Season 2 · Episode 29
Full episode description
The Council of Nicaea in 325 CE is treated in Christian memory as a beginning. It was not. By the time Constantine summoned the bishops, the architecture they ratified had been under construction for two centuries. This episode walks the figures and the disputes that built it.
This episode walks:
- Ignatius of Antioch, writing letters on the road to martyrdom around 110 CE, the first Christian to argue that the bishop is the visible centre of the church
- Justin Martyr, the philosophical convert who described Christian worship to the emperor in detail and gave the movement its first sustained defence in Greek thought
- Marcion of Sinope, whose published canon in the 140s forced every other Christian community to answer the same question. What are our books
- Valentinus and the Gnostic schools, who turned salvation into knowledge and read the gospels in ways the proto-orthodox refused
- Montanus, who in Asia Minor in the late second century claimed continuing prophecy from the Holy Spirit and was eventually rejected for it
- Irenaeus of Lyon, who in Against Heresies catalogued the Gnostic schools, articulated a rule of faith, and made the case for four gospels and no more
- the Quartodeciman controversy in the 190s, where the bishop of Rome attempted to excommunicate the churches of Asia Minor over the date of Easter, and was forced by Irenaeus and others to back down
The coalition that would meet at Nicaea was being assembled out of regional churches that already disagreed on practice. The coalition held. It held because nobody managed to break it.
Not from tradition. From evidence.