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aaah! to learn something new every day! Aye?
Okay they split , but what about their writings?
When did they document their changes and new doctrines?
Orthodoxy said:
it would appear the "time line" is incomplete. Nothing worth noting happened between 900 ad and 1200 ad?
Does 1054ad ring any bells? A duped roman catholic time line maybe?
Orthodoxy
Here's what an "Eastern" Orthodox web site has to say about the split.
600 Years
Q & A
"That is not surprising, considering it was the Roman Catholic Church - for the first 600 years of its own existence."
Q - What do you mean by "600 years" of existence ?
A- We are talking about the time period from the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. to the time of the Split in 1056 A.D - when the Eastern Roman Catholic Church, became the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Q - So what happened between the time of the founding of the Church in the New Testament book of Acts and 325 A.D. ? Are you suggesting that the Roman Catholic Church did not exist prior to 325 A.D. ?
A - What actually happened was that Constantine made a deal with the Bishop of Rome, to legitimize a certain number of Churches in exchange for influence. That deal was made between Constantine, the Bishop of Rome, Eusebius and a few others immediately After the Council of Nicea. In other words, once the delegates had gone home after the main conferences, and were back with their own local congregations, that is when Eusebius and Constantine organized the foundations of their new Political Church.
It was that political arrangement that created the position of Pope and created the newly sanctioned Roman Catholic Church.
Q - Well if the Roman Catholic Church did not exist before 325 A.D., then what Churches existed prior to 325 A.D. and then at the time of the council of Nicea ?
A- The independent Bible believing Congregations that were autonomous, and that had managed to survive 200 years of Persecution by the Roman Empire.
Between the Earliest Christians, and those of who attended the Council of Nicea, there is no unbroken line of succession. On the contrary, those who attended came with the Gospel in their hearts, their parchment scrolls and books, but the lines of succession between those surviving christians and the original "early Christians" had been broken many many decades before.
The Contention that Jerusalem or Antioch operated in an open and unbroken line of succession is a premise which is not supported by historical facts. Though Jesus died sometime around 33-37 A.D, it was Titus who came into Jerusalem and decimated those who lived there at the time of his destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. This not only affected those who were followers of Judaism, but also those who were part of the Church in Jerusalem up until that time. The point is that the situation which developed in Jerusalem in 70 A.D. is exactly the kind of event that breaks apart churches, church organizations and church structures. Just look at the independent truly Bible believing churches that operated underground - or tried to - in Soviet days.
Churches in Russia (not referring to the compromised Orthodox Church) that existed before the 1917 revolution did not survive in an unbroken line of succession until the 1990s. Most of them have no idea where those local churches began nor by whom. They did emerge after the communist persecution of local churches, but they had lost contact with their roots. All that they retained were the gospels - the Bible - that they passed on. If this is the case for 70 years of persecution between 1917 and 1990 at the end of the Cold War, then what would it be like and how hard would it be to preserve a heritage over a period of time 3 or 4 times that long during 270+ years of Persecution (between 33 A.D. and 325 A.D.) ?
Q - Then to get back to the point - what was the connection between the Churches that existed in the earliest days of Chrstianity and the Apostles and Disciples, and the Churches that existed by the time of the Council of Nicea 300 years later ?
A - By the time that the Churches emerged from living underground and being on the run, for 200 years of persecution, the "theoretical" Continuity that supposedly existed from those early first Churches until the time of the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. did not exist. The lines of succession had been broken many many decades before.
This leaves us with a dilema: if the Patriarchates did not come from the original Churches and congregations started by the Disciples and personal Apostles of Christ, then where did they come from ?
Q - So how do you answer this ?
A- What actually happened was that Constantine made a deal with the Bishop of Rome, to legitimize a certain number of Churches in exchange for influence. That deal was made between Constantine, the Bishop of Rome, Eusebius and a few others immediately After the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. . In other words, once the delegates had gone home after the main conferences, and were back with their own local congregations, that is when Eusebius and Constantine organized the foundations of their new Political Church.
It was that political arrangement that created the position of Pope and created the newly sanctioned Roman Catholic Church.
The Roman Catholic Church was not the collection of the churches that existed at the Council of Nicea. We can note this from the fact that most of the representatives at the Council of Nicea refused to affiliate with the Bishop of Rome (now called Pope) and with the arrangements of power he had made.
Most of those churches retained their independence and rebuked the Pope for over-extending his unrighteous authority every time he attempted to falsely assert that He was the Pope in charge of All Churches.
Q - What about Constantine and the Creation of the Eastern Orthodox Church ?
A - The Orthodox Hierarchy does not like to discuss this much because it emphasizes just how muchthe Eastern Orthodox Church was Roman Catholic, and created by Constantine just as much as the Roman Catholic Church in the West
When Constantine created the Roman Catholic Church, He created the Eastern Half along with the Western Half (though it was not implemented and the Eastern Orthodox Church really did not get going until 50 to 75 years later). At that point, the Patriarchates in the East under the jurisdiction of the Eastern Patriarch was not something already established - since the Eastern Half of the Roman Catholic Church was still getting started in asserting its jurisdiction over other churches in the East (a position which, in fact, was never resolved historically, - since those attempts were refused and rebufed - which is why the Eastern Orthodox Church then "chose" to recognize the independance of the other Patriarchates.
Later as time passed, and the historical records were more confused, and could not be so easily disproven - by eyewitness testimonies {about which Patriarchates started when}, it was a that later point that the Eastern Orthodox Church (as part of the Roman Catholic Church) claimed their jurisdiction no longer from the Roman Emperor via Constantinople and Rome, but rather succession from the "original" Christian Churches of the east.
But this is merely a claim and an afterthought to try to bend the historical record, not a fact. And most of those Patriarchates still fought with each other constantly, almost all of them expelling and excommunicating each other on a frequent basis. So if they all excommunicated each other, then on what basis would their lines of succession have remained "unbroken" at that point - even if we were to presume that no line of succession had been broken beforehand ?
The conclusion that is historically supported is that while the Patriarchates appear united and tied historically back to the Earliest Christian churches that existed within their domains, the actual ties - between them and the original churches 300 years earlier - do not exist.
As one scholar from Oxford recently wrote:
" The Bishop of Constantinople did not enjoy any position of privilege among the Bishops of the East before Constantine transformed Byzantium into Constantinople and made it his Capital. It was not he, but the Bishop of Heraclea, who was the Metropolitan of Thrace"
Source: "Barbarians and Bishops" by Liebeschuetz - Oxford - Clarendon - 1992 - pp 161
Other Eastern Christian Churches did exist. They were independent, autonomous and self-governing. They retained their independance as long as possible, until the Roman Emperor intervened and took that away from them, and changed their doctrines. But this was a slow process that took place as the Roman Catholic Church appropriated more power to itself as each decade went by. What many Eastern Orthodox in the West do not know, is that the Eastern Orthodox Church and its patriarchate, for the most part, fully participated in the process of changing the theology of churches that came under its control after 600 A.D. and especially after its own 7th Church Council, which caused its split with its parent & corrupted Church, the Roman Catholic Church of the West.
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ALSO SEE: http://www.exorthodoxforchrist.com/1056.htm
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