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The pile
AD2026
Click any piece to go to its date
On a phone
This is the reading version. The full line, with the pieces flying onto the pile and the pile lifted by date, is on a laptop or desktop screen.
A dated history of what was added
One line from the apostles, three partings, four churches. Every church holds things decided after the apostles. This site sets each addition on the date it came in and sorts them all by one rule, the Protestant line included.
Pick where you stand. Then walk back toward the apostles and watch the pieces come off, one date at a time.
The numbers count this page’s 59 dated entries. They are a count, not a score.
Read this first
This page will read as a threat to something you hold. It is written to be checked, not believed. Every entry gives its date, its first source, the earliest witness that the practice was once absent or resisted, the texts, the objections your own side would raise, and the three things that would refute it. Use them.
The page does not say your church is no church, that its sacraments are empty, or that the men who made these decisions were insincere. It says that at dated points your church made things conditions of communion, of a valid ministry, or of law, that the apostles did not, and it shows the date, the source, and the earliest witness that the practice was once absent or different. The test it applies is the one your own tradition professes: Vincent’s “everywhere, always, by all,” Trent’s “received by the apostles from the mouth of Christ himself,” Vatican I’s “not so that they might make known some new doctrine.” Where the page counts a decision as recognition rather than addition, Nicaea, the Trinity, the canon, it says why, and it holds them with you. If an entry is wrong, the three conditions that would refute it are stated on the opening page, and a single early source would do it. For no entry on the Roman line has that source been produced; the page will print the first that is.
The page does not count the seven councils’ confession of Christ against you, nor the realism of the second-century Supper, nor the Spirit-led reception of the apostolic writings; it holds them. It counts what a council required under anathema that the apostles did not require, and it puts the same question to the Latin West and to the Protestant line, by the same rule, with the same result. It dates the West’s clause in the creed and the East’s anathema on the Latin reading on the same terms. Where the Orthodox answer is that a definition only named what the saints always knew, the page states that answer in your words and then asks for the early witness that would show it. Several entries carry a “contested” or “qualified” footing because your tradition’s defense has real evidence behind it; in each the page says what that evidence shows and what it does not, and in none of them does it show the practice received from the apostles. A council can name what the saints always knew. It can also name what the saints of its own century had come to believe, and the dates on this page are how a reader tells the two apart.
Your line is on the page, and it is not spared. It carries six entries of its own, three requirements it shares with Rome and the East, and seventeen of the entries from before 1517, seven of them in part; and its confessions made readings into tests, on justification, on election, on the cross, on the clause in the creed, on infant baptism and on which baptism counts, in both directions, exactly as Rome and the East did. The rule this page applies is the one your confessions state, that every council since the apostles may err and that Scripture is the test. The page asks you to use that rule on your own line, where it has been used once at scale and then set aside.
Start at the apostolic form, at c. 50, which is where every line on this page begins and where it points: a house, a table with a meal, elders in the plural, each one with a part, and nothing required that the apostles did not require. Then walk forward on any line and watch what was added. The verdict at the end says what the page concludes and what it does not.
The rule this page applies
Every church today holds things decided after the apostles. Some of those decisions only recognized what the apostolic writings already say. The rest were added. One test tells the two apart, and it is put to all four lines, the Protestant one included.
A later decision is a recognition only if
it affirms what the apostolic witness already asserts or excludes what that witness already contradicts, so that rejecting the decision would mean rejecting the text and not merely a later inference,
and it adds no content, office, rite, or condition of communion or salvation that the witness does not contain.
Anything that fails either test is an addition, and where it is presented as apostolic or made a requirement, the burden lies on its defenders to show it in the earliest evidence as already received, not newly introduced. If they can, the claim stands. If they cannot, it cannot be required of anyone as apostolic.
It ends with the last apostle. John lived at Ephesus “until the times of Trajan,” who became emperor in 98, and saw the Revelation “towards the end of Domitian’s reign,” about 95 (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.4; 5.30.3). After him no one could add to the faith “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). That is why the page’s apostolic form runs from about 50 to about 100, and why everything after it is dated.
