Chateau Lloyd

Yesterday was the Feast of St. Nicholas, more popularly known as Santa Claus.   While reimagined as an elf living at the North Pole, the actual St. Nicholas was a bishop of the Church and some claim he punched out the arch-heretic Arius at the Council of Nicea.

The linked article says that there's no contemporaneous evidence of this, the the oldest source for the story is from the 14th Century.  This is consistent with the scholarly rule of thumb that sources closer to historical events are more accurate.

However, there is one giant caveat here, and that is that often individuals who later become significant, are ignored or diminished in their own time.  In the years afterwards, more information becomes available but this is subsequently lost, and so  all we are left with are more distant recapitulations of those stories.

This trait is akin to how scholars approach prophecy, generally assuming that they are all fake, created by snake-oil salesmen to support their made-up religion rather than honest people who are credulously recording remarkable events. 

For example, if a friend of mine writes down that I correctly predicted in August of 2013 that Michigan State would have an incredible run, there is no reason for anyone to doubt that as he has nothing to gain.  Yet bible scholars would, because (to them) such things are highly unlikely.  Clearly my friend is trying to push a cult or something.

In the bigger picture, this points to how people who ostensibly swear by facts and reason are just as emotional and biased as the religious people they disdain.  One of the reasons I entered the Church and began to take its claims seriously was that the logical contortions to explain away all these well-document events was comical.

Simply insisting that the sum of all knowledge has already been found and that miraculous events - which are meticulously documented - is completely illogical.  

So while it's impossible to prove St. Nick didn't bust Arius' chops, we can't rule it out, either.