Abstract
This essay surveys the dominant commentaries and discourses on the Council of Nicaea and the Nicene Creed, and proceeds to critique contemporary Nicene-derived and -inspired theological thinking which constructs its meaning to reside solely in the theological discourses associated with and clustering around the Council and its Creed. Through critical historiography and theories of discourse, the history of the Council and the Creed is read as a discursive formation the meaning of which lies outside of the Nicene disputation. By setting “Nicaea” as icon within the framework of changes in religious mentalities of the period, the rising cults of saints and martyrs, the article argues that the Council of Nicaea was actually conceived as the vicennalia, the celebration of Constantine’s rule, especially his victory over Licinius, and that the real prize for Emperor Constantine was the erection of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Church was celebrated as a monument to Constantine’s victory, and the celebrated Nicene formula of homoousios helped link Constantine to Christ as a means to authorise his rule.
“The crime, the crime,” Franz interrupted me impatiently. “What a strange notion of crime you have. It is the charge that generates the crime. The charge scoops up a few specifics from the infinite and overwhelming flood of occurrences, activities and actions, and puts them together into what we call the crime. One man shoots, another falls dead; at the same time birds are chirping, cars go by, bakers are baking, and you’re lighting a cigarette. The charge knows what it is that counts. The charge turns the shot and the dead man into a murder, and neglects everything else.”
Bernhard Schlink, Self’s Deception, trans. Peter Constantine (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), 264–265
We get scared by history; we allow ourselves to be bullied by dates.
In fourteen hundred and ninety-twoColumbus sailed the ocean blueAnd then what? Everyone became wiser? People stopped building new ghettoes in which to practise the old persecutions? Stopped making the old mistakes, or new mistakes, or new versions of old mistakes? (And does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.) Dates don’t tell the truth. They bawl at us – left, right, left, right, pick ’em up there you miserable shower. They want to make us think we’re always progressing, always going forward. But what happened after 1492?
In fourteen hundred and ninety-threeHe sailed right back across the seaThat’s the sort of date I like. Let’s celebrate 1493, not 1492; the return, not the discovery. What happened in 1493? The predictable glory, of course, the royal flattery, the heraldic promotions on the Columbus scutcheon. But there was also this. Before departure a prize of 10,000 maravedis had been promised to the first man to sight the New World. An ordinary sailor had won this bounty, yet when the expedition returned Columbus claimed it for himself (the dove still elbowing the raven from history). The sailor went off in disappointment to Morocco where, they say, he became a renegade. It was an interesting year, 1493. History isn’t what happened. History is just what historians tell us. There was a pattern, a plan, a movement, expansion, the march of democracy; it is a tapestry, a flow of events, a complex narrative, connected, explicable. One good story leads to another. First it was kings and archbishops with some offstage divine tinkering, then it was the march of ideas and the movements of masses, then little local events which mean something bigger, but all the time it’s connections, progress, meaning, this led to this, this happened because of this. And we, the readers of history, the sufferers from history, we scan the pattern for hopeful conclusions, for the way ahead. And we cling to history as a series of salon pictures, conversation pieces whose participants we can easily reimagine back into life, when all the time it’s more like a multi-media collage, with paint applied by decorator’s roller rather than camel-hair brush.
Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (London: Vintage Books, 1989), 241–242
1 Explanation in Place of an Introduction
With some playfulness and innovative imagination, the two epigraphs can be translated into useful frameworks for setting up an experimental rethinking of Nicaea – the iconic event (the Council), its symbolic significance (the Creed and the theological discourses into which it is woven from 325 CE up to the present day), and the historical processes leading up to it and the after-tremors of its reception.
The scene in Bernhard Schlink’s novel from which the first epigraph is taken, concerns the interrogation in prison of the private investigator, Gerhard Self, who, upon questioning the details of the crime supposedly committed, receives the answer cited in the passage. At issue here is the concept of the charge: the charge generates the crime, according to the prosecutor, and it does so by picking out from a “flood of occurrences and activities” only those specifics and details that, in combination, would constitute a crime as defined by the charge. With some creative tinkering it is easy to imagine that “charge” can function as a stand-in for “theory.” Theory, to play with the ancient Greek word, as act of seeing, perception, something seen, or inquiry from an oracle (this latter compatible with our contemporary sense of theory as guiding investigation, research), does not reproduce all the myriads of data, but according to some or another principle or framework, only selects certain data, “occurrences and activities,” as relevant constituent elements for the construction of a phenomenon and its intellection.1 Like the charge, theory constructs the phenomenon that is the subject of scholarly discourse, which is, in our case, Nicaea – the icon and all it stands for. The theory working here behind the scenes is discourse theory.2 In my understanding, a theory of discourse works on two levels: in a broader sense, “discourse” is the collective noun for all the kinds of acts of signification (words, texts, rituals, practices, institutions, material objects, spaces) that, in concert, construct our way of knowing the world which knowing is institutionalised in accepted (“canonical”) ways of thinking and acting (“institutionalised,” in the sense of habituating actions, affects, and dispositions, that is, creating a habitus); and so it tends to shape the way we know, experience, and move in the world we live in. Understood like this, the study of “discourse” is a way into investigating all the concrete operational sites of a given historical social formation or society’s sense of self – its self-understandings, its self-representations, and its self-reinscriptions. In a narrower sense, “discourse” also designates knowledge or disciplinary formations (that are themselves not independent of the broader social self-understandings and worldviews they are embedded in – disciplines and scholarship are products of history, after all, and subsist in the flow of history), and in this narrower sense one can speak of “discursive formations,” a term that indicates that we do not encounter knowledge formations or complex realities (like the “stuff” of religion, e.g., the sacred, ritual, creeds, all kinds of religious significations) as brute in-themselves-subsisting transcendent objects but as “complexes constituted by grammars, syntaxes, and semantics of representations, significations, and enunciations institutionalised in emerging (and eventually maintained) conventions of stating factual states of affairs,” especially here with regard to scholarly-discipline-knowing of a defined set of phenomena in which “facts” or “evidence” do not refer to natural objects but to outcomes of conceptualisations, and further, that history/the historical is an outcome of narration.3 And with that we have the link to the second epigraph.
