The Apostles' Creed - What Do Christians Really Believe?

Twelve Articles of Faith and the Remarkable Story Behind Christianity's Ancient Creed

Every Sunday, in village chapels and great cathedrals, in Manila and Nairobi and a small parish in Ohio, Christians profess familiar words: "I believe in God, the Father almighty." Many of them learned those words as children and could not tell you when. A grandmother says them on the crucifix of her rosary. A godparent says them at a baptismal font on behalf of a baby who cannot yet speak. A man who has not prayed in twenty years finds, at a funeral, that the words are still there.

That is what a creed is for. It is not a theology lecture. It is the faith in a form small enough to carry everywhere, and to say together. Of all the forms of prayer gathered in our complete guide to Christian prayer, this Creed may be the one that asks the most of the person praying it, because it is not a request. It is a declaration.

The Apostles' Creed is an early Christian statement of faith, used mainly in the Western churches, that summarises what Christians believe about God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit in twelve articles. It grew out of the baptismal confession of the early Church of Rome, and it is called "apostolic" because it faithfully summarises the faith the apostles taught.

Here is the full Apostles' Creed prayer in a widely used traditional English form. Small differences in wording exist among Christian churches and prayer books.

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
Creator of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended into hell;
on the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and life everlasting. Amen.

— The Apostles' Creed, traditional English text

The Words of the Apostles' Creed

The Creed has a simple architecture once you see it. It is built in three parts, one for each Person of the Trinity: a brief opening about the Father and creation, a long middle section about the Son and everything he did for us, and a closing section about the Holy Spirit and the life the Spirit gives in the Church. Martin Luther taught it this way in his Small Catechism, under three headings: creation, redemption and sanctification. Catholic tradition counts the same text as twelve articles, a numbering the Catechism of the Catholic Church notes was already attested by Saint Ambrose in the fourth century (CCC 191).

Two phrases trip people up, and it is worth settling them at the start. The first is "the holy catholic Church," with a small c. The word comes from the Greek katholikos, "according to the whole," and means universal: the one Church of Christ spread throughout the world. The earliest surviving use of the phrase comes from Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, writing around 110 on his way to martyrdom in Rome: "wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church." Christians who are not Roman Catholic also use the term in this universal sense, and some Lutheran versions have long rendered it "the holy Christian church."

The second is "He descended into hell." Some modern ecumenical translations say "he descended to the dead" instead. The wording raises questions about what happened between Christ's death and Resurrection, which we will explore below. You will also hear small variations, "Holy Ghost" for "Holy Spirit," "sitteth" for "is seated," depending on the prayer book. These variations generally preserve the same central profession of faith. The Creed's power has never depended on one perfect English translation; it has depended on people meaning what they profess.

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Did the Apostles Really Write It?

There is a beautiful old story. On the day of Pentecost, or shortly after, the apostles gathered before scattering to preach across the world. So that their teaching would never diverge, they agreed on a short summary of the faith, and each of them contributed a line. The earliest full account of this comes from Rufinus of Aquileia, a priest who wrote a commentary on the Creed around the year 400. He describes the apostles each contributing his own sentence to one common summary, and he explains the old name for a creed, symbolum: a token or watchword, like the password soldiers used to recognise their own side in the dark. By the sixth century, sermons had gone further and assigned each article to a particular apostle by name. Our article on the twelve apostles and their stories tells what we know of the men themselves.

As history, the story does not hold. Rufinus himself compared the creed of his own church at Aquileia with the creed of Rome and noted differences between them; the line "He descended into hell," for instance, was in Aquileia's creed but not in the Roman version Rufinus knew. Twelve apostles composing one fixed text at Pentecost would not have left the churches of the fourth century saying different words. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907, no enemy of tradition, concluded that Rufinus's detailed narrative has to be regarded as unhistorical.

What history does show is more interesting. From the earliest decades of Christianity, believers summed up their faith in short formulas. Writing to the Corinthians in the 50s, barely twenty-five years after the Resurrection according to the usual chronology, Saint Paul passed on a summary he says he had himself received:

"For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures."

— 1 Corinthians 15:3–4

Many scholars regard this as one of the oldest Christian formulas we possess, older than the letter that preserves it, and you can hear our Creed already taking shape in it: died, buried, rose on the third day. Our account of how Christianity began in Jerusalem describes the community that first proclaimed such words.

The Creed's direct ancestor was baptism. In the early Church of Rome, a person being baptized was asked three questions in the water: do you believe in God the Father almighty? Do you believe in Christ Jesus, the Son of God? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit and the holy Church? The answers accompanied baptism in water. Around 200, Tertullian in North Africa could already quote a "rule of faith" closely related in content to later creedal formulas. Those three questions, filled out over time, became associated with the Old Roman Creed, and the Catechism calls the Apostles' Creed "the ancient baptismal symbol of the Church of Rome" (CCC 194).

Scholars still debate exactly when the wording became fixed; the older view placed a Roman text before 150, while more recent research is more cautious about the date of the written formula. Lines such as "he descended into hell" and "the communion of saints" appeared in some Western versions over the following centuries, and the text we say today had settled into its familiar form by the early Middle Ages.

