the course of the 1500 years since the Great Division, Christianity has been carried through history by only a handful of major traditions. In the year 650, the Christian world was dominated by the three traditions known as Chalcedonian, Miaphysite, and Church of the East. By the year 1100, the Chalcedonian tradition had divided in two, creating the separate and distinct Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions. Five hundred year later, Catholicism and Orthodoxy had become Christianity’s foremost traditions because the Church of the East had been persecuted into near oblivion and the Miaphysite churches had been severely reduced in size and influence, as well. Since 1500, the Catholic and Orthodox traditions have been joined by two other major Christian traditions: Protestantism, which began in the early 1500s, and Pentecostalism, which first took shape around 1900.
Currently, the Catholic tradition is home to roughly half the world’s Christians, Orthodoxy serves about 10 percent of the total, and Protestantism and Pentecostalism split the rest with about 20 percent each. Taken together, these four contemporary traditions are embraced by roughly 97 percent of all Christians worldwide, so they are the logical places to begin answering the question “What is Christianity?” The next four chapters describe each of these traditions in detail, highlighting their spiritual and theological distinctives, tracing their divergent histories, and explaining their organizational structures. Whatever Christianity is today, almost all of it has been funneled down to the present through one or another of these traditions.
Notes
1 1 Eusebius of Caesarea, Church History, Book 3: Chapter 1, New Advent, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/250103.htm (accessed August 27, 2020).
2 2 “The Didache,” in Bart D. Ehrman ed., Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 211–219.
3 3 Cyprian, On the Unity of the Church, Christian History Institute, https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/study/module/cyprian (accessed August 27, 2020).
4 4 Martin Palmer, The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity (New York: Ballantine, 2001), p. 166.
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