Another detail has occurred to me. John and several other people in the Universal Gnostic Church arranged to get re-consecrated as bishops sub conditione by Herman Spruitt of the Church of Antioch in the 1980s. That's a procedure followed when a bishop's claim to apostolic succession is questionable; John told me that some question had come up about the consecration that Shaw and his co-founders of the UGC had received. If John happened to know that there were issues in Shaw's claims about his own history, that would have been a good way to put the UGC's apostolic succession beyond all doubt.