evidence that Carthage and other areas of the African littoral were evangelized by Christian Zealots and Essenes and had a very early tradition of militancy and resistance to authority and persecution. Tertullian embodied this tradition. To him the Church was precious elite of believers, to be defended against contamination from whatever quarter; the Devil, he thought, roamed the earth seeking to corrupt. Christians should limit their contacts with the state to the minimum: they should refuse to serve in the army, or the civil service, or even in state schools; they might not earn their living in any trade connected, even indirec tly, with pagan religion. He particularly deplored the attempts of rationalists, like Marcion, to reconcile Christian teaching to Greek philosophy: 'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has the Academy to do with the Church? What have heretics to do with Christians? Our instruction comes from the porch of Solomon, who had himself taught that the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart. Away with all attempts to produce a Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic Christianity! In his contempt for intellectual inquiry, Tertullian appeared anti-Pauline. Yet in another sense he sprang from the Pauline tradition. He stressed the overwhelming power of faith, the precious gift of the elect. To him Christians were supermen because the spirit moved in them. This is Paul's conception of the Church: a community where the spirit worked through individuals, rather than an organized hierarchy where authority was exercised by office. Tertullian's burning faith made him a scourge of heretics and an avid propagandist for the Church - one of the best it ever had. Yet his alignment with orthodoxy, at any rate orthodoxy as conceived by a clerical establishment, was fundamentally against his nature. He thought direct communication with the deity not only possible but essential. And so did many other people. It was among the earliest traditions of the Church, and it had the full stamp of Pauline authority. But the idea of a free-lance, self-appointed proclaimer of truth was, in the end. incompatible with a regular priesthood, charged with the duty of protecting the canon. The crisis came to a head in the second half of the second century but it had been building up for a long time. The nature of Christianity, carried rapidly forward by wandering evangelists, attracted charlatans. Some of the earliest Christian documents (and the earliest pious forgeries) were attempts to establish the bona fides of missionaries and warnings against fraud. Sophisticated pagans sneered at Christians for their gullibility. That sparkling Greek satirist Lucian, who took a contemptuous view of human credulity, was particularly critical of Christians because ‘they take their beliefs from tradition, and do not insist on definite evidence. Any professional fraud can impose himself on them and make a lot of money very quickly.’ Lucian gave as one example the Cynic philosopher Peregrinus who picked up Christianity in Palestine, ‘and in no time made them all look like children - he was prophet, cult leader, head of the synagogue, everything. He interpreted their holy books, and composed some himself. They revered him as a god, treated him as a lawgiver, and made him their leader - next, of course, after the man who introduced their cult into the world, and who was crucified in Palestine, whom they still worship. 'Peregrinus may have been more sincere than Lucian gave him credit for: he eventually cremated himself on a funeral pyre at the close of the Olympic Games in 165. It was always difficult to distinguish between the truly inspired. the self-deluded, and the plain criminal. And, inconvenient as individual ecstatic and 'speakers with tongues' might be, there was always the more serious danger that they might fall under the spell of an outstanding charismatic and prophet who would constitute a counter-Church. Just as the varieties of Gnosticism risked capturing the Church's personality and absorbing it into a disintegrating mess of sub-Hellenic cults, so the charismatics might submerge the Church's unitary voice under a Babel of ‘prophecies’. The moment was judged to have come about 170 when Montanus, a successful charismatic who described himself as the Paraclete, was declared an enemy of the Church. Many of his closest followers were women,' and they clearly played an outstanding role in his movement - as, indeed, they did in one or two of the Pauline congregations. Montanus was attacked by his enemies for breaking up marriages and then giving these inspired matrons who flocked to join him ecclesiastical offices. Montanism, or rather the efforts to combat it played a conclusive role in 28