The Nicene Council called by the Roman Emperor Constantine involved 300 Christian bishops that met at Nicaea, just west of Constantinople, from May to August of 325 A.D. A deacon
in Alexandria named Arius had asserted that Jesus Christ was a separate, semi-divine creature, the first order of creation of God the only true God, Abba, our heavenly Father. As a creature, Jesus became the son of God through both baptism and his earthly ministry of three years to establish the kingdom of God in the world. The priest Athanasius supported the full Trinity of three equal persons of ONE God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. For more than a century after the Council of Nicaea, the Roman Empire alternated back and forth between Arian and Trinitarian conceptions of God. The main source of the council is found in Eusebius' HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH, an eyewitness account of the proceedings. For example, the German missionary Ulfilas(311- circa 382) or Wulfila, took an Arian Gothic Bible to the reputed barbarian German tribes on the borders of the Roman Empire(Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition, 2008).