UsefulCharts Got the Family Tree of Christianity Wrong

Matt Baker promises to explain how Christianity divided into its modern denominations. But when his family tree reaches the Eastern Catholic churches, several branches lead to the wrong ancestors.

A family tree makes an unusually powerful claim. It does not merely tell us that two groups resemble each other. It tells us where they came from, how they separated, and which historical institutions gave birth to them.

That is precisely why errors in a family tree matter more than errors in an ordinary historical summary.

In his February 17, 2023 video, History of Roman Catholicism & Eastern Orthodoxy, UsefulCharts creator Matt Baker walks viewers through nearly two thousand years of Christian history. He explains the ancient patriarchates, the Great Schism of 1054, the rise of national Orthodox churches, and the complicated relationship between Catholicism and Eastern Christianity.

The problems begin when he assigns particular churches to their supposed ancestors.

The Ruthenian Catholic Church is connected to Serbia. The Coptic Catholic Church is traced to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria. Three Catholic churches associated with Antioch are presented as descendants of the same Greek Orthodox patriarchate.

These are not merely disagreements about terminology. They confuse distinct historical communities, some of which separated more than a thousand years before the institutions Baker identifies as their parents.

The documentary record offers a substantially different picture.

The Ruthenian Church Did Not Come From Serbia

Baker introduces the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church by explaining that it originated when congregations separated from the Serbian Orthodox Church.

That is a remarkable geographical mistake.

The Ruthenian Catholic tradition is rooted in the Carpathian region, particularly the territory now called Transcarpathia in western Ukraine, together with neighboring communities in Slovakia, Poland, and historically Hungary.

Its people are commonly known as Rusyns.

One defining event in their Catholic history occurred on April 24, 1646, when 63 Orthodox priests entered communion with Rome at Užhorod.

This became known as the Union of Užhorod.

Further agreements followed at Mukačevo in 1664 and in the Maramureș region around 1713. Together, these developments established Catholic communion across much of the region's Byzantine Christian population.

The Catholic Near East Welfare Association's historical account, written by Ronald Roberson, documents this sequence in considerable detail. It identifies the Ruthenian churches' Carpathian homeland, their Hungarian political setting, their ecclesiastical agreements, and the subsequent development of their institutions.

Serbia does not provide the historical explanation for these events.

The confusion matters because the Ruthenian story is about a specific people negotiating their religious identity within the political world of Central Europe.

Their history includes conflicts with Latin Catholic authorities, disputes over the independence of their own hierarchy, persecution under Soviet rule, and continuing concern about preserving a separate Rusyn identity.

Indeed, Roberson records that the Ruthenian bishop of Mukačevo opposed integration into the much larger Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church because he wished to protect that distinct identity.

A family tree tracing Ruthenian Catholicism to Serbia does not simply place a branch in the wrong location. It removes the historical circumstances that explain why the branch exists.

For a video whose central purpose is tracing religious ancestry, this is a fundamental failure.

Egypt's Coptic Catholics Have Been Given the Wrong Parent

Baker makes another consequential mistake when he describes the Coptic Catholic Church as having broken away from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria.

To understand why this matters, we must return to a division he had already explained.

In 451, the Council of Chalcedon helped produce a lasting separation between Christian communities that accepted its theological decisions and those that rejected them.

Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Church belongs to the Oriental Orthodox tradition.

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria belongs to Eastern Orthodoxy.

These are different ecclesiastical traditions, despite sharing the ancient Christian geography of Alexandria.

The Coptic Catholic Church emerged through attempts to establish communion between Rome and Egyptian Christians belonging to the Coptic tradition.

An unsuccessful agreement was reached at the Council of Florence in 1442. Catholic missionary activity among Egyptian Copts expanded during the seventeenth century.

Then, in 1741, a Coptic bishop named Anba Athanasius entered communion with Rome.

Pope Benedict XIV appointed him apostolic vicar for the small Coptic Catholic community, which numbered no more than approximately 2,000 people.

Athanasius eventually returned to the Coptic Orthodox Church, but the Catholic community continued under successive apostolic vicars.

These details are documented in CNEWA's history of the Coptic Catholic Church.

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria is not the parent institution in that account.

Baker correctly distinguishes Oriental Orthodoxy from Eastern Orthodoxy earlier in his video, then confuses those traditions when explaining the origins of the Coptic Catholic Church.

This is a particularly damaging inconsistency.

The separation of Oriental and Eastern Orthodoxy is one of the major historical divisions that his entire chart is supposed to explain.

A viewer who understands that distinction should be able to follow the Coptic Catholic Church back through the Egyptian Coptic Christian tradition.

Instead, Baker supplies a different ancestry.

The result is not merely an inaccurate date or an omitted religious leader. It is a misclassification across one of Christianity's principal historical divisions.

