that this has been a very successful. All right, let’s see it. Let’s move on.

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Thank you. All right, welcome to the next segment, Urban Legends. Today I want to talk about a source for a handful of different urban legends and that would be the Council of Nicaea which. Ah yes, yes, that old chestnut held in 325 CE, attended by between 250 and 350 bishops and their attendants, convened by the Emperor Constantine. This would be the first of the great ecumenical councils of early Christianity, the first attempt to try to achieve unity across Christendom or as much as Christendom, as much of Christendom as they could interest in joining them. Council of Nicaea has been accused of and blamed for a number of different things within the contemporary practice of Christianity. And so I want to go. Yeah, it pops up a lot, surprising amounts.

I think a lot of people had this idea that it was a bunch of dudes just sitting around a table thinking about how to control everybody based on TikTok. That’s what it was all about. But I want to talk about what this was about, what went on at the Council of Nicaea, what some of the aftermath was and then some of the things that along the way we will pepper it with some things that are claimed about the Council of Nicaea.aea. Now the main thing that they were there to try to resolve, not the only thing they discussed, but the main thing that they were there to try to resolve was something known as the Arian controversy. And this has nothing to do with World War I or World War II idea of Aryan. But there was a presbyter, there was an official within the Christian church in Alexandria in Egypt. So all the way up at the, the top of the, the Nile delta city called Alexandria, which is one of the intellectual centers of the Mediterranean at this time, there was this presbyter named Arius.

And for a while Christianity had been trying to figure out how to think and talk about Jesus’s relationship to God. Jesus is presented in the New Testament as having some kind of unique relationship with God that in some sense they seem to be distinct, in some sense they seem to overlap. And so since the second century, since apologists like Justin Martyr and others, people had been trying to figure out how exactly do we think and talk about this relationship. And so as the apologists applied a lot of Greco-Roman philosophical frameworks to this, we started talking about essence and we started talking about the, I think the, the word Trinity develops by the end of the 2nd century CE, but it’s not quite the idea as people understand it today. But this guy Arius was saying two things that upset a lot of the other Christians around the Mediterranean.

He was saying that Jesus was not equal to the Father, but subordinate to the Father. And this was based on some texts from the New Testament, for instance, where somebody calls Jesus a good teacher or master and he says don’t call me good, only one is good, the Father. And so there are a number of ways that Jesus’s subordination to God is reflected in the New Testament.

So Arius was saying, and even so self prescribed.

Yeah, yeah, this was Jesus describing himself as not on the same level. There’s some unity there, there’s a oneness in one sense. But you frequently have these hints that Jesus is not on the same level, is functioning subordinate to God. And Arius also said that Jesus was a created being. Now by this time this idea that Jesus had been begotten had developed based on the description of Jesus as God’s only begotten is not a great translation, only son. And so this idea of begottenness is actually not what we think of today when we think of the Bible’s list of begat so and so and so and so, beget so and so. But this idea is that Jesus was eternally begotten, meaning there was never a time when Jesus was not being begotten, that Jesus is eternal in that he was begotten from eternity. And Arius was saying that doesn’t make any sense.

Jesus was begotten, sure, but in the sense that Jesus wasn’t there. And then Jesus was created. And so there was a time when the Son was not. And that would mean there was a time when God was not the Father. And this upset a lot of Christians around Christianity. And so this was, had been debated among some central leaders. And finally Constantine was like, all right, we’re just going to do this thing, everybody come to Nicaea, we’re going to sit down, we’re going to hammer this out. And so you have Arius, who has a handful of supporters, maybe two dozen supporters who join him there. They’re vastly outnumbered. But you have Eusebius of Nicomedia, who would later be the one to baptize Constantine on his deathbed, who was a staunch supporter of Arius. You have Eusebius of Caesarea, who was one of Constantine’s main advisors and who is responsible for writing a text called the Ecclesiastical History, which is one of our most important sources for the development of the early Christian church, who seems to like some of the things that Arius is saying, but not others.

