Branches : James Johnson

Bill Rogers (0:00)

The Great Split Let's start with the obvious. There's only one Bible. Okay, there are different translations, different languages, a few disagreements on which books count. Some include the Apocrypha, some don't, we'll get to that. But in theory, there's one holy book at the root of this whole thing. One origin story, one divine message, one central character arc running from Eden to Armageddon. And yet, there are over 40,000 Christian denominations in the world today.

That's not a joke. That's the actual estimate from the World Christian Encyclopedia, and it grows every year. Each one slightly different, each one confident, each one certain they're the ones who finally got it right. How?

How did the followers of one Jewish rabbi from Galilee end up splintered across every country, culture and theological spreadsheet on earth? That's what this book is about. Not to convert you, not to mock you, not to sell you a replacement belief system, just to lay it out.

Where it started, where it split, why it split again, and again, and again.

Until you get Pentecostals speaking in tongues in Tulsa, Anglicans sipping wine in Oxford, Baptists debating Halloween in Arkansas, and Seventh-day Adventists prepping for the end times with veggie loaves, and Ellen White devotionals.

We're not here to tell you that's not true. We're here to show you what happened. Think of this book as a spiritual family tree, with a few lawsuits. We'll cover saints and scandals, power plays and printing presses, schisms, visions, and the occasional golden plate. We'll decode doctrines, map the madness, and translate the jargon. All without trying to push you one way or another. Because here's the thing. If you're a Christian, you inherited a vision. If you're not, you've still been shaped by one. And no matter where you stand, it helps to know who's been holding the mic for the last 2,000 years, and how many times they've changed the lyrics. Welcome to the great split. Let's see where the pieces landed.

Chapter 1, the Bible before the Bible.

Ask the average person where the Bible came from, and you'll probably hear something like, God wrote it, or the disciples wrote it. Or maybe it's just always been around, which is kind of like asking where pizza came from and being told, it's food. Technically true, but wildly unhelpful, because the Bible you've seen on a hotel nightstand or passed around in pews didn't fall from the sky, leather bound and red lettered. It was built, collected, translated, debated, cut, rearranged, canonized. The Bible as we know it is the product of centuries of oral storytelling, political infighting, imperial power grabs, theological hair splitting, and yes, divine inspiration, if that's your thing. It is not one book. It's a library of books written across 1500 years by dozens of authors in three ancient languages, many of whom never met each other and didn't know they were contributing to a future mega book that would define global civilization. And even now, no one fully agrees on what counts as the Bible. Canon doesn't mean big gun here. It means the official list of books considered sacred sculpture.

Think of that like a greatest hits album. Which songs make the cut? Which are left off? Who decides? Well, different groups answered that question very differently. Here's the short version. Catholic Bible, 73 books. Protestant Bible, 66 books. Eastern Orthodox Bible, 79 to 81 books depending on who you ask. Ethiopian Orthodox Bible, a whopping 81 to 88 books with texts most Christians have never even heard of. And all of them claimed their version is the real deal. So, who's right? Before there were scrolls, there were stories told aloud, passed from mouth to ear for generations, memorized and recited in villages and temples. This is how the earliest parts of what we now call the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, were preserved.