‘Paganism versus Christianity’, ‘Classical paideia versus Christian culture’ and ‘State versus Church’ – such are the traditional dyads brought into question by this fresh interpretation of Christian and ‘Roman’ encounters in the third and fourth century. Schott proposes that Christianity and the Roman empire shared a set of fundamental ideas and ideological strategies as they promoted their respective universalistic goals. The latter derived from the discourse and practices of Roman imperialism, which formed the basic DNA that informed the make-up of late antique social and religious groups as well as the thought-worlds of intellectual figures. For example, the deep structure of Roman imperialism shaped both classical ethnographies and Christian heresiography as each drew on similar categories and approaches to map cultural/religious sameness and differences. Overall, the author chose to explore these themes by examining elite discourse. Chapter i, ‘Philosophers, apologists, and empire’, compares how traditional philosophers and Christian apologists responded to the fact of Roman power. Chapter ii, ‘Porphyry on Greeks, Christians and others’, establishes how the ‘anti-Christian’ philosophical writer used classical cultural categorisations in his polemics against Christians. Chapter iii, ‘Vera religio and falsae religiones: Lactantius's Divine institutes’, explores Lactantius' indebtedness to the political discourse of imperial universality when he set forth his own criteria for distinguishing between religious orthodoxy and heresy. Chapter iv discusses how the Emperor Constantine affected subsequent Christian appropriations of the discourses of universalism and particularity, and chapter v reads Eusebius of Caesarea's salvation history as an adaptation of imperial providential discourse. An epilogue and appendix on Porphyry's polemic and the Great Persecution conclude this fine study. The book actively engages with current scholarly conversations surrounding the receptions of Roman imperialism and the construction of local cultural identities; for bringing these fields into a common dialogue in such a stimulating manner, the author deserves warm congratulations and thanks. By arguing that Christianity was already in important respects ‘imperial’ well before the advent of the so-called imperial Christianity that came with Constantine's conversion, the book suggests that the ‘Constantinian’ imprint on Christianity was ultimately less transformative than some others have supposed. This reviewer's main question has to do with the author's attribution of the aforementioned deep structures to Roman imperialism since many of those ‘imperial’ discourses and strategies that the author identified clearly existed before the rise of Roman imperialism and, in its Mediterranean manifestation at least, can readily be traced to Greek discourses from the early classical period onwards. Put differently, is it not the case that Christianity was in many ways ‘imperial’ because it was fundamentally a universalistic ‘Hellenistic religion’? A provocative interpretation, Christianity lays out a promising new roadmap for reading the intellectual history of the early Church as well as paving the way for further diachronic and synchronic exploration of its central tenets.