Antioch: Three Catholic Churches, Three Different Histories

The problem becomes more serious when Baker reaches Antioch.

He explains that three Catholic patriarchal churches associated with the ancient city broke away from its Greek Orthodox patriarchate.

The three traditions in question are the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, the Syriac Catholic Church, and the Maronite Catholic Church.

They do not share the same institutional origin.

The Melkites: A Genuine Greek Orthodox Separation

The Melkite Greek Catholic Church provides the strongest example of the kind of separation Baker describes.

Its modern Catholic identity emerged from a dispute within the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch.

Following the death of Patriarch Athanasios III in 1724, competing factions supported different successors.

A pro-Catholic faction elected Cyril VI, while Constantinople supported Sylvester.

The resulting dispute produced rival patriarchal lines.

Rome recognized Cyril's election in 1729, consolidating the Catholic branch that became the Melkite Greek Catholic Church.

This is an identifiable historical separation from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch.

But it does not establish the origins of the other two churches.

The Syriac Catholics: A Different Orthodox Tradition

The Syriac Catholic Church developed from the Syriac Orthodox Church.

That church belongs to Oriental Orthodoxy, not Eastern Orthodoxy.

Its Catholic history includes seventeenth-century missionary activity among Syriac Orthodox Christians, competing patriarchal elections, and a renewed Catholic patriarchal succession established through Michael Jarweh.

In 1782, Jarweh was elected patriarch by the Syriac Orthodox synod. He subsequently entered Catholic communion and established a continuing Syriac Catholic patriarchal line.

The division involved the Syriac Orthodox tradition.

It was not a separation from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch.

The distinction returns us to the same historical boundary that Baker confused in Alexandria.

The Maronites: Another History Entirely

The Maronite Catholic Church presents a still different case.

Maronite Christianity developed around the followers of Saint Maron, whose monastic tradition emerged in the late fourth and early fifth centuries.

Its communities eventually established a distinct ecclesiastical identity in the mountains of Lebanon.

By the eighth century, they had developed their own patriarchal leadership.

Their relationship with Rome was formally confirmed in 1182, during the Crusader period.

Maronite tradition maintains that the church never lost communion with Rome. Whether communion was historically uninterrupted is a question requiring separate examination.

What matters here is that the Maronite Church did not originate through a straightforward separation from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch of the kind described in the video.

CNEWA accordingly places the Maronites in a separate category: churches without an Orthodox counterpart.

This makes Baker's classification especially difficult to defend.

Three Catholic churches associated with Antioch represent three different histories.

One emerged from the Greek Orthodox tradition.

Another emerged from the Oriental Orthodox tradition.

The third developed through a distinct monastic and patriarchal history.

They share a historical connection to Antioch, but sharing a patriarchal title is not the same as sharing institutional ancestry.

Antioch is the clearest demonstration of the danger in Baker's approach: geographical association is repeatedly allowed to stand in for actual ecclesiastical descent.

For anyone trying to understand how Christianity divided, that distinction is indispensable.

Ukraine's Catholic History Is Not Simply a Rejection of Russia

Baker's explanation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church introduces a different problem.

He connects its emergence during the sixteenth century with Christians in Ukraine who did not wish to join the Russian Orthodox Church and therefore entered Catholicism instead.

There is a recognizable historical issue beneath that explanation: religious independence from Moscow has been important to Ukrainian Christianity.

But the actual circumstances of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church's formation are considerably more revealing.

Its decisive institutional development was the Union of Brest in 1596.

At the time, the Kyiv metropolitanate was historically connected with Constantinople, while much of the territory containing its faithful lay within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Moscow had declared ecclesiastical independence in 1448 and received recognition of its patriarchate in 1589.

The Ukrainian bishops negotiating with Rome were therefore operating within a complicated religious and political system involving Constantinople, Moscow, Poland-Lithuania, and the Catholic Church.

The Union of Brest was not simply a decision to avoid joining Russia.

It was an agreement through which Orthodox bishops accepted papal authority while seeking to preserve their Byzantine liturgy, church organization, and religious customs.

Political influence was central.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth favored Roman Catholicism, and Orthodox clergy faced unequal treatment.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church's own historical account identifies protection against religious assimilation, preservation of the Byzantine tradition, and the difficulties facing the Kyiv metropolitanate as important reasons for the union.

An Orthodox account published by the Orthodox Church in America places greater emphasis on pressure from Catholic authorities, political privileges offered to Orthodox bishops, and resistance among Orthodox believers.

It reports that nine of eleven Ruthenian Orthodox bishops formally accepted the agreement.

The two accounts disagree about how the religious and political pressures should be judged.

They nevertheless establish that the negotiations involved specific institutional interests and political circumstances.

That is the story worth explaining.

