whom he called a heretic, of highway robbery; he held disgusting feasts with she was covetous. The indictment continues: ‘Does a . the prophetess Priscilla. and true prophet use make-up? Does he dye his eyebrows and eyelids? Does he love ornaments? Does he gamble? Play dice? Does he lend money at interest?’ What was normal practice among all Christians - the practice of calling widows virgins, the payment of priests, the use of money to get persecuted brethren out of state prisons, were in heretic sects described as evil. The sects which attracted the largest followings were, as a rule, the most austere and God-fearing; but, being the most successful, they had to be the most bitterly assailed on moral grounds. : There is thus a sinister Goebbels' Law about early Christian controversy: the louder the abuse, the bigger the lie. In a circular letter to bishops in c. 324, Bishop Alexander of Alexandria wrote of Arians: ‘Impelled by avarice and ambition, these knaves are constantly plotting to gain possession of the richest dioceses. . . they are driven insane by the devil who works in them. . . skilled deceivers. . . hatched a conspiracy. . . vile purposes. . . equipped dens of robbers . . . Organized a gang to fight Christ . . . excite disorders against us . . . persuade people to persecute us .. . their immoral womenfolk . . . their younger women followers ru':1 around the street in an indecent fashion and discredit Christianity... .' And so on. There was a constant and depressing inflation in the vocabulary of invective during the course of the first two centuries; thus the orthodox were told that among the Manichees ‘no modesty, no sense of honor and no chastity whatever is to be found; their moral code is a mass of falsehoods, their religious beliefs are shaped by the devil, and their sacrifice is immorality itself.’ Where their writings survive, we find that heretics, schismatics and critics of the orthodox used the same language. Thus the anti-Nestorian Bishop Cyril of Alexandria was described by Isadora of Pelusium as 'a man determined to pursue his private hatreds rather than seek the true faith of Jesus Christ’ ; and another critic, Bishop Theodore of Cirrus, greeted Cyril's death with the words: 'The living are delighted. The dead, perhaps, are sorry, afraid they may be burdened with his company. . . . May the guild of undertakers lay a huge, heavy stone on his grave, lest he should come back again and show his faithless mind again. Let him take his new doctrines to Hell, and preach to the damned all day and night.’ The mind boggles at the lists of offences with which distinguished ecclesiastics accused each other. The historian Solomon relates that at the Council of Tyre, 335, Athanasius, the orthodox Bishop of Alexandria, was charged with breaking a mystical chalice, smashing an Episcopal chair, false imprisonment, deposing a bishop unlawfully, placing him under military guard and torturing him, striking other bishops physically, obtaining his bishoprics by perjury, breaking and cutting off the arm of one of his opponents, burning his house, tying him to a column and whipping him, and putting him in a cell illegally - all this in addition to teaching false doctrine. The venom employed in these endemic controversies reflects the fundamental instability of Christian belief during the early centuries, before a canon of New Testament writings had been established, creedal formulations evolved to epitomize them, and a regular ecclesiastical structure built up to protect and propagate such agreed beliefs. Before the last half of the third century it is inaccurate to speak of a dominant strain of Christianity. So far as we can judge, by the end of the first century, and virtually throughout the second, the majority of Christians believed in varieties of Christian-Gnosticism, or belonged to revivalist sects grouped round charismatic. Eusebius, seeking to push back the origins of uniformity and orthodoxy as close as possible to the generation of the apostles, constantly uses phrases - ‘countless’, 'very many’, all’, - when he deals with the orthodox Church, its size, its influence, its success, its champions and its heroic sacrifices, which is not borne out by evidence, even when he cites it. In particular, he exaggerates the volume of orthodox literature from the earliest times. His motive was to show that a massive quantity of books setting out the true faith was produced in the first two centuries that they had wide circulation, were 30