You may want to check on the backgrounds of your authors.
I have seen that name, Hank Hanegraff (or Handegraff -- actual name as per Wikipedia is Hank Hanegraaff ; that double vowel to make it long is characteristic of the northern West Germanic dialects, called "Low German" because of the elevation of the land) crop up one two or three decades ago. There was some kind of high-power ministry that he was a part of which then exploded or imploded with a huge amount of acrimony between him and another leading figure. During the time-frame in which I had encountered that name before, it was at the center of a huge fire-storm, which to this confirmed atheist (became an atheist over half a century ago shortly before the traditional age of confirmation) was yet another tempest in a teapot.
In Lindy Hop class, we operated on the basic principle that every move is coming from somewhere (ie, the very first part of a leader's lead is get the motion going). Nobody ever writes anything suddenly from nothing. All authors are coming from somewhere; they all have a past. And every author writes to advance his ideas/agenda/whatever.
For example, you could pick up some books from Christian historical revisionist David Barton and start quoting from them, all the while completely ignoring that he is one of the more audacious "Liars for Jesus".
Now, that does not mean that your authors have not provided reliable information. All that it does mean is that there is a purpose in everything that they write. Which is true of all other authors. That means that we, the readers, must do our own due diligence to verify what we read.
That said, the Council of Nicea was indeed a power play. I recently had some conversations with an Iraqi Jewess who had escape Iraq decades ago (her relatives who returned to try to reclaim their properties all perished). She could not understand the process by which Judaism became Christianity. Sadly, I did not get very far -- I got to the point of showing that Gentiles were getting into these early churches and raising issues such as circumcision being required when we reached the locks near the Albert Docks in Liverpool and that stream was lost.
What I was working towards (and which she never heard) was that there was a gap of three centuries between the very first Christian sects and the Council of Nicea. A helluva lot can happen in three centuries. Look at just one century. George Washington and the cherry tree. "Honest Abe" Lincoln walking several miles to pay back a few pennies. The accretion of layer upon layer of legend upon public figures. Entirely fictional characters and events blooming into life. Full-blown legends can arise within a few generations, if even that long.
For example, from my German lit schooling, the 19th century saw the transitioning from the 18th century classical period into the Romantic Period (after an excursion into Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress") epitomized by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's
Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers ("The Sufferings of Young Werther") in which a young man is so overcome by unrequited love that he commits suicide -- the publication of that, Goethe's first novel, unleashed upon Europe a wave of copy-cat teen-age suicides, along with less lethal fashion among males of wearing blue coats with yellow breeches).
OK, after we got over Sturm und Drang, we transitioned into the Romantic Period, which could get really weird. A basic conceit of that period was that of
racial memory. Special attention was given to fairy tales and other forms of folk tales -- a by-product of this were the linguistical studies of the Brothers Grimm which were based on a number of folk tales that they collected and later published, sadly the only act that they are still remembered for. That basic Romantic conceit was that these folk tales reached back through the centuries and through the millennia. In reality, they only reached back one or two generations.
The brightest star in the sky is Sol, the sun. Obviously. But the brightest star in the night sky is Sirius, the brightest star in the constellation of Canus Majoris, "Big Dog", which gives Sirius its other name, "the Dog Star". It turns out that Sirius is a binary system, since Sirius has a white dwarf companion, Sirius B, which is invisible to the naked eye. Anthropologists identified an isolated tribe in Africa who had a mythology about Sirius. Then later anthropological contact with that tribe and with their mythology found that that mythology had changed. Now their Sirius-entity suddenly had a small companion. Somehow, the astronomical discovery of Sirius B had found its way to that tribe, who immediately incorporated that discovery into their mythology.
Talking about oral tradition, we have the American Indian mythologies that responded over the years to the incursion of Europeans. The mythologies of the Mandan Indians (central North Dakota) illustrate this:
Creation Science and Creation Myths: An Ethnological Perspective by Jeffery JR. Hanson and Jerry E. Hanson (
Creation/Evolution, Issue 32, Summer 1993, pp 20-31). Every single generation's mythology responded very rapidly to the newest changes.
So then, that Romantic Era conceit about "folk tales reaching back for generation after generation" is rubbish. Everything, absolutely everything, can change within a single generation. Or even far quicker.
Let's use some extremely simplistic dates and some very simplistic definitions. Jesus was born in the year 1 AD (there was no Year Zero, which leads us to all kinds of acrimony over when the Millennium started, but what the fuck?). In the years 30 to 33 BCE, that dude had his ministry, but in 33 BCE he died.
Then in 325 BCE, Emperor Constantine called a council to decide what true Christianity was.
THREE HUNDRED YEARS LATER!!!!!!!!!
I try to think of Faith's position and the position of every other "true believer". And with each generation the idea of an "absolute truth" becomes less and less tenuous. Let's assume that each generation is 30 years. And let us assume that Jesus spoke the truth. In 300 generations, that would have been 100 generations.
Have you ever played that game of "telegraph"? (or "telephone"). That is the model of passing information from one generation to the next. What happens in that game? The message gets garbled very quickly.
In my Scout Troop as a lad, I once played that game. Our Senior Patrol Leader was named "Jerry". I was told "Jerry wears bamboo shorts." (this was in the 60's surfer craze), so I passed it on. That was challenged at the end, but that is what I was given.
So then, in that game of "telephone", the message could get garbled, or it could get replaced by something entirely different and arbitraily.
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