Christmas originally known as “Christ Mass” in Roman Catholic Realms has become a worldwide secular entertaining festive season.
25th December 336 AD was when the church in Rome began formally celebrating Christmas, during the reign of emperor Constantine The Great (272 – 337 AD).
Because Constantine made Christianity the effective religion of the empire, some believed that choosing the date (25th December 336 AD) had the political motive of weakening and overshadowing the established pagan celebrations after he himself converted from paganism.
Constantine after gaining full political control of the Eastern and Western Blocks of the Roman Empire decided to make Christianity an Imperial religion at a time of several controversies on Bible interpretation and Authorship of some books.
Did Constantine and The Counsil of Nicaea Add or Drop Some Books From The Bible?
In AD 325, the Council of Nicaea brought together by Constantine made drastic decisions on the Holy Bible due to existing differing views on the New Testament.
But Wait!!
Constantine and the Council of Nicea had nothing to do with the forming of the canon.
It was not even discussed at Nicea (they rather discussed how to solve the disputes in biblical interpretations).
The council that formed an undisputed decision on the canon took place at Carthage in 397, sixty years after Constantine’s death!
However, long before Constantine, 21 books of the New Testament were acknowledged by all Christians (the 4 Gospels, Acts, 13 Paul, 1 Peter, 1 John, Revelation).
At that time, there were 10 disputed books (Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2-3 John, Jude, Ps-Barnabas, Hermas, Didache, Gospel of Hebrews) and several that most all considered heretical—Gospels of Peter, Thomas, Matthaias, Acts of Andrew, John,
The first recorded attempt at a canon for the New Testament was by the heretic Markion of Sinope (lived c. 85 – c. 160 AD).
Markion taught that there is not one God, but two (that’s purely gnosticism).
According to Markion, the God of the Jews, whose deeds are described in the Hebrew Bible, and the God whose deeds were preached by Jesus are actually two totally different deities.
Markion taught that the God of the Jews was a weaker, inferior deity who was overly concerned with rules and justice; whereas the God preached about by Jesus was a mightier, superior deity who understood the importance of love, compassion, and mercy.
Markion also added that, of all the apostles, Paul was the only one who truly understood Jesus’s teachings.
He claimed that all the other apostles had been misled into thinking that Jesus was preaching about the Jewish God, when he was really preaching about another God entirely.
Thus, according to Markion, only the writings of Paul were valid scriptures.
But these views were considered alien and was seriously disputed at that time.
The earliest surviving fragment of a New Testament text is the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, a small papyrus fragment containing a portion of the eighteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, which dates between c. 125 and c. 175 AD.
First of all, the New Testament canon was not even one of the issues that was discussed at the First Council of Nicaea.
In fact, the First Council of Nicaea was actually primarily concerned with the theological controversy over the nature of the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
While the New Testament mentions “the Father,” “the Son,” and “the Holy Spirit,” it never clearly explains how they are related; in the New Testament itself, the whole relationship between these three entities is left confusing and ambiguous.
At times, they seem to be the same, but at other times they seem to be distinct.
Consequently, early Christians spent a lot of time arguing about exactly how these three entities were related.
The actual finalization of the Biblical canon came much later than the First Council of Nicaea.
Athanasios of Alexandria, the same bishop who had been the foremost defender of the Holy Trinity at the First Council of Nicaea, issued a letter for Easter in 367 AD that listed all twenty-seven books of the New Testament, referring to them as being “canonized.”
This was forty-two years after the First Council of Nicaea and thirty years after the death of Constantine I, which occurred on 22 May 337 AD.
For the Roman Catholic Church, the canon was finalized by the Council of Rome in 382 AD. For Eastern Orthodox Christians, it was finalized by the Second Council of Trullan in 692 AD.
For the Anglican Church, the New Testament canon was proclaimed dogma in 1563 with the Thirty-Nine Articles. For Calvinists, the New Testament canon was finalized in 1647 by the Westminster Confession of Faith.
Constantine Believed in The Lord Jesus Christ
Prior to his rule many of the Roman Emperors were openly hostile to the Gospel, killing and persecuting many of the followers of the gospel (including top apostles like James, John and Peter).
The Emperor Nero (who started ruling at age 17) started this trend in 64 AD, when he took first century followers of the gospel, bound and dipped them in oil, and burned them alive as human torches for lighting in his palace gardens!
Successive Emperors Domitian, Marcus Aurelius (of Gladiator movie fame), Diocletian and others continued this kind of treatment.
But Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313 AD, granting religious tolerance to all views.
Constantine became sole emperor of Rome by being victorious in a series of military campaigns against other rivals.
During these campaigns he converted to Christianity (from paganism).
There is much debate today whether his ‘conversion’ was sincere, or whether he did so for political gain.
Arius and Athanasius
During the time of Constantine, the church was rocked by a controversy started by Arius, a deacon of the influential church of Alexandria in Egypt.
This gave birth to the famous Arian Controversy.
It was a series of Christian disputes about the nature of Christ that began with a dispute between Arius and Athanasius of Alexandria, two legendary Christian theologians from Alexandria, Egypt.
Arius denied that Christ was truly and fully God, arguing from the Bible that only the Father was truly God, and the Son was the firstborn of creation.
Athanasius was his arch-enemy – and a deacon in the same church.