A Christian community was trying to preserve its religious customs while negotiating its position between powerful competing authorities.

The resulting union generated bitter opposition and enduring institutional divisions.

Later developments make those origins even more consequential.

In 1946, Soviet authorities suppressed the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and organized its incorporation into the Russian Orthodox Church.

Ukrainian Catholic bishops were arrested, religious institutions were closed, and many believers continued practicing their faith underground.

The church regained legal recognition during the final years of Soviet rule.

These events illuminate the long struggle over Ukrainian ecclesiastical identity.

Baker's account compresses much of that history into an apparent choice between Rome and Moscow.

The simplification obscures the political pressures, competing jurisdictions, and institutional bargains that made the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church what it became.

Ukraine's Orthodox Unification Was Not the Merger Baker Describes

The video also describes the 2018 effort to unite Ukraine's three principal Orthodox church organizations.

These were the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Kyiv Patriarchate, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church historically associated with Moscow.

Baker characterizes the merger as largely successful.

But the institutional record exposes an important limitation.

The unification council on December 15, 2018, brought together the Kyiv Patriarchate and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.

Only two bishops from the Moscow-associated Ukrainian Orthodox Church participated.

The wider Moscow-associated hierarchy remained outside the new organization.

A contemporary account from the Centre for Eastern Studies identified those two bishops as participants from a hierarchy containing 73 bishops.

Research published by historian Andrii Smyrnov likewise documents the formation of the new church and the institutional steps leading to its recognition.

The creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine was undoubtedly significant.

But merging two organizations while almost the entire hierarchy of a third stays outside is not the same as successfully merging all three.

Baker compounds this problem with his estimate that approximately 80% of Ukrainian Orthodox Christians belonged to the new church.

The figure requires a definition of membership that the video does not supply.

In November 2022, the Razumkov Centre found that approximately 63% of surveyed Ukrainian adults identified as Orthodox Christians, while about 36% of all respondents identified with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

That places declared OCU affiliation at approximately 57% of self-identified Orthodox adults, not 80%.

A subsequent November 2023 survey found that 42% of all respondents identified with the OCU and approximately 61% identified as Orthodox, producing a corresponding proportion of about 69%.

Neither calculation measures formal parish membership or church attendance. The surveys also excluded Russian-occupied territory and active combat zones, limiting their geographical coverage.

Those qualifications matter.

But they make Baker's unexplained 80% figure harder to accept as a straightforward measurement of Ukrainian Orthodox affiliation.

The difference between identifying culturally as Orthodox, declaring allegiance to a particular church, and formally belonging to a parish is substantial.

In a country where religious institutions have become entangled with national identity and war, those distinctions deserve particular care.

The Problem With Turning Christianity Into a Family Tree

Baker's principal historical framework is not without foundation.

The five ancient patriarchates were important centers of Christian authority. The Chalcedonian divisions profoundly affected Eastern Christianity. Papal jurisdiction and the Filioque controversy contributed to the separation between Rome and Constantinople.

His explanation that Catholicism contains 24 churches, including 23 Eastern Catholic churches, is also an important distinction that many popular accounts overlook.

These established elements are precisely what make the later errors consequential.

A convincing explanation creates trust.

Once viewers understand the major Christian divisions, they are likely to accept the smaller branches as extensions of the same research.

But institutional ancestry is not always a simple sequence of one church breaking away from another.

Religious communities can change jurisdiction without abandoning their liturgical traditions.

Different institutions can preserve claims to the same ancient patriarchate.

Churches can develop parallel leadership structures, reunite with earlier authorities, or preserve separate identities after political boundaries shift.

Some communities claim uninterrupted historical continuity where outside historians identify periods of separation.

A reliable denominational family tree must distinguish those different processes.

Baker's presentation sometimes does exactly that.

His discussion of the Orthodox Church in America and the disputed autocephaly of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine recognizes that religious independence can be accepted by one patriarchate and rejected by another.

Yet that sophistication disappears when several Eastern Catholic churches are assigned simplified—and in some instances demonstrably incorrect—origins.

There is no evidence in the material examined that Baker deliberately falsified these relationships.

The errors are consistent with overcompression, insufficient checking of particular genealogies, or confusion among churches with similar names and historical titles.

Those explanations may account for the mistakes.

They do not make the resulting classifications accurate.

The Verdict: A Family Tree Must Get the Parents Right

The strongest criticism of History of Roman Catholicism & Eastern Orthodoxy is not that Matt Baker gets every major historical development wrong.

He does not.

It is that a work specifically designed to explain religious ancestry makes repeated errors about ancestry itself.

The Ruthenian Catholic Church is wrongly associated with Serbian Orthodox origins.

The Coptic Catholic Church is traced to the wrong Orthodox tradition.

