Under Cuspius Fadus, the procurator who governed from 44 to 66, there arose a certain Theudas, who gave himself out for a great personage and promised great prodigies. Four hundred men followed him, but he was captured and decapitated, and those who had believed him dispersed. After him came an Egyptian Jew, who succeeded in gathering four thousand desperate men, and camping on the Mount of Olives announcing that at a sign from him the walls of Jerusalem would fall. The Procurator Felix attacked him and drove him out into the desert. In the meantime, in Samaria, arose the notorious Simon Magus, he who bewitched people with his prodigies and incantations and announced himself as the Power of God. This man, seeing the miracles of Peter, wished to turn Christian, imagining that the Gospel was only one of those Oriental mysteries into which an initiation gave new powers. Repelled by Peter, Magus became the father of heresies. He believed that Ennœa first came from God and that it is now imprisoned in human beings: according to him Ennœa (or, the first conception of the Deity), was incarnate in Helen of Tyre, a prostitute who followed him everywhere; and faith in him and in Helen was a necessary condition of salvation. Cerinthus, the first Gnostic, was one of his followers, against whom John wrote his Gospel—and Menander, who boasted that he was Saviour of the world. Another Elxai mixed up the old and new Covenant, told stories of many incarnations besides those of Christ, and swaggered about with his followers, boasting of his magic powers. Hegesippus says that a certain Tebutis through jealousy of Simon, second Bishop of Jerusalem, formed a sect that recognized Jesus as Messiah, but in everything else was faithful to the old Judaism. Paul, in the Epistle to Timothy, puts the “Saints” on guard against Hymeneus, and Phyletus and Alexander. For such are false prophets, deceitful workers transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ, “who twisted truth and sowed the evil seed of heresy in the early church.” A Dositheus had himself called Christ, and a certain Nicholas began with his errors the sect of the Nicolaitans, condemned by John in the Apocalypse: and the Zealots fomented incessant tumults, claiming that the Romans and all the heathen should be driven out in order that God might return to triumph with His own people. The second sign, the persecution, arrived promptly. The Disciples had scarcely begun to preach the Gospel in Jerusalem when Peter and John were thrown into prison: freed, they were captured again, and beaten and commanded to speak no more in the name of Jesus. Stephen, one of the most ardent of the neophytes, was taken by the priests outside the city and stoned.