There are two species of reception history. One disinters the errors of the past to bury them between new covers; the other, by showing that warrantable conclusions could be drawn from premises which are now unfashionable, exposes the partiality of our own readings. This book is an excellent specimen of the second kind, and seems to be addressed primarily to evangelicals who assume that every ancient or medieval attempt to wrest meaning from the Epistle to the Romans can be routed by a cry of ‘justification by faith alone’. Scheck's first chapter demonstrates, not without irony, that this shibboleth, which does not appear in Paul, was coined by Luther's bugbear Origen. Of course he perceives that, even if no allowance is made for the possible intrusion of Rufinus, the phrase does not mean to Origen what it meant to Luther, for no earlier Christian writer thought that faith could be present in anyone who failed to experience regeneration and manifest it in the performance of good works. Pelagius, the most infamous exponent of this doctrine, is the subject of the next chapter, where it is easily shown that he concurs with Origen in denying that Paul himself is the speaker who rails against his own sins in Romans vii and in arguing that the decree of reprobation or election in Romans ix is determined in each case by the free choice of the human agent. No measure of Origen's influence, however, can be accurate, unless these similarities are weighed against proven borrowings in this commentary from the Syrian Rufinus. In chapter iii Augustine is found to hold a definition of faith which does not differ greatly from Origen's, although after espousing almost Pelagian glosses on Romans vii and ix in his youth, he became a proponent of arbitrary predestination. In chapter iv his late disciple William of St-Thierry is shown at times to be little more than a plagiarist from Origen, although he laces his quotations with Augustinian caveats wherever Origen fails to insist that works can be brought forth only by the grace of God. Origen, as Scheck observes, was guilty only of not having read Pelagius, and would surely have endorsed these interjections. Origen and Augustine can be harmonised against Luther on many questions, as Erasmus, the subject of the first chapter, demonstrates. His dictum that one page of Origen on this letter is worth ten of Augustine is almost a tautology, in Schenke's view, as Augustine undertook no long commentary on the Epistle. In chapter vi he argues that no ‘wedge’ can be forced between the teaching of Luther on justification and that of Melanchthon, and that both were therefore equally intemperate in their vilification of Origen. His conclusion that Luther did not so much rediscover Augustine's doctrine of faith as put it to death with ceremony could not, I think, be extended to Calvin, or to the teaching of these two reformers on the relation between foreknowledge, predestination and good works.