Critics of the Nicene Creed routinely characterize it as a Hellenized distortion of the Christian faith. Even N. T. Wright complained about the fourth-century church “trying to make theological bricks without the biblical straw.” This paper argues that the Nicene Creed is rooted in Jewish theology and constructed from “biblical straw,” especially proto-creedal New Testament texts.
(1) Creeds are themselves a feature of Jewish, not Greek (or Roman) religion. The closest thing to a pagan creed is a catechetical Neoplatonic text written about forty years after the Nicene Creed in support of Julian’s attempt to restore paganism. The Jewish “creed” was and is the Shema, the main component of which is Deuteronomy 6:4.
(2) Deuteronomy 6:4 directly underlies 1 Corinthians 8:6, one of the main sources of the Creed’s structural outline (“one God the Father . . . one Lord Jesus Christ”). 1 Corinthians 8:6 is itself an early Christian creedal restatement of the Shema. The Nicene Creed’s adaptation of 1 Corinthians 8:6, with the added description of the Father as the “Maker of all things visible and invisible,” reinforces its grounding in the Jewish monotheistic worldview.
(3) Another important source of the Creed’s framework is Matthew 28:19. The Creed’s opening words, “We believe,” followed by “in [eis] God the Father,” “in [eis] one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” and “in [eis] the Holy Spirit,” alludes to the confession of faith expressed in the Great Commission command to make disciples and “baptize them in [eis] the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” As early as the Didache, the wording of Matthew 28:19 was presented in Christian writings as a baptismal confession of faith.
(4) The outline and much of the content of the Nicene Creed had already been expressed in the writings of several ante-Nicene fathers, who drew on the apostolic writings. The Nicene bishops, tasked with responding to the fourth-century Arian heretics, notably echoed passages in writings of Irenaeus and Tertullian directed against late second-century heresies.
(5) Practically every line of the Nicene Creed, excluding its quotations of Arian assertions, derives from the NT. Elements of the Creed, including those already mentioned, derive from Matthew, Luke, John, and Paul. Thus, the Creed is highly representative of the whole NT canon. This observation also applies to the expanded form of the Creed from 381.
(6) The one element of the Nicene Creed lacking verbal origin in the NT is its description of the Son as homoousion tō patri (“consubstantial with the Father”). In context, the much-debated homoousios sought to protect the church’s monotheistic position and to represent faithfully NT teaching about Christ. In particular, homoousion tō patri echoes monogenous para patros, “only Son from the Father,” in John 1:14. Thus, although the word homoousios derived from Greek thought, the Nicene Creed deployed the word in the service of a staunchly biblical theology.