His main disagreement with Arius concerned salvation.
He argued that:
“We are saved because in Christ God himself became a human being and died a human death.
God became a human to make humans divine; the immortal became mortal to raise mortals to immortality. No mere creature could achieve this but only the very Word of God.”
The Incarnation of the Word is Athanasius’ most famous writing, and his most celebrated statement of his case against the Arians.
His theology was recognized by the Council of Nicea as being the true Gospel of Christ, and as such it has been passed down the centuries.
Gospel of Judas?
The Gospel of Judas was a great discovery, but it was not a big surprise.
The famous second-century church leader Irenaeus actually mentions this so-called gospel in his book, Against All Heresies.
The Gospel of Judas was not written in Greek (as every New Testament book), but in an Egyptian language known as Coptic.
It was also composed after the New Testament was written.
More importantly, it was part of a collection of documents belonging to another religion called Gnosticism.
The gnostics looked down on physical life and taught a belief in two gods—The Creator God that we know about through Genesis 1, and also a secret, hidden, unknown god that exists in The kingdom of Light.
It is this unknown god that gnosticism claims to reveal.
At the heart of the Gospel of Judas is a revelation of this unknown god.
Irenaeus explicitly said that the gnostics wrote many different gospels and books, but he, along with all other church leaders of the second through fourth centuries, regarded them as grossly inaccurate and harmful in what they taught.
He warned:
“They adduce an unspeakable number of apocryphal and spurious writings, which they themselves have forged, to bewilder the minds of foolish men, and of such as are ignorant of the Scriptures of truth.”
It is from this religion (a religion that is quite different from Christianity) that so many spiritual books were written that are now sometimes referred to as “The lost books of the Bible.”
Although it may be rather obvious that the Gospel of Judas should not be part of the Bible, what about other books?
At various points in the history of the church, various individuals emerged and challenged what books should be in the Bible (either by wanting to eliminate some or to add others).
The important point here is that the churches already knew what the books of the Bible were; these were the ones they were already using in their teaching and worship.
These books had just not been officially recognized.
One of the earliest challenges to the commonly recognized collection of books that the churches were using as Scripture came from a man named Marcion.
He was a wealthy and prominent church leader who lived in the early second century AD in a coastal city of northern Asia Minor (today this is in the country of Turkey).
He was passionate about the writings of the apostle Paul but had a very skewed idea of what they taught.
Ultimately, he advocated that only ten letters of the apostle Paul should be accepted as Scripture as well as the Gospel of Luke; all others should be rejected (including the Old Testament).
Because of his wealth and influence, the churches of the Mediterranean world had to respond.
This challenge became a huge motivation for the churches to declare formally and publicly what books they had already been using as Scripture.
So, as early as the second century AD, the church began developing the concept of the canon of Scripture to distinguish those books that were regarded as inspired by God and thus carried divine authority.
The term “Canon” is a Greek word which means “rule” or a “standard” and came to be applied to the standard books that made up the Bible.
The eminent Princeton scholar Bruce Metzger noted that Marcion’s challenge was “accelerating the process of fixing the Church’s canon, a process that had already begun in the first half of the second century.”
By the time of Jesus, the thirty-nine books that constituted the Hebrew Bible (what we call the Old Testament) were widely recognized within Judaism as the Bible.
Because of that, Jesus could cite from various books of the Old Testament by simply referring to them as a coherent and unified whole called “the Scriptures” (see, for example, Matt. 21:42; 22:29; 26:54, 56).
As for the twenty-seven books that we know as the New Testament, these were formally recognized as the canon of Scripture in the second through the fourth centuries.
The apostle Peter himself referred to the letters of Paul as “Scripture” (2 Pet. 3:15–16).
In one of the earliest church documents written after the final New Testament book was completed, the Gospel of Mark is cited as “Scripture” (2 Clement 2:4).
The earliest church leaders regularly quote passages from the various New Testament documents giving them authority as divine revelation in a way that distinguishes them from any other writings.
It is important to realize that from the moment the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were written, they were copied and circulated throughout the extent of the world where churches had been planted—Israel, Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece, Italy, and elsewhere.
They began to be used regularly by the churches for teaching, worship, and devotion.
The same can be said about the collection of the letters of Paul, Peter, James, Jude, and John as well as the letter to the Hebrews and the book of Revelation.
They were rapidly copied, distributed to the churches, and in constant use as documents that were inspired by God and essential for the growth and nurture of believers.
Wherever churches had been planted, believers were reading and using these documents as the revealed Word of God.
What this means is that there was no one individual who privately made a decision regarding what should be in the Bible.
Or, similarly, there was no group of individuals who made such a decision and then imposed their decree upon all of the churches.
In fact, the process happened in precisely the opposite manner.
The gatherings of church leaders who produced official lists of New Testament books were formally recognizing what the churches all over the world had already recognized and were using as the inspired and authoritative Scriptures.
As Metzger notes, “The Church did not create the canon, but came to recognize, accept, and confirm the self-authenticating quality of certain documents.”
What we currently possess in our Bibles is the completed canon of Scripture.
It is exactly as God intended it and is the living, active, and powerful Word of God!!
Yes! The Biblical Jesus Christ of Nazareth was NOT BORN on 25th December but that day was chosen to make it a worldwide phenomenal celebration of Christ Jesus.
