pave the way for the new orthodoxy than anyone else: Walter Bauer. In his work Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, Bauer stated what is now commonly known as the “Bauer thesis”: the view that close study of the major urban centers at the end of the first and early second centuries reveals that early Christianity was characterized by significant doctrinal diversity, so that there was no “orthodoxy” or “heresy” at the inception of Christianity but only diversity—heresy preceded orthodoxy.