The Nicene Creed is often spoken of in a way that makes it sound like a single, clearly documented text, but there are two creedal formulations central to this topic.
The original creed composed at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, and the later Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (often just called “the Nicene Creed” in liturgical use), traditionally dated to the First Council of Constantinople in 381 CE. What we recite in most Christian traditions today is the second, longer version, which clarifies the Holy Spirit, the Church, baptism, and the life to come.
The shift from the 325 text to the 381 text is not simply an editorial update: modern scholarship suggests the 381 text may be an independent creed, probably rooted in pre-existing baptismal formulas, rather than a direct expansion of the 325 text. There is still debate on exactly how and when it was first promulgated.
At the First Council of Nicaea (June 325 CE), bishops gathered primarily to address the Arian controversy—disputes about the relationship of the Son to the Father. They produced a creed that affirmed the Son as “of the same substance” (homoousios) with the Father, countering Arian theology. This creed ended with a series of anathemas against specific Arian formulations.
While later generations assumed that the expanded creed used in the East and West was simply a revision of the 325 text, twentieth-century research revealed a more complex development. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381) is likely to have emerged out of a broader baptismal tradition and formalized at Constantinople, even though the earliest surviving reference to this version in council records does not appear until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE.
Both councils took place in Greek-speaking regions of the Eastern Roman Empire—Nicaea in what is now northwest Turkey, and Constantinople (modern Istanbul) as the imperial capital. Greek was the lingua franca of theological discourse and creedal formulation in this era.
Unlike the New Testament, where thousands of manuscripts enable detailed textual criticism, the creeds are not preserved in the same type of textual corpus. There is no huge family of creed manuscripts that can be easily categorized by text-type (such as Alexandrian, Western, or Byzantine) like we do with the Bible. Instead, the textual witnesses for the creed consist of:
A. Early Greek fragments of creed texts in liturgical or other Christian documents. The earliest known physical manuscript that includes portions of the Nicene Creed dates to the sixth century on papyrus. The papyrus is fragmentary and damaged, but it is widely regarded as the oldest surviving written copy.
B. Later medieval manuscripts (from the 9th–13th centuries and beyond) in Greek and Latin that transmit the Niceno-Constantinopolitan text in a variety of liturgical books. These show small variations but mostly preserve the creed’s wording as used in worship.
C. Patristic quotations in the writings of early church fathers like Eusebius, Athanasius, and Epiphanius, who quote or allude to the creed or related creedal formulas. These quotations help reconstruct the earlier forms before we have manuscript copies. For the original 325 creed, texts preserved in fourth-century church histories and letters serve as de facto textual evidence.
Because the textual tradition for the creed is patchy and indirect—relying partly on quotations in other works and partly on later liturgical manuscript copies—it's not accurate to speak in the same terms used for New Testament text-types. There simply aren’t enough parallel manuscripts of the creed itself to divide them into Byzantine, Alexandrian, or Western types in the standard scholarly sense.
The early physical evidence (like the 6th-century papyrus) is fragmentary, but it corroborates what we already know from patristic writings: that the Nicene formulations were stable and widely disseminated soon after they were composed. Because creeds were authoritative statements of belief rather than scriptures, scribes tended to preserve their text faithfully once the formulation was fixed in church usage.
Patristic quotations of the 325 creed appear in multiple independent sources that agree closely in substance, which strengthens confidence in reconstructing the original text. For example, Eusebius’s letter and Athanasius’s account of the council align in their presentation of the 325 creed’s wording.
By themselves, the manuscript witnesses we possess do not rival the quantity of evidence behind New Testament books. But for the purposes of historical theology—understanding what the councils intended and how the creed was received—they provide consistent and sufficient evidence. The existence of the 6th-century papyrus confirms the creed’s text was in written circulation by that time, and patristic citations reach back significantly earlier.
