The Roman Catholic Church regards Peter as the first pope, appealing especially to Jesus’ words in Matthew 16: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” The Protestant reading sees the passage’s wordplay as directing attention to Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, rather …
Eastern Orthodoxy separated from the Western church roughly a thousand years ago. It does not submit to the pope or the Roman Catholic magisterium, and its sacramental theology is not organized with the same hierarchy and specificity found in Roman Catholicism. Orthodoxy nevertheless places heavy emphasis on church tradition, the early church fathers, icons, liturgy, …
The Da Vinci Code claims that Jesus was regarded as merely human until Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea made him divine and selected the canonical Gospels for political purposes. Those assertions conflict with the historical record. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John predate the later Gnostic writings by many decades—and often by more than …