The book of Acts as a whole, however, stands for an ecclesiastical tendency in the second century to make out that the first apostles had not been divided; that Peter too was a preacher of Gentile Christism, to which he had been converted by a vision; and that Paul, in turn, had made concessions to Judaism. When the Judaic Church became less and less dangerous as a possible monopolist, the organizing Gentile churches could thus proceed to construct a theoretic connection between Christianity and Judaism, the "new dispensation" and the old, thus preserving for the new creed the prestige of the Old Testament, with which, as a body of sacred books, the New could not for a long time compete, even in the eyes of its devotees. At the same time the apostles, who had long figured as church-founders, were effectively glorified as wonder-workers, being credited with miracles which rivalled those of the Christos himself; and Peter raises a "Tabitha" from the dead as Jesus had done the "Talitha" or maiden in the gospels--a myth which was itself a duplicate of a traditional pagan miracle later credited to Apollonius of Tyana. Alongside, however, of the systematizing or centripetal process there went on a centrifugal one, the process of innovating Gentile heresy. Already in Paul's epistles we read of "another Jesus" whom the apostle "had not preached"; and in the second century a dozen "Gnostic" heresies were honeycombing the movement. Their basis or inspiration was the mystic claim to inner light, "gnosis" or knowledge, disparaged in the Pauline phrase about "knowledge [or science] falsely so-called." It was in nearly all cases a combination of ideas current in the theosophies of Asia and Egypt with the God-names of the Judaic and Christian cults. So powerful was the instinct of independence, then as in later periods of political change, that the spirit of Gnosticism, in a Judaic form, found its way into the expanding gospels, where Jesus is at times made to pose as the holder of a mystical knowledge, denied to the capacities of the multitude, but conveyed by him to his disciples; who, however, are in other passages reduced to the popular level of spiritual incapacity. It cannot be doubted that the ferment thus promoted by what the systematizers denounced as heresy helped at first to spread the cult, at least in name, since all Christists alike would tend to resort to the eucharist, or to the assemblies which were to develop into Churches.