Is the Roman Catholic Church the original church built by Christ? In this lesson, we begin by examining warnings the New Testament itself gives about departing from revealed truth — warnings to preachers, elders, and all Christians about a coming apostasy. We then survey the struggles of the early church under Jewish and Roman persecution, from the book of Acts through the Edict of Milan in 313 AD. From there, we trace the slow, incremental organizational changes that transformed the simple New Testament pattern of local churches with a plurality of elders into a sprawling hierarchy of bishops, synods, dioceses, patriarchs, and ultimately a universal bishop in Rome by 606 AD — culminating in the East-West split of 1054.
