Robert Knapp's introduction to the early Christian movement provides a historically rich account of how Christianity emerged in a world characterized by the influence of gods, magic, and the miraculous. Knapp begins with a broad setup of the history of Israel, the exilic period, the advent of the Hellenistic powers, and the rise of Christianity in his first chapter. He is careful to include an account of the supernatural world in which these events occurred, setting a tone and defining the scope of his introduction to the early Christian religious context. Knapp thus introduces his reader to Israelite and what he terms “polytheist” peoples (that is, essentially everyone else) to describe a world in which both groups experienced “unpredictable, powerful forces [that] were always and everywhere at work” (12). In chapter 3, the Jewish religious landscape comes into view through an account of Israelite foundations in the Levant and the experiences of Jewish people and their religious culture into the Roman imperial period. In chapter 4, Knapp returns theological dimensions of Jewish claims about Yahweh's promises to favor the Jewish people in an “unspecified future” in which Yahweh's justice would manifest (41). Having focused on the Jewish contexts that contributed to the early Christian movement, Knapp fills in the religious dimensions of the “polytheistic” world in chapter 5, giving a broad account of philosophical culture, forms of worship, prayer and appeal, religious festivals, rituals, and other dimensions of religious practice.

In the chapters that follow, Knapp turns from background materials to focus on the more explicitly representative religious and cultural dimensions of the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds that helped shape the early Christian movement. Chapter 6 considers the Palestinian social contexts out of which Christian communities emerged. This leads to a lengthy discussion of charismatic religious leadership within first-century Judaism that allows Knapp to introduce Jesus, whom Knapp casts as an exceptional figure whose “ultimate miracle” of “rising from the dead to defeat death itself, stretched credulity in both [Jewish and polytheistic] traditions” (129) in chapter 7. In his account of Jesus and the early Christian movement in chapter 8, Knapp adopts a relatively conservative historiography of the period, affirming, for example, the basic veracity of Luke's account of Jesus' disciples in the canonical Acts (131). Knapp then surveys the social and political contexts that early Christians faced by drawing on a swath of literary and material remains. He covers political factions, shifting Jewish conceptions of Torah-observance (including the place of circumcision), early Christian worship practices, the exceptional nature of monotheism, and the culture of public address.

The survey that Knapp offers in chapter 9 sets up an account of the hostility that second- and early-third century intellectual and political agents directed toward Christian communities. Turning to the opposite perspective in chapter 10, he discusses the appeal of the Christian movement in a culture where magic, prophecy, and the charismatic power of martyrs were compelling to subjects of the Roman Empire. As with many of these chapters, the historical details and rich literary and material evidence that Knapp musters is more illuminating than his exposition, which at times avoids difficult questions in favor of simple dichotomies (for example, his characterization of authorized Jewish “religion” as against “sorcery” [190]). Knapp closes his study by leaning into these dichotomies in a chapter discussing the shifting orientation of the Christian movement in the aftermath of the temple's destruction when he asserts that 70 represents a sharp departure for the constituency of early Christian communities who had primarily proselytized Jews before that date and turned to polytheists after it (209). Knapp concludes by portraying a transformed, more polytheistically oriented Christianity that emerged in the late second century (209; cf. 237).

Assessing this volume is difficult, especially in a short review. On the one hand, Knapp's account is rich with historical detail, including eight richly colored and glossy pages of art and material remains. It is a book clearly geared to ambitious beginners, and the book successfully portrays the early Christian movement by considering it against the backgrounds and contexts of the Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures that molded it. However, in many cases, this text demonstrates assumptions that are opposed to the kind of critical engagement one would ideally foster among beginning students. As noted above, Knapp introduces a binary population of “Jews and polytheists” (11), the nature of which he leaves unexplored even as he concludes that Christians would “[distance] themselves from their Jewish roots and [adopt] more and more to polytheist ways” (209). Knapp largely does not explore the textures of Judaism (though he cites many Hellenistic Jewish authors) or attends to strands of Christian evolution beyond the proto-orthodox. This is not the only oversight when it comes to binary characterizations. The author problematically falls into second-person voice in chapter 1––presuming that “you” signifies Israel as against Israel's adversaries (21). He also uncritically adopts uncritically adopts labels and categories of proto-Orthodox Christian figures as they applied to outsiders (30–31).

These conceptual issues are further complicated by the fact that the book feels––for lack of a better word––careless. Mistakes and small issues can be found more frequently than they should in a text by an eminent historian and published by a noteworthy press. For example, in an unevenly designed timeline that appears early in the text, the “Apostolic Fathers period” is used to describe a time frame that goes from the 70s until well into the fourth century (3). More glaringly, the phrase “the evidence that Jesus called himself a messiah is mixed at best,” is repeated twice in two paragraphs, though each leads to different discussions of the same question (128–129). It is unfortunate that the laudable merits of this text's attention to diverse kinds of historical materials are troubled by these occasional oversights that left this reviewer second-guessing if he could recommend it to the students and beginners for whom it is clearly written.