782 EPILOGUE
were reviled and furiously opposed as usurpers of their salvific terrain. By the
end of the fifth century, the heterodox sects were in large part muted. How-
ever, as late as Saint Augustine (354-430), the battle of numbers for possession
of the Christian heart lingered. An emblem of those times is Augustine's pro-
tean persuasions, the gnostic who saw the light of Christianity. Though later
he wrote abundantly against the gnostics, early in his career the theologian
was a fervently active and roaming gnostic in Italy and North Africa, one who
proselytized and preached the message of Manichaeism. His Against Faustus,
in which he denounces his former Manichaean master Faustus, is one of many
important works, along with those by Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Origen, Epipha-
nius, and Tertullian, that summarize and refute the gnostic heresy.
For the witnessing Christians, for whom Jesus Christ and God were father
and son, and Christ both human and divine, these people of light were dan-
gerous hypocrites insofar as they called themselves Christians. The gnostics
did not accept the humanity of Jesus (Jesus was a phantom), nor the trinity of
father, son, and holy spirit, nor god himself as their god. To the Christians,
gnosticism was not only a threat to their dominion but also a negation of the
conceptual frame of Christianity. The traditional Christians were also in a pe-
riod of anxiety, instability, and danger. Christianity was still at odds with Ju-
daism and with imperial Rome, which persecuted it. From Rome to
Cappadocia in Anatolia (present-day Turkey), the Christians were living in
caves and underground to escape the Roman sword. They lacked a main-
stream church (from the start there were internal feuds, as their own begin-
ning had been a feud with fellow Jews), and they were struggling to confirm
their own doctrine and domain. Above all, the lack of a defined Bible created
a scriptural vacuum. There would not be an official selection of books to be
included in the New Testament until the Nicaean Council in 325.^20 The He-
brew Bible history of the Jews, which they either denied or interpreted as their
history, was a scriptural dilemma and a plague to them even till this day.
So while the gnostics were creating abundant scripture with extravagant
myths that made god the counterfeit creator of the world, the Christians wan-
dered in a maze of overlapping apocrypha, epistles, and apocalypses, all com-
peting for inclusion in a yet to be determined canon. The Jews were less of a
- In The First Edition of the New Testament, David Trobisch states that by the middle of the
second century the essential New Testament was defined and being copied. Nevertheless, while
the core texts of the Gospels, Acts, and some of the letters may have been set in their final form,
the question of which other texts would be included remained a matter of dispute until well
into the fourth century.