Ancient Arian Detractors And Later Critics Of Athanasius: From Arius’s Latrine To The “Forged” Athanasian Creed

 If you only know Athanasius as the heroic defender of Nicaea, you miss the other long, shadowy tradition that runs alongside the hagiography: the people—ancient, early modern, and contemporary—who think he lied. Not just “exaggerated” or “spun”, but actually fabricated documents, inserted stories, and weaponized narrative for doctrinal gain.

Two test-cases are key here:

1. The Letter to Serapion on the death of Arius.

2. The so-called Athanasian Creed (Quicunque vult).

Put together, they show that suspicion of Athanasius as a forger isn’t some late Enlightenment invention. It starts in the fourth and fifth centuries and keeps resurfacing whenever people look too closely at the paperwork.

Ancient Arian Detractors (4th–5th centuries)

Start with ground zero: Arius’s own camp.

From very early on, pro-Arian historians treated Athanasius’s lurid story of Arius dying in the latrine as exactly what it sounds like: a hit piece. A miracle of divine judgment is just a bit too convenient when narrated by the man who spent his life trying to ruin Arius’s reputation.

Philostorgius (our main Arian historian) explicitly refuses to accept the miraculous version of Arius’s death. He knows the standard tale and treats it as malicious fabrication, written to make Athanasius’s theological enemy look like he literally burst apart under God’s wrath. In other words, the people closest to the controversy already suspected Athanasius of inventing the story.

And they had a timeline problem in their favour. Athanasius only circulates the famous account decades later, in a letter to Serapion written around 359. Arius died in 336. By the time Athanasius “remembers” this spectacular event, the people who might have contradicted him on the ground in Constantinople are mostly gone or marginalized. Even in antiquity the story had the smell of propaganda.

That early Arian distrust is what later critics are really building on. Once you accept that the Letter to Serapion is a polemical performance composed twenty-plus years after the fact, the door is open to treating it not as “history” but as a crafted legend—if not outright forgery, then something uncomfortably close.

Isaac Newton: Athanasius The Forger

Fast-forward to the seventeenth century and you find one of the sharpest minds in European history quietly picking up the Arian thread.

In his unpublished theological notebooks, Sir Isaac Newton rips into the Serapion story with exactly the same instincts as Philostorgius, but armed with early modern source criticism. Newton notes that Athanasius “put about” the tale long after Arius was dead, and he treats the letter as a “libel or narrative” composed around 359 to serve an agenda, not as contemporary reportage from 336.

He presses the paradox: if Arius really exploded in a bog-house in the presence of half of Constantinople, why is Athanasius the only one to mention it—and so late? Newton wonders aloud “whether the ignominious death of Arius in a bog-house was not a story put about by Athanasius,” and comes very close to naming Athanasius himself as the forger of the legend.

In Newton’s reconstruction, the late appearance, polemical tone, and conveniently edifying details all point in the same direction: this is not neutral history. It is Athanasian fiction retrojected into the 330s.

William Whiston: Athanasius Convicted Of Forgery

Newton’s protégé William Whiston does what Newton wouldn’t: he goes public.

In 1712, Whiston publishes Athanasius Convicted of Forgery, turning Newton’s suspicions into open accusation. For Whiston, the Serapion letter is Exhibit A in a much wider indictment: if you can show that Athanasius forged or doctored key documents, the entire edifice of post-Nicene Trinitarian theology starts to wobble.

Whiston combs the letter for anachronisms and stylistic tells. He points to the late date, the way the story magically serves Athanasius’s polemical aims, and the lack of independent corroboration. For him, the whole thing looks like a calculated fabrication designed to paint Arius’s death as divine punishment and thus canonize the Nicene cause.

The point isn’t just that Athanasius lied about a latrine. It’s that Athanasius was willing to manufacture “evidence” in writing. Once you accept that, you are forced to re-open other texts circulating under his name.

Edward Gibbon: Poison Or Miracle?

Edward Gibbon, never shy about tweaking ecclesiastical pretensions, doesn’t quite call the Serapion letter a forgery, but he does everything but.

He notes that anyone who wants to defend the literal story of Arius’s intestines pouring out has a binary choice: either it was miracle or it was poison. Gibbon hints that if you strip away the pious coating, a much more human explanation suggests itself.

He drives home the awkward fact that Athanasius is our sole pipeline for this “strange and horrid” account. And he underlines the logistics: with constant traffic between Alexandria and Constantinople, a truly fabricated story should have been easy to refute—unless, again, Athanasius only really weaponized it decades later, when living eyewitnesses were thin on the ground.

Gibbon stops just short of saying “forgery,” but in effect he treats the Serapion narrative as legendary propaganda: a story too neatly tailored to Athanasius’s theological purposes to trust as sober history.

Modern Patristic Scholarship: A Legend, Not A Report

Modern scholars are more polite with their language, but the basic judgment hasn’t changed much.

Most patristic experts accept that Athanasius wrote the Letter to Serapion, but they do not accept the contents of the Arius-death story as a reliable report. Ellen Muehlberger, for instance, explicitly calls it “the legend of Arius’ death,” which is exactly right: what matters is its imaginative, moralizing function, not its factual value.

Commentators routinely note that no contemporary, non-Athanasius source supports the latrine miracle. Later re-tellings all trace back to him. The letter’s late date, its rhetoric, and its usefulness as anti-Arian propaganda mark it as a crafted narrative designed to make a theological point.

In other words, even when they don’t use the word “forgery,” modern scholars treat the Serapion story as something that belongs to the realm of Athanasian myth-making rather than to the historian’s toolkit.

