That Council was held in the city of Nicea in the year 325 under the protection and intimidation of Roman troops. Constantine who wanted to use the religion to bring unity to his empire, insisted that a council of the Christian bishops to be called to resolve for once and for all who Jesus was-God or man-and what Christians had to believe to be Christians.
The conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine changed Christianity. Some, like the teacher Arius and his followers, believed Jesus to have been separate from the father God, while others, under the leadership of Athanasius, insisted that Jesus was, and always had been, God. People in the early centuries of the Christian Church held diverse ideas of who Jesus had been. The book of Acts clearly records the struggle between the Jewish and Greek Christians, who it reports had no small dissention and debate because of their conflicting expectations of what it meant to be followers of Jesus. In the gospel of Mark, Jesus is recorded as having asked his followers who people said he was, and they had a variety of responses. As the influence of Jesus spread, supernatural ideas, expectations and interpretations began to be attached to people's understanding of who he was.
They were Jewish working people who saw their leader in the context of the tradition of the Jewish prophets-Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Jonah, and Micah. We sometimes forget that the earliest followers of Jesus were Jews, not Christians.
The roots of Unitarian Universalism begin at the time of Jesus of Nazareth.
From the video Unitarian Universalism: An Heretical History, produced by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockford, IL, 1995.
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