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A Critique of what The Da Vinci Code says about
The EMPEROR CONSTANTINE and the COUNCIL OF NICAEA

A paper presented by Father Bill Olnhausen on June 15, 2006 at a Da Vinci Code Seminar sponsored by St. Nicholas Antiochian Orthodox Church, Cedarburg, Wisconsin

Dan Brown and Tom Hanks and Ron Howard say, "Don’t take this so seriously. The Da Vinci Code is just a story, it’s fiction." No, it is a mix of fact and fiction, and it doesn’t dis-tinguish between the two - as if someone wrote a story about the American revolution and had the British win, or about the election of 2000 and had the Supreme Court rule in favor of Gore. These would be interesting speculations, and here we would know how to separate fact from fantasy. But with The Da Vinci Code, unless you know early Church history well,, how you do tell truth from fiction? So people wonder: Might it have happened as The Divine Code says? And since this goes to the heart of the Christian faith, this is serious.

Can we know what really happened in ancient times? Granted, history is not entirely objec-tive: events are seen through the eyes of people; three people can describe the same event three different ways. However there is historical evidence, we possess ancient documents, and usually we can tell when something is being made up. Since I am not a professional scholar, the following is a sort of term paper. I’ve taken a small section from The Da Vinci Code - what Leigh Teabing says about the emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea, pages 251-254 in my Anchor Books paperback edition - and will try to tell you what is accurate and what is not. I have some knowledge of this: Every May 21 we Orthodox celebrate the feast of Saints Constantine and Helen, and on the Sunday after Ascension we commemorate the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council (the First Council of Nicaea). I will quote directly from the book. (In the movie, Teabing's word are altered somewhat.) Teabing says many things dogmatically. Some of them are true.

1) The Bible as we know it today was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great. This is not true. More than a century before Constantine, Christians had accepted most the New Testament books without much controversy. There is no evidence that Constantine had anything to do with it.

2) Constantine was a lifelong pagan who was baptized on his deathbed, too weak to protest. This is a blend of fact and fancy. Constantine was baptized not long before his death. Does that mean he was a pagan? No. At the time Christians sometimes postponed Baptism for fear of committing major sin afterwards. (A politician might well worry about that!) That was a misunderstanding of Baptism; it doesn’t mean he was a pagan. Perhaps he also wanted to be emperor to all the people. It is recorded that he visited pagan temples, much as an American Christian president might visit a mosque or a synagog. There is no evidence that as emperor Constantine participated in pagan worship; notably, after he conquered Rome he did not offer the customary pagan sacrifices. Constantine’s mother Helen was a Christian; she raised him after his father emperor Constantius divorced her, so he grew up under Christian influence. Constantine said he was converted to Christ by a vision of the cross inscribed with the words “in this sign conquer”. Even before that, Christian priests traveled with his army. There is no evidence that he was baptized because he was “too weak to protest”; rather it was written that he welcomed Baptism and for the rest of his life wore not imperial robes but only his white baptismal garment.

3) In Constantine’s day, Rome’s official religion was sun worship - the cult of Sol Invictus, or the Invincible Sun - and Constantine was its head priest. Actually, Romans worshipped many gods, including the emperor. Emperor Aurelian dedicated the great Roman temple of Sol Invictus on December 25, 274. Constantine may have worshipped Sol early in his life. He allowed images of the sun to remain on Roman coins, and he retained the imperial title Pontifex Maximus (high priest) of the cult of Sol Invictus. Why? Perhaps it was for reasons of political expediency. But Christians also used sun and light language about Christ, so this may also have been his way of “transitioning” the empire into Christianity.

4) Christians and pagans began warring, and the conflict grew to such proportions that it threatened to render Rome in two... In 325 AD [Constantine] decided to unify Rome under a single religion, Christianity... [As a] good businessman...he could see that Christianity was on the rise, and he simply backed the winning horse. This is an oversimplification. Actually there had been tension between Christianity and paganism (and sporadic persecu-tion of Christians) for three centuries. In the early fourth century, the pagan emperors tried to exterminate the Church. Constantine ended this persecution by his Edict of Milan in 312, and began to give preferential treatment to Christians. But before Constantine, Christianity was in danger of being wiped out. It was Constantine who made it the “winning horse”.

5) Constantine converted the sun-worshipping pagans to Christianity. By fusing pagan symbols, dates and rituals into the growing Christian tradition, he created a kind of hybrid religion that was acceptable to both parties. The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian
symbology are undeniable. Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Christian saints. Picto-grams of Isis [nursing Horus] became the blue-print for our modern images of the Virgin Mary nursing Baby Jesus. And virtually all the elements of the Catholic ritual - the miter, the altar, the doxology, and communion, the act of ‘God-eating’ - were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions... Nothing in Christianity is original. The pre-Christian God Mithras...was born on December 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days. By the way, December 25 was also the birthday of Osiris, Adonis and Dionysus. The newborn Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense and myrrh. Yes, there were many pagan antecedents to Christianity. How could there not be? Jesus was not the first baby to be born or carried by a mother. Christians took pagan art and converted it; Orthodox iconography developed directly out of Egyptian funerary art. When Christ said "Whoever eats my flesh...dwells in me and I in him” and instituted the Holy Eucharist, he drew on pagan totem religion, in which people identify with a particular animal, then sacrifice and eat it, receiving its life force into themselves. There are pagan gods who die and rise, symbolizing nature’s annual cycle. In the fourth and fifth centuries, Christians chose to celebrate Jesus’ birth on December 25, near the winter solstice, a day previously used for pagan gods of light. All this is true. Teabing has a few inaccuracies: for example, Osiris’ birthday was July 14 not December 25, and no Hindu text says Krishna received gold, frankincense and myrrh. But Teabing is right: Christ and the Church built on pagan foundations, as well as Jewish. This is not a new discovery, nor is it shocking. He is incorrect, however, to say this was Constantine’s invention. Also contrary to Teabing, there is something original in Christianity. As C. S. Lewis put it, in Christ “the myths became fact”. In the myths, gods lived once upon a time, nobody could really say when or where. Christians claim that the one God really became incarnate, died and rose in Palestine in the time of Augustus Caesar, and there were eyewitnesses. That is unique to Christianity.

