Here’s another excerpt from what I wrote last night that I may or may not use in my book.

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In the history of the Christian church, synods, or councils, were convened to make determinations about which versions of their sacred stories would be officially sanctioned. The findings of these councils came to be known as the Canon.

Alongside such tasks as determining which books of the Old and New Testament were canonical, these councils also made theological determinations about things like the nature of Christ, and his relationship to God. One of the most important councils in the early Church was the First Council of Nicea in 325, sponsored by Emperor Constantine, who had just lifted the legal restrictions against the practice of Christianity. This was considered the first ecumenical, or world-wide, council since it included bishops from all major Christian communities of the time.

The pivotal decision of the Nicene Council affirmed the doctrine of trinitarianism, which states that God is of one substance, but exists in three persons (or hypostases) as the Father, Jesus, his son, and the Holy Spirit. This step was taken in reaction to an alternate interpretation of the story, Arianism, which stated that Jesus had been created by God, was not of the same essence, and was therefore somehow inferior. The Nicene Creed was adopted by this council, and Arianism was ruled a heresy. Arian was exiled (and some say poisoned) by Constantine and his books destroyed. Though revised slightly by later councils, the Nicene Creed is still in use today by Catholics, Orthodox and some Protestant demoninations. Subsequent church councils followed more or less this same pattern, and whenever they determined something to be part of the canon, they also included rules of punishment for violating teachings of the canon.

Christian canonical materials are an example of the first method of version control, that of creating a fixed format for your stories. This way, rather than repeating and modifying stories among themselves, people may consult directly from the canonical source. More commonly though, ordinary Christians would receive their religious stories through the mouthpieces of the Church, clergy members. Clergy acted as a sort of centralized distribution system for the stories and teachings which had been given a fixed format in the canonical scriptures. The logic went that since all Christians were expected to attend Church services, they would all be exposed to the same versions of the stories.

Of course, this wasn’t always the case in reality, since different clergy members would be adding their own interpretations when they were preaching or administering to their congregations. Clergy, though working for a common cause, are still subject to the same problems as anyone when communicating: those of creating a communicable structure with sequence, emphasis, context, subtext, and dealing their own conscious and unconscious identifications and projections.