The Christian Family Tree That Gets Its Biggest Split Wrong

Matt Baker's simplified history of Christian denominations contains an extraordinary error: it places Jerusalem on the wrong side of one of Christianity's most important theological divisions.

In his UsefulCharts video, Christian Denominations Family Tree (Simplified Version), Baker explains that five ancient Christian patriarchates divided over the Council of Chalcedon. According to his account, Rome and Constantinople accepted the council's teaching, while Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria rejected it.

Except Jerusalem did not reject Chalcedon. Its bishop participated in the council, and the council itself helped establish Jerusalem's position as a patriarchate.

The surviving records document the involvement of Jerusalem's Bishop Juvenal and Antioch's Bishop Maximus in the council's decisions. Those records contradict the geographical division at the center of Baker's explanation.

This is not an obscure mistake buried in a lengthy theological argument. It changes the ancestry of Christian churches.

Baker sets out to make nearly 2,000 years of religious history understandable through a family tree. But the simplicity of that tree comes at a price: rival churches become single institutions, complicated theological disagreements become misleading formulas, and historical developments separated by decades are compressed into apparently direct lines of descent.

The problem is not that Baker leaves things out. Every short history must.

It is that some of the things he leaves out are essential to understanding the things he includes.

Jerusalem Was Not on the Side Baker Claims

The Council of Chalcedon met in 451 CE to settle disputes about how Jesus Christ could be understood as both divine and human.

Baker presents the resulting division as a disagreement between two geographical blocs.

Rome and Constantinople accepted the council, he explains, while the remaining three patriarchates rejected it.

His wording is unequivocal:

"the other three pentarchies did not accept this creed"

The historical record tells a different story.

Maximus, Bishop of Antioch, participated in the council and supported the position associated with Pope Leo I. The council's surviving proceedings record his agreement with the theological position advanced by Flavian of Constantinople and Leo.

Jerusalem's bishop, Juvenal, also participated. More remarkably, the council recognized an agreement between Juvenal and Maximus that gave Jerusalem jurisdiction over the three Palestinian provinces.

The council that Baker portrays Jerusalem as rejecting was instrumental in elevating Jerusalem's ecclesiastical authority.

The present-day Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem explicitly traces its patriarchal standing to Chalcedon.

It describes the council as the occasion on which Jerusalem was elevated to a patriarchate and its jurisdiction expanded.

Alexandria presents a different history. Its bishop, Dioscorus, opposed the Chalcedonian settlement, and the controversy contributed to an enduring division.

Antioch also developed competing Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian traditions. But that was not the same as the entire patriarchate simply rejecting the council.

The distinction matters.

A patriarchate was not a country voting unanimously on a constitutional amendment. Its bishops, clergy, monasteries, and congregations could disagree. Competing authorities could claim succession to the same ancient church.

Baker's geographical division removes those conflicts and replaces them with the appearance of institutional unanimity.

It also obscures a fact that remains visible today: Eastern Orthodox patriarchates continue to exist in Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria.

These were not three cities that simply departed from the future Eastern Orthodox Church. Their Christian communities developed along competing lines, producing traditions that continue to claim ancient roots.

One theological controversy did not divide the Mediterranean into five conveniently color-coded territories.

Chalcedon Did Not Teach the Separation Baker Describes

The geographical error is accompanied by a theological one.

Baker explains the Chalcedonian position by saying that Jesus possessed:

"two separate natures, one divine and one human"

That adjective changes the doctrine.

The Council of Chalcedon taught that Christ was acknowledged in two natures, divine and human, united in one person.

Its definition explicitly rejected division and separation.

The surviving formulation describes the union as occurring "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation."

The final two qualifications directly contradict the impression created by Baker's description of two separate natures.

This distinction may sound technical. It is nevertheless the precise issue the council was attempting to resolve.

Chalcedon sought to preserve Christ's complete humanity and divinity without dividing him into two persons.

Baker's account then presents the churches that rejected Chalcedon as believing Jesus had one nature that was simultaneously divine and human.

That description comes closer to their actual position, but it still reduces a complex theological disagreement to an inadequate numerical comparison.

The Oriental Orthodox churches traditionally follow the Christological language associated with Cyril of Alexandria, particularly the doctrine of the one incarnate nature of the divine Word.

They do not simply deny Christ's humanity.

The World Council of Churches identifies six principal Oriental Orthodox traditions: Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Indian Malankara.

It also notes that the older designation Monophysite is generally considered an erroneous description of these churches.

The difference is not a theological technicality that educators can safely discard.

