Racists don’t get it that...

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The Catholic Dictionary puts the figure into the several hundreds.

A person on WP once posted as a question ...something to the effect "why do they need so many lawyers to interpret the US Constitution? Is the Constitution worded THAT vaguely?".

But I have often wondered a similar thing about that radical carpenter turned rabbi who did his preaching thing back in Judea 2000 years ago. Were his words in sermons so vague that we now have to have 130 sects duking it out over what his words meant?

When I was teen I had this fantasy about time travel. All the churches of the world have probably corrupted what the guy said. So what if you could time travel back 2000 years. Stick a silicon chip in your brain to enable you to understand Aramaic, and could then sit at the feet of Jesus himself and hear him first hand?

A modern woman historian/author (Catherine Pagels) had a similar notion growing up. And she made a career out doing the next best thing -studying the history. She has said that she expected the many versions of Christianity to converge and become more alike as you go back in to time. But actually it turns out that opposite is the case. The there were competing forms of Christianity in the late Roman world that deviate more from standard Christianity of today than do any modern sects. Things like Arianism, and Gnosticism, etc. Some deviated more from Christianity of today than Islam deviates from modern Christianity (and Islam isnt even labeled as a "Christian" sect).

Mormonism is not a "small" sect. It has a large, and rapidly growing following. But it deviates from standard Christianity so much that few Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox, even consider it to be a form of "Christianity". Kinda like how the Druze consider themselves to Muslim, but are disowned as Muslim by both the Shiites and by the Sunnies.

In fact one of the main problems with Mormonism is that, like Islam, it tacks on a whole third book ( a third testament) onto the Bible (like how Mohammed added the Koran to the old and new testaments).

Last edited by naturalplastic on 26 Jul 2020, 2:17 pm, edited 3 times in total.

A lot of it is that the Eastern Orthodox church is an umbrella church and every eastern European nation has it's own orthodox church like the:Serbian orthodox,Russian Orthodox,Lithuanian orthodox,Estonian orthodox and of coarse Greek the first of the Eastern orthodox sects,etc...... Plus there are likely 20 to 40 sub denominations within Oriental orthodox too,like Coptic or Etrean orthodox and many Oriental Sub Dom's throughout the middle east and Africa and of coarse the first; the Armenian orthodox as well.

So between the Eastern orthodox umbrella and Oriental orthodox umbrella you have maybe 70 or so Sub Dom's.So yes there are about 130 Christian denominations in the world.To us we think Eastern orthodox and Serbian orthodox,what's the difference? But to a Serbian it would matter a great deal,the Eastern orthodox is an abstract umbrella and to the churches within that,to those people the individual church matters.

Different Orthodox churches recognize each other as valid. I don't know if there are a few of them that deviated so far that they were disowned by the others, but I would assume that the majority of Orthodox churches recognize each other. At least Russian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox do.

Now if you are talking about Orthodox vs Catholic vs Protestant then thats true that each umbrella thinks the other two are wrong. But thats the choice between 3, not the 130.

To make it slightly easier, after Vatican 2 the majority of Catholics believe that Protestants and Orthodox can still be saved. So you don't have to become Catholic in order to convince Catholics you are saved. Therefore, you are left with the choice between Protestant and Orthodox.

There is an exception though: Traditional Catholics don't recognize Vatican 2, so they *would* say you need to be Catholic to be saved. But they are in minority.

Not all Orthodox churches agree on theology. The Russian and Greek churches do (Eastern Orthodox churches), but they don't agree with Oriental Orthodox churches (like Armenian and Ethiopian) or with the Church of the East.

Basically seconding what VS said.

That makes it a bit more interesting. So do you think you can break Orthodox churches into a few groups, with churches in each group agreeing with each other? Like Russian and Greek is in one of the groups, and then maybe there are some other groups? How many arch bishops are there by the way? Are Russian and Greek Orthodox under the same arch bishop or different ones? What about other Orthodox churches?

One thing I am really curious about is whether or not Armenian and Ethiopian would agree. Because I like them for two different reasons. I like Armenian because they are the oldest, and I like Ethiopian because they borrowed elements of Jewish law (such as kosher and sabbath). Actually there is a reason why the two would go hand in hand: in particular, according to the theory that Messianics and other Sabbaterians hold, Apostles likely kept the Jewish law but then the church got de-judaized by Rome. So, according to that theory, the oldest church would be more likely to keep it. However, I haven't heard of Armenian Orthodox keeping Jewish law, I only heard of Ethiopian Orthodox doing it. So that would be a reason right there for them to disagree. But could it be that they look past it and recognize each other anyway?

