UsefulCharts Gets Christianity’s First Great Schisms Wrong — and the Churches’ Own Documents Prove It

Matt Baker has a problem with his Christian family tree. One of its most important branches broke away before the council he identifies as the cause. Another division is explained using a description of Jesus Christ that the supposedly dissenting churches explicitly reject.

And the most damaging evidence against his tidy account comes from the churches themselves. In formal agreements, religious leaders representing traditions separated for centuries have acknowledged substantial agreement on the very questions Baker presents as their defining theological differences.

Baker's January 13, 2023, UsefulCharts episode, Christian Origins & Early Schisms, promises to trace Christianity from ancient Judaism into its surviving denominations. Much of its chronology is sound. Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 CE, Theodosius established Nicene Christianity as the imperial religion in 380, and the great councils of the fifth century profoundly influenced the churches that survive today.

But the chart's most convenient feature is also its weakness. It makes religious history resemble a family genealogy, with distinct branches emerging at identifiable moments.

The actual history is considerably more troublesome. Churches acquired independence before theological controversies supposedly created them. Existing communities divided over centuries rather than overnight. And rival authorities sometimes discovered that their supposedly incompatible beliefs were closer than generations of condemnation had allowed.

That is not a small complication in a history of Christian divisions.

It challenges the explanation holding the entire family tree together.

The Church That Broke Away Before Its Supposed Breaking Point

Baker identifies the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE as Christianity's first major division within the Nicene tradition.

His account is straightforward. Bishops gathered to settle a dispute about Christ's divinity and humanity. The council rejected teachings associated with Nestorius, and the Church of the East, located in the Persian Sasanian Empire, separated from mainstream Christianity.

There is a genuine historical connection between the controversy and the subsequent theological development of the Church of the East.

The chronology, however, is wrong as an explanation of its institutional independence.

The Persian Church had already established its ecclesiastical independence before Ephesus convened.

Nina Garsoïan's research in Encyclopaedia Iranica identifies the Persian church's council of 424 as the occasion when it separated itself from Antioch and the western ecclesiastical authorities.

That was seven years before the Council of Ephesus.

Its organizational development had begun earlier. A council at Seleucia-Ctesiphon in 410 had established a structure headed by the bishop of the Persian imperial capital. The Persian monarch exercised influence over episcopal appointments, demonstrating how closely church administration was connected to the Sasanian state.

The distinction matters.

The Persian Church did not suddenly become independent because bishops in Roman territory condemned Nestorius. Its separate political environment and ecclesiastical organization already existed.

The controversy at Ephesus contributed to its later theological separation. The movement of Christians associated with the condemned Antiochene tradition into Persia strengthened that development.

Ronald Roberson's history of the Assyrian Church of the East, published by the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, describes this gradual process. It identifies the theologians Theodore of Mopsuestia and Nestorius as influences on the Church of the East during the fifth century, while recognizing the church's earlier institutional history.

Baker's account compresses two different developments into one event: the establishment of an independent church and its subsequent adoption of a distinctive theological position.

They are related, but they are not interchangeable.

The distinction also changes the meaning of Ephesus itself.

The council did not produce an immediate, universally accepted settlement. According to the 2020 Liverpool University Press edition of its surviving proceedings, rival assemblies met at Ephesus, and the emperor's representatives failed to reconcile them.

Even within the Roman Church, disagreement continued after 431.

Cyril of Alexandria and John of Antioch reached an agreement in 433 that reaffirmed Nestorius's condemnation while accommodating Antiochene concerns about Christ's humanity. The Orthodox Church in America's historical account confirms this subsequent settlement.

The council was enormously consequential.

But it was not the simple institutional birth certificate Baker's family-tree explanation implies.

The Theological Mixture That Oriental Orthodox Christians Reject

Baker's explanation of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 contains a more serious problem.

He distinguishes the Oriental Orthodox Churches from Chalcedonian Christianity by describing their differing understandings of Christ.

According to his narration, Oriental Orthodox Christians believe that Jesus possessed one nature, combining divinity and humanity.

He describes that nature as:

"a mix of divinity and Humanity"

The word mix appears harmless.

It is not.

The Oriental Orthodox Churches specifically reject the idea that Christ's divinity and humanity are confused or blended together.

This is not a modern reinterpretation imposed upon an ancient tradition. It is central to their understanding of Miaphysite theology.

Miaphysitism affirms one united, incarnate nature of Christ while maintaining the full reality of his divinity and humanity.

It must not be confused with the teaching that Christ's humanity was absorbed into his divinity or that the two became an indistinguishable third substance.

