The idea of mass media originated with propaganda, a sixteenth-century Latin word for the Jesuits' counter-Reformation ideological campaign. Propaganda is a steady stream of consistent information from a credible source to a mass audience. It emerged from the classical epistemic basis for rhetoric, namely, that truth is insufficient to convey import. In addition, a message must be conveyed frequently, or at least regularly, to appear reliable. (See truth, reliability and the ends of knowledge.) The Protestants had been able to undermine the authority of the Roman Catholic Church simply by contradicting Catholic doctrines – in many different ways – without having to present a united front. For their part, the Catholics initially either ignored or dealt with the Protestants in a local fashion, but in either case without getting across the consistency and reasonableness of their own doctrine. The need to appear reliable through repeated airing of the same message served another function. We often forget that when the Bible was taken seriously as a historical document reporting unique events of lasting significance, the deterioration of the quality of evidence over time (through the inevitable mistranslations and textual corruptions) always created a demand for demonstrations of ancient truths by contemporary means that enable new audiences to re-enact for themselves the ideas that originally animated, say, the Old Testament Patriarchs, the Apostles or the Church Fathers. (See religion and translation.)