Geneses is a collection of eleven chapters that explore the fluid nature of religious boundaries among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Three themes guide the text: the construction of triumphal religious narratives (and contemporary deconstruction of the alleged defeat of paganism), scriptures used as sources for legal texts, and contemporary issues of teaching past origins. Only the first theme includes subjects relevant to the history of Christianity. These chapters argue that Christian narratives of rapid success over paganism have been implicitly adopted by religious studies scholars in the historiography and this assumption requires revision.
Danuta Shanzer examines Christian strategies to integrate and/or supplant older pagan gods and finds that the gods were sometimes present but also surprisingly absent in the Christianization process. Votive offerings at the shrine of Felix at Nola utilized older pagan themes, but they were a new legendary invention, not a survival of older paganism. The god Mercury, however, seems to have been the inspiration for the attributes of Julian of Brioude as a wonderworker at his shrine.
Duncan MacRae utilizes reception history to trace the legends of Simon Magus from the Acts of the Apostles through Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and the Acts of Peter. He traces Simon's literary development as a false convert, idolater, heretic, and magician/sorcerer and finds Justin associated him with a Roman god on Tiber island, while the Acts of Peter made him divine-like. Simon Magus became a literary type for the Roman deified imperial rulers, so that a triumphant Church could demonstrate its conquest over idolatry, heresy, and magic.
Claudia Rapp deconstructs the Life of Porphyry of Gaza to contend that the hagiography is actually about sacred spaces, as the story recounts Christians converting pagan temples into churches in Gaza, as well as recounting fanciful details about the people (e.g., John Chrysostom) and places of Constantinople. Rapp argues the author utilized sources from Gaza and Constantinople along with conversion data to fabricate a literary imagining of how conversion took place in cities across the Byzantine Empire.
Mohamed-Arbi Nsiri surveys the exchange of letters between Jerome and Augustine to analyze their personal, doctrinal, and exegetical concerns. Nsiri shows how their interpretations of scripture, translation, and the Pelagian controversy were influenced by their life setting. He also highlights the lack of consistent postal delivery as a source of communication failure. Nsiri describes their mental worldviews and the fluidity of orthodoxy as an agreed-upon principle, while still acknowledging that they strove for unity and a common understanding of authority in the Church.
These chapters convincingly demonstrate how Christians appropriated pagan concepts and practice and sites in Late Antiquity, especially in MacRae's analysis (Nsiri's chapter less so but it remains an enlightening analysis of two intellectual luminaries). The chapters on early Christianity will be most beneficial to scholars who approach Christian encounters with paganism from a text-based historical perspective.