The second epigraph is taken from Julian Barnes’s comedic satire, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, from a chapter that deals inter alia with Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage of discovery to find a passage from Spain west to India and the Far East. The “ordinary sailor” who actually discovered land (not India or the Far East, or America, for that matter), was Rodrigo de Triana, and the land was the small island of Guanahani in the Bahamas, renamed by Columbus San Salvador. For two months Columbus’s three ships sailed around the Caribbean (landing at Cuba and Hispaniola) before returning to Spain (without the ships’ holds filled with gold – the voyage was apparently motivated by the expectation of finding so much gold so as to finance the liberation of Jerusalem from the Muslims). So much for the myth of the iconic event of 1492. But, as Barnes proposes, the events alongside and afterwards are just as significant and meaningful: Columbus returned to great triumph, received the title “Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” made “Vice-king and General Governor of the Islands and Terra Firma of Asia and India,” made three more voyages to the Caribbean and believed to the end of his life that he had found Asia, yet died in obscurity ignored by his contemporaries.4 And this is the point of the cited passage: history is the result of the narratives concocted by historiographers as they select the dates, events, movements, and significances to emplot them into meaningful connections and patterns of causation: What happened because of what, and how is the story woven, who are the heroes and who the villains, what is the telos driving the story?5 But often the emplotment – and this is particularly relevant for histories of Christianity – is informed and guided by the very insider perspectives of the sources themselves (from the Book of Acts, via Eusebius, and all the subsequent historians and heresiologists), such that these histories are simply part of the mythography of the tradition itself, and hence should be understood as mythographic historiography, where history is simply theology. While the history of the theological feuds in the build-up to the Council of Nicaea and its aftermath and reverberations in further councils are extremely well-documented, my aim here is, taking Barnes’s point, to delve into what lay around, underneath, alongside, and in the cultural context of the Council as of particular interest in reimagining Nicaea as historical event, hence the focus on the “sideshow” – Nicaea as a part-project of Constantine’s programme, the celebration of his vicennalia. The big issue with the commemoration of Nicaea is that it is mostly cast as a theological event, doing work on a (transcendent, philosophical) theological discourse level, and explained theologically. Instead, I want to make it an exercise in historiography, as indicated in the epigraphs.
2 Setting the Scene: Finding Nicaea
The year 2025 was a glorious year for Christendom and Christian theology, with the 1700th anniversary commemoration of the Council of Nicaea and its Creed, “the most important creed in ancient eastern Christianity.”6 (Far more than the Apostolicum, the Nicene Creed – or better known in its final form as we have it today, the Niceno-Constantinopolitanum of 381 – is the liturgical creed in Christendom par excellence.) Leading up to the commemoration year, and some coinciding with the commemoration, a number of books, journal issues, and conferences explored the history and significance of the Council and its Creed. It is useful for gaining a sense of the tenor of the commemoration to get an overview of these (without claiming exhaustive completeness, this is just a selection of what I took to be representative).
Among the books: Alberto Melloni and Costanza Bianchi, eds., The Creed of Nicaea (325): The Status Quaestionis and the Neglected Topics, Fscire Research and Papers 5 (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2024); Uta Heil and Jan-Heiner Tück, eds., Nizäa – Das erste Konzil: Historische, theologische und ökumenische Perspektiven (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 2025); and some earlier: Young Richard Kim, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicaea, Cambridge Companions to Religion (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2021),
Among the journal issues and magazines: Communio 51, no. 4 (2024), “The Council of Nicaea (1700 Years Later)”; Church History contains a forum edited by Young Richard Kim, “Reflections on Nicaea at 1700: A Forum on the Legacy of the Council and the Creed,” Church Hist. 94, no. 2 (2025): 338–377,
On the conference side (including activities arranged on university campuses) there was much to choose from: Fscire (La Fondazione per le scienze religiose) (Bologna, Italy), Maison Française (Oxford), Regent’s Park College (Oxford) and The House of St Gregory and St Macrina (Oxford), “The Nicene and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creeds: Tensions, Rapprochements, Effects,” 11–12 December 2023,
I want to close this overview with reference to two events that, for me, bookend the year of commemoration. The first is the conference, “Nicaea 2025: Event, Context, Reception,” 2–5 April 2025, hosted by the Pontifical Patristic Institute “Augustinianum,” and the Pontifical University of St Thomas (Angelicum),
The second event is the visit of His Holiness, Pope Leo XIV, to Iznik in Türkiye (the ancient Nicaea), as part of his inaugural Apostolic visit to Türkiye and Lebanon. The travel programme was extensively covered by Vatican News, EWTN News Nightly and Catholic News Agency, and while the full address by Pope Leo XIV in Iznik is not available (from the videos of the event it seems as if only short statements were made),9 editorial commentary made clear how the visit was intended to be seen in light of its theological significance. As Andrea Tornielli puts it:
Unity is at the heart of the first stage, in order to commemorate the Council of Nicaea, which indelibly marked the history of the Church by proclaiming faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. There is no point hiding it: we need to consider the encounter of Nicaea in light of the wound of a divided Church, a wound that continues to bleed and that in recent years has seen new rifts appear. To return with living memory to a time when the Churches were united, to a council that was also held in order to unify the date of Easter, is a sign of hope.10
Christopher Wells has it that “the ecclesial unity that marked the Council of Nicaea stands as a witness to and inspiration for the ecumenical journey Christians are making today.”11 This was also emphasised by Fr. Nicolas Kazarian from the Orthodox Observer:
Standing at the site where the bishops of the early Church forged the language of orthodoxy, Pope Leo will manifest that same Creed remains the bedrock of Catholic and Orthodox faith alike. Despite the wounds of schism, the Creed continues to echo as a shared heartbeat, a reminder that East and West still acknowledge the same mystery of Christ’s incarnation. Equally powerful is the symbolic representation of the unity of ancient Christianity during the ecumenical celebration, at the invitation of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. For the first time in history, representatives of the five ancient patriarchal sees – Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem – will stand together at Nicaea to commemorate the council’s 1700th anniversary. Their presence will be more than ceremonial: it is a living icon of the Church’s original unity, an image of a communion that once was, and may one day be restored.12
Two themes interweave here in the two “bookends,” the first of course being the mystery of Christ’s incarnation and the question of the intra-divine relationality called forth by the incarnation, and the second being the question of the unity of the church (especially that of Roman Catholicism and the Orthodox churches) playing on the historical Filioque schism of 1054 and the resulting mutual excommunications of both the Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodoxy by emphasising the common foundational creed.13
