Hello and welcome to Literature and History, Episode 90, Anti-Nicene Catholicism.

In this program, we will consider the very early history of the Catholic Church during

what's called the Anti-Nicene period, or the period of Christian history prior to the

Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. This Council had profound consequences in Christian history.

By 325, Christianity had already been designated as a permitted religion with the Edict of

Milan in 313, and it was the professed faith of the Roman Emperor Constantine. But during

the three centuries before Christianity's first great acumenical council, the religion

was growing in a number of different directions, and the Council of Nicaea was a meeting

designed to stabilize its doctrines and to chart its path forward now that it had made

inroads with the Roman executive branch.

If you've listened to the Literature and History podcast up to this point, you already know

a fair bit about early Christianity. We read the New Testament together and have already

learned about two of Christianity's branch movements during the Anti-Nicene period,

these being Nosticism and Maniquism from reading some of their primary scriptures. But there's

a lot more to the birth of Catholicism than the New Testament and Nosticism and Maniquism.

To get a precursory sense of how much more there is, we could walk into just about any theological

library and glance at the bookshelves. There, in most theological libraries covering

Christianity, we would almost certainly find a ten-volume collection of writings called

the Anti-Nicene Fathers, first published in the 1860s and 1870s. This set of books intended

to be a representative omnipotence of the earliest Christian writings is about 6,500 pages

in length, and it excludes several thousand pages of additional material for the purpose

of brevity, not to mention an ocean of additional historical and archaeological work that's

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