emerged only very gradually and represented a process of natural selection - a spiritual survival of the fittest. And, as with such struggles, it was not particularly edifying. The Darwinian image is appropriate: the central and eastern Mediterranean in the first and second centuries AD swarmed with an infinite multitude of religious ideas, struggling to propagate themselves. Every religious movement was unstable and fissiparous; and these cults were not only Splitting up and modulating but reassembling in new forms. A cult had to struggle not only to survive but to retain its identity. Jesus had produced certain insights and matrices which were rapidly propagated over a large geographical area. The followers of Jesus were divided right from the start on elements of faith and practice. And the further the missionaries moved from the base, the more likely it was that their teachings would diverge. Controlling them implied an ecclesiastical organization. In Jerusalem there were ‘leaders’ and ‘pillars’, vaguely defined officials modeled on Jewish practice. But they were ineffective. The Jerusalem Council was a failure. It outlined a consensus but could not make it work in practice. Paul could not be controlled. Nor, presumably, could others. Nor could the ‘pillars' of the centre party maintain their authority even in Jerusalem. They slipped back into Judaism. Then came the catastrophe of 66-70, and the central organization of the Church, such as it was, disappeared. It is true that the Christians now had a homogenous and extremely virile body of doctrine: the Pauline gospel or kerygma. It stood a good chance of surviving and spreading. But it had no organization behind it. Paul did not believe in such a thing. He believed in the Spirit, working through him and others. Why should man regulate when the Spirit would do it for him? And of course he did not want a fixed system with rules and prohibitions: 'If you are led by the Spirit you are not under the law.' The Church was an inversion of normal society. Its leaders exercised their authority through gifts of the Spirit, not through office. The two noblest gifts were prophecy and teaching. The apostles set the process in motion, then the Spirit took over and worked through many people: ‘And God has appointed in the Church first apostles, then prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, then healers, helpers, administrators, speakers in various kinds of tongues.’ Worship was still completely unorganized and subject to no special control. There was no specific organization to handle funds. And there was no distinction between a clerical class, and laity. There were, indeed, presbyters in the Judaic Christian Church, but not in Paul's new convert congregations. The atmosphere in short was that of a loosely organized revivalist movement. Many, from time to time, ‘spoke with tongues' ; all expected the parousia soon. Clerical control seemed needless and inappropriate. And the atmosphere in the Pauline churches was reproduced elsewhere, in a rapidly spreading movement. Granted this, it was inevitable that the Church expanded not as a uniform movement but as a collection of heterodoxies. Or perhaps ‘heterodoxies' is the wrong word, since it implies there was an orthodox version. The Pauline system did, indeed, become orthodox in time, but the other Christian versions which spread from Jerusalem were not deviations from it but evolved independently. From the start, then, there were numerous varieties of Christianity which had little in common, though they centered round belief in the resurrection. They were marked by two things: individual oral traditions, which eventually found written expression as ‘gospels’, and, linked to this, claims to an apostolic succession. Each Church had its own Jesus story’ ; and each had been founded by one of the original band who had handed over the . torch to a designated successor and so on. The most important element in all these early Churches was the genealogical tree of truth. This was a Greek, rather than a Judaic, concept. Indeed, it was essentially a Gnostic idea. No one nas yet succeeded in defining 'Gnosticism' adequately, or indeed demonstrating whether this movement preceded Christianity or grew from it. Certainly Gnostic sects were spreading at the same time as Christian ones; both were part of the general religious osmosis. Gnostics had two central preoccupations: belief in a dual world of good and evil and belief in the existence of a secret code of truth. transmitted by word of AD