Due to recent manuscript discoveries—like the Coptic library consisting of fifty-two texts discovered in earthen jars at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945—scholars now have better evidence about the intriguing ideas advanced by other groups, the “heresies” who lost their bid to become number one in the early church reality show.

Although extraordinary forces shaped the arena in which Christianity grew to maturity—e.g., erosion of the old Roman Republic, the rise of an unchallenged Imperial Rome with its corresponding Pax Romana which allowed relatively safe travel on well-built roads and aboard ships in a well-policed Mediterranean Sea; the ascending popularity of cultic mystery religions imported from the Near East to satisfy the ubiquitous hunger for personal immortality in Hellenistic society; and two Jewish wars of rebellion and their consequent violent suppression by Rome—nevertheless, one should not dismiss the idea that a Divine element has also been at work in the evolutionary process.

Twenty centuries later Pierre Teilhard de Chardin will propose a direction of flow for the whole process of evolution, from nonliving through consciousness to the Omega Point, which he identified with the Christ.