The difference is precisely the distinction Baker's explanation fails to preserve.

And there is unusually strong documentary evidence.

On May 10, 1973, Pope Paul VI and Coptic Orthodox Pope Shenouda III issued a common declaration concerning their churches' faith.

They jointly affirmed that Christ's divinity and humanity exist in a complete union:

"without mingling, without commixtion, without confusion"

Their declaration also affirmed the preservation of the properties of both divinity and humanity.

This directly undermines the description of Oriental Orthodox Christology as a mixture.

Baker could reasonably explain that Chalcedonian Christians traditionally speak of two natures, while Oriental Orthodox Christians prefer the formula of one united incarnate nature.

That distinction is historically important.

But describing one side as believing in a mixture creates a misleading contrast between the traditions.

For a video designed to explain why Christianity divided, this is not an incidental theological error.

It affects the central issue being taught.

In 1990, the Supposedly Opposing Churches Reached a Remarkable Agreement

There is another document that Baker's explanation leaves readers unprepared to understand.

In September 1990, representatives of the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches met at Chambésy, Switzerland.

These were representatives of the Christian traditions whose separation Baker traces to Chalcedon.

Their joint theological commission issued a statement addressing the ancient dispute directly.

The participants affirmed their shared rejection of both Nestorian and Eutychian teachings. They accepted that each tradition's preferred language could express authentic Christian belief.

The Oriental Orthodox could retain their traditional formula of one incarnate nature.

The Eastern Orthodox could continue using the two-natures formula.

The commission acknowledged that the theological language differed while recognizing essential agreement about Christ.

Consider what that means.

Two church families separated since the fifth century had spent generations treating particular theological formulations as grounds for exclusion.

Their representatives were now declaring that both traditions had preserved the same fundamental Christological faith.

This does not mean the historical controversy was imaginary.

Neither did the 1990 agreement automatically reunite the churches. Its recommendations required reception and implementation by the respective ecclesiastical authorities, and full communion was not restored.

But it profoundly complicates the explanation that one church believed Jesus had one nature while another believed he had two.

The difference cannot be adequately understood through those numbers alone.

The most revealing development in the history of Chalcedonian division is that representatives of the divided churches eventually acknowledged that their competing language did not necessarily express incompatible beliefs.

That should change how the original separation is explained.

Instead, Baker gives viewers the older categories without introducing the evidence that qualifies their apparent opposition.

A classification intended to clarify Christianity ends up preserving a misunderstanding that Christian theologians have spent decades trying to overcome.

Even the Church of the East Reached an Agreement on Christ

The same problem appears in the earlier division associated with Ephesus.

On November 11, 1994, Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV of the Assyrian Church of the East signed a Common Christological Declaration.

Their churches had inherited different theological traditions from the controversies of the fifth century.

Nevertheless, the two leaders jointly affirmed that Jesus Christ was fully divine and fully human, with both united in one person.

They also addressed the disputed religious titles given to Mary.

The Catholic tradition uses Mother of God.

The Assyrian tradition uses Mother of Christ our God and Saviour.

The declaration recognized both expressions as legitimate formulations of their shared faith.

It further acknowledged that historical divisions had resulted substantially from misunderstandings.

This was no minor diplomatic courtesy.

The parties were addressing questions closely connected to the original condemnation of Nestorius and the centuries of theological estrangement that followed.

The agreement did not establish full communion. Its signatories explicitly recognized continuing obstacles, including matters concerning the church's institutional constitution.

Yet its significance is unmistakable.

A religious difference presented as a defining reason for separation had become the subject of a formal declaration of substantial doctrinal agreement.

There is another problem with Baker's terminology.

He repeatedly associates the Church of the East with Nestorianism.

That association has historical foundations, but the Assyrian Church does not accept the characterization as a satisfactory description of its faith.

The church's bishops have specifically requested that it not be called Nestorian because of the term's history as a derogatory designation.

That position is documented in Roberson's account of the Assyrian Church.

A historian may legitimately discuss Nestorian influences and terminology.

But the difference between an externally imposed theological label and a church's own understanding of its doctrine deserves explanation.

Otherwise, the reader risks mistaking an ancient accusation for an uncontested description.

Chalcedon Was Also a Struggle for Ecclesiastical Power

The most consequential omission in Baker's account concerns what the fifth-century councils actually did.

They were not simply gatherings of theologians reaching conclusions that churches subsequently accepted or rejected.

They operated within an imperial system in which religious authority, political influence, episcopal office, and the enforcement of doctrine were deeply connected.

Consider Alexandria.