Distinct Catholic patriarchal churches associated with Antioch are treated as though they emerged from one Greek Orthodox institutional lineage.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church's formation is stripped of much of the political and ecclesiastical context that explains the Union of Brest.

And the account of Ukraine's Orthodox unification presents a degree of institutional consolidation that the historical record does not establish.

These are not equally serious mistakes, and they should not be treated as though they were.

The Antioch and Alexandria classifications are especially damaging because they confuse the very distinctions between Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy that the video claims to teach.

The Ruthenian error assigns a community to the wrong regional ancestry.

The Ukrainian accounts demonstrate how the desire to make history easy to follow can erase the negotiations, conflicts, and competing authorities that actually produced religious divisions.

A family tree is supposed to make complicated relationships easier to understand.

But its simplicity is an advantage only when the underlying relationships are correct.

Otherwise, every clean line becomes another opportunity to teach a mistake with extraordinary confidence.

Baker has produced an accessible explanation of Christian denominational history. What he has not produced, in these crucial sections, is a sufficiently reliable account of how the churches descended from one another.

That is a serious defect in a video whose entire premise is showing viewers where Christianity's branches came from.

References

1. History of Roman Catholicism & Eastern Orthodoxy
UsefulCharts, Matt Baker, February 17, 2023.

The original video under review establishes Baker's descriptions of the major Christian divisions and his specific claims about the Ruthenian, Coptic Catholic, Antiochian, and Ukrainian churches.

2. The Ruthenian Catholic Churches
Ronald Roberson, The Eastern Christian Churches, Catholic Near East Welfare Association, updated October 26, 2021.

Documents the Carpathian origins of Ruthenian Catholicism, the Union of Užhorod in 1646, and the community's subsequent institutional development, contradicting the proposed Serbian ancestry.

3. The Coptic Catholic Church
Ronald Roberson, The Eastern Christian Churches, Catholic Near East Welfare Association, updated October 26, 2021.

Traces Coptic Catholic origins through Egyptian Coptic Christianity, missionary activity, and Anba Athanasius's conversion in 1741 rather than a separation from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate.

4. The Melkite Catholic Church
Ronald Roberson, The Eastern Christian Churches, Catholic Near East Welfare Association, updated October 26, 2021.

Explains the disputed patriarchal succession of 1724 and provides the historical basis for identifying the Melkite Greek Catholic Church as a genuine separation from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch.

5. The Syrian Catholic Church
Ronald Roberson, The Eastern Christian Churches, Catholic Near East Welfare Association, updated October 26, 2021.

Documents the Syriac Catholic Church's emergence from the Syriac Orthodox tradition, establishing why its ancestry differs from that of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church.

6. The Maronite Catholic Church
Ronald Roberson, The Eastern Christian Churches, Catholic Near East Welfare Association, updated October 25, 2024.

Describes the Maronites' monastic origins, independent patriarchal development, and relationship with Rome, distinguishing their history from a straightforward Greek Orthodox separation.

7. Union of Brest 1596
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, official historical account, publication date not specified.

Explains the political, religious, and institutional circumstances of the Union of Brest, including the preservation of Byzantine traditions and negotiations involving the Kyiv metropolitanate.

8. The Union of Brest-Litovsk
Orthodox Church in America, The Orthodox Faith, historical education series, publication date not specified.

Provides an Orthodox interpretation of the same union, emphasizing Polish-Lithuanian political influence, promised privileges, and resistance among Orthodox Christians.

9. The Ukrainian Catholic Church
Ronald Roberson, The Eastern Christian Churches, Catholic Near East Welfare Association, historical reference.

Documents the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church's establishment, its later suppression under Soviet rule, and the survival and revival of its institutions.

10. The Unification Council of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, 15 December 2018
Andrii Smyrnov, Scientific Notes of Ostroh Academy National University, June 14, 2021.

Examines the formation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, the participating religious organizations, and the process leading to recognition of its autocephaly.

11. Historic Unification of Ukrainian Orthodox Church
Centre for Eastern Studies, December 17, 2018.

Records the participation of only two bishops from the Moscow-associated Ukrainian Orthodox hierarchy, contradicting the impression of a comprehensive three-church merger.

12. War and Church: Church and Religious Situation in Ukraine 2022
Razumkov Centre, survey conducted November 2022; report published in 2023.

Provides contemporaneous survey evidence about Ukrainian religious identification, allowing Baker's estimate of OCU affiliation to be evaluated against a defined population.

13. Religiosity, Trust in the Church, Confessional Affiliation and Inter-Church Relations in Ukrainian Society
Razumkov Centre, December 28, 2023.

Supplies later survey results distinguishing OCU affiliation, Moscow-associated church affiliation, and respondents identifying only as Orthodox; these measurements clarify why claims about church membership require precise definitions.