Divisions in Christianity

I have a real weakness for the most basic of books sometimes. Even when you think you know it all (and I definitely don't but anyway) you can always learn a bit of something new. Now I already knew this but as I recently was quite shocked (really, really stunned actually) to see on two different blogs there were commenters questioning the historical accuracy of the fact that the Catholic Church was the original Christian church. I mean, even when I didn't believe in God at all, I knew that much.

So when I saw this I thought I'd pop it in here because it is a very good and succinct explanation, even though it is highly unlikely that either of those two commenters read this blog.

There were no major divisions among Christianity until AD 1054, when the Orthodox and Catholic Churches parted company. Until then, for a thousand years there had been one Christian church, with the bishop of Rome (also known as the pope) as patriarch of the West and the other bishops of Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and finally Constantinople as fellow partiarchs of the East. The schism between the (Greek) Orthodox and the (Roman) Catholics later subdivided into the Russian and Greek Orthodox churches in the East (AD 1448) and the Catholic and the Protestant churches in the West (since the Reformation in AD 1517). Before the schism of the eleventh century, the terms "Catholic" and "Christian" were often used synonymously by believers in both the East and the West because "catholic" merely meant "universal" (from the Greek word katholikos).

Women in the Bible For Dummies