From an overview of the treatments of Nicaea in publications and conference topics, a few things stand out. Overwhelmingly, “Nicaea” is treated as a decontextualised, in-itself-standing “thing,” notwithstanding the many studies, investigations, and presentations on the historical circumstances of its calling, the disputations, conflicts, shifting group formations and standpoint takings, the prodigious production of literature, the Creed resulting from it and the continued battles surrounding the reception of Nicaea.14 Like set in a giant bubble, its meaning resides in the theological discourses associated with and clustering around the Council and its Creed. “Nicaea” is treated as a theological moment in the arc spanning the intervening councils over Constantinople (381) to Chalcedon (451), from the long process of conceptual clarification of the equally divine relation of the Son, Jesus Christ, to the Father (what “Nicaea” and its reception stand for), to the eventual definition of the Trinity, a process largely completed by the time of the Council of Chalcedon that settled the Nicene question of the equal-divinity of the Son with the Father, by affirming for Christ two distinct, unconfused natures (fully divine and fully human) in perfect union.15 Hence, the overall emphasis on what the Nicene Creed and Nicene conception of divinity means for understanding God and the practical implications of this understanding for living faith and spirituality. On the other side (recognising the imbrication of Nicene theology with imperiality through Constantine’s role in the Council), there is expressed as well the difficulty of making sense of Nicene theology in contexts not defined by the broad (late Hellenistic, and generally, Graeco-Roman) Platonic philosophical tradition(s) that served as conceptual frameworks for the philosophical theology that underlay the theological disputes leading up to Nicaea and continued to determine theological formulations long afterwards – I am thinking here of the World Council of Churches’ “Towards Nicaea 2025: Exploring The Council’s Ecumenical Significance Today” conference as well as the “Receiving Nicaea” conference at Stellenbosch University, where a number of participants, particularly from the Third World or the so-called Global South, connected contemporary reflection on Nicaea with theologico-political questions among which decoloniality.16
In the history of Christian theology, the Council of Nicaea and the Creed that originated from it, mark the first high point of the establishment of what is recognised as mainstream orthodoxy. In the popular imagination and conventional historical perspectives “Nicaea” serves as shorthand for the establishment of the biblical/New Testament canon, the establishment of a whole range of ecclesial authorities, and the formulation of a definitive declarative statement of the Christian faith.17 In short, “Nicaea” stands for a first “completion,” the first waystation of the formation of Christianity into a worldwide religion with a defined identity.18 To view “Nicaea” as this kind of symbol – as theology – is to disembed it from the material conditions in which it came into being and which shaped it. This essay puts forward an argument for viewing “Nicaea” as a discursive formation, and hence, highlights the phenomenon of “Nicaea” as a series of speech acts operationalising social formations and political practices.
3 The Culture, the Context, and Encountering Gods
Conventionally, the language of the documents of the Arian dispute is taken to be inherently intelligible and meaningful, but it is only so if one let go of the requirement that intelligible language has a referential function to reality outside of it. The highly formalised abstract logic of the Platonic philosophy in terms of which the debates were conducted functions more like mathematical formulae in that they really only refer internally to the system itself, and hence, looking at the language of the Creed and the documents constituting Nicene theology – and doing so from a distance and common sense perspective, one cannot escape the impression that the Trinitarian formula does not make sense in ordinary language.19 Our centuries-long familiarity with the Creed (and the writings of the disputants) make contemporary interpreters blind to the fact that it is, by now, the mere fact of the Creed and the Nicene theology associated with it, together with its boundary-drawing identity-defining function that renders it symbolically meaningful (and thus, to appropriate Nicene theology today requires imaginative philosophical theologising in its turn, as exemplified by many of the conference proceedings mentioned earlier). In other words, the Nicene Creed is a shibboleth. The Arian dispute, the theological to’s-and-fro’s, the Council and the Creed, all drifted on a sea of cultural assumptions, practices, and habitus, apart from which the speech-actness of the language of the Arian dispute cannot be understood – and this is foundation for the experiment in historiography (the “Barnesian 1493” experiment) that follows. The point made here is that the disputants in the Arian controversy were educated theologians who practised a kind of philosophical theology that stood at a fair distance to the lived religious reality of ordinary Christians in non-formal contexts. The problem that occasioned the Nicene conflict arose when the language and concepts of early Christian writings (esp. the Gospels with their portrayals of Jesus Christ as divine mediator – as miracle-working holy man, but the letter corpus as well) are translated into the emerging Neoplatonic philosophical framework to produce philosophically authorised and intelligible interpretations of the Christian faith. As is clear from the work of Origen, the creator of the first all-encompassing system of theology in Christianity,20 the basic issue underlying the whole Arian dispute is that of mediation: if God is the One, wholly transcendent pure Spirit, unknowable except through glimpses of the order of the cosmos and the beauty of his work of creation, the only connection between the transcendent God and the world (and humans) is through the Logos, the rational ordering divine principle that also inheres in human beings such that perception of the divine is possible. The Logos that connects God and world is the self-subsisting wisdom of God, the “second God” (“… we may call him a second God …,” Against Celsus V. 39). Only from the Logos that becomes incarnate in Christ becomes true knowledge of God possible because all rational beings share in the divine reason. The Logos-become-flesh, God-as-Logos is the revealer of divine secrets because the Logos opens the eyes of the soul. The doctrine of the Logos stands in the centre of Origen’s theology. The creation of the world and the enabling of knowledge of God is the work of this Logos. But in following this line of thinking, the historical figure of Jesus Christ recedes into the background, and the meaning of the Logos becomes the result of philosophical speculation. Of course, in this kind of setting a literal reading of the Bible does not help, and to arrive at this philosophical conceptuality, employment of allegorical exegesis is required to arrive at the light of the Gnosis of Scripture.
On this basis, Origen’s magnificent theological system is built: the invisible and unknowable God, beyond spirit and being, creator of all things; the Logos, eternally begotten by the Father, co-creator and mediator between God and the world; the Holy Spirit as the third of the inner divine beings; the world of spirits created by God – angels, human spirits and demons – eternal creatures of God, endowed with the capacity for freedom; the fall from God in the intelligible world; in periodic recurrence, the creation of a material world as the place of punishment and purification for the fallen spirits; the redemption through the incarnation of the Logos in Jesus Christ, in whom divine and human nature are united; the possibility of gnosis of God thereby created; the deification exemplified in Jesus Christ and Gnostics; finally, the restoration of the original state and the return of all beings to God, so that God is all in all and “the end is renewed towards the beginning”.21
If the emerging Nicene conflict and resulting theology stood in the long shadow of Origen, it is time to set the Nicene conflict into its broader, encompassing cultural context.
