In Dan Brown’s best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, Sir Leigh Teabing, the eccentric English historian of the Holy Grail, makes the most unhis­torical claim concerning the Council of Nicaea in AD 325:

until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet ... a great and power­ful man, but a man nevertheless. A mor­tal.

Sophie Neveu’s breathless response is: “Hold on. You’re saying Jesus’ divinity was the result of a vote?” Undeterred, Teabing pontificates on without batting an eyelid: “A relatively close vote at that.” He even adds that the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts reveal a human Jesus.

How do we unpack all that? What is history and what is fiction? The short answer is that it is almost entirely fiction. It is true that there was a Council of Nicaea in 325. After that, Teabing gets nothing right. The council was called because a presbyter named Arius, who worked in Alexandria in Egypt, came to the view that Christ is the first created being. About the year 318 Arius was busy preaching that God created Christ, then the Holy Spirit, then the world. Like the moderns day Jehovah’s Witnesses, Arius viewed Christ as the highest of the angels, not the divine Word made flesh. Whatever Arius’s deficiencies as a theologian, he certainly did not teach that Jesus was simply a mortal prophet. Neither side in the debate believed anything remotely as lame as that.

Nor was the vote a relatively close one. We are not sure how many bishops were at Nicaea as no minutes have sur­vived. Eusebius thought that 250 bishops attended the council but Eustathius of Antioch guessed that there were over 270. The historian Sozomen put the figure at 300, as did Athanasius, although he later adjusted this to 318 to match the number of troops that Abraham put in the field (Gen. 14). The emperor Constantine thought that more than 300 were present.

How many supported Arius? The Arian historian Philostorgius thought that 22 bishops were sympathetic to Arius, but his list includes Basil of Amasea who had been dead for some years. Sozomen writes that 17 supported Arius at the opening of the council, but only five bishops refused to sign the creed and/or the attached anti-Arian anathemas. So it seems that Teabing’s mathematical skills rival his expertise in history.

What about the Dead Sea Scrolls? They predate the New Testament, and they simply do not mention Jesus. The Teacher of Righteousness is not John the Baptist, and Jesus is not the Wicked Priest. The Nag Hammadi texts are different, however. They come from the second century and later, and are full of references to Christ. Gnosticism is a dualistic view of life, where spirit is seen as divine, and matter (flesh) as evil. This means that the Gnostics rejected the incarnation, and in the Gnostic scheme of things Christ is a divine spirit, not God-made-man. The Gnostic Christ, like Teabing’s, is a long way from the Christ of the Gospels, but for different reasons.

How, then, do we account for the doc­trine of the Trinity? Clearly, the Bible in both Testaments is strictly monotheistic. There is only one God (Deut. 6:4; Isa. 44:6; Mark 12:29, 32; 1 Cor. 8:4). Yet the New Testament, armed with the first commandment that we are to have no other gods besides Yahweh, declares that a man, Jesus of Nazareth, is also Lord. In fact, Jesus is specifically referred to as God in John 1:1, 18 (NASB is the best text); 20:28; Romans 9:5 (not in the RSV); Philippians 2:6; Titus 2:13; Hebrews 1:8: 2 Peter 1:1; 1 John 5:20.

The emperor Domitian insisted that he be addressed as “Lord and God”, but Thomas willingly and joyfully embraced Christ in the same terms (John 20:28). Domitian was suffering from delusions of deity; Christ was accepting his due acclaim. As the Son of God, he is equal with God (John 5:18); God is eternally the Father of the eternal Son. Christ Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15).

This is a stupendous claim. Christ Jesus is eternal (John 8:58; Rev. 1:8, 17; 22:13), everywhere at the same time (Mt. 18:20; 28:20), unchangeable (Heb.13:8), and able to do all things (Phil. 3:21; Heb. 1:3). He is the creator of the world (John 1:3, 10; Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:2-3, 10) and the judge of all the world (Mt. 25:32; John 5:28-29; 2 Cor. 5:10). He claims to forgive sins in the same sense that God does (Mark 2:1-12), and promises to give eter­nal life to those who trust him (John 10:28).

In the Old Testament, believers are exhorted to call upon the Lord (Yahweh) for salvation (Joel 2:32). In the New Testament, this is applied to Christ (Acts 2:21; Rom. 10:13). God and Christ are both described as the chief cornerstones, a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence (Isa. 8:14; 28:16 and Rom. 9:33; 1 Pet. 2:6, 8).

Christ is David’s Lord and David’s Son at once (Ps. 110:1; Mt. 22:41-46). As man, he is David’s son; as God, he is David’s Lord. Because of this, Christ is not just admired by Christians but worshipped (Heb. 1:6; Rev. 5:12). Suggest to a Muslim that he worships Mohammed, and he will soon set you straight, but the Christian is one who not only obeys Jesus as a true prophet, but bows before him as the Lord of glory.

The Holy Spirit too is set forth as a divine person who can be blasphemed (Mt. 12:31). A lie to the Spirit is a lie to God (Acts 5:3-4). The Spirit does things that only God can do. For example, he was active in creating the world (Gen. 1:2; Ps. 104:30) and he raises the dead (Rom. 8:11). He also knows all things, even the depths of God (Isa. 40:13-14; 1 Cor. 2:10­ 11) and He is everywhere at the same time (Ps. 139:7-10; 1 Cor. 3:16; 6:19). He shares the attributes of Yahweh, the I am who I am, in that he is eternal (Heb. 9:14). In summary, the Spirit of the Lord is the Lord (2 Cor. 3:17-18).

None of this looks like political chi­canery at the Council of Nicaea. Australian journalist Mungo MacCallum maintains that in the realm of politics, stuff-ups explain more of reality than do conspiracies. Nicaea, however, increas­ingly looks like neither. It simply reflects the teaching of the Bible. Often the three persons of the Godhead are mentioned together in Scripture (Mt. 3:16-17; 28:19; 1 Cor. 12:4-6; 2 Cor. 13:14; Gal. 4:6; 1 Pet. 1:2). There is a triadic pattern all through the New Testament — regarding the salva­tion of God’s people, the Father sought it, the Son bought it, and the Spirit taught it. Therefore, the one divine name — not names — covers three persons (Mt. 28:19).

These three persons are not simply appearances of the one person in different guises or forms, as a man may be a pastor, a husband and a father. At the baptism of Jesus, for example, the Father speaks from heaven, the Son is baptized, and the Spirit descends upon the Son in the form of a dove. The roles are not interchangeable. The Spirit is not baptized, and the Father does not appear in the form of a dove.

We cannot fully grasp the mystery of the Trinity, nor can we illustrate it. An orange, for example, can be cut up into three equal parts, but each part is one-third of the whole. Each person in the Trinity, however, is God, not one-third of God. Only the Son (Mt. 11:27) or the Spirit (1 Cor. 2:11) can plumb the depths of God. As Herman Bavinck says: “He can be apprehended, he cannot be com­prehended.”

Hence, as Gregory of Nazianzus put it: “I cannot think of the One without quickly being encircled by the splendour of the Three; nor can I discern the Three without being straightway carried back to the One.” The doctrine of the Trinity is not a plot exposed by a moderns day nov­elist suffering from a form of anti­ Christian paranoia. God has revealed Himself in three Persons, and the appro­priate response to this revelation is praise and worship. An ancient hymn put it rather well:

Laud and honour to the Father,
Laud and honour to the Son,
Laud and honour to the Spirit,
Ever Three and ever One,
One in might, and One in glory,
While unending ages run.