ABSTRACT
The spectrum of positions that could be included under the umbrella called Christianity was as wide then as it; there was no one Christian answers to questions of sex, of how to deal with governments, of who should be Christian ministers. But by the end of the fourth century, the Christians had their own public meeting places with their own rituals and observances and their own hierarchical organization, their own canon of holy writings, their own history, with its heroes the martyrs as well as the appropriated history of the Hebrew Scriptures. The image of Christianity as a new creation was a powerful one and was honed to explain the Christian's relationship to the divine world, to this created world, and to its history. Christianity defined itself in a pluralistic world, and its self-definition must be seen in terms of what groups Christians were distancing themselves from.
