Collected Accretion

Not every branch below is a schism. A schism (solid line, filled dot) is a documented break from one identifiable parent body — Luther from Rome, Henry VIII from Rome, Grebel from Zurich. Several traditions are not schisms at all: independent-origin movements (dotted, no connecting line) claim a new revelation with no parent body to split from — Latter-day Saints, Christian Science, Urantia. Milieu-origin traditions (faint dashed line, hollow dot) drew from several existing bodies at once rather than splitting from a single one — Adventism, Quakers, Jehovah's Witnesses, Pentecostalism. This distinction comes directly from Schism-Tree.md's own section headers, not an editorial gloss. One more thing the tree is careful about: the "Apostolic / Undivided Church" trunk's own solid line stops at the Great Schism (1054) because there's no longer a single body that is the undivided church after that point — but a line that just stops reads as "died," which is wrong. It resolves into two full peer heirs (Catholic and Eastern Orthodox), not one continuation plus a defection, so a faint dotted thread continues underneath every branch to the present as a reminder that all of them descend from this same root. Hover any line for its source citation.

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.

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.