Even if we accept that Matthew 16:18 is referring to Jesus installing Peter as the leader upon which the church will be built, there is no evidence that this actually happened. I'm not even referring to secular history, but to the New Testament books that record what went on in the early years of the church. The Acts of the Apostles starts out focussing on Peter and his fellow apostles' ministry in Jerusalem and the rest of Judea, but about halfway through switches the spotlight to Paul, someone who hadn't met Jesus and starts his preaching before ever meeting one of the apostles who had. There is also no reference in scripture to bishops who oversee a whole city, but to a more collegial system akin to a board of deacons. Evidently the system did eventually evolve into a single bishop model, as some of the apocryphal books make reference to it.
There is every indication that the decades following the death of Jesus saw multiple strains of Christianity, some which would barely be recognizable as Christian today. The Bible didn't yet exist as a source, so various groups of followers were left to create their own belief systems and pictures of who and what they thought Jesus was and what following him consisted of. This should be expected -- we take for granted today's instant worldwide communication, but this was more than a millennium before the printing press. Any standards disseminated by the leaders would be in laboriously handwritten, or depended on personal visits.
One of these groups was founded by Marcion, who believed that the God of Jesus and the God of the Hebrew scriptures were two different deities. His canon of scripture included only the gospel of Luke, the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline epistles. For years Marcionite Christians were the dominant form of Christianity in many cities. Eventually the form of Christianity that became the Catholic Church became the overwhelming majority, and since history (including the Bible) is written by the victors, competing Christianities were tarred as heretics and false teachers. It's easy to look back 2000 years and see how some of these factions taught things that didn't line up with the Bible, but there was no Bible. The writings that make up our New Testament took decades if not centuries to become widely available. And the decision regarding what would be included in the Bible and considered Holy Scripture was made by the winning faction. It's not difficult to imagine a very different Bible if one of the other sects had prevailed.
By Constantine's reign there was an entity which was recognizable as the ancestor of today's Catholic Church, but it still was far from obvious what form it should take. During that time there were five Patriarchs -- think of them as Super Bishops (the position of Cardinal hadn't been invented yet) who presided over the churches in Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria. Due to Rome and Constantinople being the capital cities of the empire, the patriarchs of those cities enjoyed the greatest prestige and the greatest influence. The Bishop of Rome at some point began to claim Matthew 16:18 as the scriptural basis for his position as leader of the entire church. The Patriarch of Constantinople disagreed. By the 600's the other three Patriarchs were in Muslim lands and therefore didn't figure into any power plays. For the most part the Eastern and Western churches were in sync on doctrine, but began to drift apart regarding ritual. But once the Bishops of Rome and Constantinople excommunicated each other, they didn't need to take the other's opinion into consideration any longer. By this time the retconning of the early church as an unbroken line of leaders starting with Peter had become ingrained. Is it possible that Peter really was the leader of undisputed "true" church, and that there was an unbroken line of successors? Maybe, but I think it's equally likely that what we see in the Fourth Century was a result of several centuries of evolution in faith and practice, with competition for souls and power among various factions. Once Christianity became legal, the Catholic hierarchy had legal authority, as well as spiritual, to back up their views.
Despite this surface unity, there were many so-called heresies that sprung up, mostly about the nature of Jesus. One thing is evident from reading the Bible as an historian and not a theologian is that the Synoptic Gospels portray Jesus' message as one of how to act while the Pauline epistles and other New Testament books focus on what to believe. This led to heresies and schisms over deep theological issues, and relegating Christian practice to prayer and ritual, rather than to loving your neighbor and doing acts of charity. One "heresy" that had remarkable staying power was put forth by a clergyman named Arius and involved (as most of the arguments did) the nature of Jesus. The Arian teaching was condemned at the Council of Nicea, but persisted until the 800's, mostly among the Germanic people. It finally withered away when Charlemagne decided to hitch his wagon to Orthodox Catholicism.
When the Protestant Reformation began, its leaders didn't at first reject the Catholic Church or its theology, although they gradually moved away from the idea that truth was determined by the church leaders' interpretation, and began to encourage ordinary people to read the Bible and defer to scripture first. Their position was that the Catholic Church had moved away from the ideals of the early church and that by going back to scripture Christians could recreate the atmosphere of godliness that existed back then. What they didn't consider was that the scriptures that had come down to them were the product of the embryonic Catholic Church. The early church didn't have the Bible. If they had any gospels or epistles, different cities had access to different versions. The Protestants, by claiming to obey only scripture and not human authority, were putting their stamp of approval on the Catholic version of what Truth ought to be!
Catholic doctrine is that scriptural interpretation should be filtered through the clergy, especially the head of the church -- the Pope. As mentioned earlier, there were competing versions of Christianity in the early days, each with its own epistles, gospels and acts of the apostles. Most falsely claimed to have been written by one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus. (None of the canonical Gospels claim authorship within their texts, several letters attributed to Paul most certainly weren't written by him, and several other epistles attributed to Peter or John are without a doubt pseudonymous). The early church leadership claimed the authority to decide which of these numerous tracts and letters were legitimate, and how the canonical ones should be interpreted. This is related to the doctrine of Apostolic Succession, which posits that Jesus taught the Twelve, who taught others, who then taught others in an unbroken chain. The assumption was that the teaching originated with Jesus and was therefore perfect, and was perfect transmitted from successor to successor. As the successors of the Apostles, and therefore of Jesus, the idea was that they were uniquely qualified to determine Biblical Truth. And they had a point. Although anyone who has played a game of "telephone" knows that information doesn't remain intact as it passes from one person to another -- someone had to sift through all myriad contradictory "scriptures" and decide what was legitimate. The idea that anyone who had access to a Bible could determine the Truth hasn't led to a return to first century paradise, with every ploughman able to discern the will of God, but to hundreds, even thousands, of competing contradictory versions of Christianity. And they all "know" that they're right.
Some of the divisions aren't even about doctrine. There are some denominations that are organized around an "episcopal" model, with bishops overseeing large areas; some are a congregationally organized, with a board of elders or presbyters making all the decisions, still others are independent, led by a charismatic leader. Denominations split and regroup, local churches change denominations, and individuals hop from church to church. You hear people who have been raised in one church describing a change in their church as "becoming a Christian", as if they weren't really a Christian before. And they all can all point to something in the Bible to justify their opinions (except the Catholics, they just say they've been around the longest). The rise of Christian Nationalism has exacerbated the problem, although the alliances have changed. Conservative Catholics and Protestant Fundamentalists have made common cause against liberal Catholics and mainstream Protestants and there appears to be a contest to see who can be the toughest sonofabitch around, rather than who can live like Jesus.
Ironic that the faith supposedly based on "love thy neighbor" is usually of the opinion that their neighbor is destined for Hell.
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