By the last decades of the first century, the Christian communities around the Mediterranean basin had entered upon a process that would, over a period of two or more centuries, produce a relatively stable, widely shared, and socially embodied sense of who they were and what they stood for. The original Christians, however, had no place in this world as Christians. They were Jews with an odd set of convictions. Judaism in the days of Jesus and Paul, in Judaea and in the diaspora as well, was a more differentiated phenomenon. Judaism in the Roman-Hellenistic age produced a variegated literature in Aramaic or Hebrew and also in Greek. Christianity was an identifiable phenomenon even before the drawn-out, and relatively self-conscious, process of acknowledging and constructing a shared identity. In defining the principles as representing the true sense of the Scriptures and the emerging 'New Testament', Irenaeus had focused attention on his alternative to the Valentinian 'secret tradition'.