A hundred years ago, Adolf von Harnack finished his ‘Reconstruction of Porphyry's 15 Books Against the Christians. Zeugnisse, Fragmente und Referate [testimonials, fragments and reports]’. For decades, this book has been used as the standard edition of Porphyry's anti-Christian work, often without proper regard to Harnack's cautious title which was supposed to make the reader aware of the patristic, often polemical context from which these fragments were recovered. Since its publication, Porphyry had become famous not only as the most important neo-Platonist after Plotinus, but also as ancient Christianity's fiercest critic, a sentiment that had already been expressed by the ancient Fathers. However, in 1973 Timothy Barnes launched a serious attack on Harnack's edition (‘Porphyry against the Christians: date and attribution of fragments’, JTS n.s. xxiv [1973], 424–42), and there have been a number of attempts since to provide a more reliable basis for research into Porphyry's criticism of ancient Christianity, the most recent being Matthias Becker's de Gruyter edition (Porphyrios, Contra Christianos: neue Sammlung der Fragmente, Testimonien und Dubia mit Einleitung, Übersetzung und Anmerkungen, Berlin 2015). However, Ariane Magny, lecturer at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, enters the academic discourse not with another edition of fragments, but rather with a fresh look at the best way to make use of the fragmentary traditions of Porphyry's work. This is not a trivial question, because there has been no consensus in this matter since Barnes's criticism. There are some who simply continue using Harnack's edition; some who add further fragments to it; some who refuse to accept the authenticity of some, but not of other fragments; and even some who doubt the historical existence of Porphyry's Contra Christianos altogether. Magny does not come up with a solution to this problem, and her conclusions are anything but revolutionary: There is ‘no straightforward approach to the problem of recovering a lost work, which survives in a polemical context’ (p. 149). Translations into modern languages seem to have obscured the manifold philological problems rather than solved them. What makes this book interesting is the process by which Magny arrives at this conclusion, and the things that she discovers along the way. In order to get firmer ground under her feet, she analyses the context of Harnack's fragments in Eusebius, Jerome and Augustine and brings to light a fascinating world of varying intentions, styles, a wide range of rhetorical tools, viz. patristic theology at its best. Eusebius, she discovers, tried to explain Christianity to those not yet converted, and introduced the idea of progress into the ancient world. Jerome, however, was more concerned with proving his own orthodoxy, and also his mastership as an exegete and translator, while Augustine, as ever, was more subtle when describing the mysterious world of the consensus evangelistarum and fitting pagan anti-Christian arguments into his own efforts to enhance his own vision of the two civitates. Magny remains true to her initial task to show the (lack of) reliability of these witnesses for Porphyry's text. Her results are disastrous for anybody trying to put any philological weight on their testimony. For those not too concerned about this, however, her book sketches a rather fascinating and positive picture of the richness of the colourful textual world of Eusebius, Jerome and Augustine. The person who is most taken aback and pleasantly surprised by these findings seems to be the author herself. A book which is to be highly recommended to anybody well versed in non-Christian ancient literature who likes to discover what, in contrast, the Fathers were like.