So the apostles did not sit down and write the surviving text, as the legend describes. But the Creed is apostolic in the sense that matters most to Christian tradition: it hands on, in compressed form, the faith the apostles preached.

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What the Creed Professes, Line by Line

"I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth." The first word is "I." Not "the Church holds" or "it is generally thought," but I. The Creed begins as a personal commitment before it is anything else. Its first object is God as Father, a name Jesus himself taught his disciples to use, and as almighty Creator. Everything that exists, Scripture says from its first verse (Genesis 1:1), exists because God willed it. To say this line honestly is to accept that the world, and your own life within it, is a gift and not an accident.

"And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord." Three titles in one breath. Jesus is a name, the name given by the angel (Matthew 1:21); Christ means the Anointed One, the Messiah Israel had waited for; and "Lord" was the title the first believers dared to give him, the same word Greek-speaking Jews used for God himself. "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus," Paul wrote, "thou shalt be saved" (Romans 10:9). This brief confession of Jesus as Lord belongs to the earliest Christian preaching, and it sits at the centre of this one.

"Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried." Notice how fast the Creed moves. It leaps from the Annunciation in Nazareth to the Crucifixion in Jerusalem without a word about the thirty years between, as if to say that everything Jesus did was taken up into his death and rising. And notice the one ordinary human name in the whole text apart from Mary: Pontius Pilate. A Roman governor, an official in a difficult province, is named in a prayer Christians have said for well over fifteen hundred years.

He is there because the Creed insists this happened in history, at a datable time and a real place. The Roman historian Tacitus, no friend of Christians, records that Christus suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius, at the hands of Pontius Pilatus. According to the Gospels, the Crucifixion and burial took place at Golgotha and a nearby tomb in Jerusalem. Christian tradition identifies these sites with the locations now enclosed within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Pilgrims today visit both traditional sites within the church.

"He descended into hell." This is the line people most often ask about. In traditional Christian interpretation, it does not mean that Christ was condemned to the hell of the damned. The expression refers to the realm or state of the dead, associated with Sheol in Hebrew and Hades in Greek. The Catechism explains that Jesus "did not descend into hell to deliver the damned," but to free the just who had gone before him (CCC 633), and Scripture speaks of him preaching to the spirits in prison (1 Peter 3:19).

The line says, first of all, that he really died. He did not seem to die, or nearly die. He entered the condition of the dead. Christian traditions differ in how they interpret the descent and its purpose, but the affirmation of Christ's real death remains central. Eastern Christian icons of the Resurrection show a powerful image of his victory: Christ standing on the broken gates of death, pulling Adam and Eve up by the wrists.

"On the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty; from there he will come to judge the living and the dead." The Resurrection is the hinge on which the whole Creed turns; Paul says plainly that without it our faith is in vain (1 Corinthians 15:14). Forty days later, according to Acts, Jesus was taken up from the Mount of Olives (Acts 1:9–12), where a small domed chapel, described in our guide to the Chapel of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives, still marks the traditional spot.

"Seated at the right hand" is the language of royal authority, not a seating plan. And the final line looks forward. The Creed is not only a memory of what God has done; it is a promise that history is going somewhere, and that it will end in the hands of the One who died for it.

From Nazareth to the empty tomb to the Mount of Olives, the middle of the Creed can be followed through the places remembered by Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land.

"I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints." The third part turns to the Spirit, promised by Jesus as the one who would teach his disciples all things (John 14:26) and poured out at Pentecost in Jerusalem (Acts 2). Then, without a pause, the Church: the Creed sees the Church as the Spirit's work, not a human club.

The communion of saints confesses the fellowship of those who belong to Christ. Catholic and Orthodox traditions particularly emphasise the spiritual communion between believers on earth and those who have died in Christ, while Protestant explanations may place different emphasis on the fellowship of all believers. It is a rich phrase with a long history of its own, and our full guide to what the communion of saints means in the Apostles' Creed treats it in greater depth.

"The forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen." The Creed ends with what all of this means for us. Sins can be forgiven, and baptism is closely associated with that forgiveness in the New Testament (Acts 2:38). The body will be raised, not discarded; Christian hope is not an escape from the flesh but its transformation (1 Corinthians 15:42–44).

And the last word before "Amen" is life. Not judgment, not death, but life that does not end (John 3:16). Of all the places a statement of faith could finish, this Creed finishes there.

The table below gathers the main Scripture passages behind each part of the Creed. These are biblical foundations and parallels rather than claims that the Creed was copied word for word from any single passage.