Since the Arian controversy had its origins in North Africa – Libya and Egypt – it is worth pointing to David Frankfurter’s work who argued for the continued vitality of traditional folk religion even as Egyptian religious culture was transformed through influences such as Hellenism, Roman government, and Christian dominance.22 Alongside the obvious Hellenistic Jewish heritage, strands of indigenous Egyptian and other Graeco-Roman cultic discourses also flowed into the making of Christianity in Egypt such that Christianity was a thoroughly hybrid discursive formation.23 However, this essay focuses on a more delimited set of phenomena, namely, the broad “cultural theology” treated by Eastman and De Wet set in the context of changes in religious culture in the ancient Mediterranean as the context in which Christian formations impressed themselves in/on that world.24
First, the broader changes in imagining and conceptualising gods and deities in the Mediterranean world. As both Henk Versnel and H.W. Pleket have shown, the emergence of empires with increasingly autocratic rulers in the Hellenistic and Roman periods not only produced a defining socio-political-ideological mentality (“mentality” as the collective construction of a worldview), but also a new religious mentality.25 As rulers became imperially elevated as tyrants, so were the gods turned into tyrants (typical terms: pantokrátōr, [pam-]basileûs, kýrios, despótēs/despoina, týrannos, dýnamis) and simultaneously the faithful transformed into humble servants of the deities (therapeutēs, hypourgós, látris, hyperétēs-doūlos): it was a process of intensification of relationships of dependency of worshippers on deities (and the concomitant gradual but ever steeper – and accelerating – promotion of deities to ever higher echelons of authority and omnipotence). The imperialising religious mentality with its imperialised gods was a projection upwards on to the great stage screen of the sky of changes in conceptions of social and political existence down here below – it was the enskyment of power and authority with a vengeance. In Chris de Wet’s concept of doulology he expresses how the discourse of slavery/being-slave in early Christianity became disembedded from its original reference to (literal) captivity to being naturalised and internalised as obedience as habitus. In tracing the development of their self-conception as servants of Christ-cult groups in the Roman world, John Kloppenborg has shown how, by the later second century, this had become a dominant self-understanding expressed in Christian writings about themselves.26 If the elevation of gods as tyrants and the simultaneous relegation of believers to positions of humble obedience produced an intensification of relationships of dependency of worshippers on deities, it also created the dependence on patronage – of the ruler, patron, authority, as well as of the god/s.27
Second, on the point of dependence on patronage we touch on what David Eastman describes as early Christian cultural theology, the way in which Christians continued Roman cultural practices, drawing on pre-existing cultural repertoires, in his discussion, particularly with regard to funerary practices, funerary meals and festivities (refrigeria) – much to the chagrin of bishops and church fathers – as well as petitioning the saints as patrons with a variety of requests. The saint, whose powerful presence filled the memorial site, is closer and more accessible than the Triune Christian God, and thus fills the gap left by the elevated deity (the now too-far-transcendent Father and the equally far-ascended Christ). In fact, the bifurcation between elevated deities and humbled servile humans had led to the space in-between being populated by numerous revelatory intermediaries and agents of God: a range of angels, archangels (archangels: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel; and “Watchers” like Azazel, Gadreel; in the apocalyptic literature and magic and incantations texts especially), demigod-like figures like Metatron across Jewish magic and incantation literature, Gnostic writings like The Apocryphon of John, Christianised Jewish literature like the collection now known as Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.28 The figure of Metatron is especially notable as a kind of divine righthand man, a kind of second-in-command, as “Prince of angels” or “co-occupant of the divine throne” in pseudepigraphic literature and Merkabah mysticism, visualised much like Jesus Christ in Christian apocalyptic vision.
This richly populated world of intermediaries sits at one end of the spectrum defined by mediation between divine and human. At the other end, we find the cults of saints, martyrs, and Christ, rooted both in Graeco-Roman cultural practices and in Jewish practices.29 The homology between the cult of Christ and the cult of saints was often used by Christian writers to argue for the likeness of Christian cult to ancient Mediterranean practices. On the level of cultural theology, as Horbury introduces his essay on the cult of saints, “[t]he Christ-cult was the most important but not the only manifestation of its kind in the early church. In the second century it stands beside the cult of angels and the cult of martyrs and saints, as appears from Justin Martyr and the Martyrdom of Polycarp.”30 Festive commemorations and pilgrimages defined the rhythm of cultural life in such cultural theologies, focused inter alia on the powerful presence of the saint in place and the miracles wrought in that presence. This class of “the very special dead” is a natural extension of that phenomenon known in the ancient world as divine men (theîoi ándres),31 who, as Jonathan Z. Smith has argued through the example of the second-century magician, Thessalos, become the embodiment of divine presence, and thus marked the emergence of a new class of religious phenomena, namely the emergence of the religious entrepreneur, the itinerant philosopher and magician, replacing the oracle or priest as channels to the divine.32 “In the popular imagination, the emergence of the holy man at the expense of the temple marks the end of the classical world,” so Peter Brown,33 and thus, the emergence of the holy man or magician signified a profound change in the converse of humans with the world of the divine. Saints and holy men, unique and gifted individuals, regarded by contemporaries as representatives of another world, populated the circum-Mediterranean world in the centuries following the start of the Common Era, teaching philosophy as expositors of divine mysteries, performing miracles and healings, functioning as conduits for the transmission of the divine and its powers into the human world, work that they would continue after their passing. Their powerful presence continued after death, “oozing” from the tomb or memorial.34 To be near the saint is to be near the divine.