Variants in the Nicene Creed
Because the creed exists in multiple layers of development and translation, variants do occur. These fall into a few broad categories:
• Versional Variation between 325 and 381: The original 325 text is shorter and concentrates on the Father and Son, with minimal treatment of the Holy Spirit. The later 381 text expands sections on the Spirit, the Church, baptism, and eschatology. These differences are structural and theological, not accidental scribal errors.
• Filioque: One of the most famous variants is the Western addition of filioque (“and the Son”) to the description of the Holy Spirit’s procession. This phrase does not occur in the original Greek creed and was added centuries later in the Latin tradition, becoming a major theological dispute between East and West.
• Minor verbal differences: Liturgical manuscripts differ slightly—for instance, the Greek tradition retains the plural “we believe” while some Latin traditions use the singular “I believe,” and there are small lexical shifts (e.g., word order, case endings). These are typical in transmission and do not alter core meaning.
Because there is no large critical-edition apparatus for the creed comparable to that for the New Testament, our knowledge of variants is pieced together from manuscript collations and patristic quotations rather than systematic unearthing of dozens of manuscript families. But what we do have shows a stable transmission with a few significant theological and liturgical variants that reflect the history of Christian worship and doctrinal emphasis rather than random corruption.
What This Means for Theology and History
The Nicene Creed’s creation was a historically situated act of theological definition, emerging from intense debates in the early fourth century and solidifying in the broader consensus by the late fourth century. We reconstruct its earliest forms from a mix of patristic quotations and later manuscript copies—a testament to how ancient doctrinal texts were preserved outside of a continuous formal manuscript tradition.
The creed’s manuscript evidence is not “weak” so much as fragmentary and indirect compared to canonical scriptures. Its reliability rests on multiple, independent early attestations that converge on the same core confession of faith. Variants exist, but they are explainable within the context of the creed’s transmission through different linguistic, theological, and liturgical traditions, and they rarely affect the central theological declarations about the Trinity and Christ’s divinity.
Are 4th century manuscripts reliable?
4th-century witnesses are reliable for the Nicene Creed, but not in the same way New Testament manuscripts are reliable. The reliability is real, but it rests on a different kind of evidence. Let’s be precise and honest, not pious or defensive.
First, an important clarification.
We do not possess a complete, standalone 4th-century manuscript copy of the Nicene Creed the way we possess 4th-century codices of the New Testament (like Vaticanus or Sinaiticus). That absence sometimes gets exaggerated into suspicion. It shouldn’t.
What we do have from the 4th century is something arguably just as strong for historical theology: multiple independent, near-contemporary witnesses that converge on the same text and theology.
The core 325 Nicene Creed is preserved through documentary transmission, not continuous manuscript copying. The most important witnesses are:
• Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 325–330), who reproduces the creed in his letter to his church immediately after the council
• Athanasius (mid-4th century), who cites and paraphrases the creed repeatedly while defending Nicene orthodoxy
• Council records and synodal letters, embedded in later ecclesiastical histories
• Anti-Arian polemical works, which quote the creed precisely because its wording mattered
These sources are independent, sometimes hostile to each other, and geographically diverse. That matters. When opponents argue fiercely over one word (homoousios), they are not paraphrasing loosely. They are quoting carefully. Polemics are accidental allies of textual reliability.
By historical standards, this is excellent evidence.
For many classical works, scholars are satisfied with manuscripts copied 800–1,000 years later, often from a single textual line. Here, for the Nicene Creed, we have witnesses within decades of composition, written by participants or near-participants, whose arguments collapse if the wording is wrong. That’s not weak evidence; that’s strong evidence of a fixed text.
So, are 4th-century witnesses reliable?
Historically: yes
Textually: yes, within their genre
Theologically: remarkably so
The Nicene Creed is not reliable because we have many manuscripts.
It is reliable because we have early, hostile, independent, and converging witnesses, and because the creed functioned as a boundary marker where wording mattered intensely.