Arius
c. 256 – 336 · Libya
Arius is on this site because the church can't tell its story without him. He was an Alexandrian priest who taught that the Son was created by the Father — that there was a 'when' when the Son was not. It was a tidy solution to the problem of how Jesus can be God without there being two Gods, and it nearly won. Half the empire's bishops backed some version of it for fifty years after Nicaea condemned him in 325. Athanasius and the Cappadocians had to fight him for two generations. The Nicene Creed exists in the form it does because of Arius. You can't understand 'one in being with the Father' without knowing what it was rejecting.
Primary source for this figure.
— Athanasius, De Synodis 15-16
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