4 And so, to the Really Important Sideshow: The Church of the Holy Sepulchre
As I have argued all along, the theological debates and position-taking that led up to the Council of Nicaea and eventuated in its Creed should not be understood outside of the broader historical-political context in which they occurred. “Nicaea” stood in the slipstream of the aftermath of the last round of persecutions from 302–312 under the Tetrarchy, as the events that unfolded shaped the fortunes of the Council and the settling of the issues it was called to deal with. But simultaneously, it is exactly the imperial self-designatory language of the Tetrarchy that furnished, arguably, the very strange conceptuality of the Nicene Creed.35 After his usurpation of the imperial power in late 284, Diocletian set about reorganising the Roman Empire. In the following year he selected Maximian to become his colleague/co-emperor. In 293 the two senior emperors (known as Augusti) promoted Constantius and Galerius as junior or deputy emperors (known as Caesars) to form a Tetrarchy, a college of four emperors. In 305 Diocletian and Maximian retired, while Constantius (Constantine’s father) and Galerius became the Augusti and Severus and Maximinus the new Caesars. (After the death of Constantius in 306, the army in Britain elevated his son Constantine, and at Rome the praetorian guard hailed Maxentius as emperor.) Regardless of the eventual discords and civil wars resulting from this, a constant was the formulations of the relations between Augusti and Caesars as one of “fathers and sons,” and as subsisting in one nature, with a common purpose. That this was not merely a formulation about human authorities is demonstrated by Diocletian’s insistence of being called Lord and God, and in this simply continued a long Roman custom of understanding the emperor as divine, but with the added aspect now that there was not just one divine emperor, but two, and with two sons-of-gods added to the mix. A discourse about fathers and sons, about making and begetting, about sameness and difference, and about subordination and coordination was not unique to Christianity, or even to religion in general. A Tetrarchy of emperors was something like a Trinity of divinities: collective but distinct, equal but hierarchical, somehow divine and human simultaneously. Often it was difficult to distinguish among the persons of the Tetrarchy, because even though emperors had different ranks, technically they all shared the same essence of imperial rule, as well as some names and titles. As a Christian rhetorician described the harmony of the emperors, they shared “one intelligence, the same opinion, a similar conviction, and the same viewpoint” (Lactantius, The Death of the Persecutors 8.1). This political statement sounded like a theological statement. As a result, Tetrarchic emperors and Christian theologians were arguing about similar issues at the same time.36 The convoluted language of the Nicene Creed is a projection of this state of affairs. In tapping into this definition of the structure of the Tetrarchy, Eusebius (both Nicomedia and Caesarea) constructed not only a Christology (a declaration about Christ) but also a theology of empire. This kind of theology had deep roots: to impute imperial titles to Jesus had a long pedigree, we see it in the Gospels already, especially the Gospel of John.37 One finds a similar confluence of God and Son earlier in the mid-second century Epistula Apostolorum (a text most probably originating in Egypt in Hellenistic Jewish Christian circles, and thus showing how the roots of the problematic Christological formulations of Nicaea were already present earlier) 3: “3. We know this: our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (is) God and Son of God, who was sent from God, the ruler of the entire world, the maker and creator of what is named with every name, who is over all authority (as) Lord of lords and King of kings, the ruler of the rulers …” – using the same kind of imperial language (emperor and Caesar) as in the Roman Empire for Christ, but also creating a problematic conceptualisation of the relation between “Father” and “Son.”
With this as context of the language of the Nicene disputes and the Creed we come to the “sideshow”: None of the commentators on Nicaea mention that the Council occurred at the same time as the beginnings of the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.38 (A note on the history of the Council and the building of the basilica: of the Council of Nicaea we have no contemporary historical records, we have to draw on later writings that reflect on the Council and the making of the Creed: mainly Eusebius’s encomiastic addresses, the laudatory language with which Eusebius celebrated Constantine’s achievements with “Nicaea,” The Life of Constantine and Praise of Constantine, to which latter is appended the short text, On the Sepulchre, some letters of Constantine sent after the Council, and the vast collection of correspondence to and from Athanasius). I have suggested that a link existed between Constantine’s insertion of the homoousios clause in the Nicene Creed and his interest in martyr theologies and cults, the latter most clearly seen in his promotion of the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Since the founding of this church, its cult, its defined centrality to the Christian world took place simultaneously to the Council of Nicaea (agreement towards its building preceded the Council, and the building followed immediately on the Council), the history of the establishment of this cult centre is of immense significance to making sense of what the Council and its Creed meant, or achieved.
In short, the basic history of the founding of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in connection with the Council of Nicaea goes like this:
Although Licinius was a co-signatory to the 313 CE Edict of Milan allowing Christianity (and any religion one might choose) to be professed in the Empire, he and Constantine soon began to fall out leading to an on-going civil war between the two, eventuating in his defeat at the two battles of Adrianopolis and Chrysopolis in 324 CE (ending the decade of difficult relations between the two) with the subsequent execution of Licinius in 325 CE on suspicion of plotting against Constantine. With this, Constantine had conquered the Eastern Roman Empire to reunite the Empire for the first time since the elevation of Maximian as co-emperor by Diocletian in 286 and immediately found him in possession of a part-Empire embroiled in a conflict that he now set out to quiet. After his letters to Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, and his priest, Arius, failed to have the desired effect, Constantine called the Council of Nicaea (initially planned for Ancyra, but moved to the lakeside city of Nicaea where Constantine had an imperial palace) to settle the dispute.
An important insight into the elements guiding the unfolding of events is provided by Eusebius who took pains to depict Licinius as a tyrant who persecuted the Christian church. Hence, his exaltatory tone in the Life of Constantine 3.3.1–3 in describing how Constantine had an image of himself with the cross (the “Saviour’s sign”) above his head installed at the entrance to his palace, while depicting Licinius as the hostile and inimical beast, in the form of a dragon (echoing Isa. 27:1):
[T]herefore the Emperor also showed to all, through the medium of the encaustic painting, the dragon under his own feet and those of his sons, pierced through the middle of the body with a javelin, and thrust down in the depths of the sea. In this way he indicated the invisible enemy of the human race, whom he showed also to have departed to the depths of destruction by the power of the Saviour’s trophy which was set up over his head.39
Licinius’s execution occurred in the same year as the finding of the tomb of Christ and the true cross, and the two events were mythologised into a homology when Constantine had the encaustic painting described above installed in his palace. So, the foundation of a new omphalos of the world in Jerusalem represented the establishment of order out of chaos, the defeat of the tyranny of the ungodly.