But he’s going to side with Constantine no matter what happens.metown, folks like Athanasius, one of the most important thinkers of 4th century Christianity and others. And we have a variety of accounts of what went down, but they were mainly there to take on this Arian controversy. They read out from Arius’s writings. We had a lot of debates. There’s one account that says things got so heated that this guy Nicholas slapped Arius in the face. And this is the famous St. Nicholas. So this is Santa Claus. Yeah. If you. If you wed the. The idea together, who, some people think like to think of it as him punching Arius. So.

Oh, Santa, how far you’ve fallen.

Well, you know, maybe David Harbour’s new movie about. What is it? Violent Night, maybe. Maybe there’s something to that.

There you go. See?

But things got heated according to this one account. But ultimately it came down to a vote and there needed to be something written down how we are going to understand this. The deliverable of this council was this text is what we all agree on. And it took a while to arrive at this text and it was basically this creed. And I’ll read the original version of the Nicene Creed in a moment. But the sticking point was what word are we going to use to refer to Jesus’s relationship to God? And what they came up with was this idea of consubstantiality. In other words, the substance of Jesus is the exact same substance as the substance of God. They are of one substance. And so you cannot divide that substance. They are the same substance. So, and this. This doesn’t mean the same kind of substance. So not like the material that I’m made of is of the same category as the material you’re made of.

The idea is they’re both carbon based.

Yeah, the idea is this material is the material that Jesus is also made of. So homoousios is the word in Greek which means same substance. And so this creed was written out and the bishops were then threatened with exile if they didn’t come up and sign this. And there’s even a story about one of the bishops goes up and goes and slips a little iota or iota, if, if you like in there to create the word homoiousios, which would be like substance, similar substance, not same substance. And it didn’t go well for him.

But did they have to start over? Did they have to write up a whole new thing that everybody had decided?

I’m sure they did. Which was. Which would have been a hassle. But by the end of this, you basically have all but two bishops signing on to this Nicene Creed. So we’ve got Arius and these two other bishops, including Eusebius of Nicomedia, who are exiled to the eastern, the land to the east of Illyria I think is what it’s called to the east of the Adriatic Sea. And this doesn’t really settle the debate, but here is the, the creed that they came up with. We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things, visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten from the Father only begotten, that is from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made of one substance, homoousios with the Father through whom all things came into being, things in heaven and things on earth. And we go for a while. But as for those who say there was a time when he was not, and before being born he was not, and that he came into existence out of nothing, or who assert that the Son of God is of a different hypostasis or substance or created or is subject to alteration or change.s subject to alteration or change." These the Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes or basically curses.

This is what they were called to sign.

Yeah.

And, and this would be renegotiated in later councils in Chalcedon and elsewhere. And this creed was kind of refined because questions later came up. Well, wait a minute. If Jesus was of the same substance as God, how could he die? He seemed to be a human walking around. And we later have this idea of the hypostatic union where… Well, his godly side was of the same substance of God, his humanly side was of the same substance as other humans.

But 100%, he’s got many substances. That dude has a lot of substances in him.

And this, and this hypostatic union is, is one of the mysteries. Basically Jesus is 100% God, but also 100% man. So the math doesn’t line up, but the philosophy can, can deal with that. So.

Right.

So we have basically the, the authorities trying to nail down. Look, we gotta agree on this, we gotta figure out how to do this. And they come up with this idea of homoousios. And there are even scholars who think that this was Constantine’s idea based on his background and what some scholars label pagan monotheism. But it is an innovation on the debates that have been going on to that time period that basically was signed off on, and that makes it authoritative. And so you’ve got to work with that in the future. So the understanding of the Trinity today is rooted in what they signed off on at Nicaea. But this discussion isn’t entirely about the Trinity. This is about—oh, thank God, we’re…

Going to get to the codifying of the gospel? Of what? Of the books of the Bible.