Baker explains that Christians in Alexandria who supported Miaphysitism broke away following Chalcedon and became the Coptic Orthodox Church.

That explanation makes an ancient Christian community sound as though it came into existence after a theological disagreement.

Alexandrian Christianity long predated the council.

The more revealing question is how competing groups came to claim authority over an existing church.

Dioscorus, Patriarch of Alexandria, opposed the theological and ecclesiastical direction established at Chalcedon.

The council deposed him.

But his deposition did not eliminate his supporters or resolve the dispute.

A Chalcedonian patriarch, Proterius, subsequently occupied the Alexandrian see.

In 457, opponents of Chalcedon consecrated Timothy Aelurus as a rival patriarch. Proterius was killed during the ensuing violence.

The development of rival ecclesiastical authorities was therefore a political and institutional struggle extending beyond the council itself.

Volker Menze's 2023 Oxford University Press study of Dioscorus examines the imperial politics surrounding his deposition and the competing interpretations of his actions. Its published chapter abstract emphasizes that the controversy cannot be adequately reconstructed as a straightforward judgment of theological guilt.

The competing patriarchates that Baker mentions are among the lasting consequences.

But his account gives viewers the outcome without adequately explaining the struggle that produced it.

The council's theological decisions mattered enormously.

So did the power to appoint bishops, recognize patriarchs, exile opponents, and enforce ecclesiastical decisions.

These were institutions governing communities, not merely competing entries in a theological dictionary.

A family tree organized around doctrinal branching dates cannot, by itself, explain those struggles.

And when the accompanying narration treats the dates as sufficient explanations, it obscures some of the most important history.

Armenia Did Not Simply Join a Split in 451

The Armenian Apostolic Church provides another revealing example of the problem.

Baker places the Armenian Church within the Oriental Orthodox tradition, explaining that it subsequently joined the churches rejecting Chalcedon.

That broad classification is correct.

But the Armenian story demonstrates why ecclesiastical divisions cannot always be assigned neatly to the council that initiated a controversy.

Armenian Christians did not participate in the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

Their country was then confronting major political and military pressures involving the Sasanian Empire.

The Armenian Church's opposition to Chalcedonian theology developed through subsequent decades and was expressed through later ecclesiastical councils, particularly those associated with Dvin in the sixth century.

Encyclopaedia Iranica documents the Armenian councils of 506 and the mid-sixth century as decisive moments in establishing the church's theological position.

The result was a centuries-long institutional separation.

But its development was not equivalent to an Armenian delegation attending Chalcedon, rejecting the decision, and immediately establishing another church.

Political circumstances, existing ecclesiastical independence, and later doctrinal decisions all mattered.

The distinction is especially important because the Armenian Church had its own organization and historical identity before Chalcedon.

It did not need a fifth-century theological dispute to acquire one.

A Modern Schism Exposes the Same Weakness

Baker's account also gets an important modern date wrong.

He states that the Eritrean Orthodox Church became independent from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in 1991.

That year belongs to Eritrea's successful struggle to end Ethiopian control, not to the completed ecclesiastical separation he describes.

Eritrea formally declared national independence in May 1993.

Its Orthodox Christians then sought recognition of an independent church.

In September 1993, Ethiopian and Eritrean church leaders agreed to separation, and the Coptic Holy Synod supported the request.

An agreement signed in February 1994 reaffirmed the churches' independent status.

The first Eritrean Orthodox patriarch was installed in May 1998.

These distinctions are hardly academic.

Political independence, ecclesiastical self-government, recognition by other churches, and the establishment of a patriarchate are different events.

Baker's simplified date erases the process connecting them.

And the process itself is revealing.

It demonstrates that the creation of another independent Orthodox church did not require a dispute over Christ's nature.

National independence and ecclesiastical jurisdiction were central to the development.

The same distinction helps explain an additional branch that Baker's treatment of the Church of the East largely passes over.

The Ancient Church of the East emerged from an internal division of the Assyrian Church of the East during the 1960s.

The dispute involved church administration, patriarchal succession, and the adoption of the Gregorian calendar.

In 1968, Mar Thomas Darmo and his supporters established a rival ecclesiastical hierarchy in Baghdad.

This produced a genuinely separate church organization.

The Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East share the same wider historical tradition, but their modern institutional separation resulted from circumstances very different from the Christological disputes of the fifth century.

This comparison illustrates the fundamental limitation of the family-tree method.

Christian institutions can separate without developing new fundamental doctrines.

They can also retain separate institutions after agreeing on important doctrines.

A chart that treats every branch primarily as the consequence of theological difference risks confusing two different questions:

What does a church believe?

