Okayyyy...so the 'great apostasy' that your religion is based on started in 12th century France? Because that's when and where the inquisition started.
Here's a selection of things in Christian history that are recorded to have happened prior to the start of the inquisition:
33 AD, Jerusalem: Pentecost ('The Baptism of the Church')
30s AD: St. Thaddeus (later the apostle of Armenia, together with St. Bartholomew) visits King Abgar V of Edessa, converting him and through him his kingdom (Osroene) to Christianity.
c. 50s AD, various places: The Pauline Epistles composed and disseminated
c.51 AD: The apostolic council at Jerusalem, recorded in the book of Acts
52 AD: St. Thomas arrives in India, where he is martyred in 72 AD
c. 53 AD: HH St. Evodius succeeds St. Peter as bishop of Antioch
c.40s-68 AD, Egypt: St. Mark arrives in Alexandria (c. 46-51 AD), baptizes Anianos c. 62 AD as bishop of that city, writes his gospel c. 65 AD, and is martyred
c. 70 AD: The Epistle of St. James
c. 73 AD: Stoic philosopher Mara Bar Serapion composes his one extant letter to his son which contains supposedly one of the earliest secular/non-Christian mentions of Jesus
c. 80s AD: I Clement, the epistle of St. Clement of Rome (d. 99 AD) to the Corinthians
c. 90s AD: The Apocalypse of St. John, a.k.a. Revelation
c. 90s AD (commonly
95 AD): The
Didache, or the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (the earliest known 'Church orders' text, concerned in large part with the qualifications for and selection of leaders)
c. 100: The death of St. John, the last of the apostles to die and the only one not to be martyred
Before 108 AD: St. Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of St. John, writes his six epistles to the Christians of various cities, and his epistle to fellow disciple of St. John, Polycarp of Smyrna (c. 65-155)
c. 110: Polycarp writes his epistle to the Philippians
c. 110 (but perhaps as late as
160): The Shepherd of Hermas
c. 120s: Aristides' apology to Emperor Hadrian (ruled c. 117-138); perhaps the earliest Christian apology
c. 130s (possibly as late as 150s): Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus
c. 144: Marcion, a rich ship builder by trade, gives the Church the impetus to define a distinctly Christian canon as a result of his own meddling with the received text for theological reasons (Marcion didn't believe that the God of the OT is the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, but rather an evil and capricious God, and hence he excised the OT completely; in addition, he provided his own NT books which he and his followers attributed to St. Paul, regarded in his movement as the only legitimate apostle). There is also a tradition that church collections began because of him, because he had given a substantial amount of money to the Church, so in the process of kicking him out of it, the leaders of the Church in Rome took up a collection from the people so as to give him all his money back. Sort of a "take your dirty money and get out" idea, I take it.
150s: The writings of St. Justin Martyr (d. 165)
150s: Martyrdom of St. Polycarp
150s: Earliest evidence of bilingual Greek/Coptic gospel fragments appear in Egypt, indicating the spread of the religion outside of the Hellenized elite in Alexandria
c. 165-175: The writings of Melito of Sardis
167: Emperor Marcus Aurelius references Christians in his
Meditations.
170s: Early Gnostic Christian writings begin to appear in Egypt
170-175: Tatian's Diatesseron, perhaps the earliest example of a 'Gospel harmony'
175-185: Writings of St. Irenaeus of Lyons
c. 176-181: Athenagoras serves as dean at the School of Alexandria (the first catechetical school in the world), the first such figure we can reliably tie to that position, hence also establishing the School as in operation from at least the late 2nd century if not earlier (as extant lists have three figures predating him, beginning in 62 AD, though these are based on later sources).
c. 180: Theophilos of Caesarea in Palestine writes in the name of the Synod of Caesrea on the question of the date of the celebration of the Paschal feast, prefiguring later councils in Rome (193) and elsewhere dealing with this question, which was a major sticking point throughout the Church, as some (Syriac Christians at Antioch, for instance) calculated it according to the Jewish dating of their Passover (14th of Nissan). The first Ecumenical Council (Nicaea 325) gave the Bishop of Alexandria the responsibility of calculating the date and disseminating it throughout the Christian East.
c. 170s-180s: The writings of St. Theophilos of Antioch, the seventh patriarch of that city (r. c. 169-182), are composed, including his
Apology to Autolycus, the earliest Christian text to use the word "Trinity" in reference to God
c. 182-202: The writings of St. Clement of Alexandria, which are important for (among other things) their many allusions to non-canonical gospels and the various gnostic sects which wrote and embraced them.
