Every council, schism, and doctrinal accretion in the history of the church that followed Jesus — c. 30 AD to today
One undivided church, branching. Every line is a tradition; every fork is a documented schism. Dashed lines are movements that were suppressed or died out; solid lines run to the present. The vertical scale expands toward the present, where branching accelerates. Hover any line for details — the full sourced tree with every node lives in Schism-Tree.md.
The core question of this investigation, drawn as one picture: how much doctrine, dogma, tradition, and structure has each living tradition accumulated beyond Jesus' own teaching? Each line counts a tradition's inherited accretion points through time (per Accumulation-Ledger.md). Two findings stand out. First, the Reformation's subtractions mostly net out — what Protestants stripped (indulgences, purgatory, papal supremacy) they largely replaced with confessional machinery of their own, so the Western lines stay bunched. Second, the genuinely short stacks belong to the churches that left early (Church of the East 431, Oriental Orthodox 451 — missing a millennium of Western accretion) and to the total-restart movements near zero (LDS, Jehovah's Witnesses, Urantia). Click legend entries to toggle traditions.
Counts are accretion points carried, net of what each branch stripped at its founding — not a distortion score. Gray lines share one color by design (8-color accessible palette limit); identity is carried by the end-labels and tooltips. Full per-row table: Accumulation-Ledger.md.
Accretion points per era, tagged by the same 20 categories used in the scores dashboard — 10 Kingdom Distortion, 10 Ideological Capture. Brighter = more accretion points carrying that tag in that era. Institutional and domination patterns (I, D) appear almost immediately; nationalism (NAT) ignites with Constantine; the modern captures (TECH, CAP) only exist in the last two eras.
All events from the eleven era files, merged chronologically. Rows edged in red are schisms. Filter, search, or scroll the whole 2,000-year sweep.