The spoken tradition did not stop. Paul told the Thessalonians to “hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter” (2 Thessalonians 2:15), and the churches went on teaching what they had heard. The page uses that tradition at every date: it is what the first witnesses are. What changed in about 100 is that no one could hear an apostle any more. From then on, what the apostles said aloud can be known only as the churches kept it, so the question for any practice is whether it shows up in the earliest sources as already received, or appears later as new. Irenaeus, the first to argue from tradition, used that test himself: the apostles’ tradition was public, kept in the churches they founded, and taught the faith the writings teach (Against Heresies 3.3–4). The Catholic and Orthodox replies, Basil’s unwritten customs among them, are answered at 1546, under What about…?
Conditions the witness itself contains: baptism on belief (Acts 2:38, 41), confessing Jesus as Lord (Rom 10:9), repentance (Acts 2:38), the apostles’ teaching (Acts 2:42), the assembly’s discipline (1 Cor 5:4–5). An optional form held as optional. A reading held as a reading. The rule bites in four ways only, and every entry says which: Required, made a condition of communion, of a valid ministry or sacrament, or of law, with a penalty for refusing; Replaced, an optional form that took the place of an apostolic practice as the normal shape of the church, though the older practice may survive at the edges; Made normative, made the church’s standard practice or teaching without an apostolic text and without a penalty; Contradicted, a rule that runs against a named apostolic instruction.
The rule is not new, and it is not one tradition’s. It is the test each already puts to the others. Vincent of Lérins (434): hold “what has been believed everywhere, always, by all.” Trent (1546) requires only traditions “received by the apostles from the mouth of Christ himself, or from the apostles themselves.” Vatican I (1870): the Spirit was promised to Peter’s successors “not so that they might, by his revelation, make known some new doctrine.” The Council in Trullo (692) condemned Rome’s Saturday fast as against what “has been handed down,” and Photius (867) demanded that Rome show the fathers for the words it had added to the creed. Each asks the other for early evidence of reception. This page asks it of all four, and shows its evidence.
Any one of three things: an apostolic text that commands or describes the practice; a source earlier than the entry’s first witness that shows it already received as apostolic, not newly introduced; or proof that the tradition carrying it neither requires it nor replaced an apostolic practice with it. Age alone, usefulness, or the authority of a later council does not meet the test, because the test is what the council itself claims to have met. Silence is not absence, so each entry also gives, where one has been found, the earliest source after the apostles that shows the practice absent, different or resisted: all of the 59 carry one; any that do not say that they rest on the text and the first witness alone. Show any of the three, and the page is wrong at that date and will change.
Every claim on this page falls into one of three kinds. Keeping them apart is the whole method, so here they are in plain words, with the test for each.
So the line is not old against new, or Greek against Latin. It is this: what the text states, as its first readers held it, may be required; readings from the text’s world teach; readings from later worlds are dated when a church made them a test. The same line is drawn through every tradition, the Protestant one included.
The creed of 325 and 381, as both East and West received it, is a recognition. What it requires are exclusions the text already makes: the Son is not a creature, the Spirit is not a creature, Christ is not less than fully God or less than fully man. The first readers after the apostles already held those things, and the FAQ below shows the test on each. The definition of 451 is not counted with it: the whole church did not receive it, what it excludes had already been confessed, and what it added, the formula “in two natures,” was made a test against another reading and parted the church. It is dated at 451. The one clause that one half of the church added to the common creed is dated, at 1014.
Nothing in the creeds says how. They do not say how the cross saves, how a sinner is counted righteous, how the unseen God is seen, or who is chosen. The creed says “for us and for our salvation” and “crucified for us,” and stops. Every account of how is later, and where a church required one, the page dates the requirement: Rome’s and the East’s accounts of the vision of God at 1336 and 1351, three accounts of justification at 1547, 1577 and 1672, one account of the cross at 1561, 1563 and 1647. The line runs there. Above it, the creed, which this page holds. Below it, readings, which it dates when they were made a test and otherwise leaves to be taught.
Every tag on a card opens its definition when touched or hovered.
FAQ
The creed of Nicaea, the word “Trinity” and the list of New Testament books all come after the apostles. Here is why none of them is counted as an addition.
