Unholy Sh+t: Santa Claus punches a guy for asking if Jesus is his own Daddy because of John 3:16

I was sitting in Sunday school at about nine years old; I immediately noticed a hotplate and a skillet. Even for religious indoctrination, this was an unusual scene. Our teacher told us that today we would be learning about the Trinity. They turned on the hotplate, placed the skillet atop it, then walked over to a refrigerator that was usually for snacks, but this time it was for them to take out a piece of ice.

They dropped the ice into the middle of the skillet and had us all stand around it. 

“Look,” the teacher said, “You can see ice, water, and steam all at once. Even though they are all different and unique substances, they are all still the same: H2O.” 

We marveled at this complexity being explained to us in such a simple way. 

If they had had hotplates or even ice in the fourth century Constantinople, then a whole lot of sh+t might not have gone down the way it did. However, they did not, and that’s nobody's business but the Turks.

Unholy Sh+t: An Irreverent Bible Study

Trinity Sunday

Today’s Reading: John 3:16-18

There are a few texts in the Bible that just about anyone could quote from memory. You don’t need to have ever attended a church service to know them; they exist within the universal lexicon. These verses have permeated pop culture through books, plays, movies, and television. When you think of a wedding, First Corinthians 13 comes to mind, or you probably have Matthew 6:9-13 memorized without even knowing it because we all have heard the Lord’s Prayer a thousand times. But there is one line of text that rises above them all, that even the most ardent from birth atheist could quote without hesitation: John 3:16.

One could argue that it is almost boring to hear the phrase at this point, “For God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”

You’ve seen the verse splattered across sports-ball games, quoted by politicians, and screamed by Bible-Thumpers from street corners.

What you probably don’t know is that this verse created one of the greatest controversies within the early church, which resulted in the assembling of the Council of Nicaea. It would bring about the Great Schism that would divide the Church to this day. So, I encourage you to buckle up for one wild f+cking ride in the history of the Christian Church.

First, let’s contextualize a few little things.

Though John 3:16 is a highly quotable line, it is not found in a sermon or prayer delivered by Jesus. Instead, it happened during a conversation Jesus was having with a theologian named Nicodemus. He was a Pharisee and a member of the Jewish ruling council. In Christianity, the whole concept of the Pharisees has been perverted into them being a group of villains. Much of historical antisemitism is rooted in how Christianity has slowly distorted the role of the Pharisees. In reality, they were scribes tasked with interpreting the Oral Law and Traditions of the Jews. Like me, you probably grew up thinking that they were literalists and legalistic, but that is far from the truth. Their actual job was to help untangle issues of legalism and literalist thinking. 

According to the scriptures, Nicodemus visits Jesus in the middle of the night, and they have a theological discussion about the role of Jesus and what it means to be saved. In typical Jesus fashion, he is speaking in riddles, saying weird sh+t like, “Ye must be born again,” and poor Nicodemus is all, “How can a grown a$$ man enter his mother’s womb to be born a second time?” Great question, Nicky. Jesus hits him back with some rambling diatribe about being born of water and fire. Jesus could have just explained the concept of baptism, which is already rooted in Jewish tradition, and that the Holy Spirit would appear as a flaming tongue, also already part of the Jewish tradition (see burning bush), and Nicodemus probably would have said, “that totes makes sense.” That would have been way too easy for Jesus, so he took the road less traveled with his “Riddle me this, Pharisee” routine.

Needless to say, Nicodemus is very confused, and rightfully so. This is when Jesus drops that famous line, “For God so loved the…” Anyway, you know the rest, but where things get historically dicy is over the use of the word “begotten.” 

In the fourth century, this priest named Arius got the idea that if Jesus is the Son of God, he can’t also be God-God because you can’t be your own dad. He decides that he is more like Hercules, a demigod of sorts, created by God the Father at some point outside of time and then birthed into real-time…

*The muses suddenly appear*

Thalia: Would you listen to him? He's making the story sound like some Greek tragedy!

Terpsichore: Lighten up, dude!

Calliope: We'll take it from here, darling!

My apologies, ladies, but I’m going to keep going if y’all don’t mind *shoos the muses away* anyway, back in Arius’ day, there wasn’t a lot on paper. Yes, we had the gospels; they even had a few more than we currently have today. There were also a lot more letters floating around as well, and not just from Paul. The elements of what would become the Bible were all out there, but there wasn’t a great deal of theology written in stone. Most folks believed in what we now call the Trinity, but it wasn’t as fleshed a concept yet. At least not until Arius and his acolytes began to teach something entirely different.

It should be noted that Arius was not an outlier; he actually had a big following, and many people were converting to his ideas. Eventually, at the behest of Emperor Constantine, the entire church met to hash out their disagreements. According to legend, Arius ended up crossing some line because, according to legend, he got punched Arius in the head by none other than Santa Claus. While it is true that Saint Nicholas of Myra was presented at the council, he was a bishop, and it is unlikely that Arius would have been present, even if his philosophies were being discussed since he was just a priest.

Ultimately, the church emerged with a declaration concerning different doctrines of the faith known as the Nicene Creed; in it, they clarified the concept of begotten. This word no longer just meant that you had a child; it now means that you mystically had a child, and you didn’t necessarily make that child because that child is God. You are God, and you are actually the same God, just different personhoods of that God. However, definitely still the same God, just with different minds, and one of you has a body, and the other one doesn’t have a body. Still, you’ve always existed together throughout all time and eternity, understand? No? What’s confusing about that?

The churches of the East took a more laissez-faire attitude toward the whole thing and didn’t get too bent on splitting hairs about the Trinity or all this begotten business. Instead, they just shrugged and said, “God is a mystery; who can understand it? Here is some baklava!” But over in the West, at the big JC Headquarters in Rome, they were still getting worked up over the whole thing. They began to debate amongst themselves about if Jesus was begotten of the Father, meaning they are coequal, then that means the Holy Spirit was sent by both Daddy and Jesus, and that’s why the Holy Spirit couldn’t do Their thing until Jesus ascended into Heaven, duh!

Unfortunately for the Roman Catholics, that darn creed written to deal with Arius expressly said that the Holy Spirit “Proceeds from the Father.” But why let something as silly as an agreed-upon doctrine of the Church, decided in council, hold them back? So they changed the creed without the consent of any of the other bishops, adding what is known as the Filioque Clause to the Nicene Creed.

To which the Eastern Church said, “The f+ck you are.” 

They fought over this sh+t for a few hundred years before eventually excommunicating each other, thus splitting the Church in two: East from West.

I guess they all should have kept reading past the “God so loved the world” part and the “begotten part” and jumped on over to the less famous and not as quotable John 3:17, which reads, “God isn’t sending his Son into the world to condemn it, but to save it.”

And that’s the Gospel truth.