This volume provides reflection and debate about precisely what levels of education were open to the first Christian writers and how they utilised whatever level of literacy they had achieved. Despite the title, the central area of interest is not ‘early Christianity’ in general, but rather the New Testament more specifically. As a partial response to the rhetorical criticism of the bible, this collection seeks to interpret the New Testament not by ‘rhetorical’ analysis, understood to be the domain of someone who has completed all levels of schooling, but rather with the tools acquired in the more basic steps of the educational process. It is not a book meant for scholars interested in the long-standing debates about ‘Christianity and Classical Culture’ – you will find no discussion in these pages of Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus or Julian's School Edict. Instead, when the volume does go into the patristic period, it keeps its attention on the common Christian, the normal adult convert and the unnamed Egyptian copyist.

The editors divide the contributions into two parts. The first investigates different settings of education in the ancient world, primarily the Graeco-Roman educational system, along with C. Hezser's helpful comparisons with Jewish rabbinic education in the early diaspora. The second group of contributions turns to more specific examples of whether and how Graeco-Roman literary and/or rhetorical education can be seen shining through the writings of the New Testament. The volume ends with two articles that speak about the sub-apostolic age, both focused on the type of teaching provided by the early Christian community. The two-page introduction provides little more than the quickest overview of chapters, unfortunately without a productive thesis or a set of guiding questions that would have given clearer shape to the volume as a whole.

Part 1, ‘Educational Contexts and Settings’, hinges around a series of comparisons. C. Hezser compares early rabbinic education with Graeco-Roman rhetorical and legal education; J.R. Harrison compares Paul's moral exhortations to the widespread teaching of the ‘Seven Sages’; and C.E. Anderson compares the myth of Plato's Cave and the Exodus story. All these articles show the difficulty of making comparisons productive. For instance, Anderson is hard-pressed to make the comparison between Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Moses’ actions in Exodus any more interesting than that both have to do with the ‘drawing out’ from slavery and false notions. And one wonders why the Latin term educare, with whose etymology he opens his article, is applicable to either the Hebrew- or the Greek-speaking contexts he is comparing. Harrison's article contains much interesting information about the spread of the Delphic maxims, but he is led to consolidate an extensive time period in order to create a concept of unified ethical training based on the wisdom of the Seven Sages. For instance, he uses Seneca's distinction between mercy and pity to illuminate the archaic Greek maxims without making an argument for a Stoic reception of these ideas. Most helpful is the one article in this section that is not based on a comparison, the excellent contribution from R.F. Hock. His essay falls into two equally illuminating parts. The first gives an overview of ancient education studies that is much more comprehensive than the laconic introduction by the editors. The second part attempts to reconstruct a realistic portrait of early, pre-rhetorical education through the amplifications provided in an eleventh-century a.d. commentary on the Progymnasmata of Aphthonius. Through this, Hock provides a deeper appreciation of what New Testament authors would have presumably experienced in their schooling.

Part 2, ‘Early Christian Appropriations’, predominantly focuses on the recurring debate about the level of education evidenced by the synoptic gospels. Is it possible to draw a clear line between these levels and assign Luke or Mark to one of them? What can literary analysis based on educational levels tell us about the authors of these works, and how can that in turn illuminate the texts? After four articles surrounding these questions, the volume ends with two contributions that look not at Christians’ levels of traditional education, but on the possibility of new, distinctly Christian educational establishments.

The first four articles in this second section form the most cohesive unit in the volume and, read together, give a good state of the question concerning the use of Graeco-Roman education by the writers of the New Testament. H. offers a convincing argument that the New Testament parables are closer to the Graeco-Roman fable than to the Jewish mashal, because of their frequent use of a summarising moral. In contrast to scholarship which at times seem to view Graeco-Roman antiquity as a monolithic entity, P.’s attempt to distinguish between different senses of the word mimesis is to be commended. J.R. Strawbridge's careful article about the possibility of distinctly Christian schools in Late Antiquity forms an interesting doublet with C. Hezser's first article on the possibility of distinctly Jewish schools at exactly the same time. However, other articles contain some puzzling moments, such as when S.A. Adams repeatedly includes Homer as a ‘prose’ writer and thereby an example of someone who uses narrative. The detail is not unimportant for his argument, since he wants to say that ‘narrative’ in the progymnasmata simply means anything in a ‘prose genre’, but of course ‘narrative’ can be used in poetry, and not all prose genres require narrative.

One of the questions that is approached sideways by more than one author in this section is the genre of the gospels. Can new insight be provided to this perennial question by placing their production within the Graeco-Roman education system? This praiseworthy goal leads to some confusion, however. For instance, while at multiple points in his article Adams denies a clear connection between the level of education one might have achieved and the genre in which one chooses to write, his argument as a whole seems to rest upon this assumption. P. tries to avoid this difficulty by distinguishing between educational exercises such as the paraphrase, which could be used by writers in a variety of genres, and the specific brand of mimesis that would be used by a writer who chose to write in the genre of history, but the relationship between genre choice and education level could have benefited from more clarification throughout the volume.

This volume is part of a very welcome trend to interpret early Christian literature within a more subtle Graeco-Roman literary context. Hopefully more work will continue to be done in this field. Since many of the articles are based on scholarship that the contributors have done more thoroughly elsewhere, this volume might be a helpful starting point for those wishing to be pointed to these larger treatments. Any edited volume is difficult to comment on in its entirety. This general truth is particularly striking for this volume, which displays a very wide range in terms of length (from ten to thirty pages), involvement with secondary literature and level of innovation. The lack of an analytical introduction contributes to this difficulty. But if there is too much diversity at one level, at another, there is too much sameness, for this reader at least. The general project is to apply the research of the most important thinkers on ancient education to the field of New Testament studies, unfortunately without an eye to what other audiences might benefit from the approach and topics that they are addressing.