It concerns the beliefs of entire living religious communities.

Baker's version risks leaving viewers with the impression that one side believed Jesus was divided and the other believed his humanity and divinity were somehow merged.

Neither formulation adequately represents the historical positions.

The Churches Themselves Have Already Challenged This Simplification

Perhaps the most revealing evidence against Baker's account comes from the churches whose disagreements he describes.

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

Their statement affirmed that Christ was fully divine and fully human, with both united inseparably.

It also acknowledged that the divisions following Chalcedon had been intensified by factors beyond theology.

That declaration did not reunite the Catholic and Coptic Orthodox churches. It did, however, establish substantial common ground concerning the very doctrine Baker uses to explain their separation.

An even stronger declaration followed on June 23, 1984.

Pope John Paul II and Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Zakka I Iwas jointly affirmed their understanding of Christ's divinity and humanity.

They attributed historical divisions concerning the Incarnation to differences of terminology, culture, and theological expression.

Their declaration identified no fundamental disagreement between their churches about the doctrine of the Incarnation as jointly stated.

These agreements deserve careful interpretation.

They do not establish that every historical disagreement was imaginary, that every theological difficulty has disappeared, or that the churches have restored full communion.

But they establish something Baker's two-sided explanation fails to convey.

Churches separated for approximately fifteen centuries have formally recognized substantial agreement about the doctrine supposedly dividing them.

The consequences are considerable.

If the churches themselves can acknowledge common beliefs while remaining institutionally separated, the history cannot be explained through theology alone.

Religious authority, historical memory, jurisdiction, political relationships, and disagreements over the legitimacy of earlier councils also matter.

The World Council of Churches records that formal dialogue between Eastern and Oriental Orthodox representatives began in 1985 and produced Christological agreements. Their reception by the individual churches remains a significant issue.

That is a more revealing story than a disagreement over whether the number of Christ's natures was one or two.

It is also a story largely absent from Baker's explanation.

The Five-Patriarch System Did Not Arrive Fully Formed

Baker's chronology presents another problem.

After explaining that Nicene Christianity became the Roman Empire's official religion in 380, he describes the imperial church developing five major patriarchates.

His account then proceeds to the Chalcedonian controversy.

The sequence creates the impression of an already established five-center institution encountering a theological disagreement.

In reality, the patriarchal structure developed over time.

Constantinople's standing rose alongside its political importance as the eastern imperial capital.

Jerusalem's jurisdiction expanded through decisions made at Chalcedon itself in 451.

The mature concept of a pentarchy, a system recognizing five major patriarchates, became firmly established in the sixth century under Emperor Justinian.

The Orthodox Church in America's historical account specifically places this consolidated five-patriarch framework in the sixth century.

Baker is therefore describing a later institutional arrangement as though it provides the natural starting structure for an earlier controversy.

His treatment of the Nicene Creed involves a related compression.

The Council of Nicaea met in 325 and established a foundational statement concerning Christ's divinity.

But the creed commonly recited by churches today is more accurately called the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.

Its formulation reflects the councils of both Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381.

The distinction matters because the theology that Baker presents as having been formally settled in 325 continued to develop through later controversies and councils.

None of this invalidates his larger point that councils gradually helped define orthodox Christian belief.

It invalidates the suggestion that one meeting produced an essentially completed religious settlement.

The fourth-century church did not possess a finished doctrinal constitution waiting to be inherited by every subsequent denomination.

Its institutions and definitions were still developing.

The Church of the East Has a More Complicated Beginning

Baker correctly recognizes that Christianity extended beyond Roman territory into the Sasanian Persian Empire.

But his explanation again transforms gradual historical development into a comparatively simple branching event.

He places the establishment of the Church of the East around the period when Nicene Christianity became the Roman Empire's official religion.

The decisive institutional developments occurred across several decades.

The Church of the East held a major synod at Seleucia-Ctesiphon in 410.

This council organized Christian ecclesiastical affairs within the Persian Empire, strengthened the position of its leading bishop, and formally accepted the Nicene Creed.

A later synod in 424 affirmed the independence of the Persian church's ecclesiastical authority from western appeals.

The history is documented by Sebastian Brock in Encyclopaedia Iranica and by Philip Wood's research on the Church of the East.

This matters because Christianity in Persia was not merely a Roman religious branch that became separate after crossing an imperial border.

Its institutions developed within a different political system, under rulers whose relations with the Roman Empire could be hostile.

Political independence, theological alignment, and ecclesiastical organization did not necessarily change at the same moment.

