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whom a bishop had singled out as a heretic. As Jeffrey Burton Russell remarks dryly, `Since no objective definition of "heretic" is possible, this definition was almost inevitable.'67
    The pagans were clearly satanic, for their gods had even dared mimic Christ's life and death. The Egyptian Osiris, the Persian Tammuz and the Roman Mithras - not to mention several other dying-and-rising gods, such as the Greek Orpheus and Dionysus - were born at the winter solstice around 25 December in humble surroundings such as caves, their nativity attended by new stars, shepherds and Magi. They all died (on a Friday) in spring, to be resurrected miraculously a few days later. Incredibly, even today, some Christians explain away this awkward fact as a sort of diabolical parody on the part of the pagan myth-makers, even though this stretches blind faith rather thinly as most of these stories predated the life of Jesus by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. Sometimes it is suggested that at best these stories were invented as a rehearsal, a sort of feeble dry run for the real 'thing68
    Even membership of the Church was no guarantee of a pristine soul. Bishop Ignatius declared that anyone who acted without the approval of his bishop was a Devil worshipper, although he admitted to being tempted himself by Satan to shirk his `duty' of martyrdom - an interesting theological and moral point. Here we have the Devil tempting him to save his life and the good God requiring him to commit a form of suicide, although of course that is a modern view, for which, no doubt, some wretched demon would have been blamed, had it been voiced in those far-off days. Ignatius wrote `I long to suffer, but I do not know whether I am worthy ... I need the meekness in which the prince of this world [Satan] is undone' 69 As Jeffrey Burton Russell notes: `Torture and death were [Satan's] work, and even kindness on the part of the pagans was a diabolical snare, since it might weaken the martyr's resolve' .70
    Distasteful though this holy masochism may seem to most modern eyes - although Catholics are still encouraged to `offer up their suffering to God', who surely must be hoping for someone to offer up their joy and pleasure by now - it must be remembered that these zealots firmly believed that Christ was about to return at any moment and claim his own. (In fact, it is highly unlikely that Jesus ever intended to found a church for posterity, being apparently firmly of the belief that the end of the world was imminent. Certainly his disciples expected him to return in glory, signalling the end, at any moment. Ironically, Saint Peter's founding of the Church of Rome can be seen as the direct result of Christ's failure to return as promised in the Apostle's lifetime.) In the meantime a martyr's death would guarantee the early Christians eternal bliss.
    Perhaps it was one way of glorifying, even simply of coping with, the persecutions that took the willing and unwilling alike and had them disembowelled by wild animals in the Colosseum or used as human torches. The arena became a potent metaphor for the battlefield between good and evil - indeed, an early Latin sermon depicts Satan as a gladiator attempting to ensnare the good Christians in his net," a perhaps unfortunate analogy, reinforcing the image of the enemy's virility at their own expense. (And ironically, this early Christian insistence on those who cause pain and humiliation being evil - and who can doubt it? - sits uncomfortably with later Inquisitorial justification for its institutionalized sadism.)
    Yet for at least the first two centuries of Christian belief there was no coherent set of articles of faith, not even a shared set of holy writings, a New Testament. Attitudes to the Fall of Adam and Eve and the nature of God and the Devil differed massively from Christian group to Christian group throughout the Roman Empire. This confusing state of affairs only ended when Constantine created a state religion out