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The Council of Nicaea was a landmark event, yet uncertainty surrounds almost every aspect of the council and its proceedings. No Acts survive, the signatory lists are incomplete, and the organization of the council’s meetings and the identities and motivations of those who participated remain controversial. Rather than propose another hypothetical reconstruction, the aim of this chapter is to reconsider the different interpretations made possible by our limited evidence and the particular questions that have divided scholarly opinion. Who attended the council? Who took the leading roles in the council’s deliberations? And who proposed and supported the crucial decisions, such as the inclusion of the contested term homoousios into the Nicene Creed? Not only are such questions essential to understanding the council and its legacy, but our search for answers offers the opportunity to look beyond the emperor Constantine and the most famous episcopal protagonists, and consider the significance of Nicaea for some of the less prominent figures who contributed to the drama. While their voices are difficult to hear, these more humble individuals had their own parts to play and shared the contemporary awe at a spectacle that symbolized the changing status of Christianity within the fourth-century Roman empire.
This chapter explores some ways in which Christian belief and some key aspects of Christian identity were articulated and formed from around AD 300 to 451. It displays the character of the interactions between Christian groups and the imperial authorities by considering two disputes which demonstrate the internal problems caused by emergence from the threat of persecution. These were the Melitian and Donatist disputes. In the last century a number of attempts have been made to treat the dispute as a conflict between the provincial 'nationalism' or 'regionalism' of the Donatists, who were striving to preserve an indigenous form of Christianity, and the imperial authorities desire to impose a universal form of Christianity under closer imperial control. In these disputes, internal Christian debate was prompted by changing relations with the non-Christian world. The most important doctrinal controversy of the fourth century concerned Christians' understanding of God, of the nature of Christ and of the very character of salvation.
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