It is in this context that the bishop of Jerusalem, Macarius, made his move to convince Constantine to build a basilica on the site of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection; at stake, for him, was an attempt at elevating the status of the bishopric against those of Gaza and Caesarea. Whether his communications with the emperor preceded the Council or took place at the Council, is not known, but Constantine’s decision to instruct the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to be built coincided with the Council. The exact order of events and details is difficult to establish: Eusebius describes the building of the Holy Sepulchre in Life of Constantine 25–40, making, incidentally, no mention of the role of the dowager empress, Helena Augusta, in some of the key moments of the establishment of the Holy Sepulchre and the cult arising with it (according to the Legend of the True Cross, she was instrumental in its finding and instituting its veneration as relic), but his description (detailed though it is) needs to be correlated with other, later, sources to get an accurate impression of the events surrounding the establishment of the cult of the Cross tied with the Holy Sepulchre – Constantine’s letter to Macarius, bishop of Jerusalem; Cyril of Jerusalem’s Lenten Lectures/Catecheses; Egeria’s Itinerarium; Sozomen’s Ecclesiastical History. Constantine ordered the church built and furnished ample manpower (in military personnel and craftsmen, Life of Constantine 3.31.2) to achieve this, with the injunction to build the most magnificent church of all on the spot.40 Local legend had probably preserved knowledge of where the site of crucifixion had been (that is, buried under the earthworks supporting Hadrian’s temple of Aphrodite),41 and thus Constantine gave orders to the temple to be demolished and the site excavated (Life of Constantine 25–28). In the course of the excavations the rock of Golgotha (“Testimony to the Saviour”) and the rock tomb (the “victory of the Saviour”) were laid open, and following that, a monumental structure was erected over the “sacred cave” (i.e., the tomb of Christ) and over that a big temple-like structure (what is now called the Rotunda). Facing that, across the open courtyard (in one corner of which was the visible remnant of the rock of Golgotha) was the main basilica, which was called, quite appropriately in this context, the martyrium. That the whole church complex contained the place of death (the Rock of Golgotha) and tomb of Jesus Christ, converted the Church itself and its liturgies into a martyr cult of the highest order.42
The establishment of the great basilica in Jerusalem, the Martyrium with the Sepulchre and Anastasis, with the elaborate liturgies performed there, was in essence a celebration of victory – military, but clothed in the language of metaphysics:
(16) … In the Palestinian nation, in the heart of the Hebrew kingdom, on the very site of the evidence for salvation [i.e., the Lord’s sepulchre – GvdH], he outfitted with many and abundant distinctions an enormous house of prayer and temple sacred to the Saving Sign [i.e., the cross – GvdH], and he honored a memorial full of eternal significance and the Great Savior’s own trophies over death with ornaments beyond all description. (17) In the same region, he recovered three sites revered for three mystical caves, and enhanced them with opulent structures. On the cave of the first theophany, he conferred appropriate marks of honor; at the one where the ultimate ascension occurred he consecrated a memorial on the mountain ridge; between these, at the scene of the great struggle, signs of salvation and victory.
Eusebius, Praise of Constantine 9.16–1743 (The online translation at New Advent, Oration in Praise of Constantine,https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2504.htm , renders the last sentence even more tellingly: “and celebrated his mighty conflict, and the victory which crowned it, at the third.”)
The ambiguity (whose mighty conflict? whose victory? Christ’s or Constantine’s?) suggests a conflation of Christ and Constantine, given the tenor of the text overall. See also the rhetoric of Eusebius’s attached text, On Christ’s Sepulchre, which is a theological justification in imperial terms of the high status and veneration of the Holy Sepulchre: it is simultaneously an exposition of the Nicene doctrine of the two natures of Christ;44 it ends with the following: “For all these reasons, then, it is reasonable that you have heeded these manifest proofs of the Savior’s power and have displayed to all men, believers and non-believers alike, a house of prayer as a trophy of His victory over death, a holy temple of a holy God, and splendid and great offerings to the immortal life and the divine kingdom – memorials of the All-Ruling Savior entirely fitting and suitable for a victorious sovereign.”45 The parallel between and conflation of Christ as All-Ruling Saviour and Constantine as all-ruling emperor shines through the text.
The Council of Nicaea that met in that very year, was in effect a celebration of Constantine’s victory in Eusebius’s account of it:
(2) Let no jealous enemy ruin our prosperity; now that the war of the tyrants against God has been swept away by the power of God the Saviour, let not the malignant demon encompass the divine law with blasphemies by other means. For to me internal division in the Church of God is graver than any war or fierce battle, and these things appear to cause more pain than secular affairs. (3) When therefore I won victories over enemies through the favour and support of the Supreme, I considered that nothing remained but to give thanks to God, and to rejoice also with those who had been liberated by him through our agency (Eusebius citing Constantine’s opening speech at the Nicene Council where he actually presided).
Life of Constantine 3.12.2–3
If one of the issues the Council had to settle concerned the resolution of the Arian controversy and the definition of the divine nature of Christ, it is clear what was at stake for Constantine: if he was victorious because of the cross (i.e., the cross standing in for the exalted Christ), and bore the cross on his head (on the crown?), then a truly divine Christ of equal divine nature to God was the guarantor of Constantine’s own authority and the foundation of a hierarchical imperial system.
5 Conclusion
The argument I followed in this essay is that the whole theological discourse that ensued in the Arian conflict and eventually the Council and its Creed, is embedded in a cultural framework of defining access to and contact with divinity. If one would ask what Constantine really wanted to get out of the Council and its Creed, it is, of course, he needed a pax deorum and homonoia in the eastern provinces. But I want to argue that the real prize for Constantine and for which the Council suited him, is a fully divinised Christ to authorise his imperial authority. The event of its commissioning, the rooting of the site in the “place of victory,” the Church of the Holy Sepulchre becoming the central orientation point for Christians – witness the dramatic pick-up in pilgrimages immediately afterwards – in the same manner as earlier cult sites for veneration of martyrs and saints, and functioning in the same manner as the birthplaces of Roman deities like Jupiter (the Psychro Cave in the Dicte mountains in Crete) and Aphrodite (the “Petra tou Romiou,” a geological formation of huge rocks on the coastline near the old city of Paphos on Cyprus) – was a way of anchoring the narrated event in history (something explicitly expressed by Cyril of Jerusalem).46 The involvement of the imperial family in turning Palestine into a Holy Land theme park commemorating the victory of the One who lends authority to Constantine, shows what was at stake. But it also allowed for Constantine to promote the fiction of him being the founder of Christianity.
