This record of the persecutions of Christians—broadly defined by the author as any attacks on Christian communities, either popular riots (called “pogroms”) or state-directed assaults—is the English translation of a compact work composed by Professor Kinzig for the “Beck'sche Reihe” series. By design, these little books are tightly focused treatments of important subjects, so the text is commensurately brief and selective. Given its mission, the annotation is also limited almost wholly to selected primary sources—although a brief set of references to some works in English is provided at end. In effect, the author offers a summary of what we might call the “standard story” of the Christian persecutions. Unlike more critical analyses of this history, such as the those by Candida Moss—who is singled out for frank disagreement in the introduction (4, 7)—this summa aims, basically, at retelling a story. Despite the serious cautions advanced in the author's prefatory remarks, what follows is a mostly a repetition of the contents of selected “dependable” martyr accounts of the first centuries CE. The author claims that the sources that he uses “basically relate events that actually happened” (4). Advancing almost emperor by emperor from Nero to Diocletian and the Tetrarchs, he offers a blow-by-blow of the basic “known facts” of the persecutions. The treatment is up to date, making reference, for example, to Paolo Chiesa's edition of the acta of Gallonius and to Alberto Camplani's edition of an Ethiopic manuscript on the early history of the Alexandrian episcopate. The translation is accurate and highly readable, reflecting the clarity of the original. Oddities like “knifed by a confector” (57) or “the affliction of Crispina” (105–106) are very rare. Additionally, there is a useful chronological chart as a guide to the sometimes-labyrinthine events under the various Tetrarchs and their successors.

Being a summary of a standard history, the story logically culminates with the imperial Constantinian establishment of the Christian church. A continuous strand in the narrative which is hardly followed, however, is one that much concerned the historian Geoffrey de Ste. Croix. Once the concepts of persecution and martyrdom had been created, they persisted. Only after Constantine, it was now Christians persecuting each other, labelling other Christians whose truth they denied as “not-Christians” or “heretics,” and calling on the power of the state to assist them in repressive actions. These other events are surely a continuing part of this history. A chapter of all of one-and-a-half pages devoted to this aspect of Christian persecution is surely inadequate. The continuities surely cannot be marginalized in this fashion, if only for the fact that so many of the standard martyr accounts (as we have them) were created or reshaped in this later age of persecution. This part of the story necessarily has much light to shed on how the earlier history of Christianity was provided with its story materials (as in Eusebius, for example, or in the many re-editions of specific martyr narratives).

If the standard facts of the standard history is what the reader wants, then this is indeed an excellent introduction. After first reviewing the reasons for dislike of Christians and the legal procedures involved in the early persecutions (chaps. 1–3), the author devotes successive chapters to the sporadic attacks on Christians in the first centuries to the systematic state assaults on them by Decian and Valerian in the mid-third century and the Diocletianic persecution of the early 300s (chaps. 4–7). Kinzig sets out the attested events in the periods of more intense attacks on Christians, as well as in the sometimes-lengthy periods of apparent inactivity, with admirable clarity. To achieve this continuous narrative, however, core problems of historical analysis have had to be sidelined. What nexus of forces created (or did not create) a “pogrom” or a persecution? Why were persecutions such hit-and-miss localized affairs until the mid-third century when they were suddenly constructed as a general concern of the state, although still very sporadically? In the end, even in a book of this limited scope, the oppositional concerns of a Candida Moss are not so easily sidelined. Although some cautions are issued—for example, that we do not even possess the decrees of Decius, Valerian, Diocletian or Galerian that initiated the great state-driven persecutions (79, 86, 97)—they are sparing. By contrast, details in Lactantius and Eusebius on the “Great Persecution” are reported with few warnings about what seem to be gross exaggerations, if not outright myths (96–97, 102–120). Even in this heavily curated set of sources, the number of times that incidents in Eusebius alone are flagged as dubious or fictitious (13, 35, 52, 75–76, 86, 91) must be a source of some real concern, especially since Eusebian materials are the backbone of the standard story. And various non-Eusebian martyr accounts—for example, those in the Diocletian persecution in the west such as the martyrdoms of Gallonius, the bishop Felix of Thibiuca, and the Christians of Abitina—are accurately rehearsed, but with no indication of how very problematic the texts are as reports of “what actually happened.” In by far the longest single chapter in the book, on the “Great Persecution” (“The Fiercest Attack,” 93–124), individual inquisitions, tortures, and executions are gone through as a remorseless, almost pornographic jardin des supplices. But how much outright fiction are we facing in these accounts? And what is the relationship between the exemplary stories of personal heroism and the whole range of events of the time, even Christian ones? Are canons of common sense, probability, or the general assent of scholars (for example, 7, 16, 38–41, 51, 66) a good basis for the critical assessment of the gap between the texts that we have and what was happening at the time? The critical canons that Kinzig outlines early on (3–6) seem rarely to have been put into hard application in assessing what follows. It is as if one has a brief account of a Newtonian universe, with no indication of how the ideas of Einstein, Lemaître, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, or Witten have fundamentally altered how we understand that story or those facts. Other recent books in this same series that tackle similar subjects, such as Konrad Vössing's Die Vandalen (2018) or Andreas Eckert's Geschichte der Sklaverei (2021), do not just retell stories but attempt more consistently to confront the critical problems of evidence, significance, and interpretation.