DE: You insist that the Bible is infallible, yet you reject the Doctrine of the Trinity. What do you make of the fact that the Canon of Scripture was established at the Council of Nicaea, which also formalised the Doctrine of the Trinity?
Ed: This is a common claim, but it’s not true.
The Council of Nicaea in 325 ad produced the Nicene Creed, which established the Trinity as the doctrine of the orthodox church. The Council did not consider the ‘canon of Scripture’—the list of the books of the Bible. The claim that it did stems from a spurious 9th Century manuscript.
The generally accepted canon, which you’re likely to find in your Bible, consists of the 39 books of the Old Testament and 27 books of the New Testament. Jewish historians confirm that the Old Testament canon was already established by the time of Christ. The first known list of the New Testament canon is contained in the Easter Letter of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in 367 AD.
However, there is abundant evidence that the New Testament canon had been fixed long before this. This includes the sheer number of manuscripts of the ‘canonical’ books; references in early church writings to the books in the New Testament; internal evidence (where books refer to each other as scripture, for example 2 Peter 3:16); consistency with the Old Testament (the New Testament books are full of references and commentaries on the Old Testament books and together they present a unified message); and fulfilled prophecy (for example Matthew 24:15–22).
Athanasius’ Easter Letter was written at a time of tension within the church, when there were pressures to disregard some of the genuine books and accept other books (which he calls ‘apocryphal’). It seems that the letter was simply a defence of the established canon.
There is no meaningful link between the canon of Scripture and the doctrine of the Trinity.