Acknowledgments
In the conception of the treatment of the topic of Nicaea I had the benefit of insightful conversations with Markus Vinzent and Chris de Wet. I gratefully acknowledge their support and insight. Whatever shortcomings, misconceptions, and mistakes may remain in the article are all on my own account.
“According to some or another principle or framework,” i.e., theory works through redescription, as in the well-known statement by Jonathan Z. Smith (which I will never tire of citing): “To summarize: a theory, a model, a conceptual category, cannot be simply the data writ large,” Jonathan Z. Smith, “Bible and Religion,” in Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 209. This statement immediately precedes a reproduction of Jorge Luis Borges’s short fiction, “Exactitude in Science” (on the art of cartography), showing the uselessness of a map that completely reproduces – on a 1:1 scale – the territory it is supposed to represent.
In all my recent published work I have worked with variations of a theory of discourse and discursive formations derived from the work of Michel Foucault, esp. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge: And The Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith and Rupert Swyer (New York, NY: Vintage, 1982), 31–39; consult, for instance, Gerhard van den Heever, “Of Materiality, Cultic Spaces, and Agency … and Discourse in Between: The Entanglement of Religious Space, Discourse, and Practice in Two Case Studies -- Two Mithraea and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,” J. Early Christ. Hist. 13, no. 3 (2023): 66–67,
Hans G. Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age, trans. Barbara Harshav (Princeton, NJ; Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2002), vii, referencing Hayden White. Since this essay is concerned with historiography, I will just gesture to recent work in which I unpacked my understanding of critical historiography: Gerhard van den Heever, “Twilights of Greek and Roman Religions: Afterlives and Transformations – A Response,” J. Early Christ. Hist. 10, no. 2 (2020): 109–111,
Derived from a summary of the voyages of Columbus: Carl F. Rohne and Michael J. Galgano, “Christopher Columbus in the Americas,” EBSCO Knowledge Advantage, 2022,
In this regard, the work of Hayden White is foundational: according to White, history writing is fundamentally narrative, using literary tropes (comedy, tragedy, romance, satire) to structure past events into meaningful stories, blurring lines between history and fiction by revealing how emplotment, argument, and ideology shape our understanding of the past, essentially treating history as a linguistic and imaginative construction, not just facts, Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, 40th anniv. ed. (Baltimore, MD; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). See also critical theoreticians of history like John Tosh, The Pursuit of History. Aims, Methods, and New Directions in the Study of Modern History, 5th ed. (Abingdon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), in similar terms as White: “Our destiny is disclosed in the grand trajectory of human history, which reveals the world today as it really is, and the future course of events. This belief requires a highly schematic interpretation of the course of human development, usually known as metahistory,” 23–24; Alun Munslow, The New History, History: Concepts, Theories and Practice (Abingdon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018),
See the remarks on this particular phrase in Markus Vinzent, “Nicaea 325 – The ‘Most Important Creed in Ancient Eastern Christianity,’ ” Relig. Theol. 32, no. 3–4 (2025): 239–253,
“Restoring the Image: Theological Anthropology and the Creed of Nicaea | Rowan Williams,” Angelicum (Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas), 3 April 2025, YouTube video, 59:51,
The summary is based on not only watching the video and listening to the address, but also on the running transcript to the video, aided by Google’s AI Overview, and supported by Google’s Knowledge Graph.
From the news reporting it seems as if it was only a short stopover for the purpose of a symbolic celebration and recitation of the Creed. The visit to Iznik (Nicaea) took place on 28 November 2025. See the short reel from EWTN News Nightly,
Andrea Tornielli, “ ‘On the Paths of Unity and Peace:’ Pope Leo XIV’s First Apostolic Journey,” Vatican News, 26 November 2025,
Christopher Wells, “A Look at the Council of Nicaea’s Impact on the Church,” Vatican News, 28 November 2025,
Fr. Nicolas Kazarian, “Why Is Pope Leo XIV’s Visit to Türkiye Important for the Orthodox Church?,” Orthodox Observer, 24 November 2025,
Ironically, or perhaps fittingly (?), to connect the pursuit of unit to the commemoration of Nicaea re-enacts the original purpose of the calling of the Council.
I emphasise “overwhelmingly.” There are essays as well that explore the imperial designs of Constantine with the Council and how it fitted into his celebration of his victory over Licinius to become sole ruler uniting the Roman Empire under a single rule: Hartmut Leppin, “Das angeeignete Konzil. Constantin der Große und Nizäa,” in Nizäa – Das erste Konzil: Historische, theologische und ökumenische Perspektiven, eds. Uta Heil and Jan-Heiner Tück (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 2025), 83–110; H.A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore, MD; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); H.A. Drake, “The Elephant in the Room: Constantine at the Council,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicaea, ed. Young Richard Kim, Cambridge Companions to Religion (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 111–132,
Historically, beyond the immediate Arian controversy, this is a process with deep roots stretching back to Hellenistic Jewish philosophy (e.g., the Alexandrian Middle Platonist, Philo), over various (Platonism-derived) Logos doctrines and theologies (e.g., Justin Martyr), and the proto-Trinitarian theologies of Tertullian and Origen.
See, for instance, in this regard, Teddy C. Sakupapa, “Echoes of Empire: Nicaea’s Legacy and the Call to Decolonise Orthodoxy,” Relig. Theol. 32, no. 1–2 (2025): 11–34,
This in the popular imagination. Historically, officially, the Council was called to settle the Arian dispute that was tearing the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire apart (see the note at the end), the new sole ruler sought to attain homonoia (harmony) in his newly conquered part of the Empire; to settle the Melitian schism; to establish a common date for Easter; and regulate disciplinary issues (these through the twenty canons issued by the Council). That the Arian controversy was so important to settle, had to do with the phenomenon that “theological disputes affected not just the ecclesiastical hierarchy but the local populace as well … These imperial subjects were ‘living in days when strong patriotic feelings could be expressed only through the medium of theological controversy.’ The Antiochene and Alexandrian schools represented not just different theological positions but different nationalities within an ethnically diverse empire. This reality, therefore, makes sense of imperial involvement in theological disputes,” Garrett Ham, “The Achievement of Chalcedon,” God and Man at Yale Divinity (blog), 5 July 2020,
The truth is that the Council and its Creed was anything but a final waystation: the instability of the Creed in its various iterations and additions by subsequent councils and bishopric sees up to and beyond the Council of Chalcedon shows that “Nicaea” did not end to any satisfactory manner the strident debates; also, for all of its “ecumenical” character, “Nicaea” was also not that, since the problems addressed by the Council were mainly internal squabbles originating in Egypt but affected mainly the eastern provinces of the Empire. And eventually, “it was less the belief of either Alexander of Alexandria or Athanasius that made its way into the West, but rather the interpretation that the bishops of Rome, like Liberius and later Damasus, would give Nicaea,” Vinzent, “Nicaea 325,” 9–12.
