Armanian Orthodox Church (est. 301) predates that slightly (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_the_Illuminator)

Sort of. I don't think any respective Orthodox church had a distinct recognition prior to the first ecumenical council (year 325), though I may be wrong on that. Plenty of people like to claim "first", but there's no strong consensus on which branch of Orthodoxy was first, though I know there's a lot of cultural pride built up in a few of the churches thinking they were first.

Longest running CEO, too.

I always thought of the Pope as "COO, Earth Division."

Nitpicking here, but Rome was a backwater for a long time. That business evidently bootstrapped in the Middle East and is continued today as the Orthodox Church.

Can you clarify on which orthodox church? Greek, Russian and Ethiopian all come to mind, but I'm not aware of a general middle eastern one (genuinely curious). Perhaps it wasn't called orthodox back then (prior to 300AD)?

Presumably the Eastern Orthodox Church which includes the Greek and Russsian branches and was centered in Constantinople/Istanbul.

Oriental Orthodox Churches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_Orthodox_Churches

Are probably the most "Middle Eastern", but apparently they, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Catholicism were all the same church until various splits happened, so I'm not sure if you can say any of them are "older".

The Orthodox churches really just get to trace their lineage to their respective founding apostle. If we do assume that the apostles that had to travel the least from Jerusalem were the ones whose churches started first, then Syria and Egypt (Coptic) were probably the first. Granted, we're making a big assumption.

When the splits are that old we call them "schisms" :-)

What leads you to select 325 as the founding year and not 1054?

First Council of Nicaea established church structure and Canon law. Also, we can trace the unbroken line of successive bishops to that date.

The Great Schism of 1054 can be viewed as just a corporate split due to political pressure, which it was. It didn't seriously change anything about the business of the parent company.

> It didn't seriously change anything about the business of the parent company.

It sort of did, though. Easier to define your own standards when you don't need consensus from peers, no?

In either case, I think it's funny to consider the Roman Catholic Church as "the parent company". It's a little dismissive of all other Apostolic Sees and sort of rewrites history a bit to imply that Roman Catholicism was the root of Christianity. Technically, you'd want to use the pre-ecumenical council of Jerusalem (year 50) and that nearly all modern Orthodox churches and the Catholic church share a starting date.

The Bishop of Rome was considered the preeminent by all the other major sees. Its just whether he was first among equals or outright leader that was the controversy. So the RCC has a bit of a claim as the parent..

Any material you can recommend I can read more on that? As I understand it, the writings of Irenaeus get cited here to make that point except they're often taken out of context.

Rome was the center of the Mediterranean world during the early church, the only city with a million people.

That's the only reason the Roman diocese became dominant. Not any sort of lineage or pedigree.

Actually, the patriarch at constantinople had the dominant authority at the early christendom.

There's a very informative youtube video about the schism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6rWf0k8d78

At that point why not count the British Empire as a business?

You could probably consider the British royal family a business.

But even if you don’t do that, for a long time the British empire was a corporation — the east India company.

Weren’t they just a majority shareholder?

What would you peg as the starting date of that? I think it's not quite that old, although I'm not a historian, so I might be wrong

1707 when Britain became politically united and ceased to be England and Scotland.

The English colonies preceded that, but it was not British. Cromwell's invasion of Ireland was the start of the plantation system, i.e. settler colonies.

Before that there was the brief Anglo-French dual monarchy during the reign of Henry VI.

And before that there was the larger Angevin Empire which included Britain, Ireland, and the western half of France. However I would consider that Norman rather than English as the rulers spoke French.

It wasn't an Empire until well into the Enlightenment. England was not really important at all for the longest time.

QE2 and House of 'Windsor' (heavy quotes) however, can trace their lineage back to the days pre-Norma invasion, so a little over 1K years by that measure.

Because it's a nation, not an asset-holding entity that is nation-agnostic.

The Vatican is a nation.

It is, nominally, a nation in name, done for political reasons to remedy the Italian government's exertion of power over the institution. Idiosyncrasies of naming aside, it serves much the same purpose as a corporate headquarters. And regardless of all of that, it's nationhood is new, under 100 years old. Imagine we suddenly granted Apple headquarters nationhood: it would not change the material reality that it is functionally a corporation.

The Papal States were a thing for about 1000 years though.

Interestingly enough, it's an extremely flat organization.