In whatever direction we turn, we thus find in the Jesuist documents themselves the traces of a "pre-Christian" Jesuism and Christism. At Ephesus, the believers "were in all about twelve men"--the number required for the primitive rite. The subsequent statement (xix, 9-10) that after Paul had debated daily for two years at Ephesus "all they which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks," is typical of the method of the pseudo-history. Either the whole narrative is baseless fiction or there were prior developments of the Jesus-cult. It may be argued, indeed, that such a work of manipulation as the Acts is no evidence for anything, and that its accounts indicating a prior spread of Jesuism are no more to be believed than its miracle stories. But however fictitious be its accounts of any one person, it is certain that there was a cult; and all critics are now agreed that the book is a redaction of previous matter--probably of Acts of Paul, Acts of Peter, Acts of the Apostles, and so on. And whereas the most advantageous fiction from the point of view of the growing "catholic" church would be an account of the apostles as everywhere making converts, stories of their finding them must be held to have been imposed on the redactor by his material. There also it must be held to stand for some reality in the history of the cult, for the same reason, that there was nothing to be gained by inventing such a detail. § 2. Prototypes Still we are met by the objection that whatever the Acts may say the gospels give no indication of any previous Jesus-cult. But that is a position untenable for the biographical school save by a temporary resort to the theory of myth-making. As Professor W. B. Smith has pointed out, the gospels expressly represent that the disciples healed the sick in the name of Jesus in places where Jesus had never been. For the supernaturalists, that is only one more set of miracles. But the biographical school, though it is much inclined to credit Jesus with occult "healing powers," can hardly affirm such healing by means of a magic name, and has no resource but to dismiss all such matter. [206] Yet why should the evangelists have framed such a narrative save on the knowledge that the name of Jesus was a thing to conjure with in Palestinian villages?