Month: January 2018

Did Constantine invent the divinity of Christ? (Part 3)

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] In our previous instalment, we saw that the Gospels testify very clearly both to the divinity and humanity of Jesus of Nazareth. In this final instalment in our short series, we will see whether the same can be said of the Christian writers outside the New Testament in the

Did Constantine invent the divinity of Christ? (Part 2)

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] In the first instalment of this short series of posts, we showed that Sir Leigh Teabing’s conspiracy theory version of early Christian history, as presented in The da Vinci Code, simply doesn’t stand up to a moment’s serious consideration. In this second part, we shall examine a number of

Did Constantine invent the divinity of Christ? (Part 1)

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] One of the more popular conspiracy theories about Christianity over the past 40 years has been the claim that the Emperor Constantine ‘invented’ the divinity of Christ at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. But does this claim have any basis in fact? So the theory goes, until

How the concept of sainthood has changed

I recently read the Lausiac History of Palladius, a 5th-century work describing the ascetic exploits of the desert monks of Egypt and other places. I was struck reading it, by how the idea of ‘sainthood’ has changed over the centuries. In this post we will briefly explore three different historical conceptions of ‘sainthood.’ Today we