This set of nineteen essays, three of which have not been published before, give us a helpful distillation of the developing thoughts of one of the freshest and most incisive thinkers in New Testament scholarship. In the collection John Barclay seeks to look at the broad question of how the earliest Christian communities, especially those associated with Paul, related to Diaspora Judaism, not least to its major institution, the Synagogue. In a fascinating introductory essay Barclay shows how his own interest in this subject emerged out of sociologically-oriented studies of early Christianity which began in the 1970s (appropriately in this context the book is dedicated to Wayne Meeks, one of the most innovative critics in this area). Broadly reflecting this intellectual background, Barclay notes that his interest in comparing early Christian communities and Diaspora synagogues is not genetic (what the Churches derived from these communities) but analogic (in which respects they were socially similar and different). Barclay is clear that we do not possess a profusion of evidence, especially for communities of Christians and Jews living in close proximity to each other, but he still believes that meaningful comparison can be conducted. While Barclay argues that the two communities could look similar (Christian communities had within them practising ethnic Jews, and their Gentiles members had desisted from idolatry), they could also look very different from one another. The early Christian movement was not a community in which membership was determined by ethnicity and those Gentiles who became members of it did not need to adopt distinctive Jewish practices (with its emphasis on a strong life-ethic, this made it more like a philosophical association than a Synagogue). Those members of the Christian community who were ethnic Jews often found that their ‘Jewish’ lifestyle might be compromised, leading to difficulties with the local synagogues. While Paul was willing to tolerate the presence within his community of practising Jews, he made it plain when discussing issues relating to the ongoing validity of food laws, that such a position was one associated with the weak ‘and in allowing difference of practices within his assemblies, Paul requires Jewish believers to recognize that service to the Lord can take place in terms outside the Torah’, Against this background Barclay thinks that it makes little sense to talk about Pauline assemblies as sects within Judaism, as has become a commonplace amongst New Testament scholars and others, because it fails to correspond to social realities. Connected with this he rejects the idea that Paul's mission should be understood as ‘judaizing the nations’ (or as he will show in his essay, as a kind of Hellenisation of Judaism, along the lines of a Philo or Josephus), holding that Gentiles converted to the group could be understood as defective proselytes. In this context it becomes clear how Paul could be seen as an apostate, even if defining that term in some essentialist way is impossible, Barclay appearing in general to tackle this matter from the perspective of a specific theory of deviance, where attention is paid to understanding those who would apply the deviant label. Consistent with these conclusions Barclay argues that while some outsiders might see Christians as Jews, authors from the early second century onwards tended not to, though developments in that period are not his specific concern. Many of the issues relating to these matters are looked at in some detail in the first part of the book, entitled ‘Paul and Diaspora Jews’, where there are essays on Paul's attitude to the law (here making excellent use of Philo and Josephus to show up Paul's distinctive and radical positions), apostasy in the Jewish Diaspora, and the beginnings of Christian anti-Jewish rhetoric.

The second section deals with questions of Christian identity. In his introduction Barclay flags up the issue of the difficulty of Christians maintaining their identity in the absence of Jewish practices, at least amongst their Gentile converts, and he quotes to good effect, Diognetus' assertion that Christians are not people who can be recognised outwardly. For Barclay a number of factors play a role in the formation of identity including hostility from outside, the intensity of communal life (in the absence of altars, priests and sacrifices, a heavy emphasis is placed upon speech as medium of identity formation), and the development of what he, following Bourdieu, dubs a Christian habitus; and in a series of interesting essays he shows how such a thing was expressed in Christian ideas of death and in their Christocentric approach to life, seen most clearly in the author of Colossians' assertion that everything should be done in the name of the Lord Jesus (Colossians iii.17). On occasion Barclay talks about the totalising effect of Christian conversion, promoted not just by the Christocentric character of Pauline communities but also by their often polarised views of the outside world and their strong sense of the eschatological transformation which they had undergone, although such a sense of things was perhaps felt more strongly in some communities than in others (in this context Barclay has a perceptive piece on the apparently very different attitudes to society seen in the Thessalonian and Corinthian community, as well as one in which he highlights contrasting attitudes to old age and its importance – as he notes, ‘Paul's constitutional strategy has a built-in uncertainty principle which allows for different expressions of a communal faith’). Because Christians had at their centre a religious experience, rather than a pre-existing set of social norms, ‘they were perhaps the most socially innovative of all associations in antiquity’.