189-199: Pope Victor of Rome, one of the African popes (probably from what is today Libya), condemns adoptionism (the belief that Christ was born a regular man who later 'became' God) by excommunicating one of its chief champions, Theodotus of Byzantium. I couldn't find a source on this, but if I remember my RC days properly, it was also under Victor that the liturgy was first celebrated in Latin (a practice which would not be adopted in a uniform fashion until a few centuries later).
189-232: HH St. Demetrius is 12th Bishop/Pope of Alexandria. Among other things, HH St. Demetrius is known for having being married for 47 years prior to his elevation to the throne of St. Mark, testifying to the presence of married bishops in the Church from an early time (which would cease to be the case in Egypt a little bit later, under the heavy influence of monasticism beginning in the mid-3rd century). He is also known for having condemned Origen via a synod held in Alexandria in 232, several centuries before the rest of Christianity would do so at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553.
c. 200-230: Ammonius of Alexandria, the teacher of Origen (c. 184-253), writes the first gospel synopsis, which placed parallel passages of the other three gospels alongside those of St. Matthew's gospel. He also wrote some sort of "harmony between Jesus and Moses" (cf. the earlier 'Gospel harmonies' genre), representing an early attempt to show the harmony of the OT and NT, in refutation of various gnostic sects which denied this (cf. Marcion, above).
c. 200-250: The
Didascalia, a.k.a. the Teaching of the Apostles, is composed for use by Christian converts in Syria, modelling itself on the earlier
Didache.
c. 246-258: The writings of St. Cyprian of Carthage, a major figure in the Novatianist controversy in North Africa in his time. The Novatianists denied the readmission of those who had apostasized during the persecution of Decius (250), while the letters of St. Cyprian argued that they should be readmitted into the Church. St. Cyprian's view won out in Rome, Alexandria, etc., though not without considerable resistance.
250: St. Paul of Thebes establishes himself as the first Christian hermit, living alone in the desert of Egypt and serving as a role model for the later monastic movement.
265-282: The writings of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, a former student of Origen during the teacher's time in Caesarea Palestina.
c. 270: St. Anthony of Egypt retreats to the desert as a hermit, and is the first such man to attract a large following of pilgrims, effectively kickstarting Christian monasticism in the process.
300: The monastery of St. Anthony is completed after two years of construction. This is the world's first Christian monastery, and is still inhabited today by approximately 120 monks.
301: King Tridates III of Armenia accepts Christianity following the preaching of St. Gregory the Illuminator (257-331), and thereby establishes Armenia as the first modern, recognizable state to embrace Christianity as its official religion.
c. 306: The Synod of Elvira (modern Grenada, Spain) is held. It issues various canons which are notable for including the earliest reference known to the practice of clerical celibacy in the West, and another that is rather unhelpfully ambiguous concerning the presence of images in worship (well established in the Christian Church by this point; see, e.g., the art in the catacombes of Rome, dating to the early 3rd century), which would therefore be used by both iconoclast (those against images) and iconodule (those who are for the use of images) in much later conflicts over this issue in the Greco-Roman churches in the 8th and 9th centuries.
325: The first council of Nicaea is held under the presidency of HH Pope Alexander of Alexandria. This is considered to be the first of the 'ecumenical' council (in this sense meaning not regional/local, as earlier councils had been, but to be applied to the whole 'ecumene' -- the whole inhabited world). This council issues a creed which declares Christ to be
homoousios -- of one and the same essence (i.e., the same divinity) -- with the Father, in a direct rebuke of the Arians and semi-Arians, who taught that Christ was of a different, or similar but not the same essence (the so-called
homoiousian position).
330: King 'Ezana of Axum (modern Ethiopia and Eritrea) accepts Christianity on the preaching of St. Frumentius (d. 383), a Syro-Phoenician Greek from Tyre (modern Lebanon) who went on to serve as the first bishop of the Axumite Church. This makes Ethiopia the second oldest Christian country in the world, after Armenia.
340s: HH St. Athanasius the Apostolic, the twentieth bishop/pope of Alexandria (r. 328-373), establishes Christianity in the Nubian territories by sending the first bishops to Philae. Distinctly Nubian Christian kingdoms in what is now Sudan would last until the Islamicization of Sudan (early 16th century). There remain a small number of Nubian Christians today, mostly absorbed into the Coptic Orthodox Church through intermarriage with Egyptian Christians over the centuries. The last great testament to the existence of distinctly Nubian Christianity was the cathedral at Faras, which was destroyed (along with many Nubian villages) with the building of the Aswan Dam in the 1960s. Many of its frescoes dating back to the 9th-10th century were preserved by a Polish team of art historians and archaeologists who worked to preserve what they could before the completion of the dam, so you can see some of them
here.