Line of the Creed	What it professes	Scripture roots
God the Father almighty, Creator	One God, Creator of all that exists	Genesis 1:1; Matthew 6:9
Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord	Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God	Matthew 16:16; John 3:16; Romans 10:9
Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary	The Incarnation: God became truly human	Luke 1:26–35; Matthew 1:18–23
Suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified, died, buried	A real death at a real moment in history	Mark 15:1–46; 1 Corinthians 15:3–4
Descended into hell	Christ truly died and entered the realm of the dead	1 Peter 3:18–19; 1 Peter 4:6
Rose again on the third day	The bodily Resurrection	Luke 24:1–7; 1 Corinthians 15:4
Ascended, seated at the right hand	Christ reigns with the Father	Acts 1:9–11; Hebrews 1:3
Will come to judge the living and the dead	Christ's return at the end of time	Acts 10:42; 2 Timothy 4:1
The Holy Spirit	The third Person of the Trinity	John 14:26; Acts 2:1–4
The holy catholic Church, the communion of saints	The universal Church and fellowship in Christ	Matthew 16:18; Ephesians 2:19; Hebrews 12:1
The forgiveness of sins	God's mercy and forgiveness	Acts 2:38; Colossians 1:14
Resurrection of the body, life everlasting	Eternal life and the resurrection of the dead	1 Corinthians 15:42–44; John 11:25

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Apostles' Creed vs. Nicene Creed

Many Christians say two different creeds and are not sure how they differ. The Nicene Creed, properly the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, is the longer one said at Sunday Mass in many churches. Its wording developed through the first two ecumenical councils, held in 325 and 381 (CCC 195), which addressed major questions about the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit. The story of that first gathering is told in our article on the Council of Nicaea and why it still matters.

The Apostles' Creed was not issued by an ecumenical council. It grew quietly out of the baptismal life of the early Church of Rome and spread across the West.

Feature	Apostles' Creed	Nicene Creed
Origin	Ancient baptismal confession of the Church of Rome	Councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381)
Length	Approximately 110–120 words in English, depending on translation	Approximately 200–230 words in English, depending on translation
Emphasis	The central events and teachings of Christian salvation, simply stated	More explicit teaching about Christ's full divinity and the Holy Spirit
Where it is used	Primarily Western churches: baptism, daily prayer, the Rosary and worship	Eastern and Western churches: Mass, Divine Liturgy and other services
Eastern Orthodox use	Not part of standard Eastern Orthodox liturgical worship	The Orthodox Symbol of Faith, professed at baptism and the Divine Liturgy

They share the central Christian confession, although the Nicene Creed expresses some doctrines more explicitly. The Nicene Creed is, in a sense, the early Christian confession under pressure: the same faith, spelled out more precisely because its meaning had been challenged.

The Catholic Catechism treats the two together and follows the older creed for its own structure, calling it "the oldest Roman catechism" (CCC 196). If the Nicene Creed offers more detailed doctrinal definitions, the Apostles' Creed offers a compact personal profession.

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Which Churches Pray the Apostles' Creed?

Because it took shape before the great divisions of Western Christianity, it belongs to almost every Western church. Catholics profess it at baptism, open the Rosary with it, and may say it in place of the Nicene Creed at Mass. Anglicans say it in Morning and Evening Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer. Lutherans learn it from Luther's Small Catechism, which explains each of its three articles with the question "What does this mean?" Reformed and Presbyterian Christians meet it in the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563, which uses it to set out the articles of the Christian faith, and Methodists say it in their worship too.

The Eastern Orthodox churches are the important exception. This creed developed in the Latin West and never entered standard Eastern Orthodox liturgical worship; the Orthodox profession of faith is the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, which the Orthodox Church in America describes as the formal confession made at baptism and an essential element of every Divine Liturgy.

This is not necessarily a disagreement about the faith the Apostles' Creed expresses, but a difference of liturgical inheritance and theological emphasis. Some independent evangelical churches, for their part, do not recite any creed in worship, though many affirm the principal beliefs expressed in this one.

It is a striking thought. Christians who disagree about a great deal still profess a shared faith in the Father, the Son and the Spirit, even when their churches use different liturgies and creeds.

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Praying the Creed Today

The Creed began at the font, and it still lives there. At a Catholic baptism, the parents and godparents are asked, in question form, whether they believe in God the Father, in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit, echoing the ancient three-part baptismal profession of faith. They answer "I do." At Easter, the whole congregation may renew those promises together. Our guide to what baptism means and how it is celebrated describes the rite in full.

Adults preparing to enter the Church still receive the Creed as a gift. In the early centuries, catechumens were formally "handed" the Creed and the Lord's Prayer in the weeks before Easter, learned them by heart, and recited them back before baptism. The Catholic rite for adults keeps that custom today, with a Presentation of the Creed and a Presentation of the Lord's Prayer.

The two texts belong together: one says what we believe, the other, explained in our article on the Lord's Prayer line by line, says how we speak to the God we believe in.

For many Catholics the Creed is most familiar as the first prayer of the Rosary. After making the Sign of the Cross, the one praying holds the crucifix and says the Creed before moving to the beads, as our step-by-step guide to praying the Rosary shows. It is a fitting beginning: before meditating on the mysteries of Christ's life, you first say what you believe about him.

And the Creed can simply be prayed. Slowly, one line at a time, with a pause after each. Said this way, at the start of the day or in a moment of doubt, it stops being a list and becomes what it was always meant to be: a person placing their whole life, line by line, into the hands of God.

Saint Paul put it in a single sentence: "with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation" (Romans 10:10). The Creed is that confession, given words.

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