DID YOU KNOW?
The answer
The surviving records show a council convened over how to speak about the divinity of Jesus, against the teaching of Arius. Its chief product was a creed — plus a common date for Easter and twenty rules of church order. No decision about the Bible's contents appears in anything that survives.
Why it’s interesting
The Nicaea-voted-on-the-Bible story is one of the most repeated claims about church history, and modern fiction gave it a second life. Historians who work on the council keep pointing back at the council's surviving documents, where the canon question doesn't appear.
Scholarly consensus
You can know the Bible.
Not just the stories, but the history, authorship, and scholarship behind it.