Baker's family-tree model makes those separate processes look like one event.

Muslim Conquest Was Not Instant Religious Replacement

The same habit of compressing history appears in Baker's treatment of the Islamic conquests.

He explains that the regions associated with the three supposedly non-Chalcedonian patriarchates fell under Islamic rule.

He then states:

"Christianity continued to exist in those areas, but was now in the minority."

The wording risks confusing two fundamentally different developments.

Political control can change after a military conquest.

The religion of an entire population generally changes through a much longer process.

Egypt came under Arab Muslim rule in the seventh century. Its Christian population did not immediately become a small minority.

Conversion, migration, administration, language change, taxation, and social developments shaped the gradual transformation of Egyptian religious life over subsequent centuries.

Research on Christianity and Islam in Egypt describes the early Muslim population as growing slowly, with immigration initially more important than conversion.

The available historical evidence does not justify assigning one precise date at which Egypt's religious majority changed.

It does establish that conquest and religious conversion must not be treated as interchangeable events.

This distinction matters beyond chronology.

A Christian community living under Muslim political authority was not necessarily a demographic minority.

The experience of an established Christian population under a new ruling power differs substantially from that of a small religious community surviving inside an overwhelmingly Muslim society.

Baker's compressed account obscures that transition.

It also misses the larger historical question: how did societies with deeply established Christian institutions gradually acquire Muslim majorities?

That transformation requires an explanation, not a change of color on a map.

Eastern Orthodoxy Does Not Have Another Pope

The account becomes misleading again when Baker reaches the division between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

He explains that Catholicism remained under Rome's jurisdiction, led by the Pope.

Eastern Orthodoxy, he says, remained:

"still led by the Patriarch of Constantinople"

The symmetry is convenient.

It is also institutionally inaccurate.

The Catholic Church recognizes the Pope's universal primacy and governing authority.

Eastern Orthodoxy does not operate under an equivalent worldwide patriarch.

Instead, it consists of self-governing churches, commonly described as autocephalous, which share a religious tradition while retaining their own governing structures.

The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople holds a position of honor and has important coordinating responsibilities.

He does not possess the equivalent of papal jurisdiction over every Eastern Orthodox church.

The Orthodox Church in America makes this distinction explicit in its explanation of Orthodox governance.

Baker mentions that the Russian Orthodox Church severed ties with Constantinople in 2018.

That observation is significant, but its meaning becomes clearer once the actual governing structure is understood.

On October 15, 2018, the Russian Orthodox Church announced that it was ending Eucharistic communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.

The immediate dispute concerned Constantinople's actions toward Ukrainian church independence and competing claims to ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

Moscow's own declaration identified Constantinople's intervention in Ukraine as the central grievance.

The dispute was not simply a subordinate religious organization breaking away from its chief executive.

It involved two major Orthodox authorities contesting jurisdiction, legitimacy, and the boundaries of church independence.

That distinction changes the entire explanation of Orthodox institutional power.

It also exposes a recurring weakness in Baker's family-tree approach.

Two churches may share theology without recognizing the same jurisdiction.

Two patriarchs may occupy prominent positions without one possessing universal authority over the other.

A historical family tree alone cannot explain those relationships.

The Protestant Revivals Do Not Fit the Timeline

Baker's account of the Protestant Reformation establishes several recognizable branches: Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, and Anabaptist.

Its broad outline is familiar.

But his subsequent treatment of American religious revivals increasingly blurs the difference between a movement emerging directly from a revival and one developing later within a wider religious culture.

Consider the Second Great Awakening.

Baker describes it as an exclusively American religious event and connects it with several new denominations, including the Plymouth Brethren.

Yet the Plymouth Brethren originated in Ireland and Britain during the late 1820s and early 1830s.

Historian Peter Brock's research, published in Church History, identifies the movement's early centers as Dublin and Plymouth.

This is not a minor geographical qualification.

Baker assigns a movement originating across the Atlantic to an awakening he has just described as taking place exclusively in the United States.

The problem becomes more pronounced when he groups Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Latter-day Saints together as the three largest denominations emerging from that awakening.

Their histories are not interchangeable.

Seventh-day Adventism developed from the Millerite movement of the 1840s and formally organized as a denomination in 1863.

The denomination's own historical encyclopedia documents that institutional development.

The Bible Student movement associated with Charles Taze Russell, from which Jehovah's Witnesses developed, began in Pennsylvania in the early 1870s.

Jehovah's Witnesses themselves identify that period as the beginning of their modern organizational history.

