increasingly, between East and West. Thus the West successfully insisted on the elimination of many Alexandrine documents, but it was unable to foist on the East a number of important Roman writings of the early second century. It almost failed with Revelation, about which most Greeks were skeptical even in the eighth century; some never accepted it. The epistle to the Hebrews, as most of the early fathers knew, was not by Paul. It was excluded from the Muratorian fragment and rejected by Tertullian and virtually everyone else in the West. The first notable Latin figure to accept it as canonical was the mid-fourth century Bishop of Poitiers, Hilary. But it was popular in the East and finally categorized as Pauline, as a result of a deal at the Council of Carthage in 419 - though we know that the most influential ecclesiastic present, Augustine, was quite sure it was not written by Paul. In general, the determining figure in the evolution of the canon was Eusebius, whose object was to associate as closely as possible the actual teaching and structure of the Church with its documentary credentials; after his death, useful documents he had considered doubtful were accepted as canonical, the process being virtually completed by 367, when Athanasius gave a list in his Easter Letter. By this time, the New Testament, roughly as we know it, had largely superseded the old Hebrew scriptures as the principal teaching instrument of the church. It was an instrument which had been fashioned by the Church, rather than vice versa. Moreover, the very idea of a body of 'new scriptures’, containing the essence of the Christian faith, assisted the forces which were creating an institutional Church. Paul had been writing in an age when the parousia was still thought to be imminent, though by the end of his life hope that it would come immediately was fading. During the next two generations, the .Christians had to face the problem of a receding eschatology and accept that the period of waiting for the apocalypse was ‘normalcy’. For a time, the idea of a general resurrection and of individual expectations of heaven at death were presented side by side, without reconciliation; then the first gradually fell into the background. Ethics once more became complicated and subtle. Paul's simple eschatological call for repentance, the summons to ‘watch’, yielded to the idea of the ‘Christian life' as expressed in, the pastoral epistles and the epistle to the Hebrews, which were fathered on him. Thus the regulation of life once more tended to be portrayed as the condition of salvation and the great ethical commandment of the gospels assumed the status of a new law. But law implied obedience; and obedience implied authority. What was this authority? The Church. What constituted the Church? The men who ran it. The same process of reasoning was at work in (faith as well as ethics. Hebrews stressed the importance of faith and of its public confession by Christians. The first epistle of John introduced the idea of the confession as a defense against heresy and false knowledge. Hitherto, the confession produced a decision for or against faith; now it was a decision for or against particular groups in the Church. In short the confession had to be interpreted. The author of | John insisted that anyone who rejected his interpretation not only rejected part of the faith but the faith, because it was indivisible. We see here the rise of dogma. The sacred writings not only had to be classified as authorative or not, they had to be explained - and the explanation itself was authoritative. Who was in charge of the process? The Church. What was the Church? The men who ran it. The idea of a clergy seems to have been a marriage between Greek and Judaic ideas. The Jerusalem elders of the Jewish-Christian Church possessed an element of authority; they were ‘pillars’. The bishops and deacons of the Gentile Church originally had purely spiritual functions. They were charismatic not organizers, fund-raisers or legislators. This was the situation portrayed in Paul's genuine epistles and also in Luke's Acts. But by the time the early Roman sources appear, early in the second century, the matrix of a clerical structure had been forged. The first epistle of Clement stressed the importance of ‘decency and order’ in the Church. And part of this order was a hierarchical structure. Women were to be subject to men, the young to the old, the ‘multitude’ to the presbyters, or alternatively to bishops and deacons selected for this purpose. A historical theory of episcopacy had already been evolved: ‘Our apostles also knew, through 33