And why does it govern itself separately?

Those are not always the same question.

The Verdict: Christianity's Divisions Were More Complicated Than Their Dates

Baker deserves to be judged against the work he actually attempted.

He set out to create an accessible introduction to the major Christian denominations, not a comprehensive academic history of late antiquity.

His account correctly identifies important councils, distinguishes the Assyrian Church of the East from Oriental Orthodoxy, and introduces ancient Christian communities that many general histories neglect.

Those achievements do not excuse the weaknesses in the explanations that connect his chart.

The Church of the East had established institutional independence before the Council of Ephesus.

Oriental Orthodox theology cannot accurately be reduced to a mixture of divinity and humanity.

The separation surrounding Chalcedon involved sustained conflicts over authority and ecclesiastical control, not merely a single decision creating new churches.

And the churches themselves have produced formal statements establishing substantial theological agreement across some of these ancient divisions.

The 1973, 1990, and 1994 declarations are particularly important.

They demonstrate that the historical arguments used to explain separate Christian identities cannot always be understood as straightforward disagreements between permanently incompatible doctrines.

They also expose the limits of reducing religious history to successive branches on a chart.

Baker's deepest mistake is treating a useful classification as though it were a sufficient historical explanation.

The councils were turning points, but they were not always the moments when independent churches were created.

The doctrines were important, but they were not the only reasons separate institutions survived.

And the theological differences were real, but some have subsequently proved less absolute than generations of religious conflict suggested.

Christianity's history is not merely the history of churches separating because they believed different things.

It is also the history of institutions acquiring power, communities resisting authority, political borders shaping religious allegiance, and rival traditions discovering unexpected common ground.

A family tree can identify where today's churches stand.

It cannot explain their history unless it also shows how they got there.

UsefulCharts gives viewers the branches.

Too often, it mistakes them for the whole tree.

References

1. Christian Origins & Early Schisms — UsefulCharts, Matt Baker, January 13, 2023.
Watch the original episode
The primary work examined here, establishing Baker's explanations of the councils, Christian doctrines, and the historical development of denominations.

2. Armeno-Iranian Relations in the Pre-Islamic Period — Nina Garsoïan, Encyclopaedia Iranica, July 20, 2004; updated May 13, 2018.
Read the historical study
Documents the Persian Church's ecclesiastical separation in 424, the political organization of Christianity within the Sasanian Empire, and the Armenian Church's subsequent theological development.

3. The Council of Ephesus of 431: Documents and Proceedings — Richard Price and Thomas Graumann, Liverpool University Press, 2020.
View the academic publication
The publisher's description establishes the existence of rival assemblies at Ephesus and the council's disputed proceedings; the complete scholarly edition was not available for review.

4. Third Ecumenical Council — Orthodox Church in America, The Orthodox Faith, undated.
Read the historical account
Explains the continued disagreement after Ephesus and the agreement reached between Cyril of Alexandria and John of Antioch in 433.

5. Common Declaration of Pope Paul VI and Pope Shenouda III — Holy See, May 10, 1973.
Read the original declaration
Provides direct evidence that Catholic and Coptic Orthodox leaders jointly affirmed Christ's complete divinity and humanity without confusion or mixture.

6. Second Agreed Statement Between the Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches — Joint Theological Commission, Chambésy, September 1990.
Read the joint agreement
Documents the participating theologians' recognition of shared Christological faith despite their churches' different traditional formulations; the agreement did not itself restore full communion.

7. Common Christological Declaration Between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East — Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV, Holy See, November 11, 1994.
Read the signed declaration
Establishes substantial agreement concerning Christ's divine and human nature and the legitimacy of different traditional titles for Mary.

8. Patriarch Dioscorus of Alexandria: The Last Pharaoh and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Later Roman Empire — Volker L. Menze, Oxford University Press, April 14, 2023.
View the scholarly study
Examines the political and institutional circumstances surrounding Chalcedon and Dioscorus's deposition; the published book and chapter abstracts were consulted rather than the complete text.

9. The Assyrian Church of the East — Ronald Roberson, Catholic Near East Welfare Association, last modified October 26, 2021.
Read the church history
Explains the church's gradual theological separation, objections to the Nestorian label, and the twentieth-century division that produced the Ancient Church of the East.

10. The Eritrean Orthodox Church — Ronald Roberson, Catholic Near East Welfare Association, last modified October 26, 2021.
Read the institutional history
Provides the chronology of Eritrea's ecclesiastical independence, distinguishing national sovereignty, recognition of church autonomy, and the establishment of its patriarchate.