What does great schism refer to?

Answer 1

The Great Schism refers to the split between the Eastern (Greek) and Western (Latin) branches of the church. The Eastern branch became the Eastern Orthodox Church and the western branch became the Roman Catholic Church.

Answer: As time passed, efforts were made to translate the Bible into the languages that people commonly spoke. Few could read the Bible in the Hebrew or Greek in which it was written. Almost 300 years before Jesus lived on earth, work began on translating the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. That translation is known as the Greek Septuagint. Some 700 years later, Jerome produced a famous translation known as the Vulgate. This was a rendering of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures into Latin, which was the common tongue of the Roman Empire of that time.

Later, Latin began to fade as a common language. Only the well-educated maintained familiarity with Latin, and the Catholic Church resisted efforts to translate the Bible into other languages. Religious leaders argued that Hebrew, Greek, and Latin were the only suitable Bible languages.

In the ninth century C.E., Methodius and Cyril, Thessalonian missionaries acting on behalf of the Eastern Church in Byzantium, promoted the use of Slavic as a church language. Their goal was to enable the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe, who understood neither Greek nor Latin, to learn about God in their own language.

These missionaries, however, met with fierce opposition from German priests, who sought to impose Latin as a defense against the expanding influence of Byzantine Christianity. Clearly, politics were more important to them than people's religious education. Increasing tensions between the Western and Eastern branches of Christendom led to the division between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy in 1054.