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They explained that what happened when the Council of Nicaea took place, the Roman government itself is now accepting Christianity as the official religion. That particular sect.
Of course, we immediately have yet another problem with Yusuf Estes' understanding of history, and that is that the Christian religion, or a form of Christianity anyways, became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380, not in 325 under Constantine.
That just simply isn't what was going on. Christianity had become a religio licita in 313, and certainly Constantine was showing great favors toward Christianity, but this was not the point in time where Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire.
His dates, once again, are inaccurate.
So this is good news for the Christians in a way, but now there was compromises. One of the compromises was they had to change the date of the birthday of Jesus to become the 25th of December, which coincided with the birth of a god called Mithras.
Interesting.
At this point we enter into pure, sheer fantasy. This is where the wheels completely come off, and wild conspiracy theories, aliens coming down from spaceships, that kind of level of argumentation starts becoming the norm.
The fact of the matter is that nothing whatsoever took place at the Council of Nicaea regarding December 25th or Mithras or anything like it. If Dr. Estes would like to try to document this, then I would challenge him to do so from meaningful sources, not from his website, not from some fanciful book, but from original sources.
For example, I've never done this before, but sitting over here, see right over there, there they are, here are the Antonicing Fathers, here is the volume of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, here are the other volumes, other 27 volumes are on the shelves back there behind Al-Qurtubi, for those of you that recognize that particular set.
There's the references, show us, document it. The fact of the matter is there was no such discussion. In fact, and I didn't bother to take the time to go back over this, I had done a study of this a little while back, but my recollection is that it is Christians who are the first ones to mention December 25th, and at the earliest, dating for anything regarding Mithra.
And December 25th is long after Christians were already using that date, toward the end of the 4th century. So, in reality, it's probably the other way around, that because Christianity was on the rise, these pagan cults, which were on decline, tried to pattern themselves after the Christians, rather than the other way around.
I know many people just assume that December 25th is a pagan date, blah, blah, blah. You actually start pushing that, you start looking into it, and we've accepted a lot of really bad argumentation along those lines.
At least some people have, I haven't. But be that as it may, again, just totally fallacious argumentation, no basis whatsoever for accepting this kind of assertion by Eusebius. He's simply wrong.
Another thing they had to do is to implement another feast or festival, called the Feast of Ishtar. And this is the goddess of fertility. This is why they have the reference here now to the eggs, and to the rabbits, because they multiply quickly.
So, it was a fertility festival from the goddess Ishtar, which we today call Easter. That's where your Easter eggs, your bunnies, and all the rest of it come from. This has nothing to do whatsoever with Christianity.
Now, most of the Christians know this. Most of the knowledgeable Christians, they know this, and certainly the scholars in Christianity will acknowledge that immediately. This is something that is no part of Christianity.
Agreed, Ishtar has nothing to do with Christianity, but neither does anything that was just said have much to do with history. There was nothing in the Council of Nicaea about Ishtar, there was nothing about bunnies or eggs, or a celebration of Ishtar, or anything of the kind.
Again, this is pure fantasy, completely bogus, cannot be documented from any historical sources. The reality is that there had been a controversy over religious celebrations, specifically of one to celebrate the resurrection of Christ.
But that had taken place in the second century, and there was division between Eastern and Western churches as to what methodology was utilized to determine the date for the celebration of the resurrection of Christ.
This is called the Quartodeciman Controversy. And while it's very fascinating, Victor, Bishop of Rome, Irenaeus, was involved with this, and so on and so forth, it demonstrates that this was a matter of discussion in regards to the resurrection of Christ, the date of the specific date of the resurrection of Christ, and how to determine it, and its relationship to Passover, and dating methodologies, things like that.
Muslims should be familiar with all this because of the fact they use a different calendar, and hence know something about how those things can become very complicated. But this was in the second century.
This has nothing to do with Nicaea, in the sense of establishing any kind of... Again, this is in the context of Esther saying these were compromises they had to make, baloney, not a shred of evidence for it, completely wrong, false, fabricated.
And so why is a man who claims to be a foreign minister, a former Christian minister, presenting pure fabrications as if they're the truth? Again, I take you back to the very first part of this video series.
Put yourself in my position if you're a Muslim. If I claim, now that I'm a Christian, that I was a former Muslim, and I'm presenting this kind of fanciful history of Muhammad, if I make things up about Muhammad, or I give the wrong dates, I put, you know, well, Muhammad wanted to do this because he felt badly about what he did here, and in reality he hadn't even done that yet, how much credibility would you give me?
Why is Yusuf Estes on the Dean Show? Why are his videos all over YouTube? Why are they being watched by Muslims? When on this subject, we have yet to see a meaningful presentation made, and we are seeing error after error, and more are coming.
Now, another thing that took place was to decide which books of the Bible would be now canonized, and that's where this expression comes from. At that time, that's when the Catholic Church said, this is what the Bible will be, and that's it, finished.
Don't argue about it anymore, because they used to argue about which books, put some in, take some out. But even the Catholic Church, over a period of time, took out the Book of Revelations, and then put it back in, and then took it out, and put it back in.
This is not our subject today, but I'm just letting you know that many things took place at that council. It wasn't just that they said this reference to the Trinity.
Once again, we have the common mythology, which still is mythology, that the Council of Nicaea had something to do with the canon of Scripture. Again, completely false. Not a single shred of historical evidence to substantiate this.
Dr. Estes obviously has never read anything about the Council of Nicaea, other than his own website, and the canon of Scripture was not a part of the discussion. By the way, it's the Book of Revelation, not Revelations, and I have no idea what he's talking about when he says that the Catholic Church put it in, took it out, put it in, took it out.
That doesn't make any sense either. Once again, purely fictional material. Just this past week, and for those looking at this at a later time, this would be about the third week of June 2008, an excellent article was posted on my blog.
I didn't write it, one of my compatriots did, on the subject of this common mythology about the Council of Nicaea having something to do with the canon of Scripture. I likewise wrote an article for the CRI Journal called What Really Happened at the Council of Nicaea that also dealt with this common mythology.
And so, look at the scholarly materials, look at the actual sources from that time period, and you will see that, once again, Eusebius is presenting as fact that which is nothing but fiction.