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Janet Jack wrote:

Dear Sirs,

  • Was 1 John 5:7 used or mentioned at the Council of Nicaea?
  • And, if so, what is the evidence?

Thank you,

Janet

  { Was (1 John 5:7) used or mentioned at the Council of Nicaea and, if so, what is the evidence? }

John replied:

Hi, Janet —

The Council of Nicaea was convened some six or seven decades before the Canon of Scripture had been determined, so while it relied on Scripture, it relied more heavily on Apostolic Tradition.

Some of John's letters, just like parts of the Old Testament, were actually disputed. Not every local Church accepted them.

The first Council of Nicaea I met in 325 A.D. but it was the Council of Rome in 382 A.D. that gave us the first official canon of Scriptures. About a decade later, the Council of Hippo in 393 A.D. and Councils of Carthage in 419 A.D. gave us the same list or canon; all of these were local councils, thus the canon became part of the ordinary Magisterium.

It wasn't until the Second Council of Nicaea (787) in the eighth century when the Church met in an ecumenical council and again ratified the work of the previous local councils and made the canon of Scripture part of extraordinary Magisterium's Teaching. All of this was long after the First Council of Nicaea had defined the Trinity.

As I said, the First Council of Nicaea, more than likely, relied mostly on Apostolic Teaching which had been handed down from bishop to bishop.

In fact, at the point before a letter could be read in the Church, such as 1st John, it had to be approved by the local bishop. He would read it and make sure the letter agreed with the teaching he received from the bishop who ordained him.

John

Eric replied:

Janet —

This would be an excellent question for Jimmy Akin, who is often a guest on Catholic Answers Live Radio Show/Podcast and has his own iTunes podcast.

Nicaea dealt not with the Trinity per se, but with the deity of Christ. The concept of the Trinity was not birthed by one council at one time; it developed over time. According to Wikipedia, Nicaea covered the deity of Christ; the First Council of Constantinople (359) covered the deity of the Holy Spirit.

The council of Nicaea dealt primarily with the issue of the deity of Christ. Over a century earlier, the use of the term "Trinity" (trinitas in Latin) could be found in the writings of Origen (185 — 254 A.D.) and Tertullian (160 — 220 A.D.), [83] and a general notion of a divine three, in some sense, was expressed in the second and third-century writings of Polycarp, Ignatius, and Justin Martyr. [84] But the doctrine in a more full-fledged form was not formulated until the Council of Constantinople in 360 A.D. [85]

First Council of Nicaea

Even if we were to grant that the verse might be appealed to prove the deity of Christ, it remains true that the comma never appeared in the original Greek (or Syriac) manuscripts, and when it did appear in Greek, it was many centuries later and it was the Greek speakers who basically ran the council, so it's unlikely they would use it to prove their point.

Of course, we don't know what really happened for sure, since we have no complete transcript of the proceedings, although we do know that St. Nicholas socked Arius.

Eric

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