ABSTRACT
In the second century, Christians would have met in enlarged private houses or rooms, and there may have been several meeting places in a large city. The Christian intellectuals who took the first steps toward defining Christianity were attempting to reshape the symbolized world in which they lived. What the early Christian intellectuals were doing was trying to reinterpret the cultural traditions of the Greco-Roman and Jewish world in light of their allegiance to the Christian community. The Christian group to which the author of the Secret Book belonged clearly viewed itself as different from the rest of the society in which it lived and articulated its sense of self in the mythic fashion. Marcion thus called for the radical alienation of the Christian from this world, an alienation also expressed in his strongly ascetic lifestyle. The powerful telling of the tale of humanity's origins is a classic example of cosmological alienation.
