inner circle of leaders of the early Christian movement. Early Christianity was not, by and large, a movement led by illiterate peasants or the socially deprived. The leaders of the movement mostly produced the texts of the movement, and the texts of the NT reflect a considerable knowledge of Greek, of rhetoric, and indeed of general Greco-Roman culture. This skill and erudition can only seldom be attributed to scribes, except in cases where scribes such as Tertius or Sosthenes (cf. Rom 16 and 1