Well, the difficulty is in establishing that they were worshipping "Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of God as told by the Gospel and/or Paul."  There were certainly pre-Christian and Christian cults before the council of Nicea, and Jesus was certainly the focus of worship for the Pauline churches that were established towards the middle or end of the first century CE.  The question is how widely distributed either extant version of Jesus was, and whether the two extant versions represent the only versions that existed.  There's considerable evidence that Paul was not referring to the Gospel Jesus in many or all of his letters, so it's quite possible that there were multiple cults worshipping different versions of the same figure.

If you want first editions of the epistles or gospels, you're going to run into trouble, but the burden of proof has pretty much been met.  Even Jesus mythicists are happy to concede that the Gospel(s) and Pauline epistles existed in the first century, and made reference to Jesus.

I should note that none of this has any particular bearing on whether there was or was not a man named Jesus who really lived.

Dude, I'm not being evasive, nor am I trying to complicate things.  If you want more detailed answers to these questions, here are some blogs and posts to read:

Which Jesus: A Legend with a Multiple Personality Disorder?

Josephus and the Testimonium: Is it Evidence of Jesus?

Biblical Languages and Dating [Revised: February 2008]

Do The Gospels Contradict Each Other?

Hambydammit's Response to John Loftus

Hambydammit's Position on Jesus Historicity

Hambydammit's Debate (1) with James McGrath

Hambydammit's Debate (2) with James McGrath

More from RRS, in THIS THREAD:

Further quotes from me in the same thread:

Though there is some debate as to the authorship of some of what are called the "Pauline Epistles," Paul himself meets pretty much all of the historical criteria for a real person.  We have multiple writings attributed to him which are consistent in style, consistent with the period, and consistent with independent corroborating sources.  We have early non-Jewish writers mentioning early Christians (though not necessarily by the name "Christians" ) and early Christian churches.  In short, we have plenty of attributable documents from before the Council of Nicea that indicate some kind of organized religion centered around at least one Jesus figure.

Was "Paul" a pen name?  Who knows.  Did someone write most of the Pauline epistles at or around the time they were allegedly written?  Almost certainly.  If you want to know more about this, you should read "Christianity before Christ" by John G. Jackson, and The Jesus Puzzle, by Earl Doherty.  They're two of the best books on the subject that I've read.

That's a loaded question.  Was Jesus believed in by multiple sects of Christians before the Council of Nicaea?  Yes.  We have not only pre-nicene church fathers like Justoin Martyr and Tertullian, Origen, and others but attestation to Christian belief in Jesus as the son of God (and as God) by Pliny the Younger, Celsus, and Tacitus (and a small part of Suetonius' works on the Twelve Caesars).  We also have New Testament books which predate the Council of Nicaea.  Mark was probably (although not conclusively proven to have been) written around the end of the first century CE.  Even at its latest (revisionist) terminus ad quem, somewhere around 116 CE--the date prior to the latest terminus a quo of Matthew (who used Mark's Gospel to construct his own)--precedes the Council of Nicaea by just over 200 years.  That doesn't even take into account Luke's probable authorship around the time of Marcion (early-mid second century CE) who not only believed in Jesus as the son of God, but disputed the reliability of the Hebew Bible/Septuagint and its God, claiming Yahweh was a false God and Jesus was the son of the better, bigger God  (Such were the beliefs of Marcion if the heresiologists can be trusted, that is).  I haven't even gone into the Nag Hammadi Christian texts, most of which predate the Council of Nicaea.

So yes, there is plenty of attestation to the cult of Christianity that worshipped Jesus.

That is a rather naive thing to say.  History is a science.  Just because it doesn't utilize what pop-culture has come to think of as test tubes, that does not make the methods any less scientific. 

It is additionally naive to assume that all that exists are manuscripts.  There are additional inscriptions, crosses, artifacts, etc...that correspond with Christian origins prior to the Council of Nicaea.  There are also polemics against Christians which still exist and were preserved, no by Christians but mainly by Muslims and Jews, which attest contemporaneously to Christianity and Christian teachings during the second-third centuries CE. 

