correspondingly vengeful. The total of Jewish losses provided by Josephus add up fo nearly one and a half million. The figure is unrealistic but it accurately mirrors the horrors of those years. There was 11 new, desperate Diaspora. The Temple was destroyed and henceforth Judaism became the religion of the Talmud. The Jewish nation never recovered from the blow, though the final dispersion took place in the next century, when Jerusalem was razed and rebuilt as a Roman colonial city. The Jewish-Christian community was dispersed; most of its leaders were no doubt killed. Survivors fled to Asia Minor, the east, Egypt, especially to Alexandria. Thus the centre of Christian gravity shifted to Rome: and the theological vacuum left by the extinction of the Jerusalem Church was filled by the Pauline system. A number of readjustment s followed. Paul's Christ had not been anchored to the historical Jesus of the Jerusalem Church. This was remedi ed by Mark, who wrote the first biography of Jesus, presenting him as a deity. Luke, in his gospel and his Acts, completed the plastic surgery by giving the decapitated trunk of the Jerusalem Jesus a Pauline head. The change of balance and direction in the Church was eventually accepted by most Christian-Jewish communities in Africa and Asia. It is reflected in a number of documents, such as the gospel of Matthew, who neatly contrives to be both very Jewish and very Christian, and the gospel of John, which marks the triumph of Pauline theology. But other Christian-Jewish fragments declined to change and so became heretical. Such were the Ebionites, or poor ones, chiefly in Egypt. They saw themselves as the true, primitive Church; they had allowed themselves to be by-passed by events, lost their title to orthodoxy, and so came to be treated as false innovators - a familiar paradox in the history of religion. It is interesting that their writings and those of other Jewish Christians in the fifties who had first introduced the idea of heresy in the portray Paul as antichrist and the first heretic. It was in fact the Jewish Christians in the fifties, who had first introduced the idea of heresy in the campaign against Paul and Hellenization; thus the arrow flew swiftly back to the archer. In Judaism itself, heresy was already a mature and powerful concept. Hence, following the collapse of Jewish Christianity, the orthodox Judaic authorities did not wait long to anathematize Christianity as such.. Around 85, the judgment was incorporated in the synagogue liturgy: 'May the Nazarenes and the heretics be suddenly destroyed and removed from the book of life.' Heresy was another Judaic gift to the Christian Church, where it soon began to flourish mightily. Yet what was Christian heresy? And, for that matter, what was the Church? Most of our knowledge of early Christian history comes from the writings of Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century. Eusebius was in many ways a conscientious historian, and he had access to multitudes of sources which have since disappeared. But he believed, and was therefore concerned to demonstrate by his presentation of the evidence, that a Christian Church, vested with the plenitude of Christ's teaching, and with divine authority to uphold it, had been ordained by Jesus right at the beginning, and had then been solidly established by the first generation of apostles. Moreover, it had triumphantly survived the attempts of various heretics to tamper with the truth it passed on intact from generation to generation. This view is a reconstruction for ideological purposes. Eusebius represented the wing of the Church which had captured the main centers of power, had established a firm tradition of monarchical bishops, and had recently allied itself with the Roman state. He wanted to show that the Church he represented had always constituted the mainstream of Christianity, both in organization and faith. The truth is very different. We have already seen that the original legatee of Jesus’ mission, the Jerusalem Church, did not hold Steadfast to his teaching and was slipping back into Judaism before it was, in effect, extinguished, its remnants being eventually branded as heretics. The Christology of Paul, which later became the substance of the Christian universal faith, came from the Diaspora, and was preached by an outsider whom many in the Jerusalem Church did not recognize as an apostle at all. Christianity began in confusion, controversy and schism and so it continued. A dominant orthodox Church, with a recognizable ecclesiastical structure, 24