Which is why it is called a “mystery,” and why it is jettisoned in African theological thinking about Christ. See the discussions of the problematics of Christology in Singata, “What Does Nicaea Have to Do with Black Theology?”
Wilhelm Weischedel, Der Gott der Philosophen: Grundlegung einer philosophischen Theologie im Zeitalter des Nihilismus, 2 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2013), 88; see pp. 90–92 for the following. The citations are mainly from First Principles and Against Celsus.
Weischedel, Der Gott der Philosophen, 91–92, my translation. Similar conceptual constructions occur in the Christian Gnostic literature of Nag Hammadi, esp. The Apocryphon of John 2–8.
David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance, Mythos: The Princeton/Bollingen Series in World Mythology (Princeton, NJ; Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1998); David Frankfurter, Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity, Martin Classical Lectures (Princeton, NJ; Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2017). In general, local cults and folk religious practices lived on in appropriations or syncretism in emerging Christianity, cf. for Asia Minor, Clinton E. Arnold, The Colossian Syncretism: The Interface Between Christianity and Folk Belief at Colossae (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015 [1995]).
Gerhard van den Heever, “Early Christian Discourses and Literature in North African Christianities in the Context of Hellenistic Judaism and Graeco-Roman Culture,” in The Routledge Companion to Christianity in Africa, ed. Elias Kifon Bongmba, Routledge Religion Companions (New York, NY; Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 75.
Chris L. de Wet, “Christ’s Enslaved Children: Deconstructing the Holy Bondage of Saint Patrick and ʿAḇdā Da-Mšiḥā,” Relig. Theol. 32, no. 3–4 (2025): 311–335,
H.S. Versnel, “Religieuze stromingen in het Hellenisme,” Lampas 21, no. 2 (1988): 111–136; H.W. Pleket, “Religious History as the History of Mentality: The ‘Believer’ as Servant of the Deity in the Greek World,” in Faith, Hope and Worship. Aspects of Religious Mentality in the Ancient World, ed. H.S. Versnel, Studies in Greek and Roman Religions 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 152–192.
John S. Kloppenborg, “Second-Century Constructions of Christianity,” in Religious Inventions: Ancient Mediterranean Practice and the Study of Religion, eds. William Arnal and Erin K. Vearncombe, Studies in Christianity and Judaism 6 (Montreal; Kingston; London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025), 36–68,
On the ubiquity and operations of patronage in Mediterranean society, see Eric C. Stewart, “Social Stratification and Patronage in Ancient Mediterranean Societies,” in Understanding the Social World of the New Testament, eds. Dietmar Neufeld and Richard E. DeMaris (Abingdon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), 156–166; focused on Roman society specifically, see Richard P. Saller, Personal Patronage under the Early Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),
See for instance examples in Lawrence Schiffmann and Michael Swartz, Hebrew and Aramaic Incantation Texts from the Cairo Genizah, Semitic Texts and Studies 1 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992); James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English (Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill, 2002 [1978]); James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Volume 1: Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2009 [1983]).
Theodor Klauser, Christlicher Märtyrerkult, heidnischer Heroenkult und spätjüdische Heiligenverehrung, Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Forschung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Geisteswissenschaften Heft 91 (Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 1960); William Horbury, “The Cult of Christ and the Cult of the Saints,” New Testam. Stud. 44, no. 3 (1998): 444–469,
Horbury, “Cult of Christ,” 444.
On the term and the phenomenon, see the work of Ludwig Bieler,
Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Temple and the Magician,” in Map Is Not Territory. Studies in the History of Religions, Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 23 (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 172–189; Heidi Wendt, At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in the Roman Empire (Oxford; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150–750 (New York, NY; London: W.W. Norton, 1989), 103,
See the Stephen Wilson, ed., Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
On what follows, see Raymond Van Dam, “Imperial Fathers and Their Sons: Licinius, Constantine, and the Council of Nicaea,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicaea, ed. Young Richard Kim, Cambridge Companions to Religion (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 19–42,
Van Dam, “Imperial Fathers and Their Sons,” 27.
Gerhard van den Heever, “From the Textures of Texts to a Christian Utopia: The Case of the Gospel of John,” in Rhetorical Criticism and the Bible. Essays from the 1998 Florence Conference, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Dennis L. Stamps, JSNT Supplements 195 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 297–334, here 314–317.
A more detailed and fuller exposition of the history of the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and its connection to the Council of Nicaea is provided in my study, van den Heever, “Of Materiality, Cultic Spaces, and Agency,” 92–101. I draw on that study here.
Life of Constantine 3.3.2, Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall, trans., Eusebius: Life of Constantine, Clarendon Ancient History Series (Oxford; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 122.
See Jan Willem Drijvers, Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 27 (Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill, 1992), 82–86; and H.A. Drake, “Eusebius on the True Cross,” J. Eccles. Hist. 36, no. 1 (1985): 1–22,
The site is compatible with topographical information in the Gospels, the site having been a disused quarry at the time into which walls rock tombs were hewn. “The most important argument for the authenticity of the site is the consistent and uncontested tradition of the Jerusalem community which held liturgical celebrations at the site until AD 66,” so, Macarius was acting on a living tradition, Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide from Earliest Times to 1700, 5th ed., Oxford Archaeological Guides (Oxford; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008), 49–50.
Eastman, “Martyr Cults,” 225.
H.A. Drake, In Praise of Constantine: A Historical Study and New Translation of Eusebius’ Tricennial Orations, University of California Publications: Classical Studies 15 (Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA; London: University of California Press, 1976), 101,
Drake, In Praise of Constantine, 103–127.
Drake, In Praise of Constantine, 127.
Cyril of Jerusalem, Lenten Lectures (Katēchēseis), Catechesis 13 “On the Crucifixion and Burial of Christ,” 13.4, Leo P. McCauley, S.J. and Anthony A. Stephenson, trans., The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, The Fathers of the Church 64.2 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1970), 6.
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