Christ's churches from the apostles to today, and the errors they withstood. Begin with The Perpetuity of the Church, or browse the full timeline.
Jesus called out His church during His earthly ministry and empowered it at Pentecost. The apostles planted local churches of baptized believers, and under Nero those churches met the first great persecution.
False teachers rose among the churches, one bishop over each city's churches became the pattern, and infant baptism appeared and was contested. Separatist churches like the Montanists and Novatianists refused the drift, though not without errors of their own.
After the Great Persecution, Rome turned from persecuting Christians to favoring them, and church and empire began to merge. Catholic bishops met in councils called by emperors, and churches that would not join the state church were treated as heretics.
The papacy grew in power, images were sanctioned in worship, East and West divided, and the Crusades began. Free churches like the Paulicians endured at the edges of the empire.
Preachers like Peter of Bruys and the Waldenses called people back to Scripture and the baptism of believers. Rome answered with crusades and the Inquisition, and in England owning an English Bible was outlawed.
Luther and the Reformers challenged Rome's doctrine within Catholic Europe. Believers baptized in Zurich in 1525 were hunted as Anabaptists by Catholics and Protestants alike. Tyndale put the New Testament in English, and the King James Bible followed in 1611.
Baptist churches enter the documentary record in England and America, confess their faith, and carry the Gospel to the nations through the modern missions movement. They did not come out of Rome, and they are not Protestants in that sense.
New movements arose claiming restored truth or a new outpouring of the Spirit, from the Latter-day Saints and the Watch Tower Society to Azusa Street and the Oneness controversy. Evangelicals reaffirmed the inerrancy of Scripture in the Chicago Statement.