This book, originally a dissertation approved by the Protestant Faculty of the University of Münster and supervised by Barbara Aland, sets out to analyse and compare how two prominent early Christian theologians used Hellenistic paideia in order to render their versions of Christianity more plausible to their respective audiences. Origen, outdoing the claims of elitist pagan philosophy with his own version of a universalist Christianity, develops the concept of a Christian paideia that claims to involve its disciples ‘in a process of constant moral and intellectual purification whose goal is the assimilation to their pre-existent origin’ (p. 89). John Chrysostom, more than a century later and in wholly altered political and social circumstances, attempts to transform the pagan city into a Christian city by proposing a Christian education for children, by trying to replace socially ambitious pagan euergetism by more democratic Christian charity and by brilliantly exploiting the possibilities of rhetorics whilst at the same time subordinating it to the exigencies of the communication between the Christian preacher and his urban audience. Tloka's carefully nuanced and well-informed analysis reaches somewhat predictable if unexceptionable conclusions: both church Fathers clearly satisfy the minimum criterion of theological soundness by carefully limiting the role of paideia and thus denying it any deeper ethical or soteriological value. Although a veritable Plausibilisierungsstrategie is confidently attributed to both, Tloka occasionally expresses scepticism as to the result of their exertions: regarding Chrysostom she readily admits that he may have been less than successful in persuading his Christian audience to abandon self-advancement by ostentatious euergetism in favour of selfless Christian charity (p. 204). Chrysostom's ideal of a Christian society even strikes her as ‘utopian’ (p. 246). In the case of Origen, however, she speculates (p. 83) that although he probably did not direct a particular missionary effort at the educated, he may still have succeeded in raising the percentage of Christians belonging to the social elite. Tloka's relentless application of the ‘challenge and response model’ runs the risk of hermeneutic monotony: for example, she observes that Chrysostom's reflections on the role and value of pagan paideia are partly prompted by the Emperor Julian's pagan ‘educational reforms’ (‘bildungsreformerische Bemühungen’). Although Tloka concedes that the impact of Julian's edict on rhetors (CTh 13.3.5) must have been quite limited (it was effectively abrogated in 364 by Jovian: CTh 13.3.6), she fails to explore more deeply why Julian's policy continued to cause intellectual excitement among Christians long after the event. Moreover, I am not sure whether she has fully realised the seriousness and confident aggressiveness of Origen's project for teaching Christianity as the true philosophy. After all, the very first sentence of De principiis assures the reader that knowledge of how to live the good and perfect life (i.e. ‘bene vivere’, the agreed telos of ancient philosophy) is only to be found in the words and the teaching of Jesus Christ. When she claims that Origen's Christian theology is different from (pagan) philosophy because the Alexandrian teacher bases his teaching on the revealed logos contained in Scripture (p. 82), she seems to miss the fundamentally exegetical character of both Christian and pagan philosophy in late antiquity (but see p. 117 and n. 39). The name of Pierre Hadot is conspicuously absent from her bibliography. Her attempt at refuting Clemens Scholten's thesis that Origen's ‘catechetical school′ was, in fact, a kind of Christian university rather than an institution preparing converts for baptism, is unconvincing (pp. 112–24). However, despite this criticism Tloka's book is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature analysing Christianity's acculturation in the ancient world.