Christianity

Christianity is the largest religion in the world, with over two billion adherents, and is made up of a large set of traditions originating in first-century Palestine with the philosophy and teachings of Jesus (or Yeshua) Christ. As an historical and theological offspring of Judaism, the early Christian community incorporated the Jewish scriptures into their Bible and the relationship between the Jewish and Christian traditions remains complex and multifaceted. Christianity is a monotheistic faith that teaches that God is made up of three persons sharing a single essence (this teaching is known as Trinitarianism), and that His will for the world has been revealed in the Bible, a book made up of several dozen pieces of literature composed over 2,000 years in the Ancient Near East.

Denominational taxonomy

Christianity has developed into a variety of traditions and ecclesiastical bodies over the past 2,000 years. The broadest division is between Eastern and Western Christianity, two families that come from historical differences between the Latin-speaking Roman Empire and the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire. The Eastern traditions are made up of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Church, two associations of national churches in communion (although not with one another) and the much smaller Assyrian Church of the East, whose leadership lives among the Assyrian diaspora in Chicago, Illinois, United States of America. The Western faiths trace their heritage through direct descent, reform, or missionizing to the Roman church and included Catholicism, Protestantism, and Anglicanism. In addition, there are hundreds of millions of independent Christians - many in the United States; sub-Saharan Africa, where the Pentecostal movement has been influential; and the People's Republic of China - that have a legacy of some Protestant history, but are not formally associated with a church authority. Some churches from the East have formally joined the Catholic faith, and are historically and culturally Eastern, but ecclesiastically Western. Additionally, there are some movements - such as Messianic Judaism or Christian anarchism - which eschew these distinctions, and are based on a radical interpretation of early Christianity.