of Christianity with different intellectual and religious traditions.
Indeed, the maintenance of orthodoxy involved discerning
between the right and wrong answers to quite legitimate ques-
tions about the nature of Jesus Christ and his significance for
humankind. That this entailed a delicate balancing act can be
seen from the apparent ease with which certain Christian writers
slipped, as it were, from orthodoxy into heresy, as their theolog-
ical investigations led them to postulate theses that the insti-
tutional church came to regard as heresy. For example, the stern
morality of the north African Christian Tertullian was much
admired by his contemporaries; but it eventually brought him into
conflict with church authorities at Carthage and Rome over his
views on the redemption of sin. In the end, Tertullian’s views
seem to have driven him to a rigorist position quite close to
Montanism. Similarly Origen, perhaps the greatest early Christian
commentator on scripture, came to be regarded with suspicion.
His exploitation of Platonist philosophy in his theological spec-
ulations provoked some concern in his own lifetime. After his
death, however, his ideas came to be regarded as more and more
dangerous, especially in the context of debates on the Trinity in
the fourth century. Increasingly it seemed as if Origen’s specula-
tive patterns of thought were incompatible with later, more rigid
definitions of orthodoxy.
Although certain heresies arose at specific times or in partic-
ular places, many enjoyed considerable popularity elsewhere.
Valentinian gno ̄ sisflourished in Rome, as did the extreme anti-
Judaism of Marcion. Similarly, Montanism, although it originated
in Phrygia, came to north Africa. The reputation of the second-
century Syrian theologian Tatian reveals other ways in which
the struggle between orthodoxy and heresy was a complicated
process. He began as irreproachably orthodox, a student of Justin
Martyr at Rome. After Justin’s death in 165, however, his extreme
views on the renunciation of the world led him to be condemned
as a heretic. For all that, his Diatessaron(a harmonization of the
four canonical gospels in a single narrative) continued to be
regarded as scripture in the Syrian church until the fifth century.ORTHODOXY AND ORGANIZATION IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY
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