6) Christianity’s weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans. Originally Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun...Sunday. Yes, Constantine made Sunday the imperial day off. For the rest, no. It is well documented that from the beginning Christians worshiped on Sunday to celebrate Christ’s resurrection - sometimes on Saturday night, following the Old Testament pattern: "there was evening and morning, a first day". We Orthodox still begin the day at sunset, and many Christians keep eves of Sundays and feasts. The linguistic evidence that we worship on Sunday because of Christ (not the sun) is that in Greek the first day of the week is called not Sunday but Kyriake (Lord’s Day).

7) At [the Council of Nicaea] many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon - the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration of the sacraments, and of course the divinity of Jesus...until that moment in history Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet... a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal. Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea. A relatively close vote at that. Here we have documentary evidence: five eye-witness accounts of the Council of Nicaea.We have the Council’s decisions; we know many details. To be precise, the bishops voted on what words to use to express the divinity of Jesus. The rest of what Teabing says is false. Till the fourth century, Jesus’ divinity was not controversial among Christians. There are many clear references to it in the New Testament and the early Fathers, long before Constantine. It was not Christ’s divinity that some doubted but rather his humanity. The gnostic gospels (so-called) claimed that Jesus was divine but not fully human. Gnostics believed matter is unworthy and that Christ cer-tainly did not take flesh. St. John is typical in warning against those who deny that Christ came “in the flesh”. Teabing has this totally wrong. The first notable follower of Jesus to suggest that he was a created being was Arius in the fourth century, and even he didn’t say that Jesus was only a man, only a prophet. He appears to have believed that Jesus became divine, was adopted by the Father at some point, like certain Greek gods. In response the bishops approved the first part of what we call the Nicene Creed: Christ is “God of God, light of light, begotten not made, of one essence with the Father...who for us men and for our salvation was incarnate and made man”. These words were not invented by Constan-tine. Except for the term "essence" (homoousios), they were taken from an old Palestinian creed. Finally, the vote: Of the 318 (some say 348) bishops at Nicaea, only two voted no: Theonas of Marmaric and Secundus of Ptolemais. Is that a "relatively close vote"?

8) Because Constantine upgraded Jesus’ status almost four centuries after Jesus’ death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling his life as a mortal man. To rewrite the history books, Constantine knew he would need a bold stroke... Constantine commis-sioned and fashioned a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up and burned. This also is entirely untrue. We know of no documents before Constantine that said Jesus was only a man. There is no evidence that Constantine commissioned a new Bible or authorized bookburning. The bookburning was done by his pagan predecessors who tried to destroy all Christian documents. Nor did Constantine insist on the divinity of Christ. The evidence suggests that he did not grasp what the theological dispute was all about: all he seems to have wanted was that Christians stop fighting. In fact Constantine later fell under Arian influence: he exiled St. Athanasius of Alexandria, the chief defender of Christ’s divinity, and he was baptized by an Arian bishop who denied Christ’s full divinity. This passage is totally inaccurate.

9) Establishing Christ’s divinity was critical to the further unification of the Roman empire and to the new Vatican power base. By officially endorsing Jesus as the Son of God, Con-stantine turned Jesus into a deity who existed beyond the scope of the human world, an entity whose power was unchallengable. This not only precluded further pagan challenges to Christianity, but now the followers of Christ were able to redeem themselves only via the established sacred channel - the Roman Catholic Church. From my Eastern Orthodox perspective, these references to the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church are just off the wall. Constantine had already moved his capital out of Rome to Constantinople, now called Istanbul. The Nicene Council was held not in Rome but in the east near Constantinople, and of the 318 or so bishops who attended only five came from the Latin west. Pope Sylvester of Rome sent only two priests - no bishops, so he didn’t even have a vote. The decisions at the Council were made by eastern bishops, and eastern Christianity has never been under the jurisdiction of Rome. Rome’s only connection to the Council was that they endorsed its decisions. To say the Council was a Vatican power grab is absurd. And, to be accurate, there was a further pagan challenge to Christianity: Constantine’s nephew the emperor Julian the Apostate tried to reestablish paganism in the empire.

10) Constantine took advantage of Christ’s substantial influence and importance. And in doing so he shaped the face of Christianity as we know it today. This is true, but maybe not in the way Teabing thinks. Constantine did use Christ and the Church to unite his empire - but there is much evidence that he did so because he sincerely believed in Christ. We Orthodox see Constantine as a truly great man who ended the persecution of the Church and allowed the bishops freedom to clarify and hand on the original faith of the Church. It was because of him that Christianity became established in the world and has been passed down to us. In that sense, indeed "he shaped the face of Christianity as we know it today". That is why, despite his failings - which were many - we Orthodox title him Saint Constantine. But he did not create Christianity as we know it today.

I hope I have demonstrated that these four pages of The Da Vinci Code are a mix of fact and fiction - an undifferentiated and (I would say) devious blend of truths and falsehoods. Now, extend this into the remaining 485 pages. All I can say is: if after this you trust the information in this book or find the theories convincing..., I’ve got a bridge I want to sell you.

[For non-US readers:- The reference to the "bridge" at the end of this article concerns the Brooklyn Bridge, the subject of a 19th century joke about an immigrant who was offered a chance to buy it for $5. Ed.]