Was Jesus made the Son of God by a vote at the Council of Nicaea?
Dan Brown says that Constantine
commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ's human traits and embellished those gospels that made him godlike.
But Constantine could not have embellished the Gospels if he had wanted to. As long ago as the second century, there were already far too many copies in circulation. By the fourth century, there were hundreds of copies, maybe thousands. It would have been quite impossible to call them all in and change them.
And what Dan Brown does not tell us is that the Gospels that are in our Bible today describe Jesus as a fully human figure. He gets hungry, tired, angry, sad, happy, and lonely. If you were out to suppress any idea of Jesus's humanity, you really would not want to include these Gospels.
The process by which some documents were rejected, while others were accepted as authoritative, and became part of today's Bible, was a long and complicated one. It began long before the Council of Nicaea, and went on long after.
The four Gospels and Paul's letters were accepted almost as soon as they were written. Other documents, although they were widely used, took much longer to be universally accepted.
In 367 AD, a church leader called Athanasius - who had opposed Arius at Nicaea, produced a list of New Testament books. For the first time, this list was the same as the one we have in the Bible today.
The Church officially recognised the full list of New Testament books at the Synod of Carthage, in 397 AD - that is, more than seventy years after the Council of Nicaea.
Dan Brown's central ideas are that Constantine had Jesus made into the Son of God by a vote at the Council of Nicaea, and that Constantine chose which books to include in the Bible, to support this decision, for his own political reasons.
But we have seen that Christians had believed that Jesus was the Son of God from the earliest days - nearly three hundred years before Nicaea. However, it took them several hundred years to work out exactly what this meant.
This debate began long before the Council of Nicaea, and went on long after it. It wasn't brought to a conclusion until the Council of Chalcedon, in 451 AD.
And we have seen that it just is not accurate to say that eighty Gospels were considered for inclusion in the Bible: the four Gospels that are in the Bible today had been accepted as authoritative for nearly two hundred years before Nicaea. There never was a time when there were dozens of different Gospels competing to get into the Bible.
As the first 'Christian' Emperor; as the Emperor who made Christianity tolerated in the Roman empire; and as the one who called the Council of Nicaea, Constantine was important. But he did not change what Christians believed about Christ, and he did not choose which Gospels were included in the Bible. Constantine was an important Roman Emperor - but he was not as important as Dan Brown suggests, and he did not do what Dan Brown says he did.