Fabienne Jourdan has produced this significant study of the relationship between the figure of Orpheus and Christ in early Christianity, in which she has integrated in a new and interesting way literary allusions with iconographical remains. Her ambitious plan is to study the transformation of the figure of Orpheus in the first five centuries of Christian history with a close examination of the kind of process involved in such a transformation (pp. 30–1). Without straying into the realm of contemporary theories of art or epistemology, she focuses instead on Clement of Alexandria's Protrepticus in order to identify the particular literary genre, both pagan and Christian, in which Clement worked and which formed their common perspective without recourse to which his project could never have succeeded.

A protrepticus is a discourse whose purpose is to engage other people in a decision about their future life. At the formal level, it is in two parts. The first brings the reader to a refutation of doctrines that the author opposes and an exhortation to a better condition. The second sets out the positive doctrine implied in the refutation in the first part, or a practice to be followed in consequence of what he has established. At the level of content philosophy is defined by its end as the Sovereign Good, and thus seeks to attract and persuade the reader to accept his position. Thus Clement invites total engagement in a process of radical transformation, but substitutes the Platonic Form of the Good with the incarnate Logos (p. 35). This substitution gives us the clue to how Clement will proceed using a protreptic methodology: condemn beliefs of opponents but at the same time transpose their features into the Christian sphere (p. 83). The particular form that Clement's condemnation takes is shaped by Celsus’ True word, a writer whom he never mentions but whose critique of Christianity is never far from Clement's mind. Celsus had claimed that Christianity, like Judaism, had been a second-hand version of far more ancient myths. Lucian too had denounced Christ as a crucified sophist and as a wizard propounding myths. Celsus had viewed Christians as a mystery cult (pp. 81, 162). Jourdan now identifies Clement's picture of Orpheus as reconstructed to show what the pagan picture of Christ was but which the latter was not. Orpheus is the magician who weaves his charming spell through music, but who, and not Dionysus, is the founder of the mysteries. As poet he produces the θεολογíα as the ultimate author of the μῦθος that undergirds those rites (pp. 166, 174–6, 221). Such a θεολογíα involves Dionysiac cannibalism and incest, and shows its savagery in the myth of the dismemberment of Dionysus. Clement deliberately associates the rites of Dionysus and Demeter (Eleusis), with the myth of the descent into the underworld (p. 82).

Clement will share with Celsus a Platonism that opposes λογóς to μῦθος and will assert Christ as λογóς against pagan μῦθος. This is the substance of the first part of a protrepticus, that of refutation of opponents. But the second, positive part Clement executes in accordance with a strategy that Jourdan perceptively analyses. Justin Martyr had previously proposed a comparison between the crucifixion and the dismemberment of Dionysus: the former was a demonic imitation of the latter. But Clement denies this comparison implicitly by his silence about it, as he does any reference to the body of Christ eaten in the eucharist. That he knows of such a comparison can be found in Stromateis where he refers to the dismemberment of the Logos that is torn apart in the disputes of Greek philosophical schools and Christian heretical sects (p. 214). The descent into the underworld is reinterpreted from a visitation to the powers below immediately following the Crucifixion to a post-Resurrection deliverance of the dead (p. 81). But the theme of Orpheus and his chant is now applied to the Stoic Logos immanent in the world and incarnate in Christ. In a careful analysis of ἐπωδ and ἐπωδóς, generally characteristic of Jourdan's treatment of such technical terms throughout her work, she concludes ‘malgré sa critique, Clément renouvelle le sens de ces termes et mène par là à son achèvement une transmutation lexicale inaugurée par Platon’ (p. 136). The chant of the logos is in contrast to that of the magicians (p. 137), and Socrates too chanted because he testified to the true Logos (p. 138). Jourdan now explores in depth the theology of the Logos as a chant, particularly in Jewish writers such as Philo, and as the song of creation, that make great play with the term νομóς as both ‘law’ and ‘musical strain’ (pp. 260–362). Finally Jourdan is able to turn her attention to iconography, and to the ten Christian examples of the Orpheus theme that appear between the third and the fourth century and which, interestingly, correspond with the increase in such themes in pagan funerary art at this time, particularly in Italy (p. 383). This brings her to a detailed discussion of the images in the cemeteries of Callistus, and of Petrus and Marcellinus where the figure of Orpheus in depicted with a lyre, assimilated arguably with the figure of David. Clement claims such a connection with David foreshadowing the heavenly Logos (pp. 350–1).

In her second volume Jourdan is able to pursue the theme of Orpheus through Athenagoras, the Pseudo-Clementines, Pseudo-Hippolytus, Origen, Theophilus and Gregory Nazianzus, Epiphanius and Eusebius, drawing out the uniqueness of Clement's presentation, perhaps shared with Eusebius. Jourdan's work takes us beyond mere comparison between parallels in early Christian and pagan literary imagery and plastic iconography and addresses the fundamental issue of how the transformation from pagan to Christian culture took place. Her answer is in the particular nature of the protreptic genre and thus benefits from being an answer that Clement would recognise in his historical context. As with all truly creative work, her achievement leads us now to a further demand for a more general model of cultural transformation, yielding a more general explanation of the mechanism of cultural change, whether from paganism to Constantinian Christianity and then in some places to Islam, from Marxism to Liberal Capitalism, or from religious societies to secular ones (or vice-versa).