Recognition, in what it excludes
Because the text already contradicts the reading Nicaea excludes. You cannot call the Son a creature and still affirm that all things were made through him and that he is before all things (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16–17; Hebrews 1:10–12). The text also calls him God (John 1:1; John 20:28). So homoousios, a word the text does not use, rules out a denial the text already rules out, and it adds no content, office, or rite. What is required is the exclusion. The word is its instrument. Arius affirmed those verses too; what shows that his reading denies them is the text in context, “all things” and “before all things” with no exception made for the Son, together with the earliest readers after the apostles, who already held the Son to be God. No surviving reader of those texts in the generation after the apostles took him for a creature. The earliest surviving sources show the Son’s deity received long before 325: Ignatius calls him “God existing in flesh” (Ephesians 7.2, c. 110) and “our God, Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 18.2), and Pliny reports Christians singing to Christ as to a god (Letters 10.96, c. 112).
The same council’s canons on rank are a separate entry, at 325.
Recognition
Because the text already names the three together under one name and one divine agency (Matthew 28:19; 2 Corinthians 13:14; 1 Corinthians 12:4–6). It already contradicts the three denials the doctrine excludes: that the Spirit is not God (Acts 5:3–4; 1 Corinthians 2:10–11), that the three are three gods (1 Corinthians 8:4–6), and that the three are one person under three names (Matthew 3:16–17; John 14:16–17). So the word “Trinity” labels a pattern the text already forces. The triadic confession is attested as received in baptism by Justin (1 Apology 61, c. 155) and in the Didache 7, whose date is debated, decades before the word appears in Theophilus (To Autolycus 2.15, c. 180).
Identification
Because the canon is an identification, not a doctrine. The lists of 367, 393 and 397 conferred nothing. They recorded which writings the churches had received as apostolic: a core already visible inside the text (2 Peter 3:15–16; 1 Timothy 5:18) and in Irenaeus (Against Heresies 3.11.8, c. 180), with the disputed edge settled by the same test of apostolic origin and early usage. The church’s testimony about what it received is accepted as evidence, not as authority to define.
That is the New Testament, and its edge is still not counted the same everywhere: the Syriac Peshitta has twenty-two books, and the Ethiopian church’s broader list has more than twenty-seven. The Old Testament list is a separate question and still disputed: Hippo and Carthage also listed Tobit, Judith and Maccabees, which the list of 367 leaves out of the canon. It is taken up at 1546.
The councils, one by one
The Oriental Orthodox count three councils, the Eastern Orthodox seven, Rome twenty-one. The rule does not take or leave a council whole. It sorts each decision, and it sorts them all the same way.
Recognition
It confesses the Spirit as Lord, worshiped and glorified with the Father and the Son. That recognizes what Acts 5:3–4 and 1 Corinthians 2:10–11 already force. Its creed says that the Spirit proceeds from the Father (John 15:26). The words “and the Son” were added to it later in the West: see 589–1014.
Recognition, in what it excludes
It holds in what it excludes: two subjects in Christ. The text already says that the one Mary bore is the Lord and God’s own Son (Luke 1:43; Galatians 4:4; John 1:14). So Theotokos, God-bearer, a word the text does not use, guards what the text says about him. Ignatius says as much without the word around 110: “our God, Jesus Christ, was … conceived in the womb by Mary” (Ephesians 18.2). The devotion to Mary that later gathered round the title is classified separately: see c. 600. This is the last council the Oriental Orthodox count.
Narrowing, not a recognition
The whole church did not receive it. What it excludes, a Christ less than fully God or less than fully man, or divided into two persons, the church had already confessed at Nicaea, Constantinople and Ephesus, and both sides of the split still confess it (John 1:14; Colossians 2:9; 1 John 4:2–3). What 451 added was a formula, one Christ “in two natures,” made a condition of communion against the other reading in use, Cyril’s “one incarnate nature.” Neither formula is in the text, and joint commissions of the two families have since stated that both confess the same Christ (1989–90). That is a narrowing, and it is dated at the split of 451. Its canon 28 is dated at 381–595.
In part
Its canons on the one subject hold on Chalcedon’s ground: the one crucified in the flesh is the Lord of glory (canon 10; 1 Corinthians 2:8). Its other work does not. It anathematized a teacher a century dead, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and certain writings of two others whom Chalcedon had received, Theodoret and Ibas, with all who defend them (canons 12–14); that is a condition of communion the text does not contain. The anathemas on Origen linked with it are the entry at c. 420–553.
