Many of the earliest Christian texts are letters. They were addressed to specific recipients in the first or second century. Feminist readings have challenged the influence of patriarchal texts and rehabilitated texts dismissed as apocryphal, such as the Acts of Paul and Thecla, or rejected as heretical, such as the newly discovered gnostic literature. The hermeneutic of newly discovered texts begins in a different place. Specialists are indispensable, for only they have access to the language: Coptic in the case of the Gospel of Truth. The freethinking and feminist hermeneutic depends, not upon reading the text, but on setting the text in a reconstructed social and historical world which is taken to be patriarchal, hierarchical and authoritarian: indeed, the supposed world of the Pastoral Letters. The Pastorals recognize the importance of corporateness and community, of the need for leadership and respect, for the acceptance of duties and responsibilities if a group is to function effectively.