This article is a critical confrontation with Walter Bauer’s book Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. The author focuses in particular on what Bauer says about Christianity in Western Asia Minor. He tests Bauer's basic thesis that "what would later be called heresy was often 'primary' and therefore the original form of orthodox Christianity, and that in some places and at some times, heresy had a numerical advantage and outnumbered what came to be called orthodoxy."