The disappearance of charismatic wandering Christian teachers or prophets and the assertion of the authority of bishops were probably sealed by the Catholic Church's confrontation in the later second century with a movement known as Montanism or ‘the New Prophecy’.

Anything grandiose or historically based tends to sound flat and banal when it reaches English, partly because translators get stuck between contradictory imperatives: juggling fidelity to the original sense with what is vocally viable, they tend to resort to a genteel fustian which lacks either poetic resonance or demotic realism, adding to a sense of artificiality rather than enhancing credibility.

Gateway has plenty of company in having to deal with frustrated, sometimes irate, customers. . . . The natives are restless. Few vendors are spared.

She was wearing a black and white striped slack-suit with flared bottoms.