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Looking at the Largest Orthodox Cathedral on Earth

Looking at the Largest Orthodox Cathedral on Earth

Last updated on: October 18, 2026 at 3:13 pm by Dan Peterson

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Looking at the Largest Orthodox Cathedral on Earth 2026-10-18T15:13:18-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Strictly speaking, the Seattle Washington Temple is located in suburban Bellevue.
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There is often a considerable amount of anger and, shall we say, misunderstanding with regard to this issue. Jennifer Roach Lees actually knows something about the matter, and she has written a very helpful piece: “Analysis: How Latter-day Saint child protection policies actually work: Viral headlines often distort how child safety policies actually work. Here are the facts behind Latter-day Saint youth protection guidelines”

A sunset view toward the west from atop Mt. Pisgah, Iowa (taken with my cellphone), hear the grave of my ancestor Joseph Knight, Sr.

Next week’s new installment of Becoming Brigham will go up tomorrow (Monday) morning. (Here is the thirty-six-second trailer for it. “Everywhere it’s mud and sickness, but unless Brigham Young and the Twelve can show they’re leaving Nauvoo, the restored Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will be “blown to the Seven Winds.””) So, if you haven’t already done so, please watch this week’s installment: “Sacrifice For What? — Becoming Brigham Episode 38”

And please subscribe to the series; there is no charge for doing so. Of course, if you would like to contribute to the cause — whether to the ongoing effort of creating Becoming Brigham itself or to the Interpreter Foundation more generally (please specify!) — we won’t object. (See the instructions for donating.) And I point out, yet again, that no Interpreter funds have gone toward either my idylls on the Danube or so much as a spoonful of Bulgarian lentil soup. All of the money for such things comes from my own private corruption, crimes, and depredations.

This, the art museum of Craiova, is one of the several attractive buildings that we walked by today. Formerly, it was a private palace. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Still basking in the morning’s news of BYU’s football victory over Notre Dame — we disembarked for the last time from the AmaVerde early today and boarded a bus for the lengthy drive to the Romanian capital of Bucharest. For the first hour or more, we drove mostly in a rather thick fog. Had it been dark, this would have been evocatively appropriate: We are, after all, in the homeland (more or less) of Count Dracula.

We broke for a walk in the downtown area of Craiova, an attractive town with some very nice neoclassical and other architecture. Among other things, we visited an Orthodox church dedicated to the Holy Trinity. We also ate a pre-arranged lunch in the Restaurant Casa Ghincea.

We finally arrived our Bucharest hotel at about 5:30 PM. After a long, long day of bus-riding.

My wife took this photograph of the National Cathedral of Romania with her cellphone, from the window of our hotel room.

Our hotel is essentially across the street from the still rather new National Cathedral of Romania, the patriarchal cathedral of the Romanian Orthodox Church and the tallest Eastern Orthodox church building in the world, as well as the largest by both volume and area. Pretty impressive. Unfortunately, its doors were closed by the time we got here. I hope that we’ll have a chance to enter it, but I’m not certain.

Being here in an Orthodox country, where bishops and patriarchs and so forth function rather differently than they do in the Latin Catholic Church, has reminded me of some notes that I extracted from a fascinating article that I read back in 2020. It was written by a Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of California at Berkeley: Robert Knapp, “How Magic and Miracles Spread Christianity,” Biblical Archaeology Review 46/1 (January-February 2020): 50-53. The story of the rise of Christianity after the time of the apostles is often told, he writes, on the level of bishops and archbishops, Christian scholars and writers, and Roman emperors, with their laws, decrees, and policies. This, says Professor Knapp, is “very misleading.” (50)

It wasn’t emperors who made Christianity. It was ordinary men and women. . . . In the ancient world, the cares and concerns of such people are mundane: How will I survive? Can I do more — can I flourish? The hazards of life, illness, accident, personal confrontations — is it possible to control these? My family, my ancestors, my offspring — how can I honor, protect, and strengthen them? (50)

By about A.D. 150, four generations after the crucifixion, all eyewitnesses (ordinary folk) were dead. The new Jesus-sect (also called the Way) had begun to be interpreted, spread, and controlled by an elite within the movement. These men, closely tied intellectually and culturally to the polytheist culture around them, were mostly concerned with touting Christianity using categories of thought and action familiar to educated Romans and Greeks. This “orthodox” (literally, “straight-thinking”), elite-conceived picture elided ordinary men and women in important ways.

Retrieving the early Christians and Christianity largely unseen by the orthodox version of the beginnings — essentially writing about “invisible Christians” — is hard because ordinary people are usually voiceless in the material that survives from antiquity. It is doubly hard because discussion of early Christianity is usually written in the almost indelible ink of elite discourse — both ancient and modern. (51)

In demonstrating the ability to direct supernatural power, Jesus and the early Christian apostles met polytheism on its own ground by focusing on the ability to help people deal with life’s contingencies and boasted that their Way showed itself superior. Jews, too, believed in miracles. They also could be convinced of the new sect’s legitimacy because miracles were a long-accepted proof of Yahweh’s power.

To the elite, who gradually gained control of orthodoxy, miracles were an embarrassment, evidence of everyday religiosity that circumvented their favorite method of discourse — increasingly erudite, abstract, and pagan-influenced explanations of the meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection. (53)

By the end of the third century, Knapp writes,

Perhaps as many as 10 percent of urban dwellers and 3 percent of rural inhabitants believed in some form of Christianity. In all likelihood, the movement would have continued as one option among many in the polytheist world — no better, no worse than others — appealing to a few, but hardly to all. (53)

The conversion of Constantine, however,

canceled that trajectory. Instead, Christianity became an imperial religion. Its appeal and spread no longer depended on meeting people’s needs through demonstrations of power. Top-down replaced bottom-up. (53)

This all seems to me quite compatible with Latter-day Saint teachings on a “Great Apostasy.”

Posted from Bucharest, Romania

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