EastGreek, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian & Ethiopian churches
WestLatin churches of Italy, Gaul, Africa & the Isles
Short accounts that tie the masters together: ideas that passed from one master to the next, the ages of the early Church, the threads that ran between teachers and students, a few great journeys, and the councils. Each story was written for this site and ends with the sources for what it describes.
How an idea or practice passed from one master to the next, and what each one changed. Each step cites the text where it appears; passages marked ✓ were checked in the translation named.
How the masters taught, ordained, befriended and argued with one another. Each story can also be followed on the connections map.
Some masters spent their lives in one place; others crossed the Mediterranean. Each journey can be traced on the map.
An ecumenical council was a gathering of bishops from across the Christian world, usually called by the emperor, to settle disputes about the faith and set rules for church life. Its decisions were accepted as the voice of the whole Church. Seven councils between 325 and 787 are accepted as ecumenical by both the Orthodox and Catholic churches. Other churches accept fewer, which explains several of the divisions that still exist.
| Church family | Councils accepted |
|---|---|
| Eastern Orthodox | All seven (I–VII) |
| Roman Catholic | All seven, plus later Western councils it counts as ecumenical (14 more, through Vatican II) |
| Oriental Orthodox (Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Malankara) | The first three (I–III) |
| Assyrian Church of the East | The first two (I–II) |
| Anglican, Lutheran and many other Protestant churches | Generally the doctrinal decisions of the first four (I–IV), as consistent with Scripture |
The masters did not live in isolation. They taught and ordained one another, wrote each other’s lives, translated each other’s books, wrote letters, and sometimes quarrelled. Each line on this map is a connection recorded in an ancient source, which is cited with it. Names sit at the middle of each person’s life, with the Greek East above the dotted line and the Latin West below. Centuries with more masters are drawn wider so their names have room.
Each dot is a master, placed where they are most associated. Choose a century to see who was alive then, or tap a dot to trace that person’s journeys, numbered in order.
Each master sits in the church they served. East covers the Greek-speaking churches of the eastern Roman Empire plus the Syriac and Coptic churches: Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Asia Minor and the Egyptian desert. West covers the Latin churches of Rome, Italy, Gaul, North Africa, Spain, Britain and Ireland.
The churches beyond the councils. Before 1054 the East had already divided. The Church of the East, in the Persian Empire, did not accept the Council of Ephesus (431). The Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopian churches, today called the Oriental Orthodox, did not accept Chalcedon (451). Their saints appear in the East stream and can be found with the Church of the East, Oriental Orthodox and Syriac tradition filters. Masters from before these divisions, such as Ephrem, Athanasius and the Desert Fathers, are honored across these churches.
Some early writers wrote in Greek but served Western churches. Irenaeus, for example, was bishop of Lyon, and Justin Martyr taught in Rome. They appear in the West. Paul and John belong to the whole Church, but they appear in the East because they worked mainly in the Greek-speaking world.
The Connections page maps who taught, baptized, ordained, befriended or wrote about whom. Every line cites the ancient source that records it.
The site ends at 1054, when the mutual excommunications between Rome and Constantinople became the traditional date for the split between East and West. The gold markers show the seven councils that both Orthodox and Catholic Christians accept as ecumenical.
Scholarly series. Where they exist, cards also list volumes from five series of modern translations: Classics of Western Spirituality (Paulist Press), focused on spiritual texts; Ancient Christian Writers (begun by Newman Press, now Paulist), fully annotated translations; The Fathers of the Church (Catholic University of America Press), the largest English series of patristic translations; Cistercian Studies (Cistercian Publications), strong on the desert and monastic writers; and The Early Church Fathers (Routledge), each an introduction to one Father with selected translations. Many can be borrowed through the Internet Archive’s lending library.
Buying books. In-copyright books also have Buy links: an Amazon search, the publisher’s site for series volumes, used copies on AbeBooks, and Logos where Logos carries the book (checked October 2026). They are plain links: this site earns nothing from them. Free and public-domain texts have no buy links.
“Find copies” links run a search on Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive or WorldCat, so you can pick the edition you want. The Schaff volumes on CCEL hold many works by each writer, so use the volume’s table of contents to find a particular title.
The biographies, stories and summaries on this site were drafted with an AI assistant (Claude) from general historical knowledge, not copied from any one source. They should be checked against the references given before being quoted or cited. Specifically:
The references used across the site include:
The texts themselves come from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, New Advent’s Fathers of the Church, tertullian.org, Early Christian Writings, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, St Patrick’s Confessio (Royal Irish Academy) and Bible Gateway.