Um...didn't you specifically just ask for evidence earlier for a cult that worshiped Jesus?  Now you want to discount that evidence?  Are you okay?

I am more amused by this than annoyed.  The fact that you would believe pop-culture fiction (i.e. the mosaics in "Nazareth"--which date to the Middle Ages by the way...) than actual historical investigations into the history of Christianity (like secular scholars such as Bart Ehrman for example). 

It does exist.  There are quite a few Roman sarcophagi that date to the third century CE (Council of Nicaea was in the fourth century - 325 CE) that depict passion narrative scenes with Jesus.  There are also third century catacomb paintings beneath the Appian Way in Italy (an old road that literally led to Rome and spanned the length from Rome to Northern Italy).

You're talking about a large span here.  (Your whole conclusion is rather flawed, but more on this in a moment)  Eusebius was a witness to the Council and was responsible for gathering the resources and materials to formulate the beginnings of what we know as the New Testament (although it took another couple hundred years, the Council of Trent in the middle ages, to establish a canon).  Justinian was the last Roman emperor, who lived a few generations after Eusebius (you're talking two centuries later here...in the sixth century...).  But lets ignore that for a moment.

But forget that for a moment.  Your premise is illogical to begin with.  Eusebius had to convert into something, and Constantine didn't create Christianity (remember, he was trying to unify Christianity to stop his empire from falling apart).  So even without much thought, you have to conclude that Christianity existed prior to the Council of Nicaea (which was where Christianity became unified, for a short time anyway, under the supervision of Constantine). 

Errr...it already had one.  It didn't need to invent a new one.  *sigh*  Who is filling your head with these preposterous ideas?  Put down the magazines and turn off the History Channel...and go to a library, stat!

 Quest, do you know much about evolution?  If you do, a careful study of phylogeny would help you feel more comfortable about history.  There are a lot of very scientifically accurate clues in various texts that lead directly to certain places and times, in the same way that a certain allele leads to a particular place in genetic history.

As a crude example, suppose there was a monastery that used a particular kind of ink that contained trace elements of some substance or other during a known period of history.  If we find a copy of the Gospel that is certainly from that monastery, and it has a certain error in it, and then we find another later copy from some other locale, and it has exactly the same error, we can be pretty damn certain that it was copied from the monastery.  Given the number of words in the gospel, the odds of the exact same error occurring are astonishingly bad.  If there are other corroborating data, we can establish a firm chain between the two locales.  When we get all the extant copies of the gospel together, we can create a tree, much like a phylogenic tree, tracing large groups of copies to common "ancestors."  With so many extant copies from early Christendom, we can be really, really certain of our findings.

When people talk history the one thing I seem to see constantly getting lost in all this is human nature. Sure you can "trace" artifacts and people to certain dates. But Occham's razor simpfies human nature without getting caught up in detail.

Some human took a drawing tool at one point and drew a circle, later humans took tools and turned stone into wheels and then chisled wood to make wheels, then others, then others took metal and made wheels and then others added frames and made carts, then others added engines and made cars. ALL HAVE WHEELS.

So when people argue over which was the first Jesus cult, is silly and irrelivent to me, because the "chosen people" motif was arround even longer that the first written tradition.

Jesus was just another claim(maybe based on a real cult or real person) but still simply another claim of people who thought their hero was going to save them by commiting this act(incert different story here)

"My god(s) will save my(the chosen) people if I sacrifice this girl to this volcano"

"My god(s) will save my(the chosen)people if I sacrifice this dead fish to the ocean"

"My god(s) will save my(the chosen) people if I sacrifice this goat to this fire"

"Well the details are different" is the common mantra of every person of every label in human history, "That makes it original".

That is like saying because your Lamborginni is red, you invented the first wheel.

So when people harp on "history" I say understanding human nature is far more important and that humans will and usually do what they always have done. Inventing claims is nothing new and copying borrowing and incorperating and steeling old motifs into new product is nothing new and quite common in human behavior. Which is why both Coke and Pepsi both have Cherry flavored sodas.