This is a book of circumspect hypotheses, but for the most part I am less inclined to commend the hypothesis than the circumspection. Doubting as I do that any philosophy maintained a pure tradition in the Hellenistic era, I have yet to grasp the ‘paradox’ that Troels Engberg-Pedersen ‘solves’ in the introduction (p. 8) by proposing that Greek schools of the Roman era adopted strategies of survival by absorption; least of all do I understand why this strategy should be imputed to Christian texts that are earlier than most of the texts which are cited as evidence of this change. As all sane moral systems will converge, I admit that Paul adapted a common trope when he spoke of the Church as the body of Christ; but in the maxim ‘make your bodies a living sacrifice’ (Romans xii.2) I hear Psalm li.17 where Runar Thorsteinsson hears an echo of the Stoics. I would agree with Niko Huttunen that he turned to the Stoics for a theory of natural law, were it not that the works of Philo the Jew are already leavened by this notion. Stanley Stowers, who notes that Greek and Jewish ethics often coincided, surprises me all the more when he derives Christ's exhortation to love our enemies from the Stoics and not from Proverbs xxv.21. Most Stoics would have deplored the tears of Christ at the grave of Lazarus, as Harold Attridge opines, and Gitte Buch-Hansen is not the first to point out that Origen made use of Stoic concepts in explaining away his weakness; men weep for the dead, however, as the sun rises, whether philosophers approve or not. Albert Harrill deftly unearths Stoic antecedents for the combination of appeals for steadfastness with the prophecy of a final conflagration at 2 Peter iii.7; John Fitzgerald prudently concludes that Stoics and Christians had different motives for easing the condition of their slaves. On the other hand, Nicola Denzey is too hasty when she concludes, from the undoubted fact that Christians were emboldened by examples of pagan fortitude, that martyrdom would not otherwise have ‘developed as it did’ (p. 192). Esther de Boer may be right to adopt the platitude that passion begets confusion as a key to the Gospel of Mary, but it is not an indication of any peculiar indebtedness to the Stoics. I fear that only a series of audacious substitutions enables Ismo Dunderbeg to discern a common architecture in Stoic and Valentian cosmologies. It is pleasant to see, in Takashi Onuki's study of the Apocryphon of John, an undeniable, if ‘critical’, appropriation of the Stoic taxonomy of the passions. Tuomas Rasimus argues that Stoic elements in the unattributed commentary on the Parmenides are less likely to have been introduced by Porphyry than inherited from Sethian Gnosticism; so long as he does not, like Engberg-Pedersen, take the scant remains of Atticus and Numenius as evidence that the Platonists succeeded the Stoics as the dominant thinkers of the second century, I am happy to concur.