On Nicaean Council Ruins

Ruins of the Church of the Nicaean Council Hidden Underwater (Video Screensave)

Did you know that after the first century apostles died that there was a gradual loss of connection among the churches established by the Apostle Paul and others among the non-Jewish churches?

Before Paul was arrested in Jerusalem and imprisoned in Rome, he established an offering be set up among all the churches he established. The offerings were collected over about a three year period before Paul, along  with representatives from each church, brought the donations to Jerusalem. The donations were for the Apostles to administer. The purpose was to help sustain “the poor” body of Messiah to continue to minister in Israel.

By 318 AD no churches had continued sending financial assistance, even though Paul knowingly paid for delivering it with his freedom.

As he made his journey to Jerusalem to carry the FIRST donation from ALL the Churches, prophets came out warning Paul that if he continued forward, he would be arrested. Paul already knew there would be harsh consequences for him delivering this important financial gift to the Apostles in Jerusalem for sustaining their ministry and for assisting Jewish believers in Israel.

 In Paul’s letters to the churches four out of six times that Paul uses the phrase, “the poor,” he is clearly in context referencing the poor believers in Judea.  One of the remaining two is in reference to himself.  (Ro 15:26, 1 Cor 16:1, 15; 2 Cor 9:1, :12-13). They were of the Jewish people, but were shunned because of faith in Yeshua. It has been much the same today as then and it the reason for much of the lack of financial blessing among the body of Messiah and their ministries in Israel.

As for the Paul, reason to ignore what the “Apostle to the Gentiles” has to say on many other issues has sprung from so many Christians falsely accusing Paul because he did not heed what the prophets were telling him on that last fateful trip to Israel. Maybe that is why prophetic circles continue to drag their heels recognizing all Paul wrote about God restoring Israel. Christian prophets often comment that it was a major failing by the Paul to avoid arrest and ignoring the prophets who warned him not to go to Jerusalem. The prophets didn’t know what Paul knew:  his mission was from God.

The simple truth is Paul had a higher calling from God to take the donations to the Jerusalem Apostles. His prophetic act was to be a biblical-historical example for the Church of the last days to see and reestablish this precedent set by Paul. It was by God’s leading that he do so because it is God’s leading that the Church do the same in the last days.

Some in the Church have already heard the call of God to rise up and begin to reestablish supporting donations to the Jewish Israeli body of Messiah for their ministries and outreaches to other Israelis.

In 318 AD a group of men representing the believers in Israel journeyed to Rome. Several of them were descendants of Jesus’ own family members who were among the leadership of the believers in Jesus in Israel. Their long travel to Rome was to appeal to pope Silvester to institute the donations Paul had originally established among all the churches.

Silvester refused. He did not want split loyalties between Rome and Jerusalem owing to the discovery there were still “Desposyni” leaders within the Israeli Jewish congregation.  Desposyni means “belonging to the Lord” in Greek and it is a term reserved for the family, relatives, and direct bloodlines from Yeshua’s family members. As in the biblical first century, these descendants from Yeshua’s family members would often serve in the leadership of their congregations.  

In 325 AD, Seven years after Rome cut off ties with believers in Israel, the Catholics convened a council a Nicaean church. (Pictured in ruins after discovery in 2014).

At the first Nicaean council, they made the break with the Jewish believers in Jesus official. Deciding on several issues of controversy with the churches, they also dealt with changing the date Easter would be observed. It was the first official, but second act of replacement theology “decoupling” Christianity from its roots and origins established in Jerusalem. There would be many more in history but this officially removed the correlation of Jesus’ death on the Cross from the reality of direct ties to the Passover.

“The bishops decoupled the Christian celebration of Easter from the Jewish Passover calendar. They established the rule that Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox.”

In removing the death of “Lamb of God” from its Passover context, it has ever since made Jews believe this Jesus was a foreign god, not the God who had made covenant with Abram. God warned the Chosen Jewish people from the beginning to have “no other gods before Me.”
The decoupling has continued in Christian history and many in the churches worldwide are deceived by those who continue in this error. God is calling for His people to awake to the truth expressed in His Word, that salvation is the shared blessing of both Jews and non-Jews through faith that only comes by Yeshua, Jesus.