The connection to earlier American revivalism is historically meaningful.

But that does not make every later religious movement a direct institutional product of one awakening.

The distinction between an immediate organizational origin and a broader intellectual or cultural inheritance matters.

A denomination can develop from ideas popularized during a revival without being founded during that revival.

Baker's explanation largely collapses those categories.

There is another revealing detail.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church now explicitly affirms the Trinity, describing Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three co-eternal persons.

That belief appears among its official fundamental doctrines.

Baker acknowledges the denomination's later movement toward Nicene Christianity.

But its changing theology demonstrates precisely why fixed branches and permanent categories can misrepresent historical religious identities.

Churches change their doctrines.

They revise institutional arrangements.

They separate, reconcile, and sometimes discover that their alleged theological differences were less fundamental than generations of controversy suggested.

A static family tree struggles to capture those developments.

A Family Tree Cannot Prove Religious Influence

One of Baker's more speculative claims concerns the origins of Islam.

He describes the Ebionites and Nazarenes as Jewish Christian movements that accepted Jesus as Messiah but not as God.

He then proposes that these movements:

"likely had an influence on the development of Islam"

The resemblance between some early Jewish Christian beliefs and Islamic teachings concerning Jesus is historically interesting.

But resemblance does not establish direct influence.

To demonstrate a historical connection, researchers need evidence concerning chronology, surviving communities, transmission, texts, and plausible channels through which ideas reached their later recipients.

The possible influence of Jewish Christianity on early Islam remains an area of scholarly disagreement.

A 2021 study by Francisco del Río Sánchez specifically examines the continuing debate over Jewish-Christian explanations for Islam's origins.

Baker uses the word likely, which indicates some uncertainty.

The problem is that the family-tree format can make an uncertain intellectual relationship appear more concrete than the underlying evidence permits.

A line connecting two religious traditions is not merely decorative.

Readers naturally interpret it as evidence of descent or transmission.

But shared beliefs may result from common inherited traditions, contact with related communities, indirect borrowing, or separate developments within a shared religious environment.

These possibilities are not equivalent.

An educational family tree must distinguish established institutional succession from proposed theological influence.

Otherwise, an attractive diagram can turn a historical hypothesis into an apparent fact.

The Real Problem Is the Authority of a Clean Diagram

The weaknesses in Baker's video are not evenly distributed.

Some are straightforward historical errors.

Jerusalem's supposed rejection of Chalcedon is one.

Others concern misleading theological descriptions, incomplete institutional explanations, compressed chronology, or uncertain historical relationships presented too neatly.

Together, they create a larger problem.

A family tree implies that religious traditions split at identifiable moments into branches with recognizable ancestors.

Christianity sometimes developed that way.

But it also developed through overlapping jurisdictions, competing bishops, imperial intervention, changing doctrines, migration, religious revival, and institutions that continued to claim the same historical inheritance after separating.

A tree can represent some of those developments.

It cannot replace the historical evidence needed to establish them.

And when the evidence contradicts the tree, the tree must change.

The most striking example remains Chalcedon.

Baker describes a division between five ancient religious centers. Yet the council records identify bishops from the supposedly opposing territories participating in its decisions.

The council's theological definition explicitly rejects the separation Baker attributes to it.

Modern Catholic and Oriental Orthodox leaders have formally affirmed substantial common ground on the same Christological questions that supposedly produced an irreconcilable doctrinal divide.

Those three findings emerge from different kinds of evidence: ancient council proceedings, theological texts, and modern declarations by the churches themselves.

All challenge the simplified narrative.

They also reveal what the video could have explained instead.

Christianity's historical divisions were not always the predictable result of different groups adopting incompatible religious ideas.

Sometimes institutions separated while preserving profoundly similar beliefs.

Sometimes political disputes hardened theological differences.

And sometimes authorities spent centuries defending divisions that later generations proved capable of reconsidering.

That is a more consequential history than the one Baker offers.

The Verdict: A Map That Mistakes Simplicity for Accuracy

Matt Baker's Christian Denominations Family Tree attempts to explain an exceptionally complicated subject in a short video.

Its greatest weakness is not the decision to simplify.

It is the failure to distinguish simplification from distortion.

Jerusalem was not simply a non-Chalcedonian patriarchate. The Council of Chalcedon did not teach that Christ's divine and human natures were separate. The patriarch of Constantinople does not govern Eastern Orthodoxy as the Pope governs Catholicism.

These are not peripheral qualifications.

They concern the origins, beliefs, and authority of some of Christianity's oldest surviving institutions.

