About this site

Lineage of the Church sets the leaders of three ancient sees side by side on one timeline: the archbishops of Canterbury, the bishops of Rome and the patriarchs of Constantinople. Because the lines share the same century rows, you can see at a glance who held office at the same time, and follow the dotted circles to the families of churches that grew from or alongside them.

How to read the chart

• Down the page is forward in time. Each row is a century, and each figure sits in the century in which most of their time in office fell.
• Selected figures are shown first. Press + more beside a century to see every holder of the office in that century.
• Anyone can be opened. Click or tap a person for a short biography, their dates in office and lifespan, and one thing that happened in the wider world while they served.
• Dashed lines mark the great divisions: 451, after the Council of Chalcedon; 1054, between Rome and Constantinople; and 1534, between England and Rome. The lines carry on through them.
• Dotted circles open a family of churches: the Oriental Orthodox churches, the wider Orthodox family, the Protestant churches, and the Anglican churches in North America.

What the chart does not claim

The chart is a timeline, not a verdict. It takes no position on which church is the true continuation of the apostles, or on the validity of any church’s orders. Jesus is named above the three lines as the origin all three claim, not drawn into any one of them. Rome sits in the centre column only for layout. Each tradition reads the divisions differently: the Orthodox see 1054 as Rome’s departure, Catholics see it the other way, and Anglicans see 1534 as a reform rather than a founding.

The earliest names and dates follow later tradition, and are marked as such where it matters.

Where the information comes from

• Lists of office holders, biographies and portraits come from English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons; birth and death years from Wikidata.
• The “in the world at the time” events come from Wikipedia’s year articles and a hand-checked timeline. Each event is used once, and falls within that person’s time in office.
• The information is current as of September 2026. Every biography links to its full Wikipedia article.

Biographical text is reproduced from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Portraits are from Wikimedia Commons, under their individual licences; most are in the public domain.

Corrections

Dates in early church history are often disputed, and lists this long contain mistakes. If you spot one, please write to [contact email to be confirmed] with the person’s name and, if you can, a source.

Credits

Site built by MAE Online. Set in EB Garamond, by Georg Duffner and Octavio Pardo, under the SIL Open Font Licence.