The Athanasian Creed: A Pseudonymous “Quicunque Vult”

The same pattern—long unquestioned attribution, then a cascade of doubts—plays out with the so-called Athanasian Creed.

For most of the Middle Ages, the Quicunque vult was simply “by Athanasius.” Medieval theologians took it for granted. A pious legend had him composing it in Rome for Pope Julius I. Western bishops like Hincmar of Rheims cite it as Athanasius’s teaching. No one in Paris or Canterbury lay awake at night wondering if this short, punchy Latin text was really by a fourth-century Greek bishop.

The first crack in that façade comes from the East, much later. Gennadius Scholarius, a fifteenth-century patriarch of Constantinople, reportedly calls the text the work of a drunk. Even stripped of Gibbon’s dramatic retelling, that’s still a deeply unimpressed reaction—it implies that, for an educated Greek churchman, this creed neither sounded like Athanasius nor looked like a venerable fourth-century composition. (As Andrew Criddle rightly notes, this is Gennadius Scholarius in the 1400s, not some earlier Gennadius in the fifth century.)

Reformation Anti-Trinitarians

At the Reformation, anti-Trinitarian thinkers go much further than merely frowning at the style.

Michael Servetus rejects the Athanasian Creed outright as an unbiblical human invention, a “mere device of men” that makes it nearly impossible to preach Christ to Jews and Muslims. For Servetus, the very existence of such a creed is proof that post-apostolic bishops have introduced alien dogma and then retro-fitted it with apostolic names.

The Socinians follow suit. Laelius and Faustus Socinus simply refuse the Nicene and Athanasian formulas as late products with no apostolic authority. The content is unscriptural, therefore the creeds themselves are functionally fraudulent. If Athanasius’s name is on something that teaches Augustinian or Chalcedonian refinements, it cannot be genuine Athanasius.

Vossius And Ussher: Historical Criticism Kills The Attribution

The decisive move, though, comes from early modern scholars applying historical criticism, not from doctrinal enemies.

Gerhard Johann Vossius, in the 1640s, is the first to really lay the attribution on the table and cut it apart. He points out that no early Greek writer mentions such a creed; that the text is in Latin, saturated with Western technical terms; and that its Christology and Trinity language reflect a post-Athanasius stage of debate. On internal and external grounds, Athanasius simply cannot be the author.

James Ussher, the archbishop of Armagh, independently reaches the same conclusion. The creed presupposes developments Athanasius never saw, and it is invisible in the East for centuries. From the mid-seventeenth century on, learned Catholics and Protestants quietly drop the Athanasian attribution. Athanasius is out; an anonymous Latin is in.

Isaac Newton (Again) And William Whiston

Newton, again privately, treats the Athanasian Creed as part of the broader Athanasian fraud-problem. If you already suspect Athanasius’s party of interpolating 1 John 5:7 and similar texts, a Latin creed falsely bearing his name fits the pattern: textual artefacts used to shore up a doctrine that didn’t originally have that scriptural support.

Whiston then makes this public and programmatic. In the same 1712 Athanasius Convicted of Forgery where he attacks the Serapion letter, he also lists the creed among the pseudo-Athanasius items. For him, Trinitarian dogma stands on a scaffolding of forged or doctored texts; knock those out, and the whole “orthodox” structure totters.

Gibbon And The Forgery Frame

Gibbon, in his great footnotes, simply treats the Athanasian Creed as a pseudepigraphon. Athanasius did not write it; it did not exist for a century after his death; it was composed in Latin. He classifies it alongside things like the Donation of Constantine and the False Decretals: documents to which a great name or early date has been falsely attached to give them institutional punch.

Here Gibbon is closer to Swainson and other nineteenth-century Anglican scholars, who talk openly of “imposture” not in the sense of doctrinal fraud (the content can be perfectly orthodox) but in the ascription. If you attach Athanasius’s name to a text that has nothing to do with him, that is a kind of forgery, however pious or well-intentioned.

Modern Consensus: Pseudo-Athanasian

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Catholic and Protestant scholarship converge on a stable position:

The creed is doctrinally orthodox (from a Nicene-Chalcedonian point of view), but it is not by Athanasius. It likely originated in the Latin West—often placed in southern Gaul, perhaps Lérins—around the late fifth or early sixth century. Its terminology is deeply indebted to Augustine’s De Trinitate.

So the Quicunque vult is “Pseudo-Athanasian.” The forgery, if you want to use that word, lies in the name: someone, at some point, decided that attaching “Athanasius” to this Latin doctrinal summary would make it harder to argue with. And for a millennium, they were right.

Putting It Together: Athanasius, Legend, And The Forgery Question

The point of lining up the Serapion letter and the Athanasian Creed is not to prove some simple “Athanasius forged everything” conspiracy theory. It is to show that from the fourth century down to the present, a counter-tradition has always existed: one that sees Athanasius—and the “Athanasius brand”—as bound up with fabrication.

Ancient Arians already thought his story of Arius’s death was a tendentious invention. Newton and Whiston turned that into an explicit charge of forgery. Gibbon and modern scholars treat the Serapion narrative as legend at best.

Meanwhile, the Athanasian Creed shows how easy it was, in the Latin West, to capitalize on Athanasius’s authority by slapping his name onto a later text. Early modern critics from Vossius to Gibbon are very comfortable putting that in the same box as other ecclesiastical forgeries used to bolster doctrinal and institutional claims.

Once you see these two dossiers side by side, the old hagiographical picture of Athanasius as “pillar of orthodoxy and transparent historian” is very hard to sustain. We are left instead with a much more ambiguous figure—and with a tradition of Athanasian forgery-talk that is as old and persistent as the cult of Saint Athanasius itself.