On the one hand, the church believed itself from very early on to be a distinct community, different from Jews on the one hand and Gentiles on the other. It did not even look like an ordinary first-century religious movement, which one would have expected to be either racially-based or a private religious club for the benefit of the ‘enlightenment’ of its members. It claimed less, and more, than these: an open society, claiming to be the human race in embryo.26 They were neither Jews nor Greeks,