Right. So one of the, one of the theories that we have largely Dan Brown to thank, but he didn’t come up with this idea, is that one of the things they discussed at Nicaea was canonizing the Bible. And there’s, there’s also a similar theory about this council or this meeting in Yamnia where the Jewish canon was canonized by early rabbis—also not a thing that actually happened. But this theory originates in a text called the Synodicon Vetus, which is basically an account of all the early synods or councils of Christianity. And it’s the true account of the synods, and it’s from the 800s CE. So it gives a bunch of accounts, but also kind of elaborates on, expands on these stories. And there are injections of kind of myths and legends. And so one of these is associated with Nicaea, where they said they stacked up all the scriptural books on a table, and then miraculously, all of the books that were part of the apocrypha fell to the ground.

And that was how they knew that this, our canon, has been given divine approbation. And this is something we see a lot in the Bible, in the Apocrypha, in other places where something that people want to be authoritative, you come up with a story for a miracle that shows God approves, therefore it’s now authoritative.

And in this case, that miracle is gravity.

Gravity, exactly. And this gets picked up by— People ignore it for a long time. 18th century ish, we get some writers, 19th century Voltaire, for instance, is one who, who repeats this tradition. And then I assume through Voltaire, Dan Brown works this into the Da Vinci Code. And I think that is the great popularizer of this idea that the biblical canon was decided at Nicaea. And there’s absolutely no truth whatsoever to that. There are no data, I think you’ve.ta. I think you’ve…

Just shocked the world. You’ve just shocked the world. Well, Dan Brown didn’t bring us perfect, true things. Next thing you’re going to be telling me that, like, that Jesus’s mom isn’t buried in the Louvre. What are you talking about?

Well, he’s, he’s, he took the money and ran. So I don’t think, I don’t think he’s much concerned for this debunking. But yeah, this is something that feeds into a lot of other theories about where the Bible came from. Because people had this idea that we had this Bible and it was full of all these awesome extra books. And then conniving men came around and sat around big oak tables and said, “I don’t like that book. It doesn’t allow me to control people. So I’m taking it out.” And that’s really not how the biblical canon developed. But there were other things that were discussed at Nicaea. The other two main issues were: one, how to determine the date of Easter. Because this is something that confuses children the world over when they’re like, “Why is Easter on this day this year?” And yeah, I just…

I just want to know the date of Easter. I just want to be able to plan.

Well, prior to Nicaea, it had been tethered to the date of the Passover, which was based on lunar cycles and the spring equinox. And so one of the things that they haggled over at Nicaea was: “We want to come up with a way to determine the date of Easter so that we don’t have to just arbitrarily…” Let me back up a little bit. Around this time period, when they determined the date, they had to send out letters to all of Christendom so that you would go to church and they would be like, “Okay, we got a letter from Rome and Easter is going to be on this date this year.” Because they didn’t really know what the mechanism was for determining that date. And so they wanted to create something that was consistent so anybody anywhere in the world could say, “Oh, well, that’s when this is. So that’s when Easter will be.” And what they came up with is the date of Easter will be determined by, I think it is, the Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox.

So it can shift significantly in that time period. But this decoupled it from the date of the celebration of the Passover. So they weren’t associated so closely with Judaism. They could be kind of on their own. And it also allowed people to figure out the date on their own without having to wait for the festal letter to come from Rome or from wherever. So that was item two on the docket at Nicaea. And then after that we have a bunch of ecclesiastical rules and regulations. Now these were referred to as canons in the early church because a canon is just a rule or a regulation. And so we associate canon today with a biblical canon. But in early Christianity they used canon to refer to canons of faith, ecclesiastical canons, as well as biblical canons. So I wonder if that’s one of the confusions, one of the things that makes people think that maybe they talked about that.

That’s interesting. That makes sense to me. Yeah, if we’re talking about canons and then, yeah, it kind of makes sense, but what it then leads to is somebody just making some stuff up out of whole cloth.

Yeah, yeah.