* After writing the above on my Facebook page, I was led into deeper research that yielded historical information relevant to us today. I have used Grok AI and some Google (Gemini) AI togive me summaries of the following research points, and both cite the online material they are pulling from. I am not giving all those citations in this writing but you could easily use AI to trace what I am sourcing in the following.FOR SEVERAL YEARS WHEN ANCIENT RUINS OR ARTIFACTS ARE FOUND related to the faith, I have had a sense that these discoveries are being made because God is drawing attention to what He is going to begin to deal with spiritually. That conviction has been tugging at me ever since I saw the discovery of the Nicaean Council Church.  

The ruins were discovered by a university professor doing aerial photography in Turkey in 2014. It had been underwater as a result of an earthquake in 740 AD. The ruins stayed underwater until it began to emerge on dry land in 2020 due to the water level of Lake Iznik dropping.

There is a persuasive number of evidence to identify this location as the site of the Nicaean Council, including the “writings by the bishop and church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, who personally attended the AD 325 council. . . . Excavations mapped the ruins of Constantine’s summer palace just 100 meters north of the underwater church, perfectly aligning with Eusebius’s description of a multi-stage meeting on the shores of Lake Askanios (now Iznik).” There is also a Vatican painting, a fresco, that pictures bishops gathering “for the Council of Nicaea inside a basilica located outside the walls of a fortified city, situated right next to a lake. . . . The Lake Iznik basilica is the only known fourth-century church in the entire ancient city, matching the unique lakeside placement in the artwork.”
I hope you didn’t get too bored by the details because the church where Nicaean Council in 325 AD and then covered entirely by water in 740 AD was not the only significant thing that happened in 740 AD.  

Three important things took place around this time period:

1. In the seventh century, the Arabs embarked on the conquest of the world in the name of Islam. The Caliphate replaced the Persian Empire and Christian Spain and conquered much of the Byzantine Empire (the ancient Greek city known as Constantinople, now Istanbul. It is called Byzantine, but was built by Constantine and its citizens considered themselves Romans).
     *I find it interesting that Iran, Spain and Turkey are currently dominating our headlines.

2. In 740 AD, the first Archbishop of York, Ecgbert, formally banned Christian clergy and laypeople from eating meals with Jews, marking an ongoing tightening of canonical separation between Christian and Jewish communities in early medieval Europe
     *I find it interesting that Christianity is being currently split into between those who despise Israel and those who support Israel.

3. In 740 AD, the ruler of the Khazar Empire, as a strategic and spiritual decision to unify his semi-nomadic empire (modern-day southern Russia, Ukraine, Crimea, and western Kazakhstan), chose Judaism to stay neutral between the Byzantine (Roman) Empire and the Arab Caliphate. The conversion to Judaism was primarily adopted by the king, the royal court, and the military elite, not the general population.
     Another interesting note here is that the Byzantine (Roman) Empire “seemed to ignore the threat of the new invaders and their religion.” (Islam). Instead, their “political and intellectual elite focused increasingly on the Jews in tracts and legal measures.”  
     *I find it an interesting parallel that has taken place in Europe, the UK and now in North America.

It is eery all the things that took place in or around 740 AD.
First being that the church the Nicaea Council met in 340 AD became submerged, hidden underwater in 740 AD at the same time the Arabs of Islam set their face to conquer the world.
740 AD a British bishop of the Church forbid Christians to have meals with Jews. 
740 AD the Khazars’ leader chose to adopt Judaism in a bid to be neutral to the wars between the Islamist Arabs and the Bysantine Romans.
     *It is interesting to me that what was launched at Nicaea was hidden from view underwater until 2020 when it began to be revealed again.

There is a certain amount of what has happened throughout history to both the Jews and the Christians that could not have been changed. God allowed it for His own purposes with us. I believe this is part of God showing both of us that we are not as faithful or righteous as we think we are in history.

