There is more than one way of nursing a scholarly thesis from the letters of Ignatius. There is the venerable way of the philologist, which has now become a warren, because the question is no longer whether Ignatius wrote the corpus or one recension of it, but whether he wrote one letter, or four, or seven. Another is the new way of the literary botanist, who imagines that, if every trope in Ignatius is pressed hard enough between the leaves of some rhetorical handbook written centuries later and for a different public, something will emerge from the resultant trickle that might not have been divined by the application of common intelligence and tact. Then there is the way of the dogmatic theologian, who is bound by his profession to ask more than the text can answer. Brent's way, which we may call that of the historian, is the first for many years that seems more likely to narrow than to widen the prospect for subsequent scholarship. His thesis is that the progress of Ignatius to Rome, as it is illustrated in the imagery of his letters, is a Christian metamorphosis of ceremonies that were regularly performed by pagan dignitaries in the cities inhabited by his correspondents. His sobriquet theophoros, or God-bearer, a neologism in Christian nomenclature, would be recognised by neophytes from the civic cult as the title of the official who carried the images in a mystery procession. Evil powers were averted in such rituals by the exhibition of effigies or tupoi, while if the object was to cement homonoia or concord between two cities, the celebrant would commence his itinerary with a sacrifice. The mysteries commended by Ignatius require no talismans and no vicarious offering: it is by his martyrdom that he will become the ransom or antipsuchon for the troubled churches, and the remedy for heresy and faction is to recognise the ministers of the congregation as types of God and Christ. This is sophistry unmasking sophistry, a Pauline theology which is all the more Pauline because it seeks its pattern in Christ, not Paul. Can we prove it to be the theology of Ignatius? Not, as Brent admits, by the conventional tools of philology, for what he professes to demonstrate is not so much a regular coincidence of diction, or even of religious heraldry, as a correlation of semantic fields. Nor, even if his reading is accepted, can he be said to have put the dating of the letters beyond dispute, for the culture of diplomatic ostentation which he describes here persisted for at least a century after the date that tradition assigns to the death of Ignatius. But it is difficult to see how the recreation of civic spectacle, which would have come so naturally to Ignatius on the road, would have served the interests of a forger in his study; and in any case the great merit of this book is that it shows ignorance of the exact date of a text to be no bar to appreciation of its purpose and milieu.