Glenn Beck cannot be trusted with Christian history

Beck may have a little more going for him when he talks about America's Founding Fathers, but he hasn't done his homework on Christian history.

Wrong about the Council of Nicaea? Check.
Wrong about the Apostles' Creed? Check.
Wrong about the Nicene Creed? Check.
Wrong about the timeline behind the canon of the Bible? Check.
Wrong about Constantine? Check.
Wrong about the Dead Sea Scrolls? Check.

Mark Shea brings it home:

"Also, just to be clear: Constantine did not agree with the Council of Nicaea. As Caesar in charge of an Empire that was being rocked by controversy over the Arian heresy, he demanded the Council meet and settle the question for the sake of keeping peace in his dominions, but when the time came for him to be be baptized (people often delayed baptism till the end of their lives at this time), he chose to be baptized by an Arian priest. In fact, after the Council of Nicaea, the Catholics who had carried the day at the Council found themselves continually harrassed and persecuted by the Imperial Court, which tended to prefer Arianism and semi-Arianism as the sensible compromise position and to view Trinitarian Catholics as extremists. Athanasius, the champion of the Council’s teaching, was exiled five times and falsely accused of murder in an attempt to shut him down. (He dramatically produced the supposed victim of his murder, alive and well, in one of the great courtroom scenes of antiquity). The notion that the winners wrote the history after Nicaea is something only a person utterly ignorant of history—somebody like Glenn Beck, for instance—could believe."

Thanks to Peter Sean Bradley at "Lex Communis" for the find.

Meanwhile, Slublog has a gimlet eye on another kind of bias.