Recognition, in what it excludes
It holds in what it excludes: a Christ without a human will. The text shows him praying, “not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42), and the council itself argues from John 6:38. Its list of men condemned by name, a bishop of Rome among them, is not a teaching the text can be tested against.
Addition
It does not pass. The council requires a rite, the kiss, the bow, lights and incense before images, and it anathematizes those who refuse. That is a condition of communion the text does not contain. Its strongest argument, that the Word became flesh and so can be pictured, shows that Christ may be depicted. It does not show that anyone was ever required to venerate the picture. See 787.
“Counted by” means counted among that line’s general councils. Protestant confessions name the first four at most (Second Helvetic Confession 11). Rome counts fourteen more after 787. Seven standing objections to the method itself, from development of doctrine to private judgment, are answered in the record under Today.
The verdict
The count is not the point. The point is what each line can do about its count, by its own rules. Three of the four lines have told us.
36 entries · 27 required · 0 set down since
Rome holds that a definition made from the chair is, “of themselves, and not by the consent of the church, irreformable,” and that whoever rejects this “let him be anathema” (Pastor Aeternus 4, 1870). Trent’s anathemas have never been withdrawn; the Joint Declaration of 1999 says they no longer “apply” to the Lutheran teaching as stated there, and lifts none of them. The definitions of 1854, 1870 and 1950 are to be believed on pain of losing the faith. By Rome’s own account, what it has defined cannot be set down without Rome ceasing to be what it says it is. That is not a charge; it is the claim Rome makes for itself, and the page takes it at its word.
32 entries · 21 required · 1 set down since
The East holds that “it is impossible for the Catholic Church to err, or at all be deceived” (Jerusalem 1672, decree 12), that the councils the whole church has received speak with the Spirit’s voice, and it reads their anathemas aloud each year, 1351’s among them. It has lifted one anathema on this page, the Old Rite’s, in 1971, which shows that it can, though the East will answer that 1667 was a local council and that the seven are another matter. Its principle says exactly that: what a received council defined is the faith, and it will not be set down.
23 entries · 14 required · 0 set down since
The Oriental churches hold three councils and the line that parted first, in 451, and carry the fewest entries. They hold the same principle as the East about the councils they receive, and they require what they require: one bishop, the ranks, the calendar of fasts and feasts, the tabot, the Zara Yaqob reforms. The last entry on their line is dated c. 1440–1450, and the page notes it.
26 entries · 15 required, most in part · 12 set down since
The Protestant line holds, as a principle its confessions state, that every council after the apostles “may err; and many have erred,” and that none is “the rule of faith, or practice” (Westminster 31). That principle is the rule of this page. It is the only one of the four under which an addition can be tested and set down without the church that sets it down ceasing to be itself. The line used it once at scale, in 1517, when it set down 12 of the West’s additions, and it has carried 6 of its own since. It requires some of them, in its confessional churches: the tests of 1529, 1577, 1619 and 1647, inherited guilt, the clause in the creed, infant baptism in most of its churches. The principle is there. It has not been finished.
So the conclusion of this page is narrower than a cheer for any church and sharper than a shrug. Faithfulness to the apostolic text without additions as requirements is not available inside Rome or the East on their own terms, because their additions are, by their own account, permanent. It is available inside the Protestant principle, and no Protestant church on this line has yet claimed it in full. Of the four, only the Protestant line allows it. None has done it.
What it would look like is on the page. The baseline at c. 50 is not a theory: a house, a table with a full meal, elders in the plural, each one with a part, baptism on belief, and nothing required that the apostles did not require. Every piece that came off on the way is on the line at its date. None of it is a reason to leave Christ or to despise the churches that carried his Scriptures to you, and the record ends, at c. 50, on what the form was for.
Every objection on this page
Each entry answers the objections a Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant reader would raise, in that reader’s own terms, inside the entry’s record. Here are all 306 of them in one place, sorted by who raises them, built from the records themselves. Tap one to open the record at the reply. If yours is not here, the opening page says what would refute an entry; send it.