The Council of Nicaea of 325

The Council of Nicaea of 325 AD (CE) has always interested me, as has the ancient world after the early disciples and apostles were gone.  

In my local library I recently discovered a book called Ghost Empire by Richard Fidler. (Some may have heard his insightful and entertaining interviews on ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] Radio National.) The book recounts a 2014 trip to Istanbul (via a few other notable destinations) by Fidler and his teenage son Joe and intertwines a lot of complicated history into a very readable story. 

Of special interest is how the Roman Emperor Constantine "adopts Christianity and shifts the capital [of the Roman Empire] east to Byzantium, which is remade as Constantinople" (p. 22). 

Now, readers of Mary Baker Eddy's writings will remember how Eddy writes: "A courtier told Constantine that a mob had broken the head of his statue with stones. The emperor lifted his hands to his head, saying: 'It is very surprising, but I don't feel hurt in the least'" (Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896, p. 224: 7). Well, Fidler writes about seeing such a statue and wonders which god is being worshipped. 

Constantine became emperor in 306 CE when, recounts Fidler: "the faithful were in furious disagreement ... on the maddeningly complex issue of the nature of Christ" (p. 45). Meanwhile, in The Reforming Power of the Scriptures, Mary Trammel and William Dawley explain that this prompted the emperor to assemble the "important ecumenical the Council of Nicaea ... to meet a crisis in the Church -- the spread of the 'Arian' heresy about the relationship between Christ and God" (p. 71). The result was that the "council condemned the heresy but agreed on a set of theological beliefs now known as the Nicene Creed -- a creed still used in many churches today" (p. 72).

Readers may enjoy two interesting articles about this early period.

The first is an article in the November 1995 issue of The Christian Science Journal called The Ante-Nicene Fathers: their role in early Christian healing by Frank C. Darling. The article gives insight into some of the thought-trends which preceded the 325 Council decision and pays tribute to the brave and faithful work of those early church workers, the majority of whom had been raised in pagan families and later became Christians.  

The second is an article in the October 1996 issue of The Christian Science Journal called "A historical perspective on church affairs: then and now" by Thomas O. Poyser. (Find it at Christian Science Reading Rooms or online to subscribers at jsh-online.com.) This article speaks directly to the 325 Council decision and some of the political motivations behind it, while also addressing the problem of divisions. In this regard Poyser quotes Mary Baker Eddy: "Mrs. Eddy counsels in No and Yes, "I enjoin it upon my students to hold no controversy or enmity over doctrines and traditions, or over the misconceptions of Christian Science, but to work, watch, and pray for the amelioration of sin, sickness, and death."" (No and Yes, p. 8).

Julie Swannell

King James - a persistent vision

King James. Two titles: James I and James VI. The entwining of England and Scotland.

Rather like Elizabeth, James was well educated. His tutors felt that the better he understood the Bible, the more effective he would be as king. Our book (The Reforming Power of the Scriptures by Mary M. Trammell and William G. Dawley) tells us that:

…from the time he was four years old, they (his tutors in Scotland) subjected him to a twice-daily routine of linguistic, theological and scientific studies that included Bible reading in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, English, and French. By the time he was 8, James could translate any Bible passage from Latin into French, and from French into English, with ease.  p. 179

James had the idea that a new translation of the Bible might reconcile those who endorsed the Geneva Bible and those who endorsed the Rheims or Bishop Bible of the Catholics. The idea was rejected and he had to wait till he was king of England as well as Scotland (in 1603).

The time came when this was a reality, chiefly through James’ endeavours to get things moving. It was he alone who – in their words – propelled the design for the new Bible forward “that the work might be hastened, and that the business might be expedited in so decent a manner, as a matter of such importance might justly require” (p. 187).

It is fascinating to read about the translators. There were six sets of them:

 The King James Version of the Bible (published 1611)

Group name	What they translated into English
The Westminster Hebrew Committee	Genesis through II Kings
The Cambridge Hebrew Committee	I Chronicles through Song of Solomon
The Cambridge Greek-Hebrew Comm.	the Apocrypha
The Oxford Hebrew Committee	Isaiah through Malachi
The Oxford Greek Committee	the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation
The Westminster Greek Committee	Romans through Jude

 Joyce Voysey

The Bible, Elizabeth I, and a virtual revolution

Pondering the fact that all the translators were men, I wondered about women’s influence on those men. Thought turned to Elizabeth I (1533-1603). Did she read the Bible? After all, her father Henry VIII (1491-1547) and her first cousin, twice-removed, James I (1566-1625) had a big influence on bringing the Bible to the masses.

In my search, up came a Christian Science Monitor article by co-author or our book, The Reforming Power of the Scriptures, Mary Trammell. The article's title is The Struggle overthe English Bible: A scholar’s view. Elizabeth I gets only a passing mention – she objected to the Geneva Bible:

"There [Geneva] they completed an ambitious retranslation of the whole Bible - called the Geneva Bible - from the original Greek and Hebrew in 1560. Surprisingly, the new sovereign, Protestant Queen Elizabeth I, refused to allow it to be sold in England, fearing its strongly antimonarchical notes."

An article from the Washington Post provides further insights: 

"Queen Elizabeth 1, who was queen from 1558 to her death in 1603, had a most extraordinary education. An especially precocious child, she studied for years with tutors and learned to speak six languages fluently as well as grammar, theology, history, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, math, logic, literature and geometry."

And her tutor taught her public speaking. She was very much involved in religion. It seems she mixed some of the Roman Catholic teaching in with her Protestantism.  

I sense that Mary Trammell’s Monitor article is a sort of precis of our present study.

Joyce Voysey

Ed. I like Mary Trammell's description of the English translation as "a virtual revolution":

"TODAY, English-speaking Christians may take the King James Bible and modern English translations for granted. But they shouldn't. The translation of the Bible into English out of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin was a virtual revolution."

And readers will find this of interest, again from Trammell's Monitor article:

"When James VI of Scotland became king of England in 1603, he faced a deeply divided nation committed to two extremist Bibles, the Geneva and the Rheims - and dead set against the one legal Bible, the Bishops' text. His way out of this Bible deadlock was to commission an entirely new translation of the Bible, to be carried out by 50 of England's best scholars. The genius of the project, which was completed in 1611, was its ecumenicism. James stacked each of the six translation committees with scholars of every theological stripe and told them to come up with a text they could all agree on. This was consistent with the king's lifelong dream to reconcile the Protestant and Catholic divisions of Western Christendom in one grand church - united under the banner of the Bible. As a king, James was a failure. He was vain, extravagant, and foolish. But his achievement in forging a gloriously beautiful English Bible, reflecting all the exuberance of the Golden Age of English literature, was enormous."