More troubling is what the video loses by organizing religious history into a succession of clean divisions.

It loses the possibility that churches separated for reasons beyond doctrine.

It loses the influence of political authority on religious institutions.

It loses the distinction between religious descent and theological resemblance.

And it loses the remarkable fact that churches divided for centuries can later recognize substantial agreement about beliefs once considered grounds for separation.

The Christian family tree is not wrong because Christianity is too complicated to explain simply.

It is wrong where the simplicity changes the history.

For an educational work presented as a guide to Christian denominations, that distinction should be fundamental.

References

1. UsefulCharts — Christian Denominations Family Tree (Simplified Version). Matt Baker, original video; publication date not established in the supplied transcript. The original work under examination, particularly its explanations of Chalcedon, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestant revival movements.

2. Council of Chalcedon — Extracts from the Acts, 451 CE. Hosted by New Advent. The surviving proceedings document the participation of Maximus of Antioch and Juvenal of Jerusalem, contradicting the video's portrayal of their patriarchates as uniformly rejecting the council.

3. Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem — Orthodox in the Holy Land, undated. Jerusalem's own institutional history identifies the Council of Chalcedon as the occasion of its elevation to patriarchal standing.

4. Creed of Chalcedon — Chalcedonian Definition, 451 CE. Hosted by the Protestant Reformed Churches in America. The theological declaration expressly rejects division and separation between Christ's divine and human natures.

5. World Council of Churches — Orthodox Churches (Oriental), undated. Identifies the six principal Oriental Orthodox traditions, explains their theological inheritance, and documents modern efforts toward reconciliation.

6. Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Shenouda III — Common Declaration, Vatican, May 10, 1973. Establishes substantial agreement between Catholic and Coptic Orthodox leaders concerning Christ's divinity and humanity while acknowledging the continuing historical division.

7. Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Ignatius Zakka I Iwas — Common Declaration, Vatican, June 23, 1984. Records Catholic and Syriac Orthodox agreement concerning the Incarnation and identifies historical differences in language, culture, and theological expression.

8. Orthodox Church in America — The Five Patriarchates, undated. Places the mature pentarchy within the sixth-century ecclesiastical framework rather than treating it as a completed fourth-century institution.

9. Orthodox Church in America — The Nicene Creed, undated. Explains the development of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed through the councils of 325 and 381.

10. Sebastian P. Brock — Isaac, Bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon. Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2006. Documents the Church of the East's synod of 410 and its formal acceptance of Nicene doctrine, demonstrating the complexity of its institutional formation.

11. Philip Wood — The Chronicle of Seert: Christian Historical Imagination in Late Antique Iraq. Oxford University Press, 2013. Examines the political setting of the Church of the East's early organization and the relationship between Persian royal authority and Christian ecclesiastical leadership.

12. Stanley H. Skreslet — Christians and Muslims in Egypt. Interpretation, April 2022. Surveys Christian-Muslim relations after the Arab conquest; the publicly accessible abstract establishes the study's scope, while the detailed demographic discussion requires access to the full article.

13. Orthodox Church in America — How Is the Orthodox Church Organized and Held Together as One Worldwide Church?, undated. Explains Orthodox self-government and the absence of a single worldwide bishop with authority equivalent to the Pope.

14. Russian Orthodox Church — Statement of the Holy Synod Concerning the Encroachment of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, October 15, 2018. Documents Moscow's stated reasons for severing communion with Constantinople; it establishes Moscow's position rather than independently resolving the Ukrainian jurisdictional dispute.

15. Peter Brock — The Peace Testimony of the Early Plymouth Brethren. Church History, Cambridge University Press; online publication July 28, 2009. Identifies Dublin and Plymouth as the movement's early centers, contradicting its placement as a straightforward product of an exclusively American awakening.

16. Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists — FAQ About Adventists, undated. Documents the denomination's Millerite origins and formal organization in 1863.

17. Jehovah's Witnesses — Their Modern Development and Growth, Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, undated. Provides the organization's own account of its beginnings in Pennsylvania during the early 1870s, distinguishing its origin from earlier American revival movements.

18. General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists — What Do Seventh-day Adventists Believe?, undated. Establishes the denomination's current official Trinitarian theology, including its belief in three co-eternal divine persons.

19. Francisco del Río Sánchez — The Deadlocked Debate about the Role of the Jewish Christians at the Birth of Islam. Religions, 2021. Examines competing scholarly explanations of Jewish-Christian influence on early Islam, providing context for why direct historical transmission remains contested.