A grand survey of ancient Christian apologetic literature is much needed, and Williams has worked an impressive amount of material into the first English-language attempt to trace all the varied defenses against pagan arguments—from Acts and the lost second-century apologists to Theodoret of Cyrus's Cure of Hellenic Maladies. Williams has chosen a lucid narrative structure, with five chapters offering essential background on the nature and limits of apologetic literature, Roman religion, Christian self-definition, and the legal and cultural motives of persecution, and thirteen following the long chronological arc into the fifth century. The result is something essential for close study of apologetic literature, which such a survey will do much to foster: a sense of the apologists as individual thinkers and not simply as exponents of a repertory of shared arguments, whose permutations Williams of course still traces (focusing, sensibly, on the appeal to antiquity, the accusation that the gods were demons, and attitudes toward philosophy).
Williams's book is in this regard a distinct improvement on its nearest counterpart, Michael Fiedrowicz's Apologie im frühen Christentum: Die Kontroverse um den christlichen Wahrheitsanspruch in den ersten Jahrhunderten (Brill, 2000 [3rd ed.]), which separates narrative summary from synopsis of arguments. Inclusion of a topical index alongside apologetic/classical and scriptural indices locorum would have made navigation easier, especially for the adventurous undergraduate or general reader. It is, however, a book aimed at people like Williams himself, who began it after teaching a graduate seminar at Baylor (1). Untranslated Latin (e.g., 2) and German (18) appear, while Williams rebuts modern theologians’ disdain for apologetics (vii–ix, 13–14) and takes for granted basic knowledge of Neoplatonism (59–61, 64–65). The ideal reader is a professional scholar, probably a historical theologian, or an experienced student guided by one.
That knowledge will, I hope, soften what I am about to say: despite admirable scope and effective structuring, this book has unavoidable flaws. I do not quibble over Williams's presentation of individual authors. Some simplification is necessary in surveying so huge a field, and Williams's summaries, for those authors I know well, are generally sound (in the case of Lactantius, an improvement over much English-language scholarship). The one gap is Clement of Alexandria's Protrepticus. Williams wants to include only apologetic (i.e., defensive, ostensibly outward-facing) works but ends up discussing Athanasius's De incarnatione and Tertullian's De idololatria. In practice, therefore, the book becomes—rightly—a survey of Christian treatises on pagan cult and culture, and Clement properly belongs.
Unfortunately, Williams's book will require more than supplementation with a study of Clement on the seminar syllabus. First, it needed a careful editorial pass. I noted over 160 formatting errors, ranging from incorrect spacing and missing italics to placeholders for further editing (333n48, 345n91), incomplete references (e.g., 31n46, 202n80), and footnotes truncated mid-sentence (30n42, 342n76, 417n92) or substantially duplicated in nearby text (152nn77 and 79, 303n95). It is disconcerting to find misspellings in the names of ancient authors and the titles of both ancient and modern works alongside mistyped Greek and, less often, Latin. Most strangely, a chunk of text on 308 broadly fits the context but does not obviously build on what precedes; introduced by three asterisks rather than a paragraph-initial offset, it appears to be a draft paragraph that has not quite found its place.
There are two misattributions. Williams treats Quod idola dii non sint as a genuine Cyprianic work (though he notes uncertainty: 256n67) and Contra paganos—part of a collection of Homoean tracts from Verona—as a work of Maximus of Turin (420). Neither attribution accords with scholarly consensus. Most scholars would put Minucius Felix some decades after Tertullian's Apologeticum (despite 242), and the authoritative edition is not Karl Halm's (CSEL 2, 1867) but Bernhard Kytzler's (Teubner, 1992 [2nd ed.]). Williams seems likewise unaware of the Teubner edition of Lactantius's Divine Institutes by Eberhard Heck and Antonie Wlosok (4 vols., 2005–2011) as well as of Heck's essential chronological and text-critical study, Die dualistischen Zusätze und die Kaiseranreden bei Lactantius: Untersuchungen zur Textgeschichte der Divinae institutiones und der Schrift De opificio dei (Heidelberg, 1972). This omission leads him into insufficiently grounded speculations about when and where Divine Institutes was written (e.g., 303–304).
There are some historical errors. Themistius delivered Oration 5 in the East (most likely at Ancyra), not at Rome, though he repeated the speech before the Constantinopolitan Senate (399). Despite the transmitted wording, Theodosian Code 16.10.2 was issued in the West by Constans, not in the East by Constantius II, and 16.10.4 in the 350s, not 346 (368). Firmus, addressee of Augustine, Ep. 1A* and 2*, was not a “priest” (409) or a “deacon” (38). As the second letter makes clear, this Firmus was an educated Carthaginian catechumen, distinct from the priest Firmus who distributed a partial copy of City of God (Ep. 184A), with whom he was identified before the letter's discovery. Finally, it is jarring to see Aelius Spartianus's Life of Septimius Severus treated without further remark as a work of an early fourth-century author (243–244). Though certainty will never be reached, the entire collection of Scriptores Historiae Augustae is generally thought to be the work of a single, pseudonymous late fourth-century literato.
These are errors in topics familiar to me, and I regret that I have had to spend so much space on them. I believe Williams's endeavor is both necessary and important, and I learned much from his discussion of Justin Martyr in particular. I can only hope that Williams has the opportunity to produce a corrected edition soon (one ideally including Clement), which will make a valuable survey of a much-neglected field into the durable orientation and one-volume reference needed by the non-specialists it will inevitably and deservedly attract.