In the final section of the book Barclay turns to Josephus. As the author of a commentary on the latter's Contra Apionem and of several articles on the Jewish author, Barclay is as well placed to discuss the latter as anyone presently working in this area. In part the studies in this volume are attempts to read Josephus through post-colonial spectacles, showing both how Josephus adopts and adapts, and even questions the presuppositions of his Roman overlords. Running through all four of the essays published here (on Josephus' representation of the Egyptians, his presentation of the Jews' place in the empire, of the Jews as Spartans and his discussion of Jewish religion) is a strong sense of Josephus' awareness of Rome as a power, and the way in which this has influenced the manner in which he wrote about the Jews, their history and practices. This, according to Barclay, contrasts with Paul who, though he writes as a Roman citizen and from cities in the Roman Empire, only allows the realities of Rome to enter his text ‘obliquely or in passing’. How, then, do we account for this near silence? Barclay is clear, of course, that Paul is not writing in the same circumstances as Josephus, that is as a client of imperial patrons, in the aftermath of a war which the same patrons have attempted to exploit to its full for their own propagandistic purposes. But even then the silence, or near silence of Paul on this matter is odd. In this context Barclay addresses the views of those scholars who have wanted to argue that Paul is in fact covertly intensely political, ‘counteracting “the imperial cult” and Rome's claim to provide benefaction for its subjects'. He shows in one essay how too often those interested in advocating this position overestimate the significance of the imperial cult in Roman religion, for it is merely part of a larger symbol-system; and then, more systematically, here tackling in particular the work of N. T. Wright, he shows how such readings are simply misreadings of what Paul says, in which, amongst other things, insufficient reason is given for the need for an encoded message of political defiance. In all of this Barclay is not seeking to return to a position which saw Paul as apolitical ‘quietly accepting the favourable conditions of the Roman Empire’. Rather, Barclay argues, ‘Paul's relation to Rome is subsumed under his relation to what he provocatively calls “the present evil age” (Galatians i.14), on an apocalyptic stage newly configured by Christ.’ In this ‘Paul's language of “powers” thus denotes comprehensive features of reality which penetrate the “political” sphere, but only as it is enmeshed in larger and more comprehensive force-fields.’ In this context the totalising character of the Christian faith is evident, giving birth to a new type of radicalism, which is in some senses more startling for lacking the specifics of anti-Empire rhetoric. Against such a background ‘post-colonial’ readings of Paul become more difficult.

This is a stimulating collection of essays, which, unlike many volumes of the same type, contains within itself an enviable coherence. While Barclay is as aware as any scholar of the complex character of the evidence available to us, and the difficulties of reading it in too definite or precise a way (note, in particular, his avoidance of any essentialist understanding of apostasy as that was understood in Judaism), one comes away from the volume with some clear impressions. So, against the current trend in the study of Jewish-Christian relations, Barclay, while critical of the parting of the ways model, is clearer than most about the way in which very early Christian communities need not be considered ‘within Judaism’. He also has provocative things to say about the nature of Christian identity, showing, above all else, how Christian language (his essay on the Christian usage of the ‘pneumatika’ is a tour de force), experience and to a lesser extent rituals and worship contributed to this. It is in this context that he writes most engagingly and interestingly, showing a real aptitude for close and inventive reading of primary material. Finally, his attempt to redress the balance in what, for want of a better term, one might call ‘Paul and Empire studies’, is carried out with dexterity and sophistication and, emerging from the wreckage of this forensic critique, comes a new and intriguing analysis upon which much further research could be based.

As the author himself notes, the studies here are limited in their scope. One might perhaps have hoped for more about how Pauline communities developed (that old question of trajectories), and possibly some more discursive engagement with the consequences of Barclay's views for further discussion of the old problem of Jewish-Christian division as that has developed in recent years (as indicated Barclay situates himself quite distinctively in this debate), and perhaps more on other Christian communities' relationship to the Synagogue and identity formation. But in a sense a request for more emerges from a genuinely positive reaction to this set of intriguing essays, which should provoke much more research in the future.