been active, there seems to have been confusion until the end of the second century. Antioch harbored multitude of esoteric religious cults. Gnosticism was powerful, and may have taken over Christianity after the departure of the apostles. Some early Christians there seem to have used a heretical text, called the gospel of Peter. The ‘apostolic succession’ may have been lost completely. When Eusebius's chief source for his Episcopal lists, Julius Africanus, tried to compile one for Antioch he found only six names to cover the same spell of time as twelve in Rome and ten in Alexandria. Orthodoxy in Antioch really dates from the episcopate of Ignatius in the late second century who had to free himself as well as his diocese from the local Gnostic tradition and who imported orthodox clergy from elsewhere to help the process. We have evidence that the same sort of process was repeated in western Asia Minor, in Thessalonica, and in Crete. Indeed, wherever evidence exists, it indicates that the process of achieving uniformity, thereby making orthodoxy meaningful, began only towards the end of the second century, and was far from complete by the end of the third. A number of factors made this process possible. The first was the evolution of a canon of New Testament writings. Although oral tradition continued to be important right up till the end of the second century, most traditions had found written form by its early decades; they constituted an enormous mass of writing, only part of which has come down to us, covering a wide range of doctrine and assertion, much of it contradictory. The Church was bothered by this problem from an early date, as is evident from the work of Bishop Papias, and was originally inclined to adopt a rigorous policy, excluding anything which it did not believe to be demonstrably connected with one or other of the apostles. During this period, indeed, Christians were still aware of the way in which traditions were finding written form and were far more conscious of the element of fraud during ‘the post-apostolic age than the later legislators of Church councils. But Marcion pushed this tendency too far: his exegetical methods, impressive though they were, would not merely have cut off Christianity from Judaism completely - thus distorting the character and intellectual background of Jesus’ work - but would have reduced the New Testament virtually to the authentic Pauline corpus. The historical Jesus would have disappeared, Christianity would have been completely Hellenized and thus made far more vulnerable to Gnostic penetration and disintegration. In the reaction from Marcion, the tendency was for the canon to become less exclusive. A fragment survives from the late second century (in an eighth century Latin translation, first printed in 1740 by L. A. Moratoria) listing the 'received' works, and indicating a major expansion since Papias's day. The instinct was to give a multi-focal vision of Jesus and his ideas and thus to broaden the appeal of his teaching and its interpretation. This meant accepting a large number of theological and ethical, and indeed historical factual contradictions; on the other hand it preserved the universalist spirit of Christianity and was more faithful to the tradition of Jesus himself as a provider of innumerable matrices and insights than a homogenous theology like Paul's. Expanding the canon was also a weapon against heresy. All the evidence suggests that heresiarchs did not create heresies; they merely articulated popular moods which already existed or in some cases fought for traditions which were being trampled by the march of orthodoxy. An inclusive canon allowed the Church to make a wider appeal to heretical populations or, to put it another way, to include under its umbrella of faith the followers of old and divergent traditions. At the same time, the process of selection and canonization allowed the orthodox leaders to demolish dangerous documents once their adherents had been captured. Thus in the third, fourth and fifth centuries, many written ‘gospels’, particularly those penetrated by Gnosticism, were excluded and so disappeared. At the same time, dangerous elements within the canon could be to some extent de-fused by attaching more orthodox documents to their authors. Thus Paul, damaged by the championship of Marcion, was credited with the so-called ‘pastoral epistles’, which have the tone of the emerging orthodox church; and the gospel of John, much used by the Montanists and other heretics - and certainly a candidate for exclusion at one time - was saved by attributing to its supposed author three unobjectionable epistles. There was horse-trading between rival centers of Christianity and, 32