Dr Paul Allen

For the first 300 years of Christianity, there was barely a breather from violent persecution. Roman emperors harangued Christians by confiscating church property, arresting worshippers, and even executing them in arenas like the Colosseum as entertainment. That persisted until the glorious year of 313 AD. Christians were granted by their government an unprecedented relief from persecution and even encouragement to convert others to their faith. On 28 October, 312 AD Constantine and Maxentius clashed in a military battle outside Rome for the highest position in the Empire. The day before, while mustering his troops, Constantine observed a pattern in the clouds that looked to him like the overlapping of two Greek letters Chi and Rho, what to us would be an X with a P over it. These two letters happened to be the first letters of the Greek word “Christ.” He saw this portent as a divine communiqué in which Jesus was promising him victory. He immediately ordered his troops to em...

Dan Brown’s bestselling conspiratorial thriller  The Da Vinci Code  seems like ancient history now. At its peak of popularity, the novel set records both for sales and for irritating scholars with its view that Jesus and the 12 apostles held to gnostic heresies. The book’s bizarre plot focuses on Jesus’ bloodline extending through a child born by Mary Magdalene. Within that narrative, Brown asserts that the New Testament canon was determined by the Roman Emperor Constantine—who was not friendly to gnostic Christianity—at a time much later (fourth century AD) than any New Testament scholar would endorse. Unfortunately, this myth has since taken on a life of its own. The notion that Constantine decided which books should constitute the New Testament springs from the ancient  Life of Constantine  by Eusebius of Caesarea (AD 263–339). Eusebius reports that in a letter written in ad 331, the emperor instructed him to … order fifty copies of the sacred Scriptur...

It was October, 312. A young general who had the allegiance of all the Roman troops from Britain and Gaul was marching toward Rome to challenge Maxentius, another claimant to the imperial throne. As the story goes, General Constantine looked up and saw a cross of light in the sky. An inscription read, “In this conquer.” The superstitious soldier was already beginning to reject the Roman deities in favor of a single god. His father had worshiped a supreme sun-god. Could this be a favorable omen from that god on the eve of battle? Later, Christ appeared to Constantine in a dream , bearing the same sign, a cross with the top bent over, resembling the Greek letters chi and rho, the first two letters of Christos. The general was instructed to mark this sign on his soldiers’ shields. He did. As promised, Constantine won the battle. It was one of several decisive moments in a quarter century of violent change. If you had left Rome in A.D. 305, to spend twenty years in the desert...

English: Icon from Mount Athos depicting the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) This question prompted the First Council of Nicaea started in 325 and concluded with the Second Council of Nicaea in 787.  Setting   &  Purpose The First Council of Nicaea was convened in 325 by the Roman Emperor Constantine . Constantine had hoped to unite his empire under the banner of Christianity, but now saw such unity threatened by a grave theological dispute. Hosius of Cordoba recommended a council as the means to address the brewing controversy and Constantine responded by calling church leaders to Nicaea in Bithynia (modern-day Iznik, Turkey). Somewhere between 250 and 318 bishops from across the Roman empire attended, and the council began its formal deliberations on  May 20 . The major issue the council was charged with addressing was the nature of Christ‘s divinity, and in particular, the relationship between the Father and the...

English: Icon of Jesus Christ (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Ask your average Muslim, Unitarian, Jehovah’s Witness, or just about any non-Christian skeptic who has read (or watched)   The Da Vinci Code ,  and they’ll try to convince you the answer is  no .  From such sources we are told that the deity of Christ was a doctrine invented centuries after Jesus’ death – a result of pagan influences on the church in the fourth century when the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its official religion. Emperor Constantine , in particular, is blamed for being the guy who promoted Jesus to the level of deity, a feat of cosmic proportions that he managed to pull off at the Council of Nicaea in 325. As Dan Brown put it (through the lips of one of his literary characters): “Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God ’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea. . . . By officially endorsing J...

The Vatican Museum houses a vast collection of ancient objects related to the early history of the Christian church. Within that collection, on public display and remarkably intact despite its age, is an intricately carved sarcophagus--a box designed to hold human remains--that was discovered in Rome’s basilica di San Paolo fuori le Mura during its restoration in the 1800’s. Historians date it between 330 and 350 AD.. The outside of this sarcophagus is divided into an upper and lower tier and each is carved all around with biblical imagery drawn from both the Old and New Testaments. Among the scenes along the upper tier are God giving his Creation Mandate to Adam, the wedding at Cana, and the miracle of the loaves and the fish. Along the lower tier is the arrival of the Magi to worship the baby Jesus, the healing of the blind man, Jesus foretelling Peter’s denial, and Peter baptizing his jailers. In the middle of it all is an image of the Christian couple who commissioned t...