But here is more general question. How did it come about that different Orthodox groups ended up disagreeing? From what I know from church history, there was one dominant church up until approximately 1000 AD, and then there was a split into Orthodox and Catholic at around 1000 AD (the reason I said "one dominant church" rather than "one church" is that there were some sects such as Arians and others we talked about, but they were in the minority and no they weren't part of that church so it is not relevant to what I am talking about now). So are you saying that -- some time after 1000 AD -- there were some further splits within Orthodox church? If so, when did they happen?

Historically the Persian Empire was a place of refuge for Christian sects that rejected the Chalcedonian Christianity of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

The Oriental Orthodox church is Miaphysite.

The Church of the East is Nestorian.

These splits all came before 1000 AD.

In this case Jesus would condemn her, since microchip is likely to be the mark of the beast. Would be interesting whether he would interupt his sermon to do it.



I think it is because she looked at 2-nd century rather than 1-st century. In the website http://www.netzarim.co.il they actually tried to go back to the 1-st century and they claim that the teachings converge to the Messianic Judaism that they are teaching. And yes they did a lot of historical studies similar to that woman. They studied dead see scrolls, etc.

I even seen a video by that guy trying to look side by side at Biblical account of creation (allegidly supporting young earth) and at the archaeological findings (allegidly supporting old earth) trying to make sense of it all. I didn't have time to hear the conclusion that he came up with, but just the fact that he has undertaken this study without pre-determined conclusion is rather striking.

Going back to the Jewish law thing, one can make a counter-argument by pointing out at the church fathers (who had direct interaction with apostles) who spoke against Jewish law. At the same time, however, I seen some other website that enabled me to reconcide these two opposing evidence. What it said is that basically biological children of the apostles kept the Jewish law while the gentile students of the apostles did not. Since they both had direct interaction with apostles, it means that one or both of them decided to knowingly stray from what the apostles taught them. So you have a choice in terms of which of the two groups to listen to, but thats just a choice between the two.

As far as gnostics, you can discard them on the basis that they were condemned by the apostles. The verses in 1 John that talk about the "spirit of antichrist" that denies that "Jesus came in the flesh" is likely referring to gnostics because gnostics didn't believe Jesus had fleshy body but rather that his body was of a spiritual substance. And also the "doctrine of Nicolatians" that was referred negatively in the book of Revelation is also likely a reference to gnosticism.

Last edited by QFT on 26 Jul 2020, 3:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

As the Byzantine Empire started to desolve,individual nations started there own churches.Serbia split with Constantinople in the 13th century,then came the Ottomans who disolved the church in the 18th century.After the fall of the Ottoman Empire at end of WW1 the Serbian orthodoxed church was reestablished.I'm sure many churches in the Eastern orthodoxy have similar stories.The Ottoman Empire made life misery for Eastern orthodox churches for centuries.Catholics and Protestants were to far north and west to be molested by the Ottomans for the most part.

I think Oriental orthodox split with Rome in the 500's AD and the great scism of the Catholics in Rome and Orthodox in Constantinople happened in 1053 AD.

Jesus was baptized by a gnostic; John the Baptist was a Mandaean (which was one of the gnostic faiths). The relationship between Gnostic Christians, gnosticism and the rest of Christianity is likely far more complicated than Pauline Christians have chosen to record.

It is possible that there are different kinds of gnostics, so that Jesus disciples embraced some of them and rejected the other ones. I read that the Gospel of John has a lot of gnostic elements. Yet it was also John who condemned Nicolatans in the Book of Revelation. So that makes it an interesting comparison/contrast to look into.

The picture shows the specific Councils (and the years they occurred) that lead to the Nestorians and Miaphysites splitting. Same with the Great Schism. Your date for the Oriental church is off, but you're right for the Great Schism.

There is also a cult belief that John the Baptist was the prophet Eliyahu(Elijah) reincarnated,weird but true actually.By true I mean some people believe that,not that that is really true.

Last edited by vermontsavant on 26 Jul 2020, 3:45 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Maybe I was thinking 5th century for the Oriental split,it's somewhere in that ballpark.

I wouldn't doubt that for a second. Gnostics seem to be a family of related beliefs, not a specific faith with a defined dogma. Gnostic Christians, Mandaeans might be two sects of a broader family. There's a lot of 'gnostic-like' thought in Iranic religions besides Zoroastrianism and I believe that's likely the source of claims of Buddhist influence on Christianity, that those ideas influenced both of them, but didn't pass from the one into the other directly.