Sects and Denominations

Orthodox Christianity is not a denomination or a sect. It is the same church founded at Pentecost in the Book of Acts which held their first Council in Jerusalem. This much is true and while it can be argued, the arguments are pitiful.
I apologize for my bluntness on this subject but it has come up in several conversations that I have had over the last year.

When one speaks of the Orthodox Christian Church one must understand the definition of the word Orthodox. Orthodox means literally "right belief" and therefore the church maintains the right beliefs of the church taught throughout the centuries first by the Apostles and handed down to the present day.
One can discover this through a myriad of different ways but the facts remain the same.

One way which I have seen commonly used to understand this is in a person's conversion through simply studying the history of the Bible itself. The Scriptures as we know them have their source in the Greek Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Torah which was used during the time of Christ). The Septuagint was used primarily because most people were Greek speaking in the region. Most of the manuscripts existed primarily in Koine Greek. Now I am no Bible scholar and this is about where my knowledge of Biblical History stops, but in what I have just said it is plain to see that Hebrew was not the common language of the people and that while it may have been used liturgically, the Disciples of Christ did not choose to pass out leaflets on the corner (for lack of a printing press) but use the teachings which Christ had given them and the revelation of His life on Earth as their ministry.
Christ revealed the scriptures to His disciples in a new way and in this they were able to speak the Gospel not out of a book (for it had not been written yet)but from their heart and from memorization of the scriptures.

What is more is that it was not until nearly three-hundred years later that someone even mentioned forming a canon close to what we know it as today.

So how did Christianity exist in a standardized form for three hundred years? We find that Paul and Peter (among the others) traveled from place to place constantly encouraging the churches of the region. This continued with the Holy Fathers of the next generation and so on and this oral tradition became so important that when the time came to formulate a canon of scriptures, it was this very tradition (known as Holy Tradition) that they used to decide on which books to put in it and which to discard.

As I said, Orthodoxy is not a sect or a denomination. It is the very church handed down from the disciples throughout the centuries. With it are the faith, doctrine and theology which is held firmly within the mind of the church through tradition and confirmed by the scriptures.
This is why for us Orthodox, it is important to understand that our church is not some break-away sect who formed an opinionated position in regards to some doctrinal concept, but the very body of Christ which the Gates of Hades have not prevailed against.