About the canonization of the Bible itself and…

Well, it’s not as sexy if you can’t deploy it for, you know, a TikTok video. And these regulations that were developed, I think they were a list of about two dozen things and it was mainly associated with rejoining the Church after excommunication and rules about excommunication and rules associated with some of the different hierarchies within the Church.hierarchies within the Church. They’re not incredibly interesting, they’re not incredibly important, but those three main things were what Nicaea did. First and foremost. This was about resolving the Arian controversy and it resulted in the Nicene Creed, in the exiling of Arius and a couple of the bishops who supported him. It resulted in basically the foundation of the modern concept of the Trinity. And then we decided on the date of Easter and then we basically wrote down a handful of rules about excommunication, about rebaptism in the church and about rules for priests and the clergy.

So it must have been nice to be able to take, you know, a handful of weeks off to just go ride in a, in a carriage down to Nicaea and hang out and argue with bishops and watch a dude get punched. I can imagine it was an enjoyable experience for those involved. But yeah, it definitely was not a place where the biblical canon was developed. It was not a place where Constantine invented Christianity. This is another urban legend that I hear about a lot. This idea that in 325 Constantine kind of decided, all right, this is what Christianity is going to be. And the goal was to make it so it was easier to control people. This was an attempt on the part of Constantine to try to achieve some unity. For the most part, he let them do what they wanted to do. You know, he was there to kind of put his finger on the scale when he wanted to, but for the most part it was like, I don’t care what you figure it out, just figure it out so that we can stop infighting.

And of course, it didn’t stop the infighting. You still had, you had a later Arian emperor come rise to the throne. So some people were brought back from exile, then re- exiled. So it didn’t really.

Fortunately, all of the infighting in Christianity is over and finished by now. Yeah, fortunately we’ve got, we’ve finally gotten rid of it. Go team.

Yeah. Who would have known? All it took was, was one emperor to, to just lower the boom on, on Christianity and get everybody to stop fighting. But yeah, that is. Any other urban legends that you have heard associated with Nicaea, because those are the main ones for me. And, and hopefully that clarifies things for, for folks.

Yeah, I think that’s great. I think that’s great. You’re. You’ve blown some minds here. I know that when I first, when you first, when I first saw you talk about this on TikTok, my mind was blown because I was certain that some of those, some of those myths were true. But there we go. I’m glad, I’m glad that we’ve cleared that up. We. We now know now Easter’s so easy to reckon. It’s just the easiest thing in the world. And, and, and thank goodness for that creed.

Yeah.

Because it’s not confusing in the slightest.

Yeah. That didn’t cause any problems. That hasn’t, that hasn’t caused any rifts within Christianity. And, and at the same time, there were other Christian groups who are not a part of this. And you had some schisms later on. You have the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church down in the kingdom of Aksum and what is today Ethiopia. That wasn’t a part of this. Yeah, that’s. A lot of people talk about this as if it was truly universal, but it was not entirely representative. And things have changed a lot since then. But still a fascinating thing to study. learn new ways of thinking about this, learn new facts about this. In fact, I’m reading a book right now called Constantine and the Divine Mind, which is about whether or not Constantine should be considered a monotheist.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Well, you know, maybe we’ll have to tackle that in another episode at a future date. Yeah, we’ll just set some urban legends to rest.

Yeah.

Thanks so much, Dan.

Until next time.

And that’s it for this week’s show. If you have any questions or comments that you’d like to address our way, feel free to write into us. contact@dataoverdogmapod.com is the address to write to. If you’d like to contribute to us, be part of making this show go, please feel free to do so. You can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and do give a per episode donation there. Then you’ll be one of our favorite people in the whole wide world. And as for favorite people, thank you favorite person Dan for enlightening us once again this week.

Well, thank you favorite person Dan. I appreciate your time. I appreciate everybody who’s listening and yeah, look forward to a lot more of this.

Yeah, we’ll see you again next week.

Bye bye bye everybody.