Next year will mark 1,700 years since the Council of Nicaea (325), the first ecumenical in history, after the Emperor Constantine had given freedom of worship to the Christian faith, a very new social phenomenon that had permeated good part of the society of the Roman empire. Emerging in Palestine within Judaism, it had quickly differentiated itself. It was not a “religion” with the elements of that time regarding worship, faith and life. It was not a philosophy either, although there were things in which it was similar. It was a new phenomenon and, as such, unknown. And, perhaps for that very reason, persecuted.
The Ateneu Universitari Sant Pacià (AUSP) has joined the study movement that this anniversary encourages and has made it an object of research by the faculties that comprise it. On April 18 and 19, it will organize an international conference on this topic. Furthermore, the anniversary has also been the reason for the inaugural lecture of this course at the AUSP, which I gave under the title Reflections and questions surrounding the Council of Nicaea of 325 and where I showed the questions raised by the birth of the Christian faith, the change that Nicaea represents when the Church stops being persecuted and how it adapts to the new situation. I made people aware of the care that must be taken with the sources that provide us with information and I noted how it should be contrasted with the maximum scientific rigor. An exciting study to understand the history and value the Christian faith from birth to today in the service of people and a more just world. Honest return to original sources helps.
For this reason, it is difficult to find statements that say that Christian beginnings were subject to the dilemma “baptism or execution”, coming from a work by C. Nixey (2018) that places Christian origins in a shadow, a darkness full of terror that forced to receive a baptism in exchange for life. A strange situation in which the one who had been persecuted was now even more of a persecutor and used the power he supposedly had to force a baptism without taking into account that, without conversion, it could not produce any effect at all. There are many scholars who have questioned the reading of the sources made in this work, as well as the research method, very little contrasted, which reaches supposed conclusions that shed light on things completely hidden throughout history until now.
Rather, today historical research is unanimous when it affirms that the Christian Church spread strongly because it was a universal phenomenon, derived from the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, which revealed God as father of the whole world, which gave a dignity equal to Anyone. The consequence was the exercise of charity not only among its members, but towards the entire world. Only that could be a guarantee that whoever wanted to take part would not do so to enjoy this benefit, but rather for a true conversion of heart, a condition for baptism.