For all the stirring rhetoric of their imagined heroes, the average practitioners of continence in Syria strike us as remarkably serene persons. The followers of Tatian included austere wandering preachers, for whom the deeds of Apostles such as Thomas continued to act as a model. By their “apostolic” journeys from town to town and village to village, they linked quiet little groups of men and women. To these men and women, Christian baptism had brought an ability to live at ease with each other. The presence of the Holy Spirit ensured that the fearsome current of sexuality that had once flowed through their bodies was safely disconnected. No treacherous spark now jumped between the once-charged poles of male and female. 74

    Men and women missionaries even traveled together—the most grueling test of all of sexual good faith in a society used to the sedentary seclusion of most of its womenfolk.75 Possessed by the Holy Spirit, as Adam and Eve had once been, men and women could once again stand together as couples, linked in a chaste communion that astonished and appalled observers in this and in all future centuries.76 When, for instance, in the late fourth century, Jerome arrived from Italy to live for a time in a Syrian village, he came to know of an elderly, un-married couple, a man and a woman, who would walk to church every day and return home together. The phenomenon intrigued him and greatly titillated his imagination. The villagers, however, referred to the couple, without any to-do, as the “Holy Ones.” 77The incident is a reminder that sexual renunciation, as practiced in one region, could look very different to Christians from another part of the Roman world.

    The celibacy of the Encratites was a group celibacy, and not one that favored isolated recluses. The individual gained a sense of security, which supported his or her renunciation, through the sense of be-longing to a clearly defined holy group. There was a tendency, built into the Near Eastern landscape itself, for Encratite communities and for the churches of the Marcionites to settle down into tight-knit sectarian villages. These communities may have resembled the Shaker “Families” of nineteenth-century America. They survived for very long periods by attracting converts and by acting as substitutes for foundling hospitals among the neighboring peasantry. They throve in the mountainous areas of Syria and Asia Minor, where the population al-ways exceeded the scarce resources of the highlands, and where there were many children to be taken [i.e. children "exposed" and abandoned by their parents].78

    But this was not the only solution adopted by the continent. By the end of the third century, little groups of continent men and women—called “The Sons and Daughters of the Covenant”—stood at the core of the married Christian communities in the Syraic-speaking regions of the Near East.79 These were not settlements of wild ascetics, but pools of quiet confidence that the Spirit rested on those who had re-gained, through baptism and continence, the full humanity of Adam and Eve. Their presence bathed the Christian community as a whole with a sense of being a group marked out by inviolate holiness. Crowded into the little churches of Syria and Northern Iraq, they stood like the animals in Noah’s Ark, their sexual urges marvelously stilled by the presence of God. The Holy Spirit bubbled up within them in the chanting of the Psalms and the self-composed hymns that are the glory of the Syriac church.80 Unjoined in bodies, young men and women were truly joined by the ethereal harmony of their voices, kept sweet by the absence of sexual activity, which ancient people knew to affect the voice adversely,81 in the spiritual chants that gave density and human warmth to the austere doctrines that we have described:

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