faithfully preserved and enjoyed a long life; they grew up and spread so vigorously that they smashed the heretics or drove them into tiny enclaves. But the books to which Eusebius refers have not survived and he does not seem to have read them, to judge by his references. Why should they survive up to the fourth century, then disappear? On the other side, the overwhelming bulk of heretic writings, including diatribes between rival heresies, have disappeared. But often their titles survive and these, in many cases, do not Suggest polemics - the works of sects struggling for survival against orthodoxy - but the regular teaching of the established majority faith. A very complex picture of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the early period is revealed if we study the ‘succession lists’ of individual bishoprics. By the third century, lists of bishops, each of whom had consecrated his successor, and which went back to the original founding of the see by one or other of the apostles, had been collected or manufactured by most of the great cities of the empire and were reproduced by Eusebius. The idea was first developed by the Gnostics who listed teachers, and their teachers, going back to Jesus, and transmitting the sacred knowledge. Thus Basilides, one of the Gnostic heretics, appealed to Glaucias, described as Peter's interpreter, and so back to Peter and Christ; another Gnostic, Valentinus, claimed he had been instructed by Theodas, a disciple of Paul: both the Carpocratians and the Nassenians appealed to Marianne, to whom James, Jesus’ brother, handed on the secrets. During the second century this Gnostic device was adopted by orthodox Christianity. Indeed to some extent it was systematized, about 180, by an orthodox writer from the east, Hegesippus. His writings are lost, but according to Eusebius he travelled round collecting evidence about the succession in various Churches and then wrote a huge tome in which ‘he presented the undistorted tradition of the apostolic preaching in the simplest possible form.' He identified intellectual continuity, preserved on a personal basis, with juristic and sacramental continuity. He thus linked the 'correct' tradition and succession with order and unanimity. Early teachers were identified and then transformed into a series of monarchical bishops. There was no conscious falsification, since by the second half of the second century it was assumed there had always been such bishops; all that was necessary was to prod people's memories to get the details. Then the list could be tidied up. | Hence the longer and more impressive the list, the later its date of compilation and the less its accuracy. Eusebius, however, presents the lists as evidence that orthodoxy had a continuous tradition from the earliest times in all the great Episcopal sees and that all heretical movements were subsequent aberrations from the mainline of Christianity. Looking behind the lists, however, a different picture emerges. In Edessa, on the edge of the Syrian desert, the proofs of the early establishment of Christianity were forgeries, almost certainly manufactured under Bishop Kune, the first orthodox bishop, and actually a contemporary of Eusebius. Christianity seems to have been brought to the area by Marcionites, about 150, and later flourished in various non-orthodox forms, including the Manichean. Different texts of the New Testament, varying in important essentials, were in use. Thus orthodoxy did not arrive until the last decades of the third century. Equally, the first Christian groups in Egypt were heterodox by later standards. They came into existence about the beginning of the first century and were Christian-Gnostics. Their teaching, put in writing about this time, was the 'Gospel of the Egyptians’, in Coptic, later declared heretical. Very recent discoveries in the Upper Nile Valley suggest that Gnosticism was also the dominant form of Christianity in Upper Egypt at this time. And in Alexandria in Lower Egypt there was a Jewish-Christian community, using the 'gospel of the Hebrews’, also later declared heretical. Orthodoxy was not established until the time of Bishop Demetrius, 189-231, who set up a number of other sees and manufactured a genealogical tree for his own Bishopric of Alexandria, which traces the foundation through ten mythical predecessors back to Mark, and So to Peter and Jesus. Orthodoxy was merely one of several forms of Christianity during the third century, and may net have OGcome dominant until Eusebius's time. Even in Antioch, where both Peter and Paul had 3]