367: In his 39th festal (Paschal) letter, HH St. Athanasius the Apostolic (who according to Coptic tradition wrote the Nicaean Creed) sets down what is now recognized to be the earliest Biblical canon of 27 NT books, which has been the standard ever since. (Later adopted, for instance, in the North African church aligned with the Latins via the Synod of Carthage in 397.)
381: The second ecumenical council is held in Constantinople. This council saw the finalization of the Creed, with the addition of clauses pertaining to the divinity of the Holy Spirit, which had not been in question at the first council but subsequently was thanks to the teaching of one Macedonius, who was installed by the Arians in Constantinople in 342. Macedonius denied the co-equal divinity of the Holy Spirit, and hence he and his followers were given the name
Pneumatomachi, meaning "spirit-fighters".
386: Nestorius of Constantinople, one-time bishop of that city (428-431), is born. This idiot taught that St. Mary is not the mother of God, but only the mother of Jesus' humanity, thereby preaching a radical disjunction between the divine and human in the person of Christ, which was adopted by a large faction of Christians in Mesopotamia who would later identify themselves as the "Church of the East" as orthodox theology. This view found immediate enemies in Alexandria, Antioch, and elsewhere, and with good reason: the use of the term
Theotokos, literally meaning 'birth-giver to God', is of much more ancient provenance in Christianity, being present in the earliest known Christian hymn written in honor of her,
Sub Tuum Praesidum (or, in the original Greek, Ὑπὸ τὴν σὴν εὐσπλαγχνίαν), which first appears in the manuscript records in a Coptic (Egyptian) Nativity liturgy from
250 AD. (This hymn is still sung to this day in the Coptic, Armenian, Greek, and Latin churches.)
424: Probably in an effort to get the Zoroastrian Persian authorities to stop arresting their bishops for accepting as guests priests from the Byzantine empire (the traditional enemy of the Persian empire), the Assyrian Christians based in Mesopotamia around the ancient see of Seleucia-Ctesiphon (roughly corresponding to modern Al Mada'in, Iraq) held the Synod of Dadisho' in which they declared themselves to be completely free from Byzantine interference in the running of their ecclesiastical affairs. This paired well with the earlier Council of Seleucia-Ctesiphon held in 410, which organized all the dioceses of the Assyrians into a unified Church at the behest of Yazdgird I (399-421), in an effort to consolidate Persian rule over the religiously heterogenous peoples of Mesopotamia (which has had a Christian presence since the first century).
431: The third ecumenical council is held in Ephesus and affirms that, yes, St. Mary
is Theotokos -- not just 'Christotokos' as the followers of Nestorius would have it -- and Nestorius and his followers are condemned as heretics. This group is the origin of the Church of the East (a.k.a. the Persian Church, as a result of the above-mentioned Persian councils), which at one time was the largest single church in the world in terms of geographical spread, extending from Cyprus in the West to China in the East before the twin assault of the Mongols and Islam crushed them basically everywhere (today they are ~170,000 and have suffered numerous schisms; their patriarch, currently one Mar Gewargis III, has resided for some time in Chicago, IL rather than the traditional areas of Assyrian settlement in Iraq, which are very unstable today).
etc., etc., etc.
I stopped at the third ecumenical council because this post is already a beast and anyway my Church only recognizes the first three ecumenical councils (325, 381, 431), so I don't feel like I can present later events in a fashion that would be agreeable in a mixed-confession environment.
You get my point though, right? There's an awful lot that happened in the early centuries of Christianity (and what is in this post is merely a fraction of it), so any 'great apostasy' that is supposedly substantiated by what the
Roman Catholic Church in particular did in western Europe in the 12th century seems hopelessly parochial and really rather lame. What effect could this have had on the Churches of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Greece, Asia Minor, and India, all of which have roots dating back to the apostles themselves? None of these were part of the inquisition, since they lived elsewhere and never took their orders from the Pope of Rome or anyone in the Roman Church to begin with.
Is your God such a limited being that he only cares about what happened in western Europe, and then only from the 12th century onwards? Or could it be
just maybe that our friend Hrairoo is correct, and the Mormon narrative is necessarily limited to the very limited view that your founder Joseph Smith had, and this really has nothing to do with God or with the actual reality of the Christian Church throughout the world for the last two millennia?