20/20 Vision | Now I believe what has been hidden from us in the past, is rising up so we can see that Christian history is no greater than Israel’s history. It has always been God’s presence or lack of presence in our lives and our nations that has made any of our history something to be proud of.

I see the revealing of the errors of the Nicaean Council in dividing from the Jewish believers in Israel to be spiritually indicative of what God is now restoring. The more we can face our own failures of Christianity, the easier it will become to accept that we have not in the least replaced Israel. Then we will be able to see that God is rejoining us as His spiritually whole family.

Today anti-Semites across America accuse Jews of being Khazars, not the Jews of the Bible but it is a historical accusation against Jews that is ignorant and false. Here is what Grok had to say about the history of this accusation:

“The claim that modern (especially Ashkenazi/Eastern European) Jews are primarily “Khazar Jews” rather than descendants of the biblical Israelites is a long-standing historical hypothesis that has been repeatedly appropriated for antisemitic purposes. It asserts that Ashkenazi Jews descend mainly from the Khazars—a medieval Turkic confederation—whose elite allegedly converted to Judaism, rather than from ancient Judeans/Israelites. This is then used to deny Jewish historical continuity, indigeneity to the Land of Israel, or legitimacy as a people.”

From the historical account, it is easy to see where some of anti-Semitic accusations have blossomed out of what took place in 740 AD. The Khazars were trying to keep out of the battles going on between the Arab Islamists and the Greco-Roman Byzantine. In doing so they laid the foundation for baseless accusations against Jews throughout the remainder of history.

Everywhere anti-Semitism has risen, there seems to be an accusation of Jews being a “ruling elite.” This obviously comes out of the Khazar leaders adopting Judaism in the royal court and military – but not throughout the population which were made of “a large family of languages and various ethnic groups across Asia and Europe. They spoke Turkic – nothing to do with Turkey – a language family of over 35 related languages.

The Ashkenazi Jews were the Jews of Israel in exile in European nations, not entirely north of the Caucasus Mountains in modern-day southern Russia, Ukraine, Crimea, and western Kazakhstan .

The Jews who went into exile, everywhere they went, took with them all the religious practices of Judaism. And although as an everyday spoken language they completely stopped using Hebrew from the 2^nd to 5^th centuries, they retained a remarkably high degree of written, liturgical, and literary knowledge of it.

Khazars had none of that.

UPDATE 8/3/2026 I want to add to this so you can understand the interpretation and perspective I am drawing about how this site was hidden underwater in 740 AD and began emerging into view in 2020.

Christian Anti-Semitism that has risen dramatically in the USA, especially in the past few years, is built “On Nicaean Council Ruins”. Christian anti-Semitism is history that most Christians do not have an inkling of. It is time we all did, so we can go God’s way, instead of siding with the enemy of our souls. We are at a Crossroads that makes it imperative.

What was hidden since 740 AD when an earthquake buried the site of the Nicaean Council in 325 AD in Lake Izkni underwater is now visible. Since 2020 the ruins have emerged from its hidden place, revealed as the lake water has receded.

I believe this conveys a spiritual message too regarding the roots that have been institutionalized in Christianity. Throughout history the poisoned fruit of what was planted in the first Nicaea Council had caused Christian persecution of Jews to arise in nation after nation.

God never sanctioned the Christian persecution of Jews in the exile.* That had been the spiritual heritage of what happened at Nicaea concerning the relationship between Christians and Jews. Now the persecution is not limited to one nation at a time, but has spread throughout the whole Christian world. Islam has furthered the grievances against Jews as it has corrupted the Christian nations they are seeking to overturn politically.

• Zechariah 1:14-16 “Then the angel who was speaking with me said, “Proclaim this word: This is what the LORD of Hosts says: ‘I am very jealous for Jerusalem and Zion, but I am fiercely angry with the nations that are secure in a bad sense. For I was a little angry, but they helped forward wickedness and affliction.’ Therefore this is what the LORD says: ‘I will return to Jerusalem with mercy, and there My house will be rebuilt, declares the LORD of Armies, and a cord marking off possession will be extended over Jerusalem.’