It is certainly accurate to state that at the Council of Nicea, the Christian Bible was formally compiled. I did not use the word "written" for good measure.
Catholics of course paint that as a "Catholic" endeavor while non-Catholics recognize it as a voluntary meeting of significant church leaders... IOW's, a "small c" catholic gathering.
Regardless of what you believe about the RCC and its beginnings, there was no ecclesiastical order similar to the RCC's before Constantine. That order devloped rapidly after him.
FWIW, Constantine's views on salvation were highly unorthodox and unbiblical.
If you want to go forth and claim that the best witnesses from that period come from the Orthodox Church, then I am at a loss. At that time, 325 AD, there was no Orthodox Church. There was Christianity. This religion was administered through the Pope, in Rome, at the time.
No. It simply wasn't. That is revisionist history and even honest Catholic historians consider it as such. The church was not organized around Rome prior to Constantine and certainly wasn't directed from there.
Therefore it does not hold that the early witnesses were created or maintained by the Catholic Church. Many if not most of those earliest mss (before 700 AD) were distributed from or find their roots in Alexandria which really didn't fall under Rome at any point.
The Byzantine mss which come mostly after the split in the 8th century come via the Orthodox Church.
It was not until the Great Schism of the 11th Century, that there became a formal split between Rome and Constantinople.
There was effective division of leadership by the 700's with various periods of unsettled reunification.
For the first fifteen hundred years of Christianity, Christianity was used to refer to the Catholic Church.
Not an answer to the question. Answer the very simple question. How is "Christian" defined and what is the final authority in establishing what a Christian is?
I find it laughable that you think that in a little over four hundred years the Protestant Reformers can feel that they are righteously stating that they are Christians while Catholics are not.
Even Catholic authorities acknowledge a continuum of dissenters (also called heretics) existed from the very start of the RCC.
But I didn't say that Catholics are not. I said simply that one term cannot accurately describe two groups with mutually exclusive opinions about the work and person of Jesus Christ. If Catholicism best meets the biblical definition of "Christian" then the title is yours. If not....
Your history as well as your philology are egregiously skewed in this discussion.
Making declarations is not the same as providing proof. You have heard and believed the RCC version of church history... I've heard it as well. It is generally scrubbed clean to affirm the dogma that RCC is the "true" church. The bottom line problem for that idea is that the early church "pre-Nicean" doesn't bear much of a doctrinal resemblance to the RCC that began to evolve after Constantine.
The more the "church" was disorganized from a human standpoint and made up of local congregations operating autonomously under local leaders and Christ... the more biblical the "church" was